You could hear them screaming down the crowded city block. "Good God! He just punched Christopher Reeve right in the throat!"

Standing on the banquet table, the cobalt-blue leather gloves on his hands dappled with blood and spit, SuperBad pulled back on his Glock and dropped the empty, white hot magazine to the floor. Twelve hundred of the East Coast's wealthiest and most brilliant scattered for the fire exits, dodging small patches of smouldering Persian carpet. The chandeliers caught on fire, fell from the ceiling, and exploded.

"You can try, but them that make it through those doors'll just choke the hallway with their corpses. Now dance!" he mocked, and suddenly dropped. His black shirt and blue sharkskin suitjacket rustled as if in slow motion, billowed like black sails fluttering in a violent breeze, and made a sound like a murder of crows taking wing as one. His blood red tie was a wound in the raw, shrill air.

Hitting the floor, he crouched and spun suddenly. The banquet hall's bright lights glinted from his well-polished Italian shoes, and then were reflected in a sharp arc of motion as he leaned forward, then kicked hard upwards.

The heavy crystal punchbowl split evenly down the middle, the first shard cut through the bottom lip and jaw of an onrushing security guard. The other shard spun wildly on the blood and champagne soaked tablecloth.

SuperBad emptied the Glock indiscriminately to his right as the thirty-five foot banner caught fire and fell from the high ceiling of the banquet hall. Its message - "Let's Celebrate - 100 Years Of Caring" - was just an impotent punctuation to the useless fabric as it coiled and collapsed to the floor amidst chaos and terror. SuperBad drank deep from a stolen bottle of Chablis and popped another empty magazine to the floor.

"I care," he bellowed madly, "I care so much it hurts!" and with that, three grenades flew in powerful arcs from his free arm. As they erupted in volcanic shades of red, SuperBad broke the Chablis bottle across the face of a fleeing dilletante.

"Damn, I think that was Neve Campbell!"

The news cameras, the microphones and speakers, the video display system which had been the first thing to come crashing, flaming, to the floor, they all popped and shot sparks like a million miniature fireworks celebration. The scalding detritus casually, and with indifference, permanently scarred many of the beautiful people and plain folks alike.

The black, featureless timer case sprung to life. "0:10" burned in red LED on its shaded screen, and a flutter of mechanical, nervous anticipation seemed to shake the red wires which led to the plastique charges on the grand hotel's mighty pillars. His guns holstered, SuperBad hurled a long table wildly into the maddened crowd, cutting the legs out from under the panicking victims. As the timer counted down, he stuffed a soaked napkin into a stolen bottle of vodka.

"Well Hell, this is like bringing coals to Newcastle," he cried as he let the Molotov cocktail fly. It shattered against the wall as the bomb's timer reach five seconds, its ominous beeping a piercing accompaniment to the spray of flaming alcohol which ran down the walls, up the curtains, and in a deadly wave over the crowd.

With a quick motion, SuperBad scissor-kicked a stout security guard barring his way to the door. Breaking the man's back, SuperBad exited quietly the shrieking hordes, slamming the oak double-doors behind him, and barring them with a crowbar.

***

SuperBad slid into the driver's seat as the uptown hotel rumbled and shook. It's squat foundation heaved once, twice, a third time as the pounds of plastique and napalm went up, It's majestic pillars, a century old each, were lifted from their foundations and set down again, shattered and cracked. They began to crumble slowly, dropping twenty-pound chunks of marble like an autumn tree drops leaves. The ground rippled as if it were water, and the shocks of the BadAssMobile whined their complaint.

Bad Mother Fucker raised his head from the back seat. "Did you get me my Kit Kat bar?"

"Dammit," SuperBad shifted into third from a dead stop, squealing his tires along the tumultuous ground, "This place wasn't even a gaddam Circle K."

"I could have sworn--"

"Me too, Bad Mother, but that's cool. We all make mistakes."

As they drove away, the upper stories of the hotel were obscured by the cloud of death-black smoke.