And I marveled that no one else ever appreciated how serious it all was, the things that were happening to us, the change that had happened to our bodies, the destinies that were slowly beginning to work themselves out for these wastrel ninjas, Martians, exiled sorcerers who would one day have to find their myriad ways home. One night, after an evening when I’d been badly beaten by a magical stone creature, Pharaoh and I sat by the ocean, the strange waters of the Gulf of Thailand. Ribs cracked, I swore inwardly that I would never quit, not ever.
I worked as a bodyguard for a drug cartel in Hong Kong, standing in a dark suit night after night behind a drunken narcotics magnate, the skinny guailo who could stop bullets and outwrestle the strongest man. Until one night a group of our competitors came through the door, too many to stop. I walked into the Hong Kong night, carrying three million dollars in a briefcase, Armani suit soaked in blood. The next morning, I was on a flight back to the United States. I was ready to show the world my real face.
At least there’s a telephone here. Thinking of those days puts me in mind of my contacts. There’s a loose web of acquaintances out there; even if they didn’t visit me in prison, there’s still a network. There are things I need if I’m going to get started. I can make some calls. But who? With all the fuss about CoreFire and the Champions back together, it’s a bad time to be a villain.
I start making a list. A lot of people are gone, hiding or in prison. Psychic Prime is out there, useful when he’s sober. There’s Nick Napalm, too, still out of prison. One of them will tell me where people are meeting up these days, maybe even do a little job for me. Lily, I’m not ready to think about.
Then there’s the Pharaoh. He’d be useful if only I could find him. Not the real Pharaoh, the one in the Super Squadron, but the other one, the two-bit villain. He had a magic hammer he liked to wave around, that he said made him invulnerable when he spoke a secret word. He’d made a suit of armor and spray-painted it gold, then drawn on it with a child’s idea of hieroglyphics, all eyes and wavy lines. He claimed to be a reincarnation of Ramses, although he used to get the a and o backward in his own name. The hammer was a big stone thing, the thirdhand hammer of somebody retired. He called it “the Hammer of Ra.” I wanted to take it apart to see how it worked, but he never let me.
We were friends in the half-collegial, half-suspicious way villains can be friends. Once, we had to hide out for two days together in a leaky shed in New Jersey while heroes hovered in the sky above us. We whiled away the time telling hero stories and boasting about our big scores. He knew Lily, too. I tried to share a few jobs with him, but the partnership never gelled.
He never amounted to much as a villain. One afternoon in downtown Chicago, he’d driven Serpentine all the way into the lake, and knocked Blockade unconscious. If he’d cared enough to make anything of it, he could have been big. The real Pharaoh never even bothered to hunt him down over the name thing.
But he’s gone, too, got out of the game a while ago. He was never that serious about it to begin with. Crime is a serious business, damn it. I told him that.
The name occurred to me during my first real job in the U.S. It was a long ride up the New Jersey turnpike, four hours in semidarkness, squatting on the wheel well. I drowsed a bit—it was strange to be driven along by a robot I’d built, and the gentle rocking motion brought back sensations of childhood road trips. I was dreaming of the zeta effect, flickering red field, its tantalizing mysteries. I woke, to stare into the molded plastic faces of the robots swaying beside me in the long, bare compartment, a row of drowsy crash-test dummies.
I felt us come out of the Holland Tunnel and into the stop-and-go traffic of downtown. The robot in the driver’s seat was a good one, convincing enough to pass as human on casual inspection. It only had to drive and pay tolls and smile blandly at other drivers. It would never get out of the van at all, whereas the four in back would go with me into the bank.
The bank was in midtown, a small one, but adequate to my needs. I had gone as far as I could go on ingenuity and petty theft. I needed capital. And I needed contact with the world; I needed them to know about me. I felt the robot smoothly taking its lefts and rights on the way to the target, even honking the horn at a truck blocking the road up ahead.
I powered up the robots. Smart and tough, but they weren’t about to fall in love or apply for citizenship. They checked their stun guns; I checked my equipment. I crawled back to the rear door and seated myself. The van cut over to the curb and double-parked squarely in front of the glass double doors.
I kicked open the van’s rear door and stepped into the street. A light snow was falling, frosting the edges of things and darkening the asphalt. I had spent months designing and assembling the robots, sewing the costume, fabricating the equipment hanging from my belt. And now I was standing in the street in midtown Manhattan, squinting in the sudden light, midmorning traffic swerving around me, the crowd just beginning to react. It was 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, late January, and in the skyscrapers overhead office workers were just halfway through the morning’s work, rustling papers and chatting at their desks. I was twenty-four years old.
A burly man wearing a uniform was staring angrily at me through the window and pointing as if to say, Go away! There was a second of vertigo, a sick moment of nightmarish embarrassment. What was I doing? I ought to be up there with them; I ought to be at work. I was wearing a costume; I was a publicity stunt, an overgrown out-of-season trick-or-treater, or a schizophrenic. This was the moment of truth, worse than any crime fighter or secret weapon. My insides clenched.
I forced my legs to take me forward toward the bank’s heavy plateglass facade. Behind me, the robots were raising their concussion pistols, and my earplugs cut in automatically. The man standing just inside put up his hand, gesturing at me to stop, go away. That was the moment. I shook my head. Stop? Go away? No. Absolutely not. I felt an unfamiliar smile take hold on my face.
He raised his gun, too late. Because I didn’t have to stop. I grabbed the door and pulled so hard, it came off one of its hinges and hung there. I wasn’t going to stop and I wasn’t going to pay any damages and I wasn’t going to say sorry, because I wouldn’t have to do what anyone else said, ever again. The sonic went off behind me as I went through the door, and after that there was a whole lot more I wasn’t going to be paying for.
“Kneel!”
I pointed to the floor, and in a second the crowd was on its knees. Most of the bank crowd would be deaf for the next thirty seconds or so anyway, but I needed to look like I was giving orders. I looked up, to see I was holding the unconscious bank guard aloft by his shirt. I tossed him into a potted palm. It was only hours later that I got home and realized he’d shot me square in the chest. There was a bang as they breached the vault. Two robots were brandishing their pistols at the crowd while the rest shoveled bricks of currency into sacks. I had nothing to do but stride around the lobby looking menacing and in control, but it felt like an eternity.
I went on shouting. I screamed, although I don’t know what I said to them. I declared myself Emperor of Manhattan, America, the world. I was shaking. Outside, traffic had stopped. People across the street peered in at me.
I could hear sirens now, but the final phase was already in progress. I’d dug the tunnel weeks before. I motioned two robots to the front of the bank to engage the police. The others were already loading the money into the shaft. After my escape, they’d collapse the tunnel behind me.
Only one thing left to do. I turned to face one of the security cameras. It was time to let them know who I was, what I’d known for years. I’d planned something—I forget what—but something else rose to my lips. The humiliations build up, and you know you’ll never get back at them, even though somewhere inside you’re better than they are. The real you is somewhere else, someone invisible, unknowable. Someone impossible.
“I’m Doctor Impossible.” I shouted it to them. “Doctor Impossible!” They would know me now; they had to
. I turned and climbed down into the shaft.
The tunnel had an exit point, miles south, and a rented truck was waiting for me. I changed into civilian clothes. On the return trip, I had one last moment of weakness. There was no turning back now. I wasn’t just a missing person anymore, or an eccentric inventor. I was a supervillain. For heaven’s sake, I’d just robbed a bank in broad daylight. I pulled over to the side of the road. I felt like I was going to be sick. What had I done? There was no way to hide this. Why had I thought this was going to work? These people could fly. They could see through objects. They would run me down like an animal.
I thought about turning myself in, giving it all up. If I gave everything back, all the money and the gold, they couldn’t do that much to me. A few years and I’d be out. I could go back to the labs. The robotics work I’d done in the past eight months would win me a research grant and help mend fences at the university. I’d be able to go on working, even do some research if I cut the right deal. Having powers didn’t mean I had to do this stupid stuff. This ridiculous little incident could all be forgotten, the stupid costume, the name. Just drop it all here.
I put my hands on my helmet, ready to lift it off. And…what? Walk into the police station? Call the FBI? Go to prison? Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn’t change anything.
It wouldn’t make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you’re different you always know it, and you can’t fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you’re given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.
It’s time to start again. Maybe this time it will be different. I’ve learned from my mistakes. With CoreFire gone, I may never get a better chance.
I think I’m going to be staying on here in my suite at the Starlight Motel. The ruins of my old base are going to be too hot for a while. I’ve checked all the hero traffic I can monitor, and I think I got away clean. There’s a RadioShack one street over, plenty of copper wire, and all the take-out food I can eat. I’ve got plans now, ideas I worked out in prison. In a few weeks, free, someone like me can accomplish a lot.
I do a little sketching, but the kernel of the new plan is a simple one. To take over the world, I need four items—a mirror, a book, a doll, and a jewel. It’s a trick, a hack I worked out back in the cell. Four objects no one particularly cares about, sifted out of all the clutter of the world, but combine them in the right way and they mean everything. I still don’t know where they are, and I need to get them without being caught. And there are still so many variables: Where is CoreFire? What if he returns?
I’m careful. I wear sunglasses even at night, and speak in an affected voice. But the Arabic man in the pink button-down shirt at the convenience store has seen me. The attendant at the laundromat knows me by a different name. The two who work the front desk at the motel know me, the old man who owns it and the teenage girl, with her acne and her dull stare. And the take-out delivery boy from the Chinese restaurant. I don’t know what they think I am. Anyone could guess my secret.
All night long the traffic moves outside my window. I’ve pushed all the furniture to the corners of the room, and the new, improved Power Staff is spread out on a sheet laid over the carpet, a skeletal frame clogged with wiring. It’s just a metal frame now, with circuits and wires, but I’m expecting packages. Nick Napalm will fetch me what I need, things you can’t buy at RadioShack. I redesigned it in prison, working in my head in the darkness while the guards paced back and forth outside.
I recall the last time but one, the battle-blimp listing, belching black smoke into the clear air as I strapped myself into a suborbital flight suit. My hands shook filling the tank, the stink of rocket fuel still in my nostrils. It was the last of five escape plans, the bottom end of a flowchart I’d put together back at the base.
And there was CoreFire, teamed up with the massive Battalion, two and a half tons of metal impossibly adrift on the summer breeze, uncanny. I’d thrown everything I had at them, and CoreFire looked smooth and unscarred, crisp as if he’d just stepped off a yacht. Underneath us, Queens spread out a little too close—I was losing altitude. My eye was already picking out places where it might be safe to fall. Soon I’d be going back to prison for term number ten.
“Give up yet?” he asked.
“Never!” And it is never. I’ve dreamed for so long of the day one of my plans will actually be fulfilled, the last step in place, executed to the last detail, the last ball rolling down its ramp into the last cup to pull the last lever in the grandest Rube Goldberg machine of all. When the doomsday device is unveiled, the launching laser built, the weather-controlling satellite finally aloft, the skies dancing to my whim. Sunny days when I wish them, dark, crackling storms, or late-afternoon drizzle. All these years underground, I dreamed of a land where I could live in the weather I wished.
“Surrender or be destroyed!”
On the bridge of my battle-blimp the wind rises, carrying a new scent. Autumn.
CHAPTER SIX
THE GAME IS AFOOT
Windows are shattered for blocks in every direction. The television news this morning shows Nick Napalm battling, ringed with flame. They evacuated the area early this morning, and an eerie calm has settled on the neighborhood. Damsel and I pass the first perimeter—she flashes some identification at the policemen on the barricades, who stare at our costumes as if we were brightly colored poisonous fish.
Damsel walks ahead, ignoring me. They direct us to a warehouse three blocks in, where they’re holding him. Walking through the streets in costume, I feel like a visitor from another planet. Footfalls ring in the silence. Empty facades gape, blotched with scorch marks; the air seems to hum with the impact of punches on hardened bodies. There are fire trucks parked outside the warehouse.
I start to show my temp ID again at the door, but Damsel brushes past them, and I follow. “The new girl’s with me,” she mutters. Nice of her to mention it.
Inside, the scene has a familiar look, the hasty ad hoc containment protocols that spring up around a hostile metahuman capture and have nothing to do with normal arrest procedure. Nick Napalm is lying facedown in a cleared space in the center of the concrete floor, hands cuffed behind him. A policeman is holding a hose on him, just standing there soaking him continually to keep his flame out.
They’ve marked out a circle sixteen feet around him in red paint, and eight or ten policemen in body armor stand watching him from behind a ring of stacked-up tires. They look exhausted and pissed off. They’ve had a long and dangerous morning, all because two superpowers decided to have a night on the town. A couple of marksmen lounge up on a catwalk, leaning on the rail.
He lies right in the puddle, which is draining into a grating in the floor. Nick Napalm is a smallish man with dark hair and olive skin, wearing a full-length orange-and-black robe. It must have created an impressive flowing effect when it was dry, but now it just looks like wet laundry. He isn’t moving. I can see the side of his face is heavily bruised.
Nick Napalm is just what he sounds like, a human flamethrower. He gets these fits where he goes out and burns things. His eyes and his voice have a blank schizophrenic gloss, but when he’s not on one of his pyromaniac tears, he’s fairly sensible, and he needs to make a living, like anyone else. The native canniness of the insane, I guess. He’s escaped plenty of fireproof holding cells over the years.
A few of the police look up at us when we arrive. They don’t seem particularly friendly, but there is a note of relief when they see the costumes. We’re used to the weirdness, they think. We’ll take this mess off their hands. A junior officer conducts us past the wall of tires.
“Nick Napalm. He had an all-night fight with Bearskin last night. A diamond got stolen, two guys fighting over the take. We brought him down around six this morning. W
ord came in to call you.”
Damsel seems used to these kinds of interactions, remaining gracious but distant. “Thanks. What happened to the gem? Any word?”
“No sign of it now. Where were you guys last night?”
“We had other business.” She was having another shouting match with Blackwolf, actually. I could hear it all the way down the hall.
We step inside the magic circle and walk out to where he lies. No one follows. I kneel down to talk.
They keep the hose on him, and I’m getting a little wet just crouching there. He still hasn’t moved. This is what people like this come to, all that talent and ambition.
“Nick,” I whisper.
“Tin Man.” His voice is a little distorted by the bruising and the way he’s lying with his cheek on the cement. He’s been awake the whole time. “Get me out. They’re gonna kill me. Heard ’em talking about it.”
It isn’t that implausible. They can always say he tried to escape. No one is going to miss this guy.
“We need to ask you about CoreFire.”
“Get me out of here first. Special. Special detention. I know you can do it.”
“Why should I bother?”
“I saw him. Doctor Impossible. Four days ago. Tell you where.”
“Fuck.” I give Damsel a look. What do we do here?
“Do it. We’ll walk him out.” She’s impatient.
“The cops are going to be pissed off is all.”
We do it. The police sergeant starts to say something, but Damsel gives him a look. He’s playing out of his league, and he knows it. But I can’t help feeling the gaze of those marksmen on the back of my head. I’m not like Damsel—a bullet in the right place will finish me off, just as it would anybody. Damsel doesn’t seem to care. She’s been a superhero all her life, and it’s obvious she couldn’t care less what the civilian police think.
Soon I Will Be Invincible Page 8