“I don’t have time for this crap!” Leah said. “I have a date!” She drove
her fingers into the metallic forehead of another of Doctor Otaku’s
robot minions and wrenched the robot’s head from its neck.
“I have you now, Iron Maiden!”
Leah Wright—known to the world as the superheroine Iron Maiden—paused in
mid-scuffle to gape. “What?” Doctor Otaku’s robots continued to try to
overwhelm her with numbers. Doctor Otaku himself thrust a glowing green
crystal toward Leah with a triumphant grin. A hand grabbed at Leah; she
casually knocked it away. “What are you talking about?”
“The...the crystal,” Doctor Otaku said, his triumphant smile slowly
dimming. He shook it at her as if that would make it work, make it
do—whatever it was he thought it would accomplish.
Leah thrust her hand into the torso of another robotic minion and tore
out the robot’s power core in a shower of sparks. Glancing at Doctor
Otaku, Leah sighed. “What about the rock?” she asked.
“It’s deadly to you,” Doctor Otaku insisted. “It saps your powers?”
Leah laughed despite her annoyance. “Are you kidding?”
She destroyed another robot, and then another. Doctor Otaku surveyed the
destruction. Leah could see him doing the math before he turned and
fled. He slammed through a fire door, and she could hear his footsteps
as he descended the metal staircase outside before the door closed.
Leah attempted to follow, and the remaining robots swarmed her. She took
out her frustrations on them. The last five robots held her up for no
more than thirty seconds.
Leah flew through the doorway—through the fire door—and up, scanning the
area for Doctor Otaku. This had gone on long enough. He’d been annoying
her for days with his obsessive sexual interest, but now he’d escalated
to threatening innocent people to draw her into one lame trap after
another. She’d wondered why. Now she suspected he’d been trying to
discover a weakness he could exploit.
Why he thought some green crystal would have any effect was beyond her,
unless he’d seriously jumped the tracks and thought it was
kryptonite—and she was Kryptonian. It was flattering in a way; she was
strong, invulnerable, and she could fly. Powerful, yes, but nowhere near
as insanely powerful as Superman was portrayed to be in the comics.
Leah caught a glimpse of Otaku slipping through a fire door into a
nearby warehouse. A quick circuit of the building showed only two other
doors, both fire doors, and a loading dock. No windows. Was this another
silly trap?
She landed outside the door Doctor Otaku had used. Locked, of course,
and booby-trapped. A killing jolt of electricity arced to her hand as
she grabbed the doorknob. It didn’t hurt her, though it tickled
slightly. Leah wrenched the door open. The interior of the building was
dark.
Leah walked into the warehouse. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
she called, peering around and trying to make out the various shapes
that filled the floor space. One in particular...it couldn’t be what it
looked like—could it? Leah lifted off the floor to drift toward it. It
was—it looked like something out of an industrial bondage catalog. It
was an X-shaped restraint...table, Leah supposed was the best word for
it. It appeared to be constructed out of I-beams with massive shackles
welded onto all four ends of the beams.
Leah approached it curiously. It wasn’t level, one end was raised so the
whole thing stood canted about thirty degrees from horizontal. It rested
on four heavy metal legs. Heavy hydraulic legs. Leah crouched to look
underneath. Yes, the whole assembly looked capable of being raised or
lowered hydraulically, and the surface could be tilted more than ninety
degrees from its current position, until the frame was completely
vertical.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Leah muttered. The thing was just the
right size to hold her if she were lying spread-eagled on top of it. She
was beginning to get an idea of what Doctor Otaku hoped to achieve with
his repeated attempts to defeat her. He didn’t want to kill her, or not
immediately. “He was hoping to capture me! Jesus Christ!”
“Indeed,” Doctor Otaku said behind Leah. She spun in place. He was
standing there with some kind of remote control in his hand. A shadow
stirred behind him, and a figure moved closer, close enough for Leah to
make it out.
“Oh my god!” Leah said.
It was another of Doctor Otaku’s goddamn robots. Not the mechanical men
she’d just been fighting but one of the rarer android forms. It was
designed to look like her. Well, not exactly. Leah struggled to keep
from laughing, but only managed to produce a very unladylike snorting
noise.
“Let me introduce you to Iron Maiden, version 2.0,” Doctor Otaku
announced proudly. “When you’ve fallen to my machinations, the world
will never notice because she will take your place!”
Leah couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. The robot was...a parody
of her, a parody that could only have come from the mind of a man with
no experience of real women. Leah laughed harder, her eyes tearing up.
Doctor Otaku looked surprised, then annoyed. That just made it funnier,
and Leah laughed all the harder. She shook with laughter, often silently
as she struggled to catch her breath. She wiped her eyes repeatedly. It
went on for a good five minutes before she finally calmed down.
She thought later that Doctor Otaku might have sicced the robot on her
while she was laughing at him, but he didn’t. “Oh...thank you,” Leah
said sincerely. “I haven’t laughed that hard in—years, I guess. You,
uh—you were kidding, right? About that thing replacing me?”
“No.” Doctor Otaku’s answer was clipped, his tone icy.
“But it—I mean...look at it!” Leah said. She would never claim she
wasn’t stacked, or that she didn’t have a great figure. But Jesus
Christ—that thing made her look anorexic! The exaggerated hourglass
figure had a wasp waist that couldn’t be as big around as her neck. And
the boobs! Ordinarily Leah hated that word, but in this case it fit
perfectly! They were the size of basketballs at least. Maybe if someone
drew a pornographic caricature of her it might look like that....
“Look,” Leah said, “your crush on me was amusing at first. And it’s even
flattering in a sick, sad kind of way—that you’d put this much effort
into all this—” She gestured at the warehouse and its contents. “But you
just had to go too far, didn’t you? Threatening innocent people just to
get my attention?”
“And it worked!” Doctor Otaku crowed. The Iron Maiden android strutted
forward, planting itself between Leah and Doctor Otaku.
“Yeah,” Leah said flatly. “It worked. You’ve got my attention.
Congratulations. Now I have to send you to jail.”
“No, you will become my prisoner,” Otaku announced, drawing himself up
to his full five feet of height. “My...willing prisoner soon enough,“ he
added with a leer. “And my android substitute will take your place.”
“Do you ever watch American animation?” Leah asked, advancing on the
android. It took up a fighting posture.
“No,” Otaku said with a sneer.
“I thought not,” Leah said. She drove her fist through the android’s
head. Milky white hydraulic fluid and pale bits of android gore
spattered the floor behind it. The android convulsed for a long moment,
then went limp. “It’s a pity. You should have.”
Doctor Otaku looked stricken. “W-why?” he asked. Leah walked over and
plucked the remote control from his hand and tossed it aside.
“There’s a conversation about monologuing you really ought to
have seen,” Leah told him. She grabbed him by the wrist and began moving
toward the door. “C’mon, you’ve got a date with the police.”
* * * * *
Leah stood balanced on the balls of her feet, fingers spread and hands
resting lightly on the round table that dominated the “living room” area
of the hotel suite. Victor Kruger—Denver's newest superhero, the Black
Knight—maintained a similar posture on the other side of the table. They
were both naked and wet.
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Copyright © 2009 | Cobblestone Press, LLC™
