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#8
MAY 10 |
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“Suicide is Painless”
Quickstart Enterprises made its headquarters in the heart of downtown Keystone City, amidst the industry and pollution that the people of the Midwestern burg called home. The company produced infomercials to inspire people to not give up on their dreams and lead new lives; ironic given the current occupants of its lobby.
“How long do we wait?” Thomas Blake whispered to the man seated next to him, as he nonchalantly paged through an old issue of Cat Fancy. The mustachioed companion scoffed under his breath and continued playing with the unlit cigarette in his fingers. “This woman’s supposed to be fast like the Flash,” Blake continued. “How is it that we’re waiting almost an hour to get a meeting?”
“Clam up, Blake,” Floyd Lawton demanded. “Your mouth keeps going and all I hear is ’wah-wah-wah,’ like a frickin’ baby with a megaphone.”
“I’m particularly impatient today,” Blake replied, lowering his voice even further to avoid future megaphone comparisons. “I got a bad feeling about this. Super-speed folks are always a handful.”
Lawton broke the cigarette he was playing with and sighed with frustration. “I’m gonna have to teach you a few things about stuff like discretion and blowing our cover.” He rose to his feet and pulled another cigarette out of his jacket pocket. “I’m heading outside for a smoke. You sit and wait silently for the appointment. I called in too many favors to set up our false i.d.s to have someone overhear your insecurities and call the cops.”
Blake laughed. “Ha,” he declared. “Cops.”
“You laugh now,” Lawton replied, “but I bet your mouth shuts when the Flash shows up and drags you across this town by your gay-ass thong underwear.”
“They’re comfortable,” Blake muttered as Lawton left the building.
Floyd Lawton was not paying attention to his surroundings as he exited, lighting a cigarette with haste to calm his nicotine craving. Before the door closed behind him, he had already had two puffs, then he looked up. His cover was blown.
“G’day, Lawton,” the unmistakably Australian Captain Boomerang said. “Fancy us meetin’ ya here, me an’ me pals.”
Lawton wasted the rest of his cigarette as it fell to the ground, the dual motions of his hands were a blur. As one hand lunged into his jacket for his pistol, the other moved to his mouth as he signaled to his partners. “We got a situation,” he said calmly as he opened fire on the Suicide Squad.
Abe Tarrant was happy to be alive. So happy, in fact, that he wanted the whole world to know about it through the pain he wished to inflict upon his enemies. On this job to Keystone, he would start his campaign of infamy by erasing the Flash from the world. His task was to occupy the Flash while Deadshot and Catman got to Jesse Quick, but he had his own agenda. He and his tattoos were no longer content to just do things the proper way, they had to be done the most enjoyable way.
With the aid of his new tattoos, capturing the Flash was simple. A mere desire for capture was all it took to bring the fastest man alive to his knees, the tattoos did the rest. Now that the hero was incapacitated, the Tattooed Man enjoyed his victory.
“I got myself quite a resume,” Tarrant gloated to the Flash, the hero bound to the ground by a myriad of impossible creations. Miniature Flashes with black wings, snakes with human faces, blurred images of Abe Tarrant himself all surrounded the speedster, who was seemingly helpless. “I faced down the goddamn Spectre, punked the Devil himself and now I take down the Flash. I gotta say, things are lookin’ up for ol’ Tattooed Man!”
The Flash was silent, attempting to speak but unable.
“No need to congratulate me,” Abe smiled. “I’ll get all the kudos I can take when everybody finds out about the things I done.”
He pawed at his skin gently, peeling forth a tattoo that was not there before. A swarm of wasps poured from his chest and buzzed around in a wild pattern. He grinned as he gathered them around his fist, readying to administer more torture to his defeated opponent. Fortunately for the Flash, he was distracted.
“We got a situation,” Lawton’s voice crackled through Tarrant’s wrist communicator. Reluctantly, Abe called back the swarm into his body and hurried to assist his partners.
Floyd Lawton did not have the time to choose his targets, but from the ten Suicide Squad operatives that surrounded him, hitting at least one was almost guaranteed. He shot three rounds, each hitting a different spot of the face of a man he did not recognize. Three shots was all he was able to squeeze out before he was engulfed in darkness, unexpectedly assaulted from behind.
He knew the second it was happening that he was pulled into a shadow disk, forced into the darkness dimension and disarmed by the long-time Squad operative called Nightshade. He had worked with her before, experiencing the dimension of shadows numerous times, enough to be acclimated to the ill effects of traveling through them. Seconds passed before Deadshot was puked back into reality, freed of his gun and momentarily blinded.
As Lawton attempted to recover, Thomas Blake crashed through the window pane in the front of Quickstart Enterprises, opting for a dramatic entrance as opposed to using the more conventional option of the door. He had torn open his shirt to reveal the black and pink cat-symbol on his chest and had raised his fist claws at the ready as he landed amongst the broken glass. He immediately recognized the odds against him and relaxed a bit, seeing Deadshot on the ground ten feet away did not encourage him. He decided to wait for the Tattooed Man to get there, hoping that the Squad was only after Deadshot.
He lowered his claws and smiled. “Hello, Bronze Tiger,” he said as pleasantly as he could muster. “It’s nice to see the Squad looking so healthy and numerous.”
“We’re pulling out all the stops on you guys,” the Bronze Tiger replied. “We brought the whole gang for our reunion with Floyd.”
Indeed they did. Nightshade and Captain Boomerang stood at the Tiger’s side; they were accompanied by seven other lesser known villains eager to minimize their prison sentences by surviving the confrontation and bringing Deadshot in alive.
The Hyena, an insane lycanthrope with rage issues. It might be a man under all that fur or it might be a woman.
Count Vertigo, rightful ruler of Vlatava. He makes things puke and fall over.
Penny Dreadful. She’s a genetic hybrid of some form or another. Who knows?
Multi-Man. He can be killed but always comes back. He’s as bald as an orange.
Mindboggler. She’s a nostalgia punk with mind control powers. She was supposed to be dead.
Kritter. It’s a freaking dog-human. It’s related to Penny somehow. It wears glasses and a neck tie.
The Blue Snowman. She seemed to be a woman wearing a robotic snowman suit. How ridiculous.
The man that Deadshot had already killed was called the Stickbug, but that hardly mattered anymore.
Familiar with only a few of them, Catman stalled for time. “I’ve got no beef with you,” he said as he raised his hands in the air in surrender. He started to back away slowly. “I’ll just be on my way now. Seeya.”
He was about to turn and leap back through the window that he had recently broken when he heard a gunshot. Surprised by the noise, he was a shocked as the Squad as they failed to realize Deadshot had recovered until it was too late. Hyena fell to the ground with a hole in its chest that oozed blood at a fatal rate. Deadshot stood with the smoking gun as everyone turned to him in shock. They quickly noticed that his pants were around his ankles.
“Nobody was watching Lawton?” Bronze Tiger yelled in disgust as he readied to attack. “Where the Hell’d he pull that gun from?“ The Squad stood dead in their tracks as Lawton waved the gun around at each of them. He slowly reached to pull his pants up and silently demanded they all remain calm.
“Let’s all be nice here,” he said as he skillfully buckled his belt with only one hand. “Me and the cat are gonna get out of here and nobody is going to lift a finger.”
“Dammit,” Boomerang cursed as he readied his razor boomerang. “It’s just one gun.”
“One gun he kept up his ass,” Bronze Tiger added. “This is Deadshot we’re dealing with.”
“Damn right it is,” Deadshot smirked. “Now,” he said as he surveyed the group. “Any objections to me leaving?” The Suicide Squad was silent. Deadshot held his gun out attentively as he began to move away, but his escape was disrupted by the sound that could only be described as a falling building. Accompanied by the sound of a falling building was a falling building.
The three story office building adjacent to the Quickstart headquarters crumpled and fell beside them. The Squad rushed for cover, seeking safety from the falling debris. Almost panicking, the Blue Snowman tackled Catman into the Quickstart building, a relative safe spot. A large hunk of masonry smashed into Multi-Man, crumbling his skull into tiny pieces. Kritter and Mindboggler ran into the Quickstart building to join the Blue Snowman as Nighshade cast a shadow of transport around herself and the Bronze Tiger.
Deadshot used the calamity to make good on his escape. As he ran through the accumulating clouds of dust and dirt, he felt a cutting pain across the side of his ribcage. He barely had time to react to the razor sharp boomerang that had cut him as it spun around in front of him and headed back at his body.
“I’ll be getting’ ya,” Boomerang yelled as Deadshot dropped to the ground to avoid the boomerang’s return. Lawton clumsily dropped his gun as he fell, cursing his amateurish grip. He was helped to his feet by the Tattooed Man, who had arrived upon the scene by bringing down an entire building to announce his presence.
“Nobody’s getting’ anybody but me getting’ you, you down under bitch!” the Tattooed Man exclaimed over the noise. The swarm of wasps that he had intended to use on the Flash burst from his chest and headed for Captain Boomerang. Boomerang wasted no time upon recognizing the threat and sprinted in the opposite direction.
Lawton smiled as he took a minute to light a cigarette. “Your one liners need work, Abe,” he said. “I don’t think that made any kind of sense.”
“Who needs one liners?” Abe asked.
“Not us,” Lawton replied as Abe handed him his wrist-guns. He strapped them around his wrists and muttered into them. “Armor piercing.”
“What do we have?” Abe asked as he picked up Lawton’s dropped pistol.
“Suicide Squad,” Lawton replied. “Eight left, maybe less. Bronze Tiger, Nightshade and a bunch of stoolies. Blake was getting ready to leave me for dead before I pulled out my emergency back-up gun.”
“The one you hid in your butt?”
“Yeah,” Lawton smiled. “The one in your hand right now.”
Abe reacted quickly with a sickened expression as he dropped the gun to the ground.
“Better get to it then,” Lawton said as they listened to the chaos amidst the fallen structure.
“Yeah,” Abe replied as he wiped his hand on his jeans. After he was finished, a dozen ink demons of various shapes and sizes burst from his skin and sped into battle. As Abe and Floyd entered into the combat zone, what remained of the Suicide Squad was already locked in battle with Abe’s tattoos.
Bronze Tiger fought an inverse version of himself; a white man dressed in purple. Each blow was matched with an equal counter, each maneuver met with a mirror response. Lawton watched with glee as the Tiger slowly exerted himself into exhaustion.
Nightshade was downed by a glowing green billy goat that was currently eating her skirt. How someone as experienced and potentially lethal as Nightshade could have been felled by a goat was beyond Lawton’s comprehension. He smiled nonetheless.
Captain Boomerang swatted at the swarm of tattoo wasps, grunting and spurting nonsensical regional slang terms from his mouth at a rapid pace. He had been stung numerous times, the marks slowly oozing an unhealthy pus. Lawton approved.
Count Vertigo was being used as a makeshift football, unconscious and being tossed back and forth between a giant samurai and an equally giant swimsuit model. Their laughs were not of this world, yet Lawton almost joined them in their laughter.
The Tattooed Man leapt into the air, held afloat by a rainbow of darkness that smelled of sulphur. His descent brought him down on Penny Dreadful who collapsed under his weight. She struggled to defend herself, forming a blast of energy from herself that had no effect on the rampaging Tarrant. Abe proceeded to rough her up, making sure to destroy as much of her clothing as possible. He wanted a good look at those melons.
Deadshot was enjoying the view so much that he almost did not notice Multi-Man’s feeble attempt at an attack. The bald man had revived from a crushed skull and was lunging at Deadshot, his hands had transformed into giant blades as long as cricket bats. Multi-Man gained new powers upon each revival from death, cricket blade hands was it this time. Wanting to be neither attacked nor distracted, Deadshot filled Multi-Man’s torso with seven explosive rounds, each exploding inside said torso with gruesome results. As Multi-Man slumped to the ground once again dead, Deadshot watched the carnage around him. With Abe’s tattoos doing all the work, Lawton could just sit back and watch it all happen.
He stood there silently as everyone was preoccupied, puffing away at his cigarette, enjoying the show. The hair on the back of his neck bristled a split second before his body was wrapped numerous times by a steel nylon cord that pulled tightly against him as he reacted. Too late to prevent the inevitable, he toppled to the ground and saw the black boot. The black boot was connected to the leg that belonged to the thing he did not want to see right now.
“You’re coming with me, Deadshot,” Batman growled as he dragged the cable that bound Deadshot away from the scene of the battle. Deadshot protested thoroughly but Batman was not the type to listen to the pleas of a murderous criminal.
Thomas Blake laid on his back. It felt to him that he was being held down by the strongest man he had ever imagined but he could see no one holding him. He was on the floor of the abandoned Quickstart Enterprises lobby, the building quickly evacuated out the rear entrance. He noticed the dog thing called Kritter sitting nearby, licking its own genitals. As Blake struggled against nothing, the dog-thing loped up to his and licked him on the face. Its tongue actually got a little bit in Blake’s mouth.
Blake spit as he was alerted to the presence of other members of the Squad.
“Don’t bother struggling, Catman,” Mindboggler said, her voice a little too masculine. “I’ve got my mind set on keeping you down. You can’t do anything about it. You’re my little slave now.” Catman hated her instantly, her hair was shaved on one side and spiked on the other. She wore ridiculous spikes around her wrist, a fashion travesty.
“Screw this crap,” the Blue Snowman panicked, a woman’s voice muffled by the peculiarly shaped snowman helmet that she wore. “Just kill the bastard so we can go home.”
Mindboggler grinned an oh-so evil grin and shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “We’re gonna see how Mr. Cat here gets along with Kritter. I think our dog friend has a crush on the guy.”
“I can talk, you know,” Kritter grumbled as he used his makeshift opposable thumbed hands to push his glasses properly into place on his snout. “But I guess that will just make things all the more unpleasant for Catman.”
Catman’s eyes widened in terror and his attempts at struggling to escape multiplied a thousand fold as he realized what was happening. Mindboggler giggled and the Blue Snowman threw up inside her helmet.
Catman screamed as Kritter began to unbuckle his belt.
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To Be Continued...
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