Adventures in the MirrorVerse

Part 8: Heist

Brian kicked in the door. The guard standing next to it started to turn, bringing his gun up, but I swarmed him with hundreds of bugs, all biting or stinging, some venomous. He screamed and dropped his gun, as did the other two guards that I was treating similarly. There were three more guards that we knew of; I saw two more go down, shaking and writhing, under Marionette's careful control.

Where was the sixth?

At the same time that I formulated the thought, Lisa voiced it.

"Everyone! Look alive! Sixth guard unaccounted for!"

Rachel's dogs were rampaging through the room, following her whistled signals. Each gun was grabbed in massive jaws and returned to the dogs' mistress, dropped at her feet like a stick thrown to be returned. The workers shrieked; some hid under the long tables at which they had been working. All were in their underwear, most were female.

I couldn't figure it out; I had distinctly counted six people wearing clothes.

Or at least, I thought I had.

"Maybe I miscounted?" I asked out loud.

"K-9! How many guns?" called out Brian.

"Five!" reported Rachel.

"Five guns, five guards?" asked Marionette, beginning to bind the guards he had brought down. Brian helped me with the ones I had stung into submission.

Lisa shook her head. "Something doesn't add up."

"Well, we can't worry about it too long," Marionette advised her. "K-9, are your dogs ready to take on cargo?"

Rachel was unfolding panniers and strapping them to the dogs. "Will be in a moment. Hive Queen, a hand?"

I nodded and moved over to assist her. Taking a pannier, I unfolded it and started strapping it on. The massive animal, Angelina by name, turned and licked me, with a tongue over a foot wide. If I hadn't had a full face mask on, it would have covered my entire face.

Something started nagging at me, a pain behind my eyeballs. I hadn't tried to control this many bugs before, crawling over all the workers, keeping track of all their movements at once. Maybe it was giving me a migraine.

I couldn't let it bother me. Rachel and I moved the dogs over near the pallet of money and started stacking bricks of money into the panniers. There was a lot of cash there.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Brian and Alec slash open bag after bag of white powder - cocaine, I gathered - and then pour the contents of the gallon can over them. The stink of the accelerant rose into the air, and the workers cried out in renewed fear.

"Do not worry!" Marionette called out to them all. "We will not harm you! We will even get the guards to safety! But this needs to be destroyed! You will be safe!"

I saw Lisa, her lips moving, trying to work something out, but then I had to get back to packing the panniers full of cash. Every brick that went in there, I would have a one-fifth share in. You can bet I packed those panniers full.

And then Lisa's head came up. "Fuck. Reinforcements."

The Day Before

"So, who are we likely to face?" I really wanted to know this.

"There are other things going on around town," explained Lisa, "so ..."

"What other things?" Brian asked it, just ahead of me.

Lisa shook her head. "Sorry. Need to know. We don't. But it does mean that the Syndicate is likely to be taken up with other stuff. Chances are, we'll get three, maybe four Minions."

Great, I thought. Up against my future teammates.

"Sorry," Brian put in, "but I haven't been keeping up with the boards. Who's in the Minions at the moment? Is Usurper still the leader?"

"No, he joined the Syndicate proper," Marionette told him with a sigh. "Can't you take anything seriously?"

"The leader of the Minions," Lisa put in sharply, "is Zombieman. He flies, and he's nearly impossible to take down for good. Hit him hard and hit him a lot. Not really a zombie, but may as well be one."

"I'll get my dogs on it," Rachel promised. "Anything I have to worry about, to avoid killing him?"

"Yeah, don't separate the head from the neck." Lisa's voice was absolutely serious, as it always was. "Just try to subdue him, all right. Keep him out of the fight."

Marionette took up the thread. "The rest of the members are Chauvinist, Redshift, Stopwatch, Kid Conquest and Shadow Slayer."

"And don't forget Headbutt," Lisa reminded him. "He was a minor villain around town, got recruited into the Minions just a few days ago."

"So what's with Chauvinist?" I asked. "Emotion bolts or something, right?"

"He fires bolts that stun you and make you horny," Rachel put in. "He was going as 'Roofie' for a while, but the Syndicate made him change it. He tries to make out as a Tinker, in a suit of armour, but the smart money's on Kid Conquest making it for him."

"Yeah, Kid Conquest is the Tinker, I remember that much," Brian commented. "A hoverboard or something?"

Lisa nodded. "Hoverboard with mounted lasers. They don't hit too hard, but if he gets a chance to pepper you, you're in trouble."

"And then there's Stopwatch," Marionette went on. "Don't let him touch you, or you'll suddenly find a gun barrel in your face. He will literally freeze you in time. Or anything else he wants to freeze. One of his favourite ways to evade police pursuit is to freeze pieces of paper right across the road. Or a string. It will cut a car right in half."

"Don't let Stopwatch touch me, right," I agreed, just to show I was keeping up. "So ... Redshift?"

"Yeah, she stretches and shrinks space," Lisa clarified. "Also, she's about twelve. Do not underestimate her. She could crush us by making the floor to ceiling space one inch. She's apparently overcome her Manton limit."

"Okay, next is ... Shadow Slayer." Lisa looked at Brian. "She used to be Shadow Stalker, right?"

"Haha, yeah," Brian grinned. The others chuckled as well.

"What's so funny?" I asked.

"She's his nemesis," grinned Rachel. "Back in the day, he'd go after her, and she'd pop him with a blunt arrowhead. It was like a big game of hide and seek for them."

"Did you ever catch her?" I asked, curious despite myself.

Brian coughed into his fist. "Maybe. But she got away again."

Lisa frowned. "She never meant any real harm, so we never pressed the issue. But now she's apparently using real arrows, and calling herself Shadow Slayer ..."

Brian shook his head. "I can't believe she's changed so much. I think it must be the Syndicate making her act like that."

Alec gave him a hard stare. "If we encounter her, and she's lining up on one of us, you don't hesitate. Got it?"

"Got it," Brian agreed, but he didn't sound happy.

"How many?" asked Marionette.

I spread my bugs out. "Six ... no, seven. One ..."

" ... on the roof," Insight finished.

Marionette turned to her. "Seriously. We need to have a chat about your 'guesses'."

"Later, guys," Rachel put in hastily. "Right now, we need to worry about the villains outside. Who are they?"

Brian had put darkness all over the windows, and was peering out through the plastic sheeting; he could see through his darkness but no-one else could.

"I count ... Zombieman, Kid Conquest, Chauvinist, Stopwatch, Headbutt and Redshift," he reported.

"And the seventh on the roof," I added. "I think it's female. There's something that may be a skirt."

"Shit, that could be anyone from Flaunt to Death," muttered Marionette.

"So what do we do now?" Rachel asked.

Pandemic had just been in the process of overseeing the return of the drugs to the clearing house when the doors were smashed in, and her guards went down. She had thought fast; dropping to the floor, she doffed her robes, leaving her in just underwear. Grabbing one of the unlucky workers, she had killed the woman with a brain aneurysm, then dragged her under the table, replacing her while the confusion was still going on.

She was good, she knew, but she needed to touch them to get control. Briefly, she considered living up to her name and releasing an airborne pathogen to kill the heroes, but decided not to go that route; the drugs and money, after all, were the valuable thing here. Infecting them with disease spores was probably not the best thing to do. And while she was not overly squeamish, killing all these workers and guards just to get the heroes was also probably overkill.

She decided to wait and see ...

"Why haven't they just burst on in?" asked Rachel. "They can't be worried about the people here."

"The drugs and money," Marionette suggested. "They don't want to risk its destruction."

"Okay, fuck it," snapped Brian. "They're waiting on us. Let's go out and give them what they want."

Insight glanced at Marionette. "Careful out there," she told him. "I'll stay back with Hive Queen. There's something off about this situation ..."

The doors burst open, and Rachel's dogs burst out, with her atop the lead one. Tenebrae had filled the street with darkness, and so the villains were caught unawares. I used my bugs to heighten the chaos, biting and stinging whatever exposed flesh they could find. Redshift suffered quite badly due to this; she had cutouts all over her costume, despite simply not having the figure for it.

Still, it looked bad for a few moments, until Stopwatch and Chauvinist abruptly collided while attempting to move past one another. Chauvinist was frozen solid, and Stopwatch knocked cold, which turned the tide considerably in our favour.

"Did you see that?" I asked. "What did that? Marionette?"

"Hm, possibly," answered Lisa. She was wandering past the rows of workers at the table; I turned to follow her, able to keep track of the battle with my bugs. "But what bothers me is ..."

I went cold all over. There was a body under the table. A dead body. Cold, lifeless. And the worker that Lisa was just in the process of walking past had turned, and was reaching out for her ...

I acted without thinking; leaping forward, I flicked out my telescoping baton and smashed it down on the wrist of the worker. She screamed and fell off the chair; Lisa leaped clear of her grasping hands.

"Dead body under the table," I reported.

"This one killed her," Lisa filled in. "Not a worker. A cape. Teenage, female." She paused. "Oh shit."

The window shattered inward, and Teaser came to a halt, not three yards from the both of us. We looked at each other, then at the stricken 'worker'.

"Fuck me." muttered Lisa. "Pandemic."

"What did you do to my sister?" screamed Teaser.

"She'll be fine," Insight told her. She blinked rapidly several times; assimilating data? "But there's something that you need to know."

"There's nothing I need you telling me," Teaser snapped. "You can't hurt me, and if you hurt her, I'll kill you. I might do it anyway."

"If I get my hands on you, bitch," Pandemic remarked from the floor, "I will personally turn every second cell cancerous, and watch as your body eats itself from the inside."

"Teaser!" Lisa's voice was urgent. "What happened to your mother? What did Pandemic do to her?"

"Nothing ..." Teaser began, her voice fading. "No ... I can't remember ... I ..."

"Shut up!" screamed Pandemic. "Shut your fucking mouth!" She lunged up off the floor at Insight, who kicked her under the chin. Her head went back, and she slumped to the ground.

Teaser tensed again. "What did you do to my sister?" she screamed, in exactly the same tone as before.

"Your parents," Insight's voice was rapid but clear. "They aren't the same as they were a few years ago, are they? They aren't like they were before Pandemic triggered, are they? Why is that, Teaser? Why is that? What did she do to them?"

Teaser clutched her head. "No ..." she moaned. "No ... it's not true ... don't make it true ... I can't think stuff about her ... I can't ..."

She sank to her knees, bowed her head. She seemed in the extremity of pain. I looked at the both of them. I had no idea what Insight had just done, and hoped like hell that she would never do it to me.

The battle outside was over; battered, a little worse for wear, but victorious, Tenebrae, Marionette and K-9 re-entered the building.

"Fuck," Brian blurted. "What the fuck happened?"

"Tell you later," Insight told him rapidly. "Let's get going. More will be here shortly."

The guards were dragged outside, along with the dead worker. We carefully, not letting bare skin touch bare skin, dragged Pandemic outside. Marionette briefly took control of Teaser to walk her outside. Then Brian tossed a match on to the gasoline-soaked drugs, and ran like hell.

We stashed the panniers in the vans, and Alec and Lisa drove those away, while Rachel led off potential pursuit with her dogs, with Brian providing darkness cover. I rode with Lisa.

"Nicely done," Lisa praised me. "You probably saved my life with your baton."

"I had no idea what she intended," I confessed. "I just ... acted."

"Well, I'm glad that you did," she replied. Reaching across, she offered her hand. I shook it uncertainly. "Welcome to the Upsiders."

We rode on in silence; she was apparently happy to let the conversation lapse, while I had things to think about.

How has she not picked up that I'm going to betray them?

If she has, what has she got planned?

No matter what I do, I'm screwed.

And the van rolled on, away from the burning drug house.

End of Part 8