Missy keeps running. Minotaur slows, stops, turns. “You’ll do,” he says.
Matt’s brain goes into free fall as Minotaur towers over him, his giant hands clenching and unclenching in anticipation, a sadistic leer playing on his face. A hundred, a thousand possibilities race through Matt’s mind in the space of a heartbeat and are discarded as unworkable, useless against something no physical force he could muster could possibly stop.
Minotaur cocks a fist. Matt closes his eyes. He prays and braces for the end.
He waits.
And waits.
Matt dares to crack an eye and wonders if he’s experiencing a kind of pre-death time distortion. He’s often heard that one’s perception of time slows to a crawl in the face of an imminent threat, but to experience it...
No, he realizes; time hasn’t stopped. Minotaur has.
“Don’t move don’t move don’t move don’t move don’t move—”
It doesn’t register right away, the connection between Sara’s frantic mantra and Minotaur’s sudden paralysis. Stuart’s warning, however, does.
“MOVE!”
Minotaur blinks as though awakening from a dream. His victim is nowhere to be seen.
The police cruiser drops like a war hammer wielded by some ancient, angry god. It rises and falls again on the prone form of the man calling himself Minotaur, rises and falls, again and again, until the vehicle is little more than two fistfuls of twisted, shredded steel in Stuart’s hands.
“I think,” Stuart pants, “that should do it.”
The police band is going crazy. Soon the site will be swarming with cops, perhaps a SWAT team, all of them too late to do anything useful, and soon after that the Protectorate will arrive to collect Minotaur and ship him off to Byrne.
No less than the idiot deserves.
Archimedes orders a traffic camera to zoom in on the Hero Squad as the skinny kid pulls an assortment of goggles and hoods and facemasks out of his trench coat—where does he keep it all?—and doles them out to his friends. He scans each of their faces before they disappear behind their flimsy disguises and tucks the information into a file on the main server labeled HERO SQUAD, along with video of the fight that, he hopes, will save him from losing any more of his precious few privileges.
Not that he had a choice in the matter. After all, he was threatened...
THIRTY-TWO
The good news is, the cop is fine—a dozen different kinds of freaked out, but physically okay (for the record: catching people in mid-air? Not an easy thing to do).
Unfortunately, the nugget of good news is outweighed by ten tons of bad news. For starters, there’s the obvious fact that, despite the Protectorate’s assurances to the contrary, we had a bad guy come after us—Minotaur was looking for us. To his credit, Concorde is not brushing this off as a one-time thing, but it’s a small comfort...as is the fact that Minotaur is in no shape to tell us if his attack was part of some larger plan or he was playing lone gunman. Not that I feel sorry for him, but Stuart’s smackdown apparently resulted in mild brain trauma. Minotaur has been in and out of something bearing a passing resemblance to consciousness and isn’t going to be spilling his guts anytime soon.
Like I said, I’m not sympathetic. Not for a killer like him.
And that there is the capper: the Toyota Minotaur threw at us had people in it. Two of them survived but are in rough shape. The other...
One more life forever changed, forever ruined—ended—by something beyond their control.
Mindforce dropped that bombshell on us as soon as we arrived at HQ the next morning for the post-incident de-brief. I spent the first half of my time in the interview room in a state of shock and the second half crying. He said there was absolutely nothing we could have done. It wasn’t an empty reassurance but it didn’t make me feel any better or any less guilty.
At one point I looked over at Concorde in his corner, arms folded in judgment, and waited for him to lay into me. He didn’t say anything. He said nothing the whole time I was in the room. I thought he was too angry to speak until, as I was leaving, he said, “You can’t save everyone.”
Before we left HQ to spend Sunday afternoon trying to lose ourselves in Kevin Smith movies, Mindforce gave each of us a small box with a belt clip. I remarked it looked like a beeper like my dad used to carry, and as it turned out, that’s what they were in a past life. Concorde repurposed the housings and made panic buttons with GPS trackers.
“Keep them on you at all times. If anything happens, push the red button and hold it for five seconds,” Mindforce said.
“And then?”
“...Hold out as best you can until we get there.”
Hold out as best we can. Real comforting—and useless if we get ambushed again.
“I don’t know if we have a lot of other options,” Sara says, picking up on my thought, not because I’m broadcasting all that loudly but because she’s let her defenses down, completely, so she can act as our early-warning system. It’s a decent theory, but who knows if a sudden murderous impulse aimed at us is going to cut through the psychic cacophony of twelve hundred teenagers and their adult zookeepers. I suggest she save herself a migraine and put her defenses back up but she refuses, out of loyalty to us. Or out of fear for her own safety.
“Little of both,” she says. “Sorry, I can’t—”
“No, I understand, it’s okay, but please promise me something: if it gets to be too much, put the wall up.”
“I will.”
She’s lying.
It’s twisted, admittedly, but I find the best way to keep my own fear in check is to worry about the others, and there’s plenty to worry about. Sara’s teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, Missy hasn’t been able to eat (correction: she hasn’t been able to keep anything down), Matt has buried it deep and is acting like everything’s perfectly normal, and Stuart...I don’t know what’s going on in his head. I run into Stuart at his locker and say hello. There’s an odd hesitation before he replies, like he can’t quite remember who I am or what he’s supposed to say to me. He’s been this way since—you know. Throw that on top of the Ronny Vick issue and, well, suffice it to say, the boy has a lot on his mind.
“Oh. Hey.”
It feels foolish on my part to ask him how he’s doing. I ask him anyway. I’ve noticed a bad habit in this group of avoiding touchy subjects and backing away whenever someone shows the slightest resistance to talking about anything that’s bothering them. It reminds me, in a way, of my Dark Period friends, who never wanted to hear about anyone’s problems (such as a certain girl’s divorcing parents) because it harshed their buzz.
A little life comes back into Stuart’s face. He’s about to say something when the sound of a body getting slammed into a locker catches our attention.
“Watch where you’re walking, killer,” Angus says. He and Gerry press in on Ronny Vick like the walls of a trash compactor.
“Yeah, watch your step, killer,” Gerry says. “You bump into me again? I might have to act in selfdefense, get it?”
“Leave him alone.”
Four jaws drop, mine among them.
“Say what?” Angus says, sounding as completely shocked as Ronny looks.
“Did I stutter?” Stuart says.
“Leave him—? Are you kidding me?” Gerry says. “Stuart, this is the kid—”
“I know who he is, Gerry,” Stuarts says slowly, each word its own tiny sentence, “and I’m telling you, leave him alone.”
Angus waves his arms, a precursor to a rant, but Gerry silences him with a backhand slap to the chest and a shake of his head. He throws a small nod at Stuart, a gesture of respect, if you can believe it, and leads Angus away.
“What are you waiting for? Get out of here,” Stuart says. Ronny turns to leave, glances back for final approval, or maybe to make sure Stuart’s not going to nail him with a sucker-punch, and vanishes down a side corridor.
Stuart falls back against his locker, his body
shuddering with great racking breaths, sobs without any accompanying tears.
“Stuart?” I touch his shoulder. His muscles vibrate under my fingers like he’s in the throes of a seizure.
“He’s not a killer,” Stuart says. “All weekend I’ve been thinking about the day Ronny was convicted. The judge, right before sentencing, he gave Ronny a chance to say something to me, my parents. All he could do was cry and say he was sorry. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t want to. I wanted him to be a monster, but he wasn’t—isn’t. He’s nothing like...”
And then it clicks: he’s nothing like Minotaur, a man who would start a fight in the middle of a crowded city street and hurl a car filled with people and not give a damn about who got hurt or killed in the process. Stuart wanted someone easy to hate, a coldblooded murderer, but what he got was a terrified boy who would have done anything to take back the worst thing he’d ever done.
“Ronny’s not...Ronny’s nothing but a stupid kid who made a stupid mistake,” Stuart says, a strange look passing over Stuart’s face. Acceptance, maybe?
“I think I just witnessed an epiphany,” I say, and Stuart gives me a wonky smile.
“Dunno. Never had one before.”
And with that, he tosses his backpack over his shoulder and takes off for homeroom like it’s another ordinary day. I guess this is a week for profound personal breakthroughs, although I can’t help but feel Stuart’s only halfway through his particular dark tunnel.
Maybe I can guide him the rest of the way.
Thanksgiving begins early in the Hauser household. Mom gets up with the sunrise to begin the prep work for the big meal, and I know that sounds a little nuts when you consider she’s only cooking for three people, but Mom much prefers doing everything herself to getting a helping hand from anyone, including me. Ask her Is there anything I can do to help? and she’ll tell you with a sweet smile Yes. Get out of my kitchen.
Fine by me because, thanks to the miracle of Skype, I’m able to indulge in my favorite Thanksgiving tradition. A few minutes before nine I fire up my laptop, set it on the coffee table, and together Dad and I watch the Macy’s parade. My Internet simulcast, while brilliant, is a weak substitute for the real deal, but like Mom said, we have to adjust to life as it is, not try to force it back to what it was.
As if to drive that point home, Mom wanders into the living room to let me know there’s a fresh pot of coffee available, and she and Dad see each other for the first time since we moved. There’s a long, awkward silence broken only by the sound of the Today show hosts nattering on about the SpongeBob SquarePants balloon.
“Hello, Brian,” Mom says.
“Hey Christina,” Dad says.
There’s nothing behind the exchange, no tension or animosity, but no warmth either. Whatever connection they once shared, it’s gone.
Mom tips her head, a wordless reminder to me about the coffee, then slips back into the kitchen. Dad watches her leave and lets out a sigh (of relief or of resignation, I can’t guess), then admirably, if clumsily, guides the morning back onto a happier track by wondering aloud “Why do so many of these marching bands have giant feather-dusters on their hats? What happened to the classy marching band hats they had when I was a kid?”
“What, you mean the ones that look like they were stolen off a Buckingham Palace guard?”
“Those are the ones.”
“They make everyone look like a giant Q-tip.”
“I’ll have you know, those were high fashion for marching bands in my day.”
“Meaning the marching band had to be high to wear those butt-ugly things.”
And so goes the riffing, non-stop, growing progressively snarkier, until Santa Claus crosses the finish line on a giant float made to look like a snow-covered roof. In years past this made me stupidly happy because, as far as I was concerned, that marked the official start of Christmas. This year that joy is tempered by the fact it also means my Thanksgiving with Dad is over.
“This was fun,” he says, trying so hard not to let me see he’s getting choked up.
“Yeah. It was. Have a safe drive and say hi to Uncle Tyler for me.”
Dad smiles, says he loves me, and shuts his webcam off without saying goodbye.
A powerful urge to shut myself in my bedroom for the rest of the day hits, but I’m not allowing myself any self-pity today. None. Done with it. It’s hard not having my dad here, but I have no right to be miserable.
At three o’clock on the nose, the doorbell rings.
Stuart is almost unrecognizable. His hair is combed and tied back into a tidy ponytail, his jeans are bright blue and devoid of a single rip and, shock of shocks, his shirt has a collar. And buttons.
“Hey,” he says, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet.
“Hey. Come on in.” He steps into the house and looks around like it’s the first time he’s been here. It’s strange to see him so anxious.
Granddad rises from the couch to greet Stuart with a big manly handshake. “Stuart,” he says.
“Greg m’man,” Stuart says. “How’s it hanging?”
“It’s hanging. That’s all it does at my age.”
Ew. So did not need to hear that.
Stuart, as he tends to do, straightens up when Mom enters, surrounded by an aura of yummy kitchen aromas. If he says my mother smells delicious I’m going to scream.
“Hi, Stuart,” she says.
“Ms. Hauser,” Stuart says.
“Christina,” Mom corrects. “I’m glad you could make it.”
“Thanks for inviting me. It...” Stuarts fidgets, clears his throat. “It means a lot to me. I, uh, I don’t know if Carrie told you—”
“She explained it to me,” Mom says. “She explained enough.”
She squeezes Stuart’s shoulder and wishes him a happy Thanksgiving. Stuart’s eyes well up. For the first time in a long time, it is a happy Thanksgiving for him.
THIRTY-THREE
There’s something you should know about me: I am absolutely mental for the Christmas.
I mean I do not simply love Christmastime; I mean I looooooooooooovvvvvee Christmastime. I love everything about it (okay, almost everything; I can do without the rampant commercialism). From Black Friday on, I am in full-blown jolly holiday mode. Red, white, and green dominate my wardrobe color scheme, Christmas songs take over the number two slot in my mental playlist (after Bruce, of course), and I pull out my favorite adorable elf hat, a long green-and-white striped stocking cap Grandma Hauser made for me years ago. I look like a total dork in it, but who cares? I am the avatar of the Christmas spirit. Nothing can bring me down.
Yes, my cock-eyed holiday optimism manages to gloss over any lingering angst over my fractured family, over the unresolved looming threat of leaving Kingsport, over the gnawing (though diminished) anxiety that one of Minotaur’s buddies might drop in to say hi in violent, vengeful fashion, and over my still-in-effect grounding by Concorde.
“In fact,” I announce to everyone over post-school peppermint mochaccinos (official Christmas beverage of Caroline Dakota Hauser), “I am going to draw from my bottomless well of Christmas cheer to take care of a few things.”
“Such as?” Stuart says.
“For starters, after the New Year I’m going to go see the math tutor after school once or twice a week to try to get my math scores up.”
“Voluntarily exposing yourself to more math,” Sara says. “Brave girl.”
“That’s the easy one,” I say. “I’m also going to talk to Concorde about us.”
Matt perks up. “What do you mean, talk to him about us?”
“I mean I was going to talk to him about reconsidering his ground order on me, but then I thought I could use the opportunity to talk to him about us. I mean, it’s obvious he doesn’t like us, but he’s never said why. I thought if I could get him to open up a little...”
“I think that’s something we should all be in on,” Matt says. “If it affects the whole team, we shou
ld all be there.”
“That might come across like we’re ganging up on him,” I say, a partial lie. “I think it’d be better if I play team ambassador and speak for all of us.”
“Why you? If anyone is going to represent the team, I think it should be me.” Matt looks to the others for approval but they’re all staring intently into their respective cups. “What? Why shouldn’t I talk to Concorde?”
“Dude, Concorde hates your guts,” Stuart says.
“Exactly,” Sara says. “You two can’t be in the same room for more than five seconds without getting on each other’s nerves.”
“Because Concorde hates your guts.”
“Carrie can talk to Concorde without cheesing him off. Let her handle it.”
“Maybe we should do it together,” Matt says to me.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say.
“Why not?”
Oh, how to put this delicately?
“Because Carrie knows how to be tactful and you don’t,” Sara says. “You’d go in with a chip on your shoulder and it would turn into another stupid shouting match and we’d all end up worse off than we are now. Carrie’s the best person to speak for the team so let her do it and stop acting like you’re our leader.”
Matt’s lips press together, damming back a flood of profanity. “Fine. I don’t care,” he says as he stands and wrestles himself into his jacket. “Let her do it since I’m apparently so incapable—”
“Matt, that’s not—” I say, but he’s halfway across the coffee shop and making a beeline for the door.
“What was that you were saying about tact?” Stuart says.
“He wasn’t taking the hint,” Sara says unapologetically. “As usual.”
“Still,” Missy says. “Harsh.”
“I’ll be right back,” I say and I race after Matt. I call out his name but he ignores me and crosses the street to put some distance between us. “Will you slow down? I’m trying to talk to you!”
“Why? You have it all covered,” he says. “You don’t need me around screwing everything up.”
Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins Page 26