Crawling From the Wreckage

by Michael C Bailey

  Edison signs off on my cover story and sends Astrid back to Kingsport so she can retrieve Dennis’s car. I wait with Dennis in the Pelican. I try talking to him to keep his mind occupied, but he’s not having it. Mostly he sits there staring off into space. Sometimes he cries.

  A couple of hours later, Matt pokes his head in to let us know Astrid’s back.

  Dennis strips out of the Skyblazer armor and rolls it up around his helmet. He glares at the bundle hatefully, as if accusing it of bringing all this misery into his life.

  I know exactly what he’s thinking. He could choose right now to step away from the super-hero life for good and go back to being a normal teenager. All he has to do is hand me the suit and walk away, and that’ll be it. The life will be behind him, and after he finishes mourning, he can get on with the important business of finishing high school, going to college, getting a job, finding a wife, raising a family, spending time with boring, mundane friends — all the things I sometimes doubt I’ll ever have.

  Instead, he tucks the mass under his arm, and I discover there’s one last tiny piece of my heart left to break.

  Nighttime has fallen, which makes the task of getting Dennis over to his car a little easier. We sneak out of the hot zone while the Protectorate and the Squad run interference with the first responders and the media. As we make our way to the distant side street where Astrid left his car, I remind Dennis how important it is to stick to the story I gave him and, above all, to keep his secret identity to himself.

  “I know you think you can trust your parents with it, but believe me, you can’t,” I say. “The entire world knew who I was all of a week after my mom found out.”

  Dennis throws the Skyblazer armor into the trunk. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he says.

  “You have to. For your parents’ sake, you have to, otherwise you’re drawing a big, fat bull’s eye on yourself and your family.” He nods. I take his hand. “You’re not alone in this, Dennis. I’m going to be here for you, every step of the way. You need me, for any reason, you call. Okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  I try to give him a hug. He backs away, shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “No, it’s —” he says without finishing the thought.

  Dennis drives off, leaving me standing there feeling powerless and helpless and more useless than I’ve ever felt in my life.

  ***

  Sara arrives home around midnight, a wide, contented smile on her lips. The smile withers when she sees me curled up in the corner of the couch.

  “Carrie? What’s wrong?”

  There’s no way to soften the blow — not that I’m in the mood to do so. “The Wardens are dead.”

  The color drains from Sara’s face. “What?”

  “Dead. Killed by a group of super-villains — which you would have known if you’d responded to the alert Edison sent.”

  Sara stammers and sputters, unable to get out a single intelligible word. “Dennis?” she finally manages.

  “No. He was with me. He’s fine.” I shake my head. “No, he’s not fine; he’s a mess. His friends are dead and the people responsible got away and he’s a total mess.”

  “Oh, God,” Sara moans as the shock begins to subside. She presses one hand to her mouth and the other to her stomach, like she’s about to vomit. She whimpers incoherently and tears pour down her cheeks.

  “Where were you tonight?” I say.

  “Where —? With Meg. You know we had —”

  “You mean with Meg,” I say — an accusation. “Did you two have your phones off?”

  Sara cringes. She can’t look me in the eye anymore.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say. “Nothing you could have done.”

  “Carrie,” Sara sobs.

  “Go to bed. It’s late.”

  “Carrie. I’m so sorry.”

  “I know.”

  She reaches out to me with a trembling hand but pulls it back without touching me. She heads upstairs. I hear her bedroom door close. Then I turn on the TV so I can’t hear her cry herself to sleep.

  TWENTY

  Jason checks his phone and frowns. A full hour has passed since he received his last message from his operatives, since Typhon reported they’d managed to sneak out of Manchester and were searching for a van or a truck to steal, something large enough to transport the entire strike team. The radio silence could signify so many things, so few of them good. Had they been captured? Were they even now sitting in a holding cell, spilling their guts to the Protectorate?

  He glances out the window, braced for the sight of police cruisers swarming on his chosen rendezvous point, a long-abandoned motel overlooking the highway, but the parking lot below is dark and empty — and so it remains for several long minutes, until the silhouette of a box truck rolls into sight, its headlights extinguished. Jason watches the truck approach at a crawl, tentative and suspicious, before disappearing from sight beneath the canopy covering the main entrance.

  He heads downstairs, willing himself to take the steps one at a time, forcing a relaxed pace lest his underlings catch a whiff of the anxiety roiling beneath his calm exterior. He pauses just outside the grand ballroom to straighten his clothes and push a rogue lock of hair back into place. Quite by chance, he steps into the beam of an emergency light mounted above the double doors — a spotlight for his grand entrance.

  Jason gets as far as, “Ladies, gentle—” before a projectile in the form of Echidna’s helmet sends him scrambling for cover.

  “You SON OF A BITCH!” Candace roars.

  “Candy, calm down,” Drake says.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!” She charges Jason, slipping past Drake’s half-hearted attempt to block her path. “You didn’t tell us they were children! You sent us to murder children!”

  Jason dives under an armored fist. Candace sinks her forearm in the wall behind him.

  “Dammit, Candy, stop it!” Drake says, this time throwing himself bodily in Candace’s path.

  “Let her go,” Thunder says. “I have half a mind to kick his ass myself. She’s right,” he says to Jason. “You should’ve told us the Wardens were a bunch of kids.”

  “I gave you all the intelligence necessary to carry out your mission.” Jason picks himself up. “I didn’t divulge their ages because it wasn’t relevant.”

  “Or because you knew we wouldn’t kill children,” Candace says.

  “I assumed you would do what was necessary to meet your objective — which you did not, I’ll point out.”

  “Yeah, but only because our target was a no-show,” Skadi says. “You never told us what we were supposed to do if Skyblazer never showed up.”

  “Variables are always part of the equation,” Jason says, “and how you handle them speaks to your competence as a potential operative — as does how you proceed from here.”

  “How we proceed? I’m ready to proceed right to Mexico,” Storm says.

  “Running away is an option, yes. Or we could take time to regroup and craft a plan for hunting down Skyblazer.”

  “You mean killing Skyblazer,” Candace spits. “How many more kids do you expect us to slaughter?”

  “As many as necessary,” Jason X says. “They are the enemy, Echidna, which means if they get in your way, regardless of their age, you take them out. Is that going to be a problem?”

  He spreads his arms, presenting the question to all present.

  “That depends,” Skadi says. “Are you going to withhold intel from us again? Because that I do have a problem with.”

  “Point taken. A solid team requires trust, and you can’t have trust without complete openness,” Jason says, “so no, I will not withhold information from you, no matter how trivial it seems.”

  “Then I’ll kill whoever you want.”

  Jason looks to ThunderStorm, who look to one another. “As long as you’re straight with us, we’re on-board,” Thunder says.

  “I don’t believe this,�
�� Candace says. “You people are sick.”

  “Is that your final answer?” Jason asks.

  “You’re damn right it —”

  “Candy, stop, hold on. Give us a minute?” Drake says.

  Jason turns away to grant his holdouts a modicum of privacy.

  ***

  “Candy, come on,” Drake says. “This is what we always wanted, isn’t it? A chance to make a real name for ourselves? To go down in history, right next to Bonnie and Clyde?”

  Candace blinks away tears. “Bonnie and Clyde never killed kids, Drake. Is that what you’re asking me to do? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

  “Oh, Candy, I didn’t — no. No, of course I wouldn’t — Candy, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We walk away. We don’t need them or their fancy suits. Let’s just walk away.”

  Drake glances over toward Jason and his teammates, now a tight circle in the center of the ballroom, their whispers a low drone of white noise.

  “That might not be an option,” Drake says.

  “What’s it going to be, Typhon?” Jason says, ending his impromptu conference. “Do you intend to remain with the team? Or are you and Echidna a package deal?”

  Drake locks eyes with Candace, the woman with whom he’s shared most of his adult life, a woman who never took a formal vow of for better or for worse yet stayed right by his side through years of worse, always hopeful the better was right around the corner.

  A woman who, for a wonderful but all-too-brief moment in time, was to become the mother of his child.

  ***

  “We’re out,” Drake says. “Both of us.”

  “Shame,” Jason sighs. “I had such high hopes for you two.”

  “Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint.”

  “I’m sure. Very well, then, if that’s your decision, I’ll thank you to strip off your suits. Perhaps their next owners will have a better grasp of their priorities than you.”

  “No,” Drake says, affecting a casual air, “I think we’ll hold onto them for a little while longer.”

  Jason’s smile, thin as it is, shrivels. “Those suits aren’t your property — and I think by now you’re well aware of what lengths my organization will go to in order to reclaim what’s theirs.”

  “I don’t plan on keeping them for good. Just long enough to put a safe distance between us.”

  The smile returns, with a wolfish edge. “Why, Mr. Anzo,” he says, wielding Drake’s real name like a weapon. “Don’t you trust me?”

  Skadi tightens her grip on her bow. A faint whiff of ozone overlays the pervasive sour smell of mold and dust.

  “Hell, no,” Drake says.

  The ballroom erupts.

  Drake reels from a tight blast of concussive force. A burst of supercharged plasma meant for his erstwhile allies goes rogue and sprays the ceiling, instantly blackening the acoustical tiling. An arrow tipped with an explosive head passes through a second wave of unnatural flame and detonates before reaching Candace Tanith’s head. The explosion is as good as cannon fire in the confines of the ballroom. Jason staggers, his ears ringing with a siren’s wail.

  And then brilliance rivaling daylight fills his vision, and he screams as raw agony like he’s never felt before, paradoxically hot and cold at the same time, consumes him.

  Jason X plummets headlong into darkness.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The days immediately following the Manchester incident are a blur, like a half-remembered dream — or nightmare, more accurately.

  The Wardens’ deaths, quickly dubbed “the Manchester Massacre” by the media, were all over the Saturday morning news. It was the lead story on every channel and every reporter seemed to be reading from the same script. Young heroes killed in action. Suspects still on the loose. Downtown Manchester closed off until further notice.

  A clearly exhausted Edison held a brief press conference that morning. Somehow, he maintained a sense of poise as he addressed a ring of microphones while camera flashes went off in his pasty, raccoon-eyed face like a miniature lightning storm. He spent a few minutes confirming and denying various rumors, firmly but politely declining to answer questions about the Wardens’ true identities, and assuring the press that further information would be released as the investigation progressed. He finished by informing the media that the Wardens’ families had been notified and that they were asking for privacy in this time of loss.

  “What about Skyblazer?” a reporter shouted out. “Where was he during all this?”

  “Skyblazer was not involved with this incident,” Edison said. “He’s currently in seclusion mourning the loss of his friends and teammates.”

  I spent the rest of that day under a dark cloud of dread. I knew it would only be a matter of time before the media revealed the Wardens’ identities, and I was terrified that when they did, Dennis’s name would be on the list. Reporters hate unanswered questions, and they have no compunctions about filling in blanks that really don’t need to be filled in if it’ll make for a good headline or juicy sound bite, collateral damage be damned. The evening news came and went without a single mention of Dennis, thank God, and I breathed such a sigh of relief I actually felt light-headed.

  Speaking of the intrusive media, people from our local news outlets — the Kingsport Press, Kingsport Chronicle, and Kingsport Report — all graced us with phone calls asking for comment on the incident. Sara fielded the calls and offered a terse “No comment” to each of them before hanging up. We eventually had to unplug all the landlines in the house because the guy from the Chronicle, Dorian Shelley, wouldn’t leave us alone. The asshat actually showed up on our doorstep that afternoon, a tiny digital recorder in hand, practically begging me for an interview. Since I’d been spotted in Skyblazer’s company several times over the previous couple of weeks, he thought I’d be able to provide some exclusive details. Fortunately for Shelley, my mother screamed him off the property before I could blast him into next month.

  Edison waited until Monday before calling me in for my debriefing. He took Sunday as a recovery day, but it didn’t help much, judging by how ragged he looked as I recounted the events of that night in a dead monotone, like I was reading the world’s most boring grocery shopping list.

  Meanwhile, Matt dug up as much information as he could on the Wardens’ killers, which wasn’t all that much. He identified Typhon and Echidna quickly enough, mostly thanks to (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) Deuce X. Machine. He had a run-in with Typhon and Echidna in Springfield last year, and before that, they were identified as suspects in a handful of bank robberies in New Jersey. The archer, Skadi, made her first appearance last fall during a bank robbery in Providence, Rhode Island — barely a week after Typhon and Echidna made their public debut. Two weeks before that, the team of ThunderStorm (one name, two people) pulled off an armored car heist in downtown Hartford, Connecticut.

  And then these three sets of previously unknown super-villains, who popped out of the woodwork within a month of each other, who had no apparent connection to one another, all decided to converge on Manchester for the express purpose of hunting down Skyblazer.

  This has the Foreman’s stink all over it.

  Unfortunately, they’ve all gone underground, so until one of them shows his or her face, we’re stuck in a holding pattern. All we can do is continue to nose around and hope something useful turns up.

  That’s what I told Dennis every time I spoke to him. I Skyped him twice a day to see how he was doing, which was as well as could have been expected — which is to say, craptacular. He never made eye contact with me, and he never spoke above a whisper — when he spoke at all, which wasn’t often.

  I didn’t say much either. When Granddad died, everyone kept telling me he was at peace, he was in a better place, blah blah blah. None of that comforted me; it made me want to kick them in the teeth. I knew the sentiments were well intentioned, but I’d h
ave preferred it if they’d kept their mouths shut, so I gave Dennis the consideration I never got. I told myself that at a time like this, I don’t have to say anything; I just have to be there for him. He needs support more than empty platitudes.

  I guess I’ll find out if that’s true soon enough. The first funeral is tomorrow.

  ***

  After a great deal of discussion, the Squad makes the hard call to restrict our presence at the Wardens’ funerals to me and me alone. While none of us have secret identities anymore, my extended absence means I’m a little less recognizable than my teammates. I should be able to blend in with the other mourners better than if all five of us went — especially since Edison is convinced the local media vultures will be there circling the services.

  However, Matt is absolutely adamant about attending Rando’s funeral, so I’ll be riding up with him today. We agreed to maintain a reasonable distance from Dennis as a precaution and simply be faces in the crowd. We’ll quietly pay our respects and then slip away unnoticed.

  “I still wish I was going too,” Sara says, “at least for Dennis’s sake.”

  “I’ll let him know you were thinking of him,” I say. “If I get a chance to talk to him, I mean.”

  “Thanks. I’m worried about him.”

  “Me too.”

  Sara touches my arm. “How about you? How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine.” Sara frowns at me. “I’m fine.”

  “You suffered trauma too, you know. You were the one who found the bod— who found the Wardens. And you’re still dealing with whatever happened to you out in space. You’re bottling so much up, eventually it’s going—”