The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Man from Tomorrow, Part 10

Mickey Malloy and the gang have turned to Chicago’s seedy underbelly to discover what they think is the Man from Tomorrow’s true target. Alongside mobster Uncle Gio, they descend into the Office’s past in search of answers.

This is Part 10 of The Case of the Man from Tomorrow. It is the sixth and final story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth. To avoid spoilers, read Parts 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, and 9 first.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, alcohol use, mild swearing.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 15, 1943
MACHINERY HALL, I.I.T. CAMPUS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

“I don’t remember these stairs being so steep,” Uncle Gio wheezed as he took a rest on the fourth landing. The big man leaned his bulk against old brick and struggled to catch his breath. Mick didn’t mind the break, the descent was hell on his old knees as well. The stairs were perilous, and the vertical shaft they wound around was dark and dank. Mick could hear water dripping far below them. It reminded him of the Grave, but bricks rather than raw stone.

The cistern was only lit by the flashlights Uncle Gio and the officials carried. To find a bottomless pit hidden behind locked doors in Machinery Hall’s cellar, dead in the heart of Chicago, was astonishing.

“How did he make it down here in a wheelchair?” Mickey asked. Lander van den Berghe had been paralyzed from the waist down for over twenty years prior to his death. He’d gotten the short end of the stick in a dogfight with a titan owl, one of Shahinji the Mad Turk’s creations, but evidently that hadn’t slowed him down.

“That was one of Lander’s first projects,” Uncle Gio gasped as he mopped his face down with a silk handkerchief. “He cobbled together a kind of motorized chair that could handle stairs.”

Beasley shined her flashlight on a deep black scorch in the brick wall behind him.

“It took a little trial and error to work out the kinks,” Uncle Gio explained with a shrug. He pushed himself off the wall lurched for the next step. “It’s only three more flights. I hope Lander’s chair is still down here, the trip back up was always worse.”

“I bet,” Mick grunted. He looked up at all the stairs looming above him for a long moment before following Gio. He almost missed the Grave and its sour warden and rickety elevator. “Beasley, did Nea finish the analysis on that bullet from the gallery?”

“Yes, spectographics came over the wire a little while ago,” she replied, pulling a folded report out of her pocket to read by her flashlight. “Nothing definitive on the trace on it, except that it’s a weird alloy, mostly copper and zinc, with traces of nickel, lead, and iron. I haven’t seen anything like it before, especially in ballistic armor.”

“I’ve heard of it before,” Gio called from the front.

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Mick asked his back.

“That specific brew is an ancient and very specific alloy called orichalcum, or aurichalcum. It’s Latin for ‘gold copper,’” Gio answered, puffing up like a high-brow professor. “They used it as money in Atlantis.”

“Okay, well copper and gold sounds too soft to block bullets,” Mick said to the pair of officials, ignoring the huffing mafioso’s absurd ‘Atlantis’ claim completely.

“It sounds conductive,” Ford pointed out.

“Highly,” Beasley agreed. “Could he be projecting an electromagnetic field through it?”

“I’ve seen weirder,” Mick said. That, they all agreed on and continued their descent.

Mickey let Ford and Beasley go ahead. He followed close, one hand on the rough brick wall, the other wrapped tight around a heavy flashlight. There were indeed heavy tread marks scraped into the steel steps, as if van den Berghe had driven his chair up and down the stairs a thousand times. The officials followed Uncle Gio’s gasping bulk three more flights down until they reached the final landing, a rusty platform inches above a pool of still black water. Yet another flight of pitted steps reached downward, this set melting into the water’s inky darkness.

“Here we are,” Uncle Gio finally wheezed. He leaned up against the damp wall.

“At the bottom of a cistern, great,” Ford muttered.

“Keep your eyes open, kid,” Uncle Gio chuckled. He pushed himself off the wall and revealed a strange emblem, a bronze plate with a design resembling a gear-toothed cross within a circle.

“The Antikythera mechanism,” Beasley said. Ford and Mick looked at her in confusion. She explained further: “It is an ancient computational device. The Greek government allowed us to extract it to Oak Ridge before the Nazi invasion. I was able to see it once. Zoo Base studied its mechanisms to help build ADA.”

“That’s the one, Official Beasley,” Uncle Gio said, smiling. His voice took on a professorial tone. “Lander named our club after the thing. Something weird and mysterious. He said he’dbeen able to study it before the war and that jst seeing it inspired him. He hoped the same thing with our club.”

While he spoke, Uncle Gio twisted the gears in the bronze plate until they were arrayed in a specific, dizzying pattern. The emblem clicked and a rumble emanated from behind the bricks. Mick braced himself against the wall, tucking as far back from the edge of the stairs and the black water as he could.

“Sump pumps!” Uncle Gio shouted over the racket. The water began gurgling around them and slowly, one step after another was exposed as it drained away. It spun into a vortex in the center of the shaft and sucked downward until a final landing emerged, dripping wet. The sump pumps quieted to a lower gear, running just enough to keep the water level down.

“It still works. It’s been, God, twenty years?” Uncle Gio chuckled. He pointed his flashlight at a metal door recessed into the wall at the bottom landing that looked like something Mick would’ve expected to find on a submarine.

“There’s the club house.”

The officials followed him down the final flight of stairs. The door had a matching Antikythera emblem embossed into it. Uncle Gio tucked his flashlight under one of his chins, cranked the handle open, and threw his shoulder into it, only to bounce off.

“It has been two decades,” he muttered, rubbing his shoulder.

Ford slipped past, placed his gloved left hand in the middle of the steel door, then shoved it open with little more than a grunt. The old metal groaned and creaked.

“Thanks, Hercules,” Gio said. He reached into the dark room and flipped a switch.

A bank of ancient spotlights flickered to life. One popped and sparked the second current hit, sending Ford’s hand scrambling for his holster and making Mick and Beasley duck behind the door frame.

“Calm down, bunnies,” Gio chuckled. The cold black room drank in the light and glowed golden and warm.

The officials entered the room warily, quickly clearing it of threats while trying to act nonchalant for the grinning gangster.

A tall banquet table dominated the center of the room, blanketed in thick dust. Uncle Gio ambled past it to a makeshift smokers’ lounge clustered with plush armchairs and flopped into one in a puff of gray.

The officials ventured past him, taking it all in.

“Musty,” Mick grumbled. The thick carpets looked clean, but two decades locked up underwater had given them a robust smell.

The back wall was dominated by an extensive bar done up in brass and polished wood. The bar mirror was starting to fade with age. Mickey immediately clocked that the few remaining liquor bottles were long empty.

The left half of the room was dominated by shelves full of unidentifiable machinery, with cables, antennas, pipes, and tanks sticking out in every direction. Opposing it was a series of work stations, thousands of dollars equipment just left in the dark. Mick noted welding stations, lathes, and a table covered in laboratory glassware with a fume hood looming above. Several fuse boxes hung in the back corner.

It was an extensive facility that would have taken years to build, even legitimately. It must have been helpful to have a mafia family on call for that kind of thing.

“What would the Man from Tomorrow want with this place?” Ford wondered aloud. “It looks half scrapyard, half museum in here.”

“There’s things here that are beyond anything you boys are working with,” Uncle Gio said. “Or there was. But don’t let the mess fool you.”

Mickey ambled around the room. The junk piled on the left did look like a bunch of old garbage. A good chunk of it looked like radio equipment to the best of his know-how, but years of humidity and neglect had made its mark. Rust dotted most of the abandoned devices, and cobwebs coated the rest.

He picked up a short metal tube with a socket for connecting a pressurized tank on one end and a perforated cap on the other. He held it up, puzzled. Uncle Gio recognized it instantly.

“The carbonator!” he said. “That was my favorite of Lander’s toys. It’s for fizzing your drink.”

“Here then,” Mick tossed the tube to Uncle Gio, who snatched it out of the air and stuffed it in his jacket’s inner pocket. When he turned back to the over-stocked shelves his sleeve caught corner of a transmitter and pulled it off the shelf with a loud crash. Mick poked at the scattered parts and noticed Ford’s hand back on his pistol grip, Beasley’s fingers intertwined through her brass knuckles.

“What?” Mickey asked innocently. He chuckled, then looked back at the shelf. The gleaming periscope eye of a kriegerpuppe machine soldier stared back at him.

“What the hell?” he shouted, stumbling away from the murderous automaton’s head. He nearly tripped over the broken radio pulling his club out from under his jacket. He leveled it at the glass orb, ready to smash it to pieces. “What the hell is one of those doing here?”

“What are you talking about?” Gio asked. He grunted and lurched out of the chair, trying to get a look at what had set Mick off. The other officials slunk in, close but wary.

“That thing, right there,” Mick said, trying to keep his voice in check. Mick had not seen a kriegerpuppe since the last war, during his first stint with the Office.

“Oh, that’s Jasper,” Uncle Gio said. “Lander kept him, like a pet. When he got real drunk, he could make Jasper dance. Mostly it tended bar.”

“He kept a live kriegerpuppe down here?” Mickey asked. He could feel red flushing his face.

“If I recall correctly, Kolonel van den Berghe was the co-creator of the perception-analysis engine that ran the kriegerpuppe,” Beasley reported from memory.

“These things are dangerous,” Mickey growled, not in the mood for a history lesson.

He inched forward and kicked more trash out of the way to reveal an intact robotic soldier sitting before him: periscope eye, beer keg body, tiny bird arms, and stomping metal feet. No punch card brain on its back, that much he was grateful for. It was nearly exactly as he remembered them from the Somme.

“How did it work?” Ford asked Uncle Gio.

“From what Lander said, hardly at all. He lost his partner’s journals after the war, he complained about that like a broken record. But he kept working on everything from memory. I remember how proud he was when he finished this thing. The whole club whooped it up that night. Him and I got three sheets and ended up watching the dawn from Machinery Hall’s roof with a couple quarts of Canadian single malt and a couple coeds,” Gio said with s sigh as he patted the infernal machine’s eyestalk.

“You didn’t answered the kid’s question,” Mick grated.

“Didn’t I? Well, Lander spent years tinkering with this thing, then built something he calling the thinking engine. From what I understand, Jasper sees things, those images are compared in the engine to known sights, then it responds how Lander told it to depending on what it seen. It was a walking encyclopedia of something like three hundred different cocktails.”

Mick looked at Jasper’s back. It didn’t have its own brain, not like the kriegerpuppen that he’d fought back in the trenches. It was just an empty socket back there.

“He’s a little rough for the wear these days, but trust me when I tell you that Jasper pours one hell of an Old Fashioned.”

“Seems like a waste,” Ford said.

“Lander had had enough seriousness during the war. After, all he wanted to use his knowledge to teach and make people happy,” Uncle Gio replied.

“So where’s the thinking engine?” Beasley wondered.

“Yeah, it ain’t here,” Mick grunted.

“Oh, that’s it right there,” Uncle Gio said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. He pointed at a black steamer trunk a few feet away laying half-covered by a sheet. The long black cables emerging from its side terminated in plugs that looked to fit the sockets in Jasper’s back. Gio cleared his throat and clarified: “Lander called it the ‘brain box.’”

“What the hell?” Mick gasped. He lurched past Gio, ripped the sheet away, and opened the trunk to find a labyrinth of wires and vacuum tubes that boggled his mind. The maze of electronics was more intricate than anything he had ever seen.

“Hell no,” he growled, then ripped the umbilical cables from the brain box’s ports. He was ready to smash it to pieces or throw down the bottomless cistern.

“That’s got to be what Spark’s looking to sell,” Beasley said. “With that, the Germans could manufacture new armies overnight.”

“They’re going to have to, how many more soldiers does that country have left to put on the line?” Ford pointed out.

“Anything Department Three builds now would be more effective than the Great War kriegerpuppe in every way,” Beasley noted. Mickey shuddered. He remembered the whistling steel soldiers well, a relentless and fearless force that took a dozen bullets each to bring down.

“I only survived those things because they were limited by their weaponry. Put an MG-42 into their hands and our boys would get cut down in seconds,” Mick finally said softly. “No wonder Eizhürst should up himself.”

“Then it’s settled,” Ford said calmly. He drew his beat-up Colt and leveled it at the trunk.

“Wait!” Mick snapped. Ford hesitated.

“That thing’s worth thousands!” Uncle Gio objected.

“No, not that,” Mick said. He put his hand on Ford’s Colt and shoved the gun toward the floor. “If this thing can save kraut lives, it sure as hell can save our men, too.”

“These things can be used by anyone, no matter how crazy they are,” Ford said. He holstered his pistol, though he didn’t look happy about it. “There are people out there that are so nuts that not one person listens to a word they say. What happens if they can order up their own personal army?”

“That’s above my pay grade, kid,” Mick said, but Ford did have a point. Whatever else they were fought for, wars started and ended by the will of the people fighting ‘em. An army of kriegerpuppe with no ideology would be dangerous. No order would be too horrific, no battle would be surrendered. They would kill until the last round was fired, until the last diesel fume had been consumed.

Beasley looked between the two conflicted men.

“This device was created by one of the founding officials. We’re taking it to Oak Ridge to be cataloged,” she declared. Ford grumbled, but left his heater holstered nonetheless. “Nea should have the cataloging team assembled up top by now. They’ll take it.”

“The brain box is coming with us,” Mickey declared, relieved to have kicked that decision up the chain. “You seeing any other doomsday weapons down here, Gio?”

“Nothing I can recall,” the mobster answered, twisting his doughy head around to examine the cluttered shelves and empty work stations. “Lander’s chair isn’t even here. Dio, it’s a long walk up.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ford, help me with the trunk. Beasley, I want a full cataloging team down here as soon as possible,” Mick ordered.

“Should we bring Jasper?” Ford asked.

“We are not touching that thing, let the Library techs get it,” Mick snapped. One of those machines had shot his best friend almost thirty years ago. He was not going to let it anywhere near its electronic brain.

“Damn, this thing is heavy,” Ford grunted. He could barely lift one half of the brain box.

“We’re getting it out of here,” Mick grunted. He stomped over, kicked Jasper’s cables as far away from the brain box as they could get and hefted it by a brass handle. A grunt escaped through Mickey’s clenched teeth. “Feels like it’s full of bricks.”

“You hear that?” Uncle Gio asked.

“We could drop it down the damn stairwell for all I care, a little jostling doesn’t bother me,” Mick snapped.

“No, no that,” the mobster said quietly. He pointed at the concrete ceiling. “That.”

“The pumps?” Mickey asked, struggling with the brain box. The sumps were still running, still keeping the cistern’s water level below the room.

“No, you ape,” Uncle Gio snapped. “Listen.”

Mick scowled and set the brain box down. Ford and Beasley stood deathly still. A faint clang echoed around the room. They all heard it.

“What was that?” Ford asked. His Colt was back in his hand.

“Did it do that down here before?” Mick asked Uncle Gio.

“It’s been twenty years,” the mobster replied, though he did not look certain as to whether he meant that he did not remember or that the club could have deteriorated in that time.

“Kid, move!” Mick barked in Ford’s face. They both grunted and lifted the brain box together and waddled toward the hatch. They were only five yards from the cistern stairs when another loud bang stopped them in their tracks. Gio’s beady eyes grew wide.

“Are there any other entrances?” Beasley asked him.

“No, Lander made sure of it. No one could get near his studd down here, and it could not get near anyone else,” Uncle Gio said with certainty. Another clang made him jump and reconsider.

“We have to get this thing out of here,” Mick growled to Ford. He went to pick up the brain box, but the kid didn’t seem to hear. A louder sound, metal clashing on metal, reverberated through the room.

“There is another way in,” Ford said flatly. He spread his feet shoulder-width and raised the Colt with both hands, targeting the workbench against the wall that was littered with glassware. Another clang sounded, shaking the fume hood in the ceiling.

“The vent - !” Beasley said, but before she could react the fume hood burst downward in a spray of broken concrete and hissing sparks. A gleaming figure dropped into the room.

Ford didn’t hesitate. He opened up with his Colt, blasting eight heavy rounds into the new arrival. Each bullet pinged off Daedalus Spark’s orichalcum armor, not leaving a scratch. The Man from Tomorrow rose from a crouch. Powdered concrete trickled from his shoulders. His armor shone like a polished penny and was studded with more doodads that Mickey could keep track of. The teardrop helmet covered his whole face and was round, reflective, and smooth. It was like looking into a polished spoon. A pair of parallel fins crested his head. Mick could see his own wide eyes reflected where the thief’s face should have been.

Ford slammed another magazine into his Colt, but Spark raised a bulky gauntlet. A red light winked to life on the Man from Tomorrow’s forearm.

“Down!” Beasley shouted. She rammed full speed into Ford, knocking the wind out of him and the gun from his hands. Spark’s riddle beam lanced over their heads, scorching a deep scar into the rough bricks behind them. Spark turned, whipping the beam across the room. Every point it touched glowed with orange ember. Molten brick sputtered and spat across the floor, sizzling in the old carpets.

Mick pulled his heater and he dove behind the banquet table. The riddle beam passed above his head, popping old pistons and discarded television screens in showers of hot glass and metal. Uncle Gio was already hiding under the table.

“Help me!” Mick grunted at him. The two men planted their shoulders beneath the table and shoved upward. The heavy oak groaned and tipped toward the armored man. It slammed down hard, raising dust and putting half-a-foot of solid oak between them and the riddle beam.

“You think that would stop Daedalus Spark, the Man from Tomorrow?” the thief demanded. Oak hissed as Spark brought the riddle beam against it. The red line of hot light sliced through the burled wood like it was a Christmas goose. A smoking triangle clattered to the floor near Mickey’s feet: the table’s intricately carved corner.

Antique hardwood wouldn’t hold up long against the flamboyant thief’s searing riddle beam.

Beasley’s boots pounded against brick and moldy carpet as she sprinted across the room, firing her pistol.

“Quit that!” she shouted. Her bullets bounced off Spark’s blank helmet with the sound of a snare drum. They seemed to ricochet before they could touch him. Her shots weren’t being deflected: they were redirected.

“You quit!” Spark barked. He raised his other gauntlet and launched a metal net in Beasley’s direction. She fell back behind the equipment shelves for cover but the silver filaments wrapped around them, hemming her in. It tightened around the racks, nearly crushing the shelves, cutting into them, and shattering the ancient equipment they held.

Beasley grunted in pain and fell back; one of the bladed fibers had whipped around and slashed her forearm.

“I warned you!” Spark shouted. Red bloomed through Beasley’s sleeve. She was trying to reload her revolver, but she was fumbling the loose bullets with only one hand available.

“Now where is it?” Spark asked. He stalked ahead, swinging his eyeless helm around to scan the smoking chaos. Mick popped his head up, only for a red lance to swing down at him in an executioner’s ax. He rolled to the side, ending up splayed across Uncle Gio. The riddle beam split the table in two and lit the carpet beneath it.

“God, you’re heavy,” Gio gasped. Mick pushed himself off the old gangster and scrambled away from the flames.

“I’ll take that!” Spark declared. Mickey risked a peek around the edge of the table. Spark raised his hand and shot a thin silver line out of his wrist with a puffed of compressed gas. The cord wrapped around van den Berghe’s brain box tight as a lasso. Spark tugged: the rope went taut and the trunk was secure.

Spark’s riddle beam flared back to life. The thief raked it across the bank of fuse boxes in the corner, blowing each of them out in a blast of sparks and acrid smoke. The spotlights cut out, leaving them in smoke-choked darkness lit by flame. Mickey ripped his bandanna out of his pocket and clamped it over his nose and mouth. The specially-treated fabric filtered the smoke from the air.

“You thought you could stop me?” Spark taunted. “Well I think you’re all wet!”

With that, Spark lined himself up under the ruined fume hood and clicked the heels of his shining boots. The rocket pack on his back roared to life, lighting the room for an instant with orange chemical fire before washing choking wall of roiling exhaust over the officials. The roar became deafening and and Spark rose, dragging the brain box behind him.

“I got him!” Ford shouted. He was back on his feet and took several bounding steps to dive onto the sliding brain box, wrapping his arms around it. The box was accelerating, hauled by the silver thread toward the broken fume hood.

“Let it go!” Mick yelled. The kid was going to get himself killed.

“No, I got it!” Ford shouted again. He twisted around and planted his heels in the concrete floor, but the brain box’s skid didn’t slow.

“Ford, drop it now!” Mick roared, but the kid was deaf to him. He kept his hands locked tight around the cable, though he wasn’t doing anything to slow down the escape. His heels skidded across the floor as the taut line continued slithering up the blasted fume hood’s jagged opening. The scream of Spark’s rocket reverberated from the vent, its orange glow dimming as the Man from Tomorrow ascended. “Damn it, kid!”

Mick pulled his Colt Detective Special and leveled it. Arthritic pain pulsed through his scarred knuckles. Mick lined up his sights on the snaking silver cable and fired: one slug flew high, one low, and three more high.

Mick exhaled and aimed. He’d only have one more shot. The cable was dead in his sights. He squeezed the trigger, the pressure gentle and even.

Cold brown water washed over his feet, soaking his oxfords.

Mick jumped with surprise, sending his last shot wild.

“Crap!” Ford shouted. Filthy water rooster-tailed behind the box and he let get, hitting the ground with a brown splash. Water was pouring in over the bottom lip of the club’s open door. The cistern was refilling: Spark had destroyed the fuse box, cutting off the juice to the sump pumps that kept the water level below the clubhouse.

Ford spit up half a lung-full and recovered in time to see the silver cord and brain box sucked up the fume vent like a strand of spaghetti.

“It’s gone, it’s time to hoof it!” Uncle Gio shouted, grabbing Mickey’s elbow with one of his big mitts. Mick jumped, the revolver in his hand clicking empty.

“I almost blew your head off!” he gasped.

“Not with a dry heater,” Gio replied. “We’re going to be sleeping with the fishes if you don’t move your ass.”

Mick splashed through the calf-deep water and pulled Ford to his feet. The young man wiped the frigid rainwater from his eyes and plastered his brown hair back. The silver line had shredded one of his gloves, revealing his bare hand for the first time. It wasn’t scarred, and he had all five fingers. It just so happened that those five fingers were jade green. Ford had yet to realize his hand was exposed.

“We have to get some of this stuff!” he sputtered. He was soaked through.

“Leave it for the frogmen!” Mick shouted at him. “Just get her!”

He shoved Ford toward Beasley and the razor-edged silver net pinning her behind the shelves. The water was knee-deep already.

“Got her,” he said, then stumbled over something in the water. He reached down and grasped around, quickly coming up with his beat old Colt 1911 pistol that he shoved back in its holster.

“Cover your eyes,” Ford told Beasley. He hooked a bundle of strands with his green hand and ripped them out. Metal netting snapped and twanged. The very wires that could saw metal and slice flesh didn’t seem to affect his green skin. He pulled the nets down like dry old vines. Beasley was freed in seconds.

“Our membership’s expiring,” Gio insisted, but Mick ripped free of his grip. He flipped the cylinder open and dumped the empty brass into the water with six little plunks. He jammed a new set of six rounds in with a speed loader and trudged through the rising water to the fume vent. He leaned underneath the gaping hole and raised his pistol. The walls of the metal vent were still hot, and the rising water sizzled as it made its way up the rocket-scorched wall. He fired six echoing shots upward, shooting at nothing but shadows.

“You get him?” Ford called back. He was standing in the open door.

“Don’t think so,” Mick growled, but he did feel better. He jumped a little as the freezing water rose past his thighs.

“Then let’s go,” Ford said. He squeezed against the door frame as Uncle Gio shoved past. “We know where Spark will be.”

“You’re damn right we do,” Mick muttered. He holstered his pistol and waded to the door. Machines he couldn’t name sputtered as their fuses shorted. A merciless current pulled at him through the door, trying to drag him back into the rapidly-filling room.

Mickey grunted as he hauled himself into the open cistern shaft. The water was swirling around them, reclaiming the metal steps. Beasley and Uncle Gio were on the landing above them, him wheezing like he’d run a marathon, her shivering and bleeding, and the both of them soaked to the bone.

With Ford’s hand wrapped up in the shoulder of Mickey’s jacket, he half-led, half-hauled Mick up the stairs until they were level with Beasley and the gasping mafioso. Mick leaned up against the brick wall and considered what had just happened. They had allowed Daedalus Spark to escape with one of the most dangerous pieces of technology he could imagine. The black water rose, finally stopping six inches below the platform they were standing on.

“The easy part is over, kids,” Uncle Gio wheezed.

“We’ll get him,” Ford assured him. There was fire in the young soldier’s voice.

“Between your men and my backup, Spark and Eizhürst don’t stand a chance,” Mickey growled. They didn’t have any other choice than to retrieve the brain box.

“No, that’s not that hard part. That is,” Gio wheezed. He pointed upward, at the winding stairs that disappeared into darkness above them. Mick groaned. His knees throbbed in protest.

“Better get started then,” Mick said. He sighed and took the first steps. Beasley and Ford looked at each other, smirking, then trudged past him toward the surface.

Mick snorted. They were still young, they didn’t know yet that getting back up was always the hardest part.

Like what you read? Buy me a beer or @ me about it.

Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.