Super Thieves

Carter

"You know they won't just let us walk out, right?" I said to Heather as she rummaged through her bag as if she were taking inventory in a store.

"Well, we have eight gas bombs left. How many of them do you think are immune to chloroform? We could make a run for it!" she laughed back, putting everything she had taken out back into the bag she took it from.

"We can make a run for it, but Andrew can't," I replied, picking my notes up from the coffee table and sorting them in my hands, "so what's the plan?"

"It's insane," Heather giggled, plugging the hard drive Glow Woman had given us into her computer.

"Insane is all we've got at this point."

I set the notes down in a neat stack on the table and took a seat next to Heather, intently watching her as she hacked her way through the encryption on the hard drive. It looked like some basic firewall that really wasn't meant to stop you from accessing the information. Probably because it's been guarded by an entire army of superheroes, if you managed to successfully steal it you probably wouldn't get far enough to crack it anyways. An encryption, even if it is weak, is sure to slow you down long enough for heroes to grab you. I doubt even we could pull off stealing this thing, and we're the best you'll find.

"What's on there?" I asked, moving closer to get a better look at the files Heather had finally broken into.

"It looks like diary entries, hundreds of them," Heather mumbled back, "there's one here that has a time stamp matching the time of the Hero Villain War."

She clicked on the file, quickly scanning through its contents before moving on to another one. Everything was either a mission report, casualty list, or kill confirmations on villains. Not much of the information was new or relevant, except for one file. The time stamp perfectly matched the halfway point of the war, when the heroes had finally regained the upper hand. The file was an executive order signed by Power Woman herself. It ordered, and approved, the construction of a secret nuclear weapons base under the city of Chicago. If for some reason the villains were to regain the upper hand, the heroes would have a surefire way of ending the war.

"The base wasn't discovered during the war. It was built. By the NSL," Heather whispered in shock.

"So they built an insanely dangerous nuclear facility, it can't be that bad can it?" I chuckled. My jaw dropped when Heather opened the next file.

"They sold it to the mayor of Chicago when the war ended. And then Black Ice bribed the mayor to sign the deed over to him," she read slowly, "Power Woman went out to stop him when they found out about the transaction."

"Then he killed her."

"How in the hell did he get the money to bribe the mayor?"

"Maybe he sold it for thirty cents and a chicken nugget," I laughed. Heather let out a frustrated sigh and downloaded the information we needed onto her laptop, wiping the hard drive of everything else.

"We know where the last two pieces of the battery are, where the base itself is, and that the NSL are going to probably try and arrest us tomorrow," she grumbled, "and we can't just run now and leave Andrew behind."

"And what if they arrest us? Those cells are made to contain super villains. We have no hope of escaping," I said quietly. I took the stack of notes into my hands and stared at Heather, unsure of what we should do next.

"The best we can do is give them fake locations and hope there's a way to break out," Heather replied simply. She set her computer down onto the table and flopped back onto the couch, her blonde hair sprawling itself around her like a messy golden blanket. I sat in silence with her and stared at the stack of papers in my hands, taking one last glance over everything and eyeing a box of matches sitting on the kitchen counter.

"If they're going to arrest us, I'm not leaving anything behind for them to find," I said as I stood up and walked across the room. I threw my piles of notes into the sink and lit up a match, tossing it in and waiting for the papers to catch before throwing in a second and third one. Heather's computer has unbreakable firewalls and several fail safes that will do more than just hurt any superhero intruders that try to break into it.

Heather smiled and looked up at the ceiling. Her arm had mostly healed so she figured it was time to take off the splint. We were mostly patched up from our run in with Black Ice, the giant cut along Heather's cheek had finally healed and my black eye was mostly faded. It hasn't been the first time the crap's been beaten out of us, and I certainly hope it won't be the last.

But I learned an important lesson that day. Don't forget to aim for the head.