01-00
Really, the trenchcoat should have been more obvious to the typically ultra-aware citizens; the day was a scorcher, the first properly ‘nice’ weekend in months. The winter had been persistent and clammy, icy slush and frigid drafts creeping out of the alleys and gutters of Isidore far longer than anyone would have expected. Spring had brought very little change, except to replace the occasional flurries of snow with the occasional paint-peeling cannonade of hail. It was well into May, and just the previous Monday the early morning joggers still saw their own breath crystallizing before their eyes.
But now it was a brilliantly cloudless Saturday afternoon, and while the heat wasn’t anything approaching a true midsummer’s day, it seemed downright volcanic after the malingering damp. The pedestrian population of Isidore increased exponentially, and there was hardly a pair of sandals left to be bought in the coastal city’s Dollar Stores. Food cart vendors battled one another for roadside real estate, rust and cobwebs still visible from their long winter storage. Every bistro, coffee shop and diner that had any sort of sidewalk or patio dining was thronged with people wanting to feel genuine sunshine on their necks while sucking down their caffeine.
There would be uneven tan lines and sunburns galore in the coming work week, where the temperatures were once again expected to drop alongside the barometric pressure, but no-one seemed to care. It was fun, and enjoyment would not be denied.
Pyrrhus knew the trenchcoat was big and bulky, but he’d gone out with it several times over the last few weeks on trial runs. A trip to the grocery store, body armor shifting and binding awkwardly as he slung the basket full of dairy up onto the counter. A cab ride, just down to the local indoor mall, followed by a quick walk back to his apartment to see if any of the peripherals, cables or accoutrements rattled or fell loose. Several late night jogs to the Quick Stop for soda. Not once had anyone noticed anything peculiar, or if they did notice they elected to say nothing.
Both were good, but secretly he hoped for the second. A little bit of hipster street cred could do his burgeoning career a world of wonder.
Pyrrhus, born Barton Ezekiel Smith and raised as ‘Little Barty’ until the fateful day he emancipated himself with a wood axe, boarded the Supertrain at the dull grey, cathedral-like 128th Street station, an open-concept fortress of aluminum and concrete. The main line ran north-south, from the spreading particle-board suburbs of Upper Isidore all the way downtown in a great inverted candy-cane path. 128th was also the hub for the much newer east-west line that jiggered like a heart attack patient’s ECG through the ever-spreading suburban sprawl of the modern city seeking to redefine itself as something other than an industrial hub.
Escalators, elevators, stairs and ramps connected the extruded platforms of the four separate tracks, and during any of the average day’s five or six rush hours just moving from one train to the next could count as assault, if not battery. Not-So-Little Barty felt safe and secure inside Pyrrhus’s shell, and every time someone tried to squeeze past him, dart around him or simply shove their way through him, he chortled. Many an arm or a shoulder came away bruised, a mixture of confusion and spite on the commuter’s face, but invariably they were too entwined with their own personal schedule of just-slightly-too-late bullshit to make a fuss about it.
The southbound train wasn’t especially busy at this station, but he knew every single stop would pick up more and more witnesses. Really, he thought, if he actually lived downtown it might have made this more difficult!
Pyrrhus thought of his apartment, his abode of the last four years, going up in flames. He’d been forced to leave most of his possessions behind, but they were the ones most easily replaced. Pretty soon, he’d have no more need to worry about something as commonplace as how both rent and electricity bills would be paid. He could afford new things. Better things. The best things.
It was a little depressing that everything he’d selected to carry over into his new life fit into two duffels and a white plastic ShopRite grocery bag, but he supposed it just enhanced his ascetic, Spartan lifestyle. He eschewed the trivialities of luxuries, distractions from his glorious destiny as the newest and most revered of Isidore’s pantheon of supervillains. The trigger sensors and detonators were all in place, and, if the police weren’t wholly incompetent, his building would soon be spread across several square blocks of crappy low-income high-density walk-ups.
Pyrrhus grabbed one of the ceiling-mounted handholds by the junction between two train cars, where he hoped he’d be mostly out of the way of the other passengers. He couldn’t sit very well, not with the trenchcoat bunching and shifting over the enormously complicated bulk of his armor. His heart was pounding, lurching in his titanium-shelled chest, far worse than any of the times he’d taken the suit for a test-run. This was the real thing. This was the day. This was happening.
Sweat trickled down his back, gathering support in his last remaining pair of clean white jockeys, and flowed in rivulets down to his feet. His suit’s environmental systems kept him fully insulated from any exterior contamination from the waist down, a requirement whenever anyone was dealing with catastrophically dangerous levels of electricity. Unfortunately, he was learning that, on the hottest day of the year thus far, it was also going to have him walking in puddles until he could install some form of coolant system.
Schematics for a liquid-flow heat-pump system drifted through his mind as the train pulled out of the station.
By 96th Street, it became obvious that this particular train car’s air conditioning was also not working at optimum efficiency. Pyrrhus might be the city’s latest scourge of the One Percent and the downfall of the Establishment, but Bart E. Smith’s moon face was flushed dangerously red, which only made the white flesh near his hairline all the more shockingly pale. With every additional rider, the car’s humid air seemed to gather more weight, more pressure, until he feared he’d have to suit up early.
By 80th Street, the last seat had been taken, and the battle for Standing Room Only had begun.
By 64th, halfway to his destination as the crow flew but hardly a third of the distance by laid track, people had begun to disembark, but not in numbers sufficient to counterbalance the new boarders.
“Aren’t you hot?” asked an elderly woman wearing a floral outfit that seemed to have been constructed from at least three different forms of 70’s drapery panel. She held a tiny battery-powered fan in one hand, her wrist oscillating back and forth, drafting her strangely-tanned wattles and blowing her too-permed hair up like waving octopus tentacles.
“M’fine,” Bart answered, for perhaps the last time. Soon Bart would be no more, he thought, nothing but the shed chitin of a new and deadly type of… of… of bug? That didn’t sound very good. There were already far too many bug-themed villains in Isidore-
“If you’re sure!” the old lady smiled politely, her eyes making it clear that this was simply more proof everyone in the world was an addle-brained moron, except for her. “I do wish they’d let you open the windows!”
Outside, far-coastal crosswinds buffeted the sides of the Supertrain as it whizzed along at close to ninety miles an hour, hardly reaching top speed before it was time to slow down for the next station. Passing 50th Street, the buildings around them began to rise higher and more majestically into the sky. The elevated tracks followed the Delta Highway for the majority of its journey, and more than forty feet below, the day’s traffic was a blurry rainbow of sedans, taxis and busses. If he leaned far to the side, nearly crushing the old lady (and wouldn’t that just have been a wonderful bonus for today, yes?) in his attempt to press his sweltering face against the plexiglass, he knew he’d be able to see the elite, moneyed paradise of Downtown.
How soon they would tremble, how quickly would their hired goons and thugs and so-called ‘heroes’ realize the folly of their braggadocio when the spectre of Pyrrhus was cast across their shadows?
“Shadows?” inquired the old lady, whom Bart was starting to dislike.
“Sh’nothin’,” he replied, wiping the back of his hand across his brow and sending a small rain of salty droplets across the bored-looking hipsters seated across the aisle from the old woman. The girl-hipster, whom Bart could only identify as female from the all-too-familiar look of revulsion that crossed her face at the most innocent of physical contacts, made a disgusted noise in her throat and looked to her mate for support.
Guy-hipster, looking up at the huge and imposing shape of Pyrrhus, wisely decided not to pursue the issue and resumed staring out the window. Girl-hipster glared daggers at the back of his skull, and Pyrrhus smiled.
The train car, second from the back and just one of eight links in the chain of aluminum sausages, was nearly at capacity when they passed 28th Street. The stations from here on out were no longer bound by the mathematically predictable road crossing monikers, but were named after the great and supposedly important institutions and legendary nomenclature of the region. Up next was Kingsway Station, although this country had been founded on its lack of kings. After that was Freeport, another lie when one considered the exorbitant taxes and fees levied upon anyone attempting to use the city’s bustling port. Then came Methodist General, then Franklin, then Grand Boulevard, then Mercy, and then his destiny.
Lionsgate, he thought. A word soon to be synonymous… with Pyrrhus.
Wait, he thought a moment later. It wouldn’t be synonymous, it wouldn’t MEAN the same thing as Pyrrhus. It would… it would be mentioned in the same breath as Pyrrhus, yes. It would evoke the aura of Pyrrhus. That sounds better. I need a voice recorder app.
At Freeport Station, a significant chunk of the riders disembarked but were replaced by a legion of sweaty teenagers. The volume within the suddenly cramped train car skyrocketed, and somehow, somehow, a small beachball was being bounced around in the limited airspace between the tops of their boisterous heads and the runnelled aluminum ceiling panels.
He could call himself Pyrrhus all he liked in just a few more short stops, but it was Bart E. Smith who glared sullenly at the tall, muscular teenaged boys and resentfully at the tall, glistening teenaged girls. Sleek legs tipped with gaily-colored flip-flops met at shorts that seemed too small to safely contain their youthful enthusiasm. They slid into every available seat with audible squeaks of cheap vinyl upholstery against slick flesh, while the overburden crammed in upright like sardines.
“Five more stops,” he muttered, swaying as the Supertrain accelerated. The downtown stations were hardly a handful of blocks apart, and the whine of electric motors fell away just as it was approaching dentist-drill frequencies. He leaned the opposite direction, fighting the braking momentum, and wobbled unsteadily when the doors slid open at Methodist General Station, across the street from the namesake hospital.
He’d hoped some of the nearly-deads would have gotten off there, particularly the old woman and her god-damned buzzing fan, but no such luck. If anything, more teenagers seemed to be squirming their way into the car, surely beyond the maximum occupancy.
What could they be doing here?! He thought madly. What the fuck is going on around Methodist Fucking General that two proms worth of underage promiscuity need to hog the mass transit?! After today, there’s going to be some fucking CHANGES around here!
Another short, grinding journey, the entire population of Southbound Car #6 making bovine lowing noises, as though performing some sort of crowd-participation ritual at a baseball game. Pyrrhus was imagining an entire pre-coital migration of hairless, flip-flopped mole rats, leaking pheromones and emitting obnoxious squonks and chortles, fighting for the scant, spastic attentions of mate after mate after mate.
Big changes!!!
Franklin became Grand Boulevard, and outside the train the buildings became instantly familiar. Bart E. Smith had spent many, many hours over the last few months memorizing the hundred square blocks surrounding his target. Every conceivable scenario, every potential escape route, every location he could arrange for a decoy or a double-back. There were three rogue fanatics in the vicinity, and all three had supplied verified references and laid deposits in Pyrrhus’s bank account.
Downtown was audacious.
Broad daylight was spectacular.
A glorious late spring day, the sun shining, laughter and young love in the air… this day would be legendary. Isidore would long remember this as the day that everything changed.
“Hmmm?” the old woman asked, tugging at her ridiculously gaudy flower-print blouse and aiming her fan, along with Bart’s unwilling eyes, down her front.
The train had just pulled out of Mercy, beginning the first leg of the curved candy-cane course. The slickly rattling cars angled gently away from one another, and through the windows opposite Bart he could see the chrome-capped beginning and the ending cars of the train, if he tried. There was no engine car, there was no caboose, of course; there wasn’t even a conductor. Every car was identical, equipped with the same Motronics HPL-482 electric single-axle rail motors and the same Garbrandt M1890-D Teflon-ceramic compression brakes. Those brakes would be automatically triggered by the networked Supertrain systems, and a signal would instantly alight on the various maintenance Supertrain kiosks around the city, if there was a catastrophic emergency in any car on any train.
Bart E. Smith reached back under the strangely humped collar of his trenchcoat, and Pyrrhus pulled his articulated and fully-armored helmet and facemask into position, tiny electromagnets sealing it seamlessly around his neck.
“Uhm, sir?” the old woman asked, squinting up at the suddenly insect-like rider standing above her. “You, uhm… your…” Her wrist spun like the blades of her fan, as though physically cycling through all of the words available to her, and not finding quite the right one to capture the strange mix of emotions flooding her mind.
The car’s hubbub, which was relayed, filtered, enhanced and rebroadcast inside Pyrrhus’s helmet, changed pitch. All the higher frequencies dropped off almost completely, to be replaced by a deep, trepiditious rumbling. The beachball bounced against a few heads before coming to rest in a young seated girl’s lap. Hours later, when watching security camera footage of herself, she was surprised to see that beachball arrive in her embrace; at the time, she’d never noticed it.
Pyrrhus slid his hands into his pockets, into the thickly-padded bronze-plated gauntlets carefully positioned there, which clicked home against more electromagnetic hardpoints. A casual rip of his enhanced arms, minuscule batteries of hydraulics giving his shoulders and elbows a thick, bulky, ungainly appearance, and his coat fell in a useless pile around his heavy rubberized boots.
“Fu-u-uck me,” the old woman sighed, shaking her head in resignation. “Figures, today is the-”
Pyrrhus’s backhand sounded like a wet sapling splintering under an uncaring bulldozer’s treads. Her head struck the window, not damaging the plexiglass in the slightest but leaving a modern-art spiderweb splash of arterial scalp blood. Still somehow gripping her fan, buzzing and thwipping away against her blouse, she hissed one final breath and slid out of her seat.
“MORTALS!” he roared, tiny state-of-the-art speakers build into his neckpiece nearly deafening those closest to him. Burnished green and bronze armor plates glinted dully, like someone putting too much polish and elbow grease into a junker that needed far more than just a new coat of paint. “YOU ARE BEHOLDEN TO PYRRHUS!”
The train passed 22nd and Mikkelson, one of those peculiarly elusive boundaries that separated high-rent modern urbanity, coffee shops rubbing shoulders with artisanal greengrocers and artist supply lofts, from the stubborn remnants of harder economic times. Looming over the intersection, stretching from the canopy of a local florist all the way to the crenelated cornices of the building’s fifth and highest storey, was the huge and perhaps permanently unpowered vertical sign reading ‘CHINEESE LAUNDRY’. At some point during the sign’s creation, decades prior, the spelling error must have been noticed, but it wasn’t until it was installed that the owner apparently decided that the mistake was destined for some sort of ironic fame.
That sign was his point of no return, and Pyrrhus was relieved to discover that his normally traitorous body didn’t hesitate in the slightest.
He swung his right arm up, clenching his fist one finger at a time, pinkie through index. In order to prevent accidental activations of the suit’s heavy weaponry, there were only two nonverbal codes built into the gauntlets: pinkie through index, and index through pinkie. Contacts in the fingertips completed circuits against the gauntlet’s insulated palm armor, and the very first proper field test of the Rarefied Arc Plasma Cannon commenced. For the last time in his life, he wished he had better component words to choose from. When he was famous, the RAP Cannon might sell well in certain historically lower-income parts of the city, but he would need something snazzier to market upscale.
Four insectile rods leapt up on thin titanium tripods from his forearms, wires trailing from their backs. Those seated nearest to him cried out in terror, having seen just as many examples on the nightly news of bleeding-edge technology ripping armored cars apart like butterflies under a blowtorch as they had examples of that same gadgetry exploding like the cruelest form of dirty IED. It was considered the height of poor form for either side to create civilian casualties, but the unregulated arms race knew only the skunkworks method of design and development. Passengers both sitting and standing shied away from Pyrrhus, clawing at one another to flee what would no doubt be a blast point of one kind or another.
The electrodes sparked and heated to white hot in moments. Damn, not as fast as preliminary trials! Pyrrhus thought madly, having only tested the individual components, and some of the larger assemblies together. Not much, half a second, should be fine, should be fine, RIGHT BEND KNEES CRAP!
So caught up was he in the moment, he blanked on his carefully-memorized procedure. He hunkered down, leaning forwards against his outstretched arm like some wilderness hunter trudging through a blizzard. The electrodes flashed blue once, and the microturbine on his back thrummed hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs. The helmet displays fogged, and Bart E. Smith panicked when his world went all different kinds of white.
The cannon discharged, several hundred gigawatts of very carefully harnessed and focused energy turning the side of the Supertrain into an erupting boil of molten plexiglass and scorched, twisted aluminum. Foamed insulation exploded like numerous safety trials had indicated it would not, raining fire down on the public below. The upholstery flashed to a gaseous state that expanded with the force of a grenade, tossing those unlucky enough to still be close to Pyrrhus aside like tenpins. He was safe within his armor, the carefully-harnessed forces of concussion and convection directing the ridiculously vast energies out into the sparse atmosphere some thirty feet above the street.
The catastrophic emergency triggered the brakes, and on the various maintenance Supertrain kiosks around the city, many lights that rarely had a chance to shine flicked on with gusto.
The world lurched to the side as the train’s maximum speed was ground out against the tungsten alloy rails. More screams and curses flowed around him, mixing with the smoke and blowing cinders of the explosion. The suit remained upright and intact, dashing the last few remnants of Bart E. Smith’s anxiety.
It worked, he thought. Of course it worked. How could it not?
The microturbine on his back was good for two more energetic events, which was all he needed. The train’s speed dropped to sixty miles per hour, then forty, then twenty, cars vibrating and shaking all but the hardiest passengers from their feet. The power cell that had shipped with the turbine would be expended, and he would owe some rather well-connected and efficient men a considerable amount of money.
And they’ll have it, Pyrrhus grinned inside his helmet, watching a fairly dull expanse of old, polished grey concrete slide into view through the twisted and tortured scar he’d rent in the Supertrain’s hull. The cannon had taken longer to fire than expected, but the brakes had worked more efficiently than expected.
“Everything’s coming up Barty!” he wheezed, his throat tight with emotion. Not tight enough to keep those words from being amplified and rebroadcast at deafening volume, but still measurably distraught. He watched the tiny animated equalizer dance as it measured his stereo output, and he snarled. Fortunately, this snarl was also rebroadcast, and somewhat improved his self-image.
The Gulf Business Development Bank, the gem of 22nd Street and the shining upscale promontory surrounded on all sides by the dingy waters of suburban delocalization, was almost close enough to touch. The Supertrain’s course had slowly taken it from the concrete pillars that marched down the center of 22nd, and the nearly motionless vehicle was moving at a shallow angle to the surrounding buildings. If it hadn’t been stopped by the emergency brakes, it would have all but brushed the side of the bank’s far corner, passed over a few light commercial stripmalls and modular storage facilities before pulling into Lionsgate Mall.
Pyrrhus stared at his displays, marvelling that the little orange smear of paint on the uniform grey wall had somehow lined itself up directly with him.
“DESTINY!!” he roared, the amplification still potent enough to cause the huddled passengers to clap their hands over their ears. The doors between the cars weren’t locked, but as often seemed to be the case there was a definite traffic jam forming as curious onlookers from the adjacent capsules fought to investigate the situation.
Pyrrhus spun, giving his capacitors time to recharge. Most of his suit was fairly run-of-the-mill, space-age materials embedded onto ultra-strong monomer fabrics, coated and insulated with simple impregnable silicone membranes. He could survive under a hundred feet of water, or at thirty thousand feet. He had enough private air for six hours. His gauntlet was blackened and pockmarked, but his hand had felt none of the collateral damage from the plasma pulse. The turbine strapped to his back, though, along with the twin banks of microcellular capacitors, was an experimental miniaturized version of the ones that powered overseas vehicle-mounted anti-fortification weapons. He wasn’t entirely sure how his sellers had come across them, but the multi-million-dollar price tag had come with a very attractive payment plan.
The passengers shied away from him, averting their eyes as they would were a Titan descending from on high. He laughed, a deep belly laugh that echoed around his head in the supposedly sound-muffling helmet. It carried on far longer than he’d really planned, having allotted four to five seconds for a little self celebration. The capacitors were redzoning, and his insides were still spasming. At the far north end of the car he could see several phones aimed his way, no doubt recording, hopefully some livestreaming with the correct hashtags.
“PYRRHUS!” he bellowed, feeling ten feet tall. He swung his left leg back and drove his armored boot into the old woman’s hip, curious as to whether or not those bones were as brittle as sitcoms and commercials made them out to be.
A tiny part of him thought it a little petulant and small-thinking to be kicking an unconscious septuagenarian, but fucked if it didn’t just feel good.
The bank was right there. The amusingly-named GBDB did not have much in the way of customer numbers, and their ground-floor frontage was little more than a bank of cash machines to one side of some glass double doors, and some secretarial staff to the left. All of the offices were upstairs, along with what passed for a vault these days, hardly more than an afterthought bunker built in the late 90’s. Reinforced concrete blocks, and a three-eighths inch steel plate sheathing? Please, he thought. Make it easy for me, why don’t you.
The former Bart E. Smith had landed that orange paintball the week before, after doing scrupulous research into the building’s innards. He’d been terrified, his toes curling in his boots, palms sweaty, tongue dry, his right eye tearing up for some reason, pulling out that little gas-powered gadget, hardly more than a child’s toy, at three in the morning. He’d expected to get gunned down, even though he was white and wearing a jogging suit. He’d expected police lights to flash and sirens to erupt all around. He’d expected screams, he’d expected a torrent of attention brought down on the head of a perfectly normal man who’d just chosen to bring a cheap handheld paintball gun along on his nightly walk.
There’d been nothing. He drew, aimed, fired at the spot where the vault lined up with the building’s curtain wall, and then carried on his way. He’d celebrated with a Vanilla Coke at one of the all-night convenience stores, and then celebrated further with another Vanilla Coke several blocks later. He’d hardly slept that night.
Pyrrhus stared down at the godlike suit cradling his body, and wondered how he’d ever been so frightened, so small.
A godlike boot cracked the old woman again, and the laughter started up again.
Ding.
The readouts in his helmet flashed from red to green, and a text message alert appeared in the upper left quadrant of his vision. The capacitor banks were charged, and his rogue fanatic within the bank itself had checked in with a verified account. HellBat644 would be ready and waiting at the southeast stair tower.
“You are about to be very rich, HellBat,” he whispered, careful to stay below the microphone’s threshold this time. He decided to add to his celebration by spreading the love around, turning and stomping an armored boot down onto girl-hipster’s bare, luscious knee. She was practically sitting in guy-hipster’s lap, both of them unable to clamber out of their seats to safety without getting just that much closer to the instrument of their doom.
On impact, girl-hipster’s jaw dropped open, her lips peeled back in a silent scream. One eye bulged, the other strangely docile-looking. Her hands fluttered spasmically at shoulder level, and Pyrrhus was reminded of the cartoons he’d seen as a child where the housewife, with her hair under a kerchief and a small apron flat against her perennially black skirt, would react in much the same fashion to seeing a mouse scurrying about. Guy-hipster confirmed that the suit’s audio was still working; his own shriek was loud enough for the both of them.
“MICE!” Pyrrhus howled with ecstasy. “MICE BEFORE ME!”
The girl began to wail, long sobbing hiccoughs as though an air-raid siren couldn’t quite wind up to full power. The capacitor icons continued to blink in his suit, and it was with great reluctance he forced his attention back to the task at hand. Gotta be careful, he thought to himself. They really do talk about the Hero’s Rush, don’t they? God, I could tear them all apart with my bare hands right now, and my numbers would still be huge. But that’s the fool’s path, the path of Randolph. I’m smarter than that. I have a schedule. I have a Plan.
Pyrrhus turned again to face the wall, staring with glee at the orange target. Perfection. His fingers triggered the cannon’s activation sequence again, four electrodes springing up on their German-made servos-
The Error light on his displays gave him pause.
That wasn’t part of the Plan.
Pyrrhus brought his armored forearm up to his helmet’s cameras, and he growled with frustration. One of the electrodes had NOT sprung up on its German-made servo joints, in spite of all the testing. He supposed he had to admit, though, that a full-power test had never been run, and the sheer amount of ash and other microscopic debris that had been virtually enameled onto the moving parts could not have been properly foreseen-
“NO!” Pyrrhus forced those small thoughts out of his mind. Excuses. Weak thoughts. There was no room in his destiny, in his Plan, for weak thoughts!
The electrode had lifted up slightly at the back, so there was still some functionality. Hampered by the thick gauntlets, which were designed to withstand blowback from the cataclysmic energy of the cannon as well as deal with the red-hot semi-liquid remnants of whatever had been the target, he tried to lift the rest of the assembly into firing position. Within his suit, he was an implacable golem, a walking armored carrier; Pyrrhus had nothing to fear from the civilians who were bearing witness to his becoming.
Of course, those cameras were still recording, and the thought of his debut being ruined by a hardware malfunction brought a flush back to his cheeks and reminded him that he was still ankle-deep in sweat, undergarments clinging to the small of his back and with nowhere for the moisture buildup to escape to.
Over the sound of his own growling, he could perhaps have been forgiven for missing the renewed shouting within the train car. It didn’t matter; the entire scene had been recorded for posterity from half a dozen angles, and although they would each go viral, the clearest recording would be watched more than a million times before the day was out. More than seventy million by the following weekend.
The electrode was lifting slowly, black flakes crumbling and falling away from the treasonous joint, when his helmet’s displays were filled with the flat, high-definition palm of a large, pale hand. It stuck him harder than he would have imagined possible (though at the moment, he was fairly certain that even a car driving at highway speeds wouldn’t have bothered him overly), bouncing his skull around the padded but slightly loose-fitting headgear.
“HEY!” his assailant screamed, automated stereoscopic tracking software identifying individual droplets of spit flying from her mouth. “ASSHOLE-IN-A-SUIT! YEAH, I SEE YOU IN THERE!”
Safely concealed behind the Roman-inspired design of his helmet, his jaw dropped. He’d considered the possibility that there might be some resistance from the passengers. He’d have been foolish to ignore the potential. Any number of fledgling cowls had been done in by nothing more than their own hubris, a lack of escape routes, and some large, opportunistic bystanders. The video of Nephelem, a young billionaire from up north somewhere, being savagely curb-stomped by a quartet of monstrously drunk yet extremely energetic twenty-somethings was routinely featured as a graphic punchline on any number of late night television shows.
Pyrrhus had not considered a scenario where a teenaged girl wearing vanishingly small short-shorts and a strappy yellow top would be repeatedly driving the heels of her palms into his head. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but his balance was already not the best in the top-heavy armor. Each blow seemed to harden the air around his ears, momentarily deafening him.
The girl, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, was pivoting on her feet like a prize-fighter, winding her torso up and throwing each hard cross right from the hip. If she’d used her knuckles, she’d have likely shattered them instantly.
Someone had clearly planned for this scenario. Pyrrhus wished it had been him.
“YOU THINK IT’S FUN, KICKING PEOPLE?! HUH?! YOU THINK IT’S FUN?! HITTING A WOMAN!? COME ON, BITCH!”
The girl would have been pretty, in the slightly intimidating way that he found professional lady-athletes and models to be intimidating. Her face was angular, her jaw slightly too wide, her cheekbones slightly too high. With the right makeup and lighting she could have been modelling a perfume, or an imported luxury sedan, or perhaps she’d just have her face airbrushed and plastered overtop of some company’s name and website. Passing her on the street, he’d have thought her potentially attractive, but in that way that he felt was informed rather than instinctual.
Then why now, with her eyes dripping fire, her teeth exposed in an animalistic snarl, with her dirty and streaked blond hair flying, tongue lashing him with obscenities, did he find her heart-wrenchingly gorgeous?
No time! Stick to the Plan!
Her wild swings were slowing, and Pyrrhus remained uninjured. The shock wore off finally, and he dismissed her much as he’d dismissed the old hag and her pestering fan. The back of his left gauntlet swung with implacable force, elbow hydraulics humming smoothly.
The gasp from the crowd was audible inside his helmet when the girl ducked it, she actually fucking ducked it, and came right back up! She drove her right arm up under his left, drawing herself in closer. Her hand snaked around somehow, fingers digging into the ridged plating roughly where his mouth would have been.
It was not lost on him that the first time he was standing tits-to-tits and junk-to-junk with a beautiful girl, he wanted nothing more than to crush her skull until blood flowed from her empty eye sockets like cherry filling out of a lava cake.
“YOU AIN’T SO BAD!” she screeched. Pyrrhus drove his arm down, confident in the suit’s titanic strength. While the augmentations built unto the suit were powerful enough to rip a car’s door from its hinges, there was still the issue of a fulcrum requiring a sufficiently strong anchor. His arm moved down, true, but braced against her own arm and her well-planted legs, it simply caused his body to lift up on that side, one sweat-filled boot wiggling uselessly a few inches above the train’s linoleum floor.
Some of the onlookers laughed.
They actually laughed.
They fucking laughed at him.
“STOP IT!” Pyrrhus couldn’t remember ever shouting so loud, momentarily worried he’d torn something in his esophagus. His vision doubled, trebled, though whether it was from adrenaline or rage or perhaps a blood clot bursting in his brain, he couldn’t be certain. Every detail on the demon girl’s face was writ large on his displays. She had a smattering of acne across her too-high cheekbones. She had a shadow of freshly-plucked hairs around her brows. Her nostrils flared with every huge inhalation, looking like a champion powerlifter going for the gold. He roared like a lion. “BITCH! FUCKING… STOP IT!”
He didn’t think. He didn’t need to think. The solution was right there. It was so obvious. The Plan would need some heavy re-writing tonight, that was for certain, but for right now there was a simple, an extraordinarily simple way out of this entire situation. He would deal with the audience that were not giving him the respect he was due. He would deal with the busybodies recording him, now well over a dozen. Most of all, he would deal with the fucking bitch that was grunting with the effort of trying to lift him higher, tip him over, perhaps even push him right through the hole he’d blasted in the side of the Supertrain.
He brought the Cannon up, slamming the knuckles of his right fist into her face. The suit didn’t move fast enough for that to dislodge her, but he was pleased, elated even, to see her nose twist and snap, blood bursting from one nostril like confetti. His left arm, still being pried away from his body by the suspiciously strong girl, flexed outwards once more. He gripped the back of her head, not crushing it, but pinning her like a delicious slug between his limbs, unable to retreat, unable to look away.
Her eyes widened, finally showing the fear, the outright bone-shaking terror that he expected. His fingers flexed, articulated armor plates digging furrows in her cheeks, and he tapped the tips against his palm. Pinkie to index finger.
The fourth stubborn rod snapped into place, and all the telltales on Pyrrhus’s display flashed green.
There was no more laughter. The electrodes glowed, from crimson to pure, brilliant white, smoke rising from the detritus left by the previous expulsion. Beyond the strange, insane girl’s bleeding face, he could see a renewed rush for the exit to the next car. The smug onlookers, there only for Pyrrhus’s edification and glorification, weren’t so smug anymore, not when they found themselves directly within the focal cone of a weapon that could reduce a bank vault to slag.
His stomach roiled, knowing there’d be backlash for the body count, particularly since this was his first public appearance. Still, perhaps he could twist this to his favor, he thought. No-one would EVER dare raise a bare fist to him again, that was for certain. They would shy away from him on the streets, they would avert their eyes when he strode by. They would bow, if he asked. WHEN he asked. When he demanded.
This would be his Message.
All at once, the fear drained out of her face, as though carried away by the blood gushing freely from her nose.
“Whatever,” she said, sounding more annoyed than anything.
Her free arm, which he’d forgotten about as soon as he realized she couldn’t damage his suit, rose up out of nowhere. With a motion that seemed almost casual, she ripped one of the delicate electrodes free from its housing. Steam rose from her flesh and she yelped, a short, injured squeal of reflex, nothing more. Her expression registered no pain, however; she was smiling, her model-clean teeth smeared with blood and snot.
“NO!” Pyrrhus snapped. “YOU C-”
The explosion was heard more than twenty blocks away.
– – – – –
unpleasantries 