Chapter 5:
"Bruce," he heard someone call. "Bruce, wake up!"
He felt something kick him in the leg before he forced his eyes open. It was Dinah, and had her hands shackled behind her to a chair that looked to be bolted to the floor. It took him a moment before he realized he was in a similar position. His mind was swimming and his head ached. Bruce was pretty sure he had a concussion.
"Bruce, thank God," Dinah sighed in relief. "I wasn't sure you were ever going to wake up."
"I'm not sure being awake is an improvement given our situation," Bruce replied as he tested his bonds. He made a note to himself that he'd put off his escape training too long and if he made it out of here alive, he was going to have to track down his father's old magician friend, Zatara.
"They said they were going to get their interrogator," Dinah informed him. "I'm not sure how long we've got, but I'm pretty sure we don't want to be here when he gets back. "What are you doing?"
Bruce was sure he looked rather odd as he contorted his leg behind him until his restrained hands could reach his shoe.
"I've got a lock pick in a seam on my shoe," he explained. "If I can get to it, I should be able to pick these cuffs."
"Is there anything you're not prepared for?" she asked in disbelief. Then added, "Other than a hot girl on your lap."
"Funny," Bruce quipped as he began working on the lock. "How long was I out?"
"I'm not sure," Dinah answered. "A few hours at least. When Lawton left I saw sunlight through the doorway."
He'd just about gotten it when Lawton and another man, Bruce assumed was the interrogator, walked in.
Whereas Lawton was a fairly tall man, standing at around six foot two, with an athletic build, a bad moustache and an obvious Texan accent, the Interrogator was pretty much the opposite. He was around five foot six, with a lanky build and beady eyes that seemed to scream insanity.
"Good, you're both awake now," Lawton said with an evil grin. "Now we can get down to business. This man is known simply as the Interrogator," he said pointing to his companion as the man opened a briefcase filled with dozens of intimidating looking blades, each one with a different curve or blade combination. "He excels at causing incredible amounts of pain while keeping his subject awake as long as possible."
The Interrogator drew one of the larger blades and what looked like a modified taser and made his way over to Bruce. This part was just a show. It was all about intimidation to make them as scared as possible and for now, Bruce had to play along.
"Torture us all you want, it's not going to change the fact that when we don't show up back at the hotel tonight, the police will be on their way here to look for us," Bruce bluffed. The truth was that no one knew where they were and even if they did, the police wouldn't last five minutes against the weaponry these people had.
"Bravado, so typical," the Interrogator said with a smile. "Next will come the pleading, then the crying and finally you'll tell me anything I want just in hopes that I'll kill you and make the pain stop."
"Maybe, but that takes time," Bruce countered. "I've trained for years to resist interrogations; just how long can you afford to waste on me?"
"Somehow I doubt you're nearly as strong as you claim, boy," Lawton laughed.
"Even so, I know his type, always the hero," the Interrogator said. "I bet he'll break much faster watching me torture his little girlfriend instead."
"Oh god, no! Please no!" Dinah cried, tears running down her face.
"Leave her alone!" Bruce shouted.
"Oh come now little girl, we're going to see what your insides look like," he taunted as he leaned in close and garnished the scary looking blade.
It was then that Bruce realized that everyone in the room, including him, had yet again made the mistake of underestimating this girl. Her face suddenly hardened and the tears stopped as she brought her knee up hard between the interrogator's legs. As he leaned forward in pain, she rammed her head hard into his face, crushing his nose and sending him crashing to the floor.
Lawton quickly drew his gun and aimed at Dinah, but her distraction had been all Bruce needed. He'd long since picked his cuffs and leapt from his seat, hitting the larger man with a hard right hook that sent him crashing to the floor and his gun flying across the room.
Lawton quickly got back to his feet and faced off against Bruce.
"Gotta admit, I'm impressed kid," Lawton said. "But I'm a trained assassin; do you really think you can take me?"
"Yes," was Bruce's only answer as he unleashed a hard kick to Lawton's ribs and followed it with another hard right hook.
Lawton cringed in pain from the kick, but managed to block the punch and counter with a knee into Bruce's abdomen. The two men traded blows, each consistently countering the other's attempts to land a finishing hit.
Despite still being shackled to her chair, Dinah had managed to work her legs around the Interrogator's neck and had him in a textbook sleeper hold. Bruce knew she'd learned to box from Grant, but moves like that made it clear he hadn't been her only teacher.
Lawton was nearly as good a fighter as Bruce and his age gave him a strength advantage that forced Bruce to stick to quick strike techniques. He didn't doubt he could beat Lawton, but both men knew Lawton didn't have to win. He only had to last until the noise from the fight attracted the attention of his men. Bruce needed to end this fight and soon!
As if she could read his mind, Dinah kicked the taser the Interrogator had dropped towards him. Bruce rolled under one of Lawton's kicks and quickly picked up the taser. As Lawton swung around with a follow up punch, Bruce blocked it and jammed the taser into his arm.
Lawton's screams of pain came out only as gurgles as his body convulsed from the electrical charge, before collapsing to the floor.
"You coward," Lawton gasped out. "You cheated."
"You're a criminal and a murderer," Bruce replied. "You don't deserve a fair fight," he finished before crashing his foot hard into Lawton's face, knocking him cold.
"You took your sweet time," Dinah chirped at him.
"Sorry, I didn't knock out the world class assassin sooner," Bruce quipped. "I'll do better next time."
"Nice timing with the cuffs though," Dinah smiled. "Wasn't sure if he was actually going to shoot me or not, but I'm glad I didn't have to find out."
"That was a pretty nice move yourself," Bruce replied as he finished picking her cuffs. "Applying a sleeper hold with your legs while chained to a chair is no easy feat."
"Something my Mom taught me," she replied with a smile.
"You have a scary family," Bruce said, shaking his head.
"You have no idea," Dinah laughed. "Any boy I take home to meet the family is going to be in trouble."
Once again finding himself feeling very awkward, Bruce quickly chained the two unconscious men up with their own cuffs and made sure to gag them in case the woke up too soon. Dinah frisked Lawton until she found a small metal vile in a pouch on his belt and a key card.
"Hopefully this is the antidote," she said.
Making his way over to the corner of the room where his phone and backpack sat on a table, he gathered his things up and checked the time.
"Damn, it's after five o'clock," he said as he once again accessed the complex's camera system.
"The fight starts in less than two hours!" Dinah nearly shouted. "Ted's only got a few hours left to live, we've got to hurry!"
"Looks like the armoury is in a small bunker, just behind the main building," Bruce told her. "If we can get inside, we should be able to blow it up."
"Umm, isn't blowing it up a bad idea?" Dinah questioned. "Won't that set off that black hole thingamajig and destroy the city?"
"No," Bruce replied as he shut down the camera in the hallway and made his way out the door. "A device like that can't just be detonated. It has to be armed and it'd take time to generate an energy field that powerful."
"You're sure?" she whispered.
"I'm sure," he replied, reasonably sure that he was sure.
They managed to sneak to the rear exit of the building with relative ease, but getting out the door was going to be more difficult. Three of the patrols intersected in the area and would be able to see anyone approaching the armoury.
"This is always easier in the movies," Dinah sighed.
"In the movies you can crawl through air ducts and every building has secret tunnels below it," Bruce replied as he scanned through the surveillance cameras. "What we need is a distraction."
"And where are we going to get one of those?" Dinah asked sardonically.
Bruce just grinned and showed her the image on his phone. The camera showed the pervert guard that had been watching them in the alley, walking over the same metal catwalk lining the wall they'd climbed over to get in. When he got to the right spot, Bruce tapped the screen and the little present he'd left behind released a powerful electrical charge, shocking the guard and sending him collapsing to the ground in much the same way Lawton had.
"You just happened to be carrying a remote control taser bomb with you?" Dinah asked in disbelief.
"I like to be prepared," he answered.
"Has anyone ever told you, you have paranoia issues?"
"Look. The other patrols are moving to investigate," Bruce said ignoring her question. "Let's move."
Dinah and Bruce moved quickly across the open ground to the armoury bunker. The door was secured with a key card and pin code access. Dinah pulled out Lawton's key card and Bruce pulled the facing off the panel and used a couple of alligator clips to connect his phone to the circuitry.
"Okay, that thing is definitely on my Christmas list," Dinah said.
"Sure, the service plan is only a thousand dollars a month and you have to write your own applications," Bruce teased.
"Good thing I've got a rich friend," she countered.
A moment later, Bruce had hacked the pin code, opened the door and the two moved inside.
"Whoa," was all Dinah could say.
The armoury was packed to the brim with hundreds of futuristic looking weapons. Some they recognized from the footage of the attack on the police or from the salesman's demonstration, but there were dozens of other types of weapons too; a few of which looked to be nearly as big as Bruce. Given the power the smaller weapons wielded, he wasn't sure he wanted to know how much damage the bigger ones could do.
"Look at this, Bruce," Dinah called.
He made his way over to her and nearly missed a step when he saw what she was pointing at. An entire wall was lined with Schwarzschild bombs.
"There must be nearly a hundred of them," Bruce said in near shock.
"They could wipe out an entire country with these," she replied in horror.
"No," Bruce countered as he finished the math in his head. "If they detonated all of these, they'd wipe out the planet."
"Okay, we need to blow these up, like now," Dinah said.
Looking around the room, Bruce found the small softball looking device he wanted and opened the outer housing.
"What's that?" Dinah asked.
"From what we saw from the news footage, I'm pretty sure it's a plasma grenade." Bruce replied as he set the device's built in timer. "They aren't supposed to exist."
"I don't think any of this stuff is supposed to exist," she replied. "Do you think we should take some of it with us? Get it checked out?"
"No, the world has enough weapons as it is," Bruce answered, setting the bomb in place. "I don't want to be part of giving it more."
Dinah nodded her head in agreement and the pair quickly made their way out of the building. They had three minutes to get clear of what was sure to be a large explosion.
"Come on, we've got to get back to the alley," he told her.
"What about the patrols?" Dinah asked. "That's kind of where your little distraction had them all going."
"Hopefully they've moved on by now," Bruce replied as he did his best to stick to the shadows. "And if not, you get to show me a few more of those moves your mother taught you."
When they got close, they saw three men still gathered around their now semi-conscious colleague. One seemed to be trying to ask him what happened while two others were carefully scouting the area with weapons raised.
Bruce pulled two baseballs he'd picked up from the sporting goods store from his bag and gave one to Dinah.
"How's your aim?" he asked.
She just gave him a wicked grin and then let loose a perfect fastball off the temple of the first guard. Before the other guards had time to react, Bruce hit the second one with his own toss.
The man that had been kneeling over his fallen friend quickly stood up and turned to see what was happening, but by the time he raised his weapon, the two teenagers were already on top of him and easily knocked the weapon aside before tossing him off the catwalk and crashing to the ground below.
Bruce threw the guns in a pile well away from the unconscious men and set one to overload before the two jumped back down to the alley.
The pervert guard was just getting back to his feet as they got to the bike. Bruce pulled his last little surprise from his bag and chucked it with perfect accuracy, easily smashing the man's jaw and making it unlikely he'd ever be able to wear that perverted grin again.
"Was that a boomerang?" Dinah questioned with disbelief. "Why the hell did you have a boomerang?"
"In a skilled hand, a boomerang can make a great weapon," Bruce explained. "It's silent and can move around corners."
"So tonight you hacked a satellite, used a remote taser bomb, disabled cameras and hacked a secure door, all with that crazy high-tech phone of yours, and you finish it off with a boomerang?" she asked, shaking her head. "Didn't you have ray gun or hypersonic, electrostatic whatsamajig you could have used?"
"I like boomerangs," Bruce replied calmly climbing on the back of the bike. "Let's get going. The fight will've already started by now."
As they pulled out of the alley, a massive explosion rocked the complex. As powerful as he knew the plasma grenades were, he hadn't expected something quite so big.
They could hear the sounds of sirens as they took off down the street, doing their best to avoid any on coming police. Hopefully they'd destroyed enough of the weapons to give the police a fighting chance and Bruce suspected the assassins would probably have an escape plan in place rather than risk a head on conflict anyway.