Action Figures - Issue Six: Power Play

by Michael Bailey

  “I don’t give a damn who’s calling you in! You’re not doing this, do you hear me?” Christina says, her eyes growing wide and wild.

  “You’re hurting me,” I say, but that only causes her to dig her fingers in even harder. “Please, I have to go! Someone could be in trouble!”

  “I don’t care! You’re not going!” she screams in my face. “I’ve already lost one daughter, I won’t let you —!”

  Her voice catches. Tears pour down her face. Oh, God. Oh, Christina...

  She slumps over and weeps into my shoulder. Her entire body shakes in my arms. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  I’m sorry I have to do this to you.

  One hard shove puts her on the floor. I lunge for the door, throw it open, and fling myself outside — and in the process, I nearly knock Matt clear off the front porch.

  “Sara?”

  “We have to go,” I say. I push him back toward his waiting car. “We have to go!”

  We’re halfway down the front walk by the time Christina reaches the door. She calls out to me, sobbing my name, begging me to come back. Matt turns to look. I push him on. We clamber into the car, and Matt peels out like Manticore is hot on our tail.

  “What was that about?”

  “Just go,” I say. “Please. Just go.”

  ***

  Once we pick up Stuart and Missy, we head toward Kingsport Heights Beach.

  “Do I even want to know?” Stuart says.

  “Edison said there was another attack,” Matt says.

  “Was it aliens again?” Missy says. “I don’t want to fight any more aliens.”

  “I don’t think so, but whoever it was, they took out every National Guardsman within the perimeter.”

  “Took out?” I say. “As in...?”

  “Yeah,” Matt says. “As in they’re all dead.”

  God, this nightmare just won’t end.

  The National Guard set up perimeter posts at the three roads leading to Kingsport Heights. We meet Concorde and the others at the Kingsport Court checkpoint, which he designated as our staging area. Wooden sawhorse-style barricades cross the road to form a mostly symbolic barrier. A ten-year-old on a skateboard could jump them. A military Humvee sits behind the barricade. Two guardsmen stand outside the vehicle along with Mindforce, Astrid, the Entity, Meg, and Kilroy. The Quantums have never gone in for the full super-hero look for some reason, so the twins, dressed in normal winter clothes, are the odd people out in this tableau. And yet, I am so jealous of them because it is absolutely freezing out. We step out of the car, and my skin erupts in gooseflesh as a stiff wind cuts right through my thermals.

  As soon as we join the group, Concorde says, “This was a planned, coordinated strike.”

  At some point overnight, he says, unknown assailants — and he’s absolutely certain there were multiple attackers — took out every man and woman assigned to the inner perimeter, a force of a dozen guardsmen plus a handful of federal agents. One of the men on watch at the Kingsport Heights Road checkpoint recalled hearing a strange noise around oh-two-hundred hours, but when he contacted the inner perimeter team, they reported that all was well. They responded to standard hourly check-ins without fail until oh-five-hundred hours, which is when one of the checkpoints sent a man down to the beach. He arrived to find a massacre.

  “Doc Quantum is up in the Raptor running aerial surveillance with TranzSister. They haven’t spotted anyone inside the perimeter, friendly or hostile, but I want to run a ground check to be sure,” Concorde says. “Trencher, take Psyche and Megawatt to the Kingsport Heights Road checkpoint. Mindforce, Dr. Enigma, Superbeast, head to the Vista Avenue checkpoint. Entity, I want you, Kunoichi, and Kilowatt to start here. I’ll join the aerial team and we’ll shadow the ground teams from above. Work your way down the main roads and we’ll reconvene at the beach.”

  Astrid grabs Mindforce and Stuart, and they teleport away. Matt, Meg, and I get back into the car and drive over to Kingsport Heights Road.

  What a difference a day makes. Yesterday at this time, Kingsport was a ghost town. Today there’s the expected amount of early morning traffic on the roads, cars are lined up at the Starbucks drive-through window, elderly people shuffle into the Friendly’s for a cheap breakfast…it’s like nothing happened, certainly not a small-scale war prompted by the arrival of an alien starship.

  We reach the checkpoint. A half-dozen TV news vans sit a few yards back from the safe side of the barricade. The news crews come to life as the guardsmen shift the sawhorses out of our path. Matt zips by the reporters before their camera operators can get a clear shot of our faces then parks off to the side of the road several yards past the barricade. He slips on his mask, I throw on my cloak, and then we climb out to make the rest of the trip on foot. My job is to scan the area for any signs of life, which means I need to drop my defenses entirely. Easily done; my defenses are barely up to begin with.

  “If you don’t think you can handle it,” Meg begins.

  “I can. I have to,” I say.

  She takes my hand. “Hon, you look terrible,” she says, but not unkindly.

  “I feel terrible. Last night was...I knew it would be bad, but I had no idea.”

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “I didn’t want to burden you with my mess. That’s not your job,” I say, and Meg laughs.

  “Oh, my silly girl,” she says, her fingers caressing my face. “You don’t get how this relationship thing works, do you?”

  “I don’t, actually. This is all new to me.”

  “If something’s bothering you, you talk to me so I can listen and comfort you and give you advice. I promise, you won’t be a burden. I want you to talk to me. We used to talk all the time, before we were dating.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” she says, ending the conversation with a kiss. God, I love this girl.

  I love Meg.

  I almost say it out loud, but this is not the time or place for it. Besides, it’s too soon. We’ve only been dating for, like, a month. Way too soon to say something like that. I think.

  “We should get moving,” Matt says.

  From that point on, we’re all business.

  The first mile and a half of our route takes us past Kingsport Harbor. There are a lot of houses along this stretch of the road, all of them now abandoned but none of them visibly damaged. With luck, the people who live here will get to come back home sooner rather than later.

  As we approach the shore, the houses thin out and give way to a couple of large boatyards. The wind picks up and slices through my clothes.

  “Here,” Matt says, tossing me a couple of small gel-filled packets. “Hand warmers. They’ll help a little.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and I slip them into my gloves. At least my fingers won’t fall off.

  The road turns and runs parallel to the shore along a cliff overlooking the ocean. The view is fantastic, even if the dead hulk of a beached alien ship does somewhat mar the scenic vista. At the top of the incline, we can see the dreadnought in its entirety, a bizarre thing that doesn’t reflect any human concepts of design. Concorde estimated the thing was as long and as heavy as a crude oil supertanker. We pause for a minute to take it in before forging ahead.

  The houses become more numerous as we near the beach — more numerous and more densely packed in. The lawns are tiny strips of green you could mow with a single pass of a mower, and none of the driveways are long enough to hold more than one car. We come across the first signs of damage a quarter-mile away from the beach in the form of a gaping hole in someone’s roof. That’ll cost a good chunk of change to fix, but it’s not catastrophic. As we go, evidence of the battle becomes more noticeable. We pass houses with shattered windows, sides riddled with bullet holes, roofs caved in by flying debris.

  The road starts to slope downward, dipping toward the beach itself, and there we get our first look at the beachfront since yesterday afternoon. It’s stil
l a disaster area, literally, but a sense of order has begun to assert itself. Several trashed police cruisers sit on the baseball field awaiting removal. The two RVs the National Guard used as mobile command posts remain in the beach parking lot along with a few Humvees and two black government sedans. Nothing here but vehicles; no signs of life whatso—

  “Stop,” I say. A tall white home shaped somewhat like a barn draws my attention. The house sits behind a low stone wall pockmarked with quarter-sized craters, the result of a hypervelocity bullet spray. The house itself, by some miracle, escaped any major damage. I spot some broken windows and a tight cluster of bullet holes in the front façade, but that’s about it.

  “What?” Matt says.

  I reach out with my powers. The initial sensation was vague, indistinct, like a distant sound. Now I have to try to pinpoint it, which is easier said than done. It’s so hard to focus, but I need to power through it. If whoever was responsible for this latest attack is still around...

  “There.” I point at the home. “Someone’s in there.”

  Matt reaches into his coat and pulls out the new high-tech toy he developed with Concorde, a gun that replicates Concorde’s concussion blasts. It’s nonlethal, but it packs enough of a punch that it can put anyone flat on his back. Meg removes her gloves so she can use her powers without incinerating them.

  “Where?”

  “In the basement?”

  “You don’t sound too sure of that.”

  “I’m not, but...Matt, whoever’s in there is scared. I think they’re hiding.”

  “They? Now there’s two people?”

  “Maybe? Look, I’m having a hard time concentrating.”

  “It’s okay,” Matt says. He puts a hand on my shoulder and gives it a gentle, reassuring squeeze. “Meg, watch our six. Sara, keep scanning.”

  “‘Watch our six?’” Meg says. “I love it when you leader-types start throwing out lingo.”

  “It’s sexy,” I tease.

  “Hey. I’m serious,” Matt says, and yeah, he is not joking around at all. “We’re in a hot zone and there could still be hostiles in the area. I’m not about to put any of us at risk, so stop screwing around. Game faces on, people.”

  “Okay,” I say, duly chastised.

  Damn, Meg mouths at me. Yeah, right?

  Matt leads us up to the front door, his gun at the ready. He moves quickly but with caution, his eyes scanning the windows for any signs of movement. As we get closer, the psychic signature gets stronger, clearer, more distinct.

  Definitely in the basement, I say over the brainphone, linking Meg in on the conversation, and definitely scared. Civilians?

  Maybe, but everyone was ordered to evacuate, Matt says.

  They were ordered to evacuate, Meg says. Doesn’t mean they listened.

  Matt grunts. Until we know for sure, we treat them as hostiles. Let’s go.

  He lays a hand on the doorknob and gives it an experimental twist. The intensity radiating from Matt threatens to overwhelm the vibe I’m picking up from inside. Come on, Matt, tone it down a little, huh?

  “I will not tone it down,” he hisses. “You need to focus.”

  Crap, he heard that thought? Guh. My self-control today is garbage.

  So, of course, Matt asks me to do something tricky. “Door’s locked. Can you pop it?”

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  He shifts out of the way so I can get right up to the doorknob, though I doubt that will help any. I’m pretty solid when it comes to wielding my telekinesis offensively, and I’ve gotten the hang of its basic defensive uses, but fine work like this would be out of my league even if I were fully rested. I take a breath to clear my head and place my fingers next to the deadbolt, in the corner where the door and the doorframe meet. There’s no way I can telekinetically pick the lock, so my best bet is to force the door as gently as I can — which turns out to be not that gently. I give the door a concentrated telekinetic shove, and the door flies open with a metallic pop. A chunk of deadbolt bounces off the carpet with a dull thud.

  “Well, they know we’re here now,” Matt gripes.

  “Could you please stop?” I say. “Your attitude isn’t helping.”

  “My attitude might keep us all alive.”

  “Oh, for the love of...HELLO!” Meg shouts, pushing past us. “This is Megawatt Quantum! We’re here with the Protectorate! Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

  “What are you doing?” Matt says.

  “Anyone with the guts to take on a dozen armed National Guard troops wouldn’t be hiding in a basement,” Meg says. “Hello? You can come out now, you’re safe!”

  Click.

  Matt crouches into a shooting stance and brings his gun up, even though he has nothing to aim at yet. Electricity dances between Meg’s fingers. She might not be as cautious as Matt, but she’s not dumb.

  The pale, wrinkled face of an old man peers out from the kitchen. I reach out and push Matt’s weapon down. This guy is no threat.

  “Are they gone?” he says in a high-pitched squeak. “Are the robots gone?”

  FIVE

  “Thrashers,” Concorde says.

  “That’s my guess,” Matt says.

  The old man, a stubborn New Englander to the core, ignored the evacuation order and decided to wait it out because he’d be damned if he was going to abandon his home. By the time he realized what a stupendously terrible idea that was, he and his wife were trapped. They retreated into the basement and hunkered down. Without any windows to peek through, they had no way to know whether the silence that followed the first battle was a good sign or not, so they stayed put. Eventually, hunger got the better of them, and under the cover of darkness, he sneaked upstairs to get something to eat and take a look outside. Depending on your point of view, his timing was either perfect or lousy. He came up a few minutes before six “big black robots” swooped in and laid waste to the guard detail before anyone could return fire or radio for backup.

  “That sound the Kingsport Heights Road checkpoint heard was probably the Thrashers’ railguns,” Concorde says, referring to the electromagnetic machine guns the Thrashers use. They’re the closest thing we have on this planet to the aliens’ hypervelocity weapons. I glance over at one of the Humvees, at the tight line of bullet holes stitching across the windshield. Inside, two dark shapes lie slumped over in their seats. That’s how everyone on the beach died: seated in their vehicles, the engines running, the heat on full blast.

  “No one survived?” Missy says.

  “No one,” Concorde confirms. “They were thorough.”

  “How did they get in?” Kilroy asks. “Didn’t Stafford pick them up?”

  “No. Neither did the Coast Guard ships, which suggests the suits employed some kind of stealth tech,” Concorde says, “but I’m less concerned with how they got in as I am with why they came here.”

  “I think that’s pretty obvious,” Matt says, waving at the dreadnought. “That thing must be like a Best Buy for alien tech. I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing’s been stripped bare.”

  “Mm,” Concorde grunts, crossing his arms in thought. “Only one way to find out.”

  ***

  And guess who’s lucky enough to be assigned to the search party?

  I’m the odd girl out on this mission. Concorde’s going in with Matt, TranzSister, and Doc Quantum, making me the only non science nerd — not that there isn’t a point to me tagging along. Concorde suspects our comms might not be able to penetrate the dreadnought’s hull once we get too deep inside her, so he lines up TranzSister as Plan B. She can use her armor’s systems to act as a signal booster for the comms, but in case of a total electronic communications fail, I come into play as Plan C and stay in touch with Mindforce via telepathy. That’s the theory, anyway.

  Kilroy takes over in the pilot’s seat of the Raptor, which flies Matt, Doc Quantum, and me to the top of the dreadnought. I step out of the airship onto the dreadnought near an open hatch. TranzSist
er is already there waiting for us. I’ve never gotten a really good look at her armor before. It’s a sleek, stylized thing that leads me to believe that the woman inside, Tisha Greene, watches a lot of anime.

  “I can see my house from here,” she jokes. Or maybe she isn’t joking. We’re hundreds above the ground, so high up that I can literally see Boston on my left and what I think might be the tip of Cape Cod on my right.

  “Oh, boy,” I gasp as my head suddenly spins and my knees go weak. I instinctively throw my arms out for balance, like I’m on a walkway only a few inches wide instead of several yards. I feel a pair of hands grab me as I stumble back.

  “Easy,” Doc Quantum says. “I have you.”

  “I’m good. Get me inside, I’ll be good.”

  Doc Quantum leads me over to the hatch, which is wide enough that all four of us could jump down at once with room to spare. Concorde goes first, floating down into the room below. The rest of us follow one by one, dropping into a large, empty chamber — an airlock, Concorde guesses. When we land the floor rings like it’s made of steel, but it yields underfoot like a thin layer of carpet. Weird. Lights mounted along the edge of the ceiling like crown molding flicker uncertainly, as does a red rectangular light over the only door in or out — a door that hangs open.

  “Make a note of that, people: the power is unreliable,” Concorde says. “Don’t trust any door or a hatch with an electronic lock to stay open. Better yet, don’t wander off on your own.”

  “Basic rule of Dungeons & Dragons: never split the party,” Matt says.

  “And for the love of all you hold dear, do not touch anything,” Doc Quantum adds. “We’re men and women of science, not children in a toy store.”

  “Mindforce, we’re inside,” Concorde says.

  “Copy that,” Mindforce says, his comm signal loud and clear — for now.

  “All right, folks. Let’s get started.”

  TranzSister fires up an array of mini-floodlights mounted on her suit’s shoulders. Matt pulls a flashlight, one of those giant black aluminum jobs, out of his coat. He leans through the open door and aims the beam into a larger chamber. “Looks clear,” he says. “No facehuggers, no chestbursters...”