Project Northwoods (16 page)

He apparently didn’t notice the destruction of his weapon as, a split second later, the other missile connected with his face. It had the same impact as a baseball, shattering his nose before losing coherence in a wet burst. His legs carried forward as his head snapped back. With a crack, his spine hit the roof. He was clearly dazed, staring up toward the sky as blood from his ruined nose poured freely down his cheek. Water wasn’t nearly the yielding force he had seen popularized by movies.

The rain stopped around him as Morgan leaned over him, grabbed his shirt, and yanked him upright. Her face was twisted furiously as she punched him in the gut, once, twice. She aimed another blow toward his head, but his forearm shot upwards to block her fist. He jabbed at her head and connected, barely, with her jaw as she feinted and dove into him, her surprising force carrying them into a nearby air-conditioning unit.

He bent painfully backward over the steel box as she straightened above him. She reared back for a punch, but the movement left her open for him to place a boot on her mid-section and shove her off. Morgan backpedaled, recovering from the push, and stood straight as the goon did the same. He brandished his fists like a boxer. She waited for him.

“We didn’t have to do this,” he called to her. “You could have just let me go.”

“You shouldn’t have attacked me, you prick,” she growled.

He smiled, a strange sight behind all the blood on his face. “Couldn’t risk having you follow me.”

She gasped for air, noticing for the first time she was barely breathing. “What’s so important that you couldn’t tell a hero? What are you planning?”

He stared at her, then dropped his hands. “You honestly don’t know.” It wasn’t a question, which kind of angered her. “Stay out of my way.” He turned to leave. At some point, the crashing waterfall at the roof’s edge had petered out into a run-of-the-mill downpour.

Morgan couldn’t let him go, not when he had attacked her first.
This isn’t how the world was supposed to work, damn it
. She sprinted after him and swung at the back of his head. Time seemed to slow down as he effortlessly ducked the blow and spun to face her. He punched her in the gut and aimed his other fist at her face.

She managed to catch his hand and twist it and herself around to his back. She shoved him to the ground, then stepped forward and brought her leg up to stomp him. She didn’t expect him to flip himself over and sweep her leg out from beneath her. Hitting the ground, she realized that he was now above her, leaping in order to land an elbow on her neck.

Rolling away, she got partially upright as he recovered from his own fall. She tackled him, knocking him below her, and she straddled his stunned form. Landing blow after blow on his neck and jaw, she was surprised when he bucked her off, stood as she tried to recover, and landed a solid, harsh kick square in her stomach.

He had done it at the right moment, knocking the air right out of her. Morgan collapsed, heaving. The man would have none of it, and he grabbed her by her hair and lifted. She tried to scream as she fought his grip. He was half-dragging and half-leading her toward the center of the roof.

“You couldn’t let me go, could you? You had to be a damn goody-two-shoes.” He flung her down, and the tiny rocks bit into her arms.

She looked up at him, exhausted, but adrenaline still pumping. She just needed time to gather herself, think of a plan.
He’s not Bestowed
, she thought.
He has to have a breaking point earlier than I do
…
he has to
…

“Stay. Away. From. Me,” the man insisted. He turned again and made his way to the edge.

It was now or never. She scrambled upright and charged, gathering rain drops in her hands until she felt the heft of them. Pushing her palms together, she shifted the water until she felt it bend to her will. She pulled her hands apart, the water in them extending into a bat which she brought down on the back of the goon’s legs.

He buckled and fell on his face. Rolling aside, he managed to instinctively avoid an overhead attack. Turning to face Morgan, he ducked under a horizontal swipe, then dove aside as she swept it up at him. Morgan would have been impressed by all her water-based attacks and improvisation had she not been so focused on beating the guy’s head in.

He was scrambling away, focusing more on flight than fight. She lobbed the weaponized rain at him, the bat twirling in the air before shattering against the back of his head. The goon fell, one arm pinned beneath him, by the rooftop greenhouse and didn’t move.

Morgan wasn’t going to fall for any tricks. She balled up some water and pelted it at his back as she approached. The hard
thunk
went apparently unnoticed on his spine. She swallowed, and gathered up enough water again to form a bat. “Are you alright?” she asked, not really sure if she had just done something fatal to her opponent.

She had barely closed in on him when he spun around and whipped a small device in front of him, aimed squarely at her. With a powerful flash, she was blinded and, somehow, even more enraged. She whipped the bat around blindly, and heard the greenhouse window shatter. The rain around her turned violent at the sound, individual water drops blasting off in every direction like tiny rockets. Her vision slowly returned, and she realized he was standing right in front of her.

The first blow was a backhand, spinning her enough for the second blow to land on the back of her head. The strikes were hard, dazing her. The bat slushed out of her hand as the rain returned to its unaltered state. He spun her back around and headbutted her square on the nose. Tears welled in her eyes as he shoved her away. Morgan tried to stay upright, and she stumbled as the mobster rushed toward her in apparent slow motion.

Please-don’t-kill-me
kept rolling through her head as she wobbled. “No,” she whispered as she took a step back. Her leg hit the lip of the building, and she spilled backward over the edge. She didn’t really have the time to process that she was falling to her death, but she really didn’t have to. Pressure on her leg and the sudden halt of her momentum sent blood rushing to her head. Morgan forced herself to gaze skyward, and she saw that the goon had grabbed her leg and was struggling to bring her back to the roof.

She couldn’t remember being pulled up. But there she was, dry-heaving on the rooftop next to the seated and exhausted goon. Morgan was mortified, but she didn’t care. She was alive, and she had never felt so unbelievably happy about that fact… even if it did feel like her intestines were trying to force their way out of her body.

“Why…” she managed to gasp. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

 “I never wanted to kill you.” He coughed and spat away from her. “You declared me rogue, remember?”

She shot a nasty look in his direction. “Yes, clearly I over-reacted,” she snarked. His eyebrows arched and he looked away. “I didn’t call it in. I guess… I guess I owe it to you to not say anything.”

He cracked his knuckles and got to his feet. “Yeah, you did get your ass beat, that’s for sure.” The goon walked in front of her and knelt. “Honestly, kid, it’s in your best interest to not mention seeing me.”

Half of her vision was going hazy. At some point, she must have been whacked hard enough in the eye to make it swell shut now that the adrenaline was working its way out of her system. “I don’t even know your name.”

“And that’s for the best.” The goon scratched absently at his face, turning suddenly introspective. “At least the computer sent some no-name hero after me,” he said as his eyes darted away. His gaze returned to her for a moment, a semi-sheepish and pink-toothed grin crossing his face. “No offense,” he coughed as he stood up and began gauging the distance between buildings. “Maybe I have enough time…” she heard him mutter before spitting blood onto the roof.

A thought buzzed in her head. Right after the primordial ‘get out of the rain’, there was something else, too. She watched him take a few large paces back, away from the lip of the roof. Something he said… he needed to know… but what?

He was about to take off running when she blurted out, “It wasn’t the computer!”

Immediately, he looked at her, then the surrounding rooftops. His eyes darted, flashing between water towers and air-conditioners, the darkening night looking ever more foreboding. “Kid, you need to get out of town. Now.”

His panic sent a surge of fear through Morgan, though she didn’t know why. She shakily got to her feet. “What? Why?”

“Just trust me!” He reached into his coat again and pulled out a standard, boxy nine millimeter pistol. “Do you have anyone you can reach out of state?”

“Just my aunt…”

He checked the weapon’s magazine and slid it back in. “Get to her house and do not let anyone you do not trust in, got it?”

Morgan’s mind was reeling. It was hard enough to concentrate, and weird aspects of the conversation were fighting to be taken seriously. “Please tell me those are rubber bullets…”

“Aquaria, for heroes’ sake, listen to me!” He grabbed her face and pulled it upright so she could look in his eyes. His green eyes were oddly beautiful, though hard to see in the shade of his trilby hat. But then that fear flashed again, and Morgan knew that she needed to be scared, too. “You need to start running,” he said.

She nodded, pulled herself away, and he resumed scanning the rooftops, weapon at the ready. But then she realized something, something which gave her enough pause to say, “I never told you my name.”

Their eyes met. It was a legitimate point. No one should know she existed except her employers and friends.

A flicker of movement at the opposite end of the roof. Her eyes caught it, and the man whipped around and trained his gun at the shadows. An orange flash lit up the night sky. A fireball, huge and surprisingly fast, shot toward them. Without thinking, the man fired his weapon twice before turning and running toward Morgan. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close as the fire ball loomed terrifyingly close.

Although mentally and physically drained, somewhere in the recess of her mind, the primal need to survive clawed its way out of Morgan’s subconscious and tapped into a hidden reserve of will power. With a flick of her wrist, the pooled water on the roof jetted upwards into a wall, thinner than last time but thick enough to halt the fireball’s progress. An initial wave of steam blasted them, and she heard the goon wail in agony a split second before the fireball burst, exploding with astonishing power. The concussive wave of fire billowed out, lifting them up and flinging their bodies backward.

They were falling. The man’s grip slackened on her, and then Morgan was falling on her own. Once more, she barely had time to think as the rain stopped falling down and started pushing upwards, slowing her own descent as her companion rocketed past her and fell to the ground with a wet thwack. She hit the ground soon afterwards, fast enough to hurt but slow enough to survive.

The clouds were unseeable, weeping above the reaches of the streetlights. Morgan was dimly aware that the orange flickering on the rooftop was where she had been moments before, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. All she wanted to do was sleep.

Then she heard the voices from the street, the gasping and people leaping to get better views of what was going on. She rolled to her side and gazed down the alley. Everyone was staring at the smoke puffing from the smoldering hole on the rooftop.

Everyone, except the man who had saved her life.

She crawled toward the twisted form resting nearby. Morgan pulled herself close enough to him to pull him onto his back, and the green eyes which had been so full of life before stared glassily into the night sky.

“Shit,” she moaned. “No, no, no…” She felt tears well up in her eyes. She was shaking as her hands flexed, trying desperately to figure out what to do. He was dead. Five minutes ago, that would have been fine with her. But right now, at this juncture, something was terribly wrong. Something the villain had been trying to keep her safe from. Her stomach knotted, and she retched.

There would be inquiries. She never reported his rogue status, which was operational procedure. It would classify her as vigilante if Internal Affairs determined she killed him. Not only that, but someone had clearly wanted him dead.

She swallowed and gathered him up as much as possible, hefting the dead weight over her shoulders. Eyes burning from the mere act of staying open, she tried her hardest to concentrate, focusing a shell of rain around her thick enough to hide behind. She was amazed that she could do it as well as she did, even if it wasn’t so much impenetrable as it was just really thick. Adjusting the man as best as she could, she started to walk. The Heroes’ Guild seemed impossibly far away, but it was the only way to make things right. He would be upright again in a couple of hours, she could thank him for not letting her die, and they could both pretend it never happened.

Morgan had to find Zombress, the legendary Queen of the Dead.

PARALLEL