A Costly Gambit

A teen from the same neighborhood where I helped to rescue a friend’s daughter a few months ago named Adam gave me an urgent call. His voice filled with fear, he told me he’d been grabbed by hooded men while he was walking toward school and they had him locked in a cage at the old abandoned carnival. He said one of the men dialed a cell phone and handed it to him, told him to tell me where he was and what’d happened.
 
“Christ! Faust you have to help me,” he yelled, sobbing and panic came clearly through his plea, “They want you to come and get me, please. They said, they’re going to kill me!”
 
The phone was ripped away from him, a raspy voice taunted me, “We got another one, bub, let’s see if you can take this one away from us. And, bub, come alone or the kid’s dead. ” The line went dead.
 
“Damn it,” I cursed, “I can’t let the kid die, but if I go in there without backup, I may not be able to guarantee that they’ll let him walk.”
 
I chirp the “Champ Phone,” they probably don’t like it when I call it that, but it makes me chuckle.
 
Socrates answers, I fill him in and it doesn’t take long before the New Champions...err...assemble.
 
Socrates filled them in so I didn’t have to.
 
We approached the carnival from all sides, but I asked the team to hold and let me do the talking before they jumped in and hurt someone. I didn’t know if we could get in there before the mooks killed the kid. The team held back.
 
I walked up to the four chumps keeping guard at the entrance. I practically had to fondle one of them before they noticed me. Great job, punks! Anyway, I felt a little more confident.
 
One of the four at the gate had me slap on a pair of handcuffs. He made sure they were tight and walked me toward the back of the carnival where they held Adam in an old circus cage. Another two of the goons were waiting there for me. So far, I wasn’t impressed.
 
The “Champ Phone” chirped in my ear, text to speech, said drones were surveying from above.
 
“I’m here,” I told the goons, “let the boy go and I won’t resist. I’ll go quietly.”
 
They took exception to that.
 
“Look, Bubbles” I retorted, “You know who I am, so what’s keeping me from grabbing this cage and just flying away? Let the kid go!”
 
“I’ll tell ya what is!” the goon to my right exclaimed angrily. He took out a metal cylinder from under his trench coat. His anger got the better of him, and he got the cylinder tangled up before he shot.
 
A yellow foam spat out from the thing, but it completely missed me. The guy who brought me here got the brunt of the thing and got slimed; unable to move.
 
In a split second, I realized these clowns had no intention of letting Adam go. I broke out of my handcuffs as I flew straight at the cage’s iron bars—trying to interpose my body between the kid and the goons.
 
“Hang on!” I yelled as I easily lifted the cage and headed toward the tree line ahead of me.
 
Adam yelled and cursed as he bounced around the cage.
 
“Fucking idiots!” I told myself, “Are these guys clueless?”
 
“Now?” I heard Maximum Resistance over the comm, “Yeah!” I said, “this is what shit hitting the fan looks like! Hit ‘em hard!”
 
Chaos erupted behind me as I carried the cage and the kid above the nearby circus tent and cleared the tree line ahead.
 
“Oh, oh,” I said.
 
“What now?” Adam asked, getting a hold of the cage’s bars and frantically looked around.
 
“Oh, shit!” He said in answer to his own question.
 
“Oh shit! Is right” I thought to myself, as a miscreant from a bad sci-fi movie with a shimmering red force field literally flew out of nowhere to block me.
 
Before I could maneuver clear of him, he extended his arms and my head almost exploded from the high pitched wave of sound and vibration that obliterated the cage. The effect was no less on Adam. As the wave hit him, his body ripped apart as if he’d stepped on an anti-tank mine.
 
The sound wave knocked be back nearly as far back as I had just flown. I was still conscious as the wave blasted me back. The horror that unfolded before me too much to fathom. I don’t even yell.
 
I hit the ground hard. As consciousness flees, only one thought has time to form.
 
“I failed...”