Emergence (7 page)

“Patience,” I said, looking at my tphone's display. “We've got them made and sent off. The trick, though, isn't to get the money transferred from his account. It’s to get him not to cancel the payments.”

“How are you—” Mister Persuasion was interrupted by my phone ringing.

Right on time.

I picked up my phone and spoke cheerfully, “Hey, Juggy! What’s happening?”

The response was less than cordial.

“Oh, this is totally part of the plan!” I said, smiling. “You didn't know that?”

The language then got colorful.

“You can't track me can you? Magical interference? Oh wait, sorry, that was me. You're breaking up.” I made static noises. “Woo, gotta hang up. Sorry!”

I hung up.

One minute left.

“Who was that?” Mister Persuasion said, putting a little more force into his words than was necessary.

I managed to resist this time. “Oh, nobody important. At least not for much longer. Forty-five seconds.”

“What?” Mister Persuasion asked, looking more than a little confused.

I didn’t blame him since I’d gone out of my way to confuse him. This next part of my plan had been detailed down to the second and, if I screwed this up…well, the future didn’t look so hot. The best-case scenario was I spent the rest of my life behind bars. The worst? Well, I wouldn’t be around to hate the worst-case scenario.

“Everyone should buckle their safety belts now.” I shifted the car into drive and pulled out of the parking lot.

“Huh?” Mister Persuasion said, rocking in his chair.

Penmanship, thankfully, did so immediately.

Ten seconds.

I decided to throw them a bone. “I, kinda-sorta, let Argyle know where we were located, and then dropped the whole cloaking field thing around us.” I hit the gas and put the pedal to the metal. “Trust me, though, it’s all part of the plan.”

Well, most of it. I was having to improvise a lot here.

Penmanship looked out the back window. “Incoming!”

I looked in my rear-view and saw a modified Capehunter military helicopter, the kind used by the Department of Chimeric Defense to hunt down flying bricks. It came sailing over the edge of McDonald’s, armed to the teeth with illegal hardware. The vibrant black chrome color and lack of an insignia told me this was the Nightchopper, the signature transport of the Night's King when he wasn't tooling around the city in an armored sports car. It was a vehicle wanted in the deaths of over thirteen criminals (not to mention three bystanders, blamed on retaliatory fire, of course).

Argyle was inside, even if he wasn't flying it. I could feel it.

The roads were almost empty, which was a good thing because I had to swerve to avoid the blowback from a rocket before accelerating to avoid the chain-gun fire he was unloading. Despite how many enhancements my car had, military grade weapons would tear this thing to pieces.

“Why the hell did you do this?” Mister Persuasion shouted as he bounced across the car, struggling to get at his belt.

“I have my reasons,” I shouted back. “Admittedly, bad ones!”

“STOP THIS CAR IMMEDIATELY!” The compulsion behind Persuasion’s words was almost irresistible.

Almost.

I hit, instead, a button on my dashboard, which caused the passenger side door to open and send the supervillain flying out. At the rate we were moving and the angle he hit, he probably wasn't going to die. He wouldn’t be leaving the hospital anytime soon, though. The door automatically shut as I narrowly avoided another vehicle.

“Your percentage just went up,” I said to Penmanship, keeping my eyes focused on the road.

“You can see the future, right?” Penmanship shouted, holding on for dear life in the back. “You know this is going to turn out all right?”

I skidded down onto another road and started driving in the wrong lane, dodging oncoming traffic as the Misery Machine headed into a tunnel. “Yeah, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Like ninety-percent! Usually!”

“Usually?”

“Always in motion is the future!”

“Are you using Yoda-speak?!”

The tunnel was long and dark but provided us a brief respite from the Nightchopper, even if I had to dodge car after car. One swerve took a valuable couple of seconds off my efforts and potentially screwed us all. I squeezed the car between two oncoming semis pulled out the other side of the tunnel to see the Nightchopper settling down in front of the tunnel with guns coming to bear. This was the moment I'd foreseen.

But I was about three seconds behind.

“I really, really hope I'm as good a lay as I think I am,” I said, pressing the triggers on the bottom of the steering wheel.

A pair of remote controlled machine guns rose from the hood and fired enhanced bullets which tore through the front of the Nightchopper's windshield, sending it spinning to the ground. In my vision, I cleared underneath it. Here? I slammed the Supra into it, despite banging on the brakes with all due haste.

An airbag managed to catch my face.

A minute later, I said, “Ow.”

Sirens were in the distance.

“Are you okay?” I asked Penmanship.

“I hate you,” she replied, letting me know she was all right.

“Five million dollars…that’s your percentage.”

“I hate you a little less.”

Stepping out of the car, I saw the front of it was completely totaled. About a million dollars’ worth of work was out the window. That didn't matter now.

The Nightchopper was equally wrecked, its two pilots dead, but I could feel the still-very-much-alive persona of Argyle Thompson inside. I closed my eyes and calculated I had about two minutes until the police arrived. By that time, with my and Penmanship’s graffiti-granted cloaking abilities, I could hijack a car and be gone.

I just needed to have a word with Mister Thompson first.

Walking up to the side of the helicopter, I pulled it open and saw the bearded, tweed-wearing billionaire struggling in his seat restraints. They’d been damaged by the crash, and he’d need the Jaws of Life to get him out. The bigoted inventor of the tphone, and numerous overpriced computers, wasn’t looking too hot.

“Hey there, Argyle,” I said, waving at him.

“I’m not going to beg, criminal scum,” the man snapped. “Gene-joke mother—”

I interrupted him by poking him in the stomach (where I noticed he was bleeding rather profusely). “Listen up. You’re going to find you’ve written numerous checks to several worthy causes in the next few days. You’re going to ignore those and make an additional pair of payments in the next few days thereafter.”

Argyle snarled. “Why the fuck should I do that? You’ve killed good men today!”

“Because you keep a hundred million dollars in free-floating cash siphoned from your company to play copyright-unfriendly vigilante. Because you paid me to have someone killed yesterday. Because you’ve killed numerous criminals with your goons before. Because you don’t hesitate to start shooting on streets filled with innocent bystanders. Because you’re a bad person, Argyle.
And
because you want to know who in the TCA wanted me to kill you.”

Argyle’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He believed me.

I smiled. “Now, would you like to hire my services to make sure this individual has a very rotten day?”

#

I groaned in pleasure. “
Ah, yeah. Right there. That’s good.
”

I was lying on my stomach, wearing just a towel over my bruised ass, very much enjoying a deep tissue massage from one of the lovelies provided by our host and benefactor, ‘Mr. Rich Oilman.’

I rolled my head to the side, wincing at the stiffness in my neck.

Some off-the-books surgeon with a deep Soviet accent, an associate of Mihailo’s, had removed the TCA-implanted chip.

”Zis vill be pinless, okie-doke?”

Riiight.

I glanced at my laptop’s live feed outside of Juggernuke's Washington, D.C., home. I'd paid to have his gated community's nanny-state cameras hacked.

Meanhile, Miha—er, Captain Bullet, sat on the leather couch, channel surfing an impressive 80-inch 4k UHD widescreen. He was in full costume,
still
, with a big yellow ribbon mask around his head like a Ninja Turtle. I was getting a little worried about him, given I wasn't sure he'd taken his costume off in the past two days. Still, both of us were enjoying some badly needed time off before we started thinking of our next heist.

“Is it time yet?” Captain Bullet asked.

“Not quite,” I said, watching. “Still a couple of minutes.”

“And you're sure this is going to work?”

“Nothing is certain in life, which is why it's interesting.” I reached over to take a drink of my margarita as the masseuse packed her lotions and oils. “Thank you, my dear. That was awesome.”

“If there is nothing else, Mister…Oilman?”

“Oh, heh. No. Thank you.”

“Tomorrow? 10 a.m.?”

“Better make it 11…I plan to sleep in.”

“Of course.”

As she excused herself from the suite, I sat on the couch in just a towel, with my laptop in one hand and margarita in the other.

Captain Bullet looked over at me. “I'm sorry you had to abandon everything back home,” he said, surprising me. “Especially your pretty wife, eh?”

“I understand she’s refusing witness protection and, additionally, intends to sue the government.”

“Probably already has a book deal lined up.
I was the Freelancer's Sex Slave
.” Captain Bullet laughed at his own joke.

“Right.”

I had to admit I was missing my wife. Lisa may have been a sociopathic bleach-blonde debutante who only cared about the money I'd brought in, but that was why I'd fallen in love with her. There were plenty of women whose values were similar, yet none would ever be able to replace her.

Maybe I should look to date a lawyer next.

Or an aspiring politician.

Ooh, a Wall Street executive.

Eh, who was I kidding? I'll likely be dating supervillains from now on.

“You know, Argyle will come after you once he sorts everything out,” Mihailo said. “I think maybe you should have killed him.”

I smiled. “No, this is much better.”

It was time. My laptop feed showed Juggernuke driving up to his house in his second car. I set the empty margarita glass on the side table, grabbed the burner phone laying there, and dialed.

I watched him pick up.

“Hey, Juggers.”

“You little shit. We're going to find you. You should have taken our deal.”

“Oh, like you weren't going to toss me behind bars as soon as you were done with me. I understand it's a media circus around Motor Hills these days. The Night's King getting credit for defeating interdimensional invaders and all that, even if they are all cartoons.”

“I'm hanging up now.”

“Before you do, you might want to check your trunk.”

The expression on his face was hilarious. Going over to his other vehicle, Juggernuke opened the trunk before reeling back in disgust. The tattooed body of the late Thrax, minus most of his bald head, was probably pretty ripe by now. That was something I'd arranged to dispose of myself. In the distance, sirens were heard, as I may have dropped a tip about it.

Juggernuke glared at his phone before saying. “Do you really think this is going to hurt me? I'm the fucking authorities! This is nothing, you little shit!”

“Probably,” I said. “But given Thompson knows you're responsible for trying to kill him, he knows exactly who to send his friends in Congress after in the resulting investigation. Given I've told all of the various supervillains in Motor Hills his secret identity, and that you're responsible for any problems they ran into during our heist, I think you're both going to have your hands full dealing with the resulting fallout, probably for the rest of your lives. Certainly, I doubt either of you will be able to operate freely anymore given the increased scrutiny. You can't go half-superhero.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?!”

“I'm Keyser Soze, Lex Luthor, and King Kong. I’m the Freelancer.” I hung up on him and tossed the phone to Captain Bullet. He caught it. “Throw that out the window for me, would you? I think we should rob some casinos today. What do you say?”

Bullet grinned.

It was time to go all in.

We Could Be Heroes

Eloise J. Knapp

Now…

Vlad reached out to give the cashier money for his candy bar. A chipped name tag pinned to the cashier’s shirt read “Dimitri.” When Vlad’s skin made contact with the old man’s hand, he saw what Dimitri had for dinner. He saw his thoughts during his smoke break, the agony he was in over the recent loss of his wife, how he replayed seeing her on her deathbed six times before his break came to an end.

The memories and sensations were fleeting. Vlad saw as much as he could in the split seconds his fingers brushed Dimitri’s outstretched palm. He was used to this now. His face didn’t betray what he’d just seen, though his own heart felt the phantom burden of the old man’s feelings as if they were his own.

Dimitri blinked slowly. “Did you say something?”

“No, why?” Vlad asked, curious. People normally didn’t feel his presence inside their minds. Over the years he’d only encountered one or two.

Dimitri shook his head, made Vlad’s change, and shoved the candy bar towards him. “Have a good night.”

Vlad took the treat and left the shop. By the time he crossed the street and resumed his position outside the nightclub, he’d mostly forgotten the old man’s memories. When he was a boy, he clung to all kinds of memories, from mundane thoughts to life changing events. Especially the good ones. But keeping them clouded his mind.

As much as he wanted to keep some of them, it was best to free them. It was too easy to stay in the ghost word they offered, and they didn’t belong to him anyway. If it were up to him, he’d never use his powers. It would mean no physical contact with another human being, but it also meant he wouldn’t be violating their deepest, darkest thoughts.

His attention drifted to the front of the nightclub. Bass thumped inside the windowless, squat building. A sign hung behind the bouncer on the club’s metal door,
‘No chimerics!
’, as if there was a need for it. As if a chimeric in Moscow, or anywhere in Russia, would feel comfortable enough to even walk the streets. He was willing to bet the only chimeric with enough guts to show his face was Pecos, the hero from Texas in America. Now
there
was a superhero. He was tougher than any chimeric Vlad had heard of. He used a steel cable lasso like a cowboy. Many Russians fancied the idea of the American Old West and cowboy culture. Vlad was one of them.