Weekly Drabble #314: Romance May Not Be Dead... Pt 1 (Patreon)

This week's prompt is from Henri Black with 'can we one date that doesn't end in a running gun battle' and it immediately made me think of Starlight and Rattler's tumultuous and star-crossed relationship. This was originally going to be a one-shot, but it ended up much longer than I planned; it's already chapter-length and adding the conclusion would have made it the size of one of my novel chapters, so I decided on a natural breakpoint to continue it at some point. Enjoy!

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Romance may not be dead, but not for lack of trying: Pt. 1

Some superheroes had a no-kill policy, others did not.

Starlight had always hoped to be the former, but her power set didn’t allow for it. She didn’t have super-strength and while she was lucky to be one of the Seeded with a kine shield, it was equivalent to a high-quality bullet-resistant vest, nowhere near an impenetrable barrier that could perpetually shrug off fists and bullets. A fight with even a regular human was something she needed to avoid, and as her encounter with Ace of Hearts had proven, a metahuman was an even more dangerous prospect. She needed to stay at a distance, using her flight and agility to avoid retaliation. For that, the lasers she could create were ideal...

...but even though Kaley lived in a world of superheroes and villains, of flying men and women who could breathe fire, there were still some physical laws that the Seeding couldn’t get around. Lasers didn’t have a stun setting.

She could blind and disorient with them, she could create flash-bang effects, she could nauseate and confuse with kaleidoscope patterns, she could sear exposed skin with intense bursts... or she could burn a hole through a man’s torso. Until this assignment, she’d only killed three people. One had been a home invader trying to break into her family’s house. Another had been an escaped convict taking a hostage. The third had been a small-time Seeded named Mad Lupus, a wannabe A-lister who thought body count was equivalent to status.

Each time, she wished there’d been another way. She hadn’t wanted this assignment. She’d never even left the US before and now she was trying to protect the Colombian president, Arvin Lozano, from a coup. The drug cartels in South America had been getting bigger and diversifying their portfolios; mining, trade, agriculture. In Colombia, the Guzman cartel had become a nation within a nation, threatening the current government with its size and influence. Now years of soft warfare had escalated to blood in the streets.

Lozano had begged the Liberty League for assistance when hostilities first broke out. The cartel had most of the Seeded in the country on-side and the Colombian president wanted to level the playing field. The League had declined his requests; they weren’t enforcers of any government’s rule, but as the rebel forces closed in on the capital, word had reached the League of atrocities against government-loyal towns being carried out by Guzman’s metahuman followers.

Though the League was stretched thin, several small strikes teams were mobilized, led by Golden Jaguar, the head of the League’s South American branch. Two of these teams were tasked with seeking out and neutralizing Guzman’s Seeded kill squads. The third, which Starlight was a part of, was ordered to assist governmental forces in defending the president.

Kaley had all but begged to be taken off this assignment. This wasn’t the kind of mission she had signed up for, but her requests had been denied. The League didn’t have many flyers left these days and even fewer that could go as high or as fast as she could. With only a handful of drones and an ever-dwindling number of helicopters, Colombian government forces desperately needed aerial recon.

Her team consisted of her and five other League members. Piranha was the team lead, a Brazilian metahuman who specialized in close combat. He got his name from his unbreakable teeth and the gnawing mouths in his hands. He wasn’t a kine-breaker like Rattler, but he could chew through steel. Along with him was Lone Star, a former Texas Marshall whose mutated eyes could give targets a glowing mark that he could track anywhere on Earth. Wallflower was the fourth, a young woman who could climb on any surface and blend in to her surroundings better than a cuttlefish in a ghilli suit. Lupa was Mexican, able to change at will into a terrifying werewolf form. Rounding out the group was Bare Knuckle, a Bostonian boxer with superhuman strength and a kine shield that could an endless beating from Mike Tyson and Muhammed Ali. He and Boxcar had a rivalry that stretched back to their days in the ring. Sometimes they could be found drinking together in remembrance of ‘the good old days’ and sometimes they would be beating the crap out of one another.

Lone Star, Lupa and Wallflower were deployed elsewhere in Bogota to monitor rebel movements, harass support columns and intercept any Seeded attempting to reach the presidential estates. Kaley, Piranha and Bare Knuckle were to defend Lozano, a job that had become much harder as night fell and the cartel made a massive push on the Casa de Narino. Hovering above the battlefield, Kaley could see the shuddering snake of technicals and stolen APCs pushing towards the presidential residence, cartel soldiers pouring out of the vehicles like ants. In one area, a knot of black-clad rebels was swarming around Bare Knuckle, a pile of battered, unconscious and crippled bodies around the pugilist, the men that were still awake clutching at broken arms and legs. Bare Knuckle had a no-kill policy, but striking someone with a fist harder than diamond didn’t always allow for that.

On the right flank was Piranha, wading into another squad of Guzman’s people. She could hear the screams from here, men slipping in the spreading pool of blood around the metahuman combatant. Piranha believed that if someone came at him with lethal intent, he’d meet them in kind. Kaley didn’t know how she felt about that, given what he could do compared to a regular human, but the Brazilian metahuman hadn’t been censured or infracted by the League for excessive force as some of his like-minded peers had in the past.

Her radio crackled. “They’re making another push at the center, gatinha,” Piranha snapped. “Show them those claws of yours.”

“Right,” Starlight answered. Three APCs had broken through the gates, grinding towards the building. Small-caliber bullets rang off their hulls. “Okay.” She raised her left palm. Light gathered around it and in the half a second before she released, she heard the cries of alarm from below. A white-hot beam swathed across the ground, cutting through the front of the first APC. Starlight brought the beam back to slice through the engine sections of the second and third, stalling their advance and blocking the vehicles behind them.

Rebels boiled out of the damaged vans, an officer putting up at her. Bullets whined through the air, but she was a hard target to hit. Those that did, did so by luck and flattened themselves on her kine shield. Kaley released a pulse of light that melted the bullets in the air around her and blinded the men who’d been looking up at her. Some of them would never see again, but they would live.

More soldiers leapt out of the second APC, a gunnery team with an RPG and thick, polarized lenses. The officer from before, directed the men’s attention to her, screaming and gesticulating emphatically. Their weapon was a wire-guided missile, able to track towards her. She could go higher and get out of its range before it fired, but they’d turn it on Bare Knuckle or Piranha. Worse, they might still try to shoot her and miss.

Everything that came up had to go down. The bullets that they were loosing at her would fall back to Earth with the same force that they’d been shot with. Anyone unlucky enough to be under them could be hurt or killed. A rocket was even more dangerous and if it missed her, it would land in the city somewhere.

The weapons team steadied their aim. Kaley felt a weight settle on her. She pointed a finger right at the launcher’s barrel and the missile pointed towards her. “Bang,” she said sadly. A needle-thin beam sliced from the tip of her finger into the warhead. It exploded, taking the two rebels and the officer next to them with it. Just like that, her body count doubled.

But they kept coming. There were too many and in the distance, she could see another set of APCs. One of them was heavier than the others. It was covered in ceramic ablative plating, with Guzman’s cartel crest painted on its front hull. Flanking it were a pair of anti-air tanks with quad guns. She called it in. “Fall back,” Piranha ordered. “Fall back to the building. If we stay out here, we’ll get wiped out by those guns.”

Starlight pulsed like a nova, covering the retreat of her comrades and the governmental forces as they fell back to Casa de Narino’s interior. Piranha went to check on the president while Bare Knuckle helped shore up the defences and Kaley was sent to the roof to provide additional recon and support if needed. None of them was in the lobby when it happened.

Kaley hadn’t reached the upper levels when the whole building shook. The radio in her ear crackled. “...rammed it right in!” Bare Knuckle was shouting, but she didn’t hear anything after that over the torrent of gunfire and the screaming. Neither lasted very long.

Without thinking, she ran back towards the lobby. It was carnage. Thirty men had held this point. Not one of them was still alive. The front of the heavy carrier was sticking through the front doors, its ramp down. There were several rebel bodies around the entrance, but hardly as many as there should have been.

Two cartel soldiers had been left to guard the vehicle. They saw her and raised their weapons. She was the last thing they ever saw, the men screaming and clutching at their eyes until Bare Knuckle came in from the left and knocked each of them senseless with a single blow to the head.

“Gahd preserve ahs,” he said in his thick Bostonian accent. “What the hell happened here?”

Men and pieces of men were scattered across the room. Some looked like they had been hit with a .50 cal at close range, but there were no entry wounds, only gaping, gorey craters. Others had been sliced to ribbons as if they’d stepped into a food processor.

Kaley met the man’s eyes. They both knew the answer to that. “Be advised,” she raid into her radio. “Hostile Seeded are on the premises.” Barely a few seconds passed before she heard Piranha’s reply.

“Contact. Second floor, heading towards the president’s office. Moving to intercept.”

More shouts and screams.

Bare Knuckle rapped Kaley on the shoulder. “Get to Lozano,” he told her. “You can evac him. I’m going to help Piranha and maybe we can stop these bastards before they get any farther into the building.”

That turned out to be a vain hope. Kaley raced through hallways and flew up stairwells soaked with blood and bodies. More rebel soldiers littered the passageways, but the slaughter didn’t end. From nearby she heard Piranha’s battle cry and knew he’d intercepted one of the enemy metahumans. She wanted to help, but that was a fight she wasn’t equipped for, and she’d been given orders. Get to the president and if need be, get him to safety.

There were no more bodies with bloody craters on her route; now she just encountered dismembered, disembowelled and decapitated corpses. A large number of them had bullet wounds. Most were wracked by automatic fire of the kind the rebels threw around, but some were neatly killed. Two in the heart, one in the head. Tasha called that a ‘Mozambique’. It was a standard method of quickly and efficiently putting down an enemy.

An icy fear started to take root in her guts, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it. She wasn’t seeing any more rebel bodies; either they’d all fallen or the ones that could keep up with the metahuman that was carving through the government forces were left. No matter how fast Kaley ran or flew, the gunshots and screams were always just too far away. She was in the presidential wing now. Bodyguards were added to the dead alongside the soldiers. She tripped over one of the dead and picked herself up.

Faster.

She wasn’t going to make it.

A flurry of gunfire came from the president’s office. She was moments away, but that was an eternity. It was too long and she arrived at doors broken inwards and another room full of dead men. Three rebels lay dead at the threshold, but President Lozano was slumped over his desk, his eyes wide and glazed, his face in a pool of blood fed from his own torn throat.

Someone whimpered; one of the bodyguards. He was half-sitting, his body braced against one of his dead comrades. Loops of intestines had spilled from his belly and he was trying to hold them in. He’d gone pallid from blood loss. He was mumbling someone, trying to speak over the frothy mist he was coughing up. “What is it?” Kaley asked, crouching next to him. “What happened? Who did this?”

He mumbled something she couldn’t understand, reaching up with the last of his strength to pull her closer. He stuttered, forcing the words out with his final breath. As life left him and he slumped onto the ground, the young woman stared at him in horror.

Kaley stared at her surroundings and the ruin of human life within it. More than six. So many more than six. “Serpiente,” she whispered to herself as that fear solidified into dreadful certainty.