Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins

by Michael Bailey

  “Won’t the door be locked?”

  “Nuts, you’re right. Go back into the bathroom. It’s not ideal, I know...”

  “No, it’s okay. If you think I’ll be safe there.”

  He gives me a pat on the shoulder and off he goes.

  And off I go. Did you guys hear all that? I say, racing toward the nearest stairwell.

  A total communications blackout? Matt says. No way that’s a coincidence.

  Dude, Stuart says, did Mr. Dent say “they”? Like, as in, more than one?

  Yeah, I caught that too. Hold on.

  There’s a door marked ROOFTOP ACCESS—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY at the top of the spiraling staircase. It’s locked but a quick zap takes care of that, and one more flight of stairs takes me onto the roof. The high school stretches off in every direction and I can’t see squat from here, so I pick a direction at random and, as I reach the edge, crouch low. I peer out over the back parking lot near the woods, and sure enough, there’s a Thrasher standing there, identical to the one we smoked the other day.

  I think we’re surrounded, I say.

  You need to get out of here, Matt says. Get to Protectorate HQ. Get Concorde.

  I’m about to do just that, but when I power up I realize the flaw in this plan: I’m a human signal flare. Archimedes would have to be totally blind to miss me taking off, and there’s no way I could bring back help before he turns the school into Swiss cheese.

  My cell phone goes off and I almost yelp in surprise. I drop flat and fumble with the thing, desperate to silence it. It’s a text message, from an unknown sender. How’d that get through?

  Oh.

  SEND ME THE HERO SQUAD.

  Guys?

  Did you get the text too? Matt says. Everyone in the classroom got it.

  Same here, Missy says. Everyone’s phone went off all at once, like the last time.

  It is Archimedes. I don’t know how, but that doesn’t matter. He’s here and he’s got I don’t know how many nuclear-powered battlesuits surrounding the school—a school filled with kids who were never a part of this fight, but now they’re all very literally in the crossfire. He’s playing the waiting game for now, but his patience will run out eventually, and we can’t count on help arriving in time—not the police, not the Protectorate.

  We have to do something.

  It’s all on us, I say.

  You mean it’s all on you, Matt says. We’re stuck in here with everyone else.

  And there are problems number one and two: I need to get the team out because I sure can’t take on multiple Thrashers by my lonesome, but more importantly, we need to get the kids and the staff clear.

  Then what? We barely beat one Thrasher suit and that was by pure luck. We had no clue what we were up against...but this time we do. That may be our only advantage.

  I have an idea, I say, because calling what I have in mind a plan might be too charitable, but the others, they’re on-board and ready to go.

  God, please don’t let us screw this up.

  I power up and step off the roof. The Thrasher zeros right in on me. The gun arm stays where it is but I don’t trust it.

  “Here I am, Archimedes. Funny running into you again,” I say with more confidence than I feel. “I thought you were on your way to Byrne?”

  “I was, thanks to you and your friends,” he says. “Didn’t quite work out that way. Where are the others?”

  “They’re coming, cool your jets...or your maglev propulsion system, as it were.”

  The railgun charges up. “I want them out here now!”

  I’m gone before Archimedes can get me in the crosshairs of suit number one. A second Thrasher is covering the north side of the building, near the main staff and student parking lot. It raises its gun arm. I zip around behind it.

  “They’ll get here when they get here,” I say. The suit spins around, I spin with it.

  “Stand still!”

  “That’ll happen. Come on, Archie, talk to me, what’s this about? You trying to take us out so we don’t capture your sorry butt again? Oh, don’t tell me you’re on a revenge trip. Didn’t think you were that petty.”

  Or that dumb, but he’s obviously not thinking straight. Maybe this is a case of be careful what you wish for: Archimedes wanted to be human and now he is, to a fault.

  “Petty?!” he says. “I was almost a prisoner again because of you! All you had to do was let me go—!”

  I don’t catch the rest because I’ve moved on to Thrasher number three at the front of the school. I float directly above its head, which rotates up to track me (thank God I didn’t wear a skirt today). The gun arm can’t quite follow; its range of motion isn’t that great, it would appear.

  “Hold still, damn you!” Archimedes roars. The suit does a funny little dance as it tries to shake me out of its blind spot. “Hold still!”

  That’s right, nutbag, focus on me. Forget about the school and its hundreds of convenient hostagesslash-targets-slash-bargaining chips.

  “Hold still, hold still,” I say, summoning forth the awesome power of mockery all teenage girls possess. “Bite me, you whiny loser.”

  “I’ll blow you out of the bloody sky you arrogant little—!”

  So, there are at least three Thrashers but only one Archimedes. In the first two suits I confronted, there was a brief but noticeable delay in responding to me. As I learned from Matt, in technical terms this is called a lag, and it happens when information is transmitted over a great distance, or when the available bandwidth is inadequate. In this case? It means one person is multi-tasking beyond his ability to do so.

  This suit? No lag.

  My blast blows the suit’s head off, rendering Archimedes blind and deaf. The suit flails comically and sends a burst of panic fire into the air. So far everything is going according to my idea-not-quite-a-plan.

  The second piece of the puzzle falls into place: three other Thrashers arc over the school like incoming missiles. I might not have had the goods to take on Manticore, but I’m betting I can keep a trio of remote-controlled battlesuits occupied long enough to make it past step three.

  The school’s clear! I say. Sara, go!

  With the school in lockdown, there are only so many ways to get everyone out of the building at once and point them in the right direction, so we’re going to attempt a controlled stampede, and Sara’s going to crack the whip. The entire building is currently your proverbial seething cauldron of anxiety. The kids don’t know what’s going on so they’re imagining all kinds of scenarios, none of them good, and the staff, who know what’s happening and know they can’t do a thing about it, feel powerless and frustrated. What we have here is a high school full of raw emotion at the simmering point, and Sara’s going to turn up the heat.

  It’s a gamble, this part, because we—I am trusting Sara to have the strength to pull it off without losing herself. She lets her defenses drop and allows the emotion to flood into her, which she broadcasts back out, which kicks the anxiety up a notch to fear, which she takes in and sends back out...it’s a vicious circle that widens with every cycle until the entire school is teetering on the edge of a full-blown freak-out.

  And then, when she’s managed to touch, even if lightly, every mind in the place, Sara sends out a single, simple message:

  ESCAPE.

  Matt and Missy and Stuart, their job is to drive the herd toward the now-clear rear of the campus. That’s the easy part considering they’re caught up in the feedback loop too; they’re going to want out as much as anyone.

  Now it’s back to me. I need to buy them time to get their heads together, and that means keeping Archimedes busy a little while longer. I blast into the sky, rising to meet the Thrashers and then shooting past them. They rev up their railguns as I’m screaming past them in the opposite direction. It takes them a few seconds to reverse course; they stall, flip around, turn to pursue, prime their weapons, and get ready to turn me into a colander. I circle around. I’m beside them,
above them, on their other side, below them. The Thrashers flip, roll, spin trying to keep me in sight—Archimedes literally doesn’t know which way is up anymore.

  Carrie! Sara says. The building’s clear!

  Then get ready, I say, because you’ve got incoming.

  I drop straight down, but not so fast Archimedes loses track of me. This time I want him to know exactly where I am. He doesn’t disappoint; the Thrashers follow me in tight formation and pour on the speed. Good boy, Archie. That’s exactly what I wanted: pedal to the metal and eyes on the prize.

  Pay no attention to that thing called the ground.

  I veer off at the last possible second. The Thrashers? Not so much. They plow into Archimedes Prime like meteorites and scatter like tenpins. They turn cartwheels across the lawn before collapsing into humanoid heaps of metal. I’ll hand it to whoever made the things, they’re durable; aside from a few shallow dents and a scrape or two in the paint job, they’re intact and in fighting shape. Well, we’ll take care of that.

  All yours, I say.

  Stuart grasps one of the Thrashers in a headlock and, with a quick twist, pulls the head clean off before Archimedes can reassert his control—and then, because he’s Stuart, he spikes it like a football.

  “Boom, baby!” he crows.

  “Don’t get cocky,” Matt says.

  “Didn’t mean to steal your job,” Stuart retorts.

  “Two to go,” I say, but they don’t need me babying them. One of the suits gets to a knee and raises its gun. Missy charges in and Archimedes makes the mistake of trying to follow our cute little human blur. As he brings his gun-arm about Stuart pounces, pulls, and Thrasher number two goes blind.

  Now is when things can get bad. Archimedes only has one useful drone left and he’s not waiting to get it back on its feet. From a prone position he opens fire, sending Matt and Sara running for cover—behind Stuart, the best cover they could ask for.

  How soon he forgets about me. Another head goes flying. The gun cycles down and the suit goes limp, splaying onto the lawn like a drunk who’s lost the will to crawl home.

  All the suits have fallen still. Nothing moves.

  “Is this like the end of a horror movie when the killer everyone thinks is dead jumps back up for the last scare?” Stuart says, and no one responds, because we’re all anticipating that very thing.

  Therefore we can’t be faulted for flinching when the chestplate of one of the suits springs open with a pop and a wild-eyed, red-faced Archimedes scrabbles to his feet.

  “Back off!” he screams at us, his arm in the air as if in triumph. “Back off or I will blow us all to kingdom come! Every one of these suits has a self-destruct system that can level this entire town and I’ve primed them all!”

  “Hey, man, hey, let’s not go crazy,” Matt says, taking a step toward Archimedes.

  “I said back off! I’ll do it! I’ll kill us all!”

  “You don’t want to do that,” Matt says, his hands up in a gesture of peace and good will. “I think you want to leave here alive as bad as we do.”

  “Not if it means going to prison,” Archimedes says, his face slick with flop sweat. “Never again.”

  “I get it. Live free or die, that kind of thing?”

  “Exactly. So you’re going to let me go, get it?” Archimedes shakes his arm at Matt, shows him his smartphone interface thing. “We all walk away or we all die. What’s it going to be?”

  Matt chooses option three: he’s going to ignore the threat, which Sara has kindly informed us is complete B.S., and drop him like a bad habit. Matt charges him and delivers a knockout haymaker. It’s a damned satisfying sight.

  It’d be more impressive if Matt didn’t follow it up with a howl of pain.

  ***

  “Mother pus bucket, that hurt,” Matt says, cradling fingers that have swollen to twice their normal size.

  You’ve never actually punched a person before, have you? I say over the brain-phone so the paramedic won’t overhear.

  I’ve punched someone before.

  Uh-huh. Sure you have.

  The paramedic hands Matt an ice pack and shoos him off so he can tend to another student. Early word is that our brilliant idea to start a semi-controlled panic got people out of harm’s way, but not without a few injuries. Nothing serious, thankfully, an assortment of bumps and bruises, but I’m sure Concorde will have a few choice words for us nevertheless.

  That is, when he finishes up at a scene that feels all too familiar: police officers, firefighters, paramedics galore swarming about a shredded landscape. Mr. Dent and Principal McGann talk to Concorde while Mindforce waves in a ginormous flatbed truck, which I assume is there for the Thrasher corpses. Maybe Concorde will be so thrilled to have four more toys to dismantle he’ll only yell at us for a little while.

  Guess we’ll find out, because here he comes.

  “How are you kids doing? Everyone okay?” he says. He sounds concerned. What the heck?

  “Uh...yeah. We’re okay,” Matt says. “Hurt my hand. Might have broken some fingers.”

  “Well, it looks like the paramedics have taken good care of you.” He leans in. “And be thankful that’s the worst you got,” he growls.

  I get it. There are people within earshot so he has to play nice. It’s a temporary stay of execution, but I’ll take it.

  “You’re not going to throw us a bone, are you?” Matt says through a fake smile.

  “No I am not,” Concorde says, and this one time I can’t be mad at him for stealing the spotlight, because guess what the Hero Squad forgot in their rush to save the day? That’s right, our lame costumes. Wasn’t that brilliant? Luckily the only person who saw our faces was Archimedes, the guy going straight to Byrne (do not pass Go, do not collect $200), and he doesn’t know us from a hole in the wall. Officially speaking, the Protectorate once again swooped in to save the day and the Hero Squad was nowhere in sight.

  “Why don’t you all go home?” Concorde says, all nicey-nice again. “I bet your parents are worried sick.”

  Oh. Oh, crap.

  I don’t know who exactly gave the order to evacuate the school, but when the stampede started no one questioned it and everyone bolted for the exits. Me, the others, we got into the woods behind the school and kept on running. We were so freaked out we didn’t dare go back until we heard the sirens, and then the police wanted to take statements from all the witnesses, and that’s why I didn’t call right away to let you know I was fine.

  That entirely plausible line of bull is what we fed our parents when we got home. I can’t speak for the others, but my mom bought the whole story without question—although I think she was so relieved that I was alive and unharmed I could have told her I’d cut school to go hang out at Coffee E all day and she wouldn’t have cared.

  We spend the evening sitting on the couch, my mom’s arms wrapped around me like she plans to never let me go. She mutters something about moving someplace else, this town is way too dangerous, but I’m going to chalk that up to nerves. She doesn’t mean it. She can’t mean it. I don’t want her to mean it.

  “I have a headache,” I say. “Think I’m going to go to bed.”

  “Okay, hon. Aspirin’s in the medicine cabinet,” she says. She kisses me on the head and says she loves me and that’s that.

  That’s that.

  It galls me to keep lying to her, but I have to think about the bigger picture now. If I tell Mom what I really did today, she’ll figure out in no time flat who my teammates are, and that would lead to a series of well intentioned Are you aware of what your child is doing? phone calls to their folks, and that would launch a crazystorm of freaked-out parents, and that would lead to my four new friends becoming my four new cheesed-off ex-friends. I can’t bear the thought of having them taken away from me.

  I’m sorry, Mom. I need this.

  But it’s a good trade-off, right? I mean, yeah, lying to Mom makes me a candidate for Bad Daughter of the Year, but all super-hero
es do it. They all have secret identities they keep from their loved ones. It’s part of the business. Mom would only worry herself sick if she knew. Besides, I—we did good today. We took down a serious super-villain and that’s no small thing. Sure, it wasn’t a pitch-perfect outing as a super-team, but we nailed the bad guy and saved a lot of lives, so in the end it’s all good, right? Sure it is.

  And Carrie Hauser of the Olympic Rationalization Team sticks the landing to win the silver medal.

  PART TWO: SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT

  NINETEEN

  “All righty, now that everyone’s here we can get started,” Matt says. “I’d like to thank you all for coming tonight.”

  “What coming?” I say. “It’s my house.”

  “I hereby call this first official meeting of the Hero Squad to order,” Matt announces, rapping his hand (the one without two broken fingers) on the coffee table like a gavel.

  “Dude,” Stuart says, “I thought we weren’t going to use that dumb name.”

  “That’s one of the items on tonight’s agenda.”

  “We have an agenda?” I say. Matt flaps a piece of notebook paper at me. I can barely read what he’s written; his handwriting is one small step above cave paintings. I’d blame it on the fingers, but it always looks like that.

  “First order of business is to call the roll,” he says. “Signify your presence by saying aye.”

  “Matt, we’re all sitting right here,” Sara says.

  “Psyche,” Matt says, pressing on.

  “I’m right here. Everyone is right here. Sitting in front of you.”

  “Kunoichi?”

  “Aye,” Missy says with a sigh of resignation.

  “Lightstorm?”

  “Is this really necessary?” I say.

  “This is an official meeting.”

  “Then where’s our recording secretary?” I counter. As sick as this sounds, I would like to get this over with and move on to the serious business of studying for my math test. Better to pull the Band-Aid off fast, that’s my philosophy.