The elevator reaches the floor it is headed to and stops. Waiting mercenaries calling themselves peace enforcers take aim at the door and fire. Holes are torn in the door as automatic and burst weapons fire tears through the metal and into the interior. Anything at waist and chest level would be shredded. A few who fire in bursts just finish as the doors open. A couple of the soldiers who readied grenades ease off.
A headless rubber chicken walks out of the elevator towards the incredulous soldiers and explodes.
I told you, it’s about style.
The Good Doctor dropped down from the ceiling of the elevator car while I decloaked. I reached out a hand so he could help me up, but instead he grabbed a severed limb that had landed nearby and began whapping me over the head with it again and again.
“Dangit, Doc, do no harm, do no harm! You’re becoming a Hippocrate!”
“You nearly got me killed for that!”
“But it looked awesome.”
He stopped hitting me with the wet end and instead turned it around to slap at the front of my helmet. “It would look a lot more awesome if you didn’t have holes in you. I thought you said you were fine.” He dropped the arm and reached down to give me a hand as I stood, feeling metal rolling around in my tender internal organs as a few holes began to bleed again. We limped over past the dead and dying men.
“The adrenaline wore off.”
“Yes, one more reason for you to not sing in the elevator.”
“You just don’t like Gwen Stefani.”
The Doc opened the other elevator down and stepped inside. He reached inside his jacket and produced a key, unlocking the elevator. He hit the ground floor button and stepped out again before the doors close. “Gwen Stefani is fine by me when it is her singing. You, on the other hand, sound like a goat being mounted by a minotaur.”
“I’m curious how you know what that sounds like.”
“Guys, this sounds like a bonding moment with you two killers having some fun back and forth, but you had better get over here,” Max spoke up over the comms.
“What is upizzle, Max?”
“A lot’s upizzle, Gecko. Heroes inbound.”
“Plural. Hobble faster.”
I did so. We worked our way to the further side of the building, towards the windows. “You’d think you two have never killed heroes before.”
“That is our notoriety, my dear deadly associate, but your hobby and our accidents.”
“I supply the red, Doc’s blue, and you are the purple prose of our posse. Ah well, I’ll be glad to get out of here. I never meant to take this much time,” I said as I reached the window. Max already had the window open for us to step out onto the suspended scaffold he confiscated from some unfortunate window washer. Then again, given the crazy hallucinogens Max cooks up in his concoctions, that window washer might be staring at a pigeon in a gutter somewhere with drool hanging from his lip to the ground and think he’s having sex with the sacred pimp-god of the buffaloes. It was just the three of us and three black cases. “You didn’t bring the girls along on this one?”
“They have names, Gecko.”
“Right, Magenta and Columbia or somesuch. Where are the heroes?”
Max rolled his eyes and pointed down, to his distraction. The lockdown mostly affected the bottom floors and my pal Mix N’Max knew how to make it look like the threat was coming from down there. He dosed the area with one of the many impossible concoctions his power lets him think up that causes people to think they are zombies. “You set something on fire?” I asked, seeing smoke roll out of the doorway far below us. Max joined me in looking down. Doc stiffly avoided looking down at any minute angle.
“No, I changed the plan. I brought along dry ice and a sound system to play Thriller. The drug they’ve been exposed to has a fun reaction to that combination.”
The Good Doctor, party pooper that he is, cleared his throat then. When Max and I looked up, he pointed right back down to the boxes. “Our getaway, gentlemen?”
“Yes, just how do we make use of your ingenious vehicular weapons?” asked Max, setting himself over the box in the middle of the three.
“Take the remote off the side,” I explained as I grabbed the one off the closest box. The remote had a handy glove on it so that you could put it on and have the remote portion in your palm. I slipped it on over my left hand.“Joystick controls the angle. Left to start turning left, right to start turning right, and then forward for down and back for up. Depending on how we do, I’ll consider swapping up and down. Once you’ve got this thing on, step on those grooves on top and let it fasten you to it, like so,” I said, and thusly hopped on top of my box. Straps extended out and looped around my boots to secure me against it. “Now, that I’m on it, you may notice a few buttons on the remote above the joystick. Run your finger over them one at a time from left to right and you’re good to rocket away like Captain Kirk from a paternity suit. Simple. Or as simple as flying a rocket with an entirely new control system could be your first times.”
Doc looked sick through his suit, and Max might have been a tad paler as well. “What’s the matter?”
“I wasn’t aware you had planned…this for our escape,” Doc spoke up.
“I was,” said Max, grabbing his remote off the side. With both of us remoted, Doc reached down and took his. “But I think we’ll have a problem launching off of here.”
“Then we’ll go ins-“ I was cut off as the elevator dinged. Out stepped a man dressed as a samurai with glowing blue and red markings over his black armor and sword and a woman in a thin-shelled armor sporting goggles and a backpack with a dish and waldos hanging off it.
“You three, surrender now. Don’t make us come after you in that position,” Said the woman in the armor. My helmet ran her face and description and gave me her name. Troubleshooter. Doc and Max stepped onto their respective boxes.
“Oh please, I’ve fought better heroes than you in far more compromising positions. You ever kicked ass while in the reverse cowboy?” I asked her. The samurai charged Doc, leaving a dual trail of red and blue light. He swung for Doc’s back as he approached.
He was stopped when Max sprayed a small amount of a fluid into the air. Hardly anything, really. Automatic air fresheners shoot more than that. As Mechamoto Musashi, as my HUD named him, swung his sword through the area the spray had been shot into, the blade snapped off. It didn’t stop or bounce off some forcefield, it just snapped all on its own. Mechamoto was understandably confused.
Doc caught the falling blade of the sword, elbowed Mechamoto in the face guard, and shoved the blade into Mechamoto’s foot. Then a banshee’s scream ripped through the air, deafening all of us. I found the cause to be the dish on Troubleshooter’s backpack, aimed at us and inducing a sonic attack. Sonic attacks just do not go with rockets, I swear. I muted the sound from outside my helmet. “Max. MAX! Do you have any more of that dissolving stuff left?!”
He mouthed the words, “A little. Was almost all,” to me and threw his hands up in the air as if he was perplexed why I’d ask.
I held up the remote in my hand so he could see, palm up, and brought my arm around to the front cable. I then activated the Nasty Surprise. The blade shot out and began eating through the cable. Max got the idea in a hurry and waited until it looked like the cable would snap, then he fired off the last of that dissolving mist on the cable in front of Doc.
I leaned back and raised my front foot, landing on the front rail of the scaffold. I had to bend over to avoid smacking my back on the back rail, but that became a moot point as I hit the startup sequence. The box burst apart as the rocket inside launched, the grooves on top the only remaining connected part of the box.
Max hopped out, falling a short ways before hitting the sequence and following after. The Doctor tumbled, spinning through the air. I came around, aiming right towards the hanging scaffold, and shot Troubleshooter the bird before pushing down, aiming for Doc. Before I could reach him, though, he finally hit the buttons and shot off, parallel to the building as opposed to Max and mine’s perpendicular launch. After a half-minute’s aerial acrobatics which were viewed at the very end by a woman in a white costume with a red cross that centered just below her ribs, we got our act together enough to make a badly synchronized exit.
Still fucking awesome, though.
And boy oh boy was I glad to be finally out of that building. That meant we could focus on the rest of our plan, or as I called it, “Wake up, cause chaos, have a beer.”
World Domination in Retrospect 