Of course, the one we were most worried about is the one still standing. Dario doesn’t look especially intimidating or dangerous, until he throws a wild punch at the Entity. The blow catches him in the shoulder and flings him into the wall. The Entity bounces off, leaving a crater in the drywall, and comes right back at Dario with a stiff kick to the face. Dario reels but doesn’t go down. I correct that and throw a kick to the back of Dario’s knee. With luck, I dislocated the joint, and he’ll stay down.
Never mind. He’s getting back up, but he’s done trying to fight us. As he rises, Dario flips the coffee table. Flips? More like he flings it at the Entity, who ducks under the flying furniture, but barely. Dario then grabs the TV and hurls it in my general direction. He’s not aiming at all, but it nevertheless comes close to taking my head off.
He bolts for the door, pausing long enough to grab his friend’s gun off the floor. Human cops, he can handle. Two spooky superhumans are too much of a challenge, apparently.
I chase after him and nearly run into a bullet. Again, he’s firing blind, but it’s enough to slow me down. I follow him down the stairs at a distance so I don’t make a clean target of myself. The good news? I make it to the ground floor without getting shot. The bad news? He makes it out of the building and onto the street.
Dario is halfway across a street packed with rush hour traffic when I reach the sidewalk. He brings the gun up and fires, but this time I’m saved when a passing car tags him. His shot goes into the air. The driver shouts a profanity at Dario, who limps away, his leg dragging. He’s easy prey now.
Unfortunately for me, he knows it. He’s desperate and ready to do anything to get me to back off — including taking a hostage. He grabs some poor guy walking down the street, minding his own business, and wraps an arm around his throat to hold him close.
“BACK OFF!” Dario screams, his voice cracking. He presses the barrel of his gun into his hostage’s temple. The man shrieks and starts babbling, a terrified mix of prayer and begging.
Foot and motor traffic grinds to a halt. Pedestrians reverse course and run away. With nowhere to go, the drivers and their passengers sit there helplessly. Most of them duck down in case bullets start flying. A few idiots whip out their phones to get everything on video.
“Let him go,” I say.
“I said back off!”
“And I said let him go.”
I don’t back off. Dario doesn’t let his hostage go.
“I swear to God, I will blow his head off!” Dario says, but it’s a front; his fake rage can’t hide his real fear.
“Good luck trying that with the safety still on.”
Obviously the safety isn’t on, but he’s so freaked out that he has to check to see if I’m right — and for one precious split second, his eyes aren’t on me.
Twenty feet separate us. I charge, halving the distance before Dario realizes what’s happening, and he does exactly what I expected him to do: forget about his hostage and instinctively turn the gun on me.
He fires. I dive. I hit the ground in a somersault and spring up, lashing out with my claws as I rise. Too bad for Dario, I’m not small arms fire. He screams. The gun falls from a hand that will never work properly again. He sinks to his knees, clutching his wrist and whimpering like a baby. The sound annoys me, so I put him out of my misery with a spinning kick to the back of the skull. He drops, unconscious.
The hostage doesn’t hang around after that. I turn to ask if he’s okay, but all I see is his back as he sprints away. I guess that answers my question.
Speaking of questions, “Were you going to help me?” I say.
“You would have complained if I had,” the Entity says. He glances down at the unconscious form of George Dario and nudges him with the toe of his boot. Dario doesn’t move. A pool of red slowly spreads under his arm.
“We should do something about the bleeding,” I say.
The Entity applies pressure on the wound — by stepping on it. He thoughtfully stands on Dario’s forearm until a small army of police arrive to take control of the scene.
Unlike the rest of the Protectorate, the Entity isn’t big on the cleanup portion of an operation. As soon as the police arrive, we return to the rooftop where this all started — whatever “this” was.
“What was the point of bringing me along?” I ask. “To see how well I handled myself in a fight? To see if I could follow orders and stick to a plan?”
The Entity glowers at me, which is a neat trick considering he has no face.
“Oh, come on,” I say, tipping my mask up. “You dragged me all the way out here without explaining anything and like a ginormous dummy I came and now you aren’t saying anything, which is, like, normal for you, if you want to call anything you do normal because you are way creepy...”
With a single finger, the Entity pushes my mask back down over my face.
“Why did you do that?” He doesn’t answer, again. “I don’t have time for this. If you have something to say to me, say it.”
“Are you listening to yourself?”
“Why would I listen to myself?”
“Because I’m curious if you’ve noticed that you sound like me.”
“I do not sound like you,” I say...except I do sound like him, flat and emotionless, utterly unlike myself. I lift my mask up. “What the heck? Why am I talking like that? I never talk like you, I talk like me!”
Like I’m talking right now. Okay, little freaked out here.
“What’s going on? What’s wrong with me?”
“The same thing that’s wrong with me,” the Entity says. “You know what I mean.”
I do know what he means. Earlier this year I was possessed by a demon. Yeah, I know, it sounds crazy, but it happened. Astrid drove it out pretty fast, but it was in me long enough to leave a little bit of itself behind. Since then I’ve been able to sense Astrid whenever she’s around, like our inner demons are somehow reaching out to each other.
I get the same feeling whenever the Entity is nearby.
“You started talking like me after you got that,” he says, pointing at my Oni mask. I bought it in Japan because it looked like a cat demon. At the time I thought it was kind of funny.
“What does my mask have to do with this?”
“Some super-heroes play a character when they’re in the uniform. It’s a trick they use to help them keep their public and private lives separate,” the Entity explains, and I immediately think of Natalie. When she’s in her Nina Nitro costume, she acts way more crazy than she does as herself. “When you hide your face, the thing inside you shows its face, and all the while you think you’re in control.”
“I am in control,” I insist.
“Were you in control when you sliced through Dario’s arm? Or when you crippled Buzzkill Joy?”
I want to say yes, except I don’t want to say yes. Either way it’s a scary answer.
“I know all about the dark thing inside you,” the Entity says. “It hides. It’s patient. It looks for opportunities to reveal itself in subtle, insidious ways — ways that fool you into believing you’re still in charge, so you never notice that it’s eating away your soul one tiny bite at a time.”
That sounds a lot like something Astrid told me. She said the demon that possessed me, something called a servitor, contaminated my soul, which meant it would be real easy for me to go bad if I didn’t pay attention to what I was doing.
“I brought you out here to see how far gone you were,” the Entity says.
I swallow as my throat goes dry. “And?”
“You’re not beyond help.”
“Your help?”
“If you want it.”
“Wait. Are you actually being considerate?”
“I’m giving you a choice. You can try to figure it out on your own, or I can teach you how to tame the darkness. I can teach you how to use it without losing control.”
Something tells me this is another test. I know the right answer is to say
yes and accept his help, but that’d mean hanging out with the Entity a lot, and who knows what that’d be like. I mean, is he always going to call me out of nowhere and tell me to drop everything and meet him God knows where so we can go beat up bad guys while he makes a bunch of weird, vague comments?
Yeah, Missy, like your life is sooooooo normal and non-crazy otherwise.
“Okay,” I say.
“Then here’s your first lesson,” he says. “Why do you do this?”
“Do what? You mean, why am I a super-hero?”
He nods. I have to think about that one. I have to think about it for a long time.
“I didn’t have a reason at first,” I say. “The super-team thing, that was all Matt’s idea, and Stuart was all over it so I said yeah, sure, why not, sounds like fun. I didn’t think it’d ever, you know, become a real thing for us. I thought we were just a bunch of kids doing something kind of dumb, like kids do, and we’d eventually find something else dumb to do and forget all about the super-hero stuff. Then everything with Archimedes happened, and all of a sudden we’re acting like real super-heroes. We were helping people and stopping bad guys. It felt good.”
“But that’s not why you do this,” the Entity says.
“...No.”
“Tell me why.”
This time, I don’t have to think about it at all.
“My dad. He was in charge of a government project to make superhumans for, like, the military or something. They put genetically engineered embryos into women getting fertility treatments. My mom was one of them. All of the kids wound up with super-powers, so yay, that part worked, but for some reason, a lot of them were messed up.”
“Violent. Unstable,” the Entity says. “Psychotic.”
“Yeah. I’m one of the ones who came out normal. Relatively, I mean. Dad had no idea how bad some of them were until Buzzkill Joy showed up, and when he realized she was part of Project Moreau, he got wicked depressed. He felt responsible for all the people Joy killed and hurt.” I look up at the Entity. “For years he thought he was making the world a better place. He honestly believed that. He doesn’t anymore. I want to show him he did make something good.”
“You.”
“Me. I want to be a hero so my dad can be proud of himself again.”
The Entity then does something I’d never expect in a million years. He eases onto one knee, which brings him down to about my eye level, and puts a hand on my shoulder. When he speaks, he almost sounds like a normal person.
“Hold on to that,” he says. “Whenever you feel like you’re losing your way, think of your father. Let it ground you. Understand?”
I nod.
And just like that, our unexpected moment is over. The Entity stands and turns to leave.
“Entity?” I say. He pauses. “What do you hold on to?”
“Go home,” he says, and without another word, he jumps off the edge of the building, vanishing from sight.
4.
I get to spend the train ride home sandwiched between a woman who talks to herself and a jerk who sits with his legs spread so wide you could park a car between them. The worst part? I completely forgot to ask the Entity to reimburse me for my train fare.
By the time I get back to Kingsport, I’ve missed dinner. I call Dad and tell him I had a mission, which is good enough for him. “I’ll tell your mother you lost track of time,” he says. “Do you need a ride home?”
“Yes, please,” I say. While I wait for Dad to come get me, I call Stuart to find out if we’re getting together for homework.
“I think we’re calling it for the night,” he says.
“That’s fine. I want to go home and sleep. You wouldn’t believe the crazy day I’ve had.”
Stuart laughs. “Betcha it wasn’t half as crazy as mine.”
SIX – SUPERBEAST AND DR. ENIGMA
FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL (II) – SOMETHING WICKED
1.
You know what the best part of having a big brother is?
Me neither.
“Come on, Stuart, hurry it up,” Gordon says as he pounds on the bathroom door. “I have to get in there.”
“Use the downstairs bathroom!” I shout back. Jeez, dude, let a man do his business in peace, why don’t you?
No, not that business. I’m only brushing my teeth, but if Gordon doesn’t cut the crap, I’m going to be really, really thorough about it.
“I have to shower,” Gordon says, “and the downstairs bathroom doesn’t have a shower.”
“It doesn’t? You know, I’ve lived here my whole life and never noticed before.”
“Very funny. Stop screwing around and let me in.”
I open the door. Gordon steps inside, leans against the doorframe, and watches me finish up with an impatient, cheesed-off frown. My older brother looks a lot like me, except taller and thinner. He got the height but I got the muscle mass. I got the better end of that deal. If he ever grew his hair long, we’d look almost identical from the neck up.
If he ever grew his hair long. He’s Mr. Respectable now, so there’s no chance of that happening.
“All yours,” I say.
“Thank you,” is what he says. What he means is, “About damn time.”
I head downstairs and join Mom and Dad at the dining room table for breakfast, which for them is coffee and some toast or cereal. For me, it’s a full plate of sausage and pancakes — and I mean a full plate. Every morning, Mom throws a whole box of frozen pancakes in the microwave for me and fries up a box of Jimmy Deans. Two pounds of food, all for me. It holds me until I get to school.
“Morning, Stuart. Looking forward to school starting up again?” Dad says, more to his iPad than to me. And people say teenagers can’t live without their gadgets.
“Not really,” I say.
“There’s a big surprise,” Gordon says as he joins us at the table.
“That was a fast shower,” I say.
“I decided to shower later.”
Jerk.
“You’ll let me know how lunch is today, won’t you?” Mom says. In addition to being a workaholic, a super-mom, and a volunteer for every community event and local charity that exists in Kingsport, Mom is a member of the school committee. Her big project for the year was to get a new vendor into the schools so kids could have meals that actually looked and tasted like real food. Two months ago the school department signed a contract with a new company, and now Mom is terrified the food will turn out to be as bad or even worse than before, which would do her political career no good.
“I promise I’ll give you a full report,” I say. “Don’t worry, Mom, I’m sure it won’t suck.”
No, I’m not. I’ve learned a lot from her about how schools operate, and one thing I learned is that contracts are always awarded to the lowest bidder. That means the company making our school lunches now is the one that said they could do it cheaper than anyone else. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure flavor costs money.
“Try paying attention to your classes more than you pay attention to your food,” Gordon says, helping himself to one of my sausages.
“That was a cool trick, Dad,” I say, “I didn’t see your lips move or anything.”
“What?” Dad says.
“Nothing.”
“Am I wrong? Mom said your grades lately have left a lot to be desired,” Gordon says.
“I’m not failing anything.”
“You’re not passing anything with more than a B, either, and you can do better than that. This is junior year, Stuart. You need to get serious about your schoolwork. You can’t coast anymore. You have to start knuckling down and getting your grades up. You have to think about your future.”
“Dude, I don’t even know what I want to do with my life yet.”
“Then you need to figure that out,” Gordon says, thumping his finger on the table to show me how super-serious he is. “You need to decide where you want to go in life and make a game plan. Part of that game plan has to be coll
ege, which means you need good grades. If you can’t get into college, you won’t be able to find a good job.”
“Oh, what, you mean like the one you have?”
Boom.
“Stuart!” Mom says, and Dad finally looks up from his tablet.
“What? He’s sitting there lecturing me about how important college is if I want a job, and he hasn’t worked a single day since he graduated!”
“I’ve been busy sending out résumés and going to interviews,” Gordon says.
“The job market is still iffy,” Dad says, coming to Gordon’s defense like always.
“Carrie got a job at a law firm and she’s still in high school,” I shoot back.
“Who?” Gordon says.
“Carrie Hauser,” Mom says. “You met her at Christmas, the cute blond girl.”
“Oh, yeah, her,” Gordon says, and something about the way he says it makes me uncomfortable. Dude, don’t be lusting after my jailbait friend. Not cool. “Which law firm does she work for?”
“Crenshaw and Associates. Something like that,” I say.
Gordon pulls out his phone and types something in. Bet I know where his next résumé is going.
“Stuart, Gordon is trying. Unfortunately, no one’s hiring — which is beyond his control, but at least he’s putting in the legwork,” Mom says, “and he’s right when he says you aren’t. If you don’t get your act together, you’ll wind up flipping burgers and living at home until you’re thirty.”
“God forbid,” Dad mutters to his iPad.
And there it is, the Lumley Family in a nutshell. Even when I’m right, Mom and Dad take Gordon’s side. He’s the golden child, I’m the failure. He could be the one who ends up jockeying a deep fryer at McDonald’s and living here his whole life, but as far as Mom and Dad care, he can never screw up as hard as I screwed up that one time.
Sometimes I think they’re never going to let me forget what happened to Jeffrey.
I push away from the table and leave for school. No one says goodbye. Whatever. Seriously, whatever.
Nice try, dude, but forced apathy isn’t going to shake this funk off.
Action Figures - Issue Five: Team-Ups Page 12