Emergence Read online

  The last part was a joke, but no one took it that way, just nodding.

  “As most of you know, I participated—”

  “Put on your costume!” said a sixteen-year-old black girl in the background. Her name was Nancy Stonewood and she was my neighbor's kid but, for the purposes of tonight, she was Penmanship.

  I stared at her, then realized everyone else wanted me to as well.

  “Fine,” I muttered.

  Going over to a nearby folding chair, I pulled on a graffiti-stained jean jacket to go with my tie-dyed shirt and ripped jeans. I put a scarf around my lower face, paint-stained sunglasses on the bridge of my nose, and topped the outfit off with a Motor Hills Freebirds ball cap. “There. Happy?”

  “That's awfully cheap,” Penmanship said, disappointed.

  “It's not cheap, it's minimalist. There's a difference. Also, special thanks to Graffiti Girl for altering this to do the same thing that the Mechanic's unnoticeable car can do.” I could have saved myself two-hundred-thousand-dollars of debt, as well as a half-hour of sweaty backseat sex, and gotten her to spray over it with a new coat. This is why you should always compare prices before making a big purchase.

  “How come we can notice you if it makes you unnoticeable?” the Inside-Out-Man interrupted.

  “Because I want you to,” I said, suppressing a growl. “Now, do you want to make money or not?”

  There was grumbling.

  Captain Bullet pulled out an M16 from his holsters and waved it around. “Listen to Lord Freelancer!”

  “Lord Free—?” I shook my head and waved my objections away. “As most of you know, I participated in a robbery attempt against software billionaire Argyle Thompson yesterday.”

  “Which you fucked up royally,” the Mechanic said, wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes and a tied-together shirt. She had a scar across her belly button from where she’d been shot at age fourteen during one of the many-many drug shoot-outs in our neighborhood. After our rut less than 24 hours ago, or perhaps because of it, and given I’d just separated from my wife, I now found her even more attractive. Or maybe it was just my wounded pride.

  “In fact,” I continued, “I was gathering Intelligence on the security response times, equipment, and material gain. It was a dry run for what could very well be the most lucrative heist of anyone here's career.”

  “Not for the Mayhemers, it wasn't,” another asshat in the audience said. This one looked like a werewolf. Hell, he might have been a werewolf.

  I pointed at them. “They knew the risks, and they weren't up to the task. If you want to know about the risks, I'll happily spell them out. Considerable. The reward? Ten million dollars.” I paused for dramatic effect. “Each.”

  Everyone was now paying attention.

  I was, of course, lying out of my ass.

  There was an estimation of some thirty million dollars in the bank we were going to rob earlier today, of which I would have gotten a cut of, and a dozen such places spread out over the city. The chances of getting all of that was slim-to-nonexistent, assuming they all contained disposable wealth in the same amount.

  Not that they knew that.

  I pointed at the chalkboard. “The problem with this situation is Argyle Thompson's personal army of mercenaries disguised as police, which they ignore for substantial payoffs, the Headhunters, the Night's King, the DCD, and Motor Hills police. All of which we can make sure are occupied. Captain Bullet, what is the guiding force behind superheroism today?”

  “Desire to do good?” Captain Bullet said.

  I glared at him. “Stick to the script.”

  “Attention!” Captain Bullet corrected.

  “Yes!” I said, slapping my pointer into my hand. “Superheroes want attention. We, the supervillains, know better.” I lied again. “However, by creating a suitable distraction, we can simultaneously hit every one of Argyle Thompson's money-laundering facilities,” I, again, lied about what these facilities were for, “to take them for all they’re worth. You have been chosen, each of you, for your unique capacities which will be instrumental in emptying these vaults.”

  That was another lie. They'd been selected because they would make an enormous stink.

  “So what will create a big enough stink to do that?” Penmanship said, following the cues I'd given her.

  I smiled. “Glad you asked.”

  #

  A flaming goat-headed alien appeared in the air above Motor Hills Stadium. The warlord stood tall in the midst of a bunch of similar animal-meets-demon-themed figures in Kirby-esque armor.

  “I, LORD DESTRUCTUS, EMPEROR OF THE DREADTHOID, CLAIM THIS STADIUM AND ITS OCCUPANTS AS MY SLAVES!” The goat-headed alien made a sweeping gesture. “I CHALLENGE ALL OF EARTH'S HEROES TO A CONTEST OF ARMS FOR THE FATE OF THESE MORTALS! IF THEY REFUSE TO FACE MY CHAMPIONS IN SINGLE COMBAT, I WILL DETONATE MY NEGA-BOMB, DESTROYING YOUR ENTIRE UNIVERSE!”

  I watched the event on my tphone as the security elevator to Argyle Thompson's office carried me, Penmanship, and Mister Persuasion up. All three of us were in costume. Mister Persuasion’s powers and Graffiti Girl's additions to our outfits meant nobody noticed as we walked right in. Besides, every police car, reporter, and helicopter in the city was now headed to the stadium toward our little distraction.

  “So, how did you arrange that, anyway?” Mister Persuasion asked. He was a short, well-dressed black man with a bow-tie, shaved head, and thick black-framed glasses. I don't quite recall why I'd agreed to let him come on my part of the mission, but because he'd explained I was immune to his powers, I didn't mind. I, obviously, had a good reason for it.

  “Fake Geek Girl turned out to be responsible for those cartoons at the meeting,” I said, smiling at the craziness. “I had my own plan for something like this. When I saw her, I improvised. Lord Destructus is from an indie comic one of my high school buddies made up. He actually got out two issues.”

  “But is that an actual thing? A ‘nega-bomb’?” Penmanship said, looking over my shoulder.

  I chuckled. “Dude, that’s just a bunch of randomly blinking lights on some welded together metal. I might be a complete bastard, but even I draw the line at killing innocent civilians.” Which was ironic because, when you thought about it, the vast majority of supervillains were kind of terrorists.

  “So your plan is to distract all of the heroes and cops in the city with the event in the stadium, and then rob the personal banks of Argyle Thompson—”

  “As a distraction for this, yeah,” I said, putting away my tphone. “Wheels within wheels, boxes within boxes.”

  “A double distraction isn’t exactly Machiavelli, dude,” Penmanship said.

  “Hush, you,” I said. “You will soon see the utter genius of my plan.”

  The elevator pinged and we arrived at the top floor of the Thompson Building, revealing a cathedral-like office filled with ridiculous modern art with stainless steel walls, polished obsidian floors, and a statue of a faceless caped figure in the center of the room.

  It was the kind of office that screamed: I love fighting crime at night!

  A holographic display desk was at the other end of the place, its drawers protected by extremely complicated thumbprint and retinal scan locks. A vault built into the side of the wall, if I was following Thompson's comic book logic, probably contained an extra Nightsuit, plus his equipment for linking up with his agents.

  “So, what's our plan? Steal the Nightsuit and blackmail him with proof of his identity? Hack into his records? Blow the top floor up?” Mister Persuasion asked, looking around the place in awe.

  “Nope,” I said, going to the side of the desk while retrieving a screwdriver from my jacket pocket. I jabbed it into the side of the drawer's complicated electronics and pried the top drawer open. Inside, contrasting against all of the high tech machinery, was a personal checkbook. I took it along with several samples of mail.

  I handed these to Penmanship.

&nb
sp; “Steal his checks?” Mister Persuasion asked.

  “Yep,” I said, giving a thumbs up. “Time to go!”

  Penmanship looked disappointed. “Seriously?”

  “There's a few other elements to my plan,” I said, smiling. “But this is your part, yes.”

  “Seems a little understated,” Mister Persuasion muttered, walking beside Penmanship and me as we headed back to the elevator.

  “Eh, I’ll leave a calling card,” I said, pulling out a grenade from my jacket and tossing it at the desk before the elevator doors closed on us.

  #

  Less than an hour later Lord Destructus and his gang had been pounded into submission by the Motor Hill Brawlers and the Night's King. Just as I thought, the Masters of Disaster had made a right mess of things, tearing up the banks they were supposed to rob, until the other Night's Kings had shown up with the surviving Headhunters, as well as an army of mercs and DCD officers.

  If nothing else, I'd blown a major hole in the idea that the Night's King was ‘one great man of history’ and revealed to the world he was a franchise. Things had gotten a good deal messier than I'd imagined, with several people on both sides killed but, hey, omelet and eggs.

  They were all assholes anyway.

  I’d actually given explicit instructions to one of the six groups I’d sent out. Not coincidentally, it was the group led by Captain Bullet and packed with the ‘villains’ I liked. CB had texted me, letting me know they’d gotten away with thirteen million. While not the ten million each I’d promised, I suspected they would get over it.

  Besides, I wasn’t going to be in Motor Hills much longer.

  Mister Persuasion was in the passenger’s seat of my Supra, and Penmanship sat in the back. I was watching the updates from my crew, the news, and the security cameras I'd placed at my house as well as various hide-outs. We were parked in a McDonald’s parking lot, engine running, with a clear path to my next destination, as well as minimal traffic.

  We had less than five minutes until things went to hell.

  4:45 if I had to estimate.

  “How long until the checks clear?” Mister Persuasion asked. I was already picking up on the downsides of his abilities—the more he talked, the more I could see through his abilities. I was already starting to question why I was giving him a third of the ten million I was siphoning from Argyle's accounts.

  “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 do
llars’ 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.’