Superheroes in Prose: The 1-4 Collection
Page 23
“Not true.”
“I’m telling you, I have no idea who sent—”
“No, I mean Deathbot isn’t dead.”
Impossible.
“How?” I say, barely above a whisper.
“Don’t know. But he’s been in the The Bend’s isolation ward for at least four weeks.”
“Then, there’s our plan.”
Casa walks to his office window and rubs his chin. He’s obviously thinking what I’m thinking, trying to find a problem with it.
He looks back at me and finally says, “I’ll call Pink and she if she’s game for a jail break.”
Chapter Two
“You want me to free Deathbot?!” the pink, tweenage apparition says, floating back and forth above us in Casa’s living room. “No friggin’ way!”
“Technically, we don’t want you to free Deathbot, Pink.” Casa says, winding his way around one of the many book stacks on the squeaky hardwood floor. “We want you to help us free him.”
“Because that’ll make a huge difference in the Land of Nobody Cares,” she says, arms and legs fading in and out of the mist surrounding her transparent body.
“Pink,” I begin as respect-like as I possibly can, “We don’t have a lot of time here. And my life—my Mom’s life—depends on this.”
“Weird—mine depends on NOT doing it.”
“Can you even pretend to care about something other than yourself?” I say.
She rushes to me. “Don’t even! You would be in a cozy cell right next to zombie-bot if I didn’t stand up for you on the bridge.”
“So what’s the difference?” I say. “Between then and now?”
“Then it wasn’t on the stupid side of crazy.”
“Why are you so—I mean, you can’t even get killed, right?”
“Gee, thanks for the legitimate concern, hero. Look, if I’m in someone, and they get greased—I’ll probably get greasy right along with them. And energy attacks hurt like crazy when I’m like this; they can probably kill me too.”
“Alright, but here it is: I’m offering you a chance to defeat Liberty. As in the for-good kind of way. Which is something you all want, right? I mean, do we all still disagree with him—with the Wertham Act? Or is whatever the two of you’ve been up to all this time just been for kicks and giggles?”
“…. You don’t know this will work,” she says.
“Why wouldn’t it? We offer him freedom in exchange for helping us defeat the dude that locked him up.”
“You don’t know he’ll come through,” Pink says. “What if Deathbot just leaves the planet? Goes back to Deathbot-ia or wherever the heck he’s from?”
“You’re incorrectly assuming we need to fight Liberty,” Casa says, pouring bourbon from a decanter he slid off the fireplace mantle.
Seriously? It’s ten in the morning.
“Before we free him, he’ll have to give us unfettered access to his memory. If what Gabe says is true, and he does function off some sort of nanite technology, then, hypothetically, every nanite will have a memory of everything that Deathbot ever did. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to pass from host to host with his memory intact.”
Pink floats between us. “How does that … ”
I step towards her. “The night HEROES came after me, Liberty told Deathbot that they had an agreement. That Liberty was supposed to turn me over to Deathbot in exchange for him leaving the rest of the city alone. That means that Deathbot had to contact Liberty before coming to Earth. He’ll have like a … digital memory of that conversation. A memory he’ll give us in exchange for letting freedom ring.”
“Do you two know how many people have tried to break in or out of The Bend?”
“Forty-six. But those people aren’t me,” Casa says.
“Those people aren’t us,” I say.
Oye.
Pink meanders around the room, looking back and forth between the both of us. “There is a reason why the forty-somethings have failed. It’s impossible.”
“Of course it isn’t impossible. Just improbable. It’s just as improbable that Gabe would have been able to avoid capture for eight months. It’s even more improbable that HEROES would have had a spy for twice that. Yet here we are.”
She shakes her head. “It’s too dangerous. I’m not doing this. I’m not helping you.”
“Pink—”
“I AM NOT! DOING THIS!”
Well, saw that coming. Quickly, Gabe. Ask Casa if he has another one of those dimensional portals lying around his domicile.
“Fine. Don’t help us,” I say. “But at least tell me what we’re up against.”
“Why? So you can get captured and tell them how you knew so much about the place? Don’t think so.”
I take a deep breath and play the last card that I have. The dirty one. The one that makes me a little like Casa, more like M, and too much like Liberty: “I’m going to tell them about you anyway.”
She looks at me, open mouthed. “But I haven’t told you—”
“Won’t matter. You’ve helped me in other ways. You and Casa. And right before the end, I’ll make sure Liberty knows it.”
“You wouldn’t … you’re not that kind of person.”
“If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you really don’t know who you are until you’re back is against the wall your about to be bricked up in. I’m going to lose everything, Pink. Do you really think that—in the last few moments before I die—I’m really going to see a lot of difference between the person that’s killing me and the person that refused to save me?”
A silence passes.
“You son of a bitch,” Pink finally whispers, not to me but to Casa. She drifts around him, arms crossed. “You knew this would happen when you asked me to help.”
Casa finishes his drink in a hard swallow. “Depends. If you mean, did I know you’d be forced to do something you didn’t want to do? Yes. If you mean did I ever think you were naive enough to think that your revenge against Liberty and the others would be easy? No.”
“So I don’t have a choice. I’m in this just as deep as him. Just like him.”
“All three of us are,” he says.
Another silence.
“When?” Pink says. “When do we do it?”
“Liberty only gave me until tonight. It has to be now.”
Casa sets his empty glass on the mantle. “Done, and I have a plan.”
“Okay … let’s hear it,” I say.
“No.”
“Come again?”
“The Bend keeps two telepaths on site twenty-four/seven,” Casa says. “ They may be able to stop you by taking over your thoughts. They’ll definitely be able to stop you by reading your mind to determine what the plan is. We have a better chance of succeeding if I don’t tell you. I’ll just have to feed it to you piece by piece over a secure transmission”
“But I know the place,” Pink says. “I know the tech, the guards, the—”
“Which is an even bigger reason for you to not know what you have to do. As soon as you jump into somebody’s body, the telepaths will be able to pull it from your brain. Again, there goes our plan.”
Pink laughs, but it’s that kind of laugh that people make when they think nothing is remotely funny.
This is just too much.
“We’re too committed to back out now,” I say.
“No—WE’RE—not,” Pink says. “And that’s the real kick in the crotch.”
***
“Hey, you. This the one and only Reagan MacPherson. And this is the beep.”
BEEEEP!
“Hi, it’s Gabe. I know things ended … weird last time. And I’m probably the last person that you wanna hear from. But things are really bad right now. Badder than they’ve ever been, and I just want to say … I never should have tried to get close to you. It was selfish. And it made your life a lot more complicated than it had a right to be. I hope you find peace. And I’m sorry I took it from you.”
That wasn’t very smart, Gabe. Liberty is probably tracing the signal in some way.
“Yeah, well, he already knew Reagan and I were together at Rock Creek Bookstore the night Villainous attacked us.” I step off the roof of Casa’s apartment and M powers us up, transforming by body into what is essentially a window into space, and my eyes become two balls of light. I fly over campus and down towards Main Street. “I’m sure Liberty has already made up his mind about whether or not he’s going to do anything to her. If he isn’t, he isn’t. If he is, just another reason in the pile of reasons that I have to pull this off tonight.”
That makes sense in a very pragmatic and non-Gabe sort of way. I wonder if facing our imminent demise has somehow made you more intelligent?
“It seems to be changing you. You haven’t been arguing nearly as much.”
Even though you’re to blame for this entire situation, it may have proved unavoidable eventually. And after further consideration, I don’t think the dino-dimension would be the best option. When you die, the best thing I will find to bond with may be some sort of dinosaur, a creature which has the mental capacity of a housefly.
“Do you think Casa will pull this off?”
Oh, I have no doubt that he’ll succeed in doing what he wants. It’s the never knowing what he wants to do that terrifies me. Then there’s Pink to wonder about.
“We knew she was in this for one reason or another. Turns out it’s revenge. For now, that’s enough for me.”
But revenge for what? And how far is she willing to go for it? Without knowing for sure, it was a bad idea to reveal your identity.
“She’d already seen our face twice. She’s been working with Casa, and she probably has access to the same equipment Liberty does. If she wanted to find out who I was, she could have.”
Perhaps. Think about her power though. And then ask yourself why she didn’t just settle your earlier argument the quickest way she knew how.
M’s words stop me to a hover above Forth Street. “Why didn’t she just possess me?”
Exactly.
“Maybe she didn’t want to … out of respect?”
…. Seriously?
“You’re right. Chalk that up to stress. But what else—wait, maybe she didn’t possess me because she couldn’t.”
Which would imply she has attempted to do so already …
“And since I don’t remember it, she probably snuck in my room and tried it when we were sleeping. Crap. Why wouldn’t she have been able to?”
Perhaps my being your host somehow protected you from her power.
“…. Again with this I’m-the-host stuff?”
The more immediate concern is why Pink did attempt to possess you—not why she couldn’t.
“She did it because she wanted to or Casa wanted her to.”
Just keep this in mind, Gabe: Our very existences may depend upon them, but we have no reason to trust the little Machiavellis.
“Definitely. Wait—the whats?”
How is it I know more about your popular culture than you?
“I don’t know what Machia—whatever means, but I guarantee you it has nothing to do with popular culture.”
I find the apartment building I’m looking for sitting on the corner of 4th and Lindsay. This is it: the first part of Casa’s plan. As in the one that I know nothing else about … Jesus, I can’t believe things are this desperate.
I fly up to the fifth floor of the six story apartment building and face the rest of Prose: The sun is just starting to set behind the mountains surrounding the west side of the city, splashing its golden colors on brick, steel and glass; people laugh, jog, and stroll down 4th Street; a little girl loses her purple balloon on the Michael Booth Bridge; a riverboat with a bright red wheel parts the Tennessee; a waiter on the rooftop of The Hairy Dog Pub and Grill lights a couple’s flambé; two other people on the same rooftop point at me and go for their camera phones.
“Well, lets give them something to take a picture of. Ready?”
Not in the slightest.
I raise my hand and point my palm at the apartment building. “Well, let’s do it anyway.”
A blue sphere of energy surrounds my hand and M uses a Grav Beam to rip away a car-sized chunk of the apartment’s brick wall; it shatters onto an unoccupied rooftop of a nearby building.
Inside the hole in the wall is the unsuspecting villain known as Weather Witch.
Sandy Stills didn’t go by Weather Witch until Lisa Lancaster popularized the nickname on iWitness News. Stills used to hire her weather manipulation powers out to farmers in the Midwest, giving them a cheap way to irrigate crops during dry weather. What she didn’t know (at least what she claims that she didn’t know) was that creating a rain cloud in one area meant that you were making it dryer in another. Her rain caused crazy changes in local weather patterns, which eventually snowballed into a series of level three tornadoes from Kansas to Washington. HEROES swept in and arrested the ‘weather witch’ for her ‘crimes against nature’ and the affected states slapped her with a couple of hundred million dollar fines. She escaped custody while in transit to The Bend and then—and this is just me guessing—she figured ‘what the hell?’ If they’re going to treat me like a criminal, I might as well act like one.
And boy did she.
She hired her powers out to anybody with the money to pay for them: bank robbers, hijackers, pirates, and of course other Supervillains (as in the really bad ones, hell bent on world domination). HEROES captured her three months ago, again. And she escaped in transit, again. Apparently, it’s really difficult transporting someone capable of controlling the weather.
According to Casa, Weather Witch has been holed up in Prose ever since her last escape. Because of the high level of Super population in the city, Prose provided her with the perfect place to hide from any equipment of the Super-sensing variety. What she didn’t count on was Casa’s sherlockness sniffing her out right when we needed a bad guy for the plan to take down Liberty. (Man, that feels weird to say, hear, think … whatever.) The irony that Liberty was going to use her against me isn’t lost on me, but at least this way Weather Witch won’t be accused of anything she didn’t do.
I’ll just have to do my best not to get her killed.
Or Pink.
Or Casa.
Or myself.
I’ve never met Weather Witch. I only know her from the news reports: She is a stocky five foot-nine brunette with dark skin, in her mid-thirties. For some reason, I expected to see her wearing the same getup that I see in the pictures online: an evil queen-looking black dress, cape, sheer black veil, and knee high leather boots.
I certainly didn’t expect to see her sitting on a couch in a black t-shirt and panties, eating a bowl of froot loops.
Nice.
She opens her mouth in surprise and two red froot loops plop back into her milk.
I hover into her living room—stun gun zapping—and give her the best impersonation of Pink that I possibly can: “Weather Witch, you’re like under arrest and stuff.”
Chapter Three
It’s just after dark when I meet Casa and Pink in a wooded area three miles outside The Bend. I land and gently place an unconscious Weather Witch on the leafy ground next to me. Sounds from crickets and katydids give the weirdness that is us a bizarre sense of regular.
Pink hovers closely to Weather Witch. “Why is her dress on backwards?”
“I …”
Oh, some fun will come out of this yet …
“I—okay, look. When I found her, she was just in her panties. So I had to put something on her. But I didn’t look.”
“You dressed her?” Pink says.
“Hence my saying I put something on her.”
“But you put it on backwards …”
“I’ve never put a dress on someone, okay?”
“Whatever,” Pink murmurs. With a pink flash of light, she disappears feet first into Weather Witch.
“On a scale of one to ten, what would you give Weather Witch?” Casa says.
“I …”
Seven at best.
“Remember the part when I said I didn’t look? I mean, I didn’t look so much that I put her dress on backwards.”
“Actually, your looking too much would be a better explanation for the dress being backwards.”
Don’t forget the being a complete moron part. I find that usually explains a great deal as well.
I rub my forehead, wondering why my life has attracted more than my fair share of people … things—beings—like M and Casa.
Casa readies a syringe full of something to wake up Weather Witch. He rolls up the sleeve of her dress and sticks her with the needle. Her eyes flutter open with a pink glow.
Pink, now fully in control of Weather Witch, stands and stretches as if she is trying on new clothing. “Guess I’d better fix this before we go in. Trying to convince everyone Weather Witch is a retard will be a hard sell.”
She loosens the dress.
“Whoa, wait, stop!” I raise a hand. What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m fixing the dress.”
“Don’t you think you should give her some privacy?”
She shrugs. “Not my boobs.” She jumps twice. “They do have an impressive amount of heft though.” She steps forward. “Check it.”
Casa reaches out a hand.
I grab his wrist and turn both of us in the opposite direction.
“What?” he says. “It’s purely an academic interest.”
“Just fix the dress, Pink. We’ll wait.”
“Well, you’re no fun,” Casa says. After we walk a few steps, he pulls something that looks like a bluetooth headset out of his jacket pocket. “Here.”
I power down, put the headset in my ear and then power back up. “Anything special about it?”
“It’s Fabulous Five tech. It has an external speaker and carries its own signal, which means it’ll work even inside The Bend. If you need anything, let me know.”