Free Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen by David Perlmutter, Brent Nichols, Claude Lalumiere, Mark Shainblum, Chadwick Ginther, Michael Matheson, Mary Pletsch, Jennifer Rahn, Corey Redekop, Bevan Thomas

its benefits. I ball my own fists and whack the ground, the concussion knocking her off her feet and flinging her back under the overpass, which shakes like a jello sculpture. I pursue, not giving her time to get her feet back under her, and she scuttles backwards like a crab, leaving bloodstains after the first few feet.
    “Surrender,” I hiss, knowing I’m wasting my breath.
    “ Die !” she screams in return, and fires another energy blast past my head. As I look up to see the source of the rumbling, she lashes out with a kick that takes one leg out from under me, and uses the recoil to push herself into a shoulder roll and back onto her feet. She fights smart. I lose track of her then because I’m on my back watching tons of pre-stressed concrete fall toward my face in slow-motion. I have enough time to cover my eyes with my arms before the weight of the world lands on me, crushing the breath from my lungs.
    Lucky for me, I’ve been here before; it’s an old supervillain gimmick, and something of a cliché— for the good reason that it works so well. All those sessions pumping iron pay off; I squirm onto my stomach, gather my knees beneath me, arch my back, and shed all that weight with one mighty heave. Then I wipe the grit from my eyes and look around for my foe.
    I said she’s smart; she hasn’t waited around to see if she finished me off. She’s not flying, but she’s skipping so high with each jump, energy glowing around her feet, that she makes an easy target. I pick up a chunk of rubble the size of my fist, judge the apex of her leap, and fling it. It catches her in mid-skip, and she goes down in a tangle of arms and legs that doesn’t bode well for her future spinal health. I lope up to her, and it’s only then I notice the cameramen in black body armor, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. I ignore them, and when I get to her, she’s lying with one leg beneath her at an angle that makes me wince. Bone sits at an unnatural angle in one forearm, but it’s not protruding. “Just” a nasty compound fracture. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.
    I kneel beside her. “Surrender. Please ! I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”
    “ Fascist! ” she spits at me, and the spittle runs down my face. But there are tears in her eyes, leaving tracks through the blood smears on her face, and there’s pain and humiliation in her eyes, and she gathers what remains of her strength, and energy begins forming around the fist of her remaining usable hand…
    One of the camera men shouts something.
    “What did you say?” I ask, disbelieving.
    “Pound her to hamburger, you fucking monster!”
    I look back at her and something changes in her eyes. Presumably she sees what’s writ large across my face. When I’m done strewing the two men across the landscape and the stench of cordite is drifting away on a light breeze, I turn back to her. “This is going to hurt,” I warn her. She grits her teeth and closes her eyes, and I carefully grip her arm, not wanting to do any more damage with these fingers, thick as her wrist. I pull gently until the bone pops back in place, and splint it there with the still-hot barrel from one of the dismembered rifles and strips of cloth torn from a uniform. Though blood runs from her bitten lip, she makes no sound. She’ll need a doctor, but she won’t lose the arm.
    “The leg is going to hurt worse, I’m afraid.” She nods, eyes still closed, and when I pull it out into the correct alignment, feel it click back into place, she sobs. I bind her legs together with a belt from one of the cameramen.
    Then her eyes open as we both hear the sound of the chopper. I pick her up in my arms. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I say.
    “In a moment,” she replies, and with her good arm gathers one of those energy balls around her fist, and flings it weakly at the chopper.
    Then I turn and walk away with her in my arms, greasy smoke rising into the sky behind us.
    * *