Chapter 23
Riding on her invisible cushioned force field, Sue glided downward through the oversized air conditioning duct that she’d breached on the roof of Dante’s condo building. It was a tight passage but her powers of concentration were keenly focused this morning, infused with determination and a tinge of anger at the revenge she sought for the bastard’s harsh abuse of her.
She’d looked up the architectural drawings of the building before she left the Fantastic Four’s headquarters, carefully planning her assault to keep the element of surprise in her favor as long as possible. Dante’s desire for a perfectly cooled and balanced living environment dictated oversized ductwork and Sue thanked him internally for his ego and his ill-gotten wealth.
Of course, Sue had no way of knowing which room in his condo that Dante might be inhabiting at this point in his day but she had chosen to exit the A/C duct in the second bedroom, the least likely room for him to spend any time in, she’d calculated. Stealth was paramount.
After smartly disengaging the sensor that she’d found on the hinged covering of the duct, Sue concentrated and went into full invisibility mode before carefully lowering herself to within an inch off the surface of the bedroom’s caramel-colored carpet. She used her powers to glide around the neatly-made bed towards the closed door to the guest room. She saw no noticeable sensor on the door frame or any of the hinges so she carefully eased the door open and peered into the hallway.
Attractive two-tone walls caught her immediate attention; cream-colored above a thin chair rail and burgundy below. There were no devices mounted on the chair rail that she could see and it seemed an unusual decorating feature for a hallway but Sue shrugged it off as she scoured the high corners and edges of the hallway for pinpoint cameras that might give her quarry instant notice of her break-in. She saw no tiny holes or the flash of any reflective lenses anywhere, so she drifted out of the guest room.
Floating above the surface of a golden oak floor, Sue made her way through the hallway toward the room that the architectural plans showed had built-in bookshelves running the width of the room’s wall facing the windows. That had to be Dante’s study, Sue had surmised. A likely place for him to be inhabiting, probably on his computer. Maybe she’d catch him trying to connect with a client for another assassination assignment. The man kept busy Sue’s research had confirmed.
Poised outside the door, Sue listened intently for any noise within the study. She held her body away from the door, resting only her ear against the glossy white painted wood. The fingertips of her midnight blue gloves pressed against the wall on either side of the door as Sue strained, letting her breathing calm down, her breasts rising and falling now in a much slower rhythm than when she was making her way down the ductwork earlier.
Not a peep. Damn! I’m going to have to break this door down hard and fast. The element of surprise is all I have.
Sue pressed herself away from the door and held her hands up, bracketing her head with her palms facing the door. She gathered her thoughts and her will into a tight imaginary spiral in her mind and let that build to a furious spin. She would unleash an unholy tornado of wind at the door and blast in to smithereens with her powers. Dante wouldn’t know what hit him. She’d encase him in an invisible field and that would be that. His days of tormenting his targets would be done forever. Sue smiled at the idea as she envisioned her success. She let the tornado spin and build a bit more until she was totally focused and then released the whirlwind of power at the door to the study.
KRAKKA-BOOOOM!!
The wooden door bowed severely inward under the onslaught before shredding into a thousand pieces of flying splintered debris. This created a hole that was almost the entire height and width of the door. Sue stepped into the room immediately, taking in the devastation she had wrought. Nasty pointed wood slivers and chunks were embedded everywhere in a wide arc from where the door exploded into the room. The window on the outer wall had a massive hole blown through it by the doorknob that had turned into a cannon ball. The ocean blue walls were covered in wooden dart shapes and blasted flaked plaster that showed white beneath the damage. The computer monitor was completely destroyed, lying on its back in an awkward tilt against the bottom of the window wall. The glass desk was fairly undamaged since it was a horizontal plane in the explosive field, thus low-profile, but every object on top of the glass surface had been blown off and now laid strewn across the room. Papers, file folders, pens and shiny paperclips covered the carpet in every possible direction. But there was no Dante to be found.
I guessed the wrong room! Hell, there goes my element of surpri…
A tone blared out of a ceiling speaker. That tone! The one that accompanied the sexual commands that Dante had ordered her to fulfill just yesterday. The Pavlovian cue!
“DROP JAW, SUBJECT SUE!”
Severely conditioned, Sue reacted involuntarily, dropping her jaw despite herself. The closet door swung open wide and fast. Dante stepped out and faced her with what looked like a toy squirt gun in hand, but her invisibility slowed his reflexes. He thought she would be so brazen that she wouldn’t even have cloaked herself. Especially after blowing through that door and supposedly taking him by surprise. The sensors in the chair rail in the hallway had ruined all that for her as he’d planned. He’d hidden himself inside the closet and had awaited her attack.
Immediately Dante reached up and switched on the infrared sensors on his goggles, lighting up Sue’s figure in his view to a rosy red. He fired the squirt gun at her quickly closing mouth but Sue needn’t have bothered. The thick sedative splashed uselessly against the invisible shield in front of her lips and chin, it ran down the curves of the shield rather than down her throat. Reacting violently, Sue created an invisible force cone and projected it at Allamordo’s chest, propelling the man backward into the closet with a bone-jarring thump against its far wall.
“Uunghh!” the sadistic assassin groaned as he hit the hard surface. He pressed the remote in his pocket with a desperate jab of his middle finger. Sue felt something ping onto the invisible shield protecting her butt. She glanced back to see a suction-tipped dart that quivered against the shield surrounding her ass. She brushed it away easily, fearing whatever the dart might do could somehow disable her.
“Uunghh!” the sadistic assassin groaned as he hit the hard surface. His vision filled with dots momentarily from the pain radiating through his injured left shoulder. He pressed the remote in his pocket with a desperate jab of his middle finger. Sue felt something ping onto the invisible shield protecting her butt. She glanced back to see a suction-tipped dart that quivered against the shield surrounding her ass. She brushed it away easily, fearing whatever the dart might do could somehow disable her.
“That won’t do the job, Allam…Yaaahh!”
Turning back to face her foe, Sue was doused with a thick syrupy coating that jetted from a hose in Dante’s left hand that he’d pulled down from the closet’s ceiling apparently. None of it coated her uniform or reached her face or any part of her, the invisible shield ensured that. But the thick purple goo covered her entire upper half from her head down to her waist. She felt the hard spray quickly coating the shield around her lower half too. She was inundated by it. In fact, the thick purple sludge encapsulated her sensuous figure so clearly visible that Dante flipped a switch to his left that cut off the sludge spray. He let the flexible hose end drop from his one hand while he shut off the infrared feature on his goggles with his other hand. His eyes, the color of dark clumped earth looked at her with a smug coldness.
“I can see your pretty shape now, Ms. Richards. Clear as day.”
Clearing a broad stripe of the viscous glop away from the shield covering her face with a sweep of her hands, Sue glares at her foe. “Maybe so, but it won’t do you any good, Dante. You’re dealing with Invisible Woman now! Not the helpless woman you tortured yesterday. I have more powers than just being invisible … as the state of this room demonstrates,” Sue motions to the devastation surrounding her.
“It’s cute that you believe that, bitch.”
“You know what’s a bitch, Dante? Payback!” Sue unleashes yet another twisting force cone at her adversary’s torso, planning to knock him unconscious with a hard knock against the closet’s door frame. The cone forces the Italian assassin back a step but that is all.
“Whaa..?” Invisible Woman is stunned at the man’s ability to resist her force cone. She’d put a lot of concentration into it. She furiously unleashes another and this doesn’t even cause the smirking foe to even sway backward.
“Figure it out yet, bimbo?”
“The goo!” Sue’s figure shutters between a fading image and full clarity until she’s fully visible. Her shield contracts helplessly though Sue tries to project it outward with all her might. It’s no use. The thick gunk surrounds her actual costume now and clings to it, dripping to the carpet as she stands there in desperate wide-eyed horror.
“Give the cunt a kewpie doll,” Allamordo says, reaching over to a shelf in the closet with both hands and coming away with a steel baton in one hand and a taser stick in the other. “Yes, Subject Sue. The goo. It’s inundated with hundreds of micro-receivers the size of rice grains. Like the hood I forced on you just yesterday, they translate the gamma ray radiation from the emitter in this room’s ceiling into power draining waves that have nullified all those special powers of yours. You’re back to square one, Very Visible Woman.”
“NOOOOOHHH!”
Sue turns around and dashes two steps toward the huge opening she’d blasted in the study’s door but the slippery sludge on the carpet has her lurching awkwardly. She grabs at the edges of the hole to steady herself, then heaves herself forward, half-way through the hole when Dante’s taser stick jabs into her right shoulder. The white arc charge sizzles in the purple goo, turning it lavender with steamy rising wisps.
“AAAAGHHHH!”
Sue’s right arm spasms and the helpless beauty loses hold of the door and droops in place, barely holding on with her left hand, her face grimacing as her body twitches in shaky spasms that sends the goo shedding off into pale violet strings and globules everywhere.
“…uunghh…uunghh…uunghh…uunghh…”
“Guess the famous heroine is little more than a brash façade.” Dante crows, then snaps the steel baton down on the knuckles of the left hand that Sue is using to desperately holding herself up. The pain in his injured left shoulder makes him wince but the pain is worth it when he see's Sue's reaction.
"Owww!" She cries, dropping down suddenly, half in the room, half in the hallway, draped over the jagged edges of the hole she’d blown through the door. The wood isn’t strong enough to pierce through the Kevlar in Sue’s costume but the pain in her left hand has Sue a bit nauseous. She cranes her head around to look at Dante looming over her.
“…bas…tard…” she groans. The attack had been so sudden, so carefully executed. She’d been a sitting duck. She tries to stall a further onslaught. “How’d…you know…I was…here?”
“My security systems are the finest in the world, Sue. I knew you’d come back.” Dante leans over and jabs Sue’s rounded rear end with his taser stick. She yelps in pain as the dripping goo lights up again into a pulsing patch of violet steam. He looks down at her with satisfaction “Your ego demanded it, just as my ego demands I finish what I started: turning you into a willing tool for Madame Minh. But hey, it’s not personal. It’s just business.”
The grimacing Sue looks at him from under furled eyebrows, her anger lashing out through her pain. “It’s personal for me, asshole!”
“Well, it would be wouldn’t it? You’re the one who’s been violated, has sucked cock and been trained to behave like a back-alley whore. For me, it’s just another contract.”
“…i will…defeat you…somehow…’llamordo…” Sue vows.
“Yes, well, let me know how that goes for you, Subject Sue. In the meantime, shut the fuck up and take your beating like the hero you claim to be.”
The steel baton comes down hard on Sue’s temple and her head shunts to the left and she nearly loses consciousness completely. She vaguely sees Dante stepping over her and into the hallway before lifting her up out of the hole and then into a fireman's carry over his right shoulder. She vaguely hears him grunt in pain but her thoughts are too fuzzy to make any sense of why.
“We’re going into the training room again, Subject. You’ve got just a few more important lessons to learn.”
She feels herself draped over Dante’s shoulder, unable to do more than sag there with her hands and legs dangling loosely in a confused fog from the taser and baton. She’d been so easily dispatched she wondered why she’d even bothered returning to fight in the first place. All she could do was groan in misery as her half-lidded eyes twitched and filled with tears.