Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  “And I take it you weren’t up for joining your friends in making a run for it?”

  Okay, maybe that wasn’t so Good Copish of me, but I’m exhausted and cranky. Sue me.

  “Ha ha. I still can’t walk, much less run. I’m lucky if I can stand on my own for more than a couple seconds.”

  “I understand you had a physical therapy session when another prisoner was brought into the medical center, and that’s who we’d like to talk about.”

  “I’m in PT a lot.” Joy shoots Missy a venomous glance. “A lot.”

  “Last Sunday. The inmate in question had attempted suicide.”

  “Oh, him.” Joy shrugs. “Yeah, so?”

  “While he was there, did you hear him say anything to anyone on the staff?” Joy doesn’t answer. “Joy?”

  “I heard you, and you can go piss up a rope. I got nothing to say to you or cupcake or leather-boy. Guard!” Joy shouts as she maneuvers, with difficulty, around the edge of the table.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see the Entity move to intercept her, but Missy beats him to it. She snares Joy by the wrists and pins them to the wheelchair’s armrests.

  “Let me go,” Joy growls. Missy doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. “I said let me go.”

  Nothing. Joy’s face reddens.

  “Let me go, dammit!” she says, trying and failing to wrench her hands free. She thrashes in her wheelchair, her voice rising to a desperate scream. “Let me go! LET GO OF ME! LET GO!”

  Missy leans in. “Tell me what I want to hear.”

  “He didn’t say anything, okay? I didn’t hear him say anything, I swear to God I didn’t, now let me go!”

  I almost feel sorry for Joy, but we have an advantage. I have to press it.

  “Tell us everything you saw and heard,” I say. “Everything. Every last detail.”

  Joy swallows. “They brought the guy in on a stretcher,” she begins. “The docs said he was breathing but they didn’t know how bad he was hurt. They wheeled him to one of the examination tables, slid him off the stretcher, onto the table, the docs took his collar off and checked out his neck, said it was bruised a little but there was nothing seriously wrong...”

  “Wait,” I say. “They took off his suppression collar?”

  “Yeah, for a couple minutes. They put it back on soon as they figured out he was okay.”

  I’m going to make a mental note on that curious factoid. “Did he say anything?”

  Joy shakes her head. “I didn’t hear him say anything, I swear. He might have said something but I didn’t hear anything. There were a ton of people in the room, doctors and guards and stuff...”

  I give it another minute, waiting to see if Joy has any last-minute revelations to share. She doesn’t. I tell Missy to let Joy go. Missy releases her death grip and steps aside, allowing Joy to pass.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” Missy says, and she gives Joy a little wave. “Bye-bye.”

  Joy can’t wheel herself out of the room fast enough. Before swinging around the corner and out of sight, she throws one last glance over her shoulder, as if to make sure Missy isn’t following her.

  “I was wrong,” the Entity says. “You didn’t need me.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Entity, Missy, and I are the first to return to the conference room, which has turned into Nap Time at Byrne Penitentiary. Matt, Stuart, and the Quantum twins are all asleep at the conference table, and Rockjaw is snoozing in the corner of the room, on the floor since none of the chairs are wide enough to accommodate his bulk. Dr. Enigma and Warden Pearce are the only conscious souls in sight.

  “Any luck?” Astrid asks, removing the ice bag from her mouth. The swelling has gone down a little. On a scale of one to Mick Jagger, she’s at Angelina Jolie, tops.

  “I don’t know. Maybe?” I say. “Joy said something that doesn’t sit right with me, but darned if I know why.”

  “This whole situation isn’t right,” Pearce says.

  That’s for sure. Byrne is supposed to be the only truly inescapable prison in the country, maybe the world. The prison proper is a fortress. Its safeguards have safeguards, and Pearce keeps a tight leash on all his personnel to avoid issues of internal corruption, or so he says — and yet, Byrne’s first and only successful jailbreak isn’t one person slipping out in a laundry hamper. This was close to the entire prisoner population, one-third of which are still on the lam.

  (Listen to me. “On the lam.” Ha. Y’can’t hold me, ya dirty screws. Ain’t no prison made that can hold me. Nyah.)

  “What?” Astrid says in response to my sudden giggle fit.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Getting a little punchy is all.”

  “I hear that.”

  Missy climbs into a chair and falls asleep instantly. The Entity sits next to her and...well, he sits there, as still as a statue, and I can’t tell if he’s asleep too or just staring at the wall. My body demands that I join the sleepers, but my brain is running on all cylinders. The brain wins out. I pour some coffee, which has grown stale and bitter (just like Mom used to make! Ah, memories) and sit next to Astrid to wait for something to happen.

  I’m waiting for a good hour before anyone else returns from their interrogation chores. Nina’s the first one back, and she declares Kobold a dead end. He was definitely unhappy about being left behind and was in the right frame of mind to bring someone down with him, but he had nothing of real value to offer. His story matched the sequence of events as we know it: he was asleep in his cell, woke up to an alarm sounding, realized that his cell door was open and his collar was off, then saw other inmates running past his cell and joined the party.

  Concorde and Mindforce return next and report the same outcome. Minotaur had no strong loyalties to his former teammates and would have rolled on them in a hot second, Concorde says, but he didn’t know of any jailbreak plans. Strike two.

  I’m not sure if we can say Doc Quantum and Sara struck out. Their interview raises more questions than answers.

  “Mr. Dawkins insists that he does not recall his actions this morning,” Doc Quantum says. “He claims he was in the command center for most of his shift, conducted his midnight rounds as usual, returned around one, and the next thing of note he allegedly remembers is the riot alarm sounding and the prisoners surging out of their cells en masse.”

  “He’s lying,” Pearce says. “He has to be.”

  “That’s the confounding element of his story, warden: he isn’t.”

  “He was telling the truth,” Sara says.

  “Impossible.”

  “Improbable,” Doc Quantum counters, “but not impossible. I’ll let Psyche explain why,” she adds with a note of disapproval.

  Her tone is explained when Sara says, “I went into Dawkins’ head.”

  “Psyche,” Mindforce says, a rebuke that falls on deaf ears.

  “There’s a blank spot in his memory. He literally has no memory of entering the master kill codes.”

  I see the conflict playing on Mindforce’s face; what Sara did was a flagrant violation of Dawkins’ civil rights, and as evidence would be inadmissible in a trial (if it doesn’t outright derail any attempt at prosecution), but it’s information we wouldn’t have otherwise.

  Concorde utters a familiar sentence that I’ve come to loathe. “We’re missing something.”

  “Maybe,” I say, and I pass along what we learned from Buzzkill Joy.

  Concorde makes a thoughtful noise. “When shift supervisors make their rounds, they check in at certain points, correct?”

  “They do, whenever they enter a new neighborhood,” Pearce says, “and their movements through the facility are tracked via GPS tags in their communication equipment.”

  “What about the suppression collars? Do you keep activity logs for those?”

  “We do.”

  “I want to see the full prison logs for the period during which the King of Pain was in the medical facility,” Concorde says. Pearce taps at his tablet th
en hands it to Concorde. “Son of a...”

  “What?”

  “The King of Pain’s suppression collar was never reactivated after the medical staff removed it,” Concorde says, showing Pearce the logs before he can offer another empty protest. “Would they have been responsible for deactivating and reactivating the collar on a patient?”

  “No, that would have been a shift commander,” Pearce says. “We keep high-level security functions like collar control compartmentalized to prevent something like that from happening.”

  “Tell me Dawkins was the shift commander on-duty,” Nina says, but Pearce shakes his head.

  “He works graveyard. He wasn’t in the building when the King of Pain was brought into medical, but he did check in at the medical facility at 12:30 AM on the nose Monday, while the King of Pain was there under observation.”

  Concorde sighs heavily. “Quantums, Squad, I’m dismissing you,” he says. “You’re wiped out and we don’t need everyone hanging around here all day, so go home and get some rest, but be ready to mobilize if we get a hit on any of our fugitives. Nina, give the Squad a lift home.”

  “Right,” Nina says, clearly relieved that she also gets to leave the bore-a-thon.

  “Concorde, what about the King of Pain?” I say, nodding toward Sara. “We’re in no shape to deal with him again if he takes another run at Psyche.”

  “I don’t think he’ll press his luck like that twice,” Concorde says. “The reason you nailed him in the first place is because he got cocky. He’s learned his lesson. He won’t repeat that mistake again.”

  Sara cuts me off before I can argue the point. “Even if he does?” she says, shrugging. “Let him. I’m not scared of him.”

  Maybe it’s the exhaustion, maybe it’s the stress, but Sara’s declaration isn’t one of bravery or defiance. She just doesn’t give a damn anymore.

  “You girls got an early start to the day, huh?” Mom says as Sara and I drag our weary butts in and collapse onto the couch. “When did you leave this morning?”

  Huh. Mom never noticed us sneaking out. Well, that’s a minor relief.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “We were both awake stupid early for no good reason, I had a jones for scones, so we went into town and treated ourselves to breakfast at that bakery on Main Street.”

  “The one that makes the incredible cheesecakes?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’m jealous. I have to go run some errands, maybe I’ll pick some up for breakfast tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to go home,” Sara says abruptly.

  “You’re what?” I say.

  “Sara, honey, is that a good idea?” Mom says.

  Sara stands. “Ms. Hauser, you’ve been so good to me, and I appreciate everything you’ve done,” she says. “It means more to me than I can say, but I have to be honest with myself. All I’m doing here is hiding out and avoiding my problems. I can’t do that forever.”

  Mom smiles, if a bit sadly, and hugs Sara. “We’re here if you need us. You’ll always have a home here.”

  “Thank you, but I think I’ve brought enough of my problems into your house.” Sara grabs her backpack up off the floor near the couch, and just like that, she’s ready to go. “Walk me home?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  Sara lingers for one last hug from my mother.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I say after we step outside.

  “Your mom already asked me that.”

  “Now I’m asking you.”

  “And I’ll say the same thing I said to her: I’m done avoiding my problems. I refuse to be scared anymore — of my father, of the King of Pain, of anything.”

  “That’s good,” I say automatically, but my gut says otherwise, “but you’d be safer if you stayed with us.”

  “I would. Your mom wouldn’t. I won’t do that to her, or to you.”

  It sounds like a very noble sentiment, but I have to wonder: by going home, is she drawing fire away from my family, or drawing it toward her own?

  No. Stop thinking like that. That’s crazy talk. She might be mad at her parents, but she’d never intentionally put them in the line of fire.

  Right?

  She stops at the end of her front walk. “I can take it from here,” Sara says. “Go home. Get some sleep.”

  “You too.”

  I wait on the sidewalk until Sara is inside. I wait some more, listening for an eruption of profanity and homophobic slurs from Mr. Danvers, primed and ready to charge in and pull Sara out, but I hear nothing. I want to believe that Sara entered to repentant parents who are even now showering her with long-withheld and long-overdue displays of love.

  I want to believe that.

  I don’t.

  Despite my exhaustion, the buzz of my phone vibrating on my nightstand is enough to wake me. Don’t look at it, Carrie. Take the phone, put it in the drawer, pretend it doesn’t exist, don’t look at the screen because it might be Concorde calling to let you know they recaptured the King of Pain or that one of the fugitives has been spotted in our neck of the woods and —

  Aw, dammit.

  It’s Matt. Put the phone down, dummy. Ignore the call. Go back to sleep. Whatever he wants, it’ll keep.

  God, I’m so stupid.

  “What?” I say.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he says.

  Screw it, I’m already awake. “About?”

  “How the King of Pain rigged his escape. I think I know how he did it.”

  Uh-huh. Of course you do. “Okay. Enlighten me.”

  “The suicide attempt was all for show,” he begins. “He knew if he tried to strangle himself, the guards would catch him long before he succeeded, he’d be taken to the medical center, and the doctors would have to remove his suppression collar to examine him.”

  “We already know all that.”

  “But we don’t know why he wanted his collar deactivated. All the guards at Byrne are normal human beings; his powers would be useless against them.”

  “They wouldn’t be useless against us,” I point out. “He was obviously planning his breakout. My guess is he wanted the collar off so he could deal with any superhumans who tried to capture him once he escaped.”

  “True, but he got a shift commander to deactivate every collar in the facility. If that was part of the plan from the get-go, why would he need his collar deactivated earlier?”

  “Because it itched like crazy?” I say. Again, speaking from experience.

  “Because he needed it off to work his influence on the graveyard shift supervisor when he came by on his rounds.”

  I sigh, my patience at an end. “He doesn’t need his powers to talk to someone, and that’s all he’d need to do. He’s a master manipulator. All he needs is five minutes to get inside someone’s head and —”

  “YES!” Matt crows in my ear. Ow. “Exactly!”

  “Oh, for...exactly what? Get to the point already.”

  Matt’s theory causes me to sit bolt-upright in bed because, God help me, it makes sense. It makes terrible, perfect sense.

  “He gets inside people’s head, literally,” he says. “The King of Pain is a psionic.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “He’s a what?” Edison says, peering skeptically over his coffee mug, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

  It’s been seventeen hours since the breakout. The Protectorate has yet to catch a wink of sleep, so they’re understandably tired and cranky, and I’m sure getting called to HQ by Matt for an emergency conference has done nothing to improve their moods. I figured they’d forgive us once Matt laid out his theory. I may have figured wrong.

  “The King of Pain is not a psionic,” Edison says. “We have a dozen case files that clearly indicate —”

  “He stopped me from using my powers,” I interrupt. “You said the King of Pain could negate natural superhuman abilities. My powers aren’t natural.”

  “And he hurt Stuart,” Matt adds.

  “S
o?” Edison says “His powers are natural.”

  “Yeah, but Stuart is invulnerable because of his hyper-dense cellular structure. How could the King of Pain neutralize Stuart’s entire body at the cellular level? Answer: he can’t.”

  “Stuart said the King of Pain kicked him right in the nose, so why doesn’t he have a broken nose?” I ask. “Why didn’t he bleed?”

  “Because the King of Pain never actually hurt him,” Matt answers. “He used telepathy to sneak into Stuart’s head and trick him into thinking he was vulnerable and could feel pain, just like he tricked Carrie and Sara and every other super-hero he’s ever faced into thinking their powers had been nullified.”

  “That’s why he’s avoided taking on groups of heroes: he can’t multi-task his powers on multiple targets. We proved even two people are too much for him.”

  “It’s also why he avoided fighting tech-based heroes like you,” Matt says to Edison. “It would have compromised the illusion that he could only affect natural superhuman abilities.”

  “Assuming you’re right, and I stress it’s an assumption,” Edison says, “how does this explain what happened at Byrne?”

  “The King of Pain faked his suicide attempt by strangulation. He knew the medical staff would remove his suppression collar to examine him,” Natalie says, picking up on our train of thought. “Once the collar was off, he could use his powers to trick the shift commander into believing he’d reactivated it. Then he could lie there in the medical center until the midnight shift commander came by on his rounds and plant a command, like a post-hypnotic suggestion, to deactivate every collar and unlock every cell in the facility at a specific time.”

  “A time when the security staff would be at its thinnest and every super-hero who could respond to an emergency at Byrne would be dead asleep,” I say. “Minimum internal resistance and maximum response time by outside back-up.”

  “Back-up that would be so distracted by dozens of inmates running around like idiots, making obvious targets of themselves, he could slip out in the chaos,” Matt says. “Come on, man, it all fits. The evidence is there.”

  They sit there, silent and unreadable (which is totally normal for the Entity, but the point stands).