Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Damn. He really has this covered.’

  ‘What do we know about Slapstick himself?’ Cygnus asked. ‘Maybe there’s something in his profile we can use.’

  Shrugging, Heather tapped at a screen and then read out what was displayed. ‘Gareth James Carew, born sixth of October nineteen-fifty-three in New York. He worked at Clayton Physics doing nuclear technologies research, but he had a reputation as a practical joker. There were a couple of reprimands about jokes gone bad, but it all really went wrong when one of his jokes backfired and he was caught in a lab filled with radon gas. He died of acute radiation poisoning a week later, and two days after that he got better.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Twilight said. ‘He loved comics from a young age. The guy apparently had a vintage collection, maybe still does. Everything in mint condition. But he idolised the villains, especially the clever ones.’

  ‘And when he woke up,’ Heather went on, ‘he was nuts. His next joke involved the lab he had worked in and a lot of explosives, and he died again. And woke up again. He’s been shot, stabbed, burned, drowned… eaten by an escaped lion. The guy seems to be immortal.’

  ‘Well, he’s aging,’ Cygnus said. She pointed at Slapstick’s image on the screen. ‘He looks like he could be sixty. So he may keep coming back to life, but he’s getting older.’

  ‘Well, maybe he can die of old age. Anyway, he still likes jokes, very destructive ones which only he seems to find funny, riddles, like this little conundrum, games–’

  ‘He called this a game, not a riddle or a puzzle.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we aren’t meant to solve this; we’re supposed to play the game.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Twilight said. ‘We play and it’s us against him, somehow.’

  ‘I think… I think it’s kind of obvious when you put it like that.’

  Jacob’s eyes narrowed. ‘You can’t be seriously thinking of doing that.’

  Cygnus shrugged. ‘I don’t see that we have that much choice. He said first light, but how long has he been holding that detonator? He’s sixty, maybe he’ll nod off and we all get vaporised.’

  ‘So it’s us against him,’ Twilight said. ‘I have to get in and catch him before he can let go…’

  ‘Which means that I have to walk into that room and take out the lights.’

  ‘If you walk in there, the mines go off,’ Heather pointed out.

  ‘That’s the point. The mines will cut the power; I just have to break the beams. My part of the game is to see how resistant to damage I am. Twilight’s part is how fast she can get down there and grab his hand.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Jacob said.

  Twilight let out a bark of a laugh. ‘Yeah, well…’ She pointed at the clown-painted face on the screen. ‘This is Slapstick we’re talking about.’

  ~~~

  The SWAT team had suggested looking for pickaxes, but Cygnus had pre-empted the search by punching a hole in the wall. As the map had indicated, there were no traps in the transformer room, just a hulking piece of machinery which hummed, a low, mildly annoying drone. Well, it was about to get a lot noisier.

  ‘You ready?’ Cygnus asked.

  ‘I have his position in sight,’ Twilight said over their radio link. ‘When you take out the lights, I’ll move.’

  ‘Okay, get ready, I’m going to open the inner door.’

  The door itself was not protected by the latticework of red beams which bounced around the interior of the corridor, but she would break a lot of them as soon as she went for the other side.

  ‘It’s still light.’

  ‘Yeah, nothing’s going to happen until I get across the corridor. We might lose comms when these bombs go off.’

  ‘I’d thought of that, yeah. Look… are you sure you can survive this?’

  ‘No, but what choice is there?’

  ‘Okay. I’m ready. Go when you are?’

  ‘Right.’ Cygnus tensed herself and then paused. She did not need strength here, just resilience. What if she could create a stronger defence? Maybe even a force field like Svetilo had. That might make this safer and Hugh thought she could do that kind of thing. It was really unlikely that Slapstick knew she could. He would have judged his game based on what he knew of her powers…

  Closing her eyes, she clenched her fists and willed herself to change. The image of the sheen Svetilo developed when she was hit by something filled her mind and she focussed on that. Strength, flight, all that could go. She needed a force field.

  Taking a deep breath, she ran at the door on the other side of the hall.

  ~~~

  Slapstick was starting to get bored, which was never a good thing. He was in half a mind to just set the damn bomb off and not worry about timing, but he had never been good with decisions and making a choice was keeping him busy while he waited. They really should have figured it out by now. It was not exactly difficult. The blonde walks into the power room and gets killed, or at least beaten black and blue, and then the brunette in the kinky new outfit had better be damn fast or–

  The stadium fell into darkness. There was light, not much, but it was there, streaming out from under the truck. Mostly it served to make the shadows seem darker. Slapstick smiled. One down, and now all the rest would go with her. His thumb eased up on the button.

  And a hand clamped over his, another thumb pressing down to hold the trigger.

  ‘Twilight. My, you are fast. Your partner is painting the town red, or the power room anyway. Blood red. Get it?’

  ‘I think you underestimate the capabilities of my friend,’ Twilight replied from right beside his ear. The darkness seemed to be getting darker. The light from beneath the truck was fading.

  ‘What’s going on with the lights? It’s darker than the inside of a bank manager. Believe me, I know, I’ve looked.’ He slipped a hand into his oversized, baggy pants and found the taser he had secreted away there. Twilight was going to be in for a shock. Shock, get it?

  ‘What’s the matter, Mister Carew,’ Twilight asked, ‘surely you’re not afraid of the dark?’

  Slapstick’s hand was withdrawing from his pants when he felt it. They were not alone here, out in the blackness on an open football field; there should have been no one else there, but there was. There was something, something old, ancient even. Something that skulked in the shadows just waiting for the chance to pounce. Because it was hungry, so hungry, and it was coming closer. Slapstick let out a wail of fear and his hands convulsed…

  ~~~

  Cygnus flew in from the parking lot carrying a large lamp with an attached battery pack which was designed to be used in disaster situations and normally needed three men to carry it. She could see Twilight sitting on the bomb beside Slapstick quite clearly, but the bomb disposal team were going to need more light to work by. The odd thing was that Slapstick looked rather slumped.

  ‘You don’t look like you got scratched,’ Twilight commented as Cygnus touched down.

  ‘I figured out how to do a force field, like the one Svetilo uses. I really can shuffle my powers about.’

  ‘That’s great!’

  ‘Yeah, it is kind of cool.’ Cygnus began setting the lamp up on a pole. ‘What’s the matter with the clown? You had to knock him out?’

  Twilight giggled. ‘Uh, no. He had a taser hidden in his pants and when I hit him with the fear thing, his fists clenched.’

  Cygnus stopped and looked up. ‘He didn’t?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Twilight was now having a little trouble not laughing. ‘He tasered himself in the nuts.’

  Cygnus bit her lips, but there was no stopping it. She was still laughing when the ordnance team arrived, much to their consternation.

  ~~~

  ‘We have him under medical supervision,’ Heather said, her eyes on a monitor which showed the cell at the UID building which was currently hosting Gareth Carew. ‘Tomorrow he gets transferred to the Fortress. They’re putting him in the Pit.’

 
‘He doesn’t seem that dangerous,’ Cygnus said, ‘and he wasn’t that badly hurt.’

  ‘He’ll be held in solitary in the Pit. When he’s got other inmates to work with, one of them usually kills the guy and we’re back to square one. As for the medical thing… Well, they ran the usual sets of checks on him. His blood work came back with some anomalies, or so the doctors are saying. They need to run more tests. Couple of other weird things too.’

  ‘Weird?’ Twilight commented. ‘Around that guy it’s got to be pretty weird to be weird.’

  ‘Huh, well, he won’t let any brunette nurses near him. He claims brunettes are evil. And he keeps demanding more light.’

  ‘Afraid of the dark?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘I get that a lot. Any word on the Judge?’

  ‘He was busy while we were busy,’ Jacob replied. ‘Three executions last night.’

  ‘What were the charges?’ Cygnus asked, grimacing.

  ‘Drug dealing, parking in a handicapped space, and spitting.’

  ‘Spitting?’

  ‘On the sidewalk. According to him that infringed some old Maryland laws about trafficking in human sputum.’

  ‘We are going to have to stop this guy.’

  ‘We’ll step up the patrols for a few days,’ Twilight said. ‘It’s not like he really hides what he’s doing. If we can spot him, we can nail him.’

  13th May.

  Skadi knocked an arrow to her bowstring and drew back, settling her hand against her cheek as she sighted down the wooden shaft at her target. Thirty yards, give or take, and moving away at a sprint, the purse he had just stolen still in his hand. Purse snatchers were not exactly on her preferred list of targets, but Red had said that a little good publicity always helped, and saving an old woman’s cash reserves from a thief was good publicity.

  She loosed the arrow, focussing her mind on the effect she wanted. The shift glittered slightly as it flew from the old, Native American bow. It had been a gift, one which had turned out to be much more important to her than she had believed at first. Instead of piercing its target, the arrow exploded on contact, becoming a cloud of wood splinters which contracted rapidly, sealing the robber in a skin of virtually unbreakable, fibrous bonds. His legs bound together, he gave out a yelp and smashed head first into the sidewalk.

  Grinning, the cloaked and cowled heroine bounced down from her perch on a fire escape, walked past the surprised victim, and started for the wriggling perpetrator. He was a wiry sort of man, and she doubted very much he was going to be able to break out, but there was no sense in taking chances.

  ‘The crime is theft.’ Skadi came to a halt at the sound of the voice, looking around for its owner. A man in a black suit stepped out of the shadows of an alley near the robber, a gleaming, golden sword in his hand. ‘You have been convicted by your own actions. The sentence is death.’

  ‘No!’ Skadi shrieked as the sword went up. She had another arrow knocked and loosed before she could even think about it. This one did not explode, but the hardened edge, capable of easily piercing light armour, struck something which looked like a shimmer of gold as it met its target and bounced away. The sword came down, driving through the wooden straightjacket and the man’s chest in one action.

  The Judge turned, his eyes on Skadi. ‘The crime is vigilantism. The crime is attempting to aid a convicted felon.’ Skadi let another arrow fly and this time it pierced the man’s shield. He flinched and reached out to her, a pulse of golden light flying from his hand, missing as she dodged aside. ‘You will not escape the law!’

  ‘Neither will you!’ Another arrow flew, again piercing the golden field around the Judge, not deeply, but enough to throw the aim of his golden bolt way off. It seemed to make him reconsider his actions as well, because he was off down the alley he had come from before she could ready another arrow.

  The victim was screaming now and the police would be coming, but the thief was still lying there, now in a pool of blood. Expecting there to be nothing she could do, Skadi ran across to him, but there was no pulse.

  ‘He got away?’ Now Twilight was standing over her. So much for being observant.

  ‘Yes, and this guy’s dead.’

  ‘The cops’ll be here shortly. You go. I’ll handle them. I’ll say you went after the Judge, but you won’t find him.’

  ‘I could track–’

  ‘He teleports. It’s in his UltraNet file. Go, before you end up having to explain this to some dumbass detective.’

  ‘I… Okay.’

  Twilight watched her go, vanishing into the shadows of the alley the Judge had gone down. No doubt she would try to track him, but there was little chance of success.

  ‘Annoying,’ Andrea commented.

  ‘Yeah, but we were too late getting here.’

  ‘And now you have to explain why we’re standing over a corpse wrapped in woodchip.’

  ‘Probably more easily than she could have.’

  ~~~

  ‘Or not,’ Andrea said as Detective Silvian stalked toward Twilight, his face suggestive of a thunder cloud.

  ‘He has a sword wound,’ the policeman began without preamble. ‘I want–’

  ‘You have a witness telling you it was the Judge who stabbed him,’ Twilight stated flatly. ‘I saw you grilling someone who’s probably a pensioner as though she was the criminal here. You were trying to persuade her I did it, weren’t you?’

  ‘I was determining the veracity of her statement. You’ll give me–’

  ‘Do I have to file harassment charges against you, Detective?’

  Silvian’s fists clenched and he glowered at her. ‘I know what you’ve been doing. I know where you were on Saturday night–’

  ‘So does most of the city. What the Hell are you talking about?’

  There was a momentary look of confusion on the man’s face, but any further questions were forestalled by the arrival of a pair of UID vehicles, a car and a van. It looked like they were pulling out all the stops to try to catch the Judge. ‘They won’t stop me nailing you,’ Silvian growled. ‘I know.’ And then he stalked away, preparing to hand the case over to the agents.

  ‘What was that about?’ Twilight asked silently.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Andrea replied. ‘He looked… It was almost like he was fighting to stay fixed on believing we were the bad guy here. I think I’ll give Viviane a call tomorrow. Ask her if she knows much about mind control.’

  ‘Right. I’d better talk to the UID. Jacob’s not here though.’

  ‘Well, it’s not like he and Heather are the only agents in the city.’

  ‘Yes, but… He’s the cutest.’

  14th May.

  ‘You don’t mind a long-distance call to England, do you?’ Andrea asked as she picked up the phone.

  Penny grinned at her. ‘I’ll put it down as business expenses.’

  Grinning back, Andrea dialled the number Viviane had given her and waited while the call connected, which seemed to take a while, and then there was one ring and…

  A flare of light appeared in the middle of the lounge, causing both girls to cover their eyes. When they looked again, Viviane was standing there, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, looking less like the haughty sorceress she normally portrayed and more like a concerned mother. Andrea put the phone down. ‘I guess there’s no charge.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Viviane asked urgently. ‘I have sensed nothing wrong, but with the distance and–’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Andrea told her. ‘No problems. I just needed some advice and I thought you might be able to help. I didn’t think you’d come all the way here as soon as I called. How did you do that anyway?’

  ‘I took the liberty of forming a fixation on your physical pattern. I have you on… a sort of magical speed dial.’

  ‘Right… Uh, this is–’

  ‘Cygnus,’ Viviane interrupted. ‘The physical change is quite remarkable, but her power signature is quite unique. I will say noth
ing of this, even to the Union, have no fear.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Penny replied. ‘I prefer Penny when I’m this shape. Our other housemate, June, should be back soon. She had a meeting in the city.’

  ‘I assume it is safe to speak around her?’

  ‘She knows pretty much everything and she’s used to Ultras. She’s dating Red Huntress. Have a seat. Want coffee?’

  ‘Thank you, no, and Americans cannot make tea. I will be fine.’ The sorceress took a seat beside Andrea, appearing to relax now that the possibility of spreading darkness was delayed. ‘How may I help?’

  ‘I was wondering if you knew how to spot mind control?’ Andrea asked.

  ‘That depends entirely on the means of control. Please explain the circumstances.’

  ‘There’s a detective in the local police who seems determined to pin some murders on me. I don’t think he likes Ultras, but I met him last night and he seemed more intense about it. He said something about knowing what I’d been up to on Saturday night.’

  ‘The news of that particular exploit reached my ears in England. Nuclear weapons tend to generate media coverage.’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t think he meant that, and he looked confused when I said everyone knew what I’d been doing. Then he kind of… refocussed, like he was taken off-guard and then his conviction was reinforced.’

  Viviane frowned. ‘An unskilled use of certain techniques could result in that kind of effect. It is possible to condition someone to believe things which did not happen, or to forget things which did. Either form can conflict with reality and result in a breakdown of the conditioning if faced with enough evidence. I always ensured that my subjects were conditioned in a manner which would avoid such conflicts, but it takes careful planning to do correctly.’

  ‘You’re kind of at ease about being an ex-villain,’ Penny commented.

  The sorceress gave her a bleak sort of smile. ‘There are a few things in my past life I regret now, but none can be undone. I have to live with them. And my insight into the mind of a truly evil person has assisted the Union on more than one occasion. Heroes think like heroes. That is not a bad thing, but it stops them considering some things which someone like me does think of.’