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He raised his head and, in a shadow of his usual ground-pounding rumble, said, “A little help?”
“You’re garbage,” Dekka snapped. “But I guess he’s worse.” She glanced at Armo. “On three? Or some other number?”
Armo nodded. “Three works.”
“Sword boy, you go around the back and start hacking. I’ll try to get close to the center of the star and do my thing. And Armo?”
Armo nodded. “Berserk time.”
Knightmare picked himself up, and Vincent, supremely confident now that he had either killed or disabled Napalm, glided serenely past, rolling over crushed vehicles and dead bodies.
“One,” Armo said.
“Where’s that Shade Darby person?” Dekka demanded angrily. “We could use her help!”
“Two.”
“But whatever,” Dekka said.
“Three.”
They were three, and on three, all three kicked off s
imultaneously. Dekka ran for the gap between the two nearest arms, howling and shredding as she went.
Armo leaped atop a leg and launched himself, snarling, toward Vincent’s fragile form.
Knightmare attacked from the back, swinging his sword arm with vicious strength, hacking and plunging and scything through arm and tendrils.
Once again, Vincent merely jerked his muscles and knocked Knightmare to the ground. He swung two legs together, pinning Dekka, and now she was between two closing walls of flesh, shredding and sending up a tornado of fleshy bits.
Armo was inches from burying his teeth in the smugly smiling boy. And then, a shadow behind him, a panicked glance, and the Mother Rock, wielded like a hammer, smashed down on Armo’s back.
In less than sixty seconds the attack had failed, and a winded, battered, shaky threesome watched helplessly as the monster plowed toward the city and the Dark Watchers writhed in glee.
Vincent was on a manic high. He had battled the great fire-breathing Napalm and left him broken in the mud of the channel. He had tossed Knightmare around like a toy. He’d had more trouble with Dekka; she had hurt him, and he suspected that the day would come when she would be a problem, but that day was not today. He could see her defeat in the weary droop of her shoulders. Armo, too, had been casually shrugged aside.
Now what Vincent wanted was rest. The mania was softening, ebbing, and melancholy now tainted his great victories.
The Dark Watchers loved him, he could feel it. He was the star! And wasn’t that a nice pun? A starfish star. Ha!
Five separated sections crawled beside him, a small but dangerous meat puppet army. He was unstoppable! He was the greatest power on earth! And they loved him for it.
He slithered across the parking lot and with a negligent swipe of one leg smashed the side of the main prison building. Crumbling masonry revealed shocked prisoners in khaki uniforms, some of whom promptly bolted.
It gave Vincent an idea, though. He could create havoc by breaking open jails and prisons, like in that Batman movie. On the other hand, if you wanted to mess up Los Angeles, all you really had to do was create traffic jams, right?
Did he want to mess up LA? Vincent hadn’t really thought about the next step. In fact, he had no clear goal in mind, other than providing the Dark Watchers a delightful entertainment. He’d done that in spades, but what was next?
Vincent understood his place in the emerging new world: he was a super-villain. The super-villain! Clearly. Okay, so what did super-villains do, exactly? Take over the world? What would he do with the world if he did take it over? That sounded like a complicated job, and he wasn’t at all sure it was a job he wanted to do. It felt as if there would be math involved.
The old voices were whispering to him. They no longer yelled, as if they were cowed by the new force that had taken root in Vincent’s scrambled brain. They reminded him that he was Abaddon, a dark angel, a destroyer of worlds. He could begin the work. He could kill and kill and kill!
Vincent sat atop and at the center of the star, riding high. He had a clear, unobstructed view of the port around him, and he considered taking some time to annihilate the dozens of great cranes, smash the containers, sink the ships—all things he was sure he could do. But why? It was all much clearer when he was manic. When the mania passed, what followed was a passive, abstracted state that normally sent him to his bed to read or watch videos and eat snack food products.
But now he was this, this great and powerful monster, Abaddon! And he was his puppets as well, seeing through their dim eyes when he chose, controlling them if he needed something from them, otherwise letting them follow like ducklings after their mother.
He kept moving, then looked left and spotted the battleship Iowa, long decommissioned and now just a tourist destination. He slid into the water of the channel and found that he could sink or swim as he chose, walk across the muddy submerged bottom, or float over the flat water.
