by Pab Sungenis
From his reaction, I guess he must have seen Mystery’s body first. He fell to his knees and started to cry. The three women went to him, and after grudgingly admitting my assumption that Rick had been the killer was (thankfully) wrong, I joined them. Rick knelt there, his mentor’s blood seeping through the knees of his jeans, and kept on crying. I really felt for the guy, having just been there myself not too long before. I crouched down beside him and put my hand on his shoulder. I wanted to comfort him somewhat, yes, but mainly I needed to get his attention. “Dude, I know what you’re going through, but—”
“But why did you think I had killed him?”
I briefly recounted the events of the morning, including Prism’s death, explained how we’d reached the conclusions we now knew were wrong, and then pointed at the far wall of the darkroom, to the photos of him, me, and Tommy. Rick’s mouth opened and shut wordlessly, as if he was physically incapable of forming sounds. “I felt the same. For a few minutes after seeing that, I almost wanted to kill him myself, even though he was already dead.”
“But if Rick didn’t kill Mystery and the others,” Sarah jumped in, “then who did?”
When every siren in the place went off half a second later, I had the suspicion we were about to find out.
***
A giant video screen on the wall opposite the trophy cases burst to life. I guess Mystery had programmed the alarms to go off based on certain criteria it had scanned from broadcasts, or something along those lines, because a local news report popped up showing us a battle royale going on in the skies almost exactly over our heads. Some vacuous hairdo masquerading as an on-the-scene reporter was doing a voice-over, describing the fight going on between Paragon and the new mystery villain in the black outfit. The two swooped around in elaborate aerial maneuvers. Somehow, the guy in black managed to dodge every one of Paragon’s swings while effortlessly landing his own blows both with fist and sword, although neither seemed to have much of an effect.
“Is that the guy who fought you, Bobby?” I didn’t notice who asked the question, but chances were all four were thinking it.
“Yeah, I think so. There’s something different about the costume, though. When I fought him, he was dressed in black from head to toe, but this time it looks like there’s some white in the outfit. Hard to make it out; they’re both moving so fast.”
“It’s his boots,” Rick observed. “He’s wearing white boots. Actually, it looks like … ” He turned to me to see if I’d reached the same conclusion.
“It looks like he’s wearing my boots. A pair of my anti-grav boots.”
We stared at each other for a second, both praying to the great whatever high upon the thing that we were mistaken. A gasp from Sarah destroyed any hope we’d had of being mistaken. We’d jumped to some stupid conclusions before but never the three of us together. I shook my head and almost felt like crying all over again.
“Right tree. Wrong branch.”
***
I like to think he never saw me coming. I smacked into him at full speed, knocking him away from Paragon and out where I could have a word with him myself. Because if he had seen me coming and he still let me blitz him like that, then it raised even more questions I figured I was better off not knowing the answers to. Better to think I’d managed to get the jump on him, something I didn’t get too many chances to do. Before he could recover from the surprise, I yanked his mask off, spun him around, and looked him straight in the eye.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Tommy?”
Confrontation
Tommy Heber wasn’t my brother by blood, but over the previous six years I had come to think of him that way. That was one of the great things about being a sidekick; we had all grown up only children but bonded together as a family by coincidence and choice. All of the benefits and for a long time I had thought none of the drawbacks. If someone had asked me whether I loved him, I would have gladly said yes, which not many heterosexual American seventeen-year-olds were willing to say. I couldn’t have cared for him more if we actually had shared parents, and when I realized he’d been the guy we’d been chasing for two months and who had sent all our lives on this insane roller-coaster ride, I couldn’t have felt more betrayed if he’d actually been flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.
“Hey, Bobby! Glad to see you showed up!” The grin on his face seemed as innocent as a newborn baby’s. You might have thought he’d been throwing a ball back and forth with Paragon, instead of trying to kill him. “Want to join in the fun?”
“Not particularly. I’ve had way too much ‘fun’ these last couple of months, and I’m not really in the mood. So, do you have anything you want to tell me?”
“Hm. Don’t think so. Anything you had in mind that I should be telling you?”
“Well, ‘why’ is always a good place to start.”
“You see, Bobby, that’s always been your problem. You always want to know ‘why.’ The simple facts are never enough. You keep digging for the mystery, even when there isn’t one.” Tommy slipped out of my grasp, which to be honest wasn’t all that tight, and slowly rotated through a couple of backflips. “You know, I never knew how much fun flying could be until I tried it. Maybe you could let me keep this pair, instead of the one you promised me yesterday. I’ve gotten used to them. I kept meaning to give them back but never got around to it.”
“That’s okay. I don’t mind you keeping them.” Peeking over Tommy’s shoulder as subtly as I could, I noticed Morgaine floating up to our position, apparently hatching some sort of plan. I decided to play for time. “But can we maybe get back to the ‘why?’ I’m still curious.”
“Not much to be curious about. I was on my way out of Mystery’s lair when Paragon snatched me off the street.” Tommy kept hovering there in front of me, trying a couple of simple aerial tricks. I tried to match him move for move, so he was always looking at me. I couldn’t tell if he knew I was stalling, but if he did, I guess he’d decided to play with me. After all, there was nothing stopping him from killing me, and he would easily see any move I could try coming, so why not go along with my game? “I guess the Doc might have had some kind of special panic button that went right to the big guy. Don’t know how he could have tripped it, though. Maybe some kind of dead-man’s switch. Appropriate, huh?”
“Yeah. Very appropriate.”
Tommy was about to continue when something took him by surprise, courtesy of Morgaine. She shouted “Ŝnuroj, lig la fiulo!” and Tommy’s body was wrapped from neck to toe in tight ropes done up in a series of impossible-looking knots. I’d always said Tommy wasn’t the smartest of the bunch, but I was a little disappointed to see we’d managed to subdue him so easily.
Tommy didn’t seem overly fazed by his new wardrobe. He twisted slightly to turn himself around and engaged the boots to move him up next to Morgaine. He wound up hanging upside down in front of her, looking at her eye-to-eye.
“Really? That’s how you cast your spells? You chant in Esperanto? Your magic is controlled by a language I learned during a commercial break on television? I really hate to say this, but your power is without a doubt the lamest one I’ve ever seen.” I looked carefully at Tommy. Something was wrong with the way he looked, but I couldn’t be too sure. Then all of a sudden, his ropes burst into flames and disintegrated. “Of course, lame or not, they’re still a damn nuisance.” The air between the two became a blur, and Morgaine’s face suddenly went blank. Her hovering stopped, and she tipped backward and plummeted toward the ground. I was too stunned to react, and probably wouldn’t have wanted to turn my back on Tommy anyhow, so I was happy to see Clytemnestra fly up to catch her and return her to the ground. My former best friend made that stupid “dusting off your hands” gesture as he watched her fall. “Next time, don’t try to bind the super fast with something that isn’t friction resistant. Oh, wait. That’s right. There won’t be a next time. Pity.”
I hauled back to paste Tommy right in the face, but his
look of amusement brought me up short. “Really? You aren’t fast enough to do that when I’m not using my super speed. You sure you want to try it?”
I begrudgingly unclenched my fist but tightened my grip on my sword. I might not be able to react fast enough if he did decide to attack me, but I was not going to let that fact make me completely helpless. “No, I don’t. I’d rather not have to. What did you do to her?”
“A little throat surgery. Did you know I can vibrate through things? I’ve learned how to make my molecules vibrate fast enough to move between the molecules of solid matter. I vibrated my fingers through her neck and into her voice box. Then, I vibrated the tips of my fingers a little faster, and they did all the work I needed. She won’t be speaking her spells any more. I used a similar technique on Prism, just something a little more permanent. Easy when you know how.”
“How could you do that?”
“Hey, give me a break!” He seemed offended. “Morgaine’s going to live. I could have killed her, too, but I had a non-lethal way to neutralize the threat she posed.”
“How gracious of you. Now can we get back to the ‘why’?”
“I thought I told you that.”
“No, I mean the bigger ‘whys.’ I won’t ask you about Mystery, I can figure out that ‘why.’ But Phoebe? And Zip?”
“Phoebe was in my way. Literally. You told me as much. I had as much of a right to sit at the big table as you; she even admitted it. But she didn’t want me taking over Uncle Seth’s job because she thought the killer might come after me if I did, which is so deliciously ironic, don’t you think?” He was just short of laughing at his own joke; he was so pleased with himself.
That’s it. Keep talking, I thought as he plowed onward.
“Until the killer was found, she was never going to let me take my rightful place, and if I gave myself up I wouldn’t have been able to get the position, anyhow. So I got her out of my way. Besides, that meant I got this handy little toy.”
He turned his head around then stuck his hand out. A beam of impossibly bright white light shot out of his fist, which must have been hiding Prism’s necklace, and smacked right into Paragon, who was about to slam into Tommy full-force. A look of agony played across the hero’s face before he burned into nothingness. “Sorry, Paragon, but sparring with you was getting boring. I’m not in a mood to play around now.” He held up the necklace, grinning proudly. “None of you ever knew how powerful she was. Worst of all, even she didn’t know it. She was the most powerful of all of you. What a waste.”
“Okay.” I was desperate to get him back to talking. I needed time to think. And since I was probably going to follow the others into a deadly blaze of glory, I might as well get the answers to my questions first. “So that explains Prism. I assume Mr. Zip figured out who you were from the video. Did he make the mistake of confronting you?”
“Another idiot. I have no idea how any of them managed to survive as long as they did. He picked up a bit of a blur on the video. The smoke was enough to distract the normal human eye, but there was just enough blur on a couple of video frames for him to figure out who was zipping in and out at full speed. Then he called and asked me to meet him at his office, where he played the video for me and asked me about it point blank, and how could I do that, and the usual bullshit. I told him the truth. I’d gotten tired of always being the good guy and getting the shaft. We all keep doing what’s supposed to be the right thing but never really get to reap the rewards. Look at what happened to you at school. Just one more example of the system screwing over the people who protect it.”
I glanced down to where the remaining heroes were out of the corner of my eye. I was relieved to see none of them were in any hurry to lead an attack. They seemed intent on watching the two of us talk and seeing what happened. Tommy went on. “So I admitted to Zip I’d been experimenting with playing the other side of the fence. Nothing too big, just some robberies and shit, mainly for the thrill of it. No one got hurt, I never took much, and everyone I stole from was insured; so no harm no foul. When I saw you on one of my jobs, I thought I’d have some fun. Stupid move on my part I’ll admit, since it let the video get into Zip’s hands.”
“Yeah. Pity you didn’t take me out when you could. Would have really cut down on the body count.”
Tommy didn’t catch my remark or at least chose to ignore it. “Zip actually thought he’d be safe confronting me. He didn’t realize I’d learned more tricks in the years I’d had my speed than he had in all the years he had his. Too bad he had to learn the hard way. Oh, by the way, thanks for showing me the pile you’d thrown his hard drive into yesterday. I can’t believe you didn’t check his e-mail.”
“What are you talking about?” Zip’s e-mail? Damn. I hadn’t bothered to go through it. I was so busy looking for a video file that I didn’t think about the obvious places to look for clues. What had I missed?
“Zip’s e-mail. Turns out he’d had a long, very disgusting, correspondence with your friend and mine, Doctor Lawrence McBride. A lot of photographs shared between them, including some fascinating ones of the three of us. I might never have discovered that if you hadn’t given me the idea of going through his hard drive myself. Oh, and if he hadn’t been stupid enough to not clean out his mailbox. So I guess that brings us around to another one of your ‘whys.’ Any more questions?”
“Yes. Just one.” One more answer, that’s all I wanted. The big one. “You still haven’t told me why you killed my Uncle Jack.”
Tommy laughed. This laughter seemed a lot nastier and hurtful, not the kind of joyful laugh I’d grown to expect from him. “Oh, Bobby. You never figured that out?”
“No,” I admitted. “I can’t figure out your motives for doing it.”
“That’s because I didn’t have any motives for doing it. In fact, if you want to be technical, I didn’t do it.”
It All Ends Here
“One of the nastier side effects of super speed,” Tommy said, “is that you get bored. Very bored, very quickly. The human brain needs constant stimulation, and when you can process information as fast as I can, stimuli don’t last very long. That’s one reason I hung out with you three so often. You amused me. You provided the stimulation I needed.
“The day the Scarlet Knight died, I was the only sidekick with nothing to do. You were away looking at one of those stupid parade of colleges, Rick told me he had other plans, and Sarah was off on some diplomatic trip or other with Clytemnestra for some weird reason, so the fastest boy in the world had time on his hands.” He rubbed those hands gleefully, as if punctuating the thought. “Like I said, when time moves as slowly as it does for me, having that much time becomes more than a little annoying. So what is the poor, little fast boy to do? The same thing he does every other time he’s gotten bored in the past few months. He goes off for a few visits to different cities, pulling stunts and crappy little jobs as the Man in Black.”
I almost sympathized with Tommy. Being a hero, even a sidekick, was a real adrenaline rush—lots of speed, lots of action, lots of thrills. Even growing up in a seaside town with tons of thrill rides on its boardwalk, I never really went in for roller coasters. That sort of thing just seems so empty when you’re putting your life on the line every night fighting for truth, justice, and yadda yadda yadda. The months I’d hung up the costume to play diligent schoolboy had been quite a letdown. I was an action junkie who’d gone cold turkey, but the rewards I thought I’d get out of my sacrifice kept me plodding onward.
I tried picturing what that must have been like for Tommy. Imagine if he went through the withdrawal I’d felt over a period of months after just one minute without action. No wonder he went batshit. It’s hard to admit this, but if I were in his position I probably would have, too.
“I was starting to realize how much fun I could have as a villain,” he went on, “and decided to have myself a ball. As I went along, pulling job after job, I started pushing my luck little by little. Eventually, I decided to
risk pulling a job in Harbor City. You see, I’d avoided cities protected by the members of the Justice Federation up to that point, but something told me that if I tried pulling a job where I stood the risk of getting caught, shit, I’d probably get the biggest thrill I’d ever had! It’s no fun without danger.”
“Uh huh.” Tommy was as sick and screwed up as any of the villains I’d gone up against, and I knew then there was no reason he could give me for what he did that I would understand. That I could forgive him for. But while he’d been talking, I’d been forming a plan. I gently brushed a toe up against one of the control buttons in my sneaker and urged him on. “So why Harbor City?”
“Oh, come on, Bobby. Think. The Knight was the least threat to me. Do you think I would be stupid enough to go up against Paragon? Other than Zip, he was about the only person who could move fast enough to catch me. Prism, Morgaine, and Clytemnestra might not have been able to catch up with me, but they could out-strategize me. Or at least, they could have back then. And with you out of action, you two wouldn’t be able to outflank me. So I started pulling jobs. I got through a couple of minor holdups and a breaking-and-entering before my luck ran out.”
“You decided to rob one of my Uncle Jack’s warehouses.”
“Can you believe it? I didn’t even pick one with anything worth stealing! So there I am with a choice to make. I could fight, which I didn’t really want to do. I could give myself up, ditto on the whole do not want thing. Or I could run. I mean, let’s face it, I’m good at running. Hell, as far as most people are concerned, running is the only thing I am good at.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘only,’ but go on.”
“So in the time it took me to consider my options—and believe me, I didn’t need that much time—I start hearing this stupid voice in my head. And I start to feel like my stomach is going round and round, like a Tasmanian Devil. I couldn’t believe it. My conscience was actually trying to get to me. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, we’d all been force fed the whole ‘Greater Good’ load of crap by the heroes we’d trained under. Besides, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a hero’s sidekick any more, not after I’d seen how thrilling the other side could be, so why would I care if I lost my costume over it? I figured I’d had my fun, and maybe the time had come to face the consequences.”