“They had all of us fooled, Mr. Keppler. As did half the London office, the majority of the New York office, and an alarming number of key players in Hong Kong,” King Tears said. “Many did us the great service of getting themselves killed during the invasion, and others were outed during the infighting just prior. Suffice it to say it appears that anyone who bought into the cult of stupidity that led to the organization’s involvement in the invasion has been dealt with.”
“The whole Los Angeles office was in on it?” Keppler said.
“Not all,” King Tears said. “But enough that the few who didn’t figure it out on their own forfeit their lives—too stupid to live, really.”
“I didn’t figure it out,” Keppler said.
“No, but you’re running our Vancouver office with a skeleton crew, and only met these idiots a few times a year. That can be forgiven,” King Tears said.
“Forgiven,” Keppler repeated.
“With this many high-level leaders dead, and even more murdered by these fools prior to the Nemesis invasion, do you know what we’re left with, Mr. Keppler?”
“We’re essentially crippled,” Keppler said. “Sir. I’m sorry, but that was what this call was about. We’re coming apart at the seams.”
“I see this as an opportunity, Mr. Keppler,” King Tears said. “We have a global infrastructure. We have manpower. And now we’ve cut off not only the sickly part of our organization who wanted to sell the planet out to aliens, but the bloated parts as well. They did a us a great service in cutting down a great number of men and women who had, perhaps, been in charge too long, allowing the organization to stagnate.”
“I… forgive me, sir, but from your reputation, I didn’t think you were… Oh, God, how do I say this. I didn’t think you were a stakeholder?”
King Tears laughed. Keppler looked as though his bladder gave out on him.
“That is a very polite way of saying it,” King Tears said. “I wasn’t a… I do like how you phrased that. I was not a stakeholder. I was a partner, and an interested party, but no, I did not hold a seat on any board. I was not one of these petty bureaucrats. I simply liked the chaos the organization sowed, and I liked the way I could profit from it.”
“And when we fell apart, you stepped in,” Keppler said.
King Tears pointed at the screen, smiling proudly.
“Now, this is why I didn’t kill you, Mr. Keppler,” King Tears said. “I looked into the tea leaves, and they told me you’d be useful.”
Keppler’s face went slack again, the shock catching up to him.
“So, tell me, Mr. Keppler. I will need a few useful people if I’m going to save this organization,” King Tears said. “Would you like a job?”
Keppler’s eyes watered. His mouth moved silently before he answered.
“Yes. Yes, I would,” he said.
“Good,” King Tears said, laughing deeply. “I have such great plans, Mr. Keppler. You’re going to love them.”
Chapter 8: A whole new man
Emily walked down a corridor inside the Tower she’d walked countless times before, amazed, as she had been every time she’d set foot in the ship since it crashed, by how unfamiliar everything felt there with the battle damage. It’s just a hallway, she thought. Same plain white walls, same floor, and now—with the success she, Henry, and Neal had getting the power on—the same running lights along the ceiling illuminating her way.
But the walls were scorched and blackened; the floor marred by scratches and dotted with piles of sand and debris. She walked by a room that had once been a storage closet. The door hung by a thread on its hinges. She pushed it, and the entire door fell off.
“Oh, man,” she said.
“You okay?” Henry said through the earpiece she wore. Emily rolled her eyes.
“I’m good,” she said. “Just breaking stuff.”
“Stop breaking stuff.”
“We live in broken stuff,” Emily said.
“Did you find it yet?”
“Almost there,” Emily said. She turned a corner and found a hatch, already partially detached, which she unfastened and dropped to the floor. She flipped on the flashlight she had in her hand and looked around inside.
“Got it,” Emily said. It’s funny, she thought, moving cables out of her way until she found the switch she’d come here to locate. A couple of years hanging around an alien spaceship and I’m just, like, pulling panels off the wall and fixing things like I’m just checking the fuse box back home.
“Warn me before you—” Henry started to say, but Emily flipped the switch anyway. “Emily!”
“You dead?” she asked.
“No!”
“Then calm down,” she said. “How’s it look?”
“Come on back. I think you’ll be pleased.”
She meandered back down the hallway, wondering if they’d ever get the ship airborne again. The least we can do is get it out of the sand, she thought. Henry had talked to the Department about setting up some sort of landing pad for it but no one really wanted the government involved—they all agreed, including Henry, who had run the Department briefly—that fixing the Tower was a family affair they wanted to do themselves. And it was moving along okay, she thought. Electricity, the alien machines that could generate food and water at the touch of a few buttons, the ship’s hilariously effective internet connection, and of course the air conditioning function so they didn’t die of heat exhaustion, the bathrooms, of course… all the basics so far. But nobody really wanted to work on the engines just yet. Henry and Neal were confident in their abilities to fix a lot of things (the pair had done quite a bit of reverse engineering, they told Emily, back in the good old days when Henry worked with Doc as the hero Coldwall). But the engines, which had been capable of sustaining flight indefinitely before the crash… that was a project that made everyone nervous.
I really don’t want to drop our base on a small town, Emily thought. She actually had confidence she could, with a bubble of float, carry the ship somewhere else, but that was so far above and beyond what she’d pushed her powers to in the past that she let the others talk her out of it.
So far, at least.
She found the others—Henry, Neal in his little trashcan body, Billy, Bedlam, and Jane—hanging out in a room that used to be their training facility. And in an alcove next to that training room was the objective of this little project.
A machine Emily had barely touched since she first arrived at the Tower now hummed with energy, its surface dotted with glowing buttons and screens.
“The costume generator,” Jane said. “You fixed the costume generator!”
“We figured we’d go for a little victory,” Henry said, tossing aside a spanner and brushing his graying hair back out of his face. “Try to get a little bit of normalcy back in your lives.”
“Let me tell you,” Billy said, hopping off the countertop he’d been sitting on and walking toward the machine. “My costume survived that battle, but do you know how hard it is to get Nemesis ship fuel out of a white costume? I look like one big stain.”
“Truly the story of your life, Billy Case,” Emily said, pushing right past him toward the generator.
“Hey,” Billy said.
“I fixed it, I go first,” Emily said.
“We fixed it,” Henry said.
“I believe, Designation: Coldwall, I did most of the fixing in this case,” Neal said.
“Whatever. We fixed it,” Emily said. “I go first.”
“You lost your Doctor scarf in the fight, didn’t you, Em?” Jane said.
“Lost is a relative term,” Emily said. “I think it’s in orbit somewhere. But I got a replacement one at Comic Con.”
“Then what are you making?” Jane said.
Emily tapped a few buttons, examined the screen, then activated the generator. A slim, black leather coat emerged, with up-pointed lapels. She threw it on over her dusty desert clothes and checked herself out.
“Yo
u made… a leather coat,” Billy said. “That you could have found at the mall.”
“A leather coat made with an alien machine,” Emily said. “So, no cows had to die for this jacket. Can’t find that at the mall, Billy.”
“Hang on—you guys had a machine that magically just… 3D printed your costumes this whole time?” Beldam said, stomping over to join them. “I’m wearing yoga pants because they’ll fit over my robo-legs. Show me how this machine works. Right now.”
Jane joined Emily and folded her arms across her chest.
“Costume change, Em?” Jane said
“Yeah,” Emily said. She looked up at Jane and wrinkled her nose. “I thought it was time.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That is a replica similar to the coat worn by Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, Designation: Solar,” Neal chimed in.
“Holy heck, our AI watches Doctor Who and I never knew this,” Emily said. “How did I never know this? How have we not talked about this, Neal?”
“You never asked, Designation: Entropy Emily,” Neal said. “If we can activate the ship’s archives, I have recordings of the original series all the way back to the beginning.”
“No. Way,” Emily said. “Even the missing episodes?”
“Yes, Designation: Entropy Emily. Even the missing episodes.”
“This is amazing,” Emily said.
“Okay, but… help a non-Whovian out here,” Jane said. “Why the coat? Isn’t the scarf your thing?”
“There was a war, Rose,” Emily said, putting on a pitch-perfect imitation of the actor’s northern accent.
“I don’t get it,” Jane said.
“Never mind,” Emily said. “I’m just going through a dark period, okay?”
“That’ll do,” Jane said. “Carry on.”
Emily turned her attention fully on Neal and pointed at him aggressively.
“And you,” Emily said.
“Uh-oh,” Neal said.
“I have been having thoughts about your situation, buckethead,” Emily said.
“This is a cause of great concern for me, Designation: Entropy Emily,” Neal said.
“No. I have an idea. Hey, Henry?”
“Uh-oh,” Henry said.
“You have extra Coldwall suits, right?” Emily said.
“I have… quite a few of them, actually,” Henry said. “I’m one hundred percent sure I’m going to regret asking why you want to know.”
Emily gestured grandly at Neal.
“Our loyal friend has been stuck in a metal tube for months,” Emily said. “Could we set up one of your suits to be his new home, so the poor guy can at least have arms and legs?”
“I have never actually had arms and legs, Designation: Entropy Emily,” Neal said nervously. “I really do not feel any sense of loss that I don’t have them now.”
“Shut it, robot, I’m trying to do you a solid here,” Emily said.
“He’s going to need a lot of things that aren’t in the suit already,” Henry said. “The suit’s not made to be an independent entity.”
“The technology I require is relatively small, Designation: Coldwall,” Neal said. “I am, as Designation: Entropy Emily has so cruelly pointed out, currently housed in a cleaning robot’s body.”
“Listen to the Roomba, Hank,” Emily said. “Plus, if you’re not in the suit, there’s a whole lot of extra room in there, right?”
“You…” Henry paused, looking up at the ceiling as if making calculations in his head. “You are…”
“I’m a genius, yo,” Emily said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Henry said. “But you are definitely on to something.”
Chapter 9: The town that once was
Doc Silence stood in an empty street, looking out over three miles of nothingness.
The patterns were still there; he’d arrived by air, carried through the sky on waves of magic, where he could see the shapes of streets and sidewalks, property lines, dirt where parks and yards once stood.
But the town that once stood here was gone.
The emptiness was almost pretty, in a way; the sunset splashed the blank landscape with pink and gold watercolors; a nihilistic, abstract painting.
He hadn’t had time to check the name of the town, but rather followed the hidden trails known only to magicians like him and other creatures of the night, places in reality where time and space bent and twisted. It took him hardly any time at all to travel across the globe the minute he sensed the disturbance, but still. He was too late.
He landed next to the town’s sign. Welcome to Westwick. A nowhere town, of which there are so many just like it. He took off his red-lensed sunglasses and looked the world with eyes burning with violet light. He paid a price for those eyes when he was young, in blood and in spirit, but they were the eyes of a wizard, and they let him see things no mortal could.
What those cursed eyes showed him caused a sharp intake of breath.
The town was covered in black, oily spinnerets, a nightmare maze like a spider’s web gone all wrong. The tendrils formed a sort of dome around the town, an opaque, protective sphere. They radiated malice and a sickly heat, and gleamed as though covered in fever sweat.
“What happened here,” Doc said, replacing his glasses. Once seen, the tendrils were visible through his glasses. The lenses had always served as a negligible barrier against the outside world anyway, Doc knew. And he had to look away to get his heart rate to return to normal.
He saw a car driving toward him in the distance. Doc waited for it to arrive, knowing who it might be.
An unmarked black vehicle pulled up beside him and the passenger door opened. An old friend emerged: Sam Barren, current acting head of the Department of What, looking simultaneously older and more spry than Doc had ever see him. The old man’s eyes were gleaming blue; his silver moustache still brilliantly maintained. He wore an old fedora and a tidy brown suit. Doc smirked as he spotted argyle socks when Sam stepped out of the vehicle.
“So, we got a call an entire town just went invisible,” Sam said. A lifelong special agent said, shaking Doc’s hand. “Wasn’t sure if I should call you or just assume you’d be here.”
“I sensed it happen from six thousand miles away,” Doc said.
“That why the kids aren’t here?”
“No time to go get them,” Doc said.
“So—alien, scientific, or…” Sam said.
“Magic,” Doc said. “Definitely magic.”
“I hate magic,” Sam said, rolling his eyes. “Why didn’t you ever let us recruit a couple of magicians to the Department, Doc?”
“There are no magicians you could recruit to the Department,” Doc said, looking back at the empty town. “You think we’re all out there looking for work, filling out our magician resumes?”
“Probably better that there aren’t too many of you running around,” Sam said. He took off his hat and scratched nearly-bald head. “I can’t believe I’m asking this out loud, but is the town there, or gone? Like, is it just invisible?”
“It’s not here, but it’s not gone,” Doc said.
“You literally just said yes to both options,” Sam said. “This is why I hate magic.”
Doc gestured at the empty space.
“This town familiar to you? Did anything ever happen here? The name is ringing a bell,” Doc said. “But I don’t know why. I feel like I should know something about this place.”
“Not at all. Hang on, my assistant gave me some talking points on the way over,” Sam said, grumpily tinkering with his smartphone. Doc smirked.
“Look at you, joining modern society.”
“I hate this thing,” Sam said. “And it’s not because I’m a technophobe. I just hate being connected all of the time.”
He tapped the screen a few times and made an ah-ha gesture with his hand.
“Here we go,” Sam said. “Westwick, California. Population eight thousand, two-hundred and seventee
n last census. Bedroom community. Commuter town. Most notable factoid I can find is they refused to allow an Apollo’s Coffee in town because it didn’t fit with the plans for the town. Snobby.”
“Didn’t take you for an Apollo’s apologist, Sam,” Doc said.
“I begrudge no man the right to get a cup of coffee to make it through the day,” Sam said. “Life is hard enough.”
Doc couldn’t help feeling as though he’d forgotten something. Why did this town feel familiar? Why did this feel purposeful? The architecture of the spinnerets looked familiar, but they could be anything—a time spider, a plague demon, even some old god stumbling back up the ladder of reality.
Sam’s phone rang. The old man sighed. Doc eavesdropped.
“Sam Barren. Yeah. Really? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we’re on our way,” Sam said. “Warn them I’m bringing Doc Silence. Don’t want to freak them out.”
Sam hung up. Doc raised an eyebrow.
“Well, we have a resident who wasn’t in town when everyone disappeared,” Sam said.
“That’s a start,” Doc said. “Where is she?”
“She’s at the airport,” Doc said. “I have agents holding her. She’s furious.”
“Tell your driver to meet us there,” Doc said.
“Oh no, no you’re not,” Sam said.
“We can’t waste time in a car, Sam,” Doc said.
“I am not letting you teleport me anywhere,” Sam said.
Doc waved at the driver, a confused young agent in a deep blue suit.
“Meet us at the airport,” Doc said.
“What?” The driver said. “Why?”
Doc made a series of gestures with his hand, opening a portal beside him, a glowing purple sphere of light.
“I’m too old for this,” Sam said, right before Doc dragged him through the portal and they both disappeared.
Chapter 10: Where you go to be forgotten
Kate could tell Titus was uncomfortable. Anyone else, she thought, would be uncomfortable for the wrong reasons here—a village of tents beneath the interstate that ran into the City, providing a huge, artificial archway as a roof for the homeless. Kate knew about this place long before the invasion. She had a friend, a dancer like herself as a child, who had fallen on hard times. Kate tracked her here, with the arrogant thought that she might bring her home, but back when the young woman was not ready for someone like Kate to force help upon her. That trip made the then-newly anointed vigilante more aware of the city’s homeless youth; who wanted her help, and who wanted to help her by being her eyes on the street. Since that first year she’d often received anonymous tips from the residents of the tent city, asking for her to step in, or sometimes to warn her about a bad situation.
The Indestructibles (Book 5): The Crimson Child Page 5