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Chapter 194 – Honeymoon’s EndBatman dived to the side, but the metal door still clipped him as it sailed over him. Fortunately, his cape and uniform had more armor than they appeared to contain. It still felt like Bane had tried to kidney-punch him.
Waylon tore the other rear door off the van, but by the time Waylon had the door ready as a weapon, Batman had moved into the shadows and was stealthily edging behind a row of cars in an attempt to get behind his foe.
But Waylon cast the door aside and charged right at Batman’s hiding place behind a Cadillac. “You think only bats can see when it’s not bright out?”
Batman leapt upward, aiming for the pipes overhead, just as Waylon grabbed the back end of the Cadillac and lifted it until its rear wheels were off the ground. Then with one ferocious shove, he slammed the front end of the car into the concrete wall.
Batman swung from the pipes and caught Waylon in the face with both feet. His foe staggered back half a step and dropped the car, but wasn’t hurt. Batman swiftly somersaulted off to one side, avoiding the hammerfist that came down and dented the car’s trunk. Waylon tried a slashing backhand that missed by a good four feet, as Batman kept moving.
Batman came up and hurled a batarang that caught Waylon in the thigh with its sharp tip … and just bounced off Waylon’s hide. Waylon didn’t even bother to yell about it. Instead, he reached down and ripped the bumper off the Cadillac.
Batman hurled two pellets as he activated the eye-shields on his mask and slapped a miniature gasmask over his mouth and nose. Both pellets exploded in clouds of teargas at Waylon’s feet.
He moved stealthily in a circle around Waylon, as the huge man thrashed around and threatened, “I’m still gonna find you, Bat!” He coughed a couple of times and warned, “Stuff like this doesn’t stop me like normal guys.”
That was useful to know. Inadvertently helpful supervillains were definitely better than the ones who concealed their best powers. He stepped back out of the clouds of gas and took a deep breath. Then he turned his head toward one of the concrete walls so he could get his voice to reflect around the garage like some sort of tera-ventriloquism. “Where were you going to take Mister Paine?” He slapped the gasmask back on before he inhaled more than a whiff of the gas.
Waylon ran at where he thought the voice was coming from, and pummeled the first thing he ran into, which turned out to be someone’s new Miata.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Waylon coughed. “Me and my family were livin’ in Florida downstream of this designer drug plant the DEA didn’t even know about till last year, and the stuff they dumped inta the creek’s prob’ly what did this ta me. They said if I helped ’em, they’d take me ta Dr. Margaret K. Walsh and she’d cure me. So you’re in my way.”
Batman considered that information. It seemed pretty unlikely that Waylon was smart enough to spread disinformation in the middle of a battle. Particularly when Waylon seemed convinced he would win the fight eventually. So Waylon probably didn’t have any useful intel, given that Batman had already taken down the two Orphans.
Of course, that didn’t mean that a dangerous threat like Waylon could be left running loose in the middle of New York.
And Batman was absolutely not going to consider how helpful Terawatt could be at this very moment. He still didn’t know how strong she really was, or how much of that was telekinesis. And he didn’t have an upper limit on the power of her electrokinesis, just a lower limit that was frankly worrisome.
Waylon was still blundering about in the teargas and still coughing, but he wasn’t showing any other symptoms of teargas inhalation, which suggested that he might be immune to some toxins. That reduced the options when dealing with him.
Maybe ‘Terawatt’ was the way to go here. After all, he had noticed what the pipes were that he had leapt up and grabbed. And he had cased the area thoroughly before he made his move on these Orphans …
Waylon froze when he heard the noise. The bat-freak the Empire guys had warned him about? Sneaky. Tricky. Too fucking quiet. But that was definitely a splash. Bat-freak had just stepped in a puddle and given away where he was.
Too bad it was gonna cost him his life, because Waylon was going to rip the little bastard apart as payback. This teargas shit stung like hell and was not a load of laughs to breathe.
He moved quietly in the direction that splashing noise had come from. And he found the puddle. Water was spilled out in an area about the size of four cars side by side. And he was almost out of the fucking gas, so he could see the water because he was standing under one of the ceiling lights for the garage.
He heard a high-pitched rustling noise like one of those things the bat-freak threw, so he was ready to grab this one. Only the thing sailed up over his head.
His first thought was that the bat-loser had missed by a country mile.
It cut right through the electrical stuff over his head, which dropped across his shoulders just as he realized someone had removed the tube protecting the wires and had peeled the insulation off the wires, too. And he was standing in —
Batman watched as Waylon was shocked unconscious. Then he cut the power, plunging the area into darkness. Waylon was still out, so Batman took the opportunity to tie him up with lengths of the heavy cables the parking garage used as protective barriers at the corners of the garage so people couldn’t drive off one level and crash down onto another.
Once he was certain Waylon was secured, he moved back and made sure the two Orphans were unconscious and going to stay that way. He needed to search them, then the truck, and then get Alfred to bring his forensic sampling kit.
* * *
Riley didn’t mind sitting behind a desk, if that was where he could help the most. But he did mind sitting behind General O’Neill’s desk. He didn’t feel that he deserved to sit there.
But the general was out of the office for a couple of weeks. Riley didn’t begrudge the man a honeymoon. He still remembered his own honeymoon with great fondness, even if he was never going to discuss it in public. He might not even discuss it with his own children when they were old enough to be about to go on their own honeymoons — assuming he and Sam ever had kids, and people were willing to have anything to do with the children of two Orphans.
The desk phone buzzed, and Riley watched its lights flicker as Sergeant Harriman put the call through.
“Colonel Finn speaking.”
“Colonel, this is … the general’s IT heads.”
Riley knew that the general had been calling his three top IT guys things like ‘Larry, Moe, and Curly’ or ‘Manny, Moe, and Jack’ or other threesomes. So he had a feeling that Dr. Winkelman had been about to introduce himself as Larry, or something equally embarrassing. “Yes? What can I do for you?”
Dr. Winkelman cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Sir, the general missed his check-in.”
Riley grimaced slightly. “He is on his honeymoon, and he might be … somewhat distracted.”
One of the other guys jumped in. “Yes, sir, we know that. And we didn’t want to be intrusive. But no one answered his sat phone, or his room phone, or Willow’s tPhone. So we checked with the hotel. They had a power outage in the middle of the night that just fixed itself with no intervention after a little under an hour. The buildings around them had no such outage. We checked all of them.”
Riley clenched his teeth unhappily. That was beyond suspicious.
Dr. Winkelman cautiously asked, “We’d like to ask you to get someone down there and check their hotel room.”
He said, “Let me put you on hold for a minute, professor.” And he called a Belize number. The general had thought it might be useful to have an emergency contact in the hotel, so there were two Team Five soldiers in a much cheaper room on the street side of the hotel down on the third floor, near a stairwell for fast support.
“Who is this?”
Riley didn’t recognize the voice, but it had a distinct accent. It clearly wasn’t one of his people. And it sure wasn’t a cleaning lady. It was a man accustomed to telling people what to do. Riley snapped, “Identify yourself at once. This is Lieutenant Colonel R.J. Finn of the United States Army, calling from the U.S. Two of my people should be in that room, and two more of my people should be in their room in the honeymoon suite up on the fifth floor. If you are involved in the kidnapping or murder of a United States general, expect some pretty dire consequences.”
“This is police lieutenant George Palacio. We’re looking at a double homicide here, and we are assuming that the two victims are your officers, based on their clothing. We have not heard anything about a fifth-floor incident, but the cleaning women reported this when they found the damaged door this morning.”
Riley thought some ugly words, but just said, “Willow Rosenberg’s hotel room is on the fifth floor. If she or General O’Neill has been kidnapped, you’re going to have a PR crisis on your hands as well, because this is undoubtedly the work of The Empire. Once word of that gets out, people may evacuate everywhere within fifty miles to get out of range of their next attack.”
There was a very satisfactory gasp on the other end of the line.
* * *
Buffy grabbed her fiancé by the arm and stopped him. “Freddie? I love you, but I need you to get out of here right this second.”
He looked at her in confusion. “Buffy, what’s wrong?” He gave her a teasing smile. “Because there’s no way you’d want to stop jewelry shopping.”
She felt tears coming on, and she ruthlessly tried to suppress them. “Honey, I love you, I mean I really love you, but this is something you can’t handle.”
He puffed himself up and insisted, “Hey, I can handle anything!”
She gritted her teeth. It was the end of everything she cared about, no matter what. She confessed, “There are at least two Orphans coming after me right now.”
He looked at her like she was crazy. “What? Orphans? The Empire? Like in the news? Why? That makes no sense.”
She explained with a sob, “It’s because I’m an Orphan, too. I’ve been hiding everything I am … everything I can do … just so I could have a normal life with you. But these guys will kill you. I need you to be safe.”
And naturally, he totally didn’t believe her. “Buffy, if this is some sort of reality show thing again …”
She put her hands on his lower ribs. Then she lifted him over her head. He stared down in shock.
She warned him, “Freddie, it’s not a game. This is real. And these guys will kill you if you get in their way. I’ve got to … do something about it.”
He looked utterly stunned. She knew he would never want to be within four hundred yards of her again. She turned and ran. She ran to the big three-story escalator that would take her to the ground floor. Sure enough, she could see one of those two Orphans riding up toward her.
Could she just ride down the down escalator right past him and not have him do something? Even if it was just calling his partners so they were waiting for her at the bottom of the escalator? Or he might just shoot her. Or he might try scrambling across the metal slope in between the escalators to grab her and …
Hey, that sounded promising. She was wearing five-inch heels and footies. The heels had an inch and a half platform, because she had small feet. But she needed the height, because she was only 5'2" and Freddie was 6'4".
She kicked off the heels and held both of them in one hand. The footies were nice and slippery, so her feet stayed comfy in those heels. She leapt up onto the metal between the up and down escalators, took a deep breath, and skated down the slope in between the two.
On the metal slope, there were bumps every so often that were lighted signs warning people to stay off this part of the escalator, and not to do a few other stupid things. And there were several metal dividers sticking up a half a foot to catch anything sliding down the slope, like your purse. So she had to control her speed and skate around the bumps and jump the dividers. It was impossible for most people.
It was perfect for a really talented figure skater with really great kinesthetics.
She balanced with her feet in position like she was performing a slide chasse, and then she did a sheep jump over the divider and a crossed chasse around the warning sign. That went better than she expected, even if she was still picking up speed.
She zoomed past the Orphan on the up escalator. He didn’t try to grab her, but he was talking into his sleeve, so she knew every other Orphan would know she was heading down to the ground floor.
She did a single jump over the next divider, and as she spun around in mid-air, she got a look behind her. Yep, that asshole was clambering across to the down escalator. She jumped the dividers and skated over the signs. Then she needed to stick the landing.
Yeah, big with the problem there. She did a stag leap over the last sign and cleared the bottom of the escalator. Then she landed on her feet on the nice fake-tile floor and slid a good thirty feet before she slowed enough to convert from skating into running. But she didn’t fall over. That was what counted. That, and not crashing into anyone.
People were applauding her and photographing her and yelling stuff, but she just ran down the hall. It was like some kind of nightmare, where all the stuff she’d ever wanted was being twisted into something sick and wrong.
But now she knew what to do.
She didn’t run for an exit. She ran down to the ice skating rink on the ground floor.
“Miss Summers! This is a surprise! We don’t have any cameramen or anything set up for you.”
Inwardly she winced, because she’d deliberately come here a few dozen times just to skate and get pictures taken and have her Twitter following ooh and ahh over her moves. Not to mention the time she got Johnny Weir to come skate with her and she talked ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and ‘Hollywood Extra!’ into filming it for a segment. She smiled. “Yeah, but don’t tell anyone. I’m not being filmed now, and I just wanted a chance to do a little figure skating while I wait on my boyfriend.”
“Well, you just go right ahead. There’s not a lot of people on the ice right now, and the next lessons aren’t for maybe half an hour.”
She darted into the back room. She had three pair of her personal ice skates there in a private cabinet. She grabbed her special ice dancing skates with the oversized toepicks and the razor-sharp blades.
Skating blades weren’t like a razor. They were like a narrow steel edge that was ground until it was a concave curve with two sharp edges at the corners, and you had to know what you were doing or have a coach who knew what she was doing, so you had the perfect skates for your style and skill level and everything else.
She lobbed her heels into the cabinet, strapped on the skates, and dashed out on the ice. A crop top and miniskirt wasn’t all that different from a lot of her skating outfits, so she didn’t look out of place. She just took a lap around the rink, looking to see if her stalkers had caught up with her yet.
And there they were. Four of them. Two were totally Orphans, a third one was probably an Orphan even if he wasn’t as hot as the first two, and the fourth guy was just hired muscle unless there were Orphans who came out looking like Mike Tyson’s punching bag.
She could practically see them working out what to do next. They could wait until she had a big crowd, or they could come out and grab her while hardly anyone was watching yet. After her stunt on the escalator, they had to know a lot of people were going to be flocking to see what that crazy bimbo was doing next. So they went for option B.
She was so angry she wanted to hurt those bastards who turned her into a freak and ruined her life and wouldn’t leave her alone and were going to make her lose everything. She kept skating, and she planned.
In a matter of minutes, they skated out after her, but they weren’t skaters. And that meant she had all the advantages, even if one had a gun and two others had tasers. They spread out in a line and tried to close in on her. But they hadn’t thought about the difference between someone on skates and an Olympic-level skater.
She skated toward the man on the far right, and she let the Orphans in the middle close to their left, trying to head her off. She tried not to even look over at the guys in the middle. But she wanted the middle left guy, who had the gun in his hand. She didn’t know anything about guns, but she’d seen plenty of movies and TV programs where people got shot, and she didn’t have that on her bucket list.
At the last moment, she spun to her right and did a 270 so she was aimed off to the left. She darted out of her spin straight at gun-guy. She moved into an arabesque position, so her body was parallel to the ice and her free leg was sticking straight out behind her. She knew she looked silly and harmless.
It worked. The guy with the gun reached out to grab her, instead of trying to shoot her.
She closed in on him and went straight into a camel spin. She stayed in her same posture but spun as fast as she could. Her aim was perfect. The edges of her skate slashed across the back of the guy’s gun hand, slicing his tendons to shreds. He screamed and dropped the gun. Blood flew everywhere.
He still tried to nail her with a punch from his uninjured arm. She dropped into a sit-spin, and he missed by a mile. She leapt back to her feet and let him know why she had chosen these particular skates. She kicked him as hard as she could in the shin with her toepicks. He screamed and went down hard, accidentally kicking the gun across the ice so it was way too far for her to grab before she had to deal with the goons on either side of her.
She darted away from where he was lying on the ice, holding his shin and cursing at her. She had dealt with the threat of the gun, so she only had closer-range threats now. But the other three goons knew that she was a threat. That she was a predator. And they knew they were in her hunting grounds.
“Get her! Get her, you bastards! Hurt that bitch!” The guy who was down wasn’t very happy with her. Well, good, because she wasn’t very happy with him, either. In fact, she was totally of the unhappy.
One Orphan shoved his taser in his pocket and skated as fast as he could for the gun. She couldn’t let him get there first. But she had to skate around the other taser-equipped thug, which meant she had to go a lot farther.
Fortunately, she was also faster. A lot faster. She detoured around Taser Guy Number Two and poured on the speed.
He was still going to get there first. He dived across the ice and clasped the gun with both hands.
She came up from behind him, so his feet were toward her and his outstretched arms were away from her. She gave it her best Salchow jump and cleared his entire body. She came down right on his arms with her blades.
He screamed in pain, and she struggled not to fall down. She caught herself and reversed direction, skating right at his face. He panicked and ignored the gun, while trying to protect his head with his injured arms.
She kicked him right in the throat with the toepicks of her left boot. Blood spurted everywhere. She turned it into a front-flip to clear his body so she didn’t fall on her face. She reversed direction and found the guy had knocked the gun across the ice. Again. What, was everyone playing ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ and no one remembered to tell her?
And Unarmed Guy was heading for the sliding gun, while Taser Guy Number Two was heading for her. Couldn’t these pricks take a hint?
She did a quick counter-turn and then moved into some crossovers to pick up speed. She could see that she was going to get to the gun first, but only by a fraction of a second. If she stopped to pick it up, Unarmed Guy would plow into her and beat the snot out of her. And regular Buffys were always better than de-snotted Buffys. It went without saying.
She cut over the gun as she dropped into a cantilever. Her knees were bent and her back was bent backward, and that meant that her body was parallel to the ice and about eight inches above the ice. She skated over the gun, her skates passing on either side of it, and she snatched it up in passing with her right hand.
Unarmed Guy extended his arms forward and dived for the gun. Or maybe for her. Either way, he missed by a couple of feet and hit the ice hard, his face bouncing off the ice like his head was made of rubber. She stayed in her cantilever and pointed the gun at him, and then she pulled the trigger.
The gun kicked a lot more than she thought it would, so she aimed the next couple of shots more carefully. They definitely hit Unarmed Guy in the ribs as he slid past her. The fourth time she pulled the trigger, the gun just sort of locked up.
She was suddenly really regretting not learning a ton about guns and gun safety and gun cleaning and anything else that might matter right now. Was the gun out of bullets? She didn’t know, and she didn’t know how to check, and she still had a guy with a taser after her. Did guns jam or get stuck or anything?
She skated into an upright position, and she picked up speed, using crossovers to move faster and turn around so she could deal with that taser.
The guy slowed down, watching her come at him with his teeth clenched. But she could see his eyes. The guy was afraid. He was maybe 240 pounds, and he had a taser, and he was scared of a petite 5'2" girl.
He had damn well better be afraid of her, because she was going to slice him in half.
He’d seen her drop into a sit-spin and he’d seen her drop into a cantilever, so she was banking on him expecting more of the same. She skated around him in a fast circle, closing in on him while he tried to keep turning so she couldn’t get behind him. Smart guy. Because if he let her get behind him, he was going to get a toepick right in the kidney.
She really wished she knew martial arts. And guns. And other stuff like that. She really wished she hadn’t been a complete bitch to Terawatt, who totally had better things to do with her life than drop in on reality TV bimbos and try to be nice to them when they were busy moping around and feeling sorry for themselves. How weird was it that she had met Terawatt? And that she chatted with Willow Rosenberg, AKA Acid Burn, pretty regularly now? Dumb reality TV losers totally did not get to talk to tera women like Willow, who hadn’t even needed to tell Buffy her real identity but she did it because she was just a sweet person.
Buffy closed in on the guy and lowered her hands. The guy fired the taser low, like she was about to drop into a hydroblading move. Instead, she threw herself upward into a death drop and leapt right over the taser wires. She was so used to using a death drop as a flying entry into a spin that she almost went into a spin when she landed. Instead, she darted forward.
The guy threw the now-useless taser aside and leapt at her. She immediately went into a split jump and cleared him completely, so he crashed to the ice while she moved cleanly forward. She reversed direction and curved around to come at him from the side.
He reached into a pocket for some other weapon, so she didn’t give him the opportunity. She leapt into the air and came down hard on the back of his neck with one skate, driving his face into the ice. She leapt off and caught herself on her free leg, skating around in a quick loop to be ready if he came at her again.
He wasn’t moving. In fact, he looked extremely dead. She wished she was upset about that, but she was so pissed at these guys that she just wanted to skate over and kick at them a bunch more. And maybe get people to throw stuff at them.
She glanced up when she heard the noises. She finally had the kind of audience she’d always dreamed of, only it was to see her spattered with blood and surrounded by dead or maimed Orphans. And there were dozens — maybe hundreds — of cameras and cellphones on her, capturing every bit of it. Just what she’d always wanted, in a way she had desperately wanted to avoid. It was like those stupid ‘monkey’s paw’ horror stories where you got your wish only twisted to make your life hell.
How did you beat a murder rap when you had way over a thousand people who had just watched you kill some guys? This was so not of the good.
And just to make things worse, two cops struggled out onto the ice with guns drawn. She was a little worried, because both cops looked about half a second from falling on their faces. Even worse, two news station camera crews were coming right after them, so there was no avoiding any of this.
She skated slowly around her four attackers, making sure none of them got up again, or pulled out another weapon. And she waited.
The cops finally got close enough to talk to her. One cop looked down at the bodies, and at her bloody skates, and at the blood splattered on her. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
She sighed inwardly and went for it. She struck a figure skating pose, making sure she was giving the closer cameraman her best three-quarter profile. She loudly announced, “I’m Buffy … the Empire Slayer.”
She was stunned to hear the cheering and applause from all around the rink.