12) Jailbreak

It turned out Mockingbird wasn’t trying to kill me by sinking his claws into the front of my throat and ripping it out. He just wanted to silence me by taking my electric voice box from me. Not that he didn’t get some of the corpse’s throat as well.

Then he jumped back, and looked at the chunk of flesh in his hand, before looking back up at me with a freaked out look. "What the…

Then the first Core Commando came through the inner door, with another one right behind her.

They swept the room with their guns, completely ignoring the freaked out supervillain standing right between them.

Who proceeded to turn and run through the open door without anyone reacting, leaving as the two Commandos turned their guns at me.

Great, Mockingbird can turn invisible too.

I guess even the Core Commandos were still basically cops, when in doubt, point your gun at the first person you see and shout at them.

Tilting my head back I pointed at the hole in the front of my throat and then stuck my pointing finger inside of it.

The Commando to the back jerked a bit as he clamped his mouth shut and went pale. The woman at the front narrowed her eyes. “Oh, this guy. What happened to Mockingbird?”

I pointed at her, the other guy, and the woman behind the glass and covered my eyes, before making a walking fingers on my other arm and pointing at the still open door.

They took a moment to figure that out. "He got past us and went through the door?"

So they missed the invisible part. But still, they got the important part. He was inside the building.

The officer began to call it in, but her buddy still looked uncertain about me and was holding his gun ready. I waved at him and pointed at one of my pouches, getting a slow nod from him in return.

I then pulled out my back up plan.

A small notebook and a black felt tip pen.

He’s Invisible

The female Commando’s eyes went wide as she started calling that in as well. And I instigated my other means of communication. Texting.

@Shimshimsherri

[Mockingbird is here, he can turn invisible.]

I ignored the text alert from her reply while I wrote another note.

I can see him

I need an escort to vouch for me

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The SWAT woman nodded at me. “Howards, secure the exit. Colombian necktie, lead the way.”

I moved my current tongue around a bit to double check it was still in my mouth as I headed into the building. I was. Red lights were flashing as we headed in.

The Commando officer following me kept up a steady patter as we headed in. "The security door should be locked down, he must have plugged something into a computer in one of the offices that messed shit up. IT should be on it soon. But that will lock us away from the action."

The security doors seemed to be a sliding door arrangement inside the arches that narrowed the hallway about every twenty feet.

“The secure cells are three stories down, but if we find a spot he ain’t gotten past yet, we stop there. No point in opening a door for him."

I wrote another note and held It up over my shoulder.

Smart. Please tell me you’re single

She laughed. “Got a wife and two kids, and we’re saving up to alter one of my eggs to have my a Y chromosome so we can have a little boy too. Now focus on moving, not flirting.”

Oh well, you have to try before you can succeed.

We finally got down a flight of stairs to the elevator to the lower floors, all but one stood open with their power off except for the one which showed it to be three floors down and, of course, unresponsive to the Officer’s attempt to bring it back up.

Number 0075, I didn’t see a name tag, turned to me. “Oh shit. He’s not after her, even he must have figured it would be suicide to fight their way out. He’s after the Transporter Blocker for the whole secure cell block.”

Well, at least that explained why Manifest didn’t portal us right into the building, that and trigger happy cops.

I made another note.

Is there any other way down?

Commando 0075 shook her head.

Shimmer and the rest of the team showed up a moment later, through Manifest’s portal right into the room with me as he had gotten a good enough of a look at it from my helmet cam.

Which meant we were too late. The blocker was down, and Manifest had never seen the secure cell block to open a portal to there.

They had a full sized group of twenty seven people waiting down there for a transfer to the Vault Super Max later that evening when traffic, and potential deaths from a super fight, would be at their lowest.

But the time control of the building had been restored, Twelve prisoners had been Transported out by an unknown Transporter. Presumably with Mockingbird as well. Since none of the cameras had been working there was no way of knowing what exactly had happened, but the computers showed trace information which the Cop's IT guys said was evidence that the Alter 4 Digitize had been brought in on a very large flash drive in order to download herself into the cops systems.

All in all, it was not a good day for the Royals or the cops.

I hung around for a long time until I realized I wasn't contributing to anything and got Manifest to agree to send the now healed up Talon corpse back to the base so I could tape up the hole in the neck piece and shove it back into the walk in freezer. Then I alerted everyone I was signing off for the day.

I didn’t think we had done all that bad. We had been ahead of the bad guy, and had at least one person, me, waiting for him. No one had known Mockingbird could go invisible, which made me think it was limited somehow, otherwise why steal the cop uniform to get in the back door?

Still, it was a depressing ride on the Subterranean tube back to my stop, and I wasn’t really in the mood to deal with a text.

From: TheRenters.

[We wish to talk. Bring Cheesy Bits from the store.]

[and beer.]

I took a left into the Core King, the local chain of 24 hour snack shacks for a knock off brand of Cheetos and a twenty four pack of cheap beer.

In the parking lot I shook up each can and cracked them open to let them go flat on the ride home.

Luckily Mice have low standards on bribes.