Odyssey

by Stan Lee

  Peg didn’t answer, her face pale with nausea, the features screwed up as if she were in physical pain.

  “Boost your shields,” Harry advised. “I think you’re tapping in to what’s coming from that giantess.”

  Another inhuman shriek came from a distance in the crowd.

  Or maybe into what’s coming from the people around us.

  Peg straightened a bit, some of the lines disappearing from her face. “I—I think you’re right,” she croaked. “That—the pain was really getting to me.”

  “What we’ve got to figure now is what we can do,” Harry said. His face tightened as he looked around. It was like gazing into a painting of Hell by—what was the painter’s name?

  “Bosch, maybe,” Peg mumbled, picking up his thought, “Or Dore`’.”

  “Now I know how it feels,” Harry said.

  “What?” Peg grabbed his arm as the Brownian movement of the crowd suddenly threatened to pull them apart.

  “I’ve written it a million times. The superhero gets caught in some crisis while in his secret identity. How can he save people without giving himself away?”

  “Except our problem is that we left our superpowers in our other suits,” Peg said, nearly getting flung on her back as the crowd began a new scramble.

  A new giant—not Thomas—was storming in their direction. Harry brought up his blast-rod, hoping for a clear shot, hoping no one would see, wondering just how long the batteries lasted on the damned things.

  “You know what this is?” Harry muttered as the stampede of people carried them along with it.

  “What?” Peg was trying to keep cool, but the strain showed in her voice.

  “I’d say this is a job for John Cameron.”

  “We’re ... not... getting ... outta ... here.”

  Joey Santangelo’s voice was hoarser than usual, his tight vocal cords reflecting the struggle being waged for control of his body. Quite simply, his hands and feet felt like wood, unresponsive to his own will. They moved to someone else’s orders, turning the escape car around, back toward those damned giants.

  “Joey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Carron yelled, pulling a pistol from under his jacket as the car lurched onto the sidewalk.

  “Not thinking. They—they’re makin‘ me come back,” Santangelo croaked. He could say no more. All his will had to be devoted to the struggle not to turn the ignition off, not to take his foot off the gas.

  His only weapon was his enemy’s ignorance of how to operate a car. The giants could never fit into the vehicles, and had no notion of how they worked. The mind trying to control him had to fumble for technical knowledge. Joey, on the other hand, was operating sheerly on instinct, swerving the big clunker from side to side in an attempt to hit as few bystanders as possible.

  At last, however, Joey’s psychic antagonist dug out enough knowledge to sabotage any escape attempt.

  A harsh whisper of “H—hang on!” was the only warning Santangelo could offer as his own hands sabotaged them, turning the wheel to send the car careening into a taxi held motionless in the Sixth Avenue traffic jam.

  Joey managed to avoid a head-on crash with the stuck cab, turning the impact into a sideswipe instead. The muscle car bounced off, only to get hung up on the pole of a streetlight instead. The windshield dissolved in a tracery of cracks, and Santangelo was flung against his seatbelt. In the rear of the car, Carron had no constraints and was thrown upward into the roof. He sprawled on the back seat, half-stunned.

  As if the crash had dispelled the mist in his mind, Santan-gelo suddenly found himself free of giant mind control. He shook his head, glancing around. His front view was useless, more like a kaleidoscope than a windshield. Then he looked out the side window and saw why the control had dissipated. One of the giants was striding toward them.

  At once, Santangelo began clawing at his seatbelt buckle. He kicked a way out of the twisted door. His boss was just pushing himself up, groaning.

  Joey desperately scanned the back of the car. Hadn’t Carron brought more than one of those rockets?

  “Boss?” he called through the still-open window, “one of the freaks is coming for us. Do we fight or run?”

  “F—fight,” Carron muttered, grabbing for an olive drab tube jammed under the front seat.

  Then the mental mist rolled in again. Carron suddenly began moving in slow motion.

  Santangelo turned, staring up without hope at the handsome, ruthless face glaring down at them.

  The only thing that could save us now is Zenith swooping down from the sky, Joey thought.

  Then, behind their advancing nemesis, he saw a pair of flying figures.

  “—the hell?” Joey mumbled.

  “— in the name of seven hells do you think you’re doing?” Emsisdin’s voice crackled in the earphones of Matavi’s half-armor. She smiled at his reference to pre-Rationalist religion, but didn’t respond otherwise. Since their arrival on this world, she’d done pretty much what he wanted, except for warming his bed. Now there was something she wanted, and he’d have to follow along.

  Matavi wanted to track down the source of the telepathic outcry that had blasted through her mind as she stood in the Diamond Center. If Emsisdin hadn’t finished sorting through his loot, too bad.

  She flew the few blocks to the site of the mental disturbance, pursued by an angry Emsisdin. They arrived to find a company of three-story-tall humanoids wreaking havoc on a large crowd.

  Matavi hung in the air, almost too surprised to throw out mental probes. The appearance of the giant humanoids took her by surprise. Matavi had gotten some mental impressions of giants from the minds she’d raided. Some seemed to refer to a sporting team, others did not. She’d basically ignored them, as she had the television coverage of the movie called Heroes.

  Now she regretted her ignorance, because the giants apparently had psionic powers. Matavi was interested, but couldn’t deny her disappointment. Oversized telepaths wouldn’t help her notions of a breeding program...

  Emsisdin’s urgent voice cut through her thoughts. “Stop staring and let’s get out of here,” he said. “We’re being noticed by more and more people.”

  Matavi was aware of the people on the ground staring upward even as they jostled each other to avoid being stomped. Arms rose to point. Voices screamed. Already too many minds had seen them—too many to have the memory erased. Matavi shrugged in her half-armor. Well, it had to happen sometime.

  A flare of mental power focused her attention on a giant stalking across the wide, traffic-snarled road below. The giant was using a crude compulsion construct to keep a pair of humans frozen beside a wrecked land-transport vehicle. The huge stalker’s intentions were all too evident.

  “Come on,” Emsisdin transmitted yet again. “Let’s leave—what are you doing?”

  Matavi checked her wrist blasters. “Teaching a bully not to choose victims smaller than he is,” she replied.

  She swooped down, her fingers forming the tridigirector.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 26

  “This way!” Peg Faber yanked on the lapels of a semifamous soap star’s suit jacket. The actor’s usually expressive face was blank with fear.

  Peg pointed him toward an inconspicuous indentation in the wall of the movie theater. “That’s an entrance to the subway over there. Head down the stairs.”

  The actor must have been a bus-and-cab New Yorker. “Is—isn’t that dangerous?” He dragged his feet as she tried to shove him in the proper direction.

  Peg glared at the guy as if he were out of his mind. “More dangerous than that?” she asked, gesturing to the carnage along Sixth Avenue.

  Below the screams and yells of the terrorized moviegoers, the whimpers and moans of the injured rose in muted, hellish counterpoint.

  They may be the lucky ones, Peg thought. Some of the huddled, bloody forms littering the pavement made no sounds at all. They didn’t move. They didn’t appear to be breathing.

&
nbsp; Peg forced her attention away from them. There were still plenty of warm, mobile bodies with their brains apparently disconnected. A vengeful giant appeared on the left, so they ran to the right. Heavy stomping feet crashed down on the right, so they veered to the left—at least the ones who survived did. Chickens with their heads cut off.

  A few of the more with-it crowd members had stormed the entrance of the theater. But as soon as they were safely indoors, they’d stopped, jamming the lobby to watch the show outside—and blocking that route for any other fugitives.

  Would-be escapees had congregated at the locked doors of nearby office buildings, trying to get in. These clusters had proven very attractive for the rampaging giants. Still bodies and vast smears of blood marked places where fleeing patrons had failed to win entrance.

  A plate-glass window had shattered inward under the pressure of another surge of frenzied fugitives. It offered a possible haven—if one had the nerve to navigate between the red-stained shards of plate glass that rose up like fangs in the windowframe.

  Peg hauled again on the dithering actor’s jacket, wishing for about the fiftieth time this night that she were in her armor. Harry was wrestling with another lost lamb, trying to steer him toward safety and nearly being pulled along in a new terrified stampede. It would be a lot easier if the cool heads in the crowd were backed up by exoskeletal muscles...

  The resistance in the soap actor’s frame dissolved as he stared upward, his mouth falling open. “Look! Up in the sky!” he said.

  Peg was about to reprove him for using another company’s tagline when she caught movement from the corner of her eye. She glanced skyward to see a human-sized armored figure floating over the maelstrom of violence on the avenue.

  For a second, her chest tightened and she found it hard to breathe. John had come to the rescue!

  Then she saw the stubby bazooka-like weapon in the figure’s right hand and squinted harder. That wasn’t John’s armor. It was the M-16 look-alike who had tried to kidnap her back on the planet Argon!

  Perhaps later she could think about what the airborne Deviant’s presence portended. Right now she had more pressing problems closer to the ground. Another goddamned giant was lurching her way. With a sound of disgust, she hurled the actor toward the available bolt hole, hurrying him along with a kick in the butt.

  Then she joined Harry in moving the crowd member he’d buttonholed. Maybe they should head for the stairway themselves. She glanced over her shoulder. The giant was coming closer.

  Yes. Better claustrophobia than ending up a jellied smear on Sixth Avenue.

  John Cameron was in his armor and in the air, moving as if he’d finally found his native element. His armor was a damned sight more inflexible than the blue wool designer suit he’d doffed in his apartment. So why was he so much more comfortable flying patrol?

  The image of Peg, carefully done up for the Heroes premiere, rose in his mind’s eye. Lead weights seemed to sink in John’s gut. He tried to leave the mental picture behind, flying in a lazy spiral that left Astoria far below him. The only thing to watch out for was the occasional plane taking off from La-Guardia Airport. Now the whole of Queens lay like an intricately wired relief map, tiny glittering lights representing individual homes. Astoria was now a neck of land jutting out from Queens proper. The highways sewing the county together gleamed like looped diamond and ruby necklaces created from the glimmer of headlights and brake lights.

  New York truly did look like a city of dreams when seen from on high. Closer to the ground, a depressing reality became visible. John saw the graffiti on the expressway overpasses, the dog crap at the base of the gleaming buildings, the human flotsam in search of the evening’s victims.

  At least he could take care of the last category. Perhaps punching out some urban terrorists would loosen the steel straps that seemed to have wrapped round his chest since he left Peg in that restaurant. At least it might distract him ...

  With a flick of his jaw, John activated the radio receiver in his suit. He’d calibrated the apparatus to sweep the news and police frequencies—a useful adjunct in pinpointing local crimes and gauging the uniformed response.

  “... out of midtown,” a traffic helicopter reported. “Sixth is completely clogged, and the riot at Fiftieth seems only to be getting worse.”

  Fiftieth and Sixth—the location of the theater where Heroes was to premiere. What was that about a riot?

  John flicked to the Manhattan police frequencies. “We’ve sealed off the area, but I’m not going to send in the riot squads,” a nervous voice argued. “Even fully-armed, they’ll be no match for a bunch of berserk giants. Those suckers are bulletproof, and I don’t have much hope of stopping them with tear gas.”

  As John listened, he threw his body into a midair tumble, reorienting himself on midtown Manhattan and redlining his gizmoidal drive to get there as soon as possible.

  The voice in his earphones paused for a moment. “Any luck on getting the National Guard to release some of their antitank missiles? We think that’s what the drive-by shooter used to zip the giantess—”

  John had left Harry and Peg to handle the rigors of the film premiere. But they were as vulnerable as the other innocent bystanders if the giants had run amuck.

  I told Peg I had business tonight in this suit, John thought. Looks like I’ll have more business than I expected.

  Then, too, there would be newspeople, photographers, camera crews on both the local and network levels. John’s business would be public and high-profile.

  He began checking his weapons systems. Maybe if he saved Harry Sturdley’s butt there’d be less discussion about proceeding in a circumspect manner.

  Thomas paused in midkick as a new wave of pain attacked his immaterial senses. This wasn’t the unfocused pain-yammering of the terrified Lessers beneath his feet. It was the sending of a psionically gifted mind, which in Thomas’s book meant a Master was in pain.

  Yes. Kevin was suffering burns. Then Thomas’s mind-connection was abruptly snapped. Psionic warfare! He drove probes back toward the embattled giant’s mind, but Alexander was already unconscious.

  Thomas spread a mental net to find the pair of attackers Kevin had gone to dispatch, but Carron and his damnable Lesser assistant were already fleeing on foot, vanishing into the mental hum of the big city.

  Changing course, Thomas headed for the giant casualty, only to be intercepted by another of his cohorts. Andrew had obviously been carried along on the tide of anger following the attack on Penelope—ominous red stains on his buskins showed that. But it seemed as though he now had second thoughts.

  “Thomas,” he said uneasily, “maybe you should rein Walter in—tell him to stop chasing the crowds and send him to Kevin.”

  “Why?” Thomas gibed. “Are you feeling squeamish about teaching a few Lessers their proper place?”

  “I’m worried that those damned picture-takers are recording what we do,” Andrew replied. “Is this really what Robert would want?”

  Hearing their leader’s name struck Thomas like a bucket of cold water. The whole point of appearing in this Hollywood charade had been to lull the Lessers while Robert worked out his plans. To put it mildly, Robert would not be pleased by tonight’s turn of events.

  “Gods below,” Thomas swore. “We can’t let Robert see this—the Lessers, either.”

  “How are you going to do that?” Andrew asked worriedly as his temporary leader marched wrathfully off.

  “Those little boxes the Lessers carry hold the pictures,” Thomas said. “I’ll just have to break them and let the pictures out.”

  Marty Burke was happy now that he’d worn a black outfit to the movie premiere—not because it made him look slimmer, but because there’d be less physical evidence if he messed himself.

  He’d been standing with Leslie Ann and her camera crew for the pre-premiere festivities, adding a little color commentary to her coverage of the arrivals of the great and near-great. Then the tone of th
e evening had abruptly changed with the drive-by rocket attack and the giants going berserk. Burke’s first inclination had been to get indoors somewhere. But Leslie Ann had rallied her cameraman to record the worst of the carnage, charging perilously close to crushing giant feet.

  Burke had stayed beside her. His brain was telling Marty that he was doing a very brave thing. Unfortunately, a couple of his sphincters seemed to have other ideas on the matter.

  Leslie Ann seemed to have no conception of the danger into which she so blithely thrust herself. She interviewed injury victims, or rather, stood looking concerned while they moaned and sobbed for the camera. She buttonholed fugitive crowd members, including several movers and shakers. An ex-mayor nearly knocked her down when she tried to stop him for a few words.

  Burke had been frankly astonished by their luck in surviving. The street scene had started to clear. Everyone who could move had run for whatever cover was available. The only people still standing around were the camera crews, all now broadcasting live details of what Leslie Ann had christened “The Slaughter on Sixth Avenue.”

  The cameraman panned across the avenue, following Thomas as he disrupted another network’s crew. Leslie Ann snapped off her microphone and turned to Burke. For a brief second, her broadcast face disappeared and she frankly gloated.

  “Got the bastards now,” she said. “Ever since the first time I saw those overgrown freaks, I knew there was something wrong about them. I just couldn’t prove it. Now they’re showing the world that the precious ‘heroes’ aren’t all sweetness and light. They’re doing it on tape ... and they’re doing it in every living room across the country.”

  For a second, Burke wanted to argue with her. After all, the giants Leslie Ann was attacking were his heroes—his supporters in the battle for the Fantasy Factory. But one of those supporters—Thomas—was presently punting a cameraman the length of a city block. The camera shattered on impact. Burke turned away to avoid seeing what happened to the technician.