(Continuing the letter to the Dark Knight regarding the claiming of the Dark Damsel and the Adventure of the Metahuman Sex Slave Ring. Based on reader feedback, I give you what many readers DESPERATELY want to have happen to Anaxandros...be warned.)
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About this time it dawned on me that I could use a really, really big gun.
Down the hall from my position at the crossroads, faceless thugs were lining up like Stormtroopers hunting down Solo and crew in the Death Star prison block. THEY weren't carrying guns. THEY were just shooting rounds of corrosive green phlegm out of their hands. In this town, it's never easy, is it? Its always some new and creative method of death...my boss has a saying about "keeping up with the Joker's" with new and creative means of pain and torture. Whoever came up with faceless mutants spitting loogies out their fingertips should get some sort of award, not only for coming up with the idea, but for convincing someone SANE to actually set up the bucks and the tech to pull it off. But I guess any world that has schmucks like Joel Schumacher putting movies about you on the screen has room for monsters with anal probing tongues or half-cow-half monkey assassins that know tae kwon do and fart living fire.
Give me a .44 Mag with one round in my pocket made of kryptonite and I'm a model of confidence and safety.
I used to carry a Desert Eagle, but I doubt you remember a night a few years back, Bats, when you stopped a drug ring run by Manny O'Dey and his New Russian Underground. I was working the night watch when you ever-so-casually slapped the piece out of my hand from the shadows, puffed yourself up and said OH SO righteously, "I don't LIKE...guns." just before cold cocking me for the umpteenth time. The gun ended up broken in two...I don't know about you but I'm not a rich man. Those things ain't cheap.
But standing at the end of a long corridor with a half-dozen purple/white anatomically-impressive zomboids closing in on me, I knew what was going through Richard III's mind when he offered up his entire empire for a quick ride out of town.
Let me say that, loogies-spitting aside, the faceless goons were pretty worthy adversaries. They are only trained for two specific tasks, one of these is to kill and the other is to fuck. Both of these programs are executed with extreme prejudice, without regard for age, gender or orientation. If you have a pulse, they will stop it. If you have an orifice, they will fill it. It's what they do. I'm sure some sick fuck like myself (but with more of a flair for dramatics and customary) is living large off the residuals from that underworld patent.
Since I couldn't negotiate with the clones closing in on me, I had to figure out a way to escape or get rid of them quickly. At the end of the walkway I found a cargo hook secured to the railing, the chain extending out and up into the dark warehouse. To the right of it was a metal door. I tried the door. Of course it was locked. The zomboids were about fifteen feet behind me, marching forward "thunp-thunp-thunp" with their ten inch violators waving toward me like doweling rods looking for well water. They didn't unleash green acid from their hands, so they apparently weren't in "Kill" mode.
I grabbed the heavy hook from its wall mount and climbed up the guide rail. In a surprising show of intelligence and strategy, one of the robots kicked at the railing, tearing it off its mounting. I fell forward desperately trying to hang onto the hook. My foot caught on the rail and twisted pretty bad. I was left hanging as the first of the zomboids came within arm's reach. Thoughts of karma and balance crossed my mind. I kicked backward, landing the heel of my shoe somewhere I'd never want to kick a real person. It felt like I'd kicked a steel pole - a sharp pain shot up my leg and I wondered if I'd crushed my heel. But the strike did knock it backward and into the far wall, pushing aside two others, one of which fell off the broken walkway into the dark. It fell for three seconds before I heard it smash into concrete and crumble like a Yugo hitting a barricade at high speed.
I freed my foot and leaped off into darkness, leaving the zombies behind me. I swooped down toward the floor, blind to what stood in my way. As the arch took me to the far side of the warehouse, what I'd hoped for I didn't see - there was no walkway or suspension on the far wall to hold onto and no way off the ride except down four stories to the concrete. I felt myself slowing and the wind shifted. I was heading back where I came from. I quickly spun myself around. Putting my weight into it like a kid on a swing, not knowing if it would help at all, I Tarzan-ed back across the warehouse, ignoring the pain in both feet as I neared the walkway with the broken railing. I could see the gray/purple outlines of the zombies in the dark hovering over the last known spot of their fallen comrade. I saw the metal door behind them. One zomboid stood between me and it, so I improvised a battering ram out of a very dumb, aroused robot.
I pulled myself up on the chain, lifting my aching feet in front of me as we connected. The shock screamed up my legs and into my hips. I was sure something snapped, maybe my ankle, but I hit the robot square in the chest, taking him off his feet and square into the door. His weight and velocity took him through the door like it was just a curtain of beads.
My momentum took me along for the ride and we both hit and slid across the concrete floor of the room beyond for a few feet, the robot waving its arms, head jerking around trying to figure out why it was suddenly being used as a sled. It scraped along the ground, slowing quickly. I felt it shift its weight, throwing me forward and off its stomach. I rolled and smacked the concrete pretty hard, skipping across the floor several feet before wrapping myself around a metal doorway in dim ruby light. I caught the wall in the stomach and it bent me around, my head smacking the opposite side of the wall where my knees hit...I felt the rapid onset of unconsciousness, but fought it - keeping in mind the concept of having my plumbing dug up by a 12" metal dong.