The Damned & the Dangerous

Gary Justice was thinking about batteries. He twirled a D-sized battery in his hand that he had stripped out of a flashlight. He thought about stored electricity. His depleted energy had been cosmic. But all energies were related, one great underlying unified field. He thought about batteries, then about car batteries, then about wall sockets, and finally massive electrical power plants. He wondered if by electrocuting himself he could regain some of his vanished powers.

Would I fry or would I absorb and convert it?

There had been a time when he wouldn’t even have wondered about it. He had once been a god. His jaw tightened at the thought. It made him furious that these... mere mortals had destroyed him, stolen the helmet of power from him, and then imprisoned him all these long years. Mortal filth who dared stop him from taking rightful control of the universe!

Yet I’m just a mere mortal too, who happened to be in the right place at the right time. My godhood was just an accident, he thought bitterly.

Justice swore and threw the battery orcs the room.

It hit the wall with enough force to imbed there in the cinderblock. The impact made a sharp crack.

Several heads in the room jerked around at the sound and stared. One blue-skinned dolt -- he could not even remember his name -- stood up from a table and glared at the wall.

Justice waved his hand. “Nothing.” He was tired. He had felt so tired ever since he woke and the strain showed. His nerves were frayed. But it was the bone-aching hunger of loss deep inside that was damn near driving him mad. Hard to get over being a god.

Especially when you are nothing now. He ground his teeth, closed his eyes, and rubbed his temples.

This lack of power was gnawing at his very soul. He could remember just looking at walls and having them disintegrate before him. He could have leveled this building, this entire city on a whim. Now he could throw a battery at a wall. The beautiful godlike dream of his existence had turned into a powerless nightmare from which he could not awake.

“Justice,” the highly synthesized voice of Tanker called from the door. The bulky, steel-gray armored figure filling the entrance of the room was, quite literally, a walking tank.

Justice looked up. “You have news?”

“There is a battle erupting downtown. Seductress has engaged the Guardians.”

Hope swelled in his chest. Justice clapped his hands and stood. “Excellent. Have you heard from the other group?”

“Nothing yet.”

Justice nodded. “Very well. We’ll wait a bit longer. Keep me informed the moment anything changes. Also, keep a watch on the battle downtown. We need to know who is fighting.”

Tanker lumbered from the room without responding. He didn’t talk much and Justice was of the opinion that he didn’t like to talk or maybe even to think. But he was loyal and knew how to follow orders. He was quite obviously a military man through and through.

Dependable, Justice thought. Completely unlike almost everyone else in this group. He looked around the room. I can’t trust any of these people. This is a coalition of the damned and dangerous. I’ve got to use them before they use me.

*****

Khan Eight was slightly faster than Albino anticipated. The burly cloned warrior shrugged off the blow and grabbed Albino’s extended wrist. He jerked Albino off balance and down, clamping his neck from behind within the vise of his other massive arm. A foot-thick slab of muscle tightened around Albino’s white neck, choking off breath. The Khan began pulling back, bending Albino’s head up and neck back.

Will I choke to death before my neck snaps? Albino wondered.

From across the street, where he was dealing with two gang members, Cheetah saw Khan Eight grab Albino. It wasn’t hard for him to be fighting two thugs at once and yet still be keeping an eye on everything else happening on the block. The way he moved, it wasn’t hard for him to do anything simultaneously.

But he did hate wasting time.

Cheetah snarled at the two street crooks attempting to fight him. He grabbed them with each hand by the hair on the backs of their heads. There was a rhythmic thrumming as their blurred heads collided face first a half dozen times. A slight spray of blood still hung in the air as they ricocheted off each other, while Cheetah spun away, crossed the street, and hit Khan Eight in the face at over a hundred miles per hour.

Khan Eight, with Albino still locked to his chest, grunted and flew backwards. His heavy-booted feet left the ground for a dozen feet until he slammed into the wall of a building. His thick shoulders and helmeted head hit the wall first. Cracks spread in concentric circles chasing a puff of dust and flying rock chips.

Khan Eight slumped to the ground as Albino performed a rather contorted flip up and over the Khan’s body, putting his feet on the man’s shoulders and pulling his head free from his grip in the process.

For good measure Albino kicked Khan Eight alongside the head. The cloned barbarian’s yak-furred, peaked helmet rolled away and he fell over sideways, unconscious. Blood trickled from the Khan’s bruised nose and mouth.

Albino flipped onto his feet and said, “Thanks. Where’s Croc?” The wind pulling away down the street let him know that Cheetah was already gone before he finished speaking. He turned his bone white head around and his glowing red eyes watched the speeding figure of his teammate recede.

Cheetah didn’t like conversation much anyway. People tended to irritate him. He was a loner, in some ways more animal than human, and so didn’t relate to them much anyway. Besides, they always moved and talked so damned slow that it made him furious. To put it mildly, he wasn’t a people person.

Cheetah found Croc holding a kicking and screaming man off the ground. Well, the screaming was rather muffled because Croc’s hand was over his face. Croc was holding the man by his face, his brown-scaled arm distended at shoulder level. At seven feet, Croc’s shoulder was higher than usual. With his super strength, it was no strain at all to hold an entire man’s weight at arm’s length. he could have done so all day long.

Croc’s other hand held his communicator. He was talking to Sumo at the Guardians headquarters.

Cheetah could tell by the kicking man’s striped uniform that he was one of the criminals they sought. Probably, from the look of it, Psycho Says.

Right behind him on the steps of a building were three young men. They were gawking, speechless. It wasn’t everyday that you got to see a seven foot tall crocodile-faced, reptilian alien right in front of your face.

Cheetah stroked his chin’s long fur and then stepped over to the young men. “Why don’t you beat it,” he growled. “Go inside or run because you might get hurt. These are violent criminals we’re capturing. They might kill you.”

It was true these were extremely dangerous supercriminals that had escaped incarceration during the Justice breakout. But Cheetah said the last bit with particular malice and bared his fangs. Some combination of snarling beast-man, lizard-dude, and “kill you” hit the young men’s minds like electricity. They scrambled up and over each other fighting to disappear inside the doorway first.

Cheetah turned back as Croc finished speaking and clipped the communicator back on his belt. Croc was second-in-command of the Guardians and field commander of this group. The two groups had been performing separate functions, though both were tied to the Justice event. The other group was hunting for Justice and his gang, while they were hunting the independent villains who had refused to join Justice’s alliance, but remained at large having taken advantage of the chaos Justice created. Both groups were also looking for leads on their missing teammates, Pirate and Brothers.

“What’s up?” Cheetah asked.

“That was Sumo,” Croc said. He looked down to Cheetah with his cold, red irises. “He was giving a progress report and informing us that Raven’s squad had encountered some of Justice’s crew.”

His strangely accented voice was extremely deep and caused an uncomfortable vibration in the eardrums. Cheetah resisted the urge to scratch his ears when Croc talked. He knew it wasn’t his fault, just a matter of his alien physiology. His race, the Koror, possessed subsonic vocal pouches as part of their own language was lower than the human ear could detect.

“Uhn. That good or bad?”

Croc shook his snout in a habit he had picked up from humanity. “They may have been compromised by Seductress. Raven fears Hercules and Nucleus are both under her power. Sumo is going out to help.”

“Gahh! That’s terrible. Hercules and Nucleus could level half the city.” Cheetah looked over at the still struggling villain in Croc’s grip. “I should join Raven now. I could be there in less than a minute. Can you finish up here?”

“Sure, no problem. I’ve got his psychotronic face plate covered up.” Croc then proceeded to tell Cheetah the location of Raven’s team.

Cheetah jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Khan’s out. Albino’s watchin’ him. Cross the street are also some knocked-out goons that were probably under Psycho’s control.”

“Good. We’ll round them up. Go.”

Croc raised his other hand and grabbed the back of Psycho Says’ head. He shifted his grip down towards the man’s throat, and then ripped Psycho Says’ entire mask off his head from the back forward.

“Hey!” the man screeched, though the sound faded away instantly as Cheetah left the scene.

Cheetah took off slowly, at thirty or forty miles per hour, his bare feet slapping the pavement as he planned a route through the city. He had memorized all the streets and traveled them enough at various times on different day to learn which ones were busy when and which ones had the lightest traffic. He didn’t like crowds and tended to avoid them, though technically he could run through them fast enough to not be bothered. When he decided on the streets he would take he sped up.

By the next block centrifugal force was tugging him sideways at a hundred and fifty miles an hour as he took the curve while his long brown hair streamed out behind him. Just the way he liked it.

-- To Be Continued --