Sam was starting to feel like they were stuck in some sort of loop. “No, I didn’t bring you here. I didn’t even bring myself here. I don’t know where we are. My name’s…”
The shoe banged down on the table, making Sam jump. He tried to push backward but only succeeded in temporarily bending the plastic legs of his chair. They made a rubbery boing sound as they pushed him forward again.
“Holy shit! Wait a minute! I know you!” the woman said, and as her eyes widened in wonder, he recognized her, too.
Oh God. Oh God, no.
She made two circles with both forefingers and thumbs, then pressed the joins together until they made a sideways figure-eight shape. She raised them up in front of Sam’s face, positioning them so that when she squinted, they looked like they were covering his eyes.
The sharp, sudden intake of breath she gave seemed to cut through her half-drunk hangover. Sam jumped to his feet, the worry about what the voice might say now a secondary consideration to what this woman was about to.
“You’re—”
“Sam. Sam Summers,” he said, thrusting his hand toward her. He smiled. Desperately. Hopefully. Pleading with his eyes. “Call me Sam. Just Sam. Please.”
She studied his face, her mouth hanging open. He nodded encouragingly at his hand, his forced smile tightening into a grimace of fear.
“Uh, Anna,” she said, taking his hand and shaking it. His skin prickled a little at her touch, and any doubt that might remain about her identity evaporated. “Anna Allen.”
She pulled him toward her a little and lowered her voice to a whisper. “What the hell is this about?”
“I don’t know,” Sam mouthed, then he extracted his hand from hers and waited until he was sitting down again before subtly rubbing his palm on his thigh in an attempt to quiet the itch.
Now that he’d recognized her, he wondered why it had taken him so long. For the most part, she looked exactly like she used to. Same red hair, same withering expression, same sprinkling of freckles across her nose that she’d always had.
She was a little taller and not as painfully skinny as she used to be. Not fat by any means, just not as wiry and elf-like as before.
And she was older too, of course. Twenty years, give or take.
“Are they watching?” she whispered, holding his gaze.
“Is who watching?”
“Them. They. Whoever,” Anna said, barely moving her lips. Sam felt her nudge his foot under the table. “Is someone watching?”
Sam nodded.
“Shit.” She picked up her shoe and hefted it from hand to hand. “Can you still do your thing?”
Sam’s voice came out as a squeak of terror. “What? No! I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” she asked.
“Both!”
She tossed him the shoe. “Then take this.”
Sam caught the shoe and clutched it in his non-itchy hand. “Thanks,” he said. Then, after some consideration: “What am I supposed to do with it.”
“Hit people,” Anna said. She mimed battering someone over the head with the shoe. “Like that.”
“OK,” said Sam. He looked down at the shiny red material and the pointy heel, then back to Anna. “Who?”
“Next person that walks through that door,” she said. “You club them, and I’ll do my thing.”
Sam’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You can still do your thing?”
“Yeah, I can do my thing. I assumed we could all still do our thing.” She glared at him and lowered her voice further. “You sure you can’t do your thing? Because your thing would be pretty handy right about now.”
“I can’t do my thing,” said Sam. “I don’t have a thing. I lost my thing.”
A smirk tugged at the corner of Anna’s mouth. “So many jokes, but now isn’t the time. Let’s put a pin in them and revisit it at a later date.”
She shrugged. “Fine. Then shoe it is,” she said, standing. “You whack, I’ll—”
“That won’t be necessary,” said a voice from over on the left. Or the right, depending whose point of view you were going by. It was the same voice Sam had heard earlier, only this time it was different. This time, it was coming to them live from within the room.
They both turned—Anna left, Sam right—to find what looked to be a shaved Yeti leaning against the wall, his arms folded across his superhumanly broad chest. He was dressed for a funeral—Sam hoped it wasn’t going to be his—and wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses that reflected the table and its two occupants.
Sam regarded the behemoth for a moment, easily six and a half feet tall while slouching against the wall.
He considered the weight of the shoe in his hand.
Slowly, and very deliberately, he slid it back across the table to Anna.
“Yeah,” she said with a resigned little shrug. “I guess I can’t really argue with your decision-making process on that one.”
The gorilla in the dinner jacket fished a handful of pistachio nuts from his pocket and tossed a few into his mouth, shell included. He crunched for a while, rubbed his slab of a hand across a head of silver stubble, then nodded in Sam and Anna’s direction. It was a testament to the size of his skull that he was able to indicate both of them with the same nodding gesture.
“I’m guessing you have questions,” he said. “No doubt you’re wondering why I brought the three of you here.”
“You’re damn right, buster,” Anna slurred, wagging a finger. Sam wasn’t sure if she’d relapsed into drunkenness again, or if this was an act for the big guy’s benefit. “I’ve been arrested on… Well, let’s just say ‘several occasions’ and I’ve never been…”
The rest of the sentence stumbled into silence as the second part of what the behemoth had said sunk in. Sam beat her to the question.
“Wait. What do you mean the three of us?”
“Aha!” cried a voice from under the table. It was followed immediately by the sudden thump of something hitting the underside. This, in turn, was followed by a muttered, “Fuck,” and a slower, more deliberate series of movements as a bearded man in a red satin cape and flying goggles clambered out.
He sprang to his feet with a flurry of arm movements and karate chops that almost saw him throttle himself with his cape.
Once he’d successfully untangled the cape from around his neck, he placed both hands on his hips and puffed out his scrawny chest, showing off the symmetrical symbol printed on his shabby-looking t-shirt.
Sam and Anna’s jaws dropped open. For a moment, neither of them knew quite what to say. It was Anna who eventually made the call.
“Ho. Lee. Shit.”
Sam swallowed. “Funny,” he croaked, looking the newcomer up and down. “That’s exactly what I was about to say.”
Chapter Five
“Well, well, well,” said the man in the cape, ejecting the words as a raspy, menacing, Batman-like snarl. “We meet again, we three harbingers of justice!”
“What’s wrong with your voice?” asked Sam.
“More importantly,” said Anna, indicating with a look that Sam should shut up. She tapped the table. “Were you under there the whole time?”
“Like a shadow,” the man in the ill-fitting cape growled. “No. Like a shadow of a shadow.”
“He didn’t always sound like that, did he?” Sam asked. “I mean, I can barely understand what he’s saying.”
“No, wait. Like the dream of a shadow of a shadow. Lurking silently, undetected by—”
“You kept touching my leg,” said Anna. “That was you, wasn’t it? I thought it was him being a sleaze, but it was you.”
“I guess we’ll never know,” the man replied, holding one edge of his cape in front of his face so only the lenses of his goggles and the top of his leather flying hat were visible.
He yelped in surprise when Anna caught him by the neck, twisted his arm, then slammed him face-first onto the table.
“OK, OK, it was me! It was me!”
> “Let him go,” said the behemoth in the suit.
Anna gave another twist, eliciting a strangled sob of pain before she released her grip. The goggle-guy jumped up, brushed himself down, then shot her a pitying look.
“You know I let you do that, don’t you?” he growled. With a nod, he indicated the shaved Yeti. “Chuck there begged me not to hurt you two. Which is real lucky for you, Red.”
“Don’t call me ‘Red,’” Anna told him.
Ignoring her, he continued: “But I’m going to say this, and I’m only going to say it once…”
“Then can you say it more clearly?” asked Sam. He pointed to an ear. “It’s just… I’m having trouble with the voice. I’m really having to concentrate to make out what you’re saying.”
Goggle-guy squared up to Anna and jabbed a finger right up in her face. “Touch me again and you’re opening a doorway to a whole world of pain and—”
His head whanged off the table with enough force to dent the plastic. Anna released him immediately and stepped back, raising her hands in a deeply sarcastic gesture of surrender.
“Sorry, that was an accident.”
“Argh! My face!”
“I was just making a downward motion with my hands, and he got in the way.”
“You broke my whole face!”
“Nobody broke nothing,” said the man named Chuck. He pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead, revealing two piercing blue eyes and a look of mild exasperation. “If you want that state of affairs to continue, I suggest you all sit down.”
Goggle-guy dabbed his cape under his nose, checking for blood, then ejected another series of guttural snarls. “I don’t sit. I lurk. Like the night itself. Like a half-forgotten nightmare of a dark void in the heart of a…” He struggled a bit while he grasped for the end of the simile. “…forest,” was the best he could come up with, and even he looked a little disappointed by it. “We’ve discussed this, Chuck. Come on!”
“Yeah, well, today you sit,” Chuck told him, in a tone that suggested there was no further discussion to be had on the subject. “You can lurk on your own time.”
Holding Chuck’s gaze, the man in the cape slowly lowered himself into the third chair. Anna slumped down into hers again, then crossed her arms over her chest in something not unlike a sulk.
“What’s this all about?” asked Sam. “Are we under arrest? Because I haven’t done anything.”
“Come on. You know why you’re here,” Chuck replied.
Sam shook his head. “No,” he said, although this was only half true. He didn’t know specifically why they were here, but he’d been living in fear of this day for his entire adult life. “I was in a store, there was a robbery…”
“Yeah. That was us,” said Chuck.
Sam looked blankly back at him. “Sorry?”
“The robbery. The hold-up. That was us.”
Sam’s blank expression tipped over into confusion. “What was you?”
Chuck tutted. “The hold-up. The gunman. He was one of ours.”
“The gunman?” said Sam. “What do you mean?”
Across the table, Anna sighed. “Jesus. I wasn’t there and even I follow what he’s saying.”
“It’s not hard,” growled the guy with the cape. “It’s pretty self-explanatory.”
Sam shook his head. “Jesus. You just went full Christian Bale there. I got, like, three words.”
He turned his attention back to Chuck. “So, you’re saying the gunman was one of your guys?”
“Bingo. You got it,” said Chuck.
“But he pointed a gun at my son!” Sam said, his voice rising an octave. “At my son!”
“You have a kid?” said Anna. “Wow. Didn’t think you had it in you.”
“He didn’t,” said goggle-guy. “That’s not how babies work. It’s the mom who has it in—”
“It wasn’t loaded,” said Chuck, interrupting. “Well, no, obviously it was loaded, but he wasn’t going to shoot him. We just wanted to see if you were still active. It seemed like the easiest way.”
“The easiest way?!” Sam spluttered. “You pointed a gun at my son, then tackled me to the ground! How was that the easiest way?”
Chuck’s eyes were glassy and cold. “Would you have preferred we’d done it the hard way?” he asked.
Sam’s expression revealed that he almost certainly would not have.
“No? Then shut the hell up,” Chuck told him.
Sam moved petulantly in his seat. “You could’ve just asked,” he muttered.
Anna peered at Sam through her tangled fringe. “You’re active? I thought you said you couldn’t do your thing?”
“I can’t. Not really,” Sam insisted.
“Bullshit. He can do his thing,” Chuck said.
Sam sighed, exasperated. “OK. Yes. Fine. But I can’t control my thing.”
“I can control my thing just fine,” said goggle-guy. He glanced between Sam and Anna, then shrugged. “Just saying. Also, I’m not referring to my penis. Because it may have sounded like it. That would’ve been inappropriate.”
Chuck squeezed the bridge of his ample nose, muttered something below his breath, then straightened up and began to pace. “For the benefit of the recording, let’s make some introductions.”
“What recording?” asked Anna, looking around them. “Are you filming this? You need our permission to film us.”
“I don’t need your permission to do shit,” Chuck retorted. He eyeballed her for a while, trying to force her to look away. Instead, she uncrossed her arms, gave him the finger, then crossed them again.
Chuck cleared his throat. “Anna Allen, aged thirty-five, formerly known as Allergy Girl. Ex-sidekick to Memetzo, Mandroid Master of the Mystic Arts and co-founder of the Justice Platoon.”
Goggle-guy reacted with a growl of surprise. “What? You co-founded the Justice Platoon?”
“No, Memetzo co-founded the Justice Platoon,” Anna said.
“Are you sure that’s what he’s saying? I think he meant you.”
“I didn’t mean her. I meant Memetzo,” said Chuck.
“Oh. It’s just, the way you phrased it…”
“Shut the hell up, Randy,” Chuck told him.
Sam frowned. “Randy?” he said. “Huh. I just realized I never knew your real name.”
“Randy Rabble, age unknown,” continued Chuck. “Formerly known as Butterfly Kid, now going by the name…” He sighed, almost imperceptibly, “… Butterfly King.”
“The Butterfly King,” Randy corrected, before reconsidering. “No. Wait. Just Butterfly King.”
“Ex-sidekick to Su Man Chu, Bolderface, and the Great Gassby.”
Anna snorted. “Who’s the Great Gassby? Aside from the recipient of the Worst Name in Human History award?”
“He’s the third goddam greatest hero I’ve ever had the honor to fight alongside,” Randy snarled. “Fourth, if I count myself. Chuck, can I count myself?”
“I don’t give a shit,” Chuck told him.
“I’ll count myself. He’s the fourth goddam greatest hero I’ve ever had the honor of fighting alongside. Sworn guardian of north-west Minnesota. Really underrated. And he picked me to be his right-hand man. The guy who had his back!”
Randy rocked back in his chair, his chest swelling with pride.
“And where is he now?” Anna asked.
“He’s dead,” said Chuck.
“Stabbed in the back, ironically,” Randy added.
“How do you stab someone ironically?” asked Sam.
Randy shook his head. “No, I mean… given what I just said about me having his back, it was ironic that he was stabbed in it.”
“Six hundred times,” Chuck added.
“Jesus,” said Anna.
“Then set on fire,” Randy concluded. He stared wistfully off into the middle distance and shook his head. “Damn shame. A real loss to the hero community.”
Chuck clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “
Aaanyway. That brings us to you,” he said, turning to Sam.
“It’s fine. You don’t have to do me. Please.”
“Sam Summers, age thirty-four,” said Chuck, ignoring Sam’s protests. “Formerly known as Kid Random, sworn sidekick of Doc Mighty, Earth’s greatest hero.”
“Come on, he’s no Bolderface…” Randy muttered.
Sam shook his head. “No, that’s… You’ve made a mistake. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Anna rolled her eyes. “Dude, seriously? The game’s up. He knows who we are.”
She stood up and threw Chuck a suspicious look.
“Which is more than we can say for you, ‘Chuck,’” she said. “Exactly who are you?”
“I was just getting to that,” Chuck told her.
Anna deflated a little. “Oh. Well… good.”
She sat down again and coughed quietly.
“Continue.”
“They call me Chuck. Nothing else, just Chuck,” he explained.
“Like Cher,” said Randy. “Or Madonna.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Or Adele.”
“Exactly.”
“Or Prince.”
Chuck remained tight-lipped for a few moments until he was sure Randy had finished.
“I head up a… let’s call it a project for the United States government,” he continued. “We call it the Sidekicks Initiative. And you three, God help us, are the stars of the show.”
“The Sidekicks Initiative?” said Sam. He looked around at the others. “What’s that?”
“It’s a contingency plan. It’s one of those just in case strategies we put in place in the hope we’d never have to use it.”
Anna uncrossed her arms. “And yet, here we are.”
“And yet, here you are,” said Chuck. “I know you guys have been out of the business for awhile...”
“I’m not out of the business,” Randy pointed out. “I live the business. I am the business.”
Chuck tried very hard to pretend he hadn’t been annoyed by this latest interruption, but the slight flaring of his nostrils gave him away. “I know most of you guys are out of the business, but times have changed. Circumstances beyond our control mean we’ve got no choice but to pull you back in.”
The Sidekicks Initiative Page 4