For Blood or Justice by Chuck Regan

Author:Chuck Regan [Regan, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: superhero noir
Publisher: Rayguns & Mayhem
Published: 2019-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

22 - For more about the adventures of a Free Zone scavenger, look for the upcoming short story Slugdodger, coming soon!

THADDEUS ORMOND

3:33 pm

Dan fell into a vat of green pudding. He bobbed to the surface, gasped for air, and as if a switch had been flipped, the pudding hardened to resin. The drops from his splashing tinkled like broken glass, skating into depressions on the glossy surface. Solid spikes of mid-splash blades formed a cage around his face. Squeezing his ribs, he couldn’t take in a full breath.

Yellow fluorescents tinkled to life around him. He was trapped in a transparent cylinder set into the floor of an abandoned subway station. Tiled walls and floors. A chubby, old man stepped into Dan’s line of sight—unkempt white hair, oval face—he was dressed in a biohazard suit without a hood. He held what looked like an old handheld video game.

“Mr. Haeckel?”

“Hyeah,” Dan strained.

“I’m Doctor Ormond. You said you have something for me?”

“Yeah, in my backpack,” he gasped.

“In a moment, you may remove it. Do it slowly.” Ormond said, looking down at his control device. He looked up again with peaked eyebrows. Ormond pressed a button on the controller. The resin evaporated down to a flat surface level to Dan’s shins. Dan flung his arms to keep balance.

“Who did you say gave you my card?” Ormond said.

“Spinner.” Dan slid off his backpack and held it by one strap. “I have one of his communicator earbuds in the front zipper pocket.”

“Slide the pack over to me.”

Dan slid it across the slick surface. The encasement walls of the chamber disappeared. Glass can’t be just turned off. It had to be some advanced kind of force wall. The backpack tumbled off the edge with a clank. Ormond pulled the bag over to himself, crouched and opened it.

“What’s his real name?”

“It . . . didn’t . . . have a name.”

Thaddeus looked confused for a moment, and saw that Dan was looking at the robot spider. Ormond shook his head. “No. Spinner. Do you know his real name?”

“Oh . . . No.”

Thaddeus stood and turned the machine over in his hands, cocking his head to either side.

“Did Spinner tell you what I do?”

“He said you might . . . pay me for that?”

“Did he tell you I might kill you?”

“Ahhhh . . . No?”

“What would you do if I told you Spinner and I are working together with the government to remove unlicensed vigilantes from the streets?”

“I’m not . . . ”

“What would you say?”

“I don’t know.”

Ormond waggled his control box. “Because I can gauge your stats with this device, and there’s no possibility you’ll be able to break out of that container. I could crush you slowly with this polystatic liquid . . . this green stuff encasing your lower extremities. Or I could teleport you a mile into the sky. How would you like that?”

“No, I wouldn’t like that,” Dan said flatly.

Ormond looked up from his device. “You think you’re indestructible? You’re not. You think you might survive a drop from that height? You won’t.

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