Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight

by Pab Sungenis

  I didn’t know how much of this to believe. Thinking back on our time together, I couldn’t think of any time Tommy out and out lied to me, even though there had to be a few. Why would he lie about something this big and this important to me? Anyway, it didn’t matter whether he was telling the truth or talking out his ass; I wanted to hear the end of the story. “So what did you do?”

  “Simple. I put my hands up in the universal sign for surrender, then reached up to pull off my mask. Boy, Bobby, you should have seen the look on your Uncle Jack’s face.”

  “Yeah, I can picture it.” I could, too.

  “So after I unmasked myself, I figured I’d get a lecture, or at least some kind of statement of disbelief. You know, something like the whole ‘you?!’ cliché. But the only thing I heard from the Knight was a grunt, then a scream.”

  “What?”

  “The Knight clutched at his chest and doubled over, then collapsed to the floor. I panicked, having absolutely no idea what to do. I guess I hesitated just a little too long, because by the time I decided to intervene, he’d stopped breathing.

  “No way. A heart attack? Uncle Jack died of a freaking heart attack?” Heart attack had been the cover story Mystery had worked up for Uncle Jack’s sudden demise. Who would have known he’d really guessed the truth?

  “Yep. Massive coronary. I swear to God, Bobby, he didn’t even know what hit him. He was dead before he hit the ground. Even if I’d run for help, it wouldn’t have done any good. Believe me, I didn’t mean for him to die.”

  Did I believe him? I had no reason to. Then again, I had no reason not to. It would be nice to think I’d been wrong in assuming my ex-best friend had murdered Uncle Jack, making me an orphan all over again. I sighed. “I believe you, Tommy. But why stab him with the sword? Why not just say he’d had a heart attack?”

  “I thought it over. There would have been too many questions to answer if I had. What was I doing there? Why was he confronting me? That sort of thing. Especially if I used the Knight’s panic button to bring in the big guns, they’d all want to know what I was up to, and I was starting to change my mind about turning myself in. Besides, who ever heard of a superhero dying of a heart attack? That’s not how heroes are supposed to die. We’re supposed to go down in battle, strong and brave to the end and shit. I liked your Uncle Jack. I really did. And I thought he deserved better than that. So I gave him the heroic end he deserved. I made it look like I’d disarmed him, snatched his breastplate, and stabbed him with his own sword. Then I triggered his panic button and high-tailed it out faster than I’d ever run before. I’d been home for a whole minute before I got a call from Zip to let me know something had happened.”

  Throughout Tommy’s confession, I’d been drifting upward very slowly, about an inch every second. Tommy had kept up with me, matching my rise almost unthinkingly. Then I gradually started accelerating, and once again he matched me. By the time he’d finished his story we were somewhere around sixty stories off the ground. I didn’t have an actual plan in mind; all I knew was I wanted to get him as far away from the innocent people on the ground as I could. Also, if we ended up fighting I wanted as much reaction time I could get and as few obstacles around as possible. And considering what the likely outcome of the two of us tussling in mid-air was going to be, I didn’t want any chance of surviving the fall. Falling from sixty stories meant there was an extremely tiny chance I might live through it, but probably wouldn’t be very thankful I’d done so. If the odds were that I wasn’t going to walk away from the confrontation, I didn’t want to risk ending up a big bag of ground beef being kept alive by machines. Besides, if I couldn’t stop Tommy, Sarah would probably be the next one to jump into the fray and get slaughtered in our quixotic efforts. If I was successful, she would live. If I failed, she would die. If she wasn’t going to make it out of this alive, there was no way in Hell I wanted to, either. So I kept inching higher and higher, and Tommy did the same.

  “Where do we go from here, Tommy?” It was time to take the initiative. “You can’t honestly think you’re going to get away with all this.”

  “Why not?” Tommy’s smugness made me want to deck him all over again. “Everyone who could have stood in our way is gone or out of commission. The whole old guard. The four of us can start over as the next generation of heroes. We’ll carry the torch, pick up the burden, all that crap. But this time, we’ll be able to run things our way. No more sacrificing everything; this time, we’re going to get the reward we deserve. I’m not just talking about praise and empty gratitude, either.”

  “What?” I asked while trying to hold back a chuckle. Tommy’s idea was so screwed up it was laughable. “Charge people for saving them?”

  “Why not? People pay taxes to fund the police, the fire department, and the military to keep them safe, don’t they? Well, let them pay a superhero tax, to make sure we’re there when they need us.”

  I couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. He wanted to run the Justice Federation as a protection racket. I didn’t need all those years of hero training to tell me that was not the way things were supposed to work and that I wanted no part of this brave new world he was planning. “Clytemnestra will never go for that. Rick and Sarah won’t, either.”

  “Sure they will. Rick’s as sick of the whole hero game as I am. He’s wanted out for ages but could never bring himself to step aside. Well, now he won’t have to. He’ll be able to keep doing what we’ve been trained to do, and this time, make a comfortable living at it. Sarah may not like it at first, but she’ll come around. And as for Clytemnestra?” He opened his fist to reveal Prism’s necklace. “If she doesn’t like it, then she can follow her friend Paragon where he went.”

  My stomach fell. This wasn’t Tommy talking anymore. I still didn’t know what had made him snap, and maybe I never would. Had what he’d found out about Mystery and Zip made him that cold? No, it went back further than that. Maybe it had been watching Uncle Jack die. Maybe it was something from running around playing bad guy. Or maybe it was something even deeper-seeded, something fundamental that the rest of us had been too blind to see. Whatever had happened to him, it had made him unrecognizable. This wasn’t my best friend brandishing Prism’s necklace, holding my Uncle Jack’s sword, and wearing my boots. This was …

  Another one of those bags of cement thudded in my brain. My boots. I had to keep him talking while I tried to remember the sequence. “And you know I won’t go for that either, Tommy.”

  He looked genuinely hurt. “Bobby, you’ve always been the best of the four of us. We need you.”

  I cycled through the menus. Where was it? And would it even work? Keep talking. “I’m sorry, Tommy. I can’t let you do this.”

  “I won’t let you stop me, Bobby.”

  There. There was the menu. Now what was the command? “You don’t want to kill me, Tommy.”

  “I didn’t want to kill Prism. Or Mr. Zip. Or Mystery. Okay, I did want to kill Mystery, but it doesn’t change my point. The point is … ”

  Before he made his point, I found what I had been looking for. In the menu for anti-grav control on my visor, I’d pulled up the status screen. The visor was communicating with his boots but not with my sneakers, since I hadn’t reprogrammed the system to deal with them yet. I went back to the menu, highlighted “reverse polarity,” and as I whispered a plea for forgiveness, I triggered it.

  Quicker than even Tommy could react, the anti-gravs in his boots switched modes and instead of pushing away from the ground, pulled hard toward it. Tommy fell faster than a rock as twice the normal pull of gravity yanked him out of the air and straight down.

  ***

  Tommy survived the fall. More than survived, it was like he’d hopped off a stoop instead of plunging somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy stories straight to the pavement. He’d managed to vibrate his arms enough to create a warm air pocket underneath him that pushed up, somewhat cushioning his fall. But while it had softened his landing, it had
not prevented it, and the anti-grav boots kept him firmly fastened to the ground.

  As he fell, I kicked my own anti-gravs into high gear and dove toward the ground. He kept working his legs, desperately trying to vibrate out of the boots, but he wasn’t having any luck. Something about the artificial gravity forces at work in the boots was preventing him from phasing the molecules of the boots around his own molecules.

  He was trapped.

  The others caught up with us, stunned at the way I’d managed to bring Tommy back down to Earth but still wary of getting too close. After all, he was still armed, and a cornered animal is always the most dangerous. I’d thought about being cautious myself, trying to keep my distance, but someone had to confront him. Besides, what I had said up in the air moments before was still true. He didn’t want to kill me. I could tell by the look in his eyes.

  It also didn’t hurt that I was the key to him being able to move from that spot ever again.

  “It’s over, Tommy.” I tried to sound as compassionate and friendly as I could under the circumstances. “It’s all over. You’re not going to be able to run away from this one.”

  “No?” That horrible, cold laugh was back again. “You forget, I’m very good at running.”

  “Tommy, I’ve got you trapped. You can’t move. There’s no way out. If you promise to come with me, I’ll turn the boots off. Maybe we can work out some kind of deal—”

  “You know as well as I do there are no deals.” He started to cry. “There are never any deals for people like us. We’re all freaks that the world tolerates because we clean up their messes and keep them safe in their beds. But when we screw up, there’s never any kind of mercy. If we’re lucky, we wind up out on that island where they stashed Painmonger and Madame Madness and the other powerful bad guys. If we’re unlucky, or we’re seen as too much of a threat … ” He didn’t complete the sentence, but he didn’t need to. We’d both heard whispers about what had really happened to some of the worst villains we’d faced after the battles were over.

  “Tommy, we’ll be there for you. We’ll see to it that—”

  “No you won’t. No one ever will. But you’re right about one thing. It’s over.” He opened his fist to reveal Prism’s necklace again. “It’s all over. It all ends here.”

  The necklace! How could I have been so stupid? I should have grabbed it while he was trying to work his way out of the boots. Now here was a boy who could move faster than me, was much smarter than me, and he was holding the most powerful weapon in the universe. Yeah, I had him trapped, but even trapped he was still a mortal threat to all of us. And for all I knew the anti-grav control would end as soon as my helmet was blasted into tiny little pieces, so maybe he wouldn’t be trapped for all that long, either.

  I was about to scream to the others to get as far away as possible when I caught a glint in Tommy’s eye. Something told me I had it all wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

  Tommy smiled at me, and somehow I suddenly knew what he was planning. I screamed for him to stop, but I was helpless to intervene. I can’t move faster than light. I don’t think Tommy could, either. Even if he could, he didn’t seem to want to as the same impossibly white light that had obliterated Paragon washed over him, leaving nothing more than a wisp of smoke in its wake as the necklace dropped to the ground, landing next to what was left of the now-empty boots.

  Housecleaning

  I’ve come to the conclusion that stuff breeds. When you put stuff into an area, then add stuff to it, some night when you’re not looking, the two stuffs are going to get it on and have a litter of baby stuffs you didn’t have before. I realized that when the time came for me to pack my stuff at Justice Federation HQ, and I needed considerably more boxes to take it out than I did when I brought it in.

  I hadn’t brought much with me when I’d set up the room. I hadn’t spent too many nights there, either. So when did so many of my things find their way to this little room? When did it get to be a proper home away from home? The only answer I could think of was my stuff had been fruitful and multiplied when I was off doing other things.

  As I was clearing off the shelves, I came across what certainly had to have been stuff spawn since I couldn’t remember ever bringing it with me. It was a little framed photograph of the four of us at the beach: me, Rick, Sarah … and Tommy. I remembered the day it was taken, but for the life of me I could not remember having the picture taken. Who had I gotten to hold the camera? And when had I gotten it developed? Or bought a frame for it? So many necessary steps to create the little memento in my hands, but I couldn’t remember taking any of them. Yet, here it was. Had I really considered all those things that I must have done to be so unimportant as to not remember them? Had I considered bringing a photo of my best friends in the world, a permanent physical reminder of how much they meant to me, with me to HQ to be so unimportant it wasn’t worth taking note of?

  No. The answer had to be stuff reproducing. That was it. The alternative was too sad to consider.

  I was still staring at the photograph when I heard the door open behind me. Sarah came in, sat down next to me on the bed, and put her arm around me. Without taking my eyes off the photo, I returned the gesture. “I remember that day,” she said softly.

  “Yeah. Happy days and all that.” We sat for a while, holding each other and looking at the picture before I worked up the energy to speak again. “Would you believe me if I said I miss him? Even after everything he did, I wish I had him here with us.”

  “So do I. I don’t know why.”

  “I do. He was our brother.” Thinking about Tommy and all the havoc he’d wrought, all that he’d destroyed, made me cry again. I couldn’t help it. I kept seeing the look on Paragon’s face as Tommy burned him away, then the bodies of Mystery and Phoebe, one after the other. But then my mind would skip back to chasing after him on the beach, and the sound of him screaming on the big rollercoaster at the amusement pier, and the stupid conversations he used to pull us into during late night bull sessions when we’d all get together. Yeah, he wasn’t going to hurt anyone else anymore, but he wasn’t going to bring any more joy into our lives either, and trying to reconcile those two facts was frustrating. Sarah cried, too, but her next words suggested her reasons for crying were different from mine.

  “Bobby, please don’t go. We need you right now.”

  “I’m sorry. I have to.” I put the picture back on the shelf, not wanting to pack it, but also not willing to dispose of it. Much better to leave it behind, just a little bit of both him and me, staying in HQ for all of eternity. Or at least until the next hero moved in. “When I started out, it was all so simple. You knew who were the heroes and who were the villains. I thought I knew what was right and what was wrong, who was good and who was bad, and you could do something about it. But the last few days, hell, the last couple of months have shown me how naive I was to think that. Look at what some of the people we thought we knew were capable of. Especially Tommy, who always seemed the most innocent of us all. He was the purest of heart, and look what this hero business did to him. It isn’t good guys against bad guys. Hell, I don’t think there are any good guys anymore.”

  “You know that’s not true, Bobby. You’re a good guy.”

  “Am I? When I was talking with Tommy that day, and he kept on bragging about what he’d done and how he’d done it, then watching him cripple Morgaine and … ” I choked up. It hurt to think about Paragon; I’d see the expression on his dying face in my dreams the rest of my life. “I wanted to kill him, Sarah. And if I could have found a way to do it, I might have.”

  “But that’s the difference between you and him,” Sarah pleaded. “You didn’t. Even when you had him at your mercy, you tried to bring him in alive. You didn’t kill him; he did it himself.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t kill him.” I went back to packing, the sooner I got away from HQ, the better off I would be. “This time. But what happens next time? What happens when some Big Bad comes after Rick?
Or, God help me, you? What if it had been you who tried to tackle him that last time instead of Paragon?” I didn’t want to say, what if it had been you he’d incinerated? “I don’t know if I could control myself. Hell, I know I wouldn’t be able to.”

  “That’s the hard part. You never know if you’re going to live up to your better nature until you have to. But I really do know you, Bobby. You’re too good to not pull yourself from the brink. Besides, you’ve got the rest of us to help pull you back when the time comes. We’ll always be there for you.”

  “I know. I would’ve said the same thing to Tommy. But I wasn’t there for him, was I?”

  “He never trusted us. He never told us what he was thinking or feeling. He never asked us for help.”

  “He shouldn’t have had to. He was my friendHe was my brother. I should have known.” I packed the last of my books into the box and folded the flaps shut. “I should have known.” That was all there was to say about it in the end, and I was determined to make it my last word on the matter.

  Sarah sat watching me pack for another minute or so. “Clytemnestra’s leaving too.”

  “What?” That took me by surprise. With the possible exception of Paragon, she had been the one to take her commitments to the Federation, and to the rest of us, the most seriously. For her to quit would have been unthinkable just a couple of days before. “I can’t believe she’d quit.”