Not Alone

Brown's Angel

Note: This is a short chapter but it was a good place to end.

Ulysses looked down at Brown with a triumphant smile that showed off all his yellow horse teeth. He looked like someone who knew he'd won, someone who was sure Brown would collapse in despair from what he'd seen.

Think again.

Brown lifted the bolt gun and smashed the barrel into the Skibidi's nose, feeling warm blood splatter across his shirt and lens as Ulysses yelped and leapt back.

Ignoring the reeling Skibidi, Brown turned to face the demon who'd murdered Gundy.

The old man Skibidi with the red eyes, still staring at him in freezing silence from across the room, Gundy's head dangling from one of his claws.

Brown calculated the situation rapidly. He couldn't get to the old man in time. Skibidi scientists and guards were swarming towards him, weapons raised. But if nothing else, Brown could aim, broken lens or not. He reached for the lump of broken glass, a twice-stolen weapon.

His hand caught something square and smooth. He had reached for the wrong pocket, and pulled out his picture of TV Woman, in its silver frame.

Brown could only stare at the little rectangle for a moment, feeling like he was looking at an artefact from a long-gone age.

Then he hurled it at the old man's face.

The picture sailed across the room, frame sparkling as it caught the light. The old man's eyes went wide and he tried to step aside, but his heavy metal body wasn't fast enough, and the frame sliced his face, leaving a long red streak under his right eye before it clattered to the ground.

Something slammed into Brown from behind and he sprawled to his knees, to be pulled upright with both wrists held tight behind his back.

"Why, hello there," someone said from above his head. "Nice to see you again."

That wasn't Ulysses.

Whoever had caught Brown was holding him with a hand, not a claw. And that voice...

No. Not you.

Brown was lifted off the ground and turned, kicking and resisting, to face a familiar ear-to-ear smile under a pair of blazing yellow eyes. A Large Cameraman Mutant, the same one he'd last seen disarmed and almost dead...

"I see you've lost your little brown jacket," the Mutant smiled. "I still recognise you by that ugly striped tie, though. I believe we were in the middle of something..."

A painful metallic whine filled Brown's hearing as the Mutant raised his right arm to show off what had replaced his hand: a Buzzsaw as big as Brown's whole torso, shining silver and covered in deadly points.

"Professor, would you like me to take his head?" the Mutant asked, not taking his starving-animal eyes off Brown.

"Take that robot outside and cut it into as many pieces as you want," the old man curled his lip. "I never want to see that thing again, even as a body for a Mutant. We shouldn't  have brought it back. I'll have what's left of it melted down for bullets. Blade Strider turns everything he touches into a disaster."

"Wait!" someone called.

Ulysses?

The old man looked down irritably, stroking his cut with one of his claws.

Ulysses held his bloody nose in his left claw and the equally bloody portrait of TV Woman in his right.

"Professor, with all due respect, can you hold off just a moment," he said, his voice a little muffled from the broken nose, "look here— he was carrying a picture of the Metal Medusa in his pocket!"

"I doubt that's a matter of any significance," the old man said, looking at Brown with reptilian hate.

"This man may be close to the higher-ups in the TV Faction," Ulysses wheedled. "I would like your permission to interrogate him."

The old man sighed.

"I allow this. But keep it in one piece, and bring it back to me when you're done. Stelios—" he looked at the Mutant as he said that name, "go with the Overseer and keep the prisoner subdued."

Buzzsaw smiled at Brown, squeezing his arms ever tighter.

"My pleasure, sir."

"Right this way," Ulysses scuttled across the room, looking down at the image of TV Woman thoughtfully as he squeezed his nose shut. "Damnit, Mutant, you got a hankerchief in that fancy suit of yours?"

"Hold up," Buzzsaw awkwardly held Brown crushed between his armpit and his toilet bowl while he fumbled through his pockets. "Yeah, here you go. A nice crisp white one, never used. The former owner had no nose or eyes."

"Thank you, Soldier," Ulysses said and gripped his nose firmly in the little white cloth. "Be gentle with that fellow, now. He's a close friend of TV Woman, it seems. Wouldn't want to get on her bad side, would you? The Metal Medusa! The Headless Hag! Why she'll be upset if anything happens to her friend here."

Was that what these brain-rotted clowns called Brown's guardian angel? He'd like to see Ulysses try to fight the "headless hag" and see how smug he looked...

He was about to be interrogated. And, in spite of Ulysses' claim he had never tortured anyone, more than that.

Brown didn't care anymore. There was no fear left  in him.

He knew nothing they could do to him could hurt as much as seeing that little grey head, severed from his body.

No torture could be more terrible than knowing he would never see Gundy again.

That he had failed her.