by Geoff North
His infrared switched off when a small flame was lit somewhere ahead. Brinn and Lowe blinked the sudden brightness away, and saw a small figure with glowing eyes holding a lantern in one hand. It spoke with the voice of a child.
“Follow me into the tunnels—I know a safe place.”
Oscar cocked his head to one side, the grief at losing Reginald momentarily pushed away.
“I know you.”
The figure was dressed in a black jumpsuit, black gloves, black boots, and a black cowl covering its head. A tattered yellow cape was slung about its shoulders, trailing into the wet filth of the sewers. A yellow crescent moon emblazoned on the chest completed the look, a perfect match for the menacing yellow eye slits.
“You’re The Gloom’s sidekick…” Oscar had to search his memory. “Moon Lad.”
“I’m nobody’s sidekick.” Moon Lad spun around haughtily and retreated into the depths of the sewers. Brinn ran between Oscar and Lowe, trying not to think what could be lurking in the four-inch-deep brown sludge spilling in over the tops of her shoes. The smell was bad enough to contend with.
Lowe spent most of the time running backwards, keeping his rifle pointed into the darkness left behind. The circular-shaped tunnels twisted and turned. Foul water dripped incessantly from the mold-encrusted bricks above their heads, running through hair and stinging eyes. At times the passages closed in, forcing them to run hunched over. Occasionally, Brinn’s arms would rub against the bricks. They felt cold and slimy, like dead fish skin.
Moon Lad finally came to a stop where the tunnel converged into another, forming a t-join. Instead of turning either way, the little super-hero kicked an especially gooey green rock near the bottom, half submerged in liquid waste. There was a low rumble and a four-by-four-foot section of brick wall slid back into shadow. There was a grinding sound as that section slid to one side slowly. Moon Lad ushered the others through, keeping a watchful eye on the tunnel they’d just traveled down.
The brick doorway slid back into place when everyone was inside. Moon Lad found a panel with half a dozen switches on the wall and pushed all of them up at the same time. A series of low-hanging fluorescents flickered on one by one above their heads. They were in a cavernous room, a great square warehouse-sized space filled with rows of old-style computers the size of refrigerators, interconnected with hundreds of power cables as thick as a man’s forearm. Inside the machines were reels of tapes. They had come to a stop years before judging by the amount of dust covering everything. In between some of the ancient computers were glass-encased displays. They contained odd weapons, fiendish-looking contraptions, villainous costumes propped up on stands, and many more unrecognizable but seemingly sinister items. Moon Lad led them near the middle of the room, where four long rectangular work tables were set in a square outline. In the center of it was the biggest computer of them all. It towered up and into the bricks of the ceiling thirty feet overhead. Each side was lined with glass monitors, all broadcasting the same gray field of electric snow. And there were buttons—thousands of them—surrounding the screens in colorful columns of red, yellow, and blue. There were no labels, no letters or numbers to indicate their function. Whoever had built the thing either knew by heart which each one stood for, or they were there mainly for effect and had no function at all. A child may have pictured a great computer like that, Brinn thought—if he were too lazy or too impatient to get on with his adventure.
Aside from the flickering fluorescents above and the silent gray snow on the computer screens, there was no power being fed to the place. It was cold and dead, the only sound coming from the buzz of the lights and the steady drip of water accumulating into pails set up on the tables and floor.
“What is this place?” Brinn wondered aloud.
Oscar shook his head in disbelief. “This is the Gloom Room, the hidden lair and crime-fighting hub of New Hamden’s most mysterious super-hero—The Gloom.” He placed his hands on his hips and turned around, taking it all in again. “A lot of people—a lot of bad people—tried finding its location, but they never succeeded.”
Moon Lad sank into a frayed leather control chair at one of the tables and swiveled to face the three. “This was the Gloom Room…The Gloom is dead.”
Oscar was mortified. “Dead... How? The last I’d heard, most of the super-villains had either been put behind bars or turned into wannasee. Who was there left with enough brains to come after him?”
Brinn held her hands up. “Wait a minute—Time out. What’re you two talking about? Bad guys and super-villains? Why would a little boy populate his imaginary world with criminals?”
Lowe answered, “Wouldn’t be much use for super-heroes if there weren’t no bad guys to fight. Why did you create a vampire?”
Brinn remained quiet.
“Which super-villain got him?” Oscar continued. “Who took him out?”
“He took himself out.”
“The Gloom…committed suicide?”
“Well, not intentionally.” Moon Lad leaned back in the chair, finding a more comfortable position to tell the story. “With all the bad guys gone, there was nothing left for The Gloom to do. I kept busy, maintained a constant vigil over the city even though there was nothing left to protect. When everyone started turning into wannasee, I finally quit crime fighting too. I’ve been looking after The Gloom ever since…was looking after him.”
Brinn knelt in front of the ex-crime fighter. “Did he get sick?”
The black-garbed head bobbed up and down, the yellow eyes never blinked, never expressed emotion. But there were other ways of reading what someone was feeling—the droop of the narrow shoulders, the dejected slump. “He got really sick.”
Moon Lad removed the cowl. A big mop of blonde hair spilled down her shoulders and back, revealing the costumed hero to be more Lass than Lad.
Brinn smiled. “I have a friend who’s a lot like you. She’s always acting tough. Pretending to be something she isn’t.”
She shrugged her shoulders and more hair fell down along the edge of her tattered yellow cape. “Neal once had a crush on a girl that looked like me in fourth grade.”
Brinn could see why. She was a definite cutie. Her uncle had had great taste in girls.
“Did The Gloom start changing?” Oscar asked, wanting to get to the bottom of things. “How did he die?”
“He sat down here for the longest time, drinking beer and eating junk food like a pig. You shoulda seen him…he got so fat…so out of shape. Then, just a couple of years ago, he got wind of some information that changed everything. He said the city was in trouble. He came out of retirement. I pleaded with him—begged him to get back into form before going out into the streets.” There was a long pause. She seemed hesitant to finish, almost embarrassed about it. “He tried swinging from his rope between skyscrapers. The line broke from all the extra weight and he fell to his death.”
Oscar tried to picture the great hero falling—the gray spandex suit stretched out over the rolls beneath and tearing at the seams, his dark purple cape fluttering and snapping in the air. “The Gloom was that big?”
“The Gloom was obese,” she said, sinking her head. “Almost four hundred pounds.”
Brinn saw no reason to put her through any more torture. Neal’s world, in many ways, was just as real as the one they both came from. “What’s your real name?”
The girl looked at Brinn, rubbing tears from her cheeks. “I…I never had one. The Gloom thought it was best to stick with the Moon Lad title since that’s what everyone started calling me. He said it would be double protection against anyone discovering who I really was.”
“What was the name of the girl Uncle Neal had a crush on?”
“Emily Fordsworth.”
“Would you like it if we called you Emily?”
The girl’s face lit up. She’d obviously thought about it before. “I would prefer Emma.”
Brinn took her by the hand and helped her out of the chair. “Emma it is, then
.”
Oscar remained seated; the shock of losing Reginald and learning what had become of The Gloom weighed heavily on him. Marshal Lowe placed the hat back on his head and stood with the girls. “Can you take us to the S.S.I.A. building from here, Emma? Do you have any maps of the tunnels we could follow?”
“The maps were all stored on the master computer.” She pointed to the useless tower of dead buttons and gray screens. “Water and other junk has worked its way inside the machinery and almost knocked them out completely.”
Brinn started to walk down another aisle between dozens of computers. “What were all of these used for?”
Emma trailed after her. “Everything… All the super-villains’ backgrounds and known hideouts, people they associated with, and a history of all the crimes they ever committed or were even planning to commit.” She beamed with pride. “Me and The Gloom took most of them from the S.S.I.A. building. A few more we put together ourselves.”
A good laptop could store all that information and more, Brinn thought. But then again, this secret lair and the two heroes were created by a little boy back in the mid-seventies. Immense towers like these that calculated information on reel tapes and spat out answers on rolls of print paper were all they had to work with back then.
“You got them from the S.S.I.A.—in other words, you stole them,” Lowe said. “That means you must have a pretty good idea how to get there from here.”
Emma looked up at the marshal, her eyes pleading. “Please don’t make me go there. Pipes isn’t the hero he once was.”
Brinn was confused. “Who’s Pipes?”
“The one we came here to stop,” Lowe answered.
Emma continued. “Since Neal died, he hasn’t been the same. The Gloom was the last one able to get close to him, but since his death, Pipes won’t talk to nobody. He’s gone seriously crazy…what he’s trying to do now…he scares me.”
Lowe pushed her on it. “What is it he’s trying to do? Neal’s world is dying and he’s speedin’ up the whole thing. What’s he up to?”
Emma shook her head adamantly. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
A silence fell between them. Brinn looked back to the section of brick wall they had come through. There was a dull, consistent pounding coming from behind. The wannasee had made it into the tunnels and were crushing up against the hidden doorway. It looked sturdy enough, but would their mass numbers and pressing weight eventually break through?
Oscar was still sitting. Lowe turned to him and the android hung his head quickly. The marshal had seen enough in his days to know when something wasn’t right. And what he saw in the android’s eyes before he dropped his head was guilt. “You ain’t just feelin’ bad about Reginald and The Gloom…you know something else.”
“It’s not what I know…more what I suspect. And I’d rather not talk about it until we get to Pipes.”
Lowe started towards him, his hand reaching for the rifle at his side. Brinn stepped between them. Whatever information Oscar was holding back wouldn’t put the group in any further danger. She knew him well enough now to trust him—with or without her mother’s warning—and she cared enough not to pry.
Emma saw the tension between the three. “I won’t take you all the way there, but I know of someone who can.”
Lowe stared down at the girl with steely gray eyes that would’ve sent the hardiest of men cowering into the shadows. “You’ll take us to this mystery person?”
It was more command than question, but Emma didn’t back down. She stuck her chin out and matched his glare. “Only if you stop acting like such a dick.”
Brinn burst out laughing. She covered her mouth but couldn’t stop. Lowe turned on her with a gaze even more frightening. Finally, he too started to grin. Those terrible eyes softened and the lawman chuckled. He placed a hand on Emma’s caped shoulder. “Would it make a difference if I said please?”
She took them to the far side of the Gloom Room, away from the secret entrance the wannasee were still scratching and hammering away at. In between two glass display cases was another towering white computer. Brinn stared into one of the displays. There was a pile of scaly green ooze sitting on a black pedestal. She looked closer and saw what appeared to be eye slits in the middle of it. Below was a small plaque that read Snakehead.
“What…was that?” she asked, disgusted but unable to look away.
“The Gloom’s most nefarious arch-enemy. He had the body of a man but the head of a snake. He had six-inch fangs and a two-foot-long forked tongue. If his venomous bite didn’t kill you, he could extend the head part of his body to incredible lengths and squeeze the life out of anything. Nasty guy—a criminal genius.”
“This is what’s left of him?”
Emma was standing in front of the white computer that looked like an eight-foot-long meat freezer stood up on one end. She was punching away at red and yellow buttons on a small square keypad located in the middle of it. “I’m not sure what became of Snakehead. He was way too smart to catch. What you see there is just one of his many moltings. He always shed a skin of his head after a big crime.”
“Like a calling card,” Lowe said.
Emma finished pushing buttons. There was a low rumble from inside the machine followed by a series of clicks. She stood back and it started to move slowly towards her, running on a set of hidden tracks beneath. It stopped after six inches with a groan. Emma cocked her head and frowned. She kicked it but nothing else happened.
“Damn it! This thing has its own built-in power generator. It shouldn’t be dead.” She tried the sequence of keypad entries again but the machine remained ominously still. Lowe and Oscar exchanged a look, their eyebrows raised at the stream of profanities pouring from the girl’s mouth.
She finally gave up on the keypad and slid between the narrow space way. “It’s supposed to come all the way out. There’s a secret exit back here.”
“Then let’s pull the thing all the way back so we can get out of here,” Brinn said.
There was a cracking sound from the far side of the room. A single brick popped out of the wall where the wannasee were pushing. A second brick followed, and a third.
Emma worked her way back out, her face covered in dust and light scratches. “We won’t be able to. The thing weighs a couple of tons.”
Oscar stood before the computer and flexed his robotic hands. “That’s still well within my capabilities.” He took hold of the sides and began to apply pressure. Metal gave way and his fingers tore into it, creating handholds that weren’t there moments before.
Emma gasped when she saw the tear of artificial skin on the back of his hand for the first time. “Bio-mechanical technology… Only the Agency could have built a device that advanced.” She backed away fearfully. “You work for them.”
Oscar heaved and the computer rose into the air. “The S.S.I.A. no longer exists.”
“Not the old Agency,” Emma said. “The new one.”
“It’s okay,” Brinn reassured the girl. “He’s one of the good guys.”
The wall on the other side of the room gave way completely. Wannasee began flooding through, their high-pitched whistles echoing off the walls and rows of dead computers. Oscar started to walk backwards, carrying the white tower with him. When there was enough room, Lowe pushed Brinn into the space left behind. He reached for Emma but the girl started back for the center of the room, back towards the main control tower and work tables.
“My mask! I can’t leave without my mask!”
“Damn it, kid, forget the mask! There ain’t a soul left out there to care about secret identities no more.”
She kept going.
Oscar dropped the tower with a thud and shoved the marshal through the opening. “Go after Brinn; I’ll take care of Emma.” Their eyes met briefly. Oscar knew the marshal was sorry for what had happened a few minutes earlier. “Go.”
Emma had recovered her mask from the table and was beginning to pull it down over her head when o
ne of the creatures rushed out from around an aisle of computer towers and tackled her. She fell to the floor, twisting at the same time so the wannasee would hit first. Its boney arms squeezed around her waist but Emma worked her cape around its neck at the same time. She took hold of the cloth between them and rolled over. The wannasee’s high-pitched whistle was cut off. Emma twisted and jerked on the cape until she felt its grip loosen around her. The struggle had taken too long. Emma was surrounded on three sides. Fleshless hands reached down. She closed her eyes.
Stupid mask.
There was a loud crash—like a truck crashing through a building—and when she opened her eyes again, she saw the white computer lying on its side a dozen feet away. It had slammed into a row of smaller towers, knocking a few of them over and crushing a dozen wannasee between and underneath.
Oscar held his torn hand out, but Emma stood quickly enough without aid. “Thanks.” She grabbed the mask and lantern and started for the secret exit. “I can’t believe our lair’s hidden location has been compromised.” She ducked into the black hole between display cases.
“It’s a big city; you’ll find another one.”
The passage narrowed and they scrambled on their elbows and knees through a tight shaft. Brinn and Lowe were waiting in another tunnel beyond, standing in black water past their knees. The marshal took Emma’s hands and helped her down so she wouldn’t drop head first. Oscar twisted his body around but wasn’t so lucky. He spilled into the waste, holding the exposed mechanics of his arms above its surface. Brinn grabbed his wrists and pulled the android back out.
Wannasee had already started scrambling into the twenty-foot-long shaft behind them.
Emma fished around with her feet in the sludge. “There used to be an iron grille covering the hole. It must have rusted through and fallen into this crap.”
They all started poking around with their feet, searching. Brinn stubbed her toe on something hard. “I found it!”
Oscar grimaced and reached down. He felt a jolt run up into his shoulder and blue arcs of electricity danced across the water’s surface. He pulled the iron grille out and slammed it into the opening with lightning speed and herculean force. It jammed four inches in and stopped. He wrapped his other hand around one of the slippery sections of bar and pushed harder. It dug into the surrounding bricks, scraping away bits of mortar until it would go no further. He wiped his hands on his already filthy shirt, thankful they still worked at all.