Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  Copyright © 2015 by Michael Bailey

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2015

  ISBN-13: 978-1508750857

  ISBN-10: 1508750858

  ASIN: B00GC74K4M

  Michael Bailey/Innsmouth Look Publishing www.innsmouthlook.com

  Cover illustrations Copyright © 2015 by Patricia Lupien

  Cover design by Patricia Lupien

  Book production by Amazon Create Space, www.createspace.com

  Edited by Julie Tremblay

  PART ONE: THE KING OF PAIN

  “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

  That’s Nietzsche’s punchy way of saying that life is full of personal trials, and by enduring them and learning from them, we become better people.

  What Nietzsche failed to mention was the price you might have to pay for that personal growth, what you might lose along the way. He never spoke about how your strength can fail so completely that you’re left wondering how you can possibly survive whatever is beating you down — or if you even want to.

  What does not kill me makes me stronger.

  Nietzsche also said, “To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

  My life is now much more meaningful.

  ONE

  There are some things in life you never see coming.

  Concorde is not one of those things. Him I see coming a mile away, and I mean that literally: the head’s-up display on the headset I wear as Lightstorm gives me a detailed picture of everything around me. At 25,000 feet above sea level, there’s no detail to speak of, so the little dot speeding toward me at a brisk mach one gets all my attention.

  At first glance it appears he’s at my four o’clock, but we’re fighting in three dimensions (one of the first hard lessons of aerial combat I learned). According to my HUD he’s actually coming up from beneath me at a thirty-degree angle — an intercept course.

  Funny thing is, Concorde can go a lot faster than mach one. I’ve matched him at mach three on more than one occasion, so his leisurely approach has me wondering — as does the fact that, based on our current respective altitudes, we’ll cross paths with a good half-mile between us. His main offensive weapons, his concussion blasts, have an effective range of one-quarter that distance.

  Concorde suddenly hikes his angle to eighty degrees and floors it, putting him on an attack vector (that’s fancy dogfight lingo for He’s coming to get me). He’ll be on me within seconds.

  Concorde has a lot of experience in aerial combat, but he also has a lot of limits. Mach three is his top speed, while I once nailed mach five without any strain (for the record, the SR-71 Blackbird has a peak speed of M3.3, and the fastest airspeed ever recorded for a manned aircraft, the X-15, was M6.72 -- 4,520 miles per hour). I’m way more maneuverable than he is. He has his close-range concussion blasts, while I can shoot high-intensity beams of force and/or heat with an effective range of half a mile (though, to be fair, I’m hardly a crack shot. My aim has improved a lot, but my hit/miss ratio is fifty-fifty, and that worsens with distance).

  As Concorde comes within firing range, I corkscrew to my right, rolling and dropping as he climbs. We pass each other. I fire, hoping to catch him on the way by, but I miss. He doesn’t; as my blast passes within inches of his face, Concorde lets off a concussion blast that catches me right in the midsection.

  Did I mention he has way more experience at this sort of thing than I do?

  While the impact doesn’t knock the breath out of me (since, as I learned a few months ago, I don’t breathe when I’m powered up), it does knock me off-course. As I spin out of control, I power off and go limp, letting myself go into freefall. The altimeter in the corner of my HUD flickers like a strobe light as I plummet.

  Don’t worry, I do this all the time. It’s relaxing, really. Better than a hot bath and a hot cup of tea.

  Hey, you relax your way, I’ll relax mine.

  It’s an obvious possum play. I don’t expect Concorde to fall for it (ha, see what I did there?), but he might follow anyway. If not, I get a little time to regroup.

  Concorde comes after me. He catches up and matches my speed, but he follows a spiraling course, orbiting around me. He stays at the edge of his range, which is well within mine, but he’s the movingest of moving targets. He knows my aim is one of my weaknesses.

  So why bother aiming?

  I spin rapidly and spray energy blindly, chancing that something will hit Concorde. It’s crude but effective; Concorde’s grunt of pain carries over the comm system, playing in my ears in crystal-clear stereo.

  Concorde accelerates to mach two and zips away. I follow, creeping up on him while jigging about, randomly bobbing up and down and left and right. It makes me tougher to hit, but it also all but guarantees I’m not going to hit him.

  Concorde cranks it up to M2.5. I match him. He goes to M2.7. I inch it up to M2.8.

  He then does the last thing I expect: he stops dead.

  Okay, he probably did not in fact drop from almost mach three to zero miles per hour in the space of a second, because physics, but relative to me it looks like that’s exactly what happened. I realize too late what he actually did: he abruptly hooked up and back, allowing me to pass underneath him.

  It happens too quickly for me to respond. Concorde nails me right between the shoulder blades.

  That’s it. It’s over.

  “And that makes ten points,” Concorde says. “I win. Again.”

  “As graceful in victory as you are in defeat,” I grump.

  “How would you know? You haven’t beaten me yet.”

  “Jerk.”

  Once, such an exchange would have been positively dripping with venom, on both sides, but my, how times have changed. Our relationship has improved radically, personally and professionally. While my win-loss record for these little airborne sparring matches is pitiful (please refer to Concorde’s recent taunt), I enjoy them and look forward to them. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say Concorde and I are friends, but we get along. I’m learning from him, and he seems happy to teach me everything he knows about the super-hero game.

  And all because Concorde had me wrongfully arrested and thrown into a supermax penitentiary. We should have done it sooner.

  “I’m hungry,” Concorde says. “Are you hungry?”

  “I could eat. What are you in the mood for?”

  “I’d say let’s hit the Cape for some seafood, but all the spots I know are closed for the winter. None of the great places open until Memorial Day.”

  “Ha! Spoken like a true mainlander,” I say, and I lay a course into my headset. “Follow me.”

  We’re in Barnstable within minutes. We touch down in the parking lot of Leo’s Clam Shanty, one of those little hidden treasures all the locals know about but keep secret from the summer vacation crowd, in a vain effort to bogart the place for themselves.

  The girl working the take-out counter, a girl about my age, gawks in total awe as Concorde and I stroll up to place our order. She calls to someone in the back of the restaurant, and then turns back to us with a huge grin.

  “Oh my God!” she squeals. “You’re Concorde!”

  “Afternoon, miss,” Concorde says, coaxing another squeal.

  “Mick! Mick, come on, you have to see this!” the girl shouts.

  A man in a grease-stained apron emerges from somewhere in the back. �
�What are they supposed to be? Are they whatchacallits? Cosplayers?” Mick says, squinting at us.

  “No, that’s really Concorde! I know you too,” the girl says, finally acknowledging my presence. “You’re, uh, Light-something...”

  “Lightstorm,” I say.

  “Yeah, right, from the, uh, Action Squad?”

  “Hero Squad,” I correct.

  “Hero Squad, right,” she says, and that signals the end of my very brief moment in the spotlight. “Can I get a picture with you?” she says to Concorde, who agrees, and take a wild guess who she hands her phone to.

  The irony is cruel indeed. I’ve eaten at this place hundreds of times when I lived here, and now here I am, in my ostensibly semi-famous public persona, and I barely warrant a second glance. Whatever. I’m not bitter.

  I’m not.

  Concorde salves my bruised ego by covering lunch. We carry our seafood platters over to a picnic bench at the edge of the property, which affords us a fantastic view of the harbor and of the Atlantic beyond. It’s April, which means most of the boats normally moored here are still in storage, but the view is beautiful nonetheless. Kingsport is a seaside community too, but it’s got nothing on the Cape.

  Concorde pops his helmet just enough to get the food to his mouth. A fried clam disappears into the helmet. A happy noise follows.

  “Ohh, that’s good,” he says.

  “Wait until you try the scallops,” I say. “Bite-sized pieces of heaven.”

  He grunts. “All right, tell me: what did you do wrong?”

  We’re not even waiting until after lunch for the training session postmortem? All right, whatever. I can eat and analyze simultaneously.

  Although, honestly, “I don’t know. Final score was ten to eight so I obviously did well...”

  “You did. You’ve improved considerably, but there are still some bad habits you have to work on,” Concorde says, moving on to the scallops. More happy noises. “First of all, you’re too predictable. You have a bad tendency to evade to the right. You need to mix it up more. I tagged you five times because I predicted you’d go right.”

  “Okay.”

  “That one time you got me good? Hit me right in the, uh...”

  “Genitals?” I suggest.

  Concorde clears his throat. “I was going to say bathing suit area.”

  “Genitals,” I repeat because I enjoy making Concorde squirm. Fun is where you find it.

  “You got me because you dodged down and to the left when I expected you to go right, then used your superior speed to hook around to my underside before I could adjust. That’s your strong suit, you know, your short game. Using those quick bursts of hyper-speed to reverse a fight’s momentum, jump from defense to offense like that?” he says, snapping his fingers. “When you do that, you’re untouchable.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Unfortunately, your long game needs a lot of work. You should be able to do some serious damage long-range —”

  “But I need to work on my aim,” I say.

  “Yes you do. That’s going to make a world of difference in your offensive game. I can design for you a training regimen to help you work on that, set up the target range at HQ, start you off on stationary targets, move you up to moving targets once you get comfortable...you’ll let me know if this gets overwhelming, right?”

  “Oh, I’m overwhelmed, all right,” I mutter, thinking aloud. Concorde gives me a look. “It’s not the training in and of itself,” I clarify, “it’s just...well, everything. I have a lot on my plate lately between school, my new after-school job at Mr. Crenshaw’s office, training with you, spending time with my boyfriend, with the Squad, with my family...”

  That last one hurts. I mean, I see Mom and Granddad all the time, have dinner with them practically every night, but I haven’t seen Dad since last month, when we went out for my belated sixteenth birthday celebration (dinner and a Boston Bruins game. The Bs won. Go Bruins). And what really sucks? I could walk to his house — my old home, I mean — from here. He’s all of fifteen minutes down the road and I can’t see him — not without crafting a Homerian epic of a lie to explain how I got here. I only have a learner’s permit, so it’s not as if I could have driven down to pay him a surprise visit.

  “Anyway, I’m juggling a lot,” I say, “and it feels like it’s starting to become too much.”

  “Your family should always come first. Your mother, your father, your grandfather — they’re all good people who love you, and you should always put them before everything else: school, work, this job, your friends, everything,” Concorde says in that arrogant, I-know-better-than-you tone I came to know and loathe during the first several months of our acquaintance.

  Time was when he spoke to me like that, I’d mouth off at him without a second thought, throw his attitude right back in his face. That was before I knew Concorde was really uber-rich super-genius Edison Bose, a man who knows too well what it’s like to lose your loved ones. As a child, he lost his parents in a botched burglary. The man who took him in and became a surrogate father died in a stupid drunk driving accident. His son, while trying to emulate his super-hero dad, was killed by the mercenary known as Manticore. All things considered, you can’t blame the guy for having strong feelings about the value of family.

  Concorde sighs, looks at his plate of clams and scallops and fried fish, then lays it on the table as though he’s lost interest in eating.

  “One day your parents will be gone, and you’re going to think about all the times you could have been with them but did something else instead, something you were convinced at the time was more important,” he says. “You’re going to realize it wasn’t important at all, and that realization is going to eat you up inside. Don’t make that mistake.”

  I almost take his hand on impulse. If Sara or Matt or Stuart or Missy were sitting next to me now, I’d do it without hesitation, but with Concorde it seems somehow inappropriate -- which sucks because I think he could use it.

  “Sorry to be such a downer,” he says.

  “No worries, boss. Kind of your job.”

  “Yeah,” he says, picking his plate back up. “Guess it is.”

  TWO

  Concorde offers to schedule another sparring match for tomorrow, but I decline on the grounds that I have a Missy to welcome home.

  As part of his ongoing campaign to strengthen what has historically been a mostly symbolic father-daughter relationship, Dr. Hamill offered to take Missy to Japan for April vacation week. I’m pretty sure every dog in town heard her delighted shriek. We plan to invade Casa de Hamill in the morning so she can regale us with stories and pictures aplenty, but we won’t have many stories to share back; Missy hasn’t missed a heck of a lot.

  April vacation was blissfully uneventful for us, outside of our ongoing training. While I’ve been working with Concorde, Sara’s been training with Mindforce, and Natalie has been showing Matt all she knows about fighting (and she knows a lot. Matt now counts Tylenol as a food group). Stuart has passed on offers of training because he is, quote, the strong guy that punches stuff, unquote, and apparently once you’ve mastered the basic aspects of throwing a punch (hit target with fist, repeat as necessary), what more do you need to know?

  Missy has likewise turned down offers to train with Natalie but for very different reasons. After the Buzzkill Joy case, Missy decided she needed to take some time off from super-heroing to work on her relationship with her father, and none of us can hold that against her.

  She promised us she wasn’t off the team for good, but I wonder if she’s ever thought about making her temporary retirement permanent. I know it’s crossed my mind on occasion — stepping down as Lightstorm, that is. Like I told Concorde, lately I’ve felt like I’m being pulled in too many different directions. Something has to give before I’m torn apart, and the super-hero job has a tendency to float to the top of the list. What would I give up instead? My family? My friends? Malcolm? A real job that could lead to
a real career and give me a real future?

  Then I think about all the people I’ve helped, all the bad guys I’ve stopped, and I realize quitting would be the most selfish decision I could possibly make.

  “Maybe you should ask Natalie how she manages to balance everything,” Matt suggests. “She’s in college, she has a boyfriend, she has a social life, she’s an active super-hero, and she never seems stressed out.”

  “She also seems a little nuts,” Sara says, but not without affection.

  “Low-grade insanity as the key to staying sane?” I say doubtfully.

  “I’ve heard of fighting fire with fire,” Stuart says, “but yeah.”

  “I don’t know. Natalie told me super-heroes are kind of crazy to begin with,” Matt says. “Maybe all you have to do is embrace the madness and things will level out.”

  I’m about to respond when Sara conspicuously clears her throat, a warning that a parent is about to enter the living room. In unison, we hunch over the coffee table and pretend we’re deeply engrossed in our game of Settlers of Catan. None of us acknowledge Mr. Danvers as he makes a slow pass through the living room — a transparent effort to eavesdrop on us. For reasons unknown, he has, over the past several weeks, become increasingly intolerant of our presence in his house. We rarely hold our nightly homework jams here anymore, and I can’t remember the last time we gamed here.

  “I’m looking for some wood and I got plenty of sheep I’m willing to trade,” Stuart says, sliding right back into the groove of our game. “Matt, do you have wood for sheep?”

  “I have so much wood for sheep,” Matt says.

  “Excuse me,” Mr. Danvers interjects. “I do not care for that kind of talk in this house.”

  “It’s part of the game, Mr. Danvers,” Matt says innocently. He holds up two cards, one featuring a pyramid of logs, the other a fluffy ram with curling horns. “See? Wood and sheep. They’re resources you can trade so you can build roads and towns. See? Part of the game.”

  Mr. Danvers’ disapproving frown deepens. He shakes his head at us, then heads into the kitchen to complete the illusion he has business in there.