Making Supers 1, page 3
“Two,” I said, and raised the gun.
“All right, all right!” the supe screamed. “Please, don’t open the door!”
He dropped the huge knife and raised his hands to show he was unarmed. I didn’t lower the gun, but Giselle did withdraw her hand from the panel, just a little. My back, arm, and side throbbed painfully, reminding me I was losing blood, and I went with the most important question at the top of the list.
“Are you Pinnacle?” I demanded.
The costumed guy’s eyes widened in horror, but he inched his head down in the slightest nod.
His whole body shuddered, like someone had just hit him with a taser, and blood exploded from the eye holes in his mask. It painted the walls of the pod in sudden scarlet, and Darkstalker dropped like a stone. I stared at the corpse for a long moment, and Giselle shrank away from the pod. She covered her mouth and staggered back into one of the benches.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Dean, I’m—”
She dropped to her knees and threw up, violently. I winced in sympathy at the sight. My first time hadn’t been any different. This was probably the closest she’d ever been to being violently killed.
I paced over to the control panel and opened the pod. The door hissed open, and I checked the corpse as quickly as I could. The shots would have echoed through the neighborhood, and the police were probably on their way.
And the edgy hero had been Pinnacle. Which meant that we were the bad guys.
Blood dripped out of the mask as I tore it off Darkstalker’s head. He didn’t look like much underneath it, but that was probably because blood had violently pushed its way out of every orifice in his head.
It had to be the work of another supe. I’d seen suicide pills and the like before, but nothing that could kill a man like this. I glanced around the room, thinking that maybe someone had been within eyeshot to kill him like this, but there was no one around. Whoever had made his skull implode had to be powerful if they were capable of killing Darkstalker remotely.
I quickly searched the rest of the body. Darkstalker had traveled clean. There wasn’t any sign of a radio, a phone, or anything that could tie him back to the people who’d sent him after us.
I briefly considered taking his costume-armor hybrid, but it would take too long to strip down the body, and it’d leave the situation looking even worse than it already did. I straightened up, left the corpse in the pod, and slid my gun back into its holster.
Giselle pulled herself up by the edge of a table and grimaced.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, “I don’t know what—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said reassuringly. “Happens to most people.”
“You’ve seen something like that before?”
“Not like that exactly,” I admitted. “Come on, we need to get the fuck out of here.”
We ran for the exit. Darkstalker had left the doors open, and I made sure to lock them behind us. It would delay anyone from finding the remains of a former superhero a little bit, and if I knew anything about Pinnacle, they would have their fingers all over the place sooner rather than later.
Giselle jumped into the driver’s side of the sedan, started it up, and reversed down the driveway way too fast.
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, slow down.”
She hissed out a deep breath, nodded, and eased off the gas. The front gate was wide open—courtesy of Darkstalker’s Lock Breach power, probably—and it made it that much easier to get on the road and out of the neighborhood.
Giselle took slow, long, deep breaths, and my admiration for her resolve just kept on climbing higher. It wasn’t often that someone could shake off a huge adrenaline dump like that and keep moving.
“Hey,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
Her hands trembled around the steering wheel. “I am freaking out. I am losing my fucking mind right now, Dean.” She clung to her breathing pattern, in and out, until she asked me exactly the same question I’d been pondering for the last five minutes. “Why did Pinnacle send a superhero to kill us?”
“I don’t know. I honestly have no idea.”
“They don’t—” Giselle swore under her breath. “They don’t do that. They don’t kill people, not unless there’s no other way. But he came after us like we were supervillains.”
“We’ll ask the hard questions later. First things first. We need a dodgy motel. Somewhere close to the highway that takes cash.”
“Why can’t we go back to my place?”
“Blood’s hard to get out of carpet,” I said. “And I don’t want to take any risks right now. First priority is getting the hell off the street, and as far away from this place as we can.”
“You think they’re tracking us? Tracking me?”
“Just worry about the road,” I assured her.
Giselle went quiet as we swept out into the evening and left Callisto behind us. I leaned back into the seats of the car and tried to lessen my profile. The blood on my shirt stood out like a stripper at a youth group, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Ten minutes of terse silence passed, until Giselle asked another question.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” she asked.
“Almost gotten killed by a supe?”
“Gone on the run. Dodged the police. Killed people.” She pushed the sedan up a ramp and onto the highway. “You’re way too calm about it. Like it’s normal for you.”
“I’ve been in scraps before, yeah. But not in the States, and not like this.”
“I must be losing my mind,” Giselle said, half to herself. “Why didn’t we wait for the police? Talk to them about what happened?”
“Pinnacle just sent an assassin after us, Giselle. They work hand in glove with the police. And, so far as they’re concerned, we just killed one of their own.” I grimaced as a fresh wave of pain hit me. “Trust me, we don’t want to talk to the cops right now.”
“We could at least go to a hospital,” she argued. “Get you patched up.”
“There should be a medical kit in the back of the car. Dad never let anyone leave home without one. It’ll be enough for now, at least until we figure out what the hell’s going on.”
“Something happened,” she continued. “You took his powers away. Or the machine did.”
“Yeah, I’m still hung up on that too.”
“How?” she asked.
I thought about it for a minute. “I have no fucking clue. I’ve never been a supe, never had all the bells and whistles and tight outfits. Hell, I’m bleeding all over the seat right now. I’m not bulletproof, and I’ve definitely never done anything crazy like fly or teleport.”
“But you beat him,” Giselle pressed.
“Yeah, I did. Don’t know how.” I raised a tired hand to stop another tide of questions and nodded to an exit off the highway. “Down there looks like the right kind of place.”
Giselle steered the sedan off the highway. The streetlights whipped dizzily past my vision as we entered Downtown. Dollar stores, pawn shops, and low-set apartment complexes welcomed us in. Bars and the odd strip joints stood out with their glowing neon signs.
Giselle pulled up beside a rundown-looking bar with a dancing cowboy beside the sign. A greasy old motel stood tucked away beside the drinking hole.
I pressed a couple of hundreds into Giselle’s hand.
“Ask for a room,” I said. “Say it’s a last minute thing, and you want to keep it quiet.”
She eyed me critically. “What about you?”
“I’ll get the medkit and meet you when you come back out,” I promised her.
Giselle slid out of the car without another word, and I waited until she’d stepped into the motel’s lobby to get out of the car and walk to the trunk. A sizable case of medical supplies sat tucked away next to the wheel-well, and I lifted it out with a grunt. Everything hurt, but I was still alive, and I’d won a fight with a supe.
That was more than just about anyone could say.
My mind drifted to the powers, and that same damned notification window popped up in my vision again. Giselle hadn’t seen it earlier, in the lab, which meant that this was purely something I could see.
No Active Powers
I frowned at the words and tried to figure out exactly what they meant. The names of the powers were obvious enough, but what did ‘no active powers’ mean? The window shrank, and then resized itself with new text.
No Active Powers
Would you like to activate a power?
Y / N
“Fuck yeah, I do,” I said aloud. “What have you got for me?”
Chapter 3
Shadow Stealth, Lock Break, and Resilience appeared across my vision, and I thought about each of them in turn carefully.
If they were really Darkstalker’s powers, then the Shadow Stealth power must have been the thing that let him melt in and out of walls like a wraith. It was an amazing ability, but I could see a few weaknesses with it. Daylight, for one. And I had no idea how it would even work, or if I was just hallucinating from blood loss.
The second power was self-explanatory enough. But it was the third one that caught my eye. Was it Resilience that had allowed the edgy punk to shrug off my bullets? Was it the source of his greater-than-human strength? Or did it mean something else completely?
I glanced down at myself, my stained t-shirt, and bleeding wounds.
Yeah, the Resilience power was a no-brainer.
“Activate Resilience,” I said aloud.
The window winked out of sight without any fanfare, and nothing happened. Another pulse of pain pumped through my body, and I grimaced as I made my way back to the car. The dark leather seats made the blood a little harder to see, but I wasn’t in a good shape. I needed to get the wounds closed, fast, and stay off my feet for a few days at minimum.
A movement from the hotel caught my eye, and Giselle appeared at the front door of the lobby. She gestured for me to follow her, and I crossed the street as quickly as I could. The last thing I wanted was some do-gooder reporting a guy covered in blood in a sketchy Downtown district, but it was a weeknight. The parking lot was almost empty.
Giselle led me down a side alley and into the backlot of the bar. A row of numbered doors appeared on the left, and my dad’s former assistant didn’t waste any time in getting number 12 opened and beckoning me inside.
The room was exactly what I’d expected. A single double bed took up most of the space. A tiny kitchenette was attached to a surprisingly big bathroom. The smell of cheap disinfectant hung in the air.
I dropped the medical case on the bed, pulled it open, and found the sutures with aching fingers.
“Let me,” Giselle said.
“I can get some of it done—”
“Shut up and sit down,” Giselle said, in a warning tone.
I eyed her for a moment and defused the tension with a grin.
“Only because you asked so nicely.”
My shirt stung my skin as I pulled it over my head, dropped it on the ground, and pulled up a chair beside the bed. At least the blood wouldn’t show up too easily on the carpet.
I sat down with my back facing Giselle, while she rummaged through the medkit with a practiced eye. I double-checked the windows, but thick off-yellow curtains shrouded us from any onlookers, and I had a good feeling a place like this would take its lodgers’ privacy seriously.
“Shit,” Giselle muttered. “You look like a passion play.”
“But I feel terrible.” I chuckled.
Giselle loaded sutures into a small, easy-to-use staple gun. The sting of disinfectant made me clench my teeth. I wasn’t a doctor, but I’d patched myself up often enough to know that I could take the pain. Pain was a teacher, after all, and right now it was teaching me a lesson about getting into fights with machete-wielding super-maniacs.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
“You’re the one bleeding everywhere and you’re asking me that?” Giselle asked.
“This isn’t exactly my first rodeo. But you’re not used to it, so yeah, I’m asking.”
“I don’t know what Brandon had in mind when he asked me to take you to a hidden location, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this,” Giselle muttered. “I’m freaking out, Dean. I’m scared beyond fucking belief, and the fact that Pinnacle sent someone in to kill us just makes it worse. And what’s worse is that you’re taking it in stride, you know what to do, and that just freaks me out even more. Because I think you’re right.”
Giselle started on my ribs with the disinfectant. I tried to focus on the pleasant warmth of her fingers rather than the sting of the chemical. She dropped to her knees beside me, and her eyes widened as she spotted the wave of battle scars over my arms and side.
“Is that a gunshot wound?” she asked, and tapped a circular scar on my shoulder.
“Yeah, healed up nicely. Got into trouble in the Netherlands.” I bit back a hiss of discomfort and pushed my mind ahead to our next objective. “We’ll have to assume the worst, and that Pinnacle knows who you are, where you live, and they’re watching for you to go home.”
“Why me and not you?”
“Because they won’t have shit on me. Haven’t been in the States for years, and whatever they can find out won’t be anything concrete. Dad made sure to take care of that when he sent me off for training.” I stretched out my arm, and Giselle wiped down the crusted blood from my skin and cleaned out the wound. “The mission hasn’t changed. We’ve still got to track down the Basement, and start a conversation with them.”
Giselle reached back for the staple gun and went to work. The steady clicks sent pain through my skin, and I pushed it into the back of my mind while she closed up the knife cuts with clean precision.
“So, to summarize,” she said, “you’re some kind of black-ops killer who is pretty much a ghost, you’ve just killed a superhero after taking away his powers, and now you want to go and make friends with a known criminal terrorist organization.” She moved around to close up my arm and shook her head. “No, it gets better. You want me to help you.”
“I didn’t say you had to help,” I clarified. “You can take the money, stay on the downlow for a couple of weeks, until all of this blows over and they’ve got bigger fish to fry. I won’t stop you, and once I’m done, I’ll find you. Short of that, you can go to the police. But I wouldn’t suggest it.”
Giselle thought about it for a moment. “You might’ve gotten killed without my help.”
“No might’ve about it. If you hadn’t sealed him up, Darkstalker would’ve taken my head off. Takes guts to push past the adrenaline, and even more to think ahead in a scenario like that.” I bit back a growl of discomfort again. “You’re resourceful, and you’ve got guts, Giselle. I’m glad you’re here.”
She clipped the last of the sutures into my arm and started on my side without a reply.
Now that the adrenaline had died down, my baser instincts took notice of how amazing she looked on her knees, the view that her open-necked blouse offered, and just how incredible her eyes looked as they narrowed with concentration on the task at hand.
Her gaze flickered up to meet mine, and a flash of color slipped into her cheeks.
I endured another minute or two of sutures, and Giselle stood up. She packed up the medkit with practiced motions, clipped it closed, and left it on the bedside, pausing to stand there.
A tense silence had settled in the air after my compliment, and Giselle watched me for a long moment without saying anything.
“I’ll say this for you, Dean Silver,” she said, finally. “You make life interesting.”
I rose from the chair and tucked it back under the tiny desk beside the room’s main window. Her gaze followed me and lingered on my bare chest with instinctive interest. I rolled my shoulders, felt the slight tension of the stitching, and made a mental note not to get too crazy about any physical activity in the near future.
“I try,” I said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get dinner at that Italian place.”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Giselle said with a smile. “Raincheck?”
“Raincheck,” I agreed, and took a tentative step toward the bathroom.
I’d expected firebombs in my nervous system, but the pain was already at manageable levels. Something had lessened it, but Giselle hadn’t given me any anesthetic.
My mind flashed back to the powers I’d supposedly gained, and I mentally tried to summon the weird menu. I jolted in surprise as it appeared in my vision again like a damn stat readout in an MMO or something.
Active Powers
Resilience
Stored Powers
Shadow Stealth
Lock Break
Resilience
“Are you okay?” Giselle asked, concerned.
I dismissed the window with a thought and hesitated. “Yeah. Better than okay.”
“You look like you’re seeing things,” she pressed.
“I don’t think I am,” I said slowly.
Her brows came together into an adorable frown. “That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence, you know. You might think you’re an action hero, but you’ve got limits.”
She might have been right, but the pain retreated further from my body as I pushed on toward the bathroom. The stitches stung, but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it should've been. I’d been shot, stabbed, and cut up plenty of times before. I had a pretty good understanding of my pain threshold, and how to handle it, but I’d never felt anything like this before. I fired a grin over my shoulder at Giselle and offered her a shrug.
“If I do, I haven’t found them yet,” I said.
I pulled the door closed behind me and stripped down. I placed the pistol with its two rounds on the vanity. My clothes were ruined, and I couldn’t expect to move around in the city covered in bloodstains and stitches.
