THE BOMB

By Desmond Reddick

“Dyke.”

Cheryl turned around to see who was the first to set the name-calling in motion today but whoever it was decided to say it in passing. She’d barely been able to walk into school and get to her locker before it started. But that was how the day usually started.

It almost always ended in tears.

She undid the combination on her lock and swung the steel door open, slamming it into the locker door next to her.

“Jesus, do you have to slam the door all the time, cow?”

Cheryl didn’t need to look to recognize Becky’s voice. She spoke with the inflected tone of one who thought they were superior. Given that she had a band of pop tarts who followed her around and hung on her every word, her superiority was validated. At least amongst her social circle.

“Bad enough, I have to have my locker beside your skanky ass all year.”

“Sorry,” Cheryl mumbled as she pulled her door perpendicular to the wall of lockers.

“You are sorry, a sorry cow,” she nattered behind the door.

Cheryl sighed audibly and imagined smashing Becky’s pretty face behind the locker door over and over until all that remained was a puddle of tears, blood and running make-up.

“Hey, Beck!” one of Becky’s pop tarts shouted from down the hall. The pop tart pranced towards her and the others followed. Trailing were two tall, good-looking boys. Cheryl recognized Steven as a basketball player, and she assumed the other was too.

“Hanging out with those less fortunate?” Steven taunted.

“Ugh! Please!” Becky bounded into Steven’s arms and French kissed him.

“What about you?” the other basketball player asked. “You wanna gimme a kiss, ugly?”

They all laughed and walked away.

Cheryl turned back to her locker. She pretended to look for something but only stared into the dark recess into the back. Tears pooled in her eyes, and she began to tremble.

“Hey, Cherry!”

It was Becky again.

Cheryl turned, eyes reddened.

“Try to do a better job next time!” Becky shouted down the hallway sticking her tongue out the side of her mouth and making slashing motions at her wrist.

Cheryl turned back to her locker, tugged down on the black and white striped sleeves of her shirt to cover the scars on her forearm.

She shuddered violently, staring at the darkened recess of her locker. Tears flowed readily and dropped from her face to splash on the linoleum floor below. She wanted to scream at Becky, to scratch and punch and kick her.

It wasn’t just Becky, though; Cheryl was tired of it happening every day. It seemed everything everyone said to her was laced with insults. Even the teachers who were nice to her turned a blind eye to the constant bullying.

Cheryl just wished that everyone in this fucking school would… Just. Go. Away!

The van took the turn much faster than one would expect it to without tipping over. The men with their fingers on the triggers of their uniform modified assault rifles were professionals. Or at least Dr. Niles Caulder expected they were, seeing as they were being tossed around the back of the open transport van as much as he was and there were no casualties or holes in the ceiling as of yet.

“He’s liable to get a ticket, driving like that.” Dr. Niles Caulder mumbled after his head had been bounced off of the wall of the van for what seemed like the fifteenth time.

“Shut up.” It was a directive, spoken coldly by the balaclava-wearing thug in front of him. “You will speak when spoken to. The Baron wants your life elixir. Now that your freaks aren’t here to save you, you’re a dead man if you don’t comply.”

Caulder stared steely-eyed at the man before speaking: “It’s in my coat pocket.”

He reached into the inside pocket of his tweed sports coat before being stopped.

“No!” The machine gun was thrust into Caulder’s belly. “Hands up. I’ll get it.”

Caulder complied.

Further down the long, mostly empty side street, a man lurched forward on uneasy feet. His right arm, curled inward at the wrist, was held tight to his side as he dragged an unresponsive leg across the asphalt road. A few people gathered on the sidewalks to watch him. They weren’t entirely insensitive, for it wasn’t the obvious disability that drew their attention.

The man was quite a sight: white bandages, hardened yellow with resin, wrapped his entire head except for slats over his mouth, nose and eyes. He looked like a dishevelled invisible man with short plumes of dark brown hair jutting out between the bandages on top of his head.

He stopped on the white line at the centre of the street and faced the van.

Behind the wheel of the careening van, the driver cackled and steadied the vehicle. He sped up, pointing the street’s centre line in the middle of the hood. He was the only one not wearing a balaclava, and he bore his teeth jackal-like as bore down on the disabled man ahead of him.
In the back of the van, the thug in front of Caulder reached into his captive’s inside pocket. Inside, he felt a piece of paper. Thinking it could be a formula, he pulled the paper out, handed the assault rifle to the thug next to him and unfolded the paper.

All he saw on the paper were the words SAY SOMETHING NICE and what looked like a broken pencil lead.

“What the hell is this?” He looked across at Caulder to see him smirking.

“Rita,” Caulder began, “you look ravishing this afternoon.”

“Thanks Chief!”

Everyone could hear the woman’s tiny voice, but no one could see her.

Until, that is, the broken pencil lead sitting in the open yet creased paper grew to mammoth proportions in the blink of an eye. As the woman grew from a millimetre to several meters tall, she threw a right cross at the thug holding the paper.

The disabled man on the street in front of the speeding van closed his eyes and wished to be somewhere else. In an instant, a black elongated phantom stretched out of his chest and crackled with an eerie white light surrounding it, providing a clear outline to what would otherwise be a form that disappears in the shadows.

The black phantom form of Negative Man shot forward, intangibly passing through the windshield of the van. It scooped Dr. Caulder up in its arms and continued through to the back of the van.

Rita, as Elasti-Girl continued to grow rending and stretching the van to shreds. As she did so, the back doors of the van popped open, allowing Negative Man to carry the Chief safely out of the van as space, to say the least, became an issue.

One assailant’s assault rifle barked off a few shots as he was pressed against the inside wall of the van, but it soon stopped when it fell from his hands.

With Elasti-Girl and the armed men tumbling out of the back of the van, the intact front end, driver and tendrils of aluminum and steel continued to screech along the road towards the bandaged man.

With huge crunching footsteps, drowned out by the van, a seven foot copper-colored automaton quickly stepped in front of the runaway wreckage. He placed one massive arm in front of him to stop the van and the rest of what was left of the vehicle bent and twisted around his powerful body to the shrieks of quickly warping steel.

The driver, having hit his head on the steering wheel of the early model transport van, was unconscious and easily pulled through the broken windshield by the metal man’s left arm.
Negative Man placed Caulder gently down beside Rita and returned quickly to his human body.

“Thanks for the save, Robotman,” he said, his autonomy returning to his gnarled body.

“Don’t mention it, Larry!” Robotman’s voice boomed when he spoke and rang with a hollow echo.

When Larry Trainor and Robotman turned back towards their teammates, Mento was already at work on the only conscious kidnapper.

The handsome man was only distinguishable by the large round hat he wore. The cobalt blue metal ring created a wide brim around his head at forehead level and an attached domino mask covered the area around his eyes. Two small antennae protruded into the air from the front of the helmet.

Elasti-Girl, now normal-sized used a comically enlarged hand to hold the kidnapper down on the pavement while Mento held a hand to either side of the man’s head.

“AH!” Mento screamed and jerked back from the man he’d been mentally probing. Normally, he could read minds easily, but with the helmet, he could probe much further and overcome obstacles paranormal or technological in nature. Most of them, anyway.

“Are you alright, Steven?” Caulder asked, placing a concerned hand on his shoulder.

“I’m okay, Chief,” he answered, making a motion to remove his helmet and then stopping, “The Baron’s gotten much better at psychic firewalls. This one actually hurt.”

“Hmm…if you take off your helmet, I’ll see what I can do about tweaking it for you. If I can’t amp up the power, I should at least be able to shield you from feedback,” Chief said. “Steven, I will need you to take off your helmet first.”

Mento looked up at his mentor and nodded in agreement. He slowly reached up and gripped both sides of the helmet, sighed quietly and tugged it off of his head. The man beneath the helmet had large beads of sweat running from his hairline and sunken eyes.

Rita, seeing the pained face of a man she had feelings for, shot a look of concern to Larry and Robotman. All of them knew that their teammate was addicted to his helmet, and that it was slowly costing him his sanity.

“What did you find out, Steve?” Larry asked the question to cut the obvious tension.

“I saw things, terrible things from his childhood. Ignorance and hatred fuelled by violence. Everything after he joined the Brotherhood of Evil was encased in a sphere. I was able to make my way around much of it before the feedback got me.”

He stopped and looked up into the air; his eyes darted back and forth.

“I don’t understand all of it. I saw death. So much death and pain. And a face that can be changed at will.” He stopped, stood, gasped, and looked from Chief and Elasti-Girl to Negative Man and Robotman before his eyes regained a sense of clarity. “Oh God. This was a diversion!”

 – ragedy here today at Fulton Senior High as an explosion of as yet unknown origin rocked the tiny neighborhood shortly before school began. Police and fire crews were on the scene very shortly after the explosion rung out, and we are being told that though they are still combing through the wreckage, there appears to be only one survivor at this time. More on this story as it develops, Ron.

Thank you, Cynthia. Our thoughts are of course with the people of Fulton today. Sports and weather coming up after the break.

“Sad.” The nurse behind the counter on the intensive care floor often talked to herself when no one was there. It was a quiet place for the most part. When it wasn’t quiet, people were dying or going into cardiac arrest or any other number of maladies known for setting off the machines attached to them.

She knew that the girl in 917A was the sole survivor of the explosion they talked about on the news. But what the news didn’t say was that the girl was unharmed. She was contently reading a book pilfered from the rack outside the gift shop an hour ago.

The last word on her was that they were keeping her for observation.

The nurse answered a phone, cradled it between her shoulder and ear and organized files in the wire basket on the counter. As she spoke to the caller, a nurse from the ER checking on a patient admitted the day before, she saw Dr. Perrish pushing the girl out of her room in a wheelchair.

The girl, hair black – an obviously bad dye job streaked with white at the front – and limp against her head looked uncomfortable. Her face winced from a pain unseen.

The nurse put the files down, covered the phone with her hand and spoke: “Dr. Perrish, what –“

“The girl is fine. We are letting her go.”

“Can I get someone to wheel her down for you?”

“No, it’s fine. Cherry and I are going to have a chat on the way.”

As the elevator door on the right closed, the nurse shrugged and stepped around the counter to collect the girl’s file for discharge. She muttered under her breath about “asshole doctors” thinking because they went to school a little longer that “they can’t drop a file off on the counter.”

She retrieved the file and put it on the top of the pile that had to be processed for discharge and went to make her way around and back behind the counter. Just as she returned to the other side of the counter, she reached for the pile of discharge files and lifted them down to the desk when the other elevator door rung.

She turned and looked to see Dr. Perrish stepping out of the elevator door on the left, nibbling on a half-finished Snickers bar and looking at a folded copy of the Daily Planet.

“That was qui – “ the sentence hadn’t even left her mouth before she realized that it wasn’t only quick, but impossible, seeing as the light above the elevator door on the right was still counting down from floor 2 to floor 1.

Dr. Perrish looked at her quizzically, but even if she was able to respond immediately, it would still have been too late to stop whoever it was that wore his face from kidnapping the only survivor of the city’s greatest disaster.

The cool air of the mid afternoon helped clear Cheryl’s head a little from whatever it was the doctor injected her with before wheeling her out of her hospital room.

“Whuh…Where are you taking me?” Cheryl asked.

The rugged, unshaven face of Dr. Perrish glistened for a moment as it became completely composed of flat surfaces. It sunk into itself as did the body below it. It settled quickly into a ravishingly beautiful, yet hard looking woman.

He raven black hair, cut into a bob down to just below ear length had edges and bangs that looked as though they were cut with a sword. She still wore the long white doctor’s coat, but as it flopped open while she walked, one could see the blood red bodysuit and knee high black boots she wore.

She bent down to Cheryl’s ear without breaking stride and spoke in French: “À l’ècole, ma chère.”

“To school,” she repeated, this time in English, “ma chère, Cherry.”

Cheryl whimpered and tried to call out but a large man in a sharp suit lifted her from her wheelchair and placed her gently in the back of a dark red Lincoln Town Car. On the seat beside her, Cheryl could read through her blurred vision a pamphlet on thick, quality paper:

Madame Rouge’s
School for Girls

With the car door closed, Cheryl’s screams were silenced.

NEXT ISSUE: Come to Madame Rouge’s School for Girls, where demure and pleasant manners are paramount and second only to the desire for complete and utter domination of the world!