Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight

by Pab Sungenis

  Glances went around the room. Everyone looked at each other, people they’d not only worked and fought with, but also trusted with their lives and greatest secrets. I doubted any of us really believed it was possible, but all the evidence kept pointing that way, and it froze our blood faster than Captain Icebox could ever have hoped to. I had to jump back in and defuse a potentially dangerous situation. “Maybe I’m wrong. Hell, I’m praying I’m wrong. I can’t really imagine any of us doing this. That’s not who we are. Not any of us.”

  “What we need to keep in mind,” Prism offered meekly, “is that this happened because Seth didn’t trust us. For whatever reason, he didn’t trust us, and now he’s dead. We’ve all been together for far too long. Whatever the truth ends up being in the end, we can’t start pointing fingers now. We need to trust each other now more than ever.”

  “Prism is right,” Clytemnestra said with a sigh. “We’ve always watched each other’s backs, and we need to keep doing so. This isn’t the time to start doubting each other.” She turned to me. “Bobby, is there another copy of the security footage?”

  “The police took the videotape. I brought the hard drive here for Zip to examine, and it looks like it’s gone.” I looked over at the computer where Professor Smith and I had examined the footage the day before, and a possibility came to me. “I didn’t do a very thorough search of his computer. He might have copied the footage to a less conspicuous directory. Or the person who deleted it might not have done as thorough a job as they thought. It might be worth giving the machine a proper forensic work over. Who’s our computer expert here?”

  The silence that followed was a perfect verbal (okay, non-verbal) smack upside the head. “I’m sorry, I cannot brain today, I have the dumb. It was Uncle Jack. How could I forget that?” I yanked the cables out of the back of the machine and picked it up. “I’ll see what I can do. Besides, now I have the time to do it.” Hell, I had nothing but time anymore. “I want to get a head start on this one. Can you folks do without me here?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Paragon looked over at Mystery, who nodded. “I’m afraid all that’s left here is cleanup detail, and I think Mister Mystery and I are best equipped for that now. See what you can find on the computer and let all of us know the second you find anything. Same goes for the rest of you. Try to dig up any leads you can, and share anything with everyone immediately, no matter how minor.”

  We all nodded, even though I had a sneaking suspicion that the instructions were a not-so-subtle rebuke for me. “I really don’t want to go through that teleporter again right now. Is there a sneaky way out of here, or did Zip just rely on that whole ‘move faster than the human eye’ trick?”

  “I’m going your way anyhow,” Prism said as if “my way” was around the block, not “vaguely to the east.” “Would you like some company?”

  “Be glad to have it.” I probably would have called her for a long talk, if not a fully-fledged appointment, just based on the events from earlier in the day, and I was not opposed to having our talk while flying home.

  “Good, then I can phase both of us out of here.” She fingered her necklace, and a strange bubble of bluish light surrounded us. The light flowed through me and felt a little odd, sort of like I was being pulled apart by the teleporter, but just a little bit, and more tingly than ow, that hurts like hell. “I’ll touch base with everyone later. Take care of yourselves.”

  “You two as well.” Clytemnestra waved.

  “Watch your backs,” Mystery said with a hiss, and then returned to what was left of Mr. Zip.

  Prism floated upward, and her bubble pulled me off the ground. I activated my anti-gravs and assumed what I liked to think of as “flight position” just in case she decided to drop the bubble without warning.

  “Brace yourself,” she said, and then rocketed through the wall, dragging me along with her.

  A moment later, we were out in the open air and high above the college. I felt myself snap the rest of the way together and a slight dip in altitude as she shut off her bubble, and I found myself once more flying solely under my own power. The GPS in my helmet picked up our location and gave me a compass heading for home. I followed its heading and took off. Prism followed right alongside me and wasted no time jumping right into social-worker-cum-therapist-cum-confidante role of hers. “It wasn’t your fault, Bobby.”

  “I never said it was.”

  “But you were thinking it was. I know you, remember? I could see it in your face.”

  “Like you said, he made the mistake of not trusting you folks. I made a mistake, too. I trusted him. If I’d thought for a second he wasn’t going to share the information, I would have taken the drive with me, banged over to Headquarters, and sent word out to everyone myself. That’s probably what I should have done.”

  “Chalk it up to inexperience. But the final, fatal mistake was his and his alone, not yours.”

  “Bad time to be new on the job, I guess. All I know is I’m getting sick and tired of watching other heroes die. That’s not what I signed up for.”

  Prism’s silence was deafening. When you have someone who loves to talk as much as she does, even one minute with nothing being said is the equivalent of getting a month’s worth of the silent treatment from someone else. I figured the time had come to deal with the elephant in the room, or at least the one hovering between us at ten thousand feet. “There’s something I haven’t told any of you.”

  “I was wondering when you were going to say something. You’ve got a weight on your shoulders. Unload.”

  “I dropped out of school this morning.”

  “What?” I could tell she wanted to scream at me but was holding back. Maybe she thought snapping would be counterproductive, but I’d be willing to bet she knew that if she screamed as loud as she wanted she would short out the speakers in my helmet, and I’d never be able to respond properly.

  “It was just a couple of minutes before we found out about Zip.” I filled her in on the whole sorry story, dancing around the fact that both a cop and my guidance counselor now knew my secret identity. I wasn’t in the mood for a they call it a “secret” identity for a reason lecture. Plus, that kind of news might make her scream and overload my circuitry all the same.

  “Bobby … ” I couldn’t quite place the emotion in her voice. Was it sorrow? Was it disappointment at the screwed-up protégé who had once again let the grown-ups down? Just as long as it wasn’t pity. I hadn’t wanted pity when I lost my pop or Uncle Jack; I wasn’t going to put up with it for losing my academic future. “Bobby, have you thought about how this is going to affect your chances of getting into college? You’re going to have more than a few admissions officers wondering why an applicant dropped out four months from graduation, which is not something that’s going to move you to the top of the pile. Then you—”

  “The chances were getting slimmer every day, anyhow,” I interrupted before I could get even more angry and frustrated. “I was nearly down to safety schools, and if I wasn’t able to pull my quarterly grades back up after a month of neglect because I was out playing hero—”

  “Maybe there’s something that can be done. You might be able to convince the school board that you—”

  “I couldn’t think of a way other than blowing my cover.” Well, blowing my cover further. “Isn’t that why I took this damned job anyhow, to keep people from putting the pieces together? What good would it do if the entire school board knew they had a superhero enrolled in one of their buildings? And if the parents of the other kids found out, they’d probably want me expelled as a danger to myself and others.”

  “You’re just looking for excuses. Jack wanted you to go to college. He wouldn’t want you quitting like this.”

  “You loved him, didn’t you?”

  “Mr. Zip? Of course not.”

  “You know who I’m talking about.”

  “You’re trying to change the subject.”

  “You’re damn right I am. A
nd since you brought him into this conversation, you can deal with it. I could see it that first night, five years ago. You were in love with Uncle Jack.”

  More silence followed, but this time I was leaving it up to her to say the words. “Yes, of course I was. Can you blame me?”

  “I can’t blame you for anything. Being straight and having that whole ‘new dad’ thing between him and me kinda keeps me from seeing him exactly how you did, but intellectually, I guess I can understand some of what you saw in him.”

  “It went even further than that. Fighting alongside someone all these years, you sort of develop a bond with people. It’s almost like being married. I’m willing to bet you’ve got a similar thing going on with the other sidekicks. Not necessarily in a romantic or physical way, of course.”

  “Of course.” Yeah, keep telling yourself that about not in a romantic and physical way. Being a healthy, red-blooded American boy, I could easily imagine a lot of stuff between Sarah and me. Stuff I would never get away with putting down in words. But I hadn’t asked her out on a date because I didn’t want to weird things out between us on the job. As for Rick and Tommy, I certainly didn’t think about them in a physical sense, but there was a certain bond between us that went deeper than any physical relationship ever could. They were my brothers, and if I had to, I would lay down my life for either of them in a heartbeat.

  “You know he wanted to ask you to marry him,” I said, and almost immediately regretted it.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He loved you, Phoebe. He always had. I don’t know why he never took it further.” Well, maybe a little. Like I said, there’s no reason to complicate things in a professional sense, especially when your profession involved life and death on a somewhat regular basis. “But he wanted to.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know how I felt toward him.”

  “No, that’s not the case. He knew. Even I knew, and I was an impartial observer in the whole thing.”

  I looked over at Prism and caught her eye. She was starting to tear up. “Maybe it’s for the best that he didn’t ask me to marry him. It would have made losing him all the more painful. Besides, could you imagine me as your foster mom? What a nightmare.”

  “I always considered you my foster mom.” Now it was my turn to tear up. I had no idea that talking about Uncle Jack with Prism was going to dredge up the level of emotion it did. She and I exchanged smiles, and then broke eye contact, looking back to where we were going. I changed the subject back to business. “So what are we going to do about replacing Mr. Zip on the team? Invite Tommy to join?”

  “He’s barely seventeen. I might be tempted to say he was too young, but you’ve all proven you kids grow up fast in this business.” She pondered the situation. “I would say yes, we should bring him in, but not yet. We’ve just discovered Jack’s death was probably not an isolated incident. Being one of us just got a hell of a lot more dangerous, and I don’t know if it’s fair to put him in the line of fire right now.”

  “He’s more than up for it.”

  “You might be right, and I know you’re his best friend, so you need to defend him, but I think right now the safest thing for him is to stay where he is. After things quiet down a bit and we catch this killer, then we can bring him on board. He deserves it. Honestly, I think all three of them deserve it, but not until this situation blows over. Besides, between Paragon and myself, we can handle the whole ‘super speed’ thing for a little bit. You can even take up some of the slack yourself, since your boots let you fly pretty darn fast. None of us are as fast as Seth or even Tommy, but for the time being, it’s safer for us to do without.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right. Like you said, I’m his best friend. Do you want me to break the bad news to him about not getting moved to the grown-ups’ table yet?”

  “No, let me do it. I have more tact, and it would sound better coming from me. Besides, that’s the last thing we need to drop in his lap right now. He’s going to have to deal with Seth’s passing, and I’m certainly better equipped to talk to him about that than you are. No offense.”

  “None taken. We all have our areas of expertise. Psychology isn’t mine. At least, I don’t think it is. When I figure out what my areas of expertise actually are, I’ll tell you.”

  Comparing the GPS readout with the landscape and what passed for Geography when they still pretended to teach it in high school, I knew Prism was going to have to veer off soon if she was going to head straight to her home. That gave me a handy excuse to end the conversation without seeming as ignorant as I actually am. “I believe this is your exit. I’m going to go dissect this heap of metal and see if I can make sense of it.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want me to come back to the mansion with you? Sure you couldn’t use some company?”

  “I’m sure. The best thing for me to do right now is drown myself in work before I realize how miserable my life really is.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see she cocked her head to look at me again, so I glanced back. “Relax. I’m kidding.” Yeah, like I said, keep believing that. “I promise I’ll talk with you later and let you shrink my head good and solid.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, Bobby.” She started drifting away from me, slow enough to get in a few more words, but fast enough to put her on the right course smoothly. “Remember what I said, Bobby. Don’t be afraid to trust us.”

  “And you remember what Mystery said, Phoebe. Watch your back.”

  Seven Days in the Hole

  Note to self: the next time you want to go off somewhere and be alone while you work on special projects and have yourself a good old-fashioned sulk, make sure you change the locks on your house and the security codes for all your alarms. Friends have an annoying tendency to butt into your affairs unwelcomed.

  “Bobby?” The voice came about thirty seconds after I heard the door to the base slide open unexpectedly. I figured any villain who was smart enough to worm his or her way past Uncle Jack’s security measures would have earned the right to stab me in the back and put the world out of my misery, so I kept on with what I was doing and didn’t bother turning around. Hearing Tommy’s voice made me a little sad. I’d not only gotten used to the idea of a Big Bad smiting me at the workbench, I’d started to look forward to it a little. Not that I wouldn’t normally be glad to hear Tommy, but he had an annoying tendency to be happy all the times I wanted to be miserable. And call me old-fashioned, but I thought that him being as cheerful as he sounded less than a week after they’d buried his Uncle Seth was a little too creepy to put up with. It wasn’t right that I should be more depressed than him.

  The thing people who have never gone through depression don’t realize is sometimes, the depressed person needs to sit and stew for a while. When something trips you up and sends you spiraling downward, the fastest way to get back up is to just go along for the ride. Strap yourself to your emotional surfboard and wait for the wave to eventually carry you back to shore. It’s not that I enjoy those moments. It’s kind of like when you go for a week or so without a shower, you don’t like the way you smell, you just notice it a lot less. Plodding your way through depression is like letting a campfire burn itself out instead of pouring the kerosene of human interaction onto it. That was why I’d sequestered myself down in the base and poured myself into work, and why I was not happy to have Tommy show up not only on my doorstep but past it and downstairs.

  Maybe if I ignored him, he’d take the hint.

  “Bob? Dude, it’s us.” Great. Rick was with him. Probably Sarah, too.

  “Bobby? I brought wings. From that place you like in Tonawanda.” Yep. Her too. All three of them had descended upon my Fortress of Suckitude. That could mean one of three things. Either (a) the world was ending and I’d let the battery on my watch run down so they had to come and get me in person; (b) they felt like reliving the old days of the four of us going out and dealing with one of the lesser bad guys, which I absolutely did not want to do in the m
ood I was in; or (c) an intervention, which was worse than the other two possibilities rolled into one. Boy, was this going to be painful.

  “You’ve reached the Baines residence,” I piped up in my best fake-cheerful voice. “We’re sorry, but no one is home right now. After the beep, please piss off. Beep.”

  “Come on, Dude. It’s been a week. No one’s seen you. We were starting to worry.”

  “Gee, it took you a full week to start worrying? What friends I’ve got. Remind me to think of you when I’m on fire sometime.”

  “There’s no reason to be nasty, Bobby.” The hurt in Tommy’s voice was clear. That wasn’t what I’d intended. I just wanted to be left alone to enjoy my own misery, and instead, I’d increased the suffering of the only person in the room who had a right to be more miserable than me. Of course, that should have made me feel even worse, but misery doesn’t work that way. Adding a new misery onto a misery you’re already in doesn’t make the old misery worse, it just adds to the things you’re miserable about. Someday, I might try to write a paper on the Commutative Property of Misery, but I doubt I’d ever be able to get the higher math degree I’d need to make anyone take it seriously.

  “I’m sorry, Tommy.” I finally spun my chair around to look at them. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’m just not in shape for company.”

  “That’s what you said last time.” Rick looked me square in the eye. “It didn’t hold water then, and it doesn’t now. You’ve been out of circulation for a week, ever since the Professor’s funeral. Mystery told me you swapped out your turn on monitor duty this week, and there haven’t been many reports of you even going out on patrol.”