by Paris, Sevan
I turn and see a girl—or rather something that looks like a girl but is actually a pink ghost—standing there with her arms folded. “Can I, like, help you or something?”
I recognize her instantly and so does M. He raises our force field and I jump in the air, hovering five feet away. “Whoa, stay away! Don’t ... possess me or anything!”
“Oh please. Why on Earth would I want to crawl around inside that noggin? You’re a freak.”
Says the pink free-floating apparition.
Pink has been with the Prose division of HEROES for a year. She’s eighteen but her powers have kept her sort of physically frozen as a thirteen year old for five years. According to herowiki, her power/curse was the result of a testing accident for Cover Chick Cosmetics. After the story broke, I don’t think a single woman in Prose wore makeup for a month.
She’s wearing the same clothing that she’s been wearing for the past five years: A Brittany Spears t-shirt, capris, and Keds.
“So, are you, like, here for something? I’m right in the middle of Vampire Diaries.”
Of course you are.
“I need help. There’s a problem out there that I need help with.”
She purses her lips as if she wants to blow air out of them. “You and everybody else.”
“This is serious, Pink.” It’s weird saying her name like I know her. “We could be in the middle of some kind of freagin’ zombie apocalypse.”
She rolls her eyes, floats through me and inside the window. The janitor doesn’t see her until it’s too late. By then, it’s y’know, too late.
She enters the janitor’s body and disappears. He arches his back so far I thinks it’s about to break and then he lurches forward again. He drops the mop and hurries over to the door with a valley girl walk. His eyes glow pink.
He unlocks the door. I knew the bastard had a key.
Pink floats out of his head. “See you upstairs.” She floats through the ceiling without telling me what floor.
The janitor shakes his head. “I hate that bitch.”
I walk inside, feeling awkward for some reason. I’m a Superhero dammit. Why do I feel awkward?
Paintings surround me in the expensive lobby. There’s one to my immediate right depicting HEROES saving the world from the Zorbog invasion forty years ago. Another one shows them defeating Victor Verse, the Verser of crime (a dude that I’ve also had the misfortune of fighting). Several more show Liberty by himself, fighting Japanese war boats during World War II. All of the paintings eventually lead my eye to Liberty’s thirty foot bronze statue in the center of the lobby.
“Wonder if he’s here?”
He is.
“You can sense him?”
Of course. He’s too powerful for me not to sense. He was even worth my notice before being confined to this wretched—
“Hey!” Pink screams above me.
I want to yell at her in a manly way, but all that comes out is a kind of girlish squeak.
I ... have never heard you make that sound, Gabe.
“What part of ‘see you upstairs’ did you not understand? Big guy’s waiting, and I’m getting tired of repeatedly pausing my show.”
She disappears.
“Will our powers do anything to her?”
I can think of only one way to find out.
***
I take the stairs because it’s quicker to fly than take the elevator. I open the door, and the Silver Sentinel is there, waiting next to the elevator. He faces me.
Silver Sentinel hasn’t made his identity public, but most of the hero identity bloggers believe he some sort of rich billionaire, or at least a person with close ties to one. His armor is lined with Andrium, the most expensive and hardest metal in the world. He creates at least one new suit each year, meaning he spends more money annually than Apple. His current suit looks like a high-tech knight from King Arthur’s Court, covered with blinking lights and topped with a huge purple plume. A mirrored visor covers his eyes, and I hear it glows when he’s angry.
He lowers his head like he’s reading something inside the helmet. “I don’t have your picture in my database.”
“Cause you shouldn’t. I’m not registered.”
“That was the general implication.” He looks at a closed door behind him. “PINK, GET OUT HERE!” His voice reverberates around us on some kind of PA system.
Pink’s head appears from the wall beside me, almost causing me to squeal again. “What?”
“You let a non-registered cape in here?”
She rolls her eyes. “He said it was like an emergency or something—a” Her head goes back into the wall before she’s through talking.
Sentinel looks back at me. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t arrest you right now.”
“I’ll give you three hundred million.”
***
I look at the HEROES gathered around the table. There are five of them. Pink, who doesn’t really sit in the chair as much as hover. Silver Sentinel, who has a special chair reinforced for both his bulk and his width.
Ms. Mystick sits to Silver Sentinel’s left. She’s supposedly the world’s greatest user of Magicks (which she spells with a “k”, so you know she’s serious). She’s a brunette with shoulder length hair. She’s dressed in something that looks like a cross between a men’s business suit and a bikini. A waist length black cape with a dark red liner hangs from her shoulders. Her eyes are bloodshot and she keeps rubbing her temples.
Next to Ms. Mystick is Thinkor, The Human Brain. Out of all the HEROES, I think he’s the most suspicious of me ... he keeps looking in my direction. At least, I think he keeps looking in my direction. He doesn’t have eyes, so it’s hard to tell. He’s like a piece of green cauliflower with arms and legs and he wears this pink Speedo thing. Really, does that guy not have a mirror?
Then there’s the big guy: Liberty.
He stands there looking at something on an iPad. His costume is black with gold highlights on the chest, forearms, and shins. His cape—which always seems to be the right size and somehow manages to evoke the right amount of wind—is dark red with a white star on the back.
All I can think about while sitting in this room is that Liberty is strong enough to move the moon’s orbit (he’s done it before). The others act like he’s nothing new though. I wonder how long it took them to think of themselves as an equal to Liberty or, at the very least, able to sit in the same room with him without peeing yourself from excitement.
“Okay,” Liberty says in a low voice that somehow manages to still sound booming. “What do we know? Anybody?”
“The white dots display the number of people in the city,” Silver Sentinel says while activating holo-projector at the foot of the table. It displays a map of Prose City. I resist the urge to pass my hand through the River and Michael Booth Bridge. “The blue dots, the number of nanites, and the green dots indicate the number of infected people,”
“Helluva lotta green dots, Sentinel,” says Liberty.
“The number of infected is at one hundred twenty-two. Current estimates puts us at five times that by tomorrow morning and the entire country by the end of the weekend.”
Liberty raises his eyebrows.
Sentinel raises his palm. “Hey, there would be a lot more by now if weren’t for the nanite scrambler I cooked up just a few minutes ago. It’s keeping the other three million or so in a sort of stasis.”
Nanite scrambler? Seriously? No wonder you have a giant plume on your head.
Liberty gestures for Sentinel to continue. “The scrambler also keeps Deathbot in one body. Whichever person his central intelligence currently resides in is the one we need to locate and destroy. After that, the other nanites will shut down and be perfectly harmless.”
“So, like, which one is he?” Pink asks, looking at the projection for the first time.
Sentinel shakes his head. “I’m still trying to find a way to calibrate my scanners. But, presently we have no way of knowing. I
t could be any of the one hundred and twenty-two.”
Liberty sets the iPad aside. “Well, that’s certainly within our means.” He turns in his chair and faces me. “And we have you to thank for this information, Galaxy is it?”
He said my name! “Yes,” I say in a voice way too high. I then try again in a octave similar to my own, “Ahem ... yes. It was from a Cyborg I fought this morning.”
Duh.
“So I hear.” He smiles, breaking the tension. “Why aren’t you registered?”
And here we go ...
“I, uhm, I’m just not.”
“Trust me,” you said. “We need their help, M. We can’t possibly do this alone ... ”
Liberty looks at me for the first time since the meeting started. Sentinel changes his posture and I think Pink looks at her nails. Thinkor leans in my direction. I think he’s trying to point his right lobe at me.
And he’s just about to tell you ...
“I need you to register before the night’s through.”
Bam.
I start to say something. I’m not sure what, but I can’t just let this go.
Liberty stands, which for some reason cuts me off before I have a chance to speak.
“In light of your bringing these events to our attention, I’ll skip standard procedure this time. Just make sure you have your paperwork in by morning. Now, let’s get this thing under control. Pink, I need you to—“
“He wants to leave,” Thinkor says.
The others look at me.
Thinkor’s voice seems to come from above us rather than from him. “No, leave isn’t the right word—he wants to escape. The boy does not wish to register.”
Liberty never looks at Thinkor. He keeps staring at me. The Greatest Hero of All Time looks at me ... and he’s disappointed.
“Galaxy, I can understand your hesitation, but the law’s the law. You have powers, and the government says you must register those powers.”
I swallow. It almost doesn’t go down. “No.”
This, Gabe, was a truly wonderful plan, worthy of song and praise for years to come.
Everyone looks at me. They can’t believe I just said no to Liberty. I kinda can’t either. I also can’t believe what else I’m about to say.
“I’m not going to register. I don’t feel safe with anybody ... everybody knowing my identity,” I hurriedly say with a shaky voice.
I wonder what they will put on your tombstone? “Here lies Gabe Garrison, failed hero and botched host to the most supreme of alien life forms.”
“Everybody won’t know, son,” Liberty says. “Just those that need to know. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”
I don’t answer.
Liberty lets a moment pass. I feel way uncomfortable, and I think everyone else in the room does too.
“Let me rephrase that, Galaxy.” He walks around the table and stops three feet away. My stomach quivers. “You should reconsider, and you should do so now. I’ve got a city to save.”
M gets a blue Grav Blast ready in each hand.
“I see,” Liberty says.
We don’t stand a chance here, Gabe. There’s far too much power in the room.
I fire a blast into the corner, behind Liberty. I could fire it at Sentinel, but it will hurt him. It will just piss off Liberty and I have no idea what it will do to Pink or Ms. Mystick. I don’t want to hurt anybody, I just want a distraction.
It doesn’t work.
I fly up and almost make it to the ceiling when Liberty’s hand closes like a vice around my ankle. He slings me into the conference table, breaking it in half. The projection of Prose stutters before winking out entirely.
They expect the impact to knock me out. Partially because Liberty’s so strong and partially because I stay motionless. It’s the same sort of fake sleeping pose I use when mom wants me to mow the yard on Saturday mornings.
“Okay, lets get this Galaxy person out to—”
And I take off again. I make it through the ceiling, the roof and into the open night. I’m about to twist and fly away when a beam of light—I think it’s from Sentinel’s photon cannon—shoots by me. It disappears into the night. Then I notice something ... the beam didn’t fire around me.
It fired through me.
Chapter Four
You realize this is, of course, all your fault, Gabe, M says.
I think he says something else too, but other things have my attention right now. Things like Deathbot’s nanite doohickeys taking over half the freaking city. Things like being on the lam from HEROES (heh-heh, I said “lam”). And things like the icky, glowy blue stuff leaking out of the tennis ball-sized hole under my right collarbone. I resist the urge to draw a smiley face in a puddle of it with my finger.
I think I’m also a tad delirious.
I peak over the steering wheel of the Jeep Cherokee I broke into fifteen minutes ago. After Sentinel shot me, I needed a place to hurt. I landed (crashed actually) in the alley behind HEROES tower and barely made it to the parking garage situated between it and Pump It Gym. My shoulder didn’t get all leaky until I made it to the Jeep.
M complained the entire time.
If we don’t get out of this, Gabe, I feel it prudent to warn you that I recently learned how to sing “Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and I can count extremely high. I know numbers your race hasn’t even fathomed yet.
“Aren’t you ... ” I swallow, trying not to vomit. “ ... aren’t you in the slightest bit of pain?”
No.
“How? How is that even possible? It feels like my entire right side is on fire.”
I simply shut it off. Pain is a distraction my people found the need to abandon millennia ago. Aside from being a crude reminder of what we once were, it had no other importance.
“Well ... that’s convenient.”
I hear laughing nearby and I duck lower in the seat. Two girls pass by the rear of the Jeep and talk about Jacob from Twilight. Their laughing and discussion of everything they want him to do to him fade away. I rise.
“Too bad you can’t use some of the no pain stuff on me.”
What do you mean? I’m using it on you now. If I weren’t, I imagine your pain would render you unconscious.
I blink. At least I would have blinked if I were in human form. I don’t have eyelids when we’re Galaxy. “Can’t you use more?”
Of course.
“Then, why the frak aren’t you?”
I need to conserve our energy levels, Gabe. What do you think will happen once we revert back to human form?
I look at the hole in my chest. Another round of gooey blue stuff plops to the car seat. “I hadn’t thought of that. Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that. What will happen?”
One of two possibilities: You will either die of blood loss or you will die of shock.
“Why can’t you just heal me like that other time?”
That “other time,” Gabe involved significantly less trauma. I might be able to heal this amount of damage, but it will take a while to—
“You-you don’t know? How could you not know?”
For the exact same reason you don’t, Gabe. This specific set of circumstances has never happened to me before. We therefore need to conserve power until I can ascertain if healing is even possible. In the event that it is not, you should be within close proximity to a hospital before reverting back to human form. Recent events with HEROES and Deathbot have made that practically impossible.
No power equals no Galaxy, which could equal a dead me. Wonderful. Now, I have to sit here and think about Deathbot, HEROES and dying for God knows how long. I wonder if figuring out how to heal me has something to do with the blue stuff? I start wondering if M would tell me if it did ...
And Liberty lands in front of the Jeep.
It wasn’t a hover to a stop kind of landing either. No, he came in, balls to the wall speed. His feet literally dug up chunks of pavement that fall on the Jeep’s hood like hail. The entire level of the
garage shakes so hard I see a ripple in my blue stuff.
I freak and lower myself to the floorboard. Actually, it’s more like a bounce to the floorboard, pinball style.
I hear the clip clop of his boots. His face has to be close to the driver’s side window but I can’t look. I can’t take Liberty. Hell, I can’t even run from him like this. I want to tell M to get ready to max out our power. If he’s gonna capture me, I’ve got nothing to lose by high tailing it out of here and then circling back for the hospital.
The Jeep rocks.
What’s he doing?
He sighs.
What the hell is he doing?
I turn my head, slowly exhaling a breath I didn’t even know I was holding. Liberty is leaning against the Jeep. Of all the cars in the parking garage, he picks this one to lean against.
I hear rocket jets and then metal screeching on asphalt. It has to be Silver Sentinel. They’re here to finish me off together.
“Did you find him, Earthling?” says a digitized voice.
Holy crap.
That slimy ...
“Do you care to rephrase your tone, Deathbot?” Liberty says in a cool voice. He’s outside the driver’s side door, so he sounds muffley.
Deathbot hacks out a sigh ... I think. “Did you find my bounty, Liberty?”
“I did, but Sentinel got a little trigger happy and I had to do damage control. The kid got away.”
“I hope that you sufficiently dealt with it, and him, for your sake.”
Liberty slams Deathbot into the side of the Jeep. The vehicle jerks sideways and I almost yell. “Let me make something clear to you which should already be painfully obvious. This kid beat the hell out of you this morning. I beat the hell out of the kid just a moment ago. That means I can, in turn, beat the hell out of you. The only reason I haven’t yet is because it’s easier for me to just give him to you, so you’ll keep your little nanites under control and then leave my planet.”
The Jeep shifts more and the driver’s side buckles in. “But don’t think for a single minute that I won’t bag your ass right here. I figure civilian casualties will be around twenty percent. By the time we cover it up, it’ll be more like five percent. I’ve dealt with worse; Prose has dealt with worse. It’ll recover and I’ll have even more support for the Wertham Act. Long story short: killing you will leave me a huge mess to clean up, but it’s a mess I can turn to my advantage if I need to.”