Scribbles and Bits

The Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang Heist (part three)
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: 10,800
Summary: Against medical advice, Biff takes a job far above his pay grade and everything goes wrong.
Notes: Part One is here; Part Two is here.  Takes place between Time to Go and The Road to Georgia. Biff is still recovering from the events of Bodily Reconstruction at the time. This story won the November, December, and January writing polls, and it was sponsored by the Patreon crew!



Biff gave me a look of indignant betrayal and spread his hands as though to demand an explanation. I didn’t have any, so focused instead on non-verbally conveying my wounded innocence and how this was totally not my fault. He didn’t seem to be buying it.

The rumbling vibration of a car driving into the garage reminded us of our priorities. Biff reached for the VCR to get the tape, forgot his stitches, and over-stretched. When he buckled over, I went for it, but in my rush--

Zap! The TV went dead.

Biff and I went through another brief, hasty pantomime—him strangling the air as much as he could when partially doubled-over in pain, me flailing with worry that I’d damaged the tape or Biff. Finally we stopped doing stupid things and Biff vanished us while I groped for him to start a proper communication channel.

Gloves meant the usual way didn’t work, and in the current situation, I didn’t dare take them off. I nearly busted his nose doing it, but at last got our foreheads touching, and the telepathy switched on.

“You said he’d be gone!/ow, fuck” Biff mentally snarled, but then he moved onto the plan: “Let’s beat his ass.”

“With what?”

Turns out that Biff, even crippled and unable to walk for long periods, still carried a sap in his boot as a matter of course; he sent me the mental image. “Look, we vanished, you got arms...” and then he reverted to nonverbal thought to give me a visualization of us beating Mark Love into concussion and bolting with all our stuff.

Well, I had to admit that would be by far the simplest solution, but,“No, Biff.”

Raw incredulity. “No? What you mean, no? We gotta load the car; my vanish won’t do fucking shit if he trips over all that shit up front--”

“You can’t do it, and I won’t. I’m a healer; I can’t hurt people anymore--”

Biff’s response was nonverbal and disdainful.

“I PROMISED! I’m a noon healer, and they put that stupid oil on my head, and I promised! And if you can’t handle that, then you shouldn’t have hired me!”

Silence for a moment… or rather, a quiet cognitive cog-turning that was too low and nonverbal for me to really make out. I figured Biff was thinking up a way to shut me up, shut me down, and get me on-board, but instead he just went, “Okay.”

That was it. No fight, no complaining. He didn’t even seem all that upset.

Before I could question it, he went, “So. What we gonna do?” and we tossed aside verbal thought as too slow and got down to nuts and bolts.

Our problems were dual. The first was the one Biff mentioned, getting ourselves and our loot out of the house and into the car, which was disguised and parked across the street. The other was more complicated: we had to insure Max Love didn’t have any remaining functional tapes or records of our presence in the house.

However I felt about Biff’s ability to pull off the first problem, I was the only person who could solve the second one. A random side-effect of my powers (or, more accurately, my lack of training) was that I was a walking electronic disaster, as demonstrated with the TV. I’d gotten better over the years, but now we needed my failings. Even if Max Love didn’t have the apartment bugged, he might’ve had back-up copies of the Mandy footage hidden somewhere in this house, and we didn’t have the time to find it. So I had to go through the whole house and destroy all the electronics, including Max’s computer and any back-up media around, and hope that did the job.

Biff wouldn’t be able to vanish me. He might’ve been able to sneak around invisible, but I needed to be able to see myself. So I would be on my own, while he tried to haul everything to the car that he could. (He claimed he could lug the tapes, as long as he did it one drawer at a time; I wasn’t sure I believed him, but didn’t have much choice.) Then I’d get out, pile into the car, and we’d make our escape. Vroom zoom avoided doom.

Well. In theory. If the car started.

Biff tossed me the mental map of the first floor, making sure to point out the gun safe, and I helped move the boxes of tapes out of the danger room; I couldn’t afford to destroy them by accident. Then Biff grabbed a drawer of tapes and vanished. Total elapsed time? Maybe a minute.

Time to get going. Max Love would be here any second, and I needed something big and loud to keep him out of the foyer and away from Biff. How fortunate that the rec room’s home entertainment center had been too large and heavy for me to move.

I heard a door open downstairs and a voice, deeply aggravated: “--rain! I know, in July! No, no, I can’t get out, the airport is a Chinese fire drill, just keep me in the loop while you’re there--”

Biff phased into view for a split second to give me a thumbs-up. Then he disappeared again and I shook my hands out and focused.

Normally, wrecking electronics wasn’t dramatic; they just died. But if I put some elbow grease into it, I could make it spectacular. And oh, I wanted fireworks.

The VCR started to smoke. Then the front panel burst off with a satisfying electronic bang!

“The heck? Shannon, let me call you back, nothing is going right this goshforsaken week...”

I was already running for the first floor.

Bedroom, office, dining rooms—I burned through them, doing a quick turn around the periphery, running my gloved hands over any gizmos, then moving on, all as quick as I could. The gloves made it a little more challenging, but fortunately, not impossible.

I almost got caught in the master bedroom and had to hide behind the bed, but fortunately, it looked like Max hadn’t quite figured out there were people in the house yet; he just thought entropy was gunning for him. Muttering furiously about the burglar alarm and the weather and everything else inconveniencing him, he stormed past without even looking, still in his work clothes and with cell phone in hand. I was relieved at his distraction until I realized he was getting dangerously close to the foyer.

I laid eyes on the stupid flat-screen Biff had so hoped for. Maybe I couldn’t lift it, but I could push it, and it hit the floor with a crash that thrilled the cockles of my delinquent soul.

“Who’s there?”

Close! Too close! I had no choice but to bolt from the room, banging past Max Love in the hall. He cried “the heck are you?” and tried to grab me, but it was his phone hand and I dodged. After a moment of indecision, I turned up the stairs. Max didn’t follow. He was heading in the direction of the master bedroom-- and the gun safe.

No time to worry about that now. I continued my dash through the second floor—I wasn’t sure if any back-ups would be there, but I didn’t want to risk it. This time, I tried to be quiet, and when I heard our mark tromp up the stairs, I hurled myself into the sewing room and hid in what looked like a customized storage closet, burrowing between the hanging rolls of fabric behind the door. While I prayed he’d be sloppy in his search, I gathered up electricity, just in case he wasn’t.

Wait. Electricity caused muscle spasms. If he had a gun in his hand, wouldn’t that just--

Too late. He was in the room. I held my breath.

He looked in the room, even the closet, but left the room without going through thoroughly. Whew.

I stayed there listening, but after a few seconds stopped hearing him.

Carefully, silently, I slipped out of the closet and into the sewing room. Evening was coming on and the already dim house was getting downright dark. Good; my night vision was surely better than his.

I peeked through the gap of the door hinge into the hall. Empty.

I got up on my toes, ears pricked, and slipped into the doorway. The hallway light was off, but when I glanced over, I saw Max Love at the mouth of the downward staircase, armed with a handgun and whispering into his phone.

His phone! I took the energy I’d been hold, focused, and blasted.

Lights burst. I heard a shot. Max Love yelped and dropped the phone as though it’d bitten him, and I sprinted past him for the third floor staircase; if I couldn’t go down, I had to go up. But now he was chasing me, shouting—not shooting yet, for love of his stupid McMansion, but I doubted that’d last much longer.

Now wasn’t the time to conserve energy; I sucked down everything available—the house’s power, the waning sunlight, ambient heat—and burned it all, destroying wiring, light fixtures, everything in range. Light bulbs popped; I heard something shatter, and I’m sure the house alarm went off, though I didn’t hear anything. It was getting hard to see now, but I kept running, relying on my mental map.

Where was my window, the one I’d left unlocked? At this point, it was my only way down. I saw a flash of beige, turned in... and found myself in the wrong room, with a nigh-identical layout but no window. For one foolish second, I looked around as though the window was hiding from me, until I got it together and turned around—only as Max lurched into the doorway, blocking my exit. He aimed his gun and I backed away, hands up; I wasn’t sure if he had the temperament to shoot me point blank, but he held the gun like someone who’d used it before.

“Don’t be stupid,” Max Love panted. “I will shoot you, and it will be legal.”

I stayed where I was, arms over my face. My breath was fogging the air, even though it wasn’t that cold; thankfully, he didn’t notice in the dark.

“Good. Let’s talk this out like civilized people.”

Not likely. I kept my head down and my arms up. Let him think I was scared; in the dark room and with shadows crawling towards me, he hadn’t gotten a good look at my face yet, and as long as he thought I was white, the situation might still be salvageable.

“There’s no way down from here. The cops will be here any minute. Nobody needs to get hurt,” Max wheezed. “Just stay there, and let’s just--”

I snuck a look up, and through the door, over his shoulder, across the hall, and through the room behind, I saw it. That useless, poorly made fake balcony.

Overlooking the pool.

My hands and arms were going numb. I was shivering with cold, even though I’d surely killed the AC by now. But still, I tried one last trick.

I absorbed all the remaining light I could, shut my eyes, and then blasted all the energy out again, hurling myself to the floor. Red seared against my eyelids, and I heard Max Love shriek, but I was already moving. My lungs burned. Come on, come on--

I plowed past Love on my hands and knees—another shot hit the wall, but he misjudged, aimed too high. I was starting to see static. Please, please let this house be as badly made as it appeared, please--

I lurched to my feet and smashed my work boot into the window. Glass shattered. The shutters burst open, caught on that stupid useless railing, and I kicked through them again, taking the whole mess off. I heard Max shouting, bulled through the rubble, and leaped.

For a moment, the air was whipping through my hair and clothes. And then--

Sploosh! Cool, chlorinated water.

I broke the surface, scrambled out of the pool, then sprinted for the car, squishing through the lawn, water gushing from my boots. Biff was already in the driver’s side, door shut and windows open, but he was gesturing frantically at the popped hood—the car hadn’t started, of course.

I didn’t so much stop in front of the car as collide with it. Hauling my gloves off with my teeth, I dug into the engine, grateful that my labors during the storm meant I knew what to grab and where. Despite my wetness, the engine itself was fine, and at some small electrical penalty to myself, I could jump it quickly.

Still, a quick jump took a very long time with a furious homeowner screaming at us (or his neighbors) from the top story. Just as well I couldn’t hear it over the engine revving and finally turning over, but I could see him aiming that gun. Not that his accuracy would be much good with that gun at this distance, but Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang was a pretty hard-to-miss target.

I slammed the hood shut, shouted, “drive!” and Biff, bless his criminal soul, presumed I knew what I was doing and goosed it. I latched onto the back like a tick as it went by and then it was just a race to get out before the cops arrived.

Thank god the community wasn’t gated and the neighbors were apathetic; we made it out fast without anyone following. A Vaygan driver par excellence, Biff turned on back road after back road, detoured every time he saw a jam, sink hole, or warning sign, changed the car vanish twice, and finally vanished us entirely once we were on an empty street, out somewhere near the fringe of the desert.

Once we were out in the desert proper and he was finally convinced we’d escaped, he pulled over on the shoulder and ditched the car vanish. Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang returned to all its dilapidated glory and I released my death grip on the back and stumbled away, soaking wet and covered in splinters and road sludge.

The view was actually pretty nice. The rainstorm had brought out a surge of desert flowers, all yellow, white, and purple, and the sunset was just finishing. If I hadn’t been so tired, I might’ve appreciated it more.

Biff did not appreciate the scenery. He was busy scowling in the driver’s seat, white-knuckling the steering wheel and pointedly not looking at me.

“You crazy fucking bitch,” he said when I opened the door.

I squished into the passenger seat, beaming.

“That was a fucking shit show. You coulda been shot, broken your crazy bitch neck on that fucking pool and then we’d’ve both been fucked up the ass--”

I kept grinning.

“The fuck so funny?” he snarled. “You think this funny?”

My cheeks ached. “No. No, I don’t think this is funny at all.”

He rolled his shoulders and glowered at me, waiting for an explanation.

“I told you what I’d do to his pool,” I said.

Biff’s eyes narrowed. He leaned over, sniffed me, recoiled like a cat given lima beans.

“You nasty,” he said, but he wasn’t shouting now, and he hunched over to strip to the waist. He was soaked with sweat, but his incisions looked fine, at least. “And you smell like dead dog.”

“Oh please, like you can even tell, the way this car smells and sweaty as you are…”

He mopped his face and armpits with his shirts, tossed them aside, and put the car back in drive. “You showering when we get home.”

“Aye-aye, captain.” And I promptly conked out in the passenger seat. Biff let me rest; he knew from experience the metabolic cost of that kind of electrical storm.

Once we got back to his place, he roused me with a shirt to the face (“I ain’t carrying your nasty ass”) and insisted I head straight for the shower. I didn’t protest; I was weak and shaky and didn’t really feel like lugging a million bags of plushies up four flights of stairs. While I grabbed a stereo speaker and staggered up like a zombie, Biff hit up his neighbors to get the rest of the contraband upstairs.

Judging by their lack of reaction, this was a normal thing for them to do. I still didn’t know their names—Biff seemed to think that might imply he cared—but I’d seen his old landlady, the tall librarian, and the short curvy girl enough for them to recognize me. The curvy girl waved. I waved back, and quickly regretted it. Now that the adrenaline had worn off and I was conscious, I was feeling the window I’d plowed through.

Somehow I made it up the stairs and into Biff’s apartment, dumped the speaker off to the side, and made it into the bathroom, which still didn’t have a door on it. At the moment, I was glad; opening it seemed more effort than it was worth. I slumped on the toilet, got my clothes off with some effort, and then I got a good look at myself.

Oh wow. No wonder everything hurt.

“Hey Biff?”

“What?” Biff was occupied with lugging a sack of Lovables that had sprung a hole in the bottom and not looking at me.

“Come here. I need your help with something.”

Now he looked at me. His eyebrows went up. “Damn.”

“Yeah. I’m going to need your help with some of this.”

More like most of it. After all the exertion, I couldn’t have tied my shoes. Fortunately, though his upper body strength was tanked, Biff’s dexterity was unaffected, and while the downstairs neighbors trucked up our ill-gotten gains and politely didn’t look at us, he got to work with tweezers and rubbing alcohol, ignoring when I hissed.

“Your own damn fault. Should’ve let me break his arms,” he said, but there was no heat in it.

All I wanted to do was sleep or eat, but he persuaded me to slither under the shower hose with a bar of soap that could cut through motor grease.

“Don’t do that again,” he ordered.

“Bah,” I slurred from where my face was plopped against my knees. “You should’ve seen my exit. It was great.”

Biff’s response was to turn the hose on me, full blast. I expected an ice storm, but I guess the heat wave had gotten to the water supply; it was pleasantly warm. “Come out when it get cold,” he ordered.

I made a happy burbling noise.

The warm water didn’t last long, but it still felt like the most amazing shower ever, and the heat helped revive me a little. When I finally raised my head from my knees, I found a roll of bandages, a box of Band-Aids, and a set of clean clothes sitting on the toilet seat. When I slithered within sight of the doorway, I saw that my dirty ones were in a heap next to the kitchen sink, which Biff was filling with soap and swishing around.

“Need help?” he asked.

I was too exhausted to feel shame. “Yes.”

Biff got me dressed, in both sense of the word. The clothes were Biff’s which meant the T-shirt sleeves came to my elbows and I had to belt the jeans halfway to Missouri, but I didn’t complain. The boxes of stolen goods had all been hauled up.

“Food’s in the fridge,” he said.

“You’re the best.” I set myself to devouring an immense quantity of sausage and spaghetti drenched in tomato sauce. Biff left my clothes in the sink to soak and went to take his own shower, then joined me in my feast. We toasted our success with water in plastic Mardi Gras cups, and then set to refueling at his battered little card table.

Midway through, someone knocked at the door.

I looked at Biff nervously; he didn’t look at me. “Yeah?” he called with his mouth full. “What?”

Raige’s voice: “Is M.D. here?”

I gave Biff a horrified look. Avoiding my eyes, he labored to his feet, took his Tupperware, and said, “Yup, and I was just going.”

“No you weren’t,” I hissed, “get back here!”

But Biff had already opened the door for Raige and squeezed past him. “Yeah, bye.”

“Coward!” I shouted, but he was already gone, leaving Raige there with me. And hoo boy, Raige was mad. I’d never seen him so white.

“You did it, didn’t you?” he said. “You went and robbed Max Love.”

I couldn’t exactly deny it, seeing as I was covered in bandages and surrounded by boxes and bags of pilfered plushies. “The guy was a sleaze, Raige; he--”

“No, no, don’t start,” he said, and his voice was shaking. “I saw the cop cars! There were gunshots!”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It worked out.”

“You’re not listening!” Raige was actually shouting now. “Do you know what the castle law is? You could’ve been shot!”

“Milquetoast, it’s okay,” I soothed. “I’ve been shot before.”

He grabbed me by the shoulders, and I realized he was crying. “I don’t want you to get shot,” he said, and hugged me.

For a moment, I just sat there, confused. Then I patted him on the back.

“This is one of those… those normal people things, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was broken and quiet. “It’s one of those normal people things.”

I rubbed his back. “Hey. Hey, I’m okay. See? Look at me.” He looked up, red-eyed. I held out my arms, which had some Band Aids but nothing serious. “See, all in one piece. No big injuries.”

“What happened to you?”

I considered lying, then sighed and said, “I had to get out in a hurry, and got pretty banged up. But I’m okay. I didn’t hurt anybody. Just a really ugly house, and I promise, my healer vows don’t apply to McMansions.”

Raige held my hands in his for a bit, as though needing to be sure, rubbing his thumb around the edges of one of the Band Aids. Then he blinked at my sleeves, saw the faded picture of Stone Cold Steve Austin on my chest and said, “What happened to your clothes?”

“Uh, yeah. I… sort of got out in a hurry via the pool.”

“Why wouldn’t you just let me pay for it?” He asked, and he wasn’t mad now, just upset. “You could’ve gotten hurt, or killed, or deported…”

I rubbed my face. “Sit down.”

He sat in Biff’s abandoned folding chair, sniffing.

“You know how there’s normal people things I don’t get sometimes? Well, there are money things you don’t get sometimes. This is what Biff does for money. Even if you did pay, he’d have to pay you back, and you wouldn’t like where the money comes from.”

“Maybe it’s his job. But it’s not yours.”

I said nothing.

Raige pulled out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and then twisted the bit of fabric between his hands. “Me and Dad are still a mess from when Mom died,” he said, “and that was ten years ago. I will lose my shit if you die because of something like this.”

I opened my mouth, only to find myself unable to respond. Raige didn’t bring up his mother often; it was his last-ditch trump card for a reason.

“You’re not… you’re not like Biff. Maybe you were once, but you’re not now. You’re Treehouse’s noon healer for the day people. Imagine if you had gotten shot. What would’ve happened to them, huh? You can’t pull this shit anymore, kid. You’ve got people depending on you, people who care about you, and I can’t tell you what to do, but please, don’t take jobs like this. It’s not going to end well, not for you, not for Biff, not for anyone, and I… I can’t be with you if you’re going to pull stunts like this.”

I felt very, very small.

“Please. Say something.”

I was still trying to figure out what to say. Finally, I settled on, “I’m sorry.”

Raige sniffed hard, blew his nose again. “Why? Why would you do this? You know better! You’ve been healer for years! You haven’t pulled shit like this since… since Jesus, I don’t know, since things went bad with Vandorsky. Since before you got your shit together. Why now? What the hell, M.D.?”

I sighed, fidgeted with my bandages and my cuticles. “I just… this will sound crazy. But I’ve never been a normal person before. You know? I was always this… this walking disaster. It was all I knew how to be, all I thought I could be. And being like this, someone with a job, and a home, and people who care about me?  Like a real family? It’s terrifying. It feels like I’m going to lose it any second, because that’s what always happens: I screw it up, and I lose it, and this time, I would actually care. I… I needed to prove to myself that I can still do something else.”

Raige’s face softened. He cupped my hands. “You don’t need to. Even if something happens, which it won’t, you belong in Treehouse. You’ll find something else there. I mean, come on, you love healing.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “but that’s not the same as other people wanting me to do it.”

Raige looked incredulous, put a hand on my cheek. “M.D., it’s obvious to everyone that you’re a healer, that this is the work you love most. I know it, Thomas knows it. Even Biff knows it, and I know he doesn’t want you doing this kind of work.”

My skepticism must’ve showed.

“He called me. Told me what happened.”

“Rat fink.” But I couldn’t put much anger into it. No wonder he’d rolled over so easy when I refused to beat up Max Love. “He won’t need me after this; he’ll be all better in a few more weeks. I’m sorry I scared you.”

He put an arm around me. “It’s okay. I’m sorry I flipped out.”

“No, it’s okay. I get it now.” I got up.

“Where’re you going?”

“To let Biff know it’s safe to come up now, that we’re doing feeling emotions.”

I found him downstairs in the zine library, slouched in a mangy armchair and watching a guy paint a house on the flickering old TV set in the corner. He didn’t look surprised to see me. “You win?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, come help me hide the body.”

We went back up to finish our dinner with Raige.