by Gregg Taylor
“If we can cast the interference net wide enough, this has a chance,” the Red Panda called to her before turning back to Brody. “Go!” he commanded, and Tank Brody and his band of survivors could not have resisted had they wished to. They raced on into the blackness, ignoring the crackle of small explosions behind them, the screams all around them, the terror in their own hearts.
They were nearly to the street indicated by the Flying Squirrel when they heard another voice call out to them. “Hey!” it ordered them. “This way! Down here!”
The group was stopped in its tracks by a policeman in uniform holding a Thompson submachine gun. He waved the crowd in the opposite direction, down an alley, and Brody could not stop the group from breaking ranks and following the officer's order. Brody followed them reluctantly, but as he neared the officer, he stopped in his tracks. He could see that the people who had followed him out of the inferno now stood confused and frightened in a blind alleyway with no escape.
Brody set down the girl in his arms and shoved her behind him instinctively. He could feel her try and cling to his arm, but he pulled it away as quickly as he could.
“What is this?” Tank Brody asked the policeman.
“You'll find out, big man,” the officer smiled, releasing the safety on the Thompson. “You'll all find out.”
Brody was on the officer before he could turn the muzzle of the weapon either towards the people in the alleyway who were now crying out in fear, or towards Brody himself. Tank threw a punch that would have made Spiro Pappas weep for joy had he seen it, a punch that should have crippled an ordinary man. Tank cried out in pain. It was like punching a brick wall. But the policeman was off balance now, and Tank hit him again to keep him that way, and then again. Every blow sent waves of agony through his hands and arms, but still he fought on, pulling the weapon from the officer's hands as he sent him sprawling to the ground.
Brody had just reached forward to pick up the gun when he heard the sharp sound of police whistles nearby and a brace of heavy boots descending upon his position.
“Stop him!” a constable cried as he barreled into Tank full force. The policemen piled on, in spite of the cries of protest from the men and women in the alley. It took a dozen of them to drag Tank down, and another ten to put him out, but the fires still raged in the city when Tank Brody knew no more.
Seven
The Flying Squirrel slumped in a chair heavily and peeled off her cowl with a sigh. She flipped it onto the wooden table before her, which was strewn with test tubes and laboratory equipment, and leaned forward, elbows on the table and cupped hands supporting her face. For a moment, she closed her eyes.
It was the silence that got her attention. It shouldn't have been that quiet, even within the confines of their underground lair. Her big, brown eyes popped open and scanned the room. She couldn't see anything, but that never meant much where he was concerned.
“I know you're looking at my cowl-head,” she said in as threatening a tone as she could manage without lifting her face from her hands. As much as she loved the life of daring-do that her dual identity offered her, Kit Baxter was always mortified by the unruly red mop that a few hours wearing the cowl turned her hair into. She was even more mortified by the fact that it seemed to fascinate the Boss. It came across as a sort of scientific interest, such as one might bestow upon a bizarre natural phenomenon, but it was still the only thing she did that seemed to catch his eye and that bothered her.
He stepped from the shadows to stand beside her, his own mask in his hand and quite pointedly looking anywhere except at his partner. “Hmmm?” he said, pretending not to have heard.
“You're not fooling anyone, you know,” she monotoned without moving.
He dropped his mask on the table beside hers and took off his right glove. “It's just… this part,” he said, holding out his hand some eight or nine inches above her head and touching a remarkable spike of hair – like a stalagmite, he thought, though he kept that comparison to himself this time. “I don't know how it does that.”
She stood and tromped wearily from the crime lab as he called after her, protesting. “All right, all right,” was all she said.
He shook his head a little. He wouldn't even admit this to himself, but he got a giddy thrill every time she took the mask off, as if he was seeing something forbidden, which in a way, he was. The fact that it was often tied to a moment of silly vulnerability in her “cowl-head” display made it all the more difficult for him to resist. The Red Panda did try awfully hard not to think of such things, but privately he supposed that she could sense his interest at such moments and found it distasteful. It always drove him to behave more strictly professional. Considering his reputation as one of the world's greatest detectives, he could not have been more wrong.
When Kit returned a few minutes later, she had clearly doused her hair in one of the sinks and wrapped it hastily in a towel. The splash of cold water had woken her up a little and she was ready for a bit of banter now, but he had settled down to work and appeared not to have noticed her absence. She sighed and stood beside him at the workbench.
Sprawled across the table were the spoils of war: a large, battered, man-like form of an automaton, the red fire in its eyes now quite extinguished. It was nearly complete, but for the absence of its right leg below the knee and one of its electric-whip appendages, which was a charred mess. She peered at it skeptically.
“Not bad, don't you think?” the Red Panda asked absent-mindedly as he poked about.
“All bad if you ask me,” Kit grumbled.
He looked up, surprised. “Yes, I see your point,” he said, not looking at the towel she wore like a turban. “Still, nice to have some physical evidence to work with. Wish we could have figured a way to get more than one,” he clucked slightly, “but still, the police will have more, and I ought to be able to get the details for comparison purposes.”
She pulled the towel from her head and began to dry her hair as she talked. “This doesn't seem weird to you at all, Boss?”
He glanced over, quickly decided that she did not mean her hair, and forced his eyes back to the prone robot. “What do you mean?” he asked.
She sighed. He was in full mad-scientist mode and couldn't see the forest for the trees. “First we had no physical evidence at all, on account of it blowing itself to kingdom come to try an' kill us. And now we're sorry that we only came back with one complete metal man. That sound goofy to you?”
He put down his instruments, raised himself to his full height and folded his hands upon the workbench. She had his attention.
Kit felt her cheeks grow hot and tried not to imagine that she had been called upon to recite at school. “Okay,” she said, “last time around Captain Clockwork robbed the city blind before you figured out that his mechanical men were just puppets, that they were getting their orders from a radio signal. Once we blocked the signal, his toys stopped in their tracks.”
“Right,” the Red Panda said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“And the Captain had the brains to do what supervillians never do. He threw in the towel and went to ground. Gave us nothing to work with and disappeared for months and months.” Kit was assembling her train of thought as she spoke, but she sensed no impatience from her mentor. He was just watching and listening. “So now he's back,” she continued, “and he must have fixed the problem, or he wouldn't have come back, right? But for lack of options, we try the same thing, block the signal. Except this time the tin men hone in on the source of the counter-signal, in this case being you standing there flat-footed–”
He coughed his displeasure but said nothing. Kit continued with new momentum, “And they do their very best to blow you to Hades by turning themselves into marching bombs.” Kit locked eyes with him across the table. She was on to something and they both knew it. “So tonight, we set up relay stations all over the battle zone to try and blanket the whole area with the counter-signal so they can't tell where it's comi
ng from–”
“And they all fall over like they've fainted,” he said, finishing her thought. “It was too easy, wasn't it?”
“Boss,” she said, “if they were still getting orders from a signal we could monkey with, Clockwork never would have sent them back out.” She pointed to the thing on the slab. “That is a trap.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I was with you for a while, Kit, but that's a bit of a leap,” he said. “This sorry chap is depowered, no explosives, not emitting a signal of any kind.”
“I still know a trap when I smell one,” she said, her eyes narrowing.
“So you're suggesting that we only recovered this unit because our foe wanted us to do so?” the Red Panda asked, intrigued by the thought in spite of himself.
“I don't know what Crazy Joe wants, exactly,” the Squirrel replied. “We got this one, and the cops have some more, and I reckon we've got to try an' make some use of them. But I reserve the right to say I told you so, is all.”
“That's tough, but fair,” he grinned and turned back to the table. All traces of the smile immediately left his face. “Look at this, Squirrel. I was hoping that examination of this automaton might give us some clue to Captain Clockwork's true purpose, but…,” his voice trailed away with his thought.
“Yes?” she said, batting her eyelashes.
“Well, look at this thing,” the Red Panda began. “The whips, for example. No hands, no claws, no manipulative devices of any kind. Just two long whips charged with enough electrical power to burn flesh and cause great pain, but not enough to kill. Not enough to serve any real purpose. Captain Clockwork's metal men were always masterpieces of form and function, designed to fulfill a single purpose perfectly.”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
He shook his head in revulsion. “But these monsters… this design suggests no purpose beyond terrifying innocent people and driving them into a frenzy.”
“Right,” she said. “And therefore?”
He was silent for a moment. “That's all they were meant to do, isn't it?” he said at last.
“Looks like.”
“But, why, Kit? Why?” He growled in frustration, “What could Clockwork have to gain?”
“Are we dismissing the possibility that he's gone insane?” she shrugged.
“I can only pray that you're wrong,” the Red Panda said quietly. “The actions of a madman, working without plan or pattern, are almost impossible to defend against. How many more lives would be lost if that were the case?” He seemed almost hopeless at the thought, just for a moment, and Kit felt compelled to try and lift his spirits somehow.
“Chin up, Boss,” she said. “It gives me the willies when even you lose hope.”
That made him laugh a little, and he shook off the vision of his city in ruins and fear of his own failure that had haunted him for an instant. He looked at the mechanical man again and seemed to come to a decision. He began to put away the tools he had been setting up for the examination.
“What's up?” she asked. “I wanted to see you make Pinocchio dance.”
“I think it's time that I admitted I'm not always the best man for the job,” he said with a smile.
“I have no idea what job you could possibly mean,” she said with a gleam in her eye, “but I know it doesn't interest me very much.”
They both stopped short, just for a moment. Kit blushed beet red and failed to notice that his face was almost the same color. That was probably a little too bold, but she was pretty tired and it had just slipped. After a small, awkward moment their eyes met across the table.
“Kit Baxter, behave yourself?” she asked.
“My very thought,” he said a little awkwardly, assuming that he was still being teased about his earlier interest somehow. “Furthermore, I thought that, since we only have one of these monsters to examine, we might make use of a better brain than mine.”
Kit did not think that such a thing existed, but this did not seem like the moment to say so, and he could only be talking about one man. “You gonna take the tin man to meet Doctor C?”
The Red Panda nodded. Doctor Theodore Chronopolis was officially employed within the Ancient Studies department of the museum, but his brilliance extended to every field of scientific inquiry, and he had never failed to surprise the masked marvels when they had sought his aid. “I was thinking he might be able to turn up something that I might miss. We can't afford to take chances with people's lives.”
She nodded grimly. “Well, I'll give it to you on points. If nothing else, the Doc isn't likely to get called away to fight some ninjas or an undead warlock or something. At least, I sure hope not,” she said. Kit was very fond of Doctor Chronopolis, but there was a fine line between genius and madness, and she couldn't tell on which side the Doc was doing a foxtrot at any given moment. Still, it couldn't hurt to get his two cents.
She was drawn from her reverie by the ringing of a red telephone in the corner of the room. It was Mother Hen's line, and that usually didn't mean anything good.
He lifted the receiver. “Report,” was all he said.
Kit watched him closely. His face could be an impassive mask when he willed it to be, impossible to read, but she was certain that she saw him turn pale at what he heard. He listened for a full minute without speaking. “Understood,” he said at last and hung up the receiver.
“What is it?” she asked. “What's happened?”
“I know now what these monsters were driving people towards,” he said, crossing the room and pulling out a map of the area in which the battle had raged tonight. He pointed a finger towards a dead-end alley on the map. “Here,” he said, then moved his finger to two more such secluded spots, blocks away from the first, and each other. “Here, and here. In each of these locations, police and clean-up crews found dozens of bodies, riddled with machine-gun fire.”
“What?” she gasped. “I didn't see any robots with guns!”
“No,” he said quietly. “Nor did I. But it happened, and right under our noses. These monsters attacked and drove innocent people before them like cattle. And when they had them where they wanted them, there was a slaughter. Sixty-two dead in all.”
“Boss,” she whispered, her hands trembling a little in rage, “it… it doesn't make any sense! There was nothing of value there! No profit to be made! And even if there was, what could possibly be worth that kind of mass-murder?”
“I don't know,” he said, turning for the door. “I'm heading to the morgue to see if there's anything more we can learn tonight. You should sleep.”
“You get the strangest ideas sometimes,” she said, pushing her mass of wet hair back into her cowl and racing along beside him.
Eight
There were only three other news-hawks crowded around the barricades when Jack Peters arrived, and they all looked like they wanted to be somewhere else. Peters knew just how they felt. It had only been a day and a half since what the papers had dubbed the Midnight Massacre in spite of the fact that it had happened around nine o'clock in the evening. Scores of innocent people dead or missing, countless more wounded, some seriously, a neighborhood in ruins, and here he was. A newsman has to make hay while the sun shines, and an accident down at the Harrison Proving Grounds was not going to win the jousting contest for column inches today.
Jack unfolded his long legs out the door of his old jalopy, picked up the camera that Editor Pearly had insisted he lug along and loped off to join the thin crowd at the barricades. He could see Bailey from the Sentinel, chewing on a toothpick and leaning heavily on the wooden sawhorse that was intended to keep back the throng of reporters that had failed utterly to materialize.
Peters nodded. “Paulie,” he said.
“Petey,” Bailey said, not removing the toothpick or looking directly at Jack.
“Been here long?” Peters asked, knowing full well what the answer was.
“Long enough,” Bailey drawled. “How'd you draw a crummy story like this?”
&nbs
p; Peters shrugged. “I assume I'm being punished for something,” he said. “It's true often enough as makes no odds. You?”
Bailey grinned and said nothing, which Peters assumed meant that his fellow reporter had been sniffing around the hen-house again. Bailey had a reputation for taking a lap around the typing pool every so often, and that didn't play well at the conservative Sentinel. “Forget I asked,” Jack said with a wave of his hand. “If it's in the doghouse, it's probably a dog.” The two men chuckled ruefully.
There was a derisive snort from Bailey's left. It was some kid neither of them had ever seen, with a shiny new press pass from the Telegraph in the band of his hat.
“Yes?” Bailey said scornfully.
“It sounds like a crackerjack story to me,” the kid said.
Bailey looked at Jack and mouthed, “Crackerjack,” and both men snorted.
The kid was undeterred. “Come on, you two comedians wouldn't kill to have a story like this any other day?'
“Sure we would, kiddo,” Jack said, “but it ain't any other day. It's today. There won't be much in tomorrow's paper that doesn't have the words 'killer robots' in it. This is good for a paragraph below the shipping schedules. If that.”
“How can you know that?” The kid was a glutton for punishment, you had to give him that. “You haven't even been in there yet.”
“Because we know what the other story is, junior,” Bailey snapped. “Unless this explosion comes with free roast beef and dancing girls, it ain't gonna get much play. We got a couple of hours left to carve off a slice of the Midnight Massacre that hasn't been written up six times in the last two days, and I'm sick and tired of waiting for the department spokesman to put in an appearance.”
“What's the hold-up?” Jack asked.
“It's probably Winnick,” Bailey growled. “He likes to work a big crowd. Makes him feel important. So we wait.”