Last week As you Recall…
Dr. Smith Watched.
He watched as they framed him.
He had been bunged into a secret tunnel, and, unable to move, he watched through a space no larger than a dime in the bricks of the wall.
There was more than one secret tunnel in this building, he was surprised no one had noticed that.
Dr. Smith watched as the Mad Doctor carefully stabbed himself in the leg, handed the knife to…Dr. Smith? He hazily watched as the other Dr. Smith ran down the tunnel, and once the other Dr. Smith had a ten-second head start he watched as the Mad Doctor screamed out in pain, so realistically anyone could have been fooled.
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| -=fig. 542: a frame job=- |
He then watched as Capt. Brown came running, being the good citizen that he was.
Then he watched as Capt. Brown came out on a stretcher, a knife in his chest, being consoled by the witnesses who had run in after him.
Immobile, he learned that he was being blamed for this whole mess, and that Capt. Brown's cronies were going to hunt him down, having taken over in the big man's absence.
He still couldn't move, and his nose was bleeding. Probably because his brain was.
No time to worry about that now, even though he was only running on 8% capacity, he still knew he needed to escape.
Feeling was beginning to come back into his extremities.
How anyone could think that he could handle a knife with any sort of accuracy in this condition was beyond him.
Oh, Fingers.
Good.
Lever?
Fingers, Lever.
Fingers, Lev–
Falling.
Pain.
Adrenaline.
Legs?
Legs!
Stand.
Dr. Smith found himself in a storage room.
Mirror?
Oh.
He saw his favorite white shirt covered in nose and/or brain blood.
And his hair was matted, like he had recently been underground.
There were jackets and hats hanging up, nice and orderly.
He took one of each, this was no time to look like a…zombie. He lurched out of the closet, as fast as his malfunctioning legs could carry him, out the bigger doors not farther off, and into the street.
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| -=fig. 543: ¡el fugitivo!=- |
Dr. Smith did a quick self-diagnosis;
Head: Pain
Body: Pain
That seemed to cover it.
He began to suspect two things, the Johnsson Bros. had hit him more than once, and the place that he had just left was no hospital.
The trap-doors and lack of serious medical treatment had given it away.
A thought worked it's way up the broken synapses,
The Brigadier.
James' Second in Command!
I'll go to him! He likes me.
Sort of.
A Second thought.
The brigadier who's currently out of the country?
That brigadier?
Scratch that, then.
-=-
The brigadier was out of the country, his first vacation in 7 years.
Given, nay, forced on him, in congratulations for beating the French Menace. He was at that moment in a beautiful, temperate string of public restrooms along the Mexican coast.
He drank the water. Bad luck.
-=-
Dr. Smith was the only man in the crowd with a baseball cap on.
He stuck out.
Successful fugitives don't stick out.
Dr. Smith wasn't sure his legs could carry him any sort of distance, so hat stores were out of the question.
In fact, going any further was out of the question too.
BANG!
RAT-ATAT-TAT!
Gunshots ring out, from close.
Run!
Hide!
Sewer Access!
Authorized personnel only!
-=-
"I see him." Said the sniper into his radio. "Brkzt–Shoot to Kill–brzkt" The radio answered back. The Sniper had reservations about this, Dr. Smith had been nice to him, It was hard to believe he had just gone craz—The small figure down below loosed a couple of shots into the crowd, and started monolouging.
Right then, Shoot to kill.
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| -=fig. 544: terrorism=- |
BANG! The Sniper swore, he had missed.
RAT-ATAT-TAT! Dr. Smith had no reason to swear, he had hit his target, which wasn't hard from the center of a crowd.
No one knew how he had gotten a tommy gun so fast, He couldn't have been out of the hospital for more than an hour.
BANG! The sniper got him that time. "Move in! Move in!" The sniper said to his radio.
Coppers in white helmets swarmed the square, the prostrate body of Dr. Smith lay on the tiles, bleeding.
The body was obscured by fleeing citizens, and when they cleared, the body was gone.
Confused coppers frisked the fleeing citizens, but they weren't concealing a body about their persons.
What the Coppers completely failed to notice was that the body had fallen quite easily in range of a small round drain cover, marked:
Sewer Access
Authorized personnel only.
The coppers may have missed it, but Karl Fester, third-in-command in the Legopolis City hierarchy, watching from a nearby roof, saw everything. Well, most everything.
He had never liked Dr. Smith, He had always resented him for being the Captain's favourite. Little did he know, Capt. Brown was Dr. Smith's only friend…anywhere.
But now he could get back at that little over-educated weasel, and with him gone, The Captain might even promote him to second in command.
Karl Fester had never liked Brigadier Black either.
"Flood the sewers." He said into his radio.
He ran that sentence back in his mind, interpreted it literally, then revised.
"With People, Flood the sewers with people. He went down into the Undercity. We have a man-hunt on our hands, gentlemen."
-=-
Captain James Brown lay in the sterilized white bed, feeling stupid.
How could he have missed it?
The Doc was Von TipRău! It was obvious!
Of course, He had only seen Von TipRău from afar, and then from behind.
And without his signature hat and cape, he certainly didn't look like himself.
The accent, hastily disguised, was a blind giveaway.
He consoled himself with the thought that he must have been pretty broken up about Dr. Smith, and that blinded him to…obvious things.
He now knew that the Dr. Smith that knifed him was not his Dr. Smith, but a Döppelganger, Von TipRău was good at that sort of thing.
If only he could communicate that to his team!
The Suxamethonium Chloride was making that difficult, however.
-=-
-=Best Regards=-
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Sir Jacob D. Fredrickson Esq.
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Chief Executive Officer of Early Bird Industries, Inc.
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