Thrusts of Justice (Chooseomatic Books) Page 3

  The sun is bright when you awaken, and Octavia is sitting in a chair next to your bed, watching you. That’s creepy. You hear the quirky monotone of NPR wafting in from the other room.

  You grunt. “What time is it?”

  “Ten o’clock,” Octavia says. You decide not to tell her that since joining the ranks of the unemployed, ten is actually an early start for you. Sitting up, you notice that your battlesuit has moved to the foot of the bed, and a large appendage is curled around your feet like a labrador retriever.

  “The alien armor isn’t designed to communicate with its wearer through verbal commands,” Octavia says. Has she been poking around in your brain while you slept? “It’s meant to join with the wearer as one — to bond with you, so the two of you think with a single mind.”

  “That sounds great,” you say, yawning. “Can we make that happen?”

  Octavia’s voice is soft. “You must understand — this isn’t something you can undo. The armor’s life cycle involves finding a host and grafting to it, forming what is almost a single entity. You must be absolutely certain that this is what you want.”

  That’s a lot to take in first thing in the morning. “And then there’s the matter of what it wants,” Octavia continues. “Normally, the armor itself would initiate the bond. But I sense a hesitancy. Remember, it was with the previous Guardian for decades. It’s mourning. Also, your subconscious apparently thinks of it as a toaster.”

  You hear the radio announcer raise his voice slightly in the other room (this is public radio — any vocal inflection is enough of a surprise to grab your attention). He says that a trio of supervillains has just descended on the nation’s capitol, and the Washington Monument has already crumbled. Tens of thousands of people are panicking in the streets. You jump out of bed — that shower will have to wait. The battlesuit jumps with you, immediately forming itself around your body.

  Are you really prepared to take on three villains at once, though? The Ox kicked your ass by himself. It might help if you and your battlesuit were fused together into a sort of unnatural, terrifying hive mind. Are you ready for that kind of commitment, though?

  “If you want to try bonding with the armor,” Octavia says, “we could do it now.”

  ▶ If you tell Octavia you’re ready, click here for page 152.

  ▶ Whoa, whoa, whoa. If you’re not ready at all and would rather face the villains unbonded, click here for page 221.

  27

  You may have superpowers, but you have absolutely no clue what they might be, so taking a swing at one of the toughest supervillains in the world seems just plain stupid. You bolt out the motel room door (and not particularly quickly — at the very least you can rule out superhuman speed).

  The Ox crashes right through the wall behind you. Crap! Across the street is a run-down office building, so you scoot into the alley behind it and, for lack of a better plan, make a running leap for a rusty old fire escape hanging just out of reach. To your complete surprise, you grab the bottom rung with ease and start scurrying up. Really? Half the superheroes in New York can fly, but you get the power of, what, parkour?

  Then again, if you could fly, how would you even know? It’s five flights to the building’s roof and you’re good and winded by the time you reach it, but the Ox didn’t try to follow you up (which makes sense, since you can’t imagine that the ancient fire escape would hold his weight). Then, as you clamber over the rooftop’s ledge, you see a gargantuan figure emerge from a doorway right in front of you.

  The Ox took the stairs.

  He charges. This is it, you think — at this point your choices are to take a punch from this monster or make a flying leap and pray for a miracle. Either way, if you’re not superpowered, you’re probably about to be super dead.

  ▶ If you brace for impact and hope to somehow survive the Ox’s wrath, click here for page 53.

  ▶ If you jump over the building’s edge and flap your arms like crazy, click here for page 146.

  28

  We’re not going to lie to you, you’re screwed either way. Axemaster has been preparing for this moment for years, and is ready to counter attacks you don’t even know you have. His mask has a built-in oxygen supply to render your knockout gas useless, and he’s given himself regular electric shocks so he’ll be able to withstand the ones your gauntlets emit. He’s studied the Nightwatchman’s fighting style and taught himself a combination of Brazilian Ju Jitzu and Scandinavian Tae Kwon Do specifically designed to throw even the world’s most dangerous hand-to-hand combatant off his guard.

  Essentially, it’s a choice between going down fighting or facing your death as a sniveling coward, and we hope you’ve made peace with whichever route you chose. He immediately gets you in a wrestling hold, lifts you over his head, and breaks your back over his knee — then, before you have a chance to wonder who might take up the mantle of the Nightwatchman while you lie in a cave somewhere recuperating, he carves open your chest and tears out your still-beating heart. And then he eats your face off.

  The guy is completely off his rocker. And he’s wrong about how long it takes you to die, but he doesn’t let that spoil his fun. He continues mutilating your corpse for a good three or four hours.

  THE END

  29

  The aliens turn out to be ferocious but not particularly tough. They’re completely gross, though — all blisters and pustules, with bony appendages they use to propel themselves like flagella. One of them jumps you and sucks your entire helmet into its expanding maw. You manage to dislodge it from your head and then pound away until it stops moving. The things keep hurling themselves at you, but you keep smacking them down. The fight is over inside of ten minutes.

  “Nice work, assmunch.”

  The voice comes from a speaker inside your helmet, but you spot a human figure approaching in a space suit that matches yours. He’s crackling with electricity. “Megawatt,” Ox sneers. You hear him through your helmet as well — they must all be linked. “I knew that hero thing was a load of crap. This is how you use your powers now? Helping alien pus bags take over the Earth?”

  “You don’t get it,” Megawatt says. “These things gave me my powers. They gave all of us our powers. And they’re giving me a bitchin’ flying battlesuit to help invade the next planet, too. Listen, there’s a suit for you too, man. You’re part of this. You’re on the list.”

  A giant spacecraft and an offer to join the dark side? Megawatt sees the look on your face, and chuckles. “Not you, dumbass. I don’t even know who you are. They’ve been planning this for decades, Ox. It’s way too late to stop them.”

  Ox gives you a glance and shrugs. “We are supervillains.”

  ▶ If you try to convince him that the world is worth saving, click here for page 76.

  ▶ If you think the fight is a lost cause and just try to talk him into hooking you up with a battlesuit too, click here for page 107.

  30

  After finishing your meal, such as it is, you have one more beer and finally head out. Despite all the excitement this morning, today has actually turned out to be kind of a drag. On a whim, you backtrack to the alley where you found Nightwatchman’s secret bunker. This time, you push and pull on the dumpster in every imaginable way for at least half an hour, but it doesn’t move an inch.

  Could you have hallucinated all of that earlier? How drunk were you?

  Back at your apartment, you find that the second season of “Glee” has arrived from Netflix, so you stay up late into the night burning through episodes and working on a twelve pack. You eventually drift off to sleep, and don’t wake up until almost three o’clock the following afternoon. Your friends still haven’t returned any of your messages, so you turn the TV back on. Later that evening, you’ve formulated some pretty strong opinions about the set list for regionals when, without warning, the world literally ends.

  All life on Earth could probably have used a hero. Next time, maybe nut up a little. We’re just saying.


  THE END

  31

  You agree to join forces with the Ox, and your new friend seems terribly excited about the prospect. He insists that you accompany him back to New York City to learn the supervillain ropes, and he escorts you to a nondescript van with tinted windows parked behind the motel.

  You climb into the vehicle (which, in retrospect, is probably soundproofed as well) with the 800-pound bank-robbing stranger. What could possibly go wrong?

  The van is actually quite plush inside, and modified to accommodate the Ox’s enormous frame. He fills the entire front seat (the steering wheel is mounted directly in the center of the dashboard) and proves to be perfectly courteous, to your relief. In fact, he’s downright chatty. “I was planning on hitting up this meeting tonight,” he says. “A bunch of guys get together and talk about crimes and stuff. We’re not like a team, or a legion or whatever, but sometimes it’s good to hear what everybody’s up to.”

  A supervillain meeting? Your reporter’s curiosity is piqued. You consider trying to contact Dale and Melah, but you’re not sure what you would say, or how much you even want to reveal, now that you have a secret identity.

  “Aw, but that’s all pretty boring,” Ox continues. “You probably wanna get your hands dirty, try to figure out your powers and stuff. We could hit another bank instead. Or an armored truck or something. C’mon, it’ll be fun!”

  ▶ Why not? If you’re ready for the thug life, click here for page 114.

  ▶ If you’d rather attend the meeting (either because you’re planning an undercover sting operation or just for general networking purposes), click here for page 60.

  32

  In addition to the Ox, Tinker, Suong, Savage Cockroach, and Verminator, you’ve picked up villains from the meeting that include Dr. Diabolus, the Turtle, Rockjockey, someone who may or may not be called Pterodactyl Girl, and nine others with names you can’t seem to keep straight. By morning you’ve added enough additional criminals to triple your numbers, tracking them down before Crexidyne’s Guardian Corps can find them and pursuading them to join your army. One of them, a big, creepy guy named Axemaster, insists that he be allowed to personally destroy the Nightwatchman with his own hands, exacting his terrifying revenge. You’re okay with that. You know, assuming you happen to run into the Nightwatchman.

  Your meddling throws a huge monkey wrench into Crexidyne’s carefully crafted plans for the day, and they send their own recruits to meet you in an all-out attack at dawn. The battle is epic. Unfortunately, Crexidyne’s goal for the villains was simply to create mass chaos to distract the world’s attention from their real plan. A balls-out war between supercriminals does the job just as well as what they had worked up to begin with.

  And it turns out that their real plan was some evil, evil stuff. You spend the day in the throes of superpowered combat, but it’s all for naught — the entire planet more or less shrivels and dies before suppertime.

  THE END

  33

  You delve deeper into the dog’s brain, and realize that there’s more than just canine remembrances here. In fact, it seems to be a storage unit for memories from a number of different sources. You get flashes of the Cosmic Guardian battling evil with the Justice Squadron and his first supergroup, the Liberty Patrol. You also find him returning frequently to what looks like a research facility. You can’t determine the purpose of these visits, but he seems to be keeping them secret from his superhero colleagues.

  You continue deeper, and find the Guardian meeting with a 1970s-era hero named Dogstar, the Savior from Sirius. Dogstar was an alien on a mission to protect Earth from any and all threats from outer space. After he died, the Cosmic Guard sent one of its battlesuits to a worthy Earthling to act as the planet’s protector in his stead.

  That’s the story, anyway. If it’s true, how could the two of them have ever met? As you watch the scene unfold, the Guardian fires some kind of energy weapon, catching Dogstar by surprise. The Savior from Sirius falls helplessly to the ground, and the Guardian pounces on him, tearing him to pieces with his bare hands.

  You’re not sure if your brain can scream or not, but it might have just happened, because suddenly you feel the alien intellect closing in on you. You have to get out of here! But there’s so much more to learn… .

  ▶ If you sever the connection now, click here for page 225.

  ▶ If you push your luck just a little further, click here for page 256.

  34

  “Ah,” Tachyon says. “I’ve always suspected that to stop them, I’d have to travel in time and undo everything, including my own ability to travel through time.” Wait, how does that work? He smiles. “You mustn’t worry too much about the paradoxes. Now, are you ready?”

  “Uh, am I going with you?” you ask. You didn’t even know that was possible. “Will I be able to get back, afterwards?”

  “After this, there won’t be anything here to come back to.”

  The room around you fades to white.

  * * * * *

  A young woman leans up against the side of a building, smoking a cigarette and waiting for her shift at the steel mill to begin. Most of the people she works with are big, ignorant men, but she’s good at her job and doesn’t care what they think of her. Above her, something streaks across the sky, crashing to Earth in the empty field behind the factory. The woman picks up a crowbar and walks into the field to investigate.

  Minutes later she discovers a shiny blue pod in a smoking crater, the shape of a football and no larger than a baby carriage. Something inside it shakes, as if trying to emerge. However, it’s dented from the impact. Perhaps the damage is preventing the pod’s inner machinery from functioning properly?

  Before she has the chance to poke it with the crowbar, the scene is bathed in a bright, white light. Tachyon’s voice calls out, deep and soft.

  “Heed my words,” he says. “This box is an instrument of evil. Open it, and your life will never be the same. You’ll see more wonders than you could ever imagine, but at the cost of everything you will ever hold dear. In the end, it can only lead to destruction. However, the choice must be yours.”

  That’s it? That’s Tachyon saving the world? The fate of every living thing on the planet is at stake, and that’s his pitch? You try to interject something about impending alien doom, but you have no presence here, no mouth with which to speak the words. The woman looks back at the steel mill, with its arc furnaces and vats of molten ore. She looks at the tiny spacecraft, and once again the scene fades to white.

  * * * * *

  You’ve wanted to be an astronaut — the most heroic, adventurous job you could imagine — ever since you were a small child. By the time you were 12, you had discovered that astronauts were just regular people who ate their vegetables, studied hard, and probably joined the Air Force. As you grew older, your friends would laugh about your ambitions. Screw ’em, you thought. Let them give up on their dreams and settle for life as an office worker, telemarketer, or investigative journalist. You knew what you wanted.

  And here you are, a decade and a half later, strapped into a rocket and about to embark upon the first manned mission to Mars. The trip will take seven months and any number of things may go terribly wrong along the way. But, if all goes according to plan, you’ll be among the first human beings to set foot on another planet. Your entire life has been leading up to this moment, and your heart races as the countdown ticks down. Four… three… two… one…

  Blast off.

  THE END

  36

  You get the hell out of there, emerging from your first encounter with a superhero utterly humiliated. Clearly, you aren’t quite ready for the fast lane. You spend the afternoon trying to figure out your powers, but learn almost nothing. It looks like you’re going to have to discover them the hard way after all. Once night falls and you’re confident Magnifico is long gone, you hit the streets, looking for easier prey.

  You find it. Alas, some other dirtbag find
s it first. It’s a weeknight, meaning the downtown core is pretty vacant, but you hear a scream as some goon grabs a woman’s purse and takes off down a back alley. After your run-in with Magnifico, snatching purses seems a little anticlimactic, but you decide to swoop in and take the spoils for yourself. You confront the mugger, but as soon as you do, you hear a voice call out from behind you.

  “Drop the purse, scumbag!” You turn to see the glowing eyes of the Nightwatchman peering down at you from a rooftop. At least, it looks like the Nightwatchman. It sounds more like some frat boy doing a goofy-sounding fake voice. Certainly this is some local Nightwatchman wannabe. Which would explain why he wasn’t eager to tangle with the Ox this morning.

  The hooligan drops the bag and runs. The Nighwatchman seems quite pleased, and introduces himself, sticking out his hand to shake. He’s obviously under the impression that you were planning to return the purse to its rightful owner. You wonder if you should correct this little misunderstanding — you did come out looking for a scuffle, after all, and surely you can take this guy.