Junior
Executive removed the chains from the toilet late Sunday evening. He managed to get some water into Corporate
Man and in the early hours of Monday morning a few crackers went in and stayed down.
Corporate
Man slept on the bed, all but dead to the world. Junior Executive shackled Corporate Man’s
foot to the bed, just to be sure, though he really doubted that his mentor would
be waking up any time soon.
At some
point, before the sun came up, Junior Executive fell asleep on the couch.
The thing
that brought him out of his dreams of financial uncertainty was barely
perceptible. It was like a whisper of
silence cutting though the soft, ever present, background noise. His eyes flicked opened. A second sound cue, something not quite a
whistle and little more than a sigh, triggered a reflex reaction that ejected him
from the couch. The final thudding noise
that followed was the result of a black throwing axe lodging into the wooden
frame of the couch, precisely where Junior’s blissful, sleeping face had been
only seconds before.
Pink Slip
stood in front of the bedroom’s open door.
A second black axe gripped in her left hand. Was she coming from Corporate Man’s
room? Had she just killed him? There was no blood on the axe she was holding. But the axe sticking out of the couch
cushions could’ve been used to do the job.
“Hmmmm,”
she purred. “You move well.”
Junior
Executive did not acknowledge the compliment.
“Too bad
I’m on the job or I’d make time to play with you.”
There was
no hint in her body language that the assault was coming. No twitch in her fingers or flare of her
eyes. And when she moved there wasn’t
even a noticeable weight shift in her musculature. She’d covered half the distance between them,
which wasn’t much to begin with, before his brain even registered the
change. And the axe no longer dangled at
her thigh. It sliced down at his face.
Junior
Executive flinched away and thrust his arms up defensively. The axe struck his forearm. The force of the blow slammed his wrist into his
face. Blood sprayed from his nose and
stars burst in his eyes. There was no
blood where the axe had struck. No
chunking sound as blade buried into bone.
Instead there was a metallic clang.
Pink Slip
did not seem to notice. She was already
three moves ahead in her mind. While her
left hand dealt damage to Junior Executive’s arm and face, her right hand
snagged the handle of the axe imbedded in the couch. As the left-hand-wielded blade rebounded off
the defensive forearm with the incongruous metallic clang, the right hand swung
the recently retrieved couch-stuck axe into Junior Executive’s upper ribs.
The sound
this time was hollow and thudding.
Pink Slip’s
lips curled like spooning lovers. And
that’s when the metallic clang registered and her eyes shifted to Junior
Executives forearm. Most of the shirt
fabric of his custodial uniform was shredded from wrist to elbow. The protective gauntlet underneath was almost
fully uncovered. Her eyes had only
strayed for a moment, but before they could flick back to her opponent’s face,
his forehead slammed into the bridge of her nose. As she stumbled back his wrist gauntlets
smashed together, her ears and temples caught in between. Something rammed into her stomach and another
something hammered into back, just below her neck.
If there
were subsequent blows, Pink Slip was far too unconscious to feel them.
Junior
Executive yanked the axe from his side.
For a moment he considered dropping it to the floor. He also considered returning it to its owner
in a very direct manner. Finally, he
settled on holding it at the ready as he unzipped his uniform down past his
stomach and pulled something from an inside pocket.
It was a
small book, nearly cleaved in two. On
the cover were the words:
THE UNION
BYLAWS
Below this
was a rounded graphic that incorporated the scales of justice, a briefcase,
dollar signs, percentage symbols and the words:
International
Association of Economic Superheroes.
