"I should have done this a long time ago," the Hawk said. "I'll do my part. Just be ready."
Kate nodded in the darkness.
"When this is over, we'll have to leave, won't we," Kate said. "We can't stay here. We'll be renegades."
Alley Hawk's body language changed, his shoulders relaxing, he seemed suddenly very tired, the weight of the mileage on his body showing through.
"No, you won't," he said. "You won't leave, because you won't be able to."
"Will they stop us?"
"No," Alley Hawk said. "Kate, I did what you do now for twenty years. And for most of that time, there was a price on my head. Sometimes it was the bad guys, sometimes it was the good guys, but in my entire career, there was always someone trying to stop me. Always someone who thought I was the villain."
"And you never left."
"People like us can't leave, Kate," the Alley Hawk said. "Because you're not doing this for the people who hate you. You're not doing this for the people who know you. You're doing this so that nobody ever has to suffer whatever you suffered to make you like this. You will keep doing this until your body fails you because you never want anyone to be hurt again."
"Better to be hated by the people in power than abandon the people who are not," she said.
"People are always going to hate you. That's the part of being a hero nobody tells you about," Alley Hawk said. "Nobody likes a hero, except the people whose lives you make a difference in."
Kate felt herself taking an involuntary, sharp breath.
"Is it worth it?" she asked. "Do you regret it? Do you ever wish you just stayed home?"
Alley Hawk let out a hissing breath, his body perfectly still. Kate let him stand there in silence for a moment, maybe longer, not answering.
"I don't know, Kate," he said. "Everyone I've ever cared about is gone. I don't think I'll live to see sixty because of what I've put my body through. And I'm not sure anything I've done to make the world a better place will be sustained when I'm gone."
"So why do it?" she asked.
"Because even if everything I do turns to dust, I made this horrible place better for a little bit while I was here. It's all we can do, Kate. It's all we're capable of."
Chapter 36:
Diagnosis
Caleb Roth sat outside the elementary school for hours. He was there so long he couldn't believe no one stopped him, a parent or police officer curious about what this strange young man was doing alone in the dark. But no one passed by, and not for the first time Caleb thought that perhaps the other part of his condition was that he had now become somehow invisible. People ignore the sick, he knew. We're afraid to look them, he thought, because they remind us of our frailty, or our own mortality, or because they make us uncomfortable or nervous. And so the sick became invisible, and if you happened to be sick and unimportant to anyone, like Caleb, then you became a ghost. No one wanted to look at you, and no one wanted to look for you.
He thought about going into the school. That had to draw their attention, making three hundred children deathly ill. The panic would make the evening news, and how could they ignore that?
But then again, Caleb thought, no one turned up looking for him after the hospital, and he'd done his worst there, walking among the weak, all of them ready to become infected. But no one appeared.
What does it take to get a little bit of attention around here? Who do I have to put in the hospital? He thought.
The sun rose, and still Caleb sat on a bench across the street, watching. Not a single person made eye contact with him, parents crossed their children to the other side of the walkway, sometimes even the other side of the street, to avoid getting too close to him. Cars created detours so that they didn't have to stop next to him. People looked right through him, ignored him, pretending he didn't exist. When one little girl, holding her mother's hand, tried to make eye contact, engage him, her mother jerked the child's arm and led her away in a rush.
Maybe this is what I've been doing wrong, Caleb thought. I need to make them look at me.
A rage boiled up in his guts. I could make all of you sick. I could put your children in the hospital, so you would have to look at them the way parents looked at me, that terrible blending of pity and fear and loathing. Your children would waste away before your eyes, and what would you do? Would you try to save them? Would you run from them? Hide behind surgical masks and hospital bills? Would you let strangers take them away and see what magic feats science had in store for them? Nothing saves us, you know. Everything leads to a terrible end.
He thought of those strange, slow nights in the laboratory, unfamiliar faces coming and going as he was poked and prodded, as test after test came and went. Of conversations comprised of hmm's and huh's and nothing else but the punctuation of needle sticks and blood draws. Even still, the scientists were an improvement from the hospital. At least at the lab they treated him like an object to be studied instead of a creature to be pitied. Anything was better than pity.
He continued to watch the school for a while. A teacher on the first floor almost make eye contact with him, and he waited, waited for her to meet his gaze, but she simple pulled a window blind, shutting him out. Like everyone else.
I need to make them see me, he thought. I need to force them all to look at me.
He thought about walking into the school, thought about the havoc and distress he could cause, but it seemed useless, somehow. He needed to do something a little different. Something a little more preemptive. He needed a voice.
He had a better idea.
Chapter 37:
Nothin' but a Hound Dog
Jane knew Emily was up to something when she started singing Elvis songs the entire way back to their holding cell.
It started off with "Jailhouse Rock," which Jane assumed was Emily being antagonistic, but Emily clearly ran out of the words after the second verse and moved on to "Nothin' but a Hound Dog." She knew all the words to that tune, and in addition to making that fact known to Jane, Billy, and their entire security contingent, she also assured everyone that she had a dance to go with it.
Jane put Elvis the Pelvis thrusts on the ever-growing list of things she wished she never saw Emily do. She did her best to tune Emily out and turned to Billy.
"How you holding up, cowboy?" Jane asked.
"I'm fine," Billy said. He wiggled his wrist to show her it had healed. "Good as new, see?"
"Any idea how that happened?"
"Aside from Sam becoming some kind of miracle worker?" Billy said. "I dunno."
"At least he's alive," Jane said.
"Little victories," Billy said.
Emily wrapped up "Hound Dog" in grand style and immediately jumped into "A Little Less Conversation."
Jane glared at her. "Are you kidding?"
Emily smiled and bopped around frenetically.
"Do you have to pee again, Emily?" Billy said. "I swear your bladder is the size of a peanut. I don't know how you get anything done all day."
Emily switched over to "Don't Be Cruel."
"You could do this all day, couldn't you," Billy said.
Emily nodded but kept singing all the way down the elevator to the nineteenth level. There, she broke out into a raucous version of "Heartbreak Hotel," forcing the caravan to stop several times while she played air guitar. Even the guards were getting a kick out of the performance, one of them singing right along in an almost pitch perfect Elvis imitation.
"Only Emily can get her jailers to sing with her," Jane said.
By the time they reached their cell, Emily and the guard — it turned out to be the one nicknamed "Two Ton Tony" a guy who they'd dealt in the past when dropping off super-villains before all this happened, but Jane hadn't recognized him in his full riot gear — were singing a wild duet of "Blue Suede Shoes."
Billy was losing it, and he bounced over to Jane and tried to convince her to dance. She looked at the other guards, and everyone just kind of shrugged, so she let
Billy lead her in a sloppy, goofy boogey. When the song wrapped up, Tony couldn't stop laughing.
"I'm sorry we have to do this to you guys," he said. "We're just..."
"Following orders," Jane said. "We understand."
"You feeling okay there, Solar? You look a little run down."
"Nothing an afternoon in the sun won't fix. I'm good."
"Let me know if you need anything," he said. "Again, sorry to have to lock you back in."
Emily broke into "That's Alright, Mama" which sent everyone into a fit of hysteria again. The guards politely nudged the trio of heroes back into their cell and locked up. When Jane figured they were out of earshot, she turned on Emily.
"What are you up to, you little lunatic?"
Emily switched back to "Hound Dog," but this time replacing the lyrics.
"We know Prevention is a psychic, spying all the time," Emily said. "We know Prevention is a psychic, spying all the time. I didn't want her spying so I sang to tune her out. Bum da da bum."
"Tune her out from doing what, Em?" Billy said.
"I figured how to open cell doors, up and down the hall," Emily sang. "I figured how unlock cell doors, up and down the hall. This is our distraction while we try to break out. Bum da da bum."
"Tell me you didn't unlock all those doors we passed," Jane said.
"You ain't nothin' but a worrywart, worried all the time," Emily sang. "You ain' nothing but a worrywart, worried all the time!"
"Em, if you let the bad guys out of their cells, a lot of people are going to get hurt. We won't be able to help them. We're locked in," Billy said.
Emily gestured at the door and a heavy clunk followed suit.
"Have you been able to unlock this cell door the whole time?" Jane asked.
Emily broke into "It's Now or Never."
"No! It is not now or never! Stop it! We need a plan, Emily."
Emily shifted into "I'm Counting on You."
"Are you serious? You're singing B-sides now?" Jane said.
Emily kept singing but beamed a huge smile at Billy and pointed at him. He shrugged and held out a hand. They started waltzing together. Even Jane stifled a laugh. The whole thing was too absurd.
"Billy's depowered, I'm running on fumes, and your only offensive power is the so called 'wall of slam,' Emily," Jane said. "Will you at least wait for the right time."
Emily started singing "My Way" instead.
"That's not an Elvis song. Frank Sinatra wrote that," Jane said.
Finally, Emily stopped singing.
"But Elvis covered it. My mom loves that version. And Sinatra didn't write it, that was Paul Anka."
"You do know everything, don't you?"
"Genius. Yo."
"You already unlocked the doors, didn't you?"
"Maybe a couple," Emily said. "They tried to kill Sam and they broke Billy's wrist. So I did it . . ."
"Don't," Jane said.
"My! Way!" Emily sang.
"This is going to cause so many problems," Billy said.
Chapter 38:
The Alley Hawk
When the Alley Hawk told Kate the City was built on a honeycomb of caverns and tunnels, he was not exaggerating. Over the years, he'd used these tunnels as a means of escape, a way to monitor villains undetected, a place to store extra equipment, and more. But even he had only explored a small percentage of these passageways. There was a time that Doc Silence, Coldwall and the Alley Hawk had uncovered an entire civilization of humanoids living deeper down, miles below the surface of the City, a blind and violent species dying rapidly from germs they'd picked up on scavenging visits to the surface.
They're probably all dead now, Hawk thought as he made his way into the Labyrinth's sewer system through one of these honeycomb branches. One of the first things the Alley Hawk did when the Labyrinth was built was find a way in. It had been a six-month spelunking project, poking around the outskirts of the Labyrinth in long-forgotten tunnels before finding a chink in the armor of the prison.
He'd been back here countless times. Mostly to make sure his secret entrance was still viable and had not yet been discovered, but sometimes to visit old enemies in the Labyrinth. One might suggest he was taunting them by visiting them in the shadows when no guards were around, but the enemies the Alley Hawk had locked up in the Labyrinth were a strange lot. Most were happy to have the company.
Over the decades, your nemeses become like old friends, Hawk thought. Because they are your polar opposite, but they are also sometimes the only ones who truly understand what it is you do.
Doc and Coldwall had multiple and often competing theories on where the city's tunnels came from. Doc thought they were the remnants of some pre-human civilization, some species so long gone from the Earth as to be completely forgotten. Alternately, Doc suspected the tunnels were what he called the Lower Realms bubbling up, a break in reality.
Coldwall, the scientist of the group, thought they were post-volcanic, natural if unique formations. He tried mapping them once and found nothing but interference below a certain depth.
For the Alley Hawk, though, what happened too far below street level mattered little. He just needed those veins nearest the surface to help him get around.
The Alley Hawk came to the ventilation shaft he had used year after year to sneak inside the Labyrinth and climbed inside. The other side was a long, empty corridor, dank with condensation, a forgotten tunnel far below the cells. He had some climbing to do, but the mission itself was straightforward. Open the main gates. There were plenty of ways to get those doors open if you knew how. It was just a matter of getting a dozen stories higher and finding the right computer terminal to abuse.
And once that was done, the Alley Hawk had a few people to visit, to remind them why they were on the inside.
He cocked his head to one side, listening.
Things might have become more complicated, he thought. Because those are definitely alarms.
Chapter 39:
Storm Front
The clouds rolled in with deliberate malice over the Labyrinth, a towering sheaf of black and purple, veined with blue lightning. The air around the prison dropped in temperature with incredible speed, turning a warm day into a dark and threatening afternoon. Rain soon followed, sheeting rain, the kind that kicks up a veil of mist as it strikes pavement. The storm was large enough to cover the Labyrinth's island footprint, and no more, a perfect umbrella over the building, where it came to a complete stop and simply remained, as if some supernatural force had turned its angry eye on the place.
Huge bolts of lightning struck the building, once, twice, three times in quick succession, rocking the structure and shorting out electronics.
In the main office of the Labyrinth, guards and techs worked together to make sure surveillance equipment still operated properly. Still others looked out the window at the torrential downpour, swearing under their breath as they watched rain fall so hard it splashed back up into the sky — as if the ground was not strong enough to contain it.
Prevention strode into the office and threw her arms up in annoyance.
"Someone want to tell me what's going on?" she said.
Rourke, one of her own officers, had been standing over the shoulder of one of the surveillance techs. He answered without taking his eyes off the screen.
"Big old storm front just settled on top of us," he said. "This can't be a natural occurrence."
"Of course not," Prevention said. "Want to make a bet these little freaks made buddies with the mobile storm they fought last year?"
"Any orders, Agent?" Rourke said.
"Stay on high alert, but don't do anything yet," she said. "This place is built to lock up monsters, it can withstand a few lightning strikes. Tell me if something more pressing shows up."
"Like this?" Rourke said, gesturing at a monitor.
Prevention joined him and hovered over the computer screen. Standing outside the front gates were two hooded figures. Their faces were obscu
red by shadow, one wore a hooded sweatshirt, the other some kind of oversized parka. The one in the sweatshirt had a spear resting against his shoulder. Prevention almost started laughing. A spear.
"Oh you've got to be kidding me," Prevention said.
"It looks like they're waiting for an invitation to come inside," Rourke said.
"Pretty much," Prevention said. "Scramble two Distribution suit pilots. If these two idiots are still standing there in five minutes, I want both suits outside. It looks like the werewolf and the vigilante have come to try to spring their friends."
"Do you want them to engage?"
"Cautiously," Prevention said. "I want them brought in alive. Especially the vigilante. She and I have some things to talk about."
And then the room went red as a warning alarm sounded.
"Oh please tell me what wonderful thing just happened?" Prevention said.
"Ma'am? Sir?" one of the surveillance techs chimed in. "We have a problem."
"Of course we have a problem. Why wouldn't we have a problem," Prevention said. "What now?"
"We appear to have an issue with some of our cell doors."
"Let me guess," Prevention said. "The Indestructibles are loose."
"Their door is one of the cells that's no longer locked," the tech said.
"One of?"
"Don't murder me," the tech said.
"One of how many? Answer before I make you bleed out through your nostrils," Prevention said.
"At least five doors are no longer locked."
Prevention looked at Rourke, who nodded back at her.
"You deal with the internal threat. Make sure the pilots are ready with the Distribution suits."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to see where I can do the most harm, and I'm going to go there," Prevention said. "Now move."
Chapter 40:
Inmates
Golem had sat in his cell patiently for years. That's what Golem did, he waited. What else does six hundred pounds of sentient clay do but wait?
The Indestructibles (Book 2): Breakout Page 17