"Escape From the Daleks of New York" - Part Three

 

Part Three

            Once the Junior Entertainment Manager aboard the starliner Alaska, Oswin Oswald was now a literal shell of her former self. Sometime during the period she was stranded on the Dalek Asylum, she was converted into one. Even though she managed to retain her human consciousness, believing she had set up camp in the cockpit of the Alaska, it was all a delusion to hide the nightmare that she had become in reality.

            Then she met a man with a bowtie – he called himself “The Doctor.”

            He helped her to see what she had become and realize that she didn’t have to succumb to the conversion. She was still Oswin Oswald in consciousness, something the Daleks could never take away from her.

            When the Dalek Asylum was blown into oblivion, Oswin thought she had perished with the rest of the defunct Daleks. But something pulled her away…away from the asylum…away from death…away from reality itself. She would come to discover that something to have been a dimensional rift that opened during the explosion and transported her and several other Daleks across the multiverse. She ended up with a faction of Daleks dedicated to erasing universes that they deemed imperfect into the Void.

            She relayed all this information to the Watterson siblings, though Gumball and Darwin remained skeptical due their previous experiences with Daleks. “This feels way too much like a trap,” Gumball said. “And this ‘Void’ thing – how come we’re just now hearing about it?”

            “Yeah,” Darwin concurred with his brother. “Cara’s never mentioned it to us, and she’s fought the Daleks for a lot longer than us.”

            “Maybe she’s just now hearing about it herself,” Anais suggested.

            Gumball shook his head. “All the more reason not to take what this Dalek…”

            “Oswin,” Anais corrected him.

            “Ugh!” Gumball moaned. “Alright. All the more reason not to take what Oswin says at face value. Let’s at least wait and see what Cara thinks about this.”

            “Well, I trust Oswin’s intel,” Anais said. “It sounds credible enough to me.”

            “YOU MENTIONED A TARDIS,” Oswin recalled to the Watterson siblings. “IS THE DOCTOR WITH YOU?”

            Anais raised a confused brow. “Who’s the Doctor?”

            Gumball and Darwin knew the answers to both Oswin and Anais’s inquiries. But, before the boys could answer either of them, the windows to the diner shattered and the floorboards busted from underneath its foundation. Oswin and the Watterson siblings saw it was the pack of vagrants that they thought to have eluded earlier.

            Oswin fired her gunstick, managing to exterminate quite a few.

            Unfortunately, the ones that came through the floorboards were successful in snatching up Darwin. “HELP!” the fish-boy cried.

            “DARWIN!” Gumball and Anais yelped.

            They did what they could to pull him away from the vagrants, but they weren’t strong enough. Darwin was sucked right into the hole in the floor to the horror of his two siblings.

            “WE HAVE TO LEAVE!” Oswin told them. “I’M SORRY!”

            Following her advice, Gumball and Anais reluctantly fled the penetrated diner with her. She acted as their protector on the way out, firing her death ray on the vagrants that attempted to break their escape.

            With Darwin’s kidnapping, it dawned on Anais and Gumball how they needed Cara’s help more than she needed theirs.

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            Cabbie graciously drove Cara, Snake, and the Superintendent to the location of the Brain. His place of residence looked to be the New York Public Library, left in a dismal state upon the city’s transformation into a prison. Cabbie parked his beloved cab a short distance from the entrance; he usually hated the thought of leaving it alone on the street, but he made a special exception for Snake and his new “friends.”

            As soon as they were at the door, Cabbie took off his shoe and knocked. While he did so, Cara glanced over at Snake and noticed him checking a device on his left wrist that appeared to be a unique wristwatch – except this one counted down instead of up. “What’s it counting down to?” she asked Snake, who only responded by shooting her the coldest stare she had ever been on the receiving end of. It was enough to make the Gladiator shiver and remark in her quirky way, “Sorry that I asked.”

            “Who is it?” a woman asked from inside Brain’s building.

            “It’s me,” Cabbie answered.

            “Who’s me?”

            “Cabbie.”

            “What do you want?”

            “A few people here want to see Brain. It’s important…”

            “No way, Cabbie!”

            “One of them’s Snake Plissken.”

            After a brief moment, the door unlocked and opened to reveal an alluring young woman with long dark, curly hair and wearing a purple-violet dress that bared her shoulders. She surveyed the four people in front of her, including Snake. “You’re Plissken?” she asked him, before her dark brown eyes settled on Cara and the Super. “And who’re these two?”

            “Associates of Snake,” Cabbie replied. “They all want to see Brain.”

            “Why?” the woman inquired, guardedly.

            “We want to meet the Duke,” the Superintendent told her.

            The woman glared over Snake, Cara, and the Super for a long moment. To Cara, she seemed like a very distrusting woman, which made a lot of sense, considering the setting. After her moment of glaring passed, she finally led them all into the building. She lit a torch to light their path through the dark and dreary interior.

            Along the way, Cabbie introduced them to the mysterious torch-bearing woman. “This is Maggie – Brain’s squeeze.”

            “His ‘squeeze’?” Cara found the title revolting.

            “Yeah,” Cabbie verified. “The Duke gave her to Brain just to keep him happy.”

            Now Cara was even more revolted. “This place really is a nightmare.”

            Maggie brought the group into the main hall of the former public library, which served as Brain’s private room. It was a cluttered mess of an area, containing machines used to make a substance Cara could only guess to be gas from the smell, diagrams of the entire city, including the 69th Street Bridge, and leftover library books that were in decent condition for text that hadn’t been read in decades.

            The man himself named “Brain” sat by a lit fireplace on a reading chair that doubled as a throne. He was a haggard-looking man with scraggy hair and a five o’clock shadow, wearing a filthy, overused lab coat and a black cloth tied around his neck. When Snake got a good look at him, he bitterly uttered a name, “Harold Helman.”

            “Who’s that?” Cara asked.

            “The ‘Brain’ in front of us,” Snake told her. “I knew him four years ago in Kansas City. You remember, Harold? You ran out on me. You left me sitting there.”

            Helman stood up from his chair, eyeing Snake. “You were late.”

            “We were buddies, Harold,” Snake hissed. “You, me, and Fresno Bob. You know what they did to Bob?” He suddenly drew his gun on Helman, prompting Maggie to draw her knife and advance on Snake.

            The Superintendent quickly stood between the two men before a bloodbath ensued. “Hold it! HOLD IT! Nobody cares about any of this! The universe cannot wait for you men to settle your petty squabble!”

            “Who’s this suit?” Helman indicated the Super.

            “I am the Superintendent,” he told Brain. “And I’m the man who’s going to save your reality.”

            Helman scoffed, glancing at Snake. “He’s joking, right? He’s completely out of his gourd!”

            “Maybe he is,” Snake said. “Or maybe you know something about those Daleks that the Duke doesn’t want anyone to know.”

            “Like what?” Helman retorted.

            “Like the machine you’re helping them build that will exterminate your whole world!” The Superintendent bellowed, his voice echoing throughout the entire abandoned complex.

            Maggie looked on Brain suspiciously. “What’s he talking about?”

            “He didn’t tell you?” The Super played on her suspicion. “Your boyfriend here has sold out humanity to the Daleks – more so than the Duke has.”

            “I didn’t sell out anyone!” Helman stormed. “The Duke and the Daleks forced me into designing that machine for them, only on the pretense that I, Maggie, and a select few would avoid being sent through the machine’s gateway and allow us to continue existing through other realities.”

            “If you believe any of that, then they should’ve called you ‘Moron’ instead of ‘Brain’,” Cara belittled. “The Daleks don’t do ‘salvation’! They’re going to leave you and everyone else in this reality to be thrown into the Void!”

            “And how do you know any of that?” Helman asked her.

            “Because I’ve dealt with the Daleks more times in the past than anyone standing in this room,” Cara said. “Believe me when I say that you’ve endangered yourselves by giving them exactly what they want.”

            Helman examined her face. The hardened expression on it told him that she was telling the absolute truth. Slumping back into his reading chair with his head in his hands, he muttered, “I’ve doomed us all.”

            Taking advantage of his guilt, Cara asked him, “Why did the Daleks abduct the President?”

            It took a moment for Brain to collect himself and respond. “He literally holds the key to the machine. A failsafe that those tech wizards up in D.C. figured out before I did. Once it’s inserted into the machine, it’s game over for the Daleks and, by default, the Duke himself.”

            With this information, Cara requested of Brain, “Arrange a special meeting between the Duke and me.”

            “The Duke just doesn’t meet with anyone – special or not,” Helman clarified.

            Cara smirked. “Oh, he will want to see the ‘gift’ you present to him.”

            “What gift?” Brain asked her, but she left the room before she could’ve given him a direct answer.

            Meanwhile, the Superintendent declared, “I’m going to make some arrangements of my own. With this special meeting between Cara and the Duke, I smell a potential sneak attack for my team.”

            “What team?” Brain asked him. “What are you people talking about?!”

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            Gumball and Anais ran through the New York streets for minutes, with Oswin lagging close behind them. The siblings – mostly Gumball, who was faster than even his slow-paced little sister – had to decrease their speed just to accommodate for Oswin’s bulky, sluggish Dalek chassis, which was designed more for patrol than elusion. Luckily, they were far enough away from the vagrants to stop and take a breath.

            “We have to go back for Darwin!” Gumball insisted.

            “We have to get back to the TARDIS!” Anais debated. “Gumball, we’re totally out of our element here! Without Cara, we’re as good as dead!”

            “What about Darwin?” Gumball asked her. “He’s as good as dead if we don’t—”

            BOOM!

            A powerful explosion erupted right where Oswin had strolled, knocking her off course and through a nearby brick wall. Gumball and Anais were shocked by the sudden attack, which was perpetrated by the most vicious-looking vagrant that they had seen roam the streets. His hair was spiky and his teeth were as sharp as a shark’s.

            “The traitor’s been eradicated,” he said. “Deal with the leftovers.”

            Anais recognized his chilling voice. It was the same one that she, Gumball, Darwin, and Cara heard over the radio earlier in the TARDIS – the one that broadcasted the memo regarding the abduction of the President.

            On his command, more vagrants emerged from the shadows, surrounding the defenseless Gumball and Anais.

            And then, out of nowhere, a green tiger leapt in and attacked one of the vagrants.

            “What the what?!” Gumball exclaimed.

            A few other vagrants were hit with a blast of fire that engulfed their bodies, making them flail around in agony and panic.

            The situation only got weirder when a white dog appeared between Gumball and Anais and barked at the vagrants standing in front of them. But it was no ordinary bark; it was like a sonic boom that emitted from its mouth, piercing through the vagrants’ eardrums and drawing blood out of them. They fell to the concrete in suffering.

            The lingering cronies were removed from the street by something faster than a speeding bullet, disappearing in the blink of an eye.

            All who remained was the sharp-toothed, spiky-haired vagrant, dumbfounded by the turn of events. “What is happening?!” he cried. “Who is responsible for all of this?! Show yourself!” In his ranting, he received a massive jolt of electricity through his body that rendered him unconscious.

            With all the vagrants incapacitated, Gumball and Anais watched as their saviors formed a line across from them. They consisted of a green-haired boy (the one who had transformed into the green tiger), a woman with fiery red hair and emerald-colored eyes, a masked man in a blue-and-black suit and armed with electric-powered batons, a boy wearing a black t-shirt with Superman’s insignia on it, and the white dog with the powerful bark.

            “W-Who are you guys?” Gumball stammered.

            “We’re the Titans,” the masked man answered.