On the other hand, what was society supposed to do with men like Rhino? Letting them roam free clearly was not an option. People like Rhino were predators, and society had the right to protect itself from predators. The problem with warehousing criminals, though, was they often went to prison with their bachelor’s degree in crime and, thanks to the example and tutelage of their fellow inmates, graduated with their master’s degrees or their doctorates. The recidivism rate for Metahumans who had been released from MetaHold was shockingly high. I often wondered if society would be doing both itself and violent Metas a favor by executing them instead of imprisoning them. Though I did not see them, two murderous supervillains I had dealt with before, Killshot and the Pied Piper, were imprisoned at MetaHold. I for one would sleep better at night if I knew there was no chance they could kill again.
“You ever think that maybe there is a better way to deal with Metahuman criminals than warehousing them?” I asked the warden.
“No.” The warden kept walking, not even turning to look at me.
“I see. You make good points. You’ve clearly given the matter a lot of deep thought and reflection. You’ve certainly given me a lot to mull over.” The warden shot me a quick glance and a frown, as if I had spoken in another language and he did not understand what in the world I had just said. He clearly was not fluent in sarcasm. I on the other hand was bilingual.
We got to the end of the corridor. Two guards outfitted from head to toe in black and grey armor and holding large futuristic-looking rifles stood in front of a door that reminded me of a bank vault. They eyed me suspiciously, as if they would have no problem blasting me if I stepped out of line. Maybe they were looking at me like that because they suspected I wanted to steal their weapons. They were right. I was unarmed, and did not much like it. Gun envy was an insidious thing.
Sakey waved them away from the door.
“He’s with me,” he said to the guards in reassurance.
“And he’s with me,” I added about Sakey. No one seemed reassured. Sakey directed me to have my palm and eye scanned at the terminal next to the door. I stepped up to it while having a feeling of déjà vu. I had gone through the same thing with similar-looking technology to get access to the Sentinels’ mansion. That was no coincidence. Mechano had designed much of the security technology both here and at the mansion. My scans on record with the Heroes’ Guild had been transmitted to MetaHold in anticipation of my visit. After the scanned confirmed I was actually me, Sakey stepped forward as well to be scanned. He then entered an access code on the data pad. He shielded what he entered on the pad with his body so I could not see it. If I did not approve of the tight security, I would have been insulted.
The heavy metal door dilated open. Sakey and I stepped inside. The door closed behind us. The dull-silver metal interior reminded me of the teleportation chamber at Hennings’ place that led to The Mountain. I felt a tell-tale sinking sensation. We clearly were in an elevator car that just as clearly was descending into the bowels of the Earth. My ears popped with the change in air pressure. The ride took so long I felt like we were journeying to the center of the Earth. If I had known, I would have read Jules Verne’s novel in preparation.
After what seemed like an eternity, the elevator car slid to a halt. The door opened again, this time to a corridor that was made of the same dull-silver material as the elevator car. Sakey led the way. Other than the sound of our footsteps, the place was a silent as a tomb. The contrast between what it sounded like down here and what it had sounded like on the ground floor of MetaHold was profound. Translucent globes that were no doubt security cameras were mounted on the ceiling. Thin metal tubes that looked the like barrels of guns were mounted on brackets high up on the sides of the walls near the ceiling. They turned to tracked us as we went down the corridor. I felt like a walking bulls-eye.
Sakey saw me looking at the tubes. “Those are both lasers and metal projectiles,” he said in explanation. “Plus some other weaponry I’m not allowed to talk about. We’re deep under the Earth’s surface in a nearly indestructible tunnel that’s protected by force fields and electromagnetic fields that protect it from teleporters and someone trying to break through it with brute force. The fields also mask the tunnel’s presence to all known forms of detection. No one can get in here without authorization.” He sounded like a proud parent.
“Every system has a weakness,” I said, though if this part of MetaHold had one, I had not spotted it yet. Sakey shook his head in disagreement. He looked insulted at the very suggestion.
In a few moments we arrived at a door that looked identical to the bank-vault door that had given us access to the elevator. We went through the same palm and retina scanning and code-giving process we had gone through before. The door opened to what looked like the bridge of a spaceship, if the window of a spaceship looked out onto a thick metal cube twice as tall as I and wide enough to house a large sports utility vehicle with room to spare. The cube glowed white. It had runes etched all over it, making it look like it was covered in hieroglyphs. The cube pulsated a little from time to time, like it was a slowly beating heart. The cube was in a large, featureless room whose walls were made out of the same material the tunnel we had just stepped out of had been.
In the room Sakey and I had stepped into were seated a man and a woman. Each of them was dressed in the black and grey uniforms of MetaHold prison guards. They were seated at a control panel that had a row of computer monitors mounted behind it. The large window that overlooked the room the glowing cube was in was directly in front of the control panel. The two guards turned a bit. They looked at me with curiosity.
“This is Truman Lord, the private detective I told you about,” Sakey said to the two guards. “This is Mike Lopez and Kierra Singleton. Mr. Lord wants to take a look at how we have Chaos contained.” Lopez was a muscular Hispanic man with a thick moustache. Singleton was a stout but strong-looking black woman with cornrows. Lopez looked me up and down appraisingly. I felt like a horse that was being inspected by a potential buyer. Lopez smiled at me. The frank look Lopez gave me smacked not only of curiosity but also of interest. I got that look from women sometimes. Not as often as I would like, but sometimes. Lopez’s look made me uncomfortable. I had no problem with men who liked men, but Lopez was looking at me the way a dog looks at a steak. I wished I had my gun. Or at least a baseball bat.
I tore my eyes away from Lopez before he could interpret my gaze as an invitation. I was tempted to leer at Singleton to let Lopez know in what direction my glandular biases laid, but I thought that was unprofessional. Not to mention not Heroic. I could not imagine Avatar ever leering at someone. Besides, Singleton was armed, and did not look like the type of woman who enjoyed being leered at. Few women were.
Instead of leering at Singleton, I instead looked at the monitors mounted on the control panel Singleton and Lopez sat behind. There were almost a dozen of them. One was pitch black; two others showed colors and patterns that seemed to shift randomly. It made me a little dizzy to look at the varying colors and patterns. The other monitors featured a single individual inside of what seemed to be the same metal square. Each person was different. The people depicted were of different sexes, races, ages, and sizes. On one screen was a teenaged raven-haired girl who exploded, filling the screen showing her with an almost-blinding explosion. Seconds later, the girl reformed on the screen, no worse for wear. She exploded again, immediately reforming again, repeating the process over and over and over. It reminded me so much of my young Meta friend Clara Barton that I had to look away, feeling a tear starting to form in my eye. Everyone knew Heroes did not cry. Especially not in front of someone like Lopez, who still had a lustful gleam in his eye. Maybe he was attracted to the sensitive type.
On another screen was an old man who was lying down with his eyes closed. It would be easy to think he was dead, except the man was floating in mid-air, about five feet from the floor. From time to time he opened his eyes. Bright orange light
s shone out of his eyes like they were spotlights. The beams of light bounced around in the square like billiard balls. Once the man closed his eyes again, they would disappear.
On another monitor was a hulking purple form that was more humanoid than human. It looked like something out of a monster movie. With rippling muscles that looked like they could tear you in half, the humanoid pounded on the sides of the cube it was in with such force that made me wince just to watch it. The cube was undamaged, though. The monster roared with obvious rage, pounding all the harder, to no effect.
On another screen was a scene that did not at first glance belong with those shown on the other monitors. A young black man wearing square glasses sat in a cloth armchair in a room that looked like it had been decorated by someone’s grandmother. He was reading a thick, leather-bound book. He studied the book avidly, as if it contained the secrets of life. Maybe it did. The only thing the young man had in common with all the other figures depicted on the screens was he was surrounded by an orange field of energy that was dotted with black. It was like he had a full-body halo. The black dots moved and morphed as if they were alive. Each figure on each screen was surrounded by the same orange energy field. While the field was centered on each figure, it extended from each of them like a rippling wave until it touched the sides of the cube.
“Chaos, I presume?” I said to Sakey. He nodded.
“The one and only,” he said, with the air of a circus owner showing off his prized elephant. “Chaos exists in several manifestations all at the same time. Think of him as a multi-sided die—each face of the die is different, but each face is still part of the larger whole. You see some of Chaos’ manifestations depicted on these screens. His Metahuman power is the ability to bend reality, which doesn’t sound like much until you see him like this. He can literally be anything or anyone he wants to be, all at the same time.” I remembered how Chaos had transformed himself into a tornado and a hurricane simultaneously, nearly destroying Chicago before he had been subdued and captured by the Sentinels years ago. He had been held here in MetaHold since then. Sakey frowned slightly. “Actually, no one knows if he actually chooses what he manifests as. We can’t tell if he is intelligent, or more like a force of nature that is governed by rules we do not understand.”
“What’s that energy field around him?” I asked. Sakey shrugged.
“We’re not sure exactly. Chaos emits it constantly, like a slug oozing mucus or a glowworm luminescing.” I almost said I did not know what “luminescing” means, but I was afraid the humorless warden would believe me. I looked like a dumb meathead, and people judged a book by its cover. “We do know that the field somehow alters reality. Expose a steel beam to it, and it suddenly becomes as soft as butter; expose cotton candy to it, and suddenly the stuff becomes harder than the hardest of substances.” At Sakey’s words, I had a flash of insight. If what he said was true, would Avatar’s invulnerable body suddenly become all too vulnerable if exposed to Chaos’ energy field? Could you then shoot and kill him as easily as a dog in the street? Was that what had happened? And, did Avatar know that was possible which was why his recording had directed me here in the event he had run amok? I nearly missed what Sakey said next.
“The structure Chaos is in, the outside of which you can see through the window directly ahead, has been specially designed by the Sentinels to contain Chaos,” Sakey said. “We call it the Cube for obvious reasons. Cutting edge technology. Nothing gets out and nothing gets in, except for when we feed Chaos. Millennium even put magical seals on the Cube, which are represented by the pictographs all around the Cube.” Sakey snorted. “Not that I believe in all that mumbo-jumbo. I personally think Millennium’s so-called magic is nothing more than advanced tech the rest of us don’t understand.” I would have agreed with him before I had experienced the parallel universe the Sentinels were keeping Avatar’s body in. Now I was not so sure. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, I wanted to say to Sakey. I resisted the impulse. I did not want to blow my meathead cover by quoting Shakespeare.
“How do you feed him?” I asked instead.
Sakey went over to the large window, pointing at the massive Cube on the other side.
“See that round access hatch about the size of a paper towel tube that’s chest high?” I looked hard, and did see it. There was a small black ring around it. “When it comes time to feed Chaos, we do so through a tube that extends from the wall and connects with that access hatch on the Cube. He doesn’t need much, just a morsel or two every couple of weeks. He can make what we give him into more with his powers.”
“So you don’t have to go inside the cell housing the Cube to feed him?”
Sakey shook his head.
“No one is permitted inside that cell. For security. We don’t want to take even the slightest chance that Chaos might escape. In addition to the tech and automated procedures we have in place, there are two guards present in this room at all times, monitoring things. There are a total of six guards who have specialized training to monitor the equipment in this room. Monitoring Chaos is all those six guards do. Lopez and Singleton here are two of them.”
“What would happen if someone went into the cell outside the Cube?”
“Alarms would go off both here, at Sentinels’ mansion, and at Heroes’ Guild headquarters. MetaHold would be swarming with Heroes in minutes.”
“Has an alarm gone off in the past few weeks?” Sakey shook his head no. He said something I missed. I was only halfway paying attention to him. I was paying more attention to what my powers were telling me. Someone’s heart rate had spiked. At first I thought it was Lopez. Perhaps he had gotten a glimpse of my butt and had gotten excited. I had been doing a lot of squats lately, after all. But no, it was not him. It was Singleton. I glanced over at her. Her wide dark face was expressionless. I was not mistaken, though: as Sakey and I spoke about whether someone had recently gone into the cell housing Chaos’ cube, Singleton’s heart raced.
“What about you?” I said to Lopez and Singleton. “Have the two of you seen anything unusual here in the last few weeks?” Sakey looked annoyed that I would address his employees directly, as if I had violated some sort of protocol. He must have been a real joy to work for.
“No,” Lopez said. He looked at me like I was the most unusual thing he had seen in a while, and that he most definitely liked what he saw. The way he looked at me, I felt like I was being non-verbally catcalled. Singleton’s eyes darted over to Sakey for an instant, then she agreed with Lopez, shaking her head no. Her heart rate and blood pressure said otherwise. She was lying. It might be easier to get the truth out of her if her boss was not hovering at my elbow, though.
I thanked Lopez and Singleton for their time. Sakey escorted me out of the control room and toward the tunnel leading back to the elevator. I felt Lopez’s eyes on me as I left the room. Singleton’s reactions to my question had made me feel like I had gotten a lead. I was feeling generous. As a result, I put a little wiggle into my gait for Lopez’s benefit as I walked away. I was no bigot. If it did not hurt me, why not throw the guy a bone?
I would not be throwing him a boner, though. One had to draw the line somewhere.
CHAPTER 18
The day after my visit to MetaHold, I rang the doorbell of the front door of Kierra Singleton’s brownstone. I had on black pants, black Adidas running shoes with white accents, and a long-sleeved, fitted button-up white shirt. The shirt was untucked mostly because I wanted to conceal the gun holstered at my hip from view. The fact I looked unspeakably cool was a happy side effect.
The Singleton townhouse was in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I looked around while I waited for someone to respond. Black children of various skin hues played ball in the quiet street, their game pausing when a car came through. A young black guy wearing a black Yankees cap with white lettering leaned against the pole of a streetlight diagonally across the street from me, w
atching the kids play. The cap was on backwards. Either he was trying to look cool or he was shielding the back of his neck from the glare of the sun. He looked a little young to be the father of one or more of the children, but one never knew these days. Precociousness was not always admirable. There were some parked cars on both sides of the street, but not as many as there would probably be later in the day. It was the middle of the day, and most people were still at work. The neighborhood was middle class and primarily black. No one called me whitey, told me to go back to England, or tried to start a race war. In fact, no one paid me any untoward attention at all. Perhaps cable news had lied to me about the amount of racial animosity in the country. Maybe I needed to stop believing everything I saw on television.
“Yes?” came a voice from a speaker mounted by the doorbell. It sounded like Singleton’s. Voice recognition software had nothing on me. When they invented a computer which could shoot, annoy people with its jokes, and wear its hat at a rakish angle, then I would start to worry about my job security.
“Ms. Singleton, this is Truman Lord. I met you at MetaHold yesterday. I would like to speak to you for a few minutes.” There was a long silence.
“What about?” Singleton finally said.
“Just some follow up questions from yesterday.” There was silence again for a long moment. Then the door buzzed open. “I’m on the second floor,” Singleton’s voice said. Perhaps it was merely the distortion of the speaker, but she did not sound happy to hear that I had turned up on her doorstep. That happened more often than I would have thought possible to someone with my sparkling personality. My feelings were not hurt. Getting punched in the jaw by a supervillains hurt a heck of lot more than not always being greeted enthusiastically.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 4): Hunted Page 20