Masked

by Lou Anders

  “That’s not it at all.”

  “Then what?”

  Saint George didn’t answer for a long moment. He looked out over the downtown Liberty skyline, huddled along the riverfront. There was a giant billboard on the rooftop directly across the way that read, PLEASE COME BACK, SERGEANT LIBERTY. PLEASE FORGIVE US.

  After a while he said, “Have you ever considered the sole reason you’re attracted to me might be because I’m the one man you can’t have with a snap of your fingers?”

  “How dare you!”

  “It’s a common psychological condition,” he said. “There’s even a name for it, though it escapes me at the moment. You disdain what you have, or can have, and only place value on what’s unavailable.”

  She opened her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes, but her hand was shaking too violently when she tried to shake one cigarette from the pack, causing a number of them to spill out all over the rooftop. She crumpled the empty pack and started to toss it away, then thought better of it and put the crumpled ball back into her purse.

  “How can you do this?” she said, once some measure of composure had been restored. “How can you be so incredibly cold, after the way you’ve treated me so many other times?”

  “When you called you said you had some vital information for me. Was this it?”

  She felt like screaming then, but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her entirely lose control. So she turned away instead, walking back toward the building’s small heliport lobby in a controlled stomp. Without turning back to face him, she said, “I received an anonymous tip that something big was going to happen in Liberty, in the next day or two. Something cataclysmic. The caller insisted on speaking to me because he knew I’d be able to get the word out to the superhero community, me being your special sweetheart and all.” The door into the glassed-in waiting vestibule was on a sensor, opening and closing automatically, robbing Eleanor of the ability to slam it behind her.

  Saint George rose from the rooftops on a flair of boot jets, quickly disappearing into the crystal blue sky.

  F is for Fast Johnny

  Always First to the Fight

  Three days later, when the Public Safety Building in Liberty blew up, Fast Johnny was in Morocco, clearing out a newly discovered nest of the Demon League. Before the rubble had finished falling to the ground, Fast Johnny had arrived on the scene. Most of the delay was due to the thirteen long seconds it took for his earpiece, a gift from Underman, to decide this was news that merited his immediate notification.

  G is for Gunslinger

  Marksman Extraordinaire

  The gutted hulk of the Public Safety Building continued to burn. A dark column of smoke marched defiantly into the sky. Bits of ash and burning debris drifted down from the sky. A blue and scarlet blur whipped and danced all around the destroyed building, sometimes disappearing into it for a second or two, after which it would emerge again, carrying someone out to safety.

  “He has to slow down every time he brings a survivor out,” Professor Hell said, from one of the undamaged buildings across the way. “That’s when you take the shot.”

  “Don’t tell me my business,” Gunslinger said.

  “But you don’t even have your gun out yet.”

  Gunslinger took his attention off the blurred image of Fast Johnny across the street and fixed his cold gray eyes on Professor Hell. “I appreciate you giving me this opportunity, Professor. I sincerely do. I haven’t had a real challenge to my abilities since—well, since never. But if I can take down Fast Johnny while he’s in motion, that would be the shot of a lifetime. Only don’t tell me my business. Back off, shut up, and let me work.”

  “Don’t you forget who’s boss, kid. I was in the original Cryptera, taking on the biggest, baddest heroes of the day, while you were still in diapers.” Emil hated trying to talk tough. He was no good at it. Everything he said came out sounding like an absurd cliché from B-movie gangster flicks. But he felt he needed to constantly reinforce his dominance over these people. Every one was a powerful and wild creature of anarchy and chaos. This new generation of supervillains wasn’t like the previous one. They couldn’t always be relied upon to act in their own best interest. Absolute dominance was his only hope of controlling them. He thought about using some of Hark’s moondust on the kid, but he didn’t want to do it in front of the others. He didn’t want them to realize how most of them had been convinced to accept his leadership. Plus, he didn’t know how the enthrallment of moondust might affect Gunslinger’s incredible marksmanship.

  “Go right ahead and be the boss,” Gunslinger said. “Boss anyone you like. You told me who to shoot and that’s what bosses do. But telling me how to go about it won’t work, because you don’t know how to do what I know how to do. Make sense? Go bother one of the others. Tell them the rest of your ingenious plan. Make all the noise you want. I won’t be distracted as long as you don’t talk to me.”

  What to do? Was this an act of insubordination, and if so, was it worth dealing with? Would the others think he was weak if he let it drop? What would Bad Moon do in the same situation, or expect him to do? Certainly, he could destroy the boy with a single spoken word. Since being forced back into the life, he’d made certain to always have just such an emergency spell at the ready. But he needed the kid. The plan required him. It was essential that they take out Fast Johnny first. His impossible speed made him the most deadly of the heroes. And Bad Moon in his wisdom had determined that Gunslinger—this puppy who couldn’t even shave yet—was the only way to make sure of the speedster.

  “Then get it done,” Emil said, leaving it at that, while leaving his place beside Gunslinger at the fourth-floor window. He walked deeper back into the commandeered office space, where the others were gathered, affecting a calm he didn’t feel.

  “So, since the kid brought it up, what is the rest of the plan?” Max said. He was idly tossing his nearly invisible swiftblade from hand to hand. There were faint traces of red on the blade. Max had been the one to single-handedly remove the office’s former occupants. There was still the smell of blood and dead secretary in the air.

  “Once Fast Johnny is down, the rest is relatively simple,” Emil said. He was wearing the old mask, the cloak, and the slouch-brimmed hat. If he had to be Professor Hell again, he was going to go all the way. Maybe then, if this went bad, he could claim it had to have been someone else posing as him. “We lure all of the other heroes to Liberty and kill them.”

  “That’s it? That’s your plan?” It was Strangeface speaking this time.

  “In broad strokes, yes,” Emil said. “That’s always the plan.”

  “You’re insane,” Strangeface said. “It’s never worked before. It’s insanity to suppose it’ll work now.” Strangeface was one of the few surviving members of the old Cryptera. It was true they’d tried to destroy the world’s superheroes en masse many times before, always without success. And that was back when there was still only a relative handful of them.

  “In the past we didn’t have the cooperation of The Ordinary Man,” Emil said.

  “Are you shitting me?” Max said.

  “He’s really on board?” Dirty Bomb said. She’d managed to reincorporate her body sometime in the past few minutes, while Emil’s attention had been on Gunslinger. Truth be told, she was still a bit misty around the edges.

  “The Ordinary Man should be arriving on the six o’clock commuter express from Philadelphia any minute now,” Emil said, with no small degree of pride. “In fact, someone should probably head out to pick him up. Someone who can pass as human,” he added, looking at Thunderhead. “I promised him we’d meet him at the train.” The others couldn’t entirely hide their newfound admiration.

  That was the moment when Gunslinger drew and fired his pistol in one smooth motion. One shot. Then he holstered it again. Everyone in the room saw it except Emil, who was facing the wrong way.

  Outside, the single 230-grain bullet traveled tow
ard Fast Johnny at a paltry 885 feet per second. However, Fast Johnny was traveling toward the bullet at a more respectable 54,000 feet per second, having just put on a burst of speed after depositing the latest bomb blast survivor with the emergency medical technicians. When the bullet impacted the man, both velocities combined to release a truly impressive amount of energy inside an enclosed space—that being the hero’s chest cavity.

  Fast Johnny vanished in a red mist.

  H is for Holocaust

  Heroes Beware

  Building by building, the downtown area of Liberty blew up in a fiery holocaust, each consecutive explosion greater than the last. Just as she’d done with the Public Safety Building, Dirty Bomb moved from one structure to the next, exploding herself into atoms, waiting for her body to reform, and then doing it again. Civilians died by the thousands.

  “I’m beginning to get the impression she reincorporates in a random spot after each explosion,” Visionary said. “I don’t think she has control over it. But that isn’t the disadvantage one might assume at first. It makes it impossible to anticipate where she’ll appear next. Three times in a row now, by the time I’ve spotted her, she’s already detonating herself again. Frustrating, to say the least.” He stood on a low rooftop nearly a mile outside of the bleeding and burning downtown area. Dormouse crouched near him. They were both in the shade of a billboard that read: “Sergeant Liberty Come Home. We’re Sorry.”

  “Perhaps if you get closer,” Dormouse said.

  “Wouldn’t help,” Visionary said. “That would just narrow my focus even further. I need the perspective of this distance to give me even a slight chance of catching her. Why are you here, anyway? The big guns are on the way. This isn’t going to be the sort of fight you could survive. No offense, but it’s out of your league.”

  “Believe me, I know it. But I was already here last night, tracking down a lead. When I woke yesterday I took a look at the reports from my mousetraps. It’s what I always do when I wake up, to see what’s happened while I was out of commission. One of the mousetraps in Liberty had caught a partial picture of one of Strangeface’s robots. I figured this must be where he’d sent them all, so this was the most likely place to find him.”

  “You have every city under surveillance by your electronic bugs?”

  “Hardly. As inexpensive as they may be individually, I’m a girl on a budget. But I served my internship year here, after graduating from Pelion. Pissed me off at the time, let me tell you. I was top of my class. Valedictorian. And yet the Kyron sentences me to a year in Liberty? What did I ever do to him?”

  “Not overly fond of the place?”

  “Who could be, after what they did to Sergeant Liberty? I did my job though. Exactly three hundred and sixty-five days of first-rate superhero work. Saved lives. Cats out of trees. The whole package. In my time here I brought in the Ling Brothers, broke up the Jolly Rogers, and even survived a throwdown with Thunderhead once. Then, when I was reprieved, I moved on and never looked back. Well—except that I check in through my mousetraps from time to time. I still have some here, left over from back then. The little things are designed to be hard to spot, and randomly change location, making them not quite as easy to recover as they are to deploy. A few always get left behind. And even three years later, some of my guys here still work.”

  “Here they come,” Visionary said.

  Saint George flew in from the west, fast, like a launched missile. In the sky over Liberty he rendezvoused with Doc Jerusalem in her chariot of fire.

  “Achilles and Underman are in the chariot with her,” Visionary said. “Must have picked them up on the way.”

  “How can you tell?” Dormouse said, shading her eyes from the stab of brightness overhead. “I can’t see a thing.” Visionary didn’t answer. Instead his attention shot back toward the center of town. A brief smile flitted across his face.

  “There she is,” he said. His eyes flashed bright blue for an instant. “Got her!”

  “Dirty Bomb?”

  “Yep. I froze her in place, right in front of Anthony’s Café. Couldn’t be certain of killing her with Red. If she can recover from blowing herself to bits, maybe she could recover from being disintegrated by an outside force. Why take the chance? Had to zap her with Blue instead.”

  “You would have killed her?” Dormouse said.

  “Of course.”

  “But we don’t do that.”

  “Open your eyes, Miss,” he said. “This isn’t going to be police work today. This time someone started a war. Different rules. Better make yourself scarce now. It’s about to get rough.”

  There were no further explosions, but the heart of Liberty continued to burn.

  I is for Imaginary

  A Friend in Need

  Like a swarm of gnats off an animal’s carcass, a sparkling cloud rose up from the burning heart of the town, into the sky. Then the twinkling motes began to disperse over the city. Hundreds of them moved toward the newly arrived heroes, resolving themselves into individual shapes as they came closer.

  “Here comes Strangeface’s robot army,” Saint George broadcast to the others. The robots were giants and they were miniatures. Some were shaped like men. Some looked like featureless small metal boxes or shiny baseballs. They floated on invisible suspensor fields, or shot forward on plumes of fire, mimicking Saint George’s own rocket jets. Most bristled with weapons, and all were incased in a carapace of mirror-bright chrome.

  “I’ll take them,” Saint George said. He pointed his laser finger at the approaching figures and slowly fanned a bright red pencil-thin beam back and forth through their ranks. Pieces of metal bodies began to rain down from the sky.

  On the ground, giant tracked monsters rumbled along the streets, mowing down people wherever they went with their canons and machine guns and grenade launchers. Strangeface’s amplified voice boomed from every vehicle. “Attention, heroes! The time for ultimate sacrifice has come upon you at last! All you have to do is kill yourselves and we stop killing civilians! That’s your only choice! Those are the only terms we’ll accept! Do you have what it takes to give the last full measure of devotion? Are you true heroes after all? Kill yourselves and we stop killing civilians!” The message repeated continuously. It was also simultaneously broadcast from every TV and radio in town.

  Achilles leapt down from Jerusalem’s chariot, still suspended in the sky. He advanced toward one of the tracked robot tanks and began tearing it apart, ignoring the bullets and bombs that shot at him or exploded around him.

  Achilles wore his own piece of shining steel armor, a single protective brace around one ankle. Most of the ground robots concentrated their fire there, not realizing it was a simple but effective trick, designed to distract and divert an enemy’s efforts and attention. It had worked for fifty years. To this day no one knew that this Achilles had no special weakness to exploit.

  Other heroes began to arrive. The new generation, with names like Xenoboy, Razorheart, and Wonder Child.

  A convoy of black vans roared into the city, and then pulled up at the edges of the rapidly expanding battle zone. Armed federal agents helped a thin young man out of one of the vehicles. It was immediately clear the man wasn’t cooperating.

  “Take me back!” he shouted. “I’m no superhero, you idiots! I tell you I can’t help in a fight! Only afterward!”

  “This is a special situation, Mr. Faust!” one of the agents said. “We need your imaginary men! As many as you can conjure!”

  Fagan Faust was known in public as The Imaginary Friend, and he was indeed a proven friend to the entire civilized world. His Zero Men had created many public works that fed and housed thousands. They worked tirelessly, after earthquake or flood, or any other sort of disaster or national emergency, and in peaceful times turned wastelands into parks, deserts into farmlands, slums into palaces. But Fagan Faust was something of a dedicated coward.

  “Don’t you get it? I can’t use my imaginary men in a fight, becaus
e I can’t imagine myself in a fight! I couldn’t conjure a single one under these conditions if my life depended on it! Take me out of here!”

  And, with utmost reluctance, they did.

  J is for Jerusalem

  Legend in Song and Deed

  Jenny Green was better known as Doc Jerusalem, champion of England’s green and pleasant land. She took up her bow of burning gold and shot the arrows of desire into one deadly machine after another. She never missed, and each robot so struck died instantly. On her hip the Sleeping Sword began to stir in its sheath, waking to the din of battle, aching to once more be in her hand, where it wouldn’t sleep again until the struggle was ended.

  K is for Kyron

  In the Black Tower

  The black tower floated stately and serenely, suspended on its four powerful gravity subtraction engines, high above the forested valley below. It was over southern Minnesota today, drifting east toward the Wisconsin Dells. This was the Mount Pelion School, the most elite, prestigious, expensive superhero training academy in the planet’s history. Pelion had been in continuous operation since it was actually located in a cave on the original Mount Pelion, when Jason and Heracles were numbered among its original student body.

  High up on one of its smooth obsidian flanks a hanger door was open, to let the natural daylight flood the large chamber. Owen Dixon, the current Kyron of the school, operated the remote control of an electronic winch with one hand, slowly and carefully lowering himself into the strange vessel directly underneath him. It was a robotic horse’s body, missing a head, built on a scale to match a knight’s heavy warhorse of old—a copper-colored metal Clydesdale or Percheron. With small touches on the control, Owen continued lowering himself in his cradle, until the burn-scarred stumps of his missing legs dangled just over the robot’s cockpit, located where the missing head would be, were this an actual steed. Then he thumbed the switch that caused the three direct-interface cables to rise up from the cockpit and attach themselves to him. He winced only slightly as the long needles inserted themselves. When that was done, he disengaged the cradle straps and settled his body the remaining few inches with arm strength alone. He engaged the locks and tightened the harness belts. Then he began systems tests. The horse’s powerful legs responded to his mental commands. The jump jets flashed green-for-go in his mind’s eye. One by one, various weapons systems reported themselves as loaded, armed, and ready. He walked forward a few tentative steps. Heavy metal hooves boomed a watch bell’s dull toll against the metal floor. Moving over to a rack against the near wall, he began to take up the helmet and additional pieces of armor that would protect his exposed upper torso, arms, and head.