Volume 2, Issue 7

Volume 2 Issue 7

Tibet...

Aaron had been walking for so many miles he almost felt like he was being pulled along.  His legs were in a constant motion, despite the minor gunshot wound he had; he’d lost feeling in the leg with the wound, but the bleeding had stopped.  He wasn’t sure if those two things overall were good or bad.  

The motorcycle had broken down right about the time the roads petered out.  He was approaching the town he’d been directed to by the locals, the one that grew a flower that was essential in the production of the drug known in the west as Nex.  It was here, somewhere in this village, that Aaron would most likely find the small contingent of men from Il Sindicato Milano that had been dispatched to retrieve a large quantity of the flower’s distillation.  With it, they’d be able to continue production of Nex and make up for the drugs Aaron had destroyed when he wiped out their production facility in Milan.  Unless he stopped them.

As soon as Aaron reached cobblestone street, he fell into the first building he found, leaning on it for support..  Every muscle he had ached, and his injuries from Milan, while not currently life threatening, were in fact far from minor.  Using the wall for support, he moved along until he found a small wooden bench, and collapsed upon it.  It was hours later when he awoke.  The sun was setting, and the temperature was rapidly dropping.  

Sitting up, Aaron found his leg was completely stiff and unmovable.  Well, this complicates things, Aaron thought.  Levering himself into a seated position with his arms, he let both legs drop to the ground and pushed off the bench.  The leg immediately buckled, and if he hadn’t leaned against the wall again, he would have fallen on the muddy ground.

Aaron searched for something to prop himself up with, and soon found some sort of long wooden pole.  He wasn’t sure what it was normally used for, but it would work for what he needed.  Moving into the village night, Aaron searched, as discretely as possible, for a clinic or doctor.  No one he met seemed to speak English, and Aaron knew no Tibetan.  He did, however, know some Chinese.  Soon, Aaron found this tactic useful, and someone was able to point him to the town’s small clinic.  He arrived to find the outside door open to the evening air, and an Indian woman leaning over a man who seemed to have some sort of agricultural injury to his hand.  Aaron knocked, and the woman, seeing that it was a caucasian, spoke to him in English.

“Come and sit over there.  I’ll be right with you,” she said matter-of-factly.  

After the woman was done helping the farmer, she went over to Aaron and helped him move over to the “examination table”, which was really just a wooden kitchen table with thick, well supported legs.  

“So, you have an injury to your leg, and you’re having some trouble walking,” the woman said.  “Let’s take a look here...” she gasped as she removed Aaron’s makeshift bandage to see a recognizable gunshot wound.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“Um, not here.  Not anywhere around here,” Aaron answered truthfully.

“Not soldiers?” the doctor asked again.

“Huh?  Oh, no, no trouble with the law or anything like that.  In fact, funny story, it’s actually the opposite.  I was shot by some criminals.  In Italy.”

The woman looked at him incredulously.  “Well, you should have stayed there and had this looked at.  There’s probably not a hospital in Italy that’s not better equipped to deal with this than I am.”

Aaron looked away evasively.  “That would have been too time consuming.  I need to find some people, stop them.”

“Are you some sort of field agent or something?” the woman asked, prodding the injury.  Gray puss seeped from the wound.  

“No.  At least, nothing official.  But I’ve had dealings with these people.  They need to be stopped.”  Aaron winced as pain shot down one side of his leg.  Then he realized there was pain, and that he had some feeling back again.  He sighed in relief.  

“My name’s Aaron,” he said to the woman.  She was older than him by at least 10 years, and somewhat attractive, in a very real-world way; not glamorous or gorgeous, but possessed of a subtle beauty that one sees better the longer one is around it.

“Nirmala,” the woman nodded.  “I have to get my kit and some bandages.  Wait here.”

Meanwhile, in the west suburbs of Chicago...

The team was exhausted, having searched all night for the Italian Nex dealers who either abducted or were somehow working with Tim O’Malley’s girlfriend, Megan.  It was close to eight in the morning, but The American Attitude was finally onto their trail.  Following but a whiff of Megan’s preferred perfume, the group had arrived at a self-storage in Aurora, Illinois.  

Before the Adept could stop him, Cazmonster had ripped the door off of the large unit; fortunately, he was taking up the majority of the now open doorway, because he was greeted by a burst of gunfire that could have seriously injured the others.  As it was, Cazmonster was knocked back off his feet and momentarily stunned by the high-powered weapons that had hit him.

Four men in the room were half-dressed in the same armor that the heroes had seen weeks ago in Stevenson.  The Adept started to open a portal under the men, but then saw Megan strapped to a chair, unable to move.  Instead he blasted one of the men with mystic energy, but it was not enough power to disable him.

The American Attitude dropped his skateboard and pushed off, but was closelined across the chest by one of the men, who were obviously high on Nex because of their reaction speed.  The Wrecker didn’t even have time to react before two more of the men jumped out at him and pinned him to the wall across the narrow lane between storage buildings.  However, The Wrecker didn’t need his hands to act.  A familiar titanium sphere slammed into one of the two men, knocking him to the ground unconscious.    

Unfortunately, these Nexers had friends.  Two other doors opened, and eight more men, all hopped up on Nex, poured out.  This was a relatively small contingent, sure, maybe one twentieth the number they’d dealt with in Stevenson.  But the heroes were fewer, too.  And they had no preparation time, and no police backup.  

“Adept!  Get Megan out of here!” Tim shouted at his old friend.  The Adept turned and focused on the ground right under Megan’s chair.  He had to be really careful to make the portal come out somewhere safe.  This was compounded by the fact that he had to keep the size of the portal small, or one of the Nexer troops would fall through with her.  While he was concentrating, one of the Nexers that had just come out of the other units fired on him, and the bullet hit him in the side.  

Screaming in pain, The Adept fell to the ground.  With a last ditch effort before passing out, he managed to open a portal below Megan’s chair, allowing her to drop through.  It closed as he lost consciousness.

Cazmonster stood at this point, bloodied from several powerful bullet hits, but nowhere near out of commission.  Turning on the group that had shot at Adept, he said, with his voice amplified by internal speakers, “you just made a tactical error!”  He launched himself at them with all his might.  Two opened fire, the other two jumped aside.  Three more bullets hit Cazmonster as he slammed into his prey.  If he’d been leaping up, this jump would have carried Cazmonster half a mile or more.  Instead, his powerful arms felt ribs breaking as he sailed across the lot and through an entire storage unit, onto the street outside.  A car, heading out for early morning shopping or a weekend job, slammed into the trio as they flew past; it kept going.  Cazmonster tumbled to a landing across the street in a parking lot.  He stood up; the others didn’t.  Turning, Cazmonster leapt back into the action.

The American Attitude had downed two of the original four, and the Wrecker had taken care of the other two.  Cazmonster had taken two more on a trip from which they had not returned.  That still left six armed Nexers, all of whom now had their guns trained on The Wrecker and the Attitude.  

“Surrender now, heroes, and we’ll let you live,” one ordered.  

The two heroes were preparing to do as demanded when Cazmonster fell into the midst of their enemies.  He began by throwing one of them high into the sky. The others quickly turned, their augmented reflexes faster than his super-powerful muscles, and opened fire.  Cazmonster screamed in pain and fell to his knees as the bullets ripped through his body.  At close range, these guns were potentially deadly even to him.  Passing out from the pain, a broken and bruised Cazmonster changed form back to Caz.  He was bleeding face-down in the lot.  

The American Attitude, about to slug one of the Nexers with his staff, stopped mid swing as the rifle spun around and was leveled at his face.  Soon, he and The Wrecker were tied up with metal cable.  They, along with Caz and the Adept, were thrown into the back of a van.  Another van pulled up to get the remaining Nexer troops, and the two vehicles drove away toward Chicago.