Rogues

by Darius Brasher

  Antonio was not about to squander the first chance he had to escape this hellhole. So, he started talking. He initially intended to leave out the part where he killed Hannah and was going to pin the blame on someone else. But, under Doctor Alchemy’s intense and perceptive gaze, he realized that would be a mistake. Besides, Antonio knew enough about Doctor Alchemy to know he had plenty of blood on his hands too.

  Before Antonio knew it, he had told Doctor Alchemy the entire truth behind how he wound up in his cell, including the fact he was a Meta. He even told him he intended to kill Omega once he got out. Once he started talking, it was hard to stop. It had been so long since he had someone to talk to.

  Doctor Alchemy smacked his fist into his palm once Antonio had finished. “When I break the law, I get an all-points bulletin,” Doctor Alchemy snarled in frustration. “When a Hero breaks the law, he gets a book deal. There really is no justice in this world. The whole system is rigged against us hard-working Rogues. No justice, no peace.”

  Antonio didn’t say anything as Doctor Alchemy continued to rant. He was afraid to. Doctor Alchemy had been calm and cool moments ago, but now there was foam at the corners of his mouth as he paced and gesticulated in front of Antonio’s cell.

  With a visible effort, Doctor Alchemy calmed down somewhat after a few minutes. “Omega’s illegal detainment of you explains the hate you have for him. That hate is what attracted me here. Once I located Silverback, it was child’s play to use his blood to formulate an elixir to point me in the direction of others who hate Omega. First Elemental Man, now you. Hate has a distinct energy signature, you know.”

  “Elixir? Silverback? Energy signature?” Antonio was confused. “I don’t understand.”

  Doctor Alchemy smiled condescendingly. “No, I do not suppose you would. The only thing that matters is that I am here and that I too want to kill Omega. I have assembled a team of other Metas who want to accomplish the same objective. Join us. Surely you must know you have no chance of defeating Omega alone. If you agree to throw your lot in with us, I will let you out.”

  Antonio did not hesitate.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 21

  Now

  Slowly my eyes opened. Bright lights shining in my face felt like icepicks jabbing into my brain. I squinted, relieving the stabbing sensation somewhat. I ached all over. I felt like I had been beaten like the proverbial redheaded stepchild.

  No, I did not feel like I had been beaten. I had been beaten, both in the literal and the figurative sense. By Doctor Alchemy and his band of not very merry men. What had they called themselves?

  My sluggish mind slowly provided the answer: The Revengers. Stupid name. Not that they had asked me. They had not wanted my opinion. They had wanted me to die.

  Why, then, was I still alive? A teensy part of me regretted that I was, considering how much pain I was in.

  The last thing I remembered was Doctor Alchemy spitting in my face and blaming me for Neha’s death. There was a lot of that going around because I blamed me too. He had pummeled me until Iceburn had pulled him off. Then Doctor Alchemy had shot me with one of his alchemy cartridges, presumably to send me to the sweet hereafter.

  But I wasn’t in the sweet hereafter. I was in the here and now. According to the little I could see through squinting, half-blinded eyes, here was a square room with unadorned beige walls, a table against the front wall on which rested various metal implements, a sink against the same wall, and twin bright white lights that shone down on me from the ceiling like spotlights. There was no doorway.

  I did not understand why I was here. Wherever here was. I had been completely at the mercy of the Revengers. I should be dead.

  I didn’t like it. Not the being alive part. That part suited me just fine. I didn’t like the why I had been kept alive part. The Revengers keeping me alive could not possibly bode well for me. I doubted they had spared me to give me a Hero of the Year award.

  Still squinting against the bright lights, I tried to shove thoughts of all the nefarious reasons why I was still alive to the side. It did not matter. The pain I was in did not matter. The mere fact that I was alive mattered. As long as you were alive, things could get better. South Carolina’s state motto was “Dum Spiro Spero.” While I breathe, I hope. As long as this Carolina boy was still alive and kicking, there was hope for a better—and hopefully less painful—tomorrow.

  The problem was I was not kicking. As my mind slowly pulled off the heavy blanket of unconsciousness, I realized I could barely move at all.

  I looked down at myself, and forced my eyes to open wider despite the too bright lights. Ricky Ricardo started playing Babalú in my head, beating on the inside of my skull like it was his conga drum. I winced, cursing all the I Love Lucy reruns I had watched as a kid.

  My body slowly came into focus. I stood spread-eagle within a tall, chrome-colored metal ring that was not much wider than the length of my feet. It and I were in the center of the plain room. A large drain covered by a stained grate was directly below me. The grate could’ve been discolored by rust; it just as easily could’ve been blood. Unsurprisingly, I still had my Omega suit on. It only changed forms or disappeared when I consciously willed it to do so. From the ankles down, some sort of thick, hard substance encased my legs. It looked like I wore casts like the ones people got when they broke their feet, only this substance was black rather than white like casts usually were. My waist had a tight ring around it of the same metal as the larger ring I stood inside of. Horizontal rods attached the ring around my waist to the larger one.

  The result of the ring around my waist and the casts on my legs was that I could wiggle my body slightly, but not much else. My splayed legs were perfectly straight; I could not bend my knees even slightly.

  None of that was a problem. I was an Omega-level telekinetic. I’d break free of these restraints faster than I could say Harry Houdini. I activated my powers.

  Or at least I tried to.

  Nothing happened. The burning in my hands that had been present ever since my powers first manifested years ago was still there, but I could not access my powers.

  My still-sluggish brain was confused. I looked up. Like my legs, my arms were straight with no bend at the elbow, and spread out at a 45-degree angle from my torso. From the middle of my forearms up, my arms were encased in the same hard black substance as my lower legs were. Thanks to the tightness of the substance, I could not so much as twitch my fingers.

  So that was why I could not activate my powers. As Doctor Alchemy had proven when I had surrendered to the Revengers and he had shot my hands with that black foam, without being able to move my hands, I was as powerless as a non-Meta.

  With my arms and legs spread out and with the giant ring around my body, I probably looked like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Maybe that guy had superpowers, but for all intents and purposes, I did not. Not like this. It was beyond frustrating. It was like knowing you had the means to illuminate a pitch-black room you were lost in, but you could not turn on the lights even though you knew they were there.

  Yeah, dum spiro spero. I was just a guy from South Carolina with no powers, breathing and hoping something terrible was not about to happen. Because that was how it felt—like something terrible was about to happen. Why else was I God only knew where trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey? Everybody knew how well that turned out for the turkey.

  But you’re not a turkey, I thought. You’re a highly trained licensed Hero. And there’s more to being a Hero than simply having superpowers. Batman doesn’t have superpowers, and he’d get out of this contraption lickety-split. As soon as I finished that internal pep talk, my subconscious started playing devil’s advocate. Batman trained for years in the art of escape. If there was an Escape 101 class at the Academy, we somehow missed it. And besides, Batman’s not even real.

  Sometimes I wondered whose side my subconscious was on.

  I shook myself as
much as the contraption allowed me to, hoping to jar something loose. If an ant was crawling on my stomach, I doubted I moved enough to shake it off. The contraption did not move at all.

  I racked my brain for a way out of this thing. As my Debbie Downer subconscious had pointed out, the Academy had given me zero training in the fine points of escape artistry. If I somehow managed to get out of here, I’d write the headmaster and recommend an addition to the curriculum.

  I wished Ninja was here. In addition to the fact that misery loved company, I knew she was an accomplished escape artist. Maybe, if I had taken her up on her team-up offer, she would have taught me enough about escaping from restraints that I would not be stuck in this mess.

  I let out a long breath of frustration. My chest hurt. Cracked ribs, or something more internal? I put the pain and thoughts of Ninja on the backburner. Wishing things were other than they were was not getting me free. What was that expression? If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Clearly that proverb had been coined in the pre-jet age, because who’d wish for a horse when he could wish for a Learjet? Regardless, I had neither a horse nor a Learjet. Ninja was not here, and she had not taught me anything other than the fact she could knock me on my butt. Also, my Academy training was providing no help.

  What else you got, brain? I had a faint recollection of reading a Hardy Boys novel as a kid in which one of the characters had escaped from being tied up by flexing his forearms while he was being tied, making the ropes loose enough when he relaxed his muscles that he could shimmy free. Had that been Frank or Joe Hardy? I couldn’t remember. Maybe it had been their trusted chum Chet or even their good buddy Biff. It didn’t matter. Unlike the villain in that Hardy Boys novel, whoever had imprisoned me here had not had the decency to revive me first so I could flex my muscles à la the Hardy Boys and escape. Things never work out in real life the way they do in novels.

  That scene from the Hardy Boys book gave me an idea, though. I looked over at my outstretched right arm. The Omega suit covered me from head to toe, including my hands. Maybe if I removed the suit’s fabric from my hands, the newly formed space, however tiny, between the black stuff trapping my hands and my hands themselves would be enough to get the job done. I just needed to move my fingers the slightest bit to trigger my powers.

  I held my breath. My suit melted away from my hands with a thought. I could not see it happen because the black substance blocked my view of my hands. But I felt the slight tickling on my skin I always did when I either retracted the suit into my body or changed its appearance.

  However, before I could move a muscle or so much as think, the black substance around my hands contracted further around my flesh, simultaneously with the retracting of the Omega suit into my body. Despite the Omega suit no longer being around my hands, I still could not wiggle so much as a pinkie finger.

  Crap! I was sure my ploy would’ve worked. Not only was I no Batman, I was proving to not even be an escape artist on the level of the Hardy Boys. Or even Chet.

  I dredged my pounding head for another idea. I came up empty. I wished I had spent less time as a kid reading the Hardy Boys and more time reading Houdini biographies, boning up on getting out of restraints. Youth really was wasted on the young.

  Then I realized I did not need to free myself if I summoned someone else to free me. My brain was definitely firing on fewer cylinders than usual. I moved my aching head to look at my left wrist, where I usually wore my communicator watch with its built-in, handy-dandy panic button. If I hit it, it would send a SOS to Isaac’s twin watch. If there ever was a time to hit the panic button, it was now. I had hit it once before, back when I was still the Old Man’s Apprentice and a blonde woman in a bank in D.C.’s Chinatown had nearly blown my head off by planting on me a Mechano-designed explosive. Thanks to me hitting the panic button, the Old Man was able to get Doctor Hippocrates to heal me in time instead of me bleeding to death in Rock Creek Park after the bomb exploded in my face.

  Double crap! My watch was gone. Unfortunately, the GPS in it only activated if I hit the panic button, so I could not expect Isaac to find and rescue me unless I hit the panic button first. The watch had been designed that way so its wearer would have privacy. I was in such a fix that I would happily have traded privacy for safety. I didn’t know how I would have hit the panic button being bound the way I was, but I would have thought of something.

  My watch had no doubt been removed by whomever had trapped me here. I had a guess as to whom that whomever was based on how the substance around my hands had shifted like something alive to keep my hands immobilized.

  Surely it was Doctor Alchemy. He was the last person I had seen before awakening here. Plus, the black stuff around my hands and feet was like the black foam Doctor Alchemy had shot onto my hands to neutralize my powers on Greene Street. It was probably something he had formulated using the Philosopher’s Stone book Neha had told me about.

  I reluctantly shelved thoughts of escape for now. Maybe a brilliant plan to free myself would occur to me once my brain started working better. I wondered how long I had been unconscious. I moved as much as I could in my restraints and flexed different muscles. Pain greeted me like an abusive spouse. Though unwelcome, the pain did give me an inkling of how long I had been out—a day, maybe two at the most, had passed since I fought the Revengers. I had been beaten and battered more than once over the years, and knew how my body felt during every stage of healing. It was an occupational hazard of Heroing. Maybe, if I escaped from this room and after the existential crisis the Sentinels warned of passed, I would take up something less dangerous. Perhaps coal mining or shark wrestling.

  I was thinking about how I would rather dig coal than be stuck in this contraption when, over to the far right of the wall I faced, the wall dilated with a barely audible hiss, exposing a circular doorway I had not known was there. Two women entered, both white, one with curly blonde hair, the other with straight brown hair. They had slight smiles and unfocused looks on their faces, almost like they were high on something. A thick choker made of a gray metal encircled their necks. They each wore long, bright turquoise dresses. There were yellow sashes around the middle of the dresses. The outfits had low scooped necks exposing the women’s cleavage. Their garish outfits and the pleasantly dazed looks on their faces made them look like extras on a science fiction movie set. In fact, their outfits reminded me of the dress the Deanna Troi character on Star Trek: The Next Generation wore before the show’s producers stopped gratuitously flashing the actress’ flesh and let her wear a traditional Starfleet uniform.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” I demanded. My throat was sore; the words came out hoarsely. The women ignored me as if I had not spoken. The blonde one raised a hand to her choker and tapped it.

  “Your prisoner is awake, my lord,” she said.

  “I will be there shortly,” responded a voice from her choker. Doctor Alchemy. My chest tightened. Having deduced that a homicidal maniac had imprisoned you was one thing; knowing it for a fact was quite another.

  The two women moved to stand in front of me, with their backs against the wall. They stared straight ahead. They still had a slight smile on their unfocused faces. They reminded me of the people I had run across in my Heroic career who had been high on heroin. Though Neha had not spoken much about her life with her father before she ran away as a teenager, she had told me that he surrounded himself with a group of people he referred to as his subjects. Like he was the King of England or something. I assumed these were two of them.

  “Is Doctor Alchemy holding you against your will?” I asked the two women.

  No response.

  “If you help me get out of this thing, I can help you. I’ll protect you from him.” Like you protected yourself from him? something within me asked. My negative nellie subconscious again. I guess it didn’t believe in positive thoughts and you-can-do-it affirmations. Maybe it needed to read some rah-rah self-help books.

  Unfortunately, my subconscious wa
s the only thing talking to me. The women just stared straight ahead with the same weird smile on their faces. Though they faced me, it did not feel like they were looking at me. More like they looked through me. It was a blast from the past. Before I became a Hero, girls habitually ignored me. But now more than my teenaged ego was at stake.

  Time passed. How much, I could not be sure in the windowless room. I was still trying to get the women to help me or at least to acknowledge my existence—if my hands and body had been free, perhaps I would have tried mooning them—when the door dilated again.

  Doctor Alchemy strode in. The Imperial March started playing in my head. I knew how Luke Skywalker had felt when Darth Vader had first walked in.

  And here I was, trapped and defenseless, without a lightsaber or powers, Jedi or otherwise.

  CHAPTER 22

  Doctor Alchemy did not have on his cape, cowl, or gauntlets, though he was otherwise in full costume. A futuristic-looking gun that looked like it could blow a hole through a steel door hung from his utility belt.

  This was the first time I had seen Doctor Alchemy’s bare face. Angular, arrogant, and brown with piercing dark eyes, his face looked like a predator’s. If I were a deer, my instincts would tell me to run. Hell, I wasn’t a deer and my instincts told me to run.

  I was surprised to see Doctor Alchemy was not alone. If he had come in with the other Revengers, I wouldn’t have been. None of those Rogues were with him, though. Rather, Doctor Alchemy came in pushing a bejeweled wheelchair. The gems it was encrusted with glittered under the bright lights of the room. The chair appeared to be made of gold, though I assumed it was merely gold-plated as it would be too heavy to push if it were solid gold. Because of the gold and the jewels, the chair looked more like a throne than it did a wheelchair for a disabled person. A plump Indian woman wearing a sparkling red and gold sari sat in the wheelchair. I recognized her from pictures Neha had shown me. It was Neha’s mother Rati. She didn’t appear to have aged a day in all the years since the pictures Neha had shown me were taken.