Countdown (27 page)

Okay, first things first,
he thought, as he paused to consider his next move.
How do I get off this crummy planet-before Darke id’s goons find out that I’m still alive?
The key was finding Forager.
She brought me here. She can darn well get me home, if only I can find her.

' *
Maybe this way?
He started moving forward again, driven by an inexplicable certainty that he was heading in the right direction. He couldn’t explain how he knew this, but he felt strangely confident that Forager was up ahead somewhere. Another facet of his puzzling new abilities, or just wishful thinking on his part? The circuitry inscribed upon his shell began to emit a faint golden glow, which steadily increased in intensity the farther he proceeded. Jimmy chose to take that as a good sign.

He crept stealthily through an intricate maze of vents, service tunnels, and other conduits. The rumble of heavy machinery reverberated ceaselessly in the background. Periodic gusts of hot air and exhaust made him grateful for his impervious exoskeleton. Occasionally he heard footsteps in the corridors outside the tunnels. Jimmy froze and held his breath until the unseen guards or servants passed. Alien rodents, twice the size of Terran rats, hissed angrily at the fire-breathing intruder before scurrying in retreat. Greasy lubricants and industrial waste dripped onto his head and shoulders, streaking his shell. The cramped passageways smelled like gasoline and brimstone.

Jimmy recalled his nauseating trek through Project

Cadmus’s sewers.
How come I keep ending up as a tunnel rat?

The booming machinery gradually receded into the distance. The glowing circuitry grew ever brighter. Jimmy sensed that he had progressed from the factories into Darkseid’s gloomy palace. But where was Forager? An itch at the back of his brain guided him to a vertical shaft that led to a rusty metal grate many yards above Jimmy’s head. A trickle of turquoise liquid dripped down the ladder before him.

Forager’s blood?

Jimmy climbed the ladder. The bars of the grate were slick with the alien fluid. Jimmy lifted it just enough to peek out into the chamber above.
Please,
he prayed.
No Parademons or overslavers, please . . .

“Forager!”

' 'His insectile traveling companion was shackled to a canted metal rack, like a butterfly mounted for display. Although scratched and blackened in places, her chitin-ous armor appeared more or less intact, suggesting that she hadn’t been tortured too severely yet, but fresh blood continued to seep from a wound in her shoulder. Jimmy remembered her being zapped by a Parademon’s laser-rifle during their initial battle with Darkseid’s strike force. He could hear her panting raggedly beneath her helmet. All six wings were retracted.

To his relief, she appeared to be alone in the dismal torture chamber, which was crowded with elaborate metal apparatus whose sadistic functions Jimmy didn’t want to think too hard about. Being careful not to let the metal grate clang loudly onto the floor, he shoved it aside and hurried over to the upright rack. Forager’s helmet concealed her expression. Jimmy couldn’t tell if she was conscious or not.

“Hang on!” he said. “Let me get you out of there!”

He started to gently remove Forager’s helmet. “Thank God you’re still alive...

And,
he discovered to his surprise,
strangely gorgeous.

Glossy purple filaments, resembling human hair, swept
211
fiais cox

across the top of her head. The elegant planes of her face had a lustrous vermilion sheen. Multifaceted compound eyes sparkled like polished yellow crystals. There was only the slightest hint of a nose, but her lilac-colored lips were plump and inviting. Slender antennae rose from her flowing purple locks.

Her alien beauty threw Jimmy off balance.
Cool your hormones,
he scolded himself.
She’s a human-sized bug for crying out loud!

He rapidly undid the clasps binding her wrists and ankles. Weakened by her ordeal, she slumped forward. He reached out to catch her. “It’s okay,” he assured her. “I’ve got you.”

“O-Olsen?” she said weakly, sounding dazed and disoriented. Her antennae tilted toward him.

“That’s right.” He propped her up as she tottered upon shaky legs. Their close contact made it hard to concentrate on the business at hand. A honeyed fragrance tantalized his senses. “It’s me, your pal Jimmy.”

“Olsen!” Without warning, she lunged at him, knocking him backward onto the floor. Straddling him, she seized his throat with both hands and began squeezing the life out of him. Adrenaline, or the insect equivalent, boosted her strength, so that she suddenly seemed as fierce as ever. Jimmy’s eyes bugged from his sockets. He gasped for breath. “Kill you! Must kill you!” she chanted, as though brainwashed. “Jimmy Olsen must die!”

“Forager, stop!” he wheezed. Her powerful hands clamped down on his windpipe; unable to breathe fire, the best he could manage was a few faint sparks. “What are you doing?”

He tried to shake her off, but her grip was like a vise. “Kill you... kill,” she repeated over and over, while buzzing like an angry wasp. “Must kill you!”

Jimmy’s arms went elastic, wrapping around her from behind and pulling her off him. He sucked in the fetid anas her fingers came away from his throat. His scaly limbs encircled Forager like the coils of a boa constrictor, binding her arms to her sides, yet she continued to writhe violently within his grasp as he scrambled to his feet. It took all his strength just to hold on to her.

He had no idea what had come over her.
Why’s she so mad at me ? It wasn ’t my idea to star her in a sci-fi version
o/'Hostel. “Stop it, Forager. You’ve got to snap out of this!” At first, he didn’t seem to be getting through to her. Then, to his surprise, the circuitry embedded in his scales emitted a brilliant flash that lit up the entire chamber. Even stranger, the light show was accompanied by a series of electronic
pings
that seemed to be coming from inside his very skull.
What in the world?
Jimmy thought.
Now what?

The dazzling flash had an immediate effect on Forager. She stopped fighting back against Jimmy’s pliable arms and shook her head in confusion. Her antennae twitched

• back and forth before turning again toward Jimmy. He saw his own reflection multiplied in her compound eyes. “Jimmy?” she said uncertainly, as though truly seeing him for die first time,

“Maybe,” he replied. With his scaly skin, elongated aims, glowing circuits, and beeping skull, he barely recognized himself. “I’m not so sure anymore.”

She scrutinized his transformed appearance with obvious fascination. Her gaze traced the complicated pattern of the circuitry etched upon his body. She listened carefully to the last few
pings
before they faded away. “Was that... ?” She sounded like she could barely believe what she was thinking. “Where did you get a Mother Box?”

The question startled Jimmy. A Mother Box, he knew, was a kind of living computer often employed by the New Gods. Among other things, they could be used to summon Boom Tubes of the sort that had transported him and Forager to Apokolips in the first place.
But what does that have to do with what’s happening to me?

“I don’t have a Mother Box,” he insisted. He wondered if Forager’s own ability to produce a Boom Tube had been disabled by her captors.
Probably,
he figured.
They wouldn% want her teleporting out of here.

“But...” she protested.

Come to think of it,
Jimmy thought,
Mother Boxes
ping
just like I did.
He shrugged his shoul ders, not ready to cope with yet another mystery. “I know.” Frustration soured his voice. “Just chalk up another one for Jimmy Olsen, boy freak.” He released his hold on Forager. “I’m just glad
whatever
happened calmed you down.”

“Forgive me, my Earth-bug,” she said sheepishly. “The only way I could deal with the pain they were inflicting on me was to go into a waking trance.” She winced as her fingers delicately explored the bleeding wound in her shoulder. “I was simply protecting myself on instinct.”

He thought that over. “And your instinct was to kill me? Nice.”

* “Yes,” she admitted. “I... I have no excuse.”

“Whereas I have no use for excuses,” a third voice interrupted.

Jimmy and Forager spun around to see a smirking, middle-aged woman enter the dungeon. Her gaunt, haggard face reminded Jimmy of Margaret Hamilton in
The Wizard of Oz,
only without all the green greasepaint and warts. A ruffled green velvet gown, with a high collar, gave her a faintly medieval look. A matching cape was clipped to her heavily padded shoulders. Lacquered black hair met in a widow’s peak atop her high forehead, as well as rising in hornlike peaks above her temples. A cruel smile evoked generations of mercilessly strict schoolteachers and librarians.

“Bemadeth!” Forager buzzed angrily.

Oh great,
Jimmy thought.
I remember her now.
Bemadeth was one of the Female Furies, an elite corps of warrior women and assassins devoted to Darkseid himself. Plus, as if that wasn’t scary enough, she was also the sister of Desaad, and said to be just as vicious as her sadistic brother.

“Better you had killed this mortal,” she informed Forager, “than let him live to sample my charms.” She drew a

two-foot-long blade from a sheath at her side. The doubleedged weapon glowed radioactively.

Jimmy stepped in front of Forager, shielding her with his body.
“Sheeshl”
he exclaimed. “Where does Darkseid dig up these nightmares!”

“Watch out, Jimmy!” Forager grabbed on to his arm from behind, as though afraid he might do something foolish—like maybe take on the sword-wielding hag unarmed. “Beware her
fahren-knifel
It bums her victims from the inside out!”

Judging from the quaver in her throaty vibrato, she was speaking from personal experience. Jimmy’s blood boiled at the thought of Bemadeth torturing Forager in this very chamber. “You’ll never touch her again, you skank!”

He mentally winced at his own tough-guy dialogue.
“Skank”? Yup, you’re really going to make a top-notch reporter someday, Olsen....

“How deplorably touching,” Bernadeth said with a sneer. “If futile.”

Raising her glowing blade, she sauntered toward her targets. Forager tugged frantically on Jimmy’s arm, urging him to flee, but he gently disengaged himself from her grip. “Stay back, Forager.” Porcupine quills shoved their way up through his skin. Fire sprayed from his lips. “I think I can handle this.”

Bemadeth swung the fahren-knife at Jimmy, only to get a face full of needle-sharp spines before her irradiated blade could connect with his head. More quills speared her velvet gown.
“Yeeeagh!”
she shrieked as the freakish attack caught her by surprise. Her body convulsed in agony ... or was it ecstasy?

“Pain ... delicious pain!” she moaned in rapture. A twisted smile spread across her face as she paused to savor the experience. Her pale, cadaverous features flushed with excitement. Fervid green eyes coveted Jimmy. “Come to me, pain-bringer. It has been too long since Bemadeth took a consort.” A crooked finger beckoned to the flabbergasted porcupine-boy. “And make it exquisite!”

Jimmy’s quills wilted. “Umm ... pass?”

“No more delectable torment for Bernadeth?” She sighed in disappointment, then raised her glowing blade once more. “Then all the more agony for you!”

She charged at him with unexpected speed. The fahren-knife came swinging at his skull. Jimmy strained to launch another volley of quills, but, before he could even
try
to defend himself a second time, parallel beams of crimson energy zoomed through the doorway, striking Bemadeth’s sword hand. She screamed again, this time less eagerly, as the lethal weapon went flying from her grip. She dropped to the floor, clutching her seared hand. Smoke rose from the scorched velvet glove. The nauseating stench of burning flesh and fabric added to the fetid odor of the torture chamber.

“Wretched meat-thing!” she snarled at Jimmy. No trace 'of perverse affection remained in her furious eyes. “The master looks favorably upon you!” She turned her attention to the empty doorway through which the twin heat-rays had come. “Bernadeth did not know, Lord Darkseid! Forgive me!”

Jimmy belatedly recognized the parallel rays as Darkseid’s dreaded Omega Beams. They were like Superman’s heat vision, he knew, only a hundred times more deadly.

Forager gazed at him in confusion. “The Dark Lord is protecting you?”

So it seems,
Jimmy thought.
But I’ll be darned if I know why.

“Now would be a good time to make ourselves scarce,” he decided. “You got another Boom Tube ready to go?” Forager shook her head. “They confiscated my transport controls.”

I was afraid of that,
he thought.
Just our luck.

They retreated back the way he’d come, rapidly descending the ladder into the byzantine maze of tunnels below. Jimmy led the way, turning this way and that, anxious to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the grisly dungeon. Not until Bemadeth’s frantic pleas had completely faded into the distance did he slow down and attempt to get his bearings. He glanced around the leaky, slime-encrusted conduits, looking for some sort of familiar landmark. This
was
the route he’d taken before, wasn’t it?

Forager kept close to his side. “Where now, Jimmy?” “I don’t know,” he admitted. Translation: He was completely lost.
How do I find my way out of here?

PING!
His head started chiming like an impatient cell phone. Forager stared at him agog. “Jimmy! Your eyes!” Luminous circuit diagrams, like the ones on his scales earlier, shimmered across his field of vision. “I know that pattern!”

“Pattern?” The circuitry danced before Jimmy’s vision like floaters.