Action Figures - Issue Five: Team-Ups

by Michael C Bailey

  I can’t listen to him anymore. I blow past Peggy. She calls out my name, but I ignore her. I head outside and pace up and down the front walkway, fighting to keep myself from doing something stupid, like punching the building off its foundation...or worse, going back inside and tearing Ronny to pieces.

  Ronny frigging Vick. That’s what it all comes down to? He was playing a big game of Pass It On? His dad dumped on him and made him feel like crap, so he’d dump on Jeff to make him feel like crap? How does that even make sense? What kind of scumbag of a person does that?! Ronny frigging Vick!

  I scream. I don’t know what else to do but let everything out in one enormous scream.

  Peggy sits next to me on the front bench. Please don’t say anything. I don’t want to talk.

  “I know this was really hard for you.”

  “Peggy, please, I don’t —”

  “You did something incredibly selfless today. I know it was hard for you, but you did it anyway, because you care about those kids,” she says, nodding toward the clubhouse. “You should be proud of yourself.”

  I can’t bring myself to thank her for that. Maybe she’s right, but all things considered, it’s hard to accept the compliment.

  “Will it do any good?” I say.

  “I don’t think every single kid in that gym will start holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya,’ if that’s what you’re asking, but I’d like to think it’ll have an impact. Way I look at it, if even one kid takes what Ronny said to heart, that’s worth it. Right?”

  The phrase “like a deer caught in the headlights” comes to mind as Ronny steps out of the clubhouse and catches sight of me. He freezes, his eyes widening to fill his face. We’re not in a gym filled with potential witnesses anymore. Peggy’s the only thing standing between Ronny and me, and he knows it. She knows it too; she lays a hand on my leg and squeezes, letting me know she’s not going anywhere until Ronny’s out of range.

  “All done?” Peggy says pleasantly. Always the professional.

  “Yeah,” Ronny croaks. He has to clear his throat several times before he can speak again. “Yeah. All done.”

  Peggy nods. “That was a good talk.”

  “Thanks. I’ve never done anything like that before, but I guess I should start getting used to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mrs. Dean asked if I’d be interested in speaking at other clubs. I said yes. She’s talking to someone at the Boston club right now, I think. She said I could make this a regular thing. You know, go around to youth clubs and schools...”

  Ronny looks at me when he says that, like he’s waiting for my approval.

  “So. Yeah,” he says.

  He starts to walk away. He gets halfway down the front walk, stops, and then turns around and marches right up to me. He’s close enough that I could reach out and pull his head off. He’s close enough that I can see how violently his entire body is trembling.

  “Stuart, I know I can never make up for what I did to you and your family,” he says, “but I’m going to try. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying, I swear.”

  I stand so I can look Ronny square in the eye. He retreats, taking himself out of my reach.

  “What do you want from me?” I rumble. “You asking me to forgive you?”

  “No,” Ronny says with a shake of his head. “You’re never going to forgive me. I accept that. I’m sorry anyway. I’m sorry for what I did.”

  And that’s how day three of the worst week of the year ends: with the person who killed my little brother Jeff looking me in the eye like a man and apologizing.

  And this time, it was sincere.

  4.

  Day four is, predictably, a downer. I spend most of it in my room screwing around online. Mom and Dad don’t bother me, not once, but Gordon isn’t so considerate. At least he knocks on the door before he barges in. Normally he skips the knocking part.

  “What?” I say.

  “Got any plans for tomorrow?”

  I look up from my laptop. “Dude. Kind of a dark joke for you, don’t you think?”

  “I’m serious. I was thinking, um...” Gordon glances up and down the hallway like he’s checking to see if the coast is clear. “I was thinking we could go grab Thanksgiving dinner, just you and me.”

  “Stop screwing with me, man. It’s not funny.”

  “I’m not screwing with you, you obnoxious little turd.”

  There we go. I was starting to think Gordon had been replaced by a pod person.

  He steps in and shuts the door. “The Country Kettle does Thanksgiving dinner every year. I thought maybe we could go.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Gordon rolls his eyes. “Yes, I’m serious. God, I’m trying to reach out here...”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re my brother,” he says with a side order of duh. “You’re a pain in the ass, but you’re still my brother.”

  Oh, just figuring that out now, are you?

  Come on, Stuart, give him a break. He’s trying.

  What the hell.

  “Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”

  5.

  And that brings us to day five.

  Gordon does something unprecedented in the history of the Lumley household: he lies to Mom and Dad. We’re going to check out the Thanksgiving Day game over at the high school, he tells them — which is true, but he never mentions what we plan to do afterwards.

  Okay, so it’s only a whatchacallit, a lie of omission, but for Gordon Lumley the Upright and Uptight, that’s practically perjury.

  Once we reach the school, I get a glimpse of just how devious Gordon can be when he puts his mind to it. He spots Phyllis what’s-her-name, one of Mom’s school committee friends, in the parking lot and makes a point of saying hello to her. Now we have an eyewitness who will, if asked, tell Mom yes, we were at the game. Slick.

  While Gordon’s setting our alibi, I spot the LGBTQ kids at their fundraising table near the front gate. I don’t know who most of the kids are, but I recognize Bo and Tylyn from the school rock band.

  Sara’s there too.

  Gordon and I head into the stadium, walking right past the table. Sara doesn’t see me...or she did see me and is ignoring me. I can’t tell.

  Football happens. Our guys get the ball past the goalpost more than the other guys. Kingsport wins. Go, local high school sports team. Rah.

  We have time to kill after the game, so Gordon drives us to north Kingsport, and we park at the beach. We talk. We talk a lot, about stuff that we should have talked about a long time ago but never did because we’re both idiots who got way too comfortable in their roles as overbearing big brother and rebellious middle brother.

  We talk about Jeff. It feels like we haven’t talked about him in forever. Gordon does a lousy job of trying not to cry.

  To be fair, I don’t do any better.

  Dinner is awesomely delicious. Everything tastes like homemade food instead of restaurant food, and all the waitresses are dressed in Pilgrim outfits, which is kind of cheesy but also kind of cool. Gordon does an admirable job of keeping up with me, but I walk out with my reputation as an unstoppable eating machine intact.

  “This was a good idea,” Gordon groans, his belly bulging under his shirt.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It was.”

  “But alas, all good things. Ready to head home?”

  “Not yet. I have something I have to do first.”

  Gordon offers to drive me over, but in the interest of maintaining our cover story he heads home alone, intending to tell Mom and Dad we had a fight, and I took off in a huff. Easy lie to sell.

  The walk over is a little creepy. The entire town is closed for business, and the streets are empty. Even the two Dunkin’ Donuts I pass are dark. Everyone’s comfy in their homes, enjoying some quality family time.

  I’m not bitter. Really, I’m not. I had my quality family time.

  As I make my final approach, a figure blows b
y me in a big hurry. It takes me a second or two to realize it’s —

  “Sara?”

  She turns. Her face is all blotchy from crying. “Stuart?” she sniffles. “What are you doing here?”

  “What? Oh. Um, I was just on my way to...hey, are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay,” she snaps. That’s fair. It was a dumb question.

  She tells me she was sitting at the table with Carrie and her mom, getting ready to tear into their holiday dinner, and Christina made a joke about her gravy being thicker than paint. Apparently, Sara’s dad used to make a similar crack about her mom’s gravy, and all of a sudden it hit her like an avalanche: this is her first Thanksgiving without her parents.

  “I know what that’s like. The first big holiday without your whole family there, I mean,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  Sara shakes her head. “No you’re not.”

  “Hey.” She looks up at me with glistening red eyes. “Yes. I am.”

  She sobs and falls into my arms. I hold her and let her cry into my chest until she’s done, and then I put an arm around her shoulders and walk her back home, so she can be with her family.

  TWELVE – THE HERO SQUAD

  THE ARRIVAL

  1.

  My phone goes off, startling me awake as if someone had set off a cannon in my room. Guh. I don’t like how much of a light sleeper I’ve become lately. I fumble for the phone, restraining the urge to chuck it against the wall and go back to sleep when I see who’s calling.

  “What?”

  “Carrie, are you watching the news?”

  “Oh, sure I am. I always watch the news at...” I glance at my alarm clock. Three o’clock. Three freaking o’clock. “Edison, there better be a damn good reason why you’re waking me up this early on a school day.”

  Or any day, for that matter. Three. In. The. Morning.

  “Go turn on the news,” Edison says. There’s an edge in his voice I’ve become too familiar with.

  “What channel?”

  “Pick one.”

  I keep him on the line while I throw a bathrobe on and head downstairs. The second I step into the hall, Sara pokes her head out of her bedroom.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “No idea,” I say in a half-whisper so I don’t wake up Mom. “All Edison told me was to go turn on the news.”

  Sara follows me to the living room. “Not like Edison to be so vague and melodramatic.”

  Edison overhears the comment. “That’s because you need to see this for yourselves,” he says.

  We flip on the TV. It comes on to some sci-fi movie, one of those dumb found footage deals, shot in grainy green night vision. I reach for the remote, intending to find a network station.

  “Carrie,” Sara says. “That’s not a movie.”

  She’s right. It’s on channel seven, the local NBC affiliate, and it isn’t a movie they’re running; it’s live video from —

  Holy crap. From Kingsport Heights Beach.

  I’ve never seen anything like it. It defies any sense of design — aerodynamic, aesthetic, or otherwise. It almost looks like someone took a half-dozen skyscrapers, fused them together haphazardly, and turned the whole thing on its side. Circular units angle out from the bottom, two near the front and two near the rear, each of them spewing a glowing blue-white plume of energy. There’s nothing in the shot to give it a sense of scale, but it somehow feels enormous.

  “Edison, talk to me,” I say, “what am I looking at?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. The Space Surveillance Network picked it up about twenty minutes ago. It entered our atmosphere a few minutes after that, came in over the Atlantic, approximately a hundred miles out, then made a beeline for the Massachusetts coast.”

  “You mean for Kingsport. Come on, boss, don’t tell me you think this thing just happened to zero in on our little corner of the planet.”

  “It is unlikely,” he agrees. “Anyway, it parked itself about five miles off the coast and has been sitting there for the last several minutes. Stafford’s scrambled its jets and I’m on my way out now. The Quantums are en route.”

  “Do you want me to —?”

  “No. I want you ready to go, but you do not deploy until I say so,” Edison says, shifting into Concorde mode. “It hasn’t done anything to suggest it’s a threat, but if it is, I don’t want to tip our hand too early about our capabilities. You’re my ace in the hole.”

  Cool. Never been an ace in the hole before.

  “I’ll go suit up,” I say.

  “Good. And stay on the line, I want you monitoring this.”

  “Copy that. Good luck. Stay safe.”

  “Carrie,” Sara says, her eyes fixed on the TV. “That is what we think it is, right?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I say.

  We have an honest-to-God alien spacecraft on our doorstep.

  I run upstairs, throw on my suit, cover it with my bathrobe, and head back to the living room to settle in for a morning of playing Concorde’s armchair quarterback. By the time I return, Stafford jets have settled into an orbit around the ship. Concorde joins them a few minutes later. I detach my comm system earpiece from my headset so I can listen in on the chatter.

  “What the hell is it?” one of the pilots says.

  “Not your concern, Dodger,” Colonel Coffin says. I hear her take a big slurp of coffee. Sounds like we’re all early risers today. “You keep an eye on that thing and leave thinking to the big brains. Concorde?”

  “I’m here, Colonel.”

  “You heard the man. What the hell is it?”

  “Best guess at this point? We’re looking at a vehicle of extraterrestrial origin.”

  “He said it,” I say. “He thinks it’s a spaceship.”

  “Mind. Blown,” Sara says. “I mean, we knew alien life existed — you’re living proof of that — but this? It’s...”

  “Yeah.”

  I get what she’s saying. I received my powers from a dying extraterrestrial, and there are at least a dozen other superhumans in the US alone who claim their powers derive from an alien source (although, according to Dr. Quentin, none of them have ever provided conclusive evidence to support those claims). This, however, is the first time proof of alien life has ever thrown itself in the world’s face. There’s no way to spin this. This isn’t a funny light in the sky or some redneck insisting he got butt-probed by little green men. This is undeniable confirmation: we are not alone.

  “Stafford, this is Doc Quantum on final approach to the landing site.”

  “Copy that, Dr. Quentin,” Colonel Coffin says. “Welcome aboard the crazy train.”

  Over the next hour, Concorde and Doc Quantum circle the ship, making observations and tossing theories back and forth. The only thing they determine for certain is that it’s huge — about 1,600 feet long. Everything else is educated guesswork. Concorde estimates the weight somewhere in the neighborhood of 350,000 metric tons, as much as a fully loaded crude oil supertanker. Doc Quantum thinks the units along the ship’s underside are plasma thrusters, designed specifically to keep the ship aloft once within a planet’s gravity well. The ocean directly beneath the ship froths violently from the downwash, and infrared scans of the water are registering temperatures in excess of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The thing is literally flash boiling the ocean beneath it.

  “I don’t see anything that looks like it might be a weapons system, so that’s good news,” Concorde says.

  “No offense, boss,” I say, “but would you even know what an alien weapons system would look like? Whoever’s inside that thing isn’t necessarily going to share our sensibilities.”

  “Hm. Valid point.”

  “I agree, but we have to begin somewhere,” Doc Quantum says, “so until the data point us in another direction, I suggest we base all our initial hypotheses on human concepts.”

  “In other words, if it looks like a gun, we assume it’s a gun until we prove otherwi
se,” I say.

  “Correct.”

  “I approve of that approach,” Colonel Coffin says. Understandable her first concern would be whether the ship poses a threat.

  “Lightstorm brings up another point,” Concorde says. “We’re assuming this is a manned vessel.”

  “Again,” Doc Quantum begins.

  “I know, but we haven’t detected anything resembling a communication attempt from the ship.”

  “No, but it is emitting RF radiation in the ten gigahertz range. It’s a steady signal...”

  “The ship is scanning us?”

  What Doc Quantum says next makes my blood run cold. “It’s scanning Kingsport.”

  “Concorde, can I have you on channel zero for a minute?” I say. I switch over to the Protectorate’s secure channel because I do not want Colonel Coffin listening in on this.

  “Clear on channel zero.”

  “It’s looking for something in Kingsport.”

  “So it would appear,” Concorde says. “I know what you’re getting at.”

  “That’s why you don’t want me up there. You think it’s looking for me.”

  Sara’s head snaps around.

  “We don’t know what it’s looking for,” Concorde says.

  “Lame deflection is lame. Come on, Concorde...”

  “We don’t know what it’s looking for,” Concorde insists. He sighs and adds, “But I’m not ruling out a connection between you and this ship — and yes, that is part of the reason why I am telling you to sit this one out for now.”

  “Yeah. All right,” I say, “but you promise me, if you need me, you call me in.”

  “I will,” he says, and he jumps off channel zero and back to the public airwaves, effectively ending our conversation.

  “You really think that thing is here for you?” Sara says.