Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  Thanks for the target.

  My blast catches one of the wings. He spirals toward the ground, pulling up just before face-planting on the asphalt. He touches down, and as I prepare my follow-up assault, his wings flare and fold up in front of his body. My machine-gun volley pings harmlessly off the impromptu shield. His tail arches up over his head and lets loose a sizzling, corkscrewing lance of energy. I cease firing and slip out of the way, but barely.

  Manticore spreads his wings and looks up at me, his tail humming, threads of energy dancing along its tip. The early morning sun gleams off a facemask of polished steel fashioned to look like a leering lion’s skull and rimmed with a golden brown mane.

  “Kid, you are so dead,” Manticore snarls.

  What else could I possibly say to that?

  “Bring it.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  My blast digs a crater in the street large enough to swallow an SUV. It would have splattered Manticore across four counties if he’d been there when the shot landed.

  My headset shows him climbing at a good clip, a shade under mach one. I rocket after him, closing the distance within seconds. His tail spits short blasts at me, forcing me to zig and zag around them, but it doesn’t slow me down.

  I spot an opening and gun it. For a precious second I’m on top of him, within arm’s reach — right where I need to be. I tap him once, briefly, with a blazing hand, then peel away before he can club me with the end of his tail — which is exactly what he tries to do. If only he were always that predictable...

  Manticore banks hard. Now he’s on my tail. I turn his own trick against him and spray blasts in my wake. I don’t expect to hit him, I just want to make it harder for him to hit me by forcing him to bob and weave. I suspect his suit has a targeting system but, as I learned from Concorde, even the best targeting systems aren’t perfect and can be confounded. Case in point: Manticore has yet to nail me.

  That kind of luck won’t last forever, especially not against Manticore. He has the edge on experience. If I’m going to take him down, or at the very least survive the encounter, I have to play this game by my rules.

  I hold my fire. Manticore takes the bait and cuts loose with a big blast. I cut right. The shot misses. Manticore follows. I throw a few energy bolts his way to let him know I’m still thinking of him then level out to give him another opening. He fires and misses as I veer right.

  We exchange a few light volleys, neither of us putting too much effort into it. It’s a ploy on both sides, an attempt by each of us to pressure the other into making a serious move. I oblige him and turn up the speed. Manticore keeps pace. I start to dip and climb and bank at erratic intervals, as though I’m trying to lose him. Manticore stays on me like he’s my shadow. I smooth out again and spit energy at him, wide and outside, totally on-purpose. He holds his course and a lance of energy screams toward me. I dodge to the right and crank it up to mach one-point-five.

  When it comes to aerial combat, Manticore is at least as smart as Concorde, as proven by the fact Concorde has never been able to beat the man in a one-on-one fight. The technology is a factor, a big one, but ultimately it’s the man in the suit who determines the outcome. If Manticore can repeatedly fight Concorde to a draw, that tells me Manticore is good at spotting patterns and bad habits in his opponent and is quick to adapt his strategy. I’m counting on that.

  Manticore sends a spray of energy my way. I brace for impact and let the volley glance off me. It stings, like I’m being pricked by a thousand red-hot needles, but it doesn’t do any damage. I play the hit as worse than it is, letting out a cry of pain and diving toward the ground as if in a panic. Manticore doesn’t disappoint. He follows me down.

  I level out and speed up, letting my course waver and drift enough to sell the illusion. Manticore fires a light blast. I feint to my right. Manticore lets me have it full force, firing where he expects me to be rather than where I am, which is banking to the left and circling around to his rear. I fire. My blast ricochets off a wing with a deafening metallic WHANG. Manticore spins out but quickly regains control, and then, with a roar of afterburners, peels out.

  He passes mach two. I ramp it up to mach two-point-five. He accelerates. So do I. He tops out at the edge of mach three. I creep up on him at mach three-point-five.

  His jet suddenly cuts out. Did he push his suit too hard?

  No. Manticore knows his limits. He’s getting ready to try something.

  His wings flare to their full extension, like air brakes, jerking him to as much of a full midair stop as he could possibly achieve, and I go roaring underneath him.

  Sorry, pal, I know this trick.

  As I pass under him, I roll onto my back and let him have it. I catch him off-guard. Startled, his attack misses by a mile while mine catches him low, right in the belly.

  Manticore plummets, his wings folded in. He’s dropping like a —

  Like a bomb.

  And hey, look: my headset says we’re right over New York City. That can’t be coincidence.

  My comm system comes to life with a soft crackle of static. “Can’t say this hasn’t been fun, kid,” Manticore says, “but I’m done. Time for you to back off.”

  “Yeah? Or what?” I say, unable to keep a cocky note out of my voice.

  “Come on, kid, we’ve played this game before. That’s New York down there. That’s an epic body count waiting to happen if you don’t stand down.”

  The last time he pulled a move like this, he set the nuclear micro-cell in his weapons systems to overload, turning his tail section into a low-yield nuclear bomb. He jettisoned it in the middle of Boston, forcing me to choose between chasing him and getting the bomb out to sea before it went kerplooey. I have to admit, it was a good trick, but as the saying goes: fool me once, shame on you...

  “Here’s a counter-proposal,” I say. “You surrender and I won’t deliver a humiliating beating to you in the heart of the second-greatest city in the country.”

  Sorry, New Yorkers, I’m a Boston girl.

  “You want to play chicken? Fine. Let’s go.”

  Manticore’s wings extend, and his jets kick back in. He spirals down in a lazy loop, zeroing in on Central Park. I follow him down. He swoops low over a wide expanse of green.

  “What the —?” Manticore says.

  “Problem?” I ask with mock innocence.

  “What did you do?!”

  Oh, nothing much, just spot-welded your tail assembly to your suit so you can’t drop it. That’s all.

  Manticore touches down and turns to face me as I come in for my landing. I keep my hands up, ready to flatten him if he tries anything funny. Please try something funny. I have a butt-ton of pent-up anger to vent, and I’d be thrilled to vent all over your ass.

  “Credit where it’s due, kid, that was a nice play,” he says. “Now here’s mine: stand down and let me go or I let the micro-cell go critical.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Uh...hello? You’d die too.”

  “That’s the point.”

  What?

  “Two minutes until the point of no return,” Manticore says. “Make the call.”

  “You’d seriously blow yourself to vapor to avoid going to prison?” I say.

  “Kid, I’d kill myself a thousand times over before I allow anyone to imprison me for one more second of my life. One minute, forty-five seconds.”

  He’s bluffing. He has to be.

  A crowd has begun to gather — not a huge crowd, maybe a couple dozen people or so, drawn by the spectacle of a glowing girl and a man dressed as a monster from Persian mythology. It’s enough to remind me of the cost if I’m wrong and Manticore is in fact ready and willing to reduce himself, and a good chunk of New York, to a smoldering hole in the earth.

  “One minute, fifteen seconds.”

  The phones come out for photos and video — records of our standoff. Records no one will ever see if Manticore’s —

  No. He’s trying to rattle me is all.
/>   It’s working.

  “One minute,” he says. “Forty-five seconds. You do like to live dangerously, don’t you?”

  Which one of us is going to blink first?

  “Forty seconds.”

  Someone in the crowd chuckles derisively, like we’re putting on a show and he’s not impressed with the performance. I know New Yorkers have a rep for being jaded, but come on...

  “Thirty seconds.”

  A little boy no older than Farley Quentin pulls at his mother’s hand, complaining that he’s bored.

  “Twenty. Blast radius is about two miles. That’s central Manhattan. Harlem. The theater district.”

  There’s no way he can be that calm, not unless he knows I’m going to crack.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Or he’s totally prepared to die.

  “Five.”

  “All right!” I shout. I lower my hands and power down, but not entirely. I maintain enough of a glow to throw off all the cell phone cameras pointed my way — and to throw up a shield in case Manticore tries to take a pot-shot at me. He’s the type.

  “Good girl. There,” he says, “the weapons system is in cool-down mode, but it’ll take time. You try anything, the countdown picks up where it left off. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Now, you stay right where you are for fifteen minutes. If I see you lift off before that?” Manticore spreads his fingers. “Boom.”

  Manticore fires up his jets, deploys his wings, and turns away.

  “Manticore.” He pauses, looking at me over his shoulder. Despite everything, despite how close Manticore came to leveling Manhattan and killing thousands of people, I grin a big idiot grin. “I had you.”

  He laughs. “You think so.”

  “People generally don’t threaten to kill themselves out of spite when they’re winning.”

  With that, Manticore roars away. I watch him until he’s a dot in the sky, until he vanishes, and I stay right where I am for fifteen full minutes while my audience disperses, blissfully unaware of how close they came to dying.

  “Well! What do you think that was all about?” the mother says to her bored little boy, who smiles and waves bye-bye to me.

  Bye-bye, kid. Have a good life.

  I’m back at Dad’s house in all of five minutes, not even enough time to peel off my sweaty clothes and jump into the shower, when my phone rings. Three guesses who it is.

  “I’d like it known for the record, Edison, I stayed out of action for more than two weeks,” I say, “so, ha.”

  “I stand corrected,” Edison says. “Are you okay?”

  I grunt. “Little cheesed off that I had to let Manticore go,” I say, and I give Edison a highly condensed version of my rather eventful morning. “I never even got a chance to ask who hired him to break out Doctor Skyfall.”

  Not that he would have told me, of course...

  “That wasn’t a jailbreak. That was a hit.”

  “A hit? As in, someone hired Manticore to kill Doctor Skyfall?”

  “Just a theory at this point, but knowing how Manticore operates, yeah. This has assassination attempt written all over it. We’ll figure it out. As Bart likes to say, one problem at a time.”

  We’ll figure it out. We will figure it out.

  “Edison? How did you know?”

  “How did I know...?”

  “That I’d un-quit.”

  “Ah.” I can practically hear his smug smirk. “Well, for starters, you never turned in your headset. I’m betting you’ve had it on you this entire time.”

  “That was the dead giveaway, huh?” Please note that I do not explicitly confirm that totally accurate suspicion.

  “Like I said before, your conscience would never let you stand idly by if someone was in danger. You’re too good a person to ever let that happen.” Edison sighs. “You’re never going to have a normal life, you know. It’s too late for that. You know what it feels like to save a life, to make a difference in the world. You’re addicted to it now. It’s an addiction you’ll never shake, and you’ll never want to.”

  “Once again, I stand in awe of your uncanny ability to simultaneously encourage and demoralize me.”

  Edison chuckles. “Can I consider you back on active duty?”

  I hear footsteps on the front porch. “Not now. I’m on vacation.” I put my phone away and brace myself for what I have to do next.

  “Hey kiddo, ready for lunch?” Dad says. He pauses in the doorway and wrinkles his brow at me. “Something wrong?”

  “Daddy, sit down,” I say, my stomach fluttering. He steps inside, closes the door, and sits on the couch with me. I take a deep breath.

  “Honey?” Dad prompts.

  “Daddy, I have something to tell you,” I begin. “It’s not going to be easy for you to hear, but I’ve been lying to you about something, something about me, and I can’t do it anymore. I hope you’ll understand why I kept this a secret from you and from Mom, and accept that this is part of my life now.”

  “Carrie, stop. I think I know where this is going,” Dad says, giving me a comforting smile. “I hope you know that I love you no matter what.”

  “I know.”

  “Good. Because I do and I always will, no matter who you’re with. All that matters to me is whether you’re happy.”

  Wait, what? No matter who I’m with? “Daddy, what do you think I’m talking about?”

  “Um...I thought you were coming out.”

  “No...”

  “Oh. So...you didn’t break up with Malcolm because you realized you like girls?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Huh. Sorry, I thought you — never mind. What were you going to tell me?”

  “That I’m a super-hero.”

  So much for breaking the news gently.

  Dad gives me a look somewhere between What the heck are you going on about? and Yeah, right, pull the other one, it plays music.

  “I’m serious,” I say. “I’m Lightstorm.”

  I watch the disbelief fade from my Dad’s features as he realizes this isn’t some bizarre practical joke. He sinks into the couch, staring at nothing in particular.

  “How?” he says.

  I tell him everything. Everything. I tell him about dying alien who gave me my powers, meeting the Hero Squad, the Thrasher, Archimedes, the Protectorate, Manticore, the Bestiary, the Foreman, Black Betty, Kysztykc, Buzzkill Joy, the King of Pain...

  Wow. I’ve had a busy year.

  It takes Dad a long time to process it all. When he speaks again, lunchtime is done and over with.

  “Why tell me now? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  There are so many answers to that question, all of them true to some degree. I thought I was protecting my parents by keeping my other life a secret. I knew they would freak out and I didn’t want them spending their every waking hour worrying about me.

  “I didn’t tell you before because I knew you’d try to stop me and I didn’t want you taking this away from me. I needed this,” I say. “After the divorce, I felt so lost. This helped me find myself again, and I like the person I found. She’s not a shallow, selfish, mean-spirited twit. She cares about other people more than herself. She cares about doing something meaningful with her life. Those are good things, right?”

  Dad doesn’t respond.

  “And I’m telling you now because I’m tired of keeping this a secret from you. Lying to you, to Mom, it’s exhausting. You deserve to know who I am — who I really am.”

  That gets a reaction, but not the one I was hoping for. “You’re going back to this? Good God, Carrie, after everything that’s happened to you, you actually want to go back to all that insanity?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Someone else can do it. Not you. Not my little girl. Carrie, if something happened to you...” Dad shakes his head. “No. Not you. Let someone else do it.”

  “I could...but that’s not how you raised me.” I shrug. “Sorry. You sh
ould have been a crappier parent.”

  Dad frowns, my attempt at levity failing miserably. I take his hands. They’re trembling.

  “This is who I am. I didn’t expect you to like it or approve of it or even to be proud of me, but you do have to accept it because I’m not going to stop.”

  “Even if I asked you to?” Dad says. “Even if I begged?”

  My answer breaks his heart. That’s fair. It breaks mine too.

  “Even if.”

  “...I hate this.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going to tell your mother?”

  “Eventually,” I say, and here I am, right back to lying to my father’s face. That era ended quickly.

  “You should tell her. She deserves to know.”

  “I know. You’re right, but I can only traumatize Mom so many times per fiscal quarter,” I say. “She’s still a little freaked out about me losing my virginity, so...”

  Dad’s crushes my hands, a reflex action, and he turns a sickly shade of gray. “Freaked out about you what?”

  Oops.

  Look on the bright side, Carrie: you took his mind off the whole super-hero thing.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Time to call the meeting to order,” Edison says, “and our first order of business is to formally welcome back one Miss Carrie Hauser.”

  Edison, Bart, and Catherine applaud while Natalie and Astrid give me a cheery Wooooo! and toast me with skewers of beef teriyaki from the Chinese feast that accompanies the Protectorate’s monthly meetings. I stand and take a bow.

  “Thank you, thank you, it’s nice to be back,” I say, then, more sincerely, “seriously, guys, thank you. It’s nice to be back.”

  “You were missed, kiddo,” Natalie says.

  “Why don’t we start with an update from you,” Edison says. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay. Getting away for a while helped a lot,” I say, throwing a grateful nod Bart’s way, “even if it did stir up a whole bunch of new problems.” I pause to clear my throat. I don’t know how well this next bit of news will go over. “I told my father about my secret identity.”

  “I see,” Edison says noncommittally.