Rpol H&H Campaign - pt. 30

Continued from here. 

The old man pushed the Mountain Man back with surprising strength and sprayed bullets with a RATATATATATAT across the chapel.  "Kill you allll!" the man yelled madly as he fired back and forth.  He connected with every Hero left standing.  Mountain Man went down.  Captain Liberty went down.  Silver Scorpion, perhaps because she was standing to the side, was only grazed.

The sound of the gunfire echoed through the temple for several seconds after the old man stopped firing.  When the sound of gunfire died away, he seemed to compose himself, paused, and turned to face Silver Scorpion.  "You can't imagine what you've done here, girl," he said bitterly through clenched teeth.  "What we've had to endure to get this far.  How we've had to suffer the company of...humans," he said with a sneer, "while we tried to build a power base here on this backward mudball of a world.  And you meddling primitives, barely out of your caves, have come this close to wrecking all our carefully worked plans.  But now...," he trailed off as he prepared to pull the trigger again.

But Silver Scorpion was not scared.  Indeed, she laughed mockingly.  "Ha ha! What little you know!" The man’s revelation of an alien heritage did not give her the least pause, for she herself was an alien to this planet.  She feigned, ducked, and lunged, feeling a surge of energy as she realized that this was it -- everything was up to her now to stop whatever foul plans were afoot!   If she could only take town the old man, she might be able to use him as a hostage to keep all the other thugs at bay.

Silver Scorpion’s plan was a noble one, but doomed to failure as she only lunged directly into point blank range with the sub-machine gun.  Spraying bullets her way, the old man connected with too many.  Silver Scorpion went down in a bloody mess.

…

No one expected to ever wake up again, but Alpha-Woman's eyes flickered open.  She felt sore all over, but she could move.  She also recognized where she was again.  It was the basement cell, with the same barred window in the metal-reinforced wooden door and the same, dimly-lit hallway outside it.  This time, they had taken extra precautions, shackling her wrists and ankles in chains, but nothing she could not wreck out of given enough time.

And she did have time.  She bided it, uninterrupted, while waiting for her strength to come back.  For a half-hour she rested, with only one unconscious person for company.   The Daoist was lying in the cell with her, also bound in chains, and looking badly bruised.  Finally, though, he started to come around.  He was still groggy, but conscious.

Alpha-Woman whispered to the Daoist her plan to bust out, grab the other prisoners, and run.  It seemed an absurdly simple plan to him, but he was too weak to argue it.  It took her, in her weakened state, two whole minutes to break the chains off of her.  The Daoist spendt three minutes on his own chains, trying to assume a form that could slither out of them, but unable to concentrate on the transformation through the pain and wound up needing Alpha-Woman’s help.

It barely took more than a flick of Alpha-Woman’s wrist to knock the cell door off its hinges.  They emerged into a hallway, familiar to Alpha-Woman, with three other cell doors farther down from theirs in the same wall.  There was one door in the opposite wall, with light coming from underneath it.  In the direction of the other cells, to the right, the hallway dead ended just past the last one.  In the other direction, to the left, the hallway opened onto another hallway in a T-intersection.  More light was coming from that hallway.

Alpha-Woman found in the cell next to theirs was the man she had rescued the last time, next to some teenaged boy she had never seen before.  The Daoist rushed down to the next cell and saw Captain Liberty alone and shackled up in the cell as he and Alpha-Woman were.  The Captain’s costume was torn and bloodied and his wounds had been sloppily bandaged.

Just then, the door across the hall opened and a scruffy hoodlum stuck his head out.  Both Heroes could see another hoodlum behind him.

“They’re loose!”  the first one cried.

“Get them!” the second shouted.

"You two dudes, I am busy trying to save people," Alpha-Woman said dismissively.  She turned her back on them and proceeded to bash in the door to Tommy and Agent Malefor’s cell.

“You get them!” the first one cries, and then they both fought to be the first one back into the room they came from.

The Daoist ran down to check the last cell and then ran back.  "They're not here!  Mountain Man and Si'ver Scorpion!" he said in a loud, frantic whisper.

"Let's save who we can," Alpha-Woman said with determination.  Her strength, though, was starting to ebb from her initial burst of power and it took her two more minutes just to smash in break the lock on the door she’d been wailing on.  The Daoist tried to smash the neighboring door, but again had worse luck, finally having to kick the door to break the lock after three minutes.

Neither of them could rouse anyone, so badly injured were the other prisoners.  So they resolved to carry the prisoners to safety instead.

The door across the hall finally opened again, but this time only a crack.  “"They've bashed three doors in!" one of the returning mobsters said in a terrified whisper from behind the door.  That comment was followed by the audible click of a revolver chamber being loaded.