Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  Oh, he’s good.

  “For the record, Mom’s coffee has improved considerably, so that’s no longer on the list.”

  “Good to know.”

  “I hate feeling helpless,” I say. “I hate it when something’s wrong and I can’t do anything to make it right.”

  “You mean what’s going on with Sara.”

  “Yeah. She’s my best friend and she’s hurting and I can’t fix it. I can’t make the pain stop.” I look up at Malcolm, the sting of impending tears making my eyes burn. “I want her to be happy again. I want my Sara back.”

  Malcolm reaches across the table to take my hands. “I get that.”

  In his case, it’s not an empty expression of sympathy. His mom — his birth mother, that is — died of cancer when he was a little boy. He doesn’t remember the details, but he remembers well enough that his mother was in pain and there was nothing he could do to make her better.

  I look to him for some of that patented Malcolm Forth wisdom. He squeezes my hands.

  “You can’t fix everything,” he says. “Some things are beyond anyone’s power to heal.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

  “It’s what you need to hear. Whatever Sara’s problem is, she has to want to fix it. You can’t help her until she wants to be helped, and you have to come to terms with that.” He pauses, steadying himself. “When Mom got sick, Dad started drinking a lot. When she died, it got worse. I was too young to grasp what was happening, but I knew he was doing something bad to himself. I asked him to stop. I asked him a lot. He didn’t. Not for a long while.”

  “But you got him to stop,” I point out.

  “I may have played a role, but the decision to stop was ultimately his. He started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that’s when I first heard a mantra they use at their meetings: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Whatever demons Sara’s wrestling with, you might not be able to help her beat them.”

  Normally I find Malcolm’s advice comforting and useful. This one, I can’t buy into. “It sounds like you’re telling me to give up on my best friend. That’s not going to happen,” I say. “No way.”

  “I would never tell you to give up on Sara. You wouldn’t listen to me anyway, but that wasn’t my point,” Malcolm says. “I’m saying, for your own peace of mind, you might want to reconcile yourself with the very distinct possibility she doesn’t want your help.”

  “She’s getting it anyway.”

  “You’re a stubborn girl.” Malcolm smiles. “Never change.”

  After that, my appetite for cheesecake makes a comeback.

  Malcolm drives me right home after dinner. Mr. Punctual pulls up to the curb at nine on the nose.

  “Looks like your Mom’s home,” he says, gazing past me to my mother’s car in the driveway. “Maybe I should skip a goodnight kiss in case she’s spying on us.”

  “Like fun,” I say, leaning over to kiss him...briefly, in case Mom is spying on us, because she’d totally do that. “Call me tomorrow?”

  “Will do. Love you.”

  “Love you. Drive safe.”

  I wait on the sidewalk until Malcolm drives out of sight then head inside, promising myself that tomorrow, whatever we end up doing, I will be a dynamo of pure, unadulterated fun and not the melancholy buzzkill I was tonight.

  (Guh. I still can’t say buzzkill without throwing up in my mouth a little.)

  I step into the living room to find Sara lying on the couch, hands folded across her stomach, staring at the ceiling, like she hasn’t moved a muscle since I left three hours ago. It’s creepy enough she does this when she’s sleeping. It’s ten times creepier when she’s wide awake.

  “Sara,” I say. “Did Mom not go out?”

  “She said she was feeling crampy. She took some Midol and a glass of wine and went to bed. How was your date?” she asks, though it’s clear she doesn’t actually care. “Were you successful in forgetting about me?”

  I freeze. She overheard that comment, and by overheard I mean she read my mind. I clench my teeth, ready to chew her out for invading my mind like that.

  No. I’m not doing this. I refuse.

  “It was good, and no, I didn’t forget about you.” I sit on the couch, at Sara’s feet. “I’m not going to give up on you, you know. Push me away all you want, but I’m not going anywhere.”

  Sara sits up and narrows her eyes at me, then blinks hard, as though emerging from a trance.

  “Carrie,” she says, and something in her voice...

  It’s her. It’s Sara. My Sara is back.

  For a moment I think she’s going to cry, but all she does is murmur, “I’m so tired,” and slump over to lay her head in my lap.

  She falls asleep right away. I join her not too long after.

  My phone jolts me awake with Concorde’s ringtone (his new one, I should say: Ozzy Osbourne’s “Flying High Again.” I like him well enough now that I ditched the wretched Coldplay tune I used to use).

  Hold on. Sara’s phone’s ringing too.

  “What’s going on?” Sara mumbles, still half-asleep.

  I answer my phone (noticing as I do that it’s a little after two in the morning) and put the call on speakerphone, so we can both hear what turns out to be a prerecorded message.

  “This is Concorde of the Protectorate with an urgent message for the New England HeroNet. We have a code red situation and I need every available hero within sixty miles of Byrne Penitentiary to mobilize now.”

  That alone is enough to set my teeth on edge. What Concorde says next hits me in the gut like a fist of solid ice.

  “We have a mass prison break at Byrne.”

  PART TWO: THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

  TWENTY-ONE

  Sara follows me as I race upstairs to grab my headset and fire up a direct line to Concorde. He responds immediately.

  “Lightstorm, where are you?”

  “Home, suiting up,” I say as I pull off my dress and wrestle into my uniform (because I am not going super-heroing at stupid o’clock in the morning in one of my favorite outfits, thank you very much).

  “Do it fast. I want you airborne ASAP. Tell the others to rendezvous with the Pelican at the high school.”

  “Call Matt and Stuart and Missy,” I tell Sara, “tell them to get over to the high school, now.”

  Sara doesn’t question me. We slip out of the house and split off at the end of the front walk. Sara races off in the direction of the school while I run into the woods nearby, to my secret launchpad. In the interest of being a good neighbor (and making sure I don’t wake my mother), I wait until I’m out of Kingsport airspace before breaking the sound barrier.

  “Concorde, I’m airborne,” I say. “ETA to Byrne, approximately seven minutes. What’s the situation?”

  “Latest word from Byrne is that the prisoners are seconds away from breaching the prison proper,” Concorde says, “and after that there’s nothing standing between them and complete freedom but the outer wall.”

  “Uh, when you say ‘the prisoners,’ how many are we talking about?”

  “All of them.”

  If I recall correctly, Byrne can house up to two hundred inmates — up to two hundred angry, desperate superhuman inmates who have no problem slaughtering anyone who stands in their way.

  No pressure.

  “We’ll have some support from the perimeter towers’ auto-sentries, but you and I are going to be the first super-heroes on the scene, so be ready to go in hot. Our priority will be holding the perimeter until reinforcements arrive. After that, we’re on inmate pacification duty.”

  “Pacification?” I say. “That’s a polite euphemism for kicking some hardcore ass, right?”

  “Bingo. Byrne control,” Concorde says, bringing the prison in on the conversation, “This is Concorde, ETA one minute, I need a sitrep.”

  “Roger that, Concor
de, ETA one min— ah, dammit!” the voice of Byrne control yelps. “Facility has been breached! Repeat, the facility has been breached!”

  “Kill the lights. Do not send anyone after the escapees. Keep your people at the edge of the woods, locked and loaded. Lightstorm, switch to night-vision mode. Stay high.”

  From the sky, I catch a brief glimpse of Byrne as a glowing ring surrounding a central pool of light, a vague and distant constellation. It winks out, melting into the night, and I activate my headset’s night-vision setting. The world comes into full focus through a haze of green.

  And this is why Concorde is the man in charge. Extinguishing the lights effectively blinds the inmates, turning the woods separating the facility from the outer wall into a maze. That will slow them down a lot, buy our reinforcements time, and maybe turn the inmates around, sending them back toward the prison and the small army of waiting guards. Those who make it through will still have to contend with a three-foot-thick, ten-foot-high wall topped with razor wire and remote-controlled machine guns spraying hornet rounds and, on top of that, Concorde and me raining destruction from on high.

  We take position several hundred feet above Byrne and watch as countless bright green spots, like a swarm of radioactive fireflies, erupt from the Byrne facility and disperse into the woods. My headset considerately does the math for me, counting the targets: one hundred thirty-seven prisoners on the loose. They move at a brisk sprint across the inner courtyard then slow by half as they hit the woods. Most of them do, anyway; a few dots never slow down and weave through the forest like it wasn’t even there. Heightened senses at work, I’m guessing.

  “Hang back,” Concorde says.

  “What happened to going in hot?” I say.

  “Be ready.”

  The first dot emerges from the woods and reaches the trench of open space between the forest and the outer wall. One of the auto-sentries roars to life, spitting hornet rounds — nonlethal ammunition designed by Bose Industries to incapacitate with extreme prejudice. They combine impact, a strong electrical charge, and a caustic chemical that, as Edison once told me, makes the target feel like he’s getting punched, Tasered, and pepper-sprayed simultaneously. Matt, who once took a volley to the back, confirmed that it is a profoundly miserable experience. I’m going to assume that Dot Number One also finds it unpleasant, based on how quickly it goes completely still after a two-second burst of gunfire.

  My habit is to challenge Concorde on pretty much everything he says, but I should know better by now than to question his judgment in combat situations. He’s letting the auto-sentries take down the prisoners until our intervention becomes necessary — again, running out the clock for the sake of our back-up while minimizing risk to ourselves.

  Two more dots clear the forest. They fall under a hail of gunfire. A fourth, moving more cautiously than his predecessors, hits the clearing. Two auto-sentries zero in on him. The dot pauses, and then becomes a streak that crosses the distance to the wall in an instant.

  “There!” Concorde says. “Go!”

  I drop, swooping in from the civilian side of the wall. As I close in, one of the auto-sentries explodes in a spray of sparks and falls silent. In the split-instant before I open fire, I catch sight of the shape perched atop the gun platform, looming over the wreckage of the gun. It’s Minotaur — more specifically, Minotaur number two, the guy who took over for the original. He’s big, strong, and more or less invulnerable, which means I can hit him full-force. My blast sends him flying. He crashes to earth on the prison side of the wall, but the damage has been done: there’s a weak point in the defenses and the approaching flood of inmates somehow sense it. The dots, spread out among the trees, regroup as they come toward me.

  “Concorde!”

  “Open fire!” he shouts.

  The night explodes with thunder as the nearest auto-sentry kicks in, laying down a line of suppressing fire in time with my own machine-gun barrage. Concorde is at my side a second later, laying into the inmates as they pour out of the woods, bellowing an incoherent war cry of animal fury.

  The siege is officially on.

  Concorde and I hover above the edge of the wall, firing wildly. We’re not putting too much effort into precision aiming, but we don’t need to; the press of bodies grows thicker, giving us a solid mass to tear apart.

  Hello, fish. Welcome to our barrel.

  Unfortunately, the fish get smart fast. The prisoners break like a wave on the rocks, spreading out, giving us multiple moving targets instead of one convenient clump of bodies.

  A plume of white-hot fire sears the air to my left. Another auto-sentry dies with a scream of rending steel and the pop of exploding electronics, and that’s when it finally dawns on me how bad things really are, how much worse they’re about to get. Minotaur shouldn’t have been able to make a ten-foot leap and tear an auto-sentry apart with his bare hands — not if his suppression collar had been active.

  A second blast of flame comes right at me. I don’t remember the girl’s name, but I recognize my attacker as one of Buzzkill Joy’s crew, a pyrokinetic we referred to as Flamey (for obvious reasons). When you can throw fire, you don’t need precision or finesse to be dangerous, and Flamey is proof positive of that. I throw a shield up at the last second. Fire washes over the wall of energy. My body instantly adjusts to the blistering heat, the way it adjusts to the freezing temperatures of the higher atmosphere, so the attack fails on every level.

  However, the woman I know only as Harpy nails me good. She has cybernetically enhanced vocal chords that can project a devastating, potentially lethal sonic shriek, and I have no defense against that. Her scream hits like a wrecking ball, knocking me out of the sky.

  It’s a short drop, ten or twelve feet, and Concorde’s early lessons included how to take a fall correctly to minimize the damage, but there’s simply no way to completely blunt the impact. The shock drives the air out of my lungs and rattles my bones. I flop over onto my back to see a trio of wavering greenish blobs moving toward me.

  I power up to let loose with a wide spray, figuring at such close range I’d have a hard time missing, but the way my luck has been running lately...

  Never mind. I’d like to retract that comment because my luck ain’t that bad after all. A massive shape drops to the ground to my right and sweeps out a hand like a coffee table, a giant backhand slap that bats away all three of my would-be attackers, mowing them down like bowling pins.

  “How’re you doing down there?” Joe Quentin, a.k.a. Rockjaw Quantum says, looming over me protectively.

  “Much better now,” I wheeze. The Quantums’ Raptor hovers in the sky over my head. Rockjaw waves to the airship, which peels off in the direction of the prison.

  “Yeah, you sound great,” Rockjaw says, helping me to my feet. “You need a minute?”

  I throw a zap past him, taking out Minotaur for a second time before he can sucker-punch Rockjaw.

  “Nope,” I say. “I’m good.”

  “I know you know your business,” Matt says, “but are welder’s goggles a good idea for a night fight?”

  “The frames are from welder’s goggles,” Nina Nitro says. “The lenses are the same set-up as your headset. I have a full head’s-up display — radar feed, night-vision, the whole magilla.”

  “Ah. Cool.”

  “Speaking of which,” Nina says, setting to the task of passing out headsets to the others. “You all have the full HUD suite too, and the headsets are GPS-equipped so we can track your positions, so keep them on at all times.”

  “Touching down, team,” Mindforce calls out from the cockpit of the Pelican. “Comm systems on. Let me hear you, people.”

  “Nina Nitro is go.”

  “Dr. Enigma is go.”

  “Captain Trenchcoat is go.”

  “Psyche is go.”

  “Superbeast is go.”

  “Kunoichi is go.”

  “And Mindforce is go. All units are online.”

  “Call it,
boss. What’s the play?” Nina says.

  “The Quantums are already on-site and waiting for us. Doc Quantum and I will provide air support over the hot zone, so keep this channel open,” Mindforce says as the Pelican touches down. “Concorde and his team will continue to hold the perimeter. Our teams will spread out and head into the woods to intercept and subdue inmates as they seek other escape routes. We have other heroes en route, they’ll be tasked as necessary.

  “Nina, you’re on point for your team. Trencher, Kunoichi, you’re with Nina and Megawatt Quantum. Superbeast and Psyche, you’re with Enigma, you’ll hook up with Kilowatt Quantum.”

  “Takedown parameters?” Nina says.

  “Hard takedown. No warning shots, no surrender opportunities,” Mindforce says. “Concorde says the prisoners’ suppression collars are inactive, so if you see anyone in an orange jumpsuit, drop ‘em before they drop you.”

  “Done and done.”

  Mindforce pops the Pelican’s hatch. “Stay safe.”

  “We have boots on the ground!” Concorde says. “Time to drive them back.”

  Shouldn’t be too hard to fulfill that request. As soon as Rockjaw showed up, most of the inmates fled back into the woods. The stragglers stand their ground out of blind panic, desperation, and/or the sadly mistaken belief they can take us out and then penetrate three feet of concrete before vanishing into the night.

  “Concorde, we have clusters of escapees moving toward the north and the southeast,” Mindforce reports.

  “You’ll have to move to intercept, we’re a little busy here,” Concorde responds.

  “Negative, Concorde, we need to keep eyes in the sky.”

  “We only need one set of eyes,” Doc Quantum chimes in. “I can take the northern group.”

  “I can get the other,” I say.

  “Do it,” Concorde says.

  “Mindforce, I need directions.” Mindforce relays to my headset an overhead view of the prison grounds, courtesy of the Pelican’s onboard sensors, and I fly toward the red blob making a beeline for the wall. My HUD zooms in, and the blob becomes six individual dots, moving in a tight formation along the edge of the forest, far enough into the tree line to avoid detection (or so they think). That means they’re working together, watching each other’s backs, and they’re thinking about what they’re doing instead of acting on instinct. I reach them as they emerge from the woods, one man in the lead. He books it across the moat of open space.