Zing in: Two Million Dollars

Two Million Dollars

Late summer, 1961:

Public Secret Message

Sunday evening was Lee Han’s favorite time to watch television. She didn’t know if they did it deliberately, but the four Chicago TV stations staggered their local news just enough so that whenever her alter ego, Zing the Queen of Quick, made the news, she got to watch it four times. The independent station WGN usually gave local news first.

Zing had pulled off a big heist at a bank in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook yesterday. The newly created Chicago Police Mystery villain Apprehension Team (MVAT) headed by Tony Spinelli and working with Chicago’s resident mystery heroes Adventurine, Red Rocket, and Tom Atomic, was making it more difficult for her to operate in the city itself, but fortunately, the nearby suburban police forces hadn’t gotten the message yet. WBN led off with the Zing story.

Lee’s power normally automatically altered the speed of her perceptions to match her current activity. When she was moving at super-speed, she needed to react at super-speed as well. But when she was talking to another person or watching television, it would be tedious to be reacting hundreds of times faster than normal, waiting subjective hours between words of a conversation, or watching the TV screen being slowly drawn line by line, dot by dot. In fact, it was worse than useless to her to watch TV in super-speed mode, which she called ‘slow time’; yet for some reason, after a few minutes of watching the local news, her perception slipped into slow time mode.

And she was stunned at what she saw. There was a message displayed on her TV screen, flashing by so fast that a normal human would never see it, but which was clearly visible to her super-speed reflexes.


Somehow, someone was sending a message over a commercial TV channel, literally in view of over a million people, and yet it was a secret message that was directed at one specific person — and she was the only one of that million who could receive that message. It was an astounding feat of technology.

She made the call from a pay phone.

“You’ll pay me two million dollars for a single robbery?” Zing was incredulous. “You want me to rip off Fort Knox or something? Or are you just crazy?”

“I assure you, Zing, I am not crazy.” He didn’t sound crazy, but how could you tell over the phone? “I want something very much, and I can’t think of a better way to get it.”

“So why don’t you steal it yourself?” she wanted to know.

“What I want is guarded well against theft by normal humans, but you should have no problems,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Are you interested?”

“Tell me more!”

In February earlier this year, after the Alliance of Mystery Heroes had foiled an alien invasion of Earth and then inducted some new members, built-in self-destruct mechanisms had destroyed much of the alien technology. However, Red Rocket had battled a squad of robots on the University of Chicago campus, and one of these robots had failed to self-destruct. This robot had been recovered by the military and was now being studied at a top-secret military research facility not far from Chicago. Most of the technology, though somewhat advanced beyond that of current Earth standards, was understandable to researchers, but so far the robotic power supply had refused to reveal any secrets. Except that it delivered a seeming endless stream of power from a package about the size of a deck of cards.

Editor’s note: The Alien Invasion story has not been completed yet, you can see a synopsis here: Alien Invasion

“I want that power supply!” The anonymous voice was strident with determination.

“I want that two million dollars!” Zing agreed with equal determination. “I think we have a deal.”

Incoming!

“Colonel De Beauchamp, the IRT screen shows something out on the lake approaching at about the speed of sound!” the Air Force radarman told his new commanding officer. “It seems to be man-sized. I’ve never seen anything move that fast over water!”

Of course, until a couple of weeks ago, when Colonel Charles (Charlie Champion) De Beauchamp had come out of retirement to take command of this secret underground research station, disguised under a fully functional Nike missile base on Chicago’s lakefront, the technician had never seen anything like De Beauchamp’s IRT (integrated radar technology) detector, either. De Beauchamp had told him that it used a combination of pulsed Doppler radar, continuous wave radar, and frequency modulated radar, each operating on a different frequency range, then used special analog signal-integration techniques to produce a detection device that was an order of magnitude more sensitive than standard military radar, though the range was limited to around fifteen miles. It was an advanced variation of an electronic detector the colonel had invented during World War II.

“If it’s coming here, it will be here in a minute at that speed!” De Beauchamp exclaimed. He slapped a switch; alarms went off, and armored doors started rumbling closed throughout the underground base.

Invasion

Zing raced across the surface of Lake Michigan. She was regretting her choice of approach. The choppy waves prevented her from reaching her top speed, and she was throwing up a trail of frothy mist behind her that was forty feet tall and could be seen from a mile away. But even at this reduced speed, it would only take her about six seconds to cover that mile. So she was going in anyway.

A couple of soldiers stationed at the base managed to fire rifles at her as she rushed ashore, but there was no organized attempt to stop her. She came to a stop on top of one of the silos, vibrated her body until she fell through the solid cap, then slowed her fall by stomping her feet at super-speed, building up a cushion of air below her. She spun around and located the elevator door, vibrated through it, and dropped farther down the shaft. At the bottom she vibrated out of the shaft, and she found herself in the entrance room for the secret military research facility.

It was a small room. The upper half of the left wall was a glass window, with a guard sitting in a security booth on the other side, while one wall was the door to the elevator, and another wall was an armored door that could only be opened by the guard. Green vapors were jetting into the room from small nozzles set in the ceiling.

“If you put all your dates to sleep like this, I’ll bet you aren’t very popular!” Zing laughed at the guard in the booth.

She laid her palm against the bulletproof window and tapped it with her fingers at super-speed, setting up conflicting hypersonic vibrations within the thick glass sheet and shattering it almost instantly. She touched the guard gently on the temple, and he fell unconscious. The steel door to the guard booth was locked from the outside, but she easily vibrated through it. Down the hall and around the corner, avoiding a handful of bullets and knocking out the three soldiers in her way, and she came to the bulkhead door to the lab section of the facility. She tried to vibrate through it, and was thrown violently backward by the electric charge running through the iron door. She was knocked back against the wall, where she slid to the floor, stunned.

The door slid open, and a figure in a brown leather costume with an emblem of the full moon on his chest and a black leather flying helmet with the goggles down, strode through. “You’ll come no farther, young lady. I suggest you surrender now and save us both some trouble.”

“You can’t be the real Captain NightOwl! He’s only a comic-book character!” she barely managed to gasp in stunned surprise.

“I’m Captain Moonlight, and I assure you, I’m not a comic-book character,” he said.

He fired a strange-looking pistol, which shot a thin line of highly flexible metal with a hook on the end at Zing. With a practiced flip of his wrist, the line wrapped once around Zing’s ankles and hooked onto itself.

“I’d advise you not to struggle too much. The multi-line will automatically tighten if you do. It won’t constrict enough to cause damage, but it might become painful,” the tall, athletically trim hero warned the still-woozy Queen of Quick. He pulled a set of handcuffs from his utility belt and strode confidently forward.

“So sweet of you to worry about me. But don’t think this thing will hold me!” She started kicking her feet, as if she were trying to do the flutter kick; even though she couldn’t move her feet very far, she moved them at super-speed, and the multi-line broke almost instantly. Zing whipped her hand up and around, catching Britian’s Ace with a backhand across the chin. Even though he saw it coming, she was too fast; he was unable to dodge, and he spun around backward and slammed into the wall. As he slumped to the floor, she jumped to her feet and zoomed through the door.

The next room also ended in a bulkhead door. Zing wasn’t going to get zapped again. Just before she reached the door, she dived forward and vibrated her body through the door, making sure not to touch the walls on either side. She passed through safely, changed direction, and counted doors along this corridor; the third door on the right was the electronics lab. It, too, was blocked by an electrified bulkhead, and she dived through that bulkhead as well. Now she was in the electronics lab, which was where she ought to find the power supply.

It was a big room full of equipment. She realized that big row of cabinets with reels of magnetic tape on the front, the lower half covered in switches and blinking lights, must be a computer. There were carts with boxes on them, with screens that looked like 1940s TV sets, and the bench tops were covered with metal chasses supporting vacuum tubes, wires, and other components. There were tools, coils of wire, and boxes of components everywhere. It wasn’t going to be easy to find what she was looking for.

She did a quick search of the room and saw several devices that resembled the description she had been given — a shiny box about the size of a deck of cards with several terminals for attaching cables. They all had cables attached, and she wasn’t about to touch something else that would give her an electric shock and knock her on her butt. She found some heavy rubber gloves, picked up a wire cutter, and started cutting these boxes loose; she would take them all with her just to be sure she got the right one.

Captain Moonlight moaned as he sat up. ‘I must be getting old, he thought sadly. She telegraphed it, I saw it coming, and I still couldn’t dodge. Even with her speed, fifteen years ago I know I could have dodged in time.’ How was he going to stop this super-fast villainess? He was pretty sure a couple of dry ice pellets from his all-purpose pistol could freeze her into a block of ice, but he’d already decided not to use the freeze pellets; encasing her in a block of ice would almost certainly cause major damage to her exposed arms and legs via either ice burns or frostbite. The multi-line had been ineffective; he’d never seen it snapped that way before. She’d been stopped by an electrical shock — maybe he could make use of that. And maybe the multi-line could be effective after all.

He examined the multi-line — the break was clean. He picked up the grapple hook and touched a hidden release button, and the short piece of wire still attached dropped away. He inserted the end of the unbroken line into the hook, touched the release again, and the multi-line was as good as new again, though a couple of feet shorter. He reached under his cap and pulled the alien power supply from a pouch on his belt, adjusted a dial on the box, and wrapped the close end of the multi-line around one of the terminals. Now whatever he touched with the hook would receive a nasty, but not fatal shock. Then he headed for the electronics lab.

Round 2

Zing was moving very cautiously, though still faster than a normal human. A couple of times when she’d reached into an apparatus to cut wires, there had been sparks arcing among the components, startling her, but the gloves had protected her. She was just about to cut the last box out, when the table in front of her flashed and glowed in the shape of the Moon, projected by the all-purpose pistol. She whirled and blazed into a super-speed attack, and came to a halt almost instantly when the entire room was plunged into darkness by a blackout bomb, again launched from the pistol. She didn’t dare run through the crowded room at super-speed when she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t take the risk of vibrating as she ran — the underground facility had been carved out of bedrock, and she didn’t want to blindly run through a wall and into the bedrock. She couldn’t see when she was vibrating through solid matter, and she wouldn’t know which way to go.

Before she could react again, the hooked end of the multi-line hit her just below the neck and discharged an electric shock. Captain Moonlight had calibrated the current so that it should knock her off her feet, at least, but she felt it less than a spark she would generate by scuffing her feet on a thick carpet on a dry summer day. She grabbed the line with both hands and gave it a super-speed yank, and Captain Moonlight stumbled into her. She tapped him on the side of the head.

“Stay knocked out this time!” she admonished him sharply, though he couldn’t hear. She waved her arms at super-speed and blew the blackout vapor out of the room. She quickly searched the British Ace’s body and found the real power supply, then headed back out of the facility using the emergency stairways instead of the elevator shaft. By now, the other soldiers on the base had been alerted to an intruder, but they had little chance of stopping Zing, who ran past them at invisible super-speed. By the time they realized she was coming at them, she was almost a mile away.

Melodramatic Meeting

She got it — two-million dollars in one-hundred dollar bills — and what an incredible pain in the ass it had turned out to be.

“I’ll call you tomorrow and give you a location. When you get there, you’ll pick up an envelope with directions to another location, where I’ll meet you to make the exchange,” she told the mysterious voice on the phone.

“Such melodrama,” he’d replied with amusement. “This will be simpler if you let me–“

“I don’t trust you,” she’d said, cutting him off. “We’ll do it my way!”

“Of course, my dear. But we will need to work together to make this swap. I suggest you make the meeting place close to home, and…”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She hung up on him. Since she could get home in seconds from anywhere, there was no way she was going to set up a rendezvous close to where she was living; she wasn’t going to give away any clues about her life to anyone.

She had no plans for a double cross, but she still wasn’t sure whether this whole deal was an elaborate plot to capture her. She figured she would invisibly follow his car as it followed her directions, so she could be sure that nobody was following them or would be waiting for them at their destination, and when he reached the meeting point, she would zoom in, drop off the power supply, stuff the cash into her knapsack, and zoom away. She’d run to a safe place and count the cash to make sure she hadn’t been cheated, and if she had been, well, she’d be back before he had time to get away.

But she’d never stopped to think just how large a package of two-million dollars would be.

She couldn’t know it, but her mysterious contact wasn’t planning on a double-cross, either, and was rather amused at her precautions. This power supply was an important part of his future plans, and he figured that in his anticipated future career, he might encounter Zing again. He’d help her out a little bit now, even though she didn’t know she needed help, and he threw in some precautions of his own.

The next night, a trusted confederate hopped into a rented station wagon and drove to the Oak Street Beach, where he picked up an envelope at a closed concession stand — an envelope Zing the Queen of Quick had dropped there only a second before he arrived. And shortly afterward, he pulled into a parking lot near Grant Park, where he got out of the car and hopped up on the hood to sit down.

Zing zoomed up. “I’ve got the box. Where’s the money?”

“I guess you’re Zing, huh?” the driver asked. “Check da back seat of da car.”

She looked in the window and was stunned. There were bundles of hundred-dollar bills that filled the back seat from side to side, more than six inches deep. There was no way she could get even half that into her pack.

“Holy moley!” she exclaimed in annoyance. “How am I supposed to carry all this?”

“Not my problem, though you could leave it wit me,” he chuckled. “But da boss put t’at steamer trunk in da back for you, if you want. It’s got wheels. Just give me da box, you pile in da money, and we’re t’rough here.”

“How do I know it’s all there?” she demanded.

“You can count it when you put it into da trunk. Just don’t touch da t’ing on da floor of da car; it’s a bomb. Won’t go off ‘less you touch it or I let go of t’is t’ing.” He showed her the small device he was holding in his right hand.

“But… that would kill you, too!” She was stunned that anyone would carry around something that could kill him.

“Well, if t’is deal don’t go down right, da boss’ll kill me, anyways. He’s payin’ me big bucks for t’is, so I decided to take da risk. We should hurry, t’ou — t’is neighborhood ain’t all t’at safe at night.” He didn’t really seem worried, but then, who knew what would bother a guy who would agree to carry around an armed dead man’s switch? “So, gimme da box, huh?”

Zing was somewhat bemused, and she gave him the box. He put it into his pocket, then carefully opened the tailgate so she could get the trunk out of the back of the car. At super-speed, she counted the bills in one packet — there were exactly one hundred bills, each of them a one-hundred-dollar bill. A little super-speed calculation told her there should be two hundred packets total. It took about five seconds to ruffle through each packet and then pack them all into the trunk. When she was finished, the trunk — which was large enough for her to curl up in comfortably if she’d wanted — was full.

Her contact threw the device to the ground. “We got thirty seconds to get outta here, lady. Nice doing business wit’ you!” And he ran off into the night.

She could easily have caught him, but if the car blew up, it would take HER money with it. Besides, so far her anonymous contact had played more than fair with her; she’d refused to listen to the potential difficulties in picking up two-million dollars, and even then, he’d thrown in free this wheeled trunk. She tried to pick it up — it weighed more than fifty pounds, which she could carry, but there was no way she could run with it. So she pushed it. And was a couple of blocks away when the car blew up.

Nothin' but Trouble!

She had to steer the trunk into an alley, because smoke was coming out from underneath it. She realized that the little wheels on the trunk had never been designed to move at high speeds, and they were starting to melt. She quickly cooled them off by using her hand as a super-speed fan; fortunately, the wind she generated blew out any flames as well. But she wasn’t moving that trunk any farther.

Zing could run home and be back here again in under five seconds — hardly time for anyone to steal her money. So that’s what she did. She filled her pack with bundles of cash and ran home, dumped the pack under her bed, and made several more trips. Finally, she had all her hard-earned money back home, and she fell into bed, exhausted.

But she couldn’t go to sleep. There was two-million dollars under her bed. What if someone broke into her apartment and stole it? She went to the kitchen for a cup of tea to calm down, but instead she kept flashing back into the bedroom at super-speed every few seconds just to check.

Constant super-speed activity took a lot of energy, and finally she collapsed into the bed and almost passed out. She slept fitfully for a few hours, then awakened. She lay in bed until the sun came up, fretting about protecting her money. When she finally got out of bed, she realized she’d never felt worse in her life.

‘Being rich is supposed to solve all my problems, not give me more!’ she thought disgustedly.

She went out for a bagel and coffee at the deli across the street, but before she got there, she had to rush back; how could she leave two million in cash unguarded? She realized she was going to have to figure out what she was going to do with her new fortune; she couldn’t go through life paranoid about leaving her apartment.

‘I can’t spend it at the places I usually shop. There’s no way they’ll let me buy breakfast for a buck twenty at the deli and pay for it with a c-note! Most of ’em don’t do a hundred dollars of business in a day.’ She knew that from experience, having checked out the registers at super-speed shortly after the mystical event that had brought her to this Earth. She tried to think of places where she could spend one-hundred-dollar bills. ‘A car dealer — but they’ll want to see my driver’s license, and if I try to deposit it, the bank will want to see my I.D.’

She hadn’t been carrying her driver’s license when an errant side effect of a magical spell had brought her to Eorth, and given her current lifestyle — mystery villain — she hadn’t bothered establishing a legitimate identity yet. It looked like she would have to do so now. To do that, she would have to overcome her paranoia about leaving her room. It would be difficult, but she had to do it.

Establishing an Identity

Lee Han had no idea how to go about setting up an identity. She vaguely remembered reading at least one story a few years ago in which the hero had needed to do something similar. She gathered up her courage and headed to the public library. Fretting the whole time about her unguarded fortune, she found the science-fiction section, which was absolutely deserted, and found to her relief that the same author existed on this world as her own. She spent the next few minutes rereading the entire collection of books by Robin A. Fineline at super-speed. Armed with what she’d learned, she developed a plan as she rushed back home to discover to her relief that her stash of cash was still untouched.

The next day, a small young Asian woman walked into a used clothing store in a rundown section of Chicago’s South Side. She was neatly groomed and clean, and her clothes were freshly pressed, but they were old, worn, and neatly patched, with ragged edges at the sleeves and hem. The manager figured she was here to look and dream — customers like her usually didn’t have money to spend.

“Can I help you?” she asked the young lady with an intimidating frown on her face.

The young woman smiled hopefully. “I need something to wear to a job interview, but I’ve only got ten dollars.”

The manager’s mood changed quickly. Ten dollars of sales would raise today from mediocre to pretty good, and it was always gratifying to help someone look better for a job interview. “I’m sure we’ll be able to help you.” She sensed there was more to this young lady’s story than what she’d heard so far.

And slowly, as she showed off some of last year’s most fashionable clothes — the best her store had to offer — the story came out. The young lady had run away from home, hoping to make it in the big city. She’d been living at the YWCA, finding money by begging on the street and running errands whenever she could. The manager got the impression of someone escaping an abusive home life, determined to make her way on her own, who had just been offered a fantastic break. The story aroused her sympathy; years ago she’d been in a desperate situation and gotten her own lucky break. The big problem this young lady had was, even after she had a nice outfit to wear to the interview, she was only seventeen years old. She needed an I.D. to prove she was old enough to work.

“Dearie, I know someone who can help you with that,” the manager suggested sympathetically. “Talk to Lefty, the bartender at the tavern down on the corner; tell him Maggie sent you.”

The cost of the new outfit somehow fell from ten dollars to only $8.50, which left the young lady enough to buy a good mid-afternoon lunch at Lefty’s.

Lunch at Lefty’s

Lunch was an adventure. Lefty’s Tavern was full of loud men and brassy women, definitely not the kind of place Zing would enter if she didn’t need to, but she walked in with confidence. She maneuvered through the crowd to an empty table, put down her bag, and sat down. Only a few seconds later, a man with greasy hair and a neat pinstripe suit was pulling out the other chair.

“Hey, baby, how’s about I buy you a drink?” he asked as he sat down.

She picked up a napkin to cover her hand, stood, and pulled the cigar from his mouth, throwing it to the floor. “Not interested. And I can’t stand those smelly, disgusting things. Leave me alone.”

The crowd in the taproom was stunned into silence until the greasy man erupted. He stood up instantly, knocking his chair backward. “You shouldn’t ought to have done that, witch,” he hissed. “Now I’m gonna cut you!” He pulled out a knife.

“You’re lucky you didn’t spill anything on my bag,” she responded, seemingly totally unconcerned with the knife. “You could save yourself a lot of pain if you go away now.”

Instead of saying anything, he kicked the table toward her. She easily stepped aside and dropped into a fighting crouch.

“That Asian kayrati crap won’t do ya no good, sister. This here is an all-American knife fight!” He lunged, and she easily knocked his arm aside, continuing the motion into full spin and delivering a side-kick to the side of his chin, about six inches above her head, moving almost faster than he or anyone in the bar could see. The force of the kick snapped his head around, lifted him off his feet, and threw him backward, and he crashed down on the next table, unconscious.

“I think I’ll sit at the bar instead,” she said to the room in general. She wasn’t bothered again, and she was able to make the necessary arrangements with Lefty in peace. Then she rushed home to make sure the bundles of cash were still undisturbed under her bed.

Top Dollar Information

Colonel Tony Spinelli, commander of the Chicago Police Mystery villain Apprehension Team, got a phone call later that day.

“Spinelli.”

“Colonel, it’s Sergeant MacRae from South Side precinct,” he heard.

“C’mon, Mac, it’s Tony. Just ’cause I’m downtown now doesn’t change us working together for more than ten years out there.”

“Sure, thanks, Tony. Say, you remember Wylie the wino? He just rushed in here and said he has some important information for you about that Zing dame. Says you’re paying for stuff like he’s got.”

Tony had put the word out that any information useful in the ongoing investigation of Zing was worth money, and there were police analysts wading through the flood of tips that had come in. He’d done business personally with Wylie in the past, so he figured it was worth talking to him today. “Thanks, Mac. Put him on.”

“Heya, Tone! Good ta talking t’you… again.” Wylie was unusually coherent today. “How mush you payin’? Wha I got t’day ish worth… top dollar, ya know!”

“We’re getting a lot of tips, Wylie, and most of them aren’t paying off. Suppose you let me decide. If your news is worth anything, I’ll have Mac pay you on the spot. If that’s not good enough, you’ll have to come downtown and talk to an analyst.”

Wylie thought it over for a few seconds. Spinelli had always been right with him in the past. He knew his news was big, and he wanted cash now; going downtown would take hours, and besides, by the time he got back, he’d be sober. He decided to take a chance on Spinelli.

“I wush at Leffy’s earl’er, ya know, sittin at… the bar, gabbin’ with Leffy.” Meaning, Tony knew, he was trying to bum a drink. “Dis dame walked in — pretty short, Far East type, ya know? Soon’s she sat down, she got inna beef with Jack da Knife, ‘member him?” Tony did; whenever there was trouble in the South Side precinct, the Knife was always one of the usual suspects.

“Jack’s gotta be twice her shize, and he pulled his shiv, ya know? Din’t bot’er ‘er none, though. Fasht’r’n you can shay it, ya know, da Knife is flyin’ t’rough da air, out cold b’fore he hitsh the ground!”

Tony stopped him and asked some questions. Wiley hadn’t seen the actual fight, but he’d heard people talking about it. She’d apparently kicked him in the head, using one of the Asian fighting techniques. Wylie insisted it was karate, but he didn’t know karate from caramel.

“Thanks, Wylie — you’re right, this is top-dollar stuff. Anything else?”

Wylie had overheard the negotiations at the bar, and he knew when the lady was scheduled to return to pick up her new documents. But he wasn’t telling… yet.

“How mush? Man’sh gotta eat, ya know?” he demanded.

‘More like drink!’ Tony thought to himself. “Eight bucks,” he replied.

“No way! I t’ought we was buddies, ya know? This has gotta be worth at least ten!” Anger helped Wylie sound more coherent.

“OK, ten bucks. Now give.” Tony had been prepared to pay up to fifteen, but he felt that as a public servant, he had a duty to be frugal with taxpayer money.

“Two-thirty tomorrow afternoon.”

Tony asked him to put Mac on the phone, and made arrangements for Mac to pay Wylie out of petty cash, then send a voucher to his attention. After he hung up, he sat for a moment, gloating, then got down to planning. This was the first big break for the Mystery villain Apprehension Team. He had a lot of work to do before tomorrow afternoon. He hoped Tom Atomic and Red Rocket weren’t booked up yet — their inventions would help trap the villainous Queen of Quick; they deserved to be in on the capture.

Caught in the Act

Lee entered Lefty’s Tavern the next day and walked up to the bar, and when Lefty came to take her order, she dropped a c-note on the bar. He handed her an envelope. “Nice doin’ bizness wit’ ya; hope you get the job!” He smiled to let her know that he knew no real job was involved.

At that instant, the front door banged open, and a stream of police officers started pouring into the taproom. They all carried strange objects: a six-inch parabolic reflector with a stud holding a silvery ball at the focal point, mounted to a pistol grip, which they immediately aimed at Lee. She couldn’t have known this, but infrared sensors in the men’s weapons instantly locked onto her body heat. If she moved, the weapons would be triggered automatically, with electronic speed — much faster than a normal man could fire. Colonel Spinelli was one of the first into the room, and he immediately started barking.

“Everybody be calm. We’re the Chicago Police Mystery villain Apprehension Team, and we’re after a dangerous villain. The rest of you are safe and will be allowed to leave shortly.” Silence filled the taproom. Lee smiled calmly, apparently unconcerned with any attempts to capture her. Tony turned to her. “Zing, you are under arrest. Please come peacefully. The weapons we are carrying have been specially designed to stop you; please don’t make us use them.”

Zing disappeared. The weapons fired instantly. Somehow they projected a kind of force-field. It was invisible to normal humans, but with her reflexes now super-speed-attuned, the Queen of Quick was able to see what looked like a dim fog spreading slowly through the room, somehow produced by the parabolic projectors. She moved forward until she actually touched the fog, and was stunned to realize that she couldn’t pass through it, even though her internal vibrations would allow her to pass through solid matter. She turned and ran for the back of the tavern, passing through the bar, the display wall with hundreds of bottles, and into the office. She was dismayed to realize that the office was also already filling with the restraining fog.

Tony Spinelli wasn’t some rookie who would leave the rear exit uncovered, and there were MVAT cops surrounding the entire building. However, due to the other buildings nearby, the coverage wasn’t as complete as it should have been. This probably wouldn’t have mattered, as the expanding fog would quickly fill in the gaps before the Queen of Quick could find them, but no one had expected her to be able to actually see the retaining field. She picked the largest such gap and raced through the outer wall.

And she almost dashed herself unconscious when she ran into Tom Atomic. He reacted instantly, wrapping both arms around her, and she was trapped. This was new; she’d escaped from him in a similar situation in the past simply by vibrating out of his embrace.

She tried hitting him thousands of times in a split instant, but the armor cloth of his costume just stiffened in response, and she was hurting her hands, not him. She tried to wriggle free, but he’d wrapped her up so well she could barely move. She tried furiously to vibrate free, using rhythms she’d never tried before, with no effect. She drummed her feet, hoping to build up air pressure underneath her and lift them both into the air, but he was too heavy. By now, she was getting a little winded; she relaxed out of super-speed mode.

“Why, Tom Atomic — no gentleman would grab a lady he hardly knows like this!”

“You’re no lady, lady!” he said, grinning at her. “Neat new trick, isn’t it? — a force-field you can’t pass through, reinforcing the costume. Built it myself, too.” He’d upgraded the circuitry in the magnetic controllers New Quest had invented as Dr. Lambda. “Sorry about the tight squeeze you’re in, but you should know that nobody escapes from Tom Atomic!”

“Sorry, Tommy-boy. I can’t say it’s been fun,” she said sweetly. “But you’re not the only one with a new trick.” She concentrated, and her body released an extremely powerful electrical shock. Even through the insulation of his costume, it jolted Tom Atomic, causing his muscles to spasm and easing his grip for just an instant — but that’s all Zing needed. An instant later, Tom was back in control of his reactions, and Zing was gone.

Lee rushed back to her room; the cash was still there. But now she had other things to worry about. That last escape was too close. If she hadn’t just discovered a new power, they would have had her.

Zing’s New Trick

Night before last, Lee had been wondering why she’d been knocked on her can the day before by an electrical charge in the secret facility under the Nike base, and then only instants later, she’d been virtually invulnerable to the powerful electrical shock Captain Moonlight had delivered. She took apart her phone and did a little cautious experimenting.

A few years ago, back on her original world when she and her folks were still in San Francisco, a technician from the phone company had come to their house to remove one of the older model wall-phones, the kind with a crank, to put in a new dial phone. He had left some exposed wires while he’d been talking to her mother, and she’d touched one of those wires and been knocked across the room. The technician had explained to her that one of the phone wires carried about fifty volts DC that was used to ring the bell and make the phone ring, and he had warned her to stay away from exposed wires, since that voltage was backed up by enough current to hurt her badly. But it hadn’t. Her parents had threatened to sue the phone company, and they’d received free telephone service for a year.

This night, she worked up her nerve and touched the exposed wire — and she was knocked on her can. When she’d recovered from the jangles the shock had produced, she touched it again, and this time she barely felt it. It was definitely very interesting. She had to stop and think about this for a while. A half-hour later, she’d come to no conclusions, so she tried the experiment again. She got a big jolt, but not nearly as big as before. She tried again, and no shock at all.

Lee always thought better when she was running, so she went out for a run. She had a theory by the time she came back. Perhaps her body could absorb electricity, and when she was charged up, she was more or less immune to further electricity. But the charge leaked away over time. That explained what she’d observed so far, but she wondered if there be more to it. Could she somehow make use of the electrical charge in her body, maybe make it discharge with a powerful spark, rather than simply leaking away? She headed back to her apartment; she’d touch the wire again, get a charge, and see if she could learn more. But she was surprised when she touched the wire and didn’t get the expected shock. The charge that she got earlier should have worn off by now, so why was she still charged up?

She tabled that question for a few minutes and concentrated on the discharge question. She didn’t know exactly how to go about it, but by moving at super-speed, she could try a lot of different things in a short time. She soon found out that by concentrating, she could release her excess charge instantly in a lightning-like spark. If only it wasn’t so painful to acquire that charge.

The next morning, she’d gone out for a run again, and when she came back, she started experimenting again. And she was surprised when she didn’t get a shock; somehow her run had charged her up.

She wasn’t totally sure of the mechanism, but she knew the results. By running at super-speed, her body acquired a massive electrical charge. Or she could charge herself up by touching a hot wire. If she concentrated, she could release this charge as a small lightning bolt. Or the charge would leak away if she didn’t discharge it violently. And while she was charged she was immune to further electrical shocks. The only thing she wasn’t sure of was why she’d been vulnerable to that shock in the research facility; she’d just finished running at super-speed for miles across Lake Michigan. Maybe that first spark had somehow activated her power.

Even with her new power, she’d almost been captured. With the Mystery villain Apprehension Team, along with the entire Chicago police force and the city’s three resident mystery heroes all gunning for her, she decided it was time to leave town. But where could she go?

The two-million dollars — well, now it was actually $1,999,900, but who’s counting? (well, LEE was counting, for sure!!) — still weighed heavily on her mind, as she tried to figure out the best place to go. Where could she spend two million in cash without raising any eyebrows? When she said it that way, the answer was obvious.

“Las Vegas, here I come!”