They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Read online

  Lee wouldn't even make eye contact with me. I probably saved the bastard's life, and that was the thanks I got. "It ain't goin'," he told her. "We got a problem."

  Everybody followed him into an adjoining room, but Tracey told me to hang back. "Watch for that thing and tell us if it comes."

  Fucking lookout again. Just like the old days.

  "Is that why you brought me? To watch your ass?"

  "Your replacement was dead for all I knew, Don. And we're not exactly equipped to fight that thing like you are. You saw what it did to Will. I'm just asking you to be lookout. You don't have to do anything but stand there, and I'll pay you out of my share. Please?"

  She had hardly smoked the cigarette I had lit for her. It still trembled in her lips.

  "Fuck, Trace, just hurry up. This is the least shittiest part of my night, anyway."

  I didn't hear anything in the corridors, so I just hung around and finished off my smoke while the rest of them, Will included, did their thing in the vault. Tracey could have us all out with time to spare before the fail-safe went off.

  The living room had cherry wood floors, some dark couches and a couple dozen nicely framed black-and-white pictures of mutilated bodies laid out with what were probably the surgical tools that had done the butchering. A floor-to-ceiling, steel-barred cage in one corner of the room enclosed a set of chains and shackles anchored to the wall. The cherry floor inside was discolored and lighter than the rest of the living room and covered in fine scratches. Like it had been scrubbed down by steel wool and cleaner. Fuck, man. This was not Nazi, shit, either, this had been done not that long ago.

  In the middle of the room, there was a handmade coffee table stacked with books that were crammed cover-to-cover with hand-written notes: The Grimoire of Pope Honorius III and The Lost Heretical Gospels Attributed to Simon Magus sat alongside The Satanic Bible, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, five different editions of The Holy Bible, the Koran, The Mahabharata and the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series. Mixed in with those were a bunch of thick, black binders full of hand-typed pages by an 'Uncle Bob' with titles like, The Killings of John Wayne Gayce, The Collected Works of Pedro Alonso Lopez, The Quantum Godhead, Night of the Dead: The Tsuyama Massacre, The Life of Javed Iqbal, Albert Fish: In His Own Words, The Reality Lie or Death By Perception, and a photo album labeled The Innocence of a Child that had a black-and-white picture of two young boys having sex on the cover.

  Christ, I was in fucking Hannibal Lecter's vacation home.

  On the wall behind me, somebody had painted: 'Do not be misled by what you see around you or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideas. But you are not a part of that world.' - Sai Baba.

  Fucking weird shit, man.

  Will stuck his head in from the next room. "Hey, stop grab-assin' and get in here."

  "Hey, why don't you get 'em to mind-control me so I go in when you want me to?"

  "Hey, how about you whine about it some more, Francine," he fired back.

  I ground my cigarette out and put it in my suit pocket so it didn't get left behind as evidence or some shit. "Fucking ass," I said under my breath.

  The next room was gray concrete with white German stenciled all over it. Portable work lights like the ones by the Hummer outside were set up to illuminate the vault door; the old fluorescent lights that had been retrofitted into the ceiling were all burnt out.

  The vault's thick security door had already come down, so that meant the vault on the other side was filled with poisonous chlorine gas. It had come down right my replacement, Splode, on top of his legs almost at the crotch. Both legs had been pulped to the thighbones, which the door then broke. It had left just enough of his muscle unfucked to pin him rather than just cut his legs off clean. Blood trickled to pool with the hydraulic fluid leaking from the door's cut closing mechanism.

  The sandy-haired kid with flames shaved into the sides of his head couldn't have been more than twenty and rattled on for someone to help him.

  "Hey, alls you gotta do is get me out and shift me to a healer, guys. Like, quick, y'know 'cause this hurts like a fuckin' wicked-ass bastard and I'm gettin' real dizzy."

  Tracey talked over him. "Lift the fucking door. How hard is that to figure out?"

  "It'll kill him," Lee shot back. "Have you seen that shit on TV where if you take like a car or something off somebody, they die because it's the only thing stopping them from bleeding to death? That door's keeping that boy alive."

  "Yeah, I'm not lifting it with him there," Will said. "Unless we have to."

  Tracey rubbed her eyes. "Oh my fucking God, we don't have time for this. So you and him didn't even get the stuff out of the vault yet?"

  Lee crossed his arms across his chest. "No, we couldn't get it. That door came down soon as he burned through the hydraulics. He tries to melt through it now, and that metal'll run down like lava on top of him. I didn't have a way in."

  "And we're about to die," she said. "Real nice plan, Don," she sniped at me as she stomped to the center of the room and breathed deeply.

  "What? I didn't say to stand under the fucking door while the hydraulics were taken out, and I told you the door would come down when you did."

  She wheeled around, utter disbelief on her face. "Bullshit! You did not say that!"

  "The fuck I didn't."

  "Oh my God, whatever!" she yelled. "I don't want to hear it right now. Fuck! Everybody move back. Where I'm standing right now is where all the shit's going to go. I will bring out the merchandise, then we have to get the hell out before the fail-safe goes, so, I again, will shift us to the entrance, and once we pack up the truck, we're halfway across the country. Everybody just stay the fuck out of my way and do what I tell you to when I tell you to do it because I do not want to die alongside you guys."

  Tracey teleported into the vault, and a column of greenish-yellow gas her height appeared in her place. It cascaded to the floor and spread at our feet, choking us with the smell of bleach. We all backed away and covered our mouths and noses.

  Splode coughed his guts out and kept asking what was going on and asking why we didn't get him out. Rosemary tried to calm him down from the spot she had staked out for herself in the corner while every second or so, another puff of the gas would appear in the room as Tracey swapped out the chlorine in the vault for fresh air to breathe.

  Will sidled up to me. "You kill that guy in your apartment?"

  "I don't know. Maybe."

  "What do you mean you don't know?"

  "I don't want to talk about it. I gotta go back to a fucking slaughterhouse and try and live there."

  "I'll help you clean up," he said.

  "Fuck, man, bring napalm."

  Three dozen lock-and-key metal security doors appeared mid-air and clattered to the ground with a loud racket, and after a few more puffs of chlorine, Tracey appeared with the notebooks and hard drives in hand, coughing her guts out.

  She dropped them and collapsed to the floor, gasping and hacking out the chlorine in her lungs. Her eyes were red and watering. Will helped her up and held her while she coughed it out.

  "Hey, okay, so get me out now, right?" Splode said. The kid was turning pale as hell and looking like he was about to go into shock.

  Lee shouldered past me and bent down to get in Tracey's face. "Yo, you got the shit, now teleport that man to a hospital. He's gonna die."

  "That's . . . retarded," she said between coughs. "I can't get . . . anything out of this . . . place, and the cops'll . . . grab him. Then we're caught."

  "What's she say?" Splode asked sharply. "What? Youse guys are scared I'm gonna get you bagged?! Fuck no, man, that ain't happenin', swear to Gawd, now get me the hell out of here. Come on!"

  The sound of a cave-in in one of the corridors shook the room and shut everybody up. Rosemary, who had quietly made her way back into the living room away from the blood without us realizing it, c
ame running in repeating, "Shit, shit, shit." Concrete dust rolled into the room behind her, mingling with the chlorine.

  "Shit, that thing's coming after us," she blurted out, eyes wide with panic.

  "Fuck," Lee said.

  I tightened the burgundy gloves on my hands. "Fuck it. Let's go say hi."

  Me, Lee and Will filed out of the vault room. Tracey would get us all out, she just needed time to recover. We just had to give her a couple of minutes.

  Splode yelled after us. "Hey! You bunch'a motherfuckers! Get me out! I swear to Gawd I'll bring this whole place down around us!"

  The three of us positioned ourselves around the mouth of the corridor that had the haze of dust spilling out of it. Nothing moved inside the dust. Will glanced at me with a 'what do you think?' look. I just shrugged and made a tight fist: be ready to bust that thing's ass. Lee just kept his eyes down the corridor.

  Suddenly, a handful of black canisters came bouncing into the living room and erupted with deafening noise, blinding light and tear gas. I stumbled away and tripped over the fucking coffee table, slamming to the floor right on my aching ribs.

  A pair of strong hands too small to be the giant's hauled me up to my feet. I coughed out "Will, which way do we go?" before I got dragged over to a wall and put up against it with extreme prejudice.

  My ears still rang, but I could hear a muffled voice I recognized from the TV shouting in my ear through a gas mask, "SCEIA! Are you powered?"

  It was six feet, two inches of ass stomp named Special Agent Red.

  Fuuuck. Me.

  Chapter 10

  20/20 Comes Later

  Red yelled loud enough to wake the fucking dead, shouting his legally required shit at me, but with the flash-bang grenades he had tossed at us, it all sounded like an old tape being played on fast-forward underwater. They were designed to fuck people up so badly with strobing lights, smoke, and choking gas so that when some asshole cop kicked the door in on somebody with a bullshit unconstitutional no-knock warrant, they were pissing themselves on the floor instead of defending themselves.

  With my face pressed against the wall unable to see shit, breathe right or come up with any kind of real thought, I could barely remember where I was and what was happening much less answer whatever the fuck questions he was throwing at me.

  Red yanked my hands together behind me and tightened a pair of white plastic zip-strip cuffs on my wrists. Then it suddenly felt like I had been stabbed in the kidney. My knees buckled, but my face stayed pressed against the wall while Agent Red palmed it like Wilt Chamberlain.

  He yelled into my ear, "Sorry. Just my knee. It slipped."

  I got hit with the second of the three Agent 'power tests' right after that invulnerability one that would probably make me piss blood in my suit. Two fingers jabbed right into a nerve bundle underneath my jaw that they had identified as potentially causing the brain to trigger a mental power by reflex. Sure enough, licks of flame started lighting around me like fireflies. Dizziness and tunnel vision came along with it.

  "Do you just have fire?" Red yelled again through the muffled silence.

  The next thing I knew, I got jerked backward and the back of my head hit the damn floor. I rolled over, yelled some shit and thought for a second I had lost both my arms until I remembered they had were cuffed behind me. I melted the zip-strips off, and one of my freed hands landed on Red's gas mask on the floor. I snatched it up and blindly scuttled into a corner like a fucking fiddler crab.

  While I kept trying to fasten the mask's broken straps around my head, I forced my burning eyes open for a couple of seconds. Two bodies grappled in the smoky haze; fight hard enough that I could feel it in the floor and walls. One of Red's earplugs bounced around inside the gas mask, and I kept trying to blindly get it out while I fumbled with the useless straps until I gave up and just held the mask on my face by hand; just in time for somebody to drag me away by the arm and prop me beside a wall. I still couldn't see for dick but my hearing began to come back while I coughed my guts out.

  "Don, can you hear me?" Lee yelled in my ear.

  I nodded and pushed him away.

  "You're welcome, motherfucker," I barely heard him say. He had pulled me back into the vault room. The fresher air in there cleared my lungs out while Lee kept talking and pointing and talking more as if I could hear one goddamn word he said. His eyes were red and streaming tears from the gas. I yelled at him to back the fuck off until one thing he kept repeating got through my hearing loss.

  The fail-safe.

  That snapped me the fuck out of the mental fog. Just in time for the wall I sat against to thunder and crack against my back and send me to the floor.

  I crawled away and opened my eyes for a few seconds of bleary sight, long enough to see Rosemary huddled in a back corner of the room rinsing chlorine gas out of Tracey's eyes with a bottle of water. Next to them, Splode was still pinned under the vault door, white as shit and grabbing at and pleading with Tracey to get him out.

  Before I could figure out where Will was, he joined us at twenty miles an hour when Agent Red slammed him through the other side of the broken wall.

  They hit some piping, and water spewed from the opening they made. A chunk of masonry that would have taken my whole eye out bounced off the gas mask I still held on my face instead. Will had landed on his face on the floor right in front of me, choking on dust and gas.

  Red jumped through the hole in the wall and landed on him, holding his wrists to the floor. Dirt and clay fell off his olive flight suit and body armor in clods. The motherfucker must have tunneled through the fucking earth to bust in on us.

  Tracey blindly grabbed Rosemary's sleeve to get a feel for where exactly she was, then teleported her out of there. Lee didn't want any part of this resisting arrest shit and hung back out of the way.

  I pushed up to my feet, my kidney and ribs still throbbing, and stumbled back into the living room while Will bucked Red off and they went at it.

  "Throw him in the gas! He doesn't have his mask!" I shouted at Will, but he couldn't hear me.

  Tracey still needed a minute to get her shit together. Until then, I would have to buy us some time. I kept the gas mask pressed tight to my face and scoured the floor until I found what I figured had to be around there somewhere. As much pain as I was in, I was still in good enough shape to commit another felony.

  I clicked the safety off the shotgun Red had dropped on the cherry wood. If this whole thing went the way it was probably going to, using a gun on him instead of my powers would mean less prison time. And I knew he was bulletproof, so none of that 'Attempted Murder' shit, either.

  A sharp crack echoed out from the vault room behind me, followed by a "Goddamn-shit-ass-motherfucker!" from Will.

  He had broken his hand on Red's face. The guy's skin and bones were that hard.

  I eased up beside them, leveled the shotgun with one hand while I held my mask on with the other and pulled the trigger right in Red's face like a fucking gangster.

  The recoil killed my ribs, and I just about dropped the damn gun. The blast managed to mess up Red's crew cut and kind of maybe almost powder burned his face. But he didn't even look up at me.

  In the corner of my eye, Lee disappeared next. The shotgun vibrated and jerked in my hands until I lost my grip on it and it broke in three places. I had heard Red had some kind of sonic-matter-manipulation-resonance-crazy-shit powers, but I'd forgotten all about it. He didn't even have to look away from pressing his forearm against Will's Adam's apple to do it.

  "Do any of you know what kind of danger we're all in?" Red shouted at the room.

  Will was breaking the floor beneath them as he struggled underneath Red's hold. Splode was rambling or singing or some shit. And with the gas from the living room coming into the vault, Tracey had lost her shit all over again and was throwing up in the corner. And the goddamn fail-safe was still warming up to fire off at any minute.

  So I joined in the stupid.

&
nbsp; I lit Red up like a Christmas tree on fire. His flight suit blackened and curled like paper and charred off of him in the fireball. The shotgun shells he had on him blew like Chinese New Year while his body armor turned to slag. Even his boots melted into pools on the floor.

  "Hey, fuck, that hurts!" Will yelled at me as the boiling composite plastic dripped on him and fired pellets shredded at his clothes. "God-damn, man!"

  The effort of the burn nearly made me pass out. Red looked like his skin might have been tanning, though. The sonofabitch wiped his melted armor and burnt clothes off, never letting go of Will with one hand. The dude was there buck naked in front of us.

  And, yeah, I looked and, yeah, he was bigger than me.

  I pushed myself into lightheadedness to turn the heat up on his bare skin. "Trace, hurry the fuck up!" I managed to get out before I became annoying enough to get Red's attention. In a blink, he had shifted his hold to grab Will by the back of the neck, flew him out of the room with a rush of air strong enough to knock me down, and before I could get back on my feet, have me back up against a wall so fast I didn't even know how I got there.

  "Stop fighting me, for God's sake!" he roared in my ear. "Where's the remote sensor? We all have to get the hell out now."

  That's when we both noticed glowing lines reaching across the floor and up the walls like that snake cell phone game, giving off an intense orange light. They crossed and spread led back to one source: the back of Splode's twitching left hand. His head rolled drunkenly from side to side on the floor. "Get me out, Tracey. Get me out, Tracey."

  He was going to blow the whole room if Tracey didn't teleport him out.

  The lines spread into the living room and got hotter.

  "Stop the heat!" Red yelled in my ear, putting enough pressure on my wrist to make it feel broken without actually breaking it.

  "It's not me," I shouted.

  Suddenly, I was out of the vault and back outside by the main door. Red's hand was still on my wrist, but it fell right off because it wasn't fucking attached to the rest of him. I cursed and kicked the hand away.