Chapter 17

Fuck ... wouldn’t you believe it? The battleship-grade steel that layered the entire top of the basement, under the ground floor was still there ... and virtually immaculate, with hardly even a scratch on it! Now I could also see that this impenetrable layer not only covered the floor of the Murder Mansion, but also the houses next door and even under the old warehouse that had stood behind it. It covered, that thick layer of hardened steel, the entire city block where my house had once stood!

“There is just some shit that I won’t put up with!” I snarled, “that plated steel has got to go ... and that fucking basement of doom beneath it! Anyone who can still fly, get going and grab that mountain of rock and lift that sucker up to fucking earth’s orbit!”

“And then drop that bastard crashing down like a meteor right on top of that steel fucking plate!” Ms. Marvelous said, accurately finishing my thought as she flew back to grab the monster’s leg once more.

“That just might do it,” Miss Miracle calculated, conversing as much with Link as she was with me. “Whatever is beneath the protective lead layer under that hard plate steel is colossally destructive, far beyond my powers to bypass or protect myself against. Can that creature, that abomination that Fate’s twisted magic has created, say the same? I think not!”

No ... the chances of that creature surviving a forceful trip down into that basement from hell were no better than mine. Zip, zero, null and none. Assuming that our exhausted heroines could manage to lift the stunned creature up high enough to drop him through that seemingly impenetrable armored plating. Those chances weren’t so good. Hell, the odds were frankly awful that any of these battered women had enough flying lift in them to together even get the bastard lifted up off of the steel floor one last time!

The chances were slim ... really, really bad. Worse even than saving Pilsner, or even getting him back on two (mostly) working legs again. I’d have to try, but frankly, the way my head was getting ready to explode on me, that the effort would likely kill me. I didn’t see any other choices though!

Not to mention, that nearly every goddamned television and radio station in the city was there behind us, eyes fixed on me, reporting once more on this new colossal disaster. Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed, especially after almost no sleep!

I think my nose and eyes were all bleeding like rivers and my eardrums were just about ready to pop from the strain of tweaking those damnably impossible odds, when rescue from an extremely unlikely source appeared. Atomic Girl and her daughter, Starlite-Starbrite had returned! Ice Lady had done all that she could, wrapping the weakened creature up temporarily in an immobile sheath of ice, but her powers were now utterly exhausted too and no one had a shred of a prayer that her thin restraint would hold the monster for very long. A minute perhaps, no more than two ... even if we were very lucky.

“We’ve been watching the madness on TV for the last half hour and decided that we’d better come back and lend you a hand,” the atomic-powered woman calmly said. There was no hint of any apology for leaving us in the first place and frankly I understood her obvious reluctance to return. It was guilt and not loyalty that brought her back; the very certain guilt of having to watch all of her heroic friends very likely die, should she not act, was the main incentive for her reappearance.

Chances were that she was entirely truthful when she had said that she wanted to quit the heroine business, and everything that it entailed, for good. The self-loathing was there written clearly in her eyes for me to read, like in a large-print oversized children’s book.

“They need you,” I simply said, trying to wipe away the blood still seeping from my eye sockets, “we just can’t do it, what needs to be done, alone, without your help.”

“I know,” she calmly said, as she flew back into the air with a burst of coronal flame, to help the others struggling to lift up the colossal beast, and together now raising it up from the steel plating and into the sky, further and higher. Virtually unaided, it was her mighty flight power that was now lifting up that colossal beast from the ground. The others tried to help as their limited remaining strength permitted, but it was clear that this astounding feat was nearly entirely to Atomic Girls credit, alone. Her daughter, with great obvious reluctance, now flew up to join her until everyone had flown far out of sight with their massive burden.

I didn’t try to calculate the various odds of what made Starlite-Starbrite’s mind tick. Women are all confusing to me to begin with, but hers was a convoluted rat’s nest of contrary impulses that I doubted even Sigmund Freud himself could unravel. Oh yes, she had a sizeable portion of her mother’s innate talent, but she also lacked nearly every measure of self-control for both its power and her own often overpowering tendencies towards erratic self-destruction.

Pilsner could probably tell you how many miles it was up to the border of outer space, and how fast (with the help of gravity) that the unfortunate monster would be falling, just like a meteor crashing to earth. Force is something like velocity times mass, I think, and those numbers started to look impossibly big inside of my head.

“Gals, get all of those newsies way away from here,” I suddenly shouted out, a few moments later, “five blocks away, at least, or better make it ten. In fact, everyone just start flying, running, or hopping and don’t fucking even slow down until after the shock wave hits!”

Yes, the chances were ... it was going to be exactly, that bad. I have to give Handy Andi particular credit, though. She grabbed up six reporters in her arms and still had two limbs left to carry them and run like the legions of hell themselves were after her! Lightning Lass, I would suppose, should get the remainder of the credit, grabbing radio and television men (and their equipment) in sequence and racing each of them off to safety, far away, in less time than it took Blackwing and Green Canary to each grab my arm to help me run.

As the rock monster’s downward descent was calculated and adjusted for accuracy, to crash directly into my armored basement, most of the heroines had flown off and returned back to the ground to flee with us. All of them, except for Atomic Girl. She was clinging on to her massive aimed projectile and even subtly adding on her own flying speed to the speeding object as she precisely guided its fall all the way down to the target. Suddenly, I didn’t like what I was calculating ... at all.

Atomic Girl was bombing her very last, final city and enforcing her retirement plans the hardest way possible. Her final flight was going to be a one-way, no return, mission.

When the light of their flaming meteoric descent began to brighten the night skies of the city, I decided that further flight or running wasn’t going to help for much longer, and I yelled at everyone to ‘Duck and Cover’. Then, just to demonstrate my own contrariness, and willingness to submit to fate, I turned around and just stood there, to watch every nanosecond of the now immanent holocaust.

If a semi-nuclear explosion was about to go off, even the Bronx, let alone their North Island headquarters, wasn’t going to be nearly far enough away to save anyone and the odds were that all of Empire Island was going to have a very unfortunate and unlucky night! At least we’d all be instantly roasted dead so that there would be no one left that could rightfully put the blame for this catastrophe on us.

We saw the flash of light, first. In an instant it became as bright as the sun and the ball of superheated fire plasmas grew, like a growing nuclear fireball. Atomic Girl’s final act of self-immolation burned an angry and bright red-orange into the sky as its heat began to scourge and vaporize the ruined rubble that was once South Hell and the Abattoir.

Then the shock wave of sound and fury hit us, knocking everyone that was left standing, like me, backwards a good ten feet or more flat on our asses. Fortunately, I crashed into the somewhat still invulnerable (or at least nearly immobile) mass of Ms. Marvelous and didn’t hurt anything other than my pride, but weakened as she was, that impact force knocked her down flat on her butt too. We ought to have laughed about the situation, but really there is just nothing at all humorous about being having front-row theater seats to a city being nuked.

As the growing orange ball of death began to grow in the sky, a different, darker glowing mass suddenly began to consume it from below. The darker vortex then abruptly pulsed, turning the angry burning bright skies suddenly pitch black, as if every light in the entire universe had been suddenly extinguished, and it then devoured the nuclear flame in its entirety in just a mere instant and vanished.

Within a blink or two of the eyes, the normal night skies returned, revealing that little (if anything) was left of SoHell but rubble and darkness.

The full dark of night had returned to Empire Island and in its gloom we discovered that we were all still there, the island included, along with most of its inhabitants. Since nearly everyone had been evacuated from the Westside earlier in the day, this fresh new carnage was unlikely to have added any great number of fresh victims.

Except, of course, for Atomic Girl.

“You’ve killed her!” Starlite-Starbrite shrieked, her eyes now wild with despair and madness. She was looking of course at all of us, not just me, but it seems like her eyes burned the craziest when they stared into mine. Of course ... I was the only male present, so she could play the traditional ‘blame it all on the man’ card!

Her hands began to burn with nuclear fire that probably matched the heat that her eyes were now giving me.

“Don’t do it ... you don’t want to do this!” I warned her, as my gift slowed the world around me to a crawl. Her first stream of fire was arcing for me, but Ms. Marvelous was already shoving me aside so that she could take the brunt of the force herself. The impact was forceful, but not mortal for her, but absorbing this damage had beaten the last reserves of strength and endurance out of her and now she could no longer even stand.

Thwarted, Starlite-Starbrite began to wildly fling nuclear fire everywhere, largely unfocused or aimed. Those bolts missed nearly everyone, except for one that struck Mighty Maid’s back, who was bending over to tend to Marvelous, and now joined her in a limp heap on the ground, each now clobbered into final submission, lying helpless while watching the horrors about to come.

I just prayed that the newsies we’d rescued weren’t seeing all of this, but those odds were meager. Sure enough, flashbulbs were starting to go off nearly all around us. That just made a terrible situation even worse!

“Starlite ... girl, stop this, or I’ll have to try and stop you!” I shouted out loudly, as I started to get myself back on my feet, unsteadily, as time ticked slowly around me.

“Fuck trying,” Blackwing muttered, as she had discovered that none of the few remaining devices or gizmos on her belt did the least bit of harm to the crazy girl. “Just put her down... hard, permanently even, if you have to!” She growled, as she then moved up to protect me with her very own body. The odds were certain that even her reinforced leather armor couldn’t hope to block that massive force enough to save her life, but that was irrelevant to the grim defender’s creed. The lives of innocents, now in this case mine, must always be protected at any cost.

My eyes had stopped bulging out and squirting blood, but my nose was still flowing the red stuff like a river. I wasn’t sure that I could do what I needed to do, or if there was anything left of my gift to still chance upon anymore, but I had to try; to save Blackwing’s life. She was likely sacrificing hers for me now, how could I not do the same?

It was worse than bringing Pilsner back to life. Much, much worse. Every orifice in my body was excreting blood, probably even my fingers and toenails. The pain forced me down up my knees, my hands trying to cover my eyes to stop them from exploded right out my head, but there ... in the middle of my world of excruciating pain, I saw a small chance for us all to keep living.

But perhaps not all entirely living happily ever after.

I unleashed my last reserve of willpower and blacked out from the force of the intolerable pain, falling face first onto the ground.

They let me sleep, peacefully, for the next thirty-six hours and when I woke up again I still felt like I needed a nap of another week, if not two ... but at least we were all still alive.

Even before I’d fully opened my eyes, I realized that I wasn’t in my own bed. But that thought was silly; of course I wasn’t in my own bed, because I didn’t have a bed anymore. Or a house to put it in either.

All gone Kaboom, along with all of the Abattoir, South Hell, and a decent chunk of North Hell as well. Absentee landlords and real estate moguls were going to invoking my name for generations as a boogie-man to frighten their children.

It all sounded like something I once heard on the radio a few years ago, an interview with an army officer talking about why they’d utterly destroyed a Chinese city near the border of Korea, that they’d had to burn it down in order to ‘save’ it. Yep, that’s just about what we’d done right here on Empire Island, trying to save the Westside!

My second thought, while trying in vain to get an eyelid cracked open more than a quarter of an inch, was that I was not alone in bed. That was a much more comforting thought. My companion felt soft and warm up against my skin, and also very feminine and naked.

That’s never a bad way to wake up!

About this time, my snuggling companion realized that I’d woken up and I felt, more than saw, a cheerful face looming over mine as she forced my eyelids a bit more open, to check and see if I was responsive. I grunted something inarticulate at her and she bounded out of bed and opened a door and began howling something, loudly. My brain still wasn’t processing stimuli well quite yet, but it sounded something like, ‘He’s awake!’

I wasn’t quite so sure, but I decided to take her word for it.

Moments later, the entire proverbial monstrous regiment of women descended upon me and the bed, which fortunately seemed to be rather sizeable one, positively groaned under the weight of a half dozen or so young, and not-so, ladies, each frantically demanding to know how I felt, and if I was feeling alright. Unfortunately, all of these delicious female shapes were clothed, but they were all genuinely happy to see me anyway.

Someone brought me a cup with coffee in it and several pairs of hands each tried to help me get it down. When I finished it, and after a pair of plump pillows had been placed under my head, I was sitting up in bed and finally making more sense out of the world. My kaleidoscopic vision had settled down to just mundane double-vision and as the gaggle of ladies jawed at me I was starting to understand perhaps two words out of every three. Enough so, that after a second cup of coffee, I could sort of concentrate enough to make acceptable conversation. My first coherent words weren’t especially profound though.

“Please girls, get off me for a moment and let me get out of bed. I’ve got to take a really wicked piss!” Boy, was that an understatement!

The gals didn’t even try to let me walk unassisted and it was just a well. My pegs were more than a bit wobbly and I’d probably have fallen at least twice if my pair of nursemaids hadn’t supported me by each arm. The lovelies, Doc Wilma at my right side, and the Green Canary, I think, at my left, got me to the right place and just in the nick of the right time. I realized about then that I was naked, when my two angels managed the feat of holding both me and my cock up above the toilet, so that I could pee. Each of them with one hand grasping it. They even shook it dry for me afterwards when they flushed. Now that was full service!

I was guided back to bed and several lovelies were vying for my very limited ability to concentrate when my head struck the pillow once more and I think I feel fast asleep once more.

There was a faint glint of daylight in the room when I woke up again, this time with the vast majority of my mental faculties. Once again I was not alone in bed, and I could feel a soft female head gently snoozing against the side of my left shoulder. An even softer feminine hand was cupped around my groin, gently holding the base of my cock with my balls held warm in her palm. I was stiff again with morning wood and a trip to the toilet was probably a good idea, but not yet urgent.

I didn’t recognized her scent but the general shape of her petite body gave me a few helpful clues. I cracked my eyes open to confirm my guess, it was Lady Firefly. Like me, she was naked, with her full-sized breasts and bare hipbone pressed up against me for warmth and comfort.

Lifting my head up a bit from my pillows, I noted with approval that most of the double-vision had gone, and after a long moment or two of squinting in the fairly dim light, I could get a fairly accurate grasp of my surroundings. If this was some secure government prison for diabolical super-powered villains or deranged criminal masterminds, then it was darned comfortable one. Especially if came equipped with naked females for bed warmers!