Chapter 37: In the Shadows (Part 4)
The City of Townsville. Tenement Area. Logger Street.
16 FEB (Thursday) 1989. 1802.
When Blossom had finally seen the bad guys through the walls of the sewers using her x-ray vision, she didn't expect to encounter more cultists. She hated dealing with them - they were so much harder to take down than the regular crooks. There were about twenty of them, and they were accompanied by some poorly dressed people. Hobos and the destitute in the cultists' employ, from the looks of it.
"Mister Blake, what do we do?" Blossom whispered her question to the USDO agent over the radio. They were just a bend and a short stretch of sewage tunnels away from the baddies.
"Hold up. Wait until I give you the go," Mister Blake said over the radio. The Girls had forged far ahead of Blake and his detail. Being small and capable of hovering, they were easily able to maneuver in the tight underground silently while the USDO soldiers couldn't even walk briskly without making a lot of sloshing noise and audible, echoing footsteps.
Despite the relatively easy difficulty of the operation, Blossom was intimidated because of exhaustion; she had fought more crime in the past two days than the entire month of January, and it was draining. Her Dad had cautioned her about exhaustion, that there was a limit to her superpowers and she'd need to rest and recharge to keep it working, or it'd be post-Highway-13 all over again. It didn't feel like it would happen again until now when it was as if the entire city's criminals had conspired to wear her out…
"We're right behind you – stay safe, Girls. Now go!" Mister Blake gave them the green light. Buttercup could hear their footsteps and water displacement using her enhanced hearing, though she didn't care to inform Blossom about it for fear of revealing her secret power – she'd been hiding her acute hearing ever since discovering it, and it'd been very useful so far for finding out things, such as the fact that Daddy thought that she was 'messed up inside', which she took to mean that Daddy no longer loved her. By extension, she thought that Blossom and Bubbles probably felt the same, since it was Dad who told them everything.
"Bubbles, Buttercup, together now!" Blossom ordered and flew around the corner. Buttercup was slow to follow. Unbeknownst to Blossom, Bubbles wasn't budging at all. Looking back the way they came, she saw no USDO soldiers, no Mister Blake. As the bad guys started shouting and screaming, Bubbles scurried into a corner, behind a huge concrete tube pouring some brownish gunk and dirty-green fluid out, and pulled a pair of syringes out. Pulling aside the Velcro strap securing her Kevlar arm guard, she stabbed herself with the syringe and injected herself with the drug. She could immediately feel the effects coming on. Returning the expended syringe into her pouch, she applied the second syringe – and that had given her what she needed – no pain, no fear, only pleasure, and false courage.
There was unbound rage, what used to come in tiny spurts on demand, but had become the rule rather than the exception. She moaned and laughed as the poison coursed through her veins.
As soon as she returned the syringe into her pouch, white beams from torchlights had appeared around the corner from where they passed. Mister Blake and friends! Bubbles kicked herself up into a high flying position and darted away before they could see her.
Blossom had to commence the fight on her own. She opened it by firing several heat beams at the closest cultists, before dropping into cover behind a crate full of drugs as the cultists returned fire. Looking behind her, she saw nothing. Nothing! Bubbles and Buttercup should have been bringing up the rear! And when Buttercup streaked into the arena of battle belatedly, she wasn't relieved at all. It felt as if the team – her team, was falling apart.
Buttercup had executed her own opening if it wasn't clear enough that there was a distance between them now. Firing her MP5 on full auto, she'd aimed it at the legs of her enemies, dropping a good number of them. Blossom didn't like it one bit – she had seen how Buttercup had done it. Most of her victims were hit with more than a bullet which was far more than necessary. She knew first hand how painful getting shot was – and knew from how normal people would bleed that it was much worse for them. When Buttercup got into cover behind a box near hers, she'd avoided looking at her. It was as if she was deliberately driving a wedge between them.
And Bubbles was still missing.
Everything was falling apart. Why? Blossom couldn't understand why her sisters couldn't be more like her.
Peeking above her box of illegal drugs, Blossom saw the group she was fighting splintering. The workers serving the cultists were running away down a tunnel, and some of the cultists took another path. The others had opted to stay and fight - and they happened to be the glowing-eyed ones. Shooting some of them in the legs didn't deter them from fighting back at all - those who could, stood up again. The others raised their guns where they were, either sitting or lying on the ground.
"Mister Blake, some of them are running away!" Blossom reported over the radio. "Will there be someone around to catch them?"
"No, Blossom, we're it," Agent Blake said over the radio. "I'm coming up now. I need the three of you to chase the runners down, over."
That meant splitting up. The reason why Blossom had been ordering that they fly in together was that she had to watch her sisters - they were both just as likely to kill now, which saddened her. How did it come to such a state? If she split the gang up, it would mean that they could kill again. But they had to - the criminals had scattered. The only upside was that she could supervise one of them.
As Blossom was panicking while considering her options, Bubbles had flown in, her eyes redder than ever.
"Bubbles!" Blossom shouted to gain her attention, but her BerXerker-ed sister hadn't even noticed her. She'd flown right into a cultist with an automatic rifle nearly instantly, fist-first, sending him flying across the sewer junction. She turned to her other sister instead: "Buttercup. Hey, Buttercup!"
"What!?" Buttercup shot back, glaring at her, clearly still mad at her for the many wrongs dealt to her.
"I need you to go down that tunnel," Blossom pointed at the one where all the workers had gone. "And stop the bad guys from running away. No killing! Okay?"
Buttercup answered her with a continued, sustained glare into her eyes. Without another word, she jumped high up and flew off in the direction of the drug workers, leaving behind only a streak of green light as defiant as the little girl they came from.
When Buttercup was gone, Blossom jumped into action, running into a cult champion with a Duranium falx who tried to swing her weapon at her, but Blossom had seized it mid-swing with a wince, the blade cutting into her palm, and punched out the cultist several times in the face, enough to gain control of the falx. The enhanced little girl tossed it into the murky water where it was unlikely to be found in the heat of battle before flying up to Bubbles, who was savaging a downed cultist and pulling her aside by an arm.
Bubbles was able to free herself from Blossom easily – before swiping at her impulsively, putting several gashes in Blossom's face.
"What is it now, Bloss!?" Bubbles snapped at Blossom, annoyed that she had been stopped in the middle of her raging. "Can't you see I'm busy!"
"We need to chase the running men!" Blossom reasoned.
"Do it yourself, sis! You're the smart one!" Bubbles retorted unthinkingly before pushing Blossom away, and a fair distance away too, such that she'd hit a wall, cracking it, and slid down into the sewer waters. In the meantime, Bubbles had jumped right back into the thick of it, ignoring bullets pelting her as if they were rubber bands, and delivering a punch into the shooter so powerful it'd sent him flipping a semi-circle before landing on his back, cracking his skull on the concrete floor.
All while Blossom watched. All while her back was hurting from being hurled into curved concrete masonry. Her lips trembled as she choked back tears from how Bubbles had callously thrown her aside and hurt her. How she no longer listened to her where previously, she was able to get a hold of herself eventually.
'You deserve this, Blossom,' she couldn't help but think to herself. 'You've hurt her and she's hurting you now.'
Never had she been so unsure of what to do. She couldn't help but let the panic and anxiety in her take control, as she knew that for every second she waited, she was letting the bad guys get away. At the same time, Bubbles had sonic-screamed at whatever cultists remained, blowing them away as they bled from their ears and eyes.
The bad guys were getting away. She couldn't stop Bubbles now, she decided, and so she darted away into the tunnel beside Buttercup's, unable to help but weep as she knew that she had lost control of her sisters (and it was all her own fault) and lots of people were going to get hurt because of it.
Just in time, Agent Blake and his team came charging into the sewer junction. Cultists who were struck down by the Girls were stubbornly getting up again, but the USDO operatives made short work of them by knocking them down with gunstocks and batons and restraining them for cuffing, after shooting down those who were stubbornly still shooting before Bubbles could get to them.
Agent Blake had inadvertently given them a better chance at living - by this point, Bubbles was more lethal than getting shot with high-powered military-grade weapons.
With no one left to fight, Bubbles let herself drop to her feet, panting from the excess adrenaline in her blood. She was spattered all over with blood, Blake could tell even without her turning. But when she did, she looked even worse.
Her eyes were still glowing bright, hellish red, and blood had been flowing from her eyes like tears after she had used her sonic scream.
"Bubbles? Are you alright?" Agent Blake asked, worried and a little afraid of what had become of Bubbles. From his perspective, things had changed drastically because of his absence. Bubbles had changed in a blink of an eye.
"Mister Blake!" Bubbles had greeted him, but she sounded nothing like the Bubbles he knew. Her voice was rough, rougher than even Buttercup's tomboyish raspy voice, and the look on her face was far from innocent, reminding him somehow of Captain Butch. "Are you here to fight me too!?"
And she sounded as if she was confused about which side she was on.
"Bubbles, we're friends," Blake reminded her and thought it odd that she needed reminding. Bubbles said nothing to that and had continued panting, her fists balled up, still. She glared at him as though she was still deciding if he was friend or foe. The newer guys in his team were on edge. Blake signaled for his team to keep their guns down, for fear of agitating the now-changed Bubbles. "Are you alright?"
"F-friends…" Bubbles muttered as if the word was new to her. She alternated between gritting her teeth and relaxing her jaws.
"Yes, Bubbles. Remember me?" Sergeant Rutherland came forward and said. He was a PTF soldier who had developed a friendship quickly with the sweetest of The Three even though they couldn't spend much time together. This was despite his reputation even among other Vietnam veterans as that 'scary black dude' who'd been through the deepest, darkest level of hell in Vietnam and returned to tell the tale – except he didn't do much of that. Rumor had it that he'd fought against the original first three recipients of Chemical A and came out traumatized as the sole survivor - without killing them. Turned out that all it took was Bubbles to get him to open up. "We used to play together."
"And what about me, you remember me?" Sergeant Holliday came forward next. A pale-looking man, he had the look of a stone-cold killer, as a Powerpuff Task Force soldier should have, but his expression was something else. "I used to cook for you. You reminded me of how much I loved cooking."
Bubbles stepped forward, looking like she needed a closer look as if she could barely even recognize them even though it hadn't been long since they last met - as if she would just kill them when she couldn't remember in time who they were.
The City of Townsville. Tenement Area. Logger Street.
16 FEB (Thursday) 1989. 1809.
The cultists – what remained of the sewer detail anyway – had tried to run and disappear, but there was no running from a bioweapon like Blossom, who, at top speed, was about as fast as a propeller plane.
She was able to catch up with them within seconds, and even fly ahead to land right in front of them before they even realize it, with her submachinegun drawn, splashing wastewater and assorted natural and artificial trash about in her rough landing.
"Give up or I'll make you!" Blossom warned the cultists with her MP5 out and her standard line. Looking at the eyes of the cultists she halted, she noticed that their eyes were natural-colored. They were the weaker ones, ones that would go down easily. One by one, they started dropping their weapons, mostly guns, and once they did, she breathed easy.
Her concern for her sisters returned after that. She thought she heard gunshots back in the sewage junction where the group was camped. Buttercup was down in a sewage tunnel right beside hers. While in most cases, sewage tunnels did not run alongside by side, Blossom thought that they would in her naivety. Hoping to find Buttercup, she looked through the wall of her sewage tunnels in an attempt to do so.
And found that her fears were realized.