The Indestructibles

by Matthew Phillion

  Kate turned back to Doc again.

  "Why salt? Why not just make it evaporate?"

  Doc threw up his hands.

  "It's magic. Movement of energy back and forth," he said. "I couldn't just displace it, and didn't want to turn it into something awful, and I wanted to transform it into something that could dissolve in the rain. It was the first thing I thought of. Next time I'll try baking soda."

  "Caught the whole thing on the news," Sam said, sidling over. "Considering an entire building is now gone — including the part of it that flew off into the sunset — you guys did a great job containing the problem."

  "Sure did," Emily said.

  "Except I think we did too good a job," Kate said. "If their goal was to maximize destruction, why attack our home base? They knew we were there. They placed that homing beacon in Hyde. This wasn't coincidence."

  "So, we're back to asking what they get out of distracting us," Jane said.

  A phone rang, an awkward, muffled, deep in someone's pocket ringing. Everyone looked around the table, then to Emily — the only one who ever got a call on her cell — and then back to each other until Billy scrambled to pull one from his pocket.

  "Uh, hello? Oh. Wow. No — yes. I'm okay. No. Really. I'm — you don't have to . . . But . . . Okay. Okay. Yes. I'll try."

  He hung up, put the phone away, and leaned back in his chair. Everyone looked at him, waiting.

  "What?" Billy asked.

  "Who was that?" Titus asked.

  "Nobody. I'm cool."

  "I'm cool? Nobody? Are you serious?" Jane asked.

  "It was — it was my mom," Billy said.

  "Holy crap. Your mom?" Titus said.

  "I, like, she saw us on the news. I wasn't wearing my costume. She recognized me."

  "Saw you on the news?" Jane said.

  She tried to picture the horror of a parent watching their child fighting a giant monster on TV. But then thought of her own adoptive parents and wondered how often they saw her and worried. Doc said they raised more than one hero, but could it be something that got easier over time?

  "Just wanted to make sure I was okay."

  "That's . . . " Titus said.

  "Really nice," Kate said.

  "I guess," Billy said.

  "Do you check in with her much?" Titus asked.

  "No," he said. "I don't want her to have to, well, do this. To worry."

  "You don't call your mom?" Kate asked, incredulous.

  "Emily calls her mom during missions!" Titus said.

  "I just . . . whatever," Billy said.

  "You should go visit her," Emily said, finally.

  Billy raised an eyebrow.

  "I'll go with you," Emily said. "She should know you're all right."

  "Looks like he got hit by a bus," Titus said. "Wouldn't call that all right."

  "Maybe another time," Billy said.

  "Doc?" Emily said.

  "It's up to you, Billy. How you conduct your private lives is entirely up to you. It'll always be up to you."

  Billy rested his hands on the table and stared at his fingers, refusing to make eye contact with anyone.

  "Billy," Kate said, as always free of irony or sarcasm. "If I had the opportunity, I would."

  He looked at her, eyebrows raised in puppy-like guilt.

  "Okay," he said.

  Doc stood up, adjusted his coat, exchanged a long glance with Sam.

  "Why don't you do that right now, Billy," Doc said. "I have a feeling things are going to get worse soon. Take advantage of the time while you have it."

  "I'm going with him," Emily said.

  "Okay," Doc said. "We'll get the rest of you back up to our — "

  "Starship!" Emily said.

  "Our base," he said.

  "If this involves a teleporter I quit immediately," Titus said.

  "No teleporters," Doc said. "I promise."

  Sam roamed up to the counter to pay their bill, and everyone else shuffled outside. Billy stayed behind, still sitting in his chair. Emily debated with Doc about whether their base could really fly deep into outer space or not. Jane lingered at the door, watching Billy mope. She opened her mouth to speak, but, knowing he probably wouldn't pay attention, turned and left.

  Billy watched her leave out of the corner of his eye, and said nothing.

  Emily came running back in, almost knocking Sam over as he passed through the door. She sat down opposite Billy.

  "Let's go, Sugar Bear."

  "Why you doing this?"

  "Because you're like my big brother."

  Billy laughed.

  "Big brothers are supposed to be the ones who do the looking after, Em."

  "That's one of life's great falsehoods, Billy Case," Emily said. "Big brothers always need the most looking after. Because nobody ever knows how much they need it."

  Chapter 53:

  The defector

  That's infinitely worse than a teleporter," Titus said, examining the best option for Kate and him to commute to and from the now airborne Tower base.

  "Trust me," Doc said. "This is much better."

  "I'm not E.T. riding a bicycle across the moon."

  Kate saw the bikes before — that's what they were calling them, one- and two-seat flying contraptions which could be retrieved by remote from a storage bay in a room none of them had visited much before. She understood Titus's concerns, truth be told — they were like oversized motorcycles, but instead of wheels, some futuristic repulsor system jutted out from the bottom and rear, allowing them to fly well into the atmosphere.

  And they weren't equipped with seatbelts.

  "What if I fall off? It's windy up here!"

  "You won't," Doc said.

  Jane, who tagged along out of morbid curiosity rather than need, laughed. "You fall off of everything," she said.

  "See?" Titus said. "I'll die on these things."

  "I wasn't going to tell you, but there is a teleporter on this ship," Doc said. "Hasn't been used in a while, but . . . "

  "How about no," Titus said.

  "We'll figure something out," Kate said, pulling Titus away from the bikes. She wanted nothing to do with them either, but the first rule of being Kate was to not show fear. The idea of riding thousands of feet above sea level made her vaguely nauseous.

  "Where we going?" Titus said.

  "I want to check where storm girl is," Kate said.

  Sam, another tagalong back to the ship, chuckled as they left.

  "Should I tell them about the time . . . "

  "Save that story for another day," Doc said.

  Kate and Titus walked briskly down the corridor toward the communications suite. Strange, everything on the ship gave the impression of being moved around since it uncoupled itself from its earthbound moorings. Now Kate took wrong turns and needed to ask Neal to help her find things.

  When they located the suite, both plopped down in chairs to search for the storm.

  "We're getting the short end of the stick on this one, Kate," Titus said.

  "Historically, heroes who couldn't fly suffered a lot of indignities," she said. "It's the way of the world."

  Kate tapped a few keys and connected to a satellite view of the Atlantic. The storm stalled northeast of Puerto Rico, a huge, swirling mass of clouds far enough off shore that none of the runoff appeared to be reaching land.

  "What's she doing out there?" Kate said.

  "Waiting? She'll raise hell whenever they get around to sending her back to the mainland."

  She tapped the keyboard a few times.

  "Something's happening out there."

  A sound neither of them had ever heard suddenly squeaked from the control console. They glanced at each other in surprise.

  "What did you touch?" Kate asked.

  "I'm just sitting here. You're the one tapping things."

  "Designation: Dancer," Neal said. "There is an incoming call from an unknown source. How would you like to proceed?"

  "Ans
wer it," Kate said. "And . . . trace it? Can you trace it?"

  "I trace all incoming calls. Patching the call through now."

  Kate placed her mask on.

  Titus pulled his hood up.

  She looked at him incredulously.

  He shrugged and mouthed — "what else should I do?"

  The screen illuminated and the saddest sack of humanity either of them had ever seen appeared on screen, three times the size of life. He wore a hippie's ponytail, thick glasses, and a hangdog look smeared in week-old stubble.

  "Who are you?" Kate asked sharply.

  "I'm — have I reached . . . " the man started laughing, a wet, almost drunken laugh. "Have I reached the good guys? I'm sorry. Don't know what else to call you. I'm just . . . I'm trying to reach the good guys."

  "I suppose you have," she said. "What do you want?"

  "I'm — my name is Hans Wegener. Doctor Hans Wegener," the man said. "These disasters, these . . . these bad things, they're my fault. Sort of my fault. I know where they came from. I'm — I'm sorry, your costume is a hooded sweatshirt?" Wegener asked staring at Titus.

  "Focus, doctor," Kate said. "Why are you contacting us?"

  Wegener rubbed his eyes. They were red, raw, bloodshot. The eyes of someone who hasn't slept in days.

  "I want to set her free," he said. "Want to let the storm escape before they use her for something terrible again."

  "How?" Kate said. "We saw a girl in the storm — is that who you mean?"

  She gestured with her hand for Titus to get the others.

  He shot back a look of confusion.

  Kate repeated the motion.

  Titus shrugged — "what?"

  "No, the girl is . . . The storm required a body. The life span of a sentient storm is less than a year. We thought if we bound it to a human, we could control it, or control her. Rationalize with it. Or . . . use pain to direct her actions."

  "Like the others. Like the cortex bombs," Titus said.

  "Yes," Wegener said. He looked over his shoulder. "I don't have much time. I — there are controls here. I'm transmitting my passwords to you now. If you destroy the controls here, they won't be able to hurt her anymore. She'll be free."

  "The girl and the storm will be free of each other?" Titus asked. "We'll set her loose?"

  Wegener shook his head.

  "Without the storm, the girl is a vegetable. The storm breathed life back into her. But without the girl the storm has weeks to live. Maybe less. They're bound to each other. That can't be fixed. Not without killing them both."

  "But we can take her away from your people," Kate said.

  "You have to," he said.

  "Neal?" Kate said.

  "Source located, Designation: Dancer."

  "Where are you, doctor?" Kate said. "Do they know what you're doing?"

  "They'll find out," Wegener said. "They always do. I haven't been . . . "

  "You need to stay safe," she said. "Don't do anything stupid. We'll come get you as well."

  "No," Wegener said. "I — I can hear them now. They're looking for me. I don't deserve your help anyway. I'm Doctor Frankenstein. Made nothing but monsters."

  "Then why call us?" Titus said.

  "You've seen the storm," he said. "She deserves to be free."

  "Everybody does, sir," Kate said.

  Wegener smiled at her, a sad, tiny smile.

  They heard a hissing noise, and then the smile faded, his eyes blurred, his shoulders slumped.

  A woman's hand slid onto the screen. It reached behind Wegener's back and pulled out a blood-covered throwing knife. She pushed him over, and the scientist dropped to the floor. The woman crossed into the camera; a refined face marred by an eye patch surrounded with scars.

  "Oh, hello," she said. "Sad little man, wasn't he? Was he looking for a rescue?"

  "Maybe," Kate lied.

  "I suppose we all want to be rescued sometimes." She looked at the body on the floor off camera. "But we can't have everything. Can we?"

  "We're going to find you," Titus said.

  "Which one are you? I don't recognize your face," the woman said. "Ah, you must be the werewolf."

  "How — "

  "It's funny, I rarely see one of your kind with their human face on," Rose said. "Do you want to know which body you keep when you die? I've killed enough of your people to be an expert on it."

  "What's it like having no peripheral vision?" Titus said.

  "I'm going to kill you as well, you know."

  "Do you trip a lot?" he said. "Sometimes, do you miss your chair when you try to sit down?"

  "Slowly. I'm going to exterminate you slowly."

  Kate disconnected the line. The screen went blank.

  "I refuse to be murdered by a chick with one eye."

  "And taunting her seemed to work so really well," Kate said. "Titus, she just stabbed a man on camera."

  "I'm having trouble processing that part," he said. "I blame that on too much TV — it really happened, right? Wasn't a show produced to try to deceive us?"

  They glanced around the room, then towards each other, unsure of what their next move should be. Finally, Kate spoke.

  "Neal, can you please pinpoint their location for us?"

  "Already done."

  "Good," she said. "Now you and I tell Doc what we found."

  Chapter 54:

  Doc

  Twenty years, Doc thought, and I'm still not sure how to beat her.

  Once upon a time — and shouldn't all stories about magicians begin this way — Doc Silence was a punk kid in baggy pants and combat boots, a street magician who knew a few spells and how to coax minor creatures out from the shadows. He played with fire. He played with blood.

  And then he went down into the sewers to save a little girl who had been stolen away, and Doc thought he was a big old hero. But there are still nightmares lurking in the sewers, he learned, and there are still monsters living in closets and under beds, and there are so very many things that go bump in the night.

  He ventured into the bilge of the city's underground plumbing, brought the little girl out, and left a piece of himself behind.

  Doc abandoned the city then; got on a train, and then he walked, and then he flew to one country, and another, conjuring money like doves from a top hat. He conversed with mediums and shaman, with old stage magicians who'd learned more than they should. He spoke with men of God and men of other things. He tried to master his craft.

  In a cave deep in the Australian Outback, he fought a nightmare that had wandered out of someone else's dreams by accident, with a dozen legs and a dark and malicious intelligence. In London he set fire to a building with Molotov cocktails so that no one would have to see what he found inside. He exorcised a house in Louisiana with wall paintings that moved when you walked by. And then Doc nearly died in Moscow at the hands of a witch older than time.

  In an abandoned Paris opera house, a demon with too many faces offered him a bargain. Doc refused, and when he next looked in the mirror, his hair was bluish white. He was twenty-five years old.

  A year passed and another malevolent creature challenged him to a duel. Doc won, but his eyes were forever changed, some small piece of that demon latched onto him, leaving each eye its own tiny inferno.

  The Lady approached him a month later, on Christmas Eve. She was as beautiful, as she was kind. And Doc was tired of losing pieces of himself in every battle with the darkness.

  She offered to teach him.

  "You don't have to fight them, darling," she said.

  She removed her movie star sunglasses and showed him her eyes, pits of fire like his, but brighter, more like real flame. "Most everything that goes bump in the night can be reasoned with. Can be bought. You just need to know how to make the right deal."

  He accepted.

  Doc assumed she'd be angry when he left a few years later. She taught him a new kind of magic, darker, more utilitarian, with more to gain, but with much higher stakes. H
e could envision where this path would lead, and he saw what the Lady had become as a broker of dark things. He understood that the world needed creatures like her, but he knew also that he couldn't be one of them.

  They parted friends.

  Doc Silence and the Lady Natasha Gray would cross paths again many times over the years. Never as allies, because he returned to the business of saving little kids from sewers and battling and the evil things that lurk under beds and in closets. Doc and his friends would interfere with the Lady's games sometimes, and she'd defeat them, or they would defeat her, and she would always come out on top, and Doc wondered for many years if he wasn't somehow part of her long con, her big scam. She trained Doc just enough to make him useful for her and her eternal game.

  Doc knew one thing: he possessed no means to destroy her. And he was not sure he wanted to — even if he were able. But if there were a way to strike a bargain, cast a spell, or cajole her out of the game . . .

  Doc poured over old books, found ancient scrolls he thought might help, uncovered diagrams for hexes the Lady would shrug off like the wind.

  He thought of the storm, the destruction that would lay waste to whatever coastal city the enemy chose to target, the number of lives that could be lost. He thought about things he could bargain away. About their friendship, their fallout, the things they shared, the things that kept them apart. He thought about what she held most dear to her, her immutable rules. And then . . . about a storm without a sorceress behind it, pulling its strings. If only there was a way he could convince her to stay out of it . . .

  There was indeed one option. He didn't like it.

  "But I enjoy this world," he said to himself. "Like being in it."

  "I like it too," Jane said, walking into Doc's study without warning. "Who you talking to?"

  "Old ghosts," he said.

  He looked at this girl, the one who would make a finer world if given the chance, who he'd picked up from the wreckage of that aircraft and held in his arms, feeling the warmth of the mid-day sun radiating off her little body. The one he handed over to John and Doris Hawkins, because he didn't know what else to do with her, because he knew he was no man to raise a child, because he knew someone else could keep her safe and help her grow up to be a better person than she would in his care. Annie, for all the good she was capable of, could never understand why he was so upset, why he had been so heartbroken, to give Jane away.