We approach the closest officer, who instinctively tries to wave us back. “We’re the Hero Squad,” I say, putting on my best authoritative attitude. “We’ll take care of this.”
“Now you hold on,” the officer says.
“She said we’ve got this,” Rando says.
I round on her. “No, I said we will take care of this. You’ve done enough today.”
“Girl, you’d best —”
“I stood up for you. Trencher didn’t want you involved in this because he thought you couldn’t handle the job. I convinced him to give you a chance to prove yourselves and you blew it.”
Rando tries to stare me down. She fails miserably at that, too.
“Officer, that girl is a superhuman who escaped from Byrne last year,” I say. “She’s strong enough to flip over your car and tough enough to take every bullet you fire. Believe me, you can’t handle her. We can.”
The officer gives me a look I’ve become quite familiar with. He’s wondering why in the world he should trust some kid to do his job and expect she’ll do it more effectively than he could.
Another officer, one with sergeant stripes on her shoulder, calls over, “Let her through.”
Stuart stays at my shoulder as we circle around the cruiser and enter the metaphorical arena.
“I tried to —” Skyblazer begins.
“Later,” I say. He fades back.
Ivy tenses up as we approach and wraps a hand around the little girl’s throat. The girl squeals like a balloon that’s slowly losing air. A dark stain creeping down the leg of Ivy’s jeans tells me the kid’s wet herself in terror. Ivy, you better pray that’s the worst thing that happens to you today. I have no mercy to spare for cowards who use children as shields.
“Hey, girl,” Stuart says.
“Stay back,” Ivy says, mainly to me. “Way back. I know what you can do.”
That’s a problem. It’s easy to give someone a gentle telepathic push when they’re not expecting it and their defenses are down, but when they’re braced for it? Not so much. It means I have to power through, which comes with its own set of problems. If I push too gently, Ivy might feel it and hurt the girl. If I push too hard, I could cause some severe brain damage, and I’m not ready to go that far. Not yet.
“We’ll stay right here,” I say, “but you know we can’t let you go.”
“Oh, you’re going to let me go.”
“No, Ivy, we’re not. What’s going to happen is this: you’re going to let that girl go and surrender peacefully.”
“No friggin’ way.”
“Your aunt’s hurt.” Ivy blinks, dismay flickering across her features before they settle back into a hard, determined grimace. “An ambulance is on the way and I think she’ll be all right. Well, she’ll be all right physically.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means after she’s released from the hospital, she’ll be facing charges of harboring a fugitive. Multiple fugitives, actually, so that’ll be four counts against her. At ten years per count, your aunt could literally spend the rest of her life in prison because of you.”
Or not. I honestly have no idea how harsh the penalties for harboring prison escapees are, but I’m not lying about the possibility of poor Mrs. Dunleavy doing time for giving her niece and her friends a place to stay, regardless of whether she did so knowingly. So yeah, it’s a partial bluff, but it’s a totally wasted effort if I guessed wrong about Ivy possessing a shred of a conscience.
I guessed right. Ivy’s features twist into a distraught rictus. “She’s a senile old lady! She barely remembers my name half the time!” she wails. “Don’t do that to her!”
“We aren’t doing anything to her, Ivy. You got her into this mess and you’re the only one who can get her out.” I take a cautious step forward. “You want to help your aunt? Let the kid go, surrender peacefully, and accept full responsibility.”
Something breaks inside of Ivy. Tears pour down her face. “Promise me you’ll help her.”
“I will try to help your aunt. That’s the best I can do, Ivy; the rest is up to you.”
With a shuddering breath that’s almost a sob, Ivy slowly, gently lowers the girl to the ground and steps away. Stuart and I move in. Stuart takes Ivy by the arm while I scoop the girl up. Yep, her pants are soaked — but she’s alive and, trauma aside, unharmed, so I won’t complain about a secondhand pee stain.
As soon as I’m past the cruisers, the girl’s mother pounces and seizes me and her daughter in her arms. She weeps into my shoulder, thanking me over and over for saving her girl. I return the hug and let her have her catharsis, but I can’t help but glance over toward Rando. She stands in the middle of the post-incident chaos and stares at me with an awestruck expression, not a hint of the posturing tough girl façade to be found.
She gets it now.
***
Over the next two hours, the Wardens get their next lesson and help with the clean-up phase, the phase no super-hero enjoys because it’s so tedious. There’s a lot of standing around and talking to the police, some guarding of the prisoners until a Byrne transport arrives to take them away, and once the police have officially cleared the scene, a little actual cleaning up.
Protectorate HQ is miles away, and the Wardens don’t have their own private base of operations, so we take care of the final step, the official debriefing, at a small bakery in town — thus bringing our day full circle. The Squad chooses to sit around unmasked, which causes considerable discomfort among the Wardens. They aren’t used to hanging out in public like this, but they don’t complain. Good. They’re in no position to complain about anything.
“Carrie would love this,” I say, shoveling another forkful of an absolutely heavenly maple-swirl cheesecake into my mouth.
“These are the best ginger snaps I have ever had in my entire life,” Missy says.
“Let me try one,” Stuart says, reaching for Missy’s plate of cookies, which she moves out of reach.
“Nuh-uh, get your own.”
“Come on, don’t be a cookie pig.”
“I’ll be a cookie pig if I want to.”
“Could we hurry this up?” Rando prods. “I really hate being exposed like this.”
“Tough,” Matt says. “After today, your days of lurking in the shadows are over. You saw all those reporters at the scene. Your faces are going to be all over the Internet by dinnertime.”
“Great,” Skyblazer mutters.
Zip pauses from gorging on a plate stacked high with brownies and says, “What are you complaining about? You’re wearing a helmet. I only have goggles.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Screw you, Dennis.”
Rando slaps Zip across the arm. “Codenames, dammit!”
“You, Rando, are the last person to chastise anyone about letting names slip,” I say.
Rando shrinks into her chair and throws her hands up. “Let’s have it, then. Tell us everything we did wrong.”
Oh, what a list that is — but I have little right to throw stones. If I’m going to be one hundred percent honest with myself, they’re not the only one who screwed up. Matt was right; the Wardens never should have been in on this mission, and we should have stuck to his original plan, but I put their feelings ahead of doing the job. Now a poor old woman is going to spend the next several days in the hospital recovering from injuries Zip inflicted by jerking her around at super-speed, only to return to a trashed home and maybe charges of aiding and abetting.
Matt slurps down the rest of his coffee, sets the mug down, and folds his hands. “You all know what you did wrong,” he says. “Let me tell you what you did right. Magnum, you put your own safety aside to back up your teammate when she was in trouble. Zip, you made getting the civilian out of harm’s way your priority. Skyblazer, you kept Ivy from getting away and you were smart enough to step back rather than risk a hostage. And Rando, you put your ego aside and accepted help when it was offered.”<
br />
“You had to push me,” Rando concedes.
“And you could have dug in your heels, but you didn’t.”
“What you’re telling us is we didn’t completely suck, just mostly sucked.”
“You made mistakes. It happens. Be grateful no one died because of it.”
“Thanks to you guys,” Skyblazer says.
“It was a team effort.”
A weak smile flickers on Rando’s lips.
“This is a hard job, guys, and it never gets easier,” Matt says, “but you don’t have to make it harder for yourselves, either. If you ever want advice or need information or want to get together and train a little, give us a call. We’re willing to help you.”
Rando nods, the closest to a proper thank-you we’re going to get from her. The girl has some serious pride issues she needs to sort out.
But as we like to say in the Hero Squad, one problem at a time.
***
Rando resisted trading contact info, claiming she wanted to maintain her secret identity, but Skyblazer — real name Dennis Antar — was eager to trade phone numbers and e-mail addresses. I admit I was initially hesitant in light of all the questions we had about him, but he’s been completely open with us — including about where he got his suit, and wow, is that a messed-up story.
He’s also taken us up on our offer to play mentor and calls us fairly regularly to ask questions and seek advice. In fact...
“Hey, Dennis,” Matt says. “Actually, yeah, I’ll have to call you back, we’re a little busy right now. We’re helping Meg move her stuff into her new place.”
“Not anymore we aren’t,” Stuart says as he steps through the door with a big old-fashioned steamer trunk balanced on a shoulder. “Last load, dude. We are done.”
“All hail Stuart,” Meg says, “hero of the big move.”
Stuart takes a bow and brings the trunk into Meg’s new bedroom, formerly a small office Natalie shared with her jerk of an ex. We didn’t have to empty it out because Derek took almost everything in the office along with most of the furniture in the living room and bedroom — including the bed, the big asshat. It was all his stuff to begin with, so I guess he had a right to take it when he moved out, but it still feels like a dick move.
“Looks like it’s pizza and beer time,” Natalie says.
“Pizza and soda time,” Missy corrects.
“Yes. Pizza and soda time.”
“I got it,” Meg says. “It was all my stuff.”
“Halfsies. We’re roommates now. Roommates share.”
Meg grins and hugs Natalie, who returns the hug but not the smile. I haven’t seen her smile once since the split — not that we’ve seen much of her at all since then. She spent a couple of weeks moping in private before making a half-hearted attempt to get back to the business of living. She decided to take a break from the Protectorate to focus on getting her life back together, and part of that was figuring out where to live. The apartment isn’t huge, but city rents being what they are, there was no way she could swing a place by herself. She was ready to move out, but on a desperate and, yes, completely selfish whim, I suggested she take Meg on as a roommate. They talked, decided it would work out for both of them, and the rest is history.
“If you want to call the order in, the takeout menus are in the —” Natalie says, pointing toward a blank spot on the wall near the front door. “Right. He took that too,” she mumbles. “Look in the drawer next to the fridge.”
“Sure,” Meg says.
Natalie turns like she’s going to sit and sulk, but there’s no place to sit besides the floor. She curses beneath her breath and presses her fists to her temples. Stuart and Missy quietly make their way into the kitchen to give Natalie a little privacy. I turn to join them. My impulse is to reach out to her, but Natalie isn’t a touchy-feely kind of woman. She likes to deal with her pain on her own.
Matt, who knows that better than any of us, hangs back. “Natalie,” he says.
“What?” Natalie grumps.
“Derek’s an ass. He’s lord high idiot of the universe for breaking up with you. You’re too awesome to waste any more of your time being upset that there’s one fewer gigantic douchebag in your life. Screw him. He sucks. I hope he gets eaten alive by chipmunks.”
Natalie blinks at him. “Chipmunks.”
“Yeah. It’d be horrible because he’d get eaten alive but it’d be really humiliating too because, you know. Chipmunks.”
It happens slowly, as though she’s forgotten how to do anything but mourn. The corner of her lip twitches and, as if against her will, curls into a smirk. That’s followed by a snort that turns onto a howl of laughter. She clamps a hand over her mouth to stifle the sound, but it’s too late. It’s out there. She takes Matt in her arms and laughs hysterically into his shoulder.
Meg sticks her head in from the kitchen to see what, at a glance, could be easily mistaken for Natalie having another breakdown. “Is Natalie okay?”
I smile. “She will be.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As always, I have to thank my own Hero Squad, test-readers Kate Sokol and Rob Isaacson, my wife Veronica, and my editor Julie Tremblay for raking my story over the coals to make sure I got everything right — which was especially important for this game-changing chapter in the Action Figures saga.
I’d also like to thank a few supporters who shared the love and spread the word about this series (as well as my fantasy series, The Adventures of Strongarm & Lightfoot): fellow author Patrick Hodges (the James Madison YA series); Phil Van Vlack, host of the podcast The Story So Far; Linda Thompson, host of The Authors Show; Jan Lewis, host of Be My Guest on Upton Community Television; and the fine folks at Annie’s Book Stop in Worcester.
I’d also like to give a quick shout-out to all my friends in the Worcester Writers Collaborative for their support, input, ideas, and recommendations for top-notch single-malt scotch.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Bailey was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts and raised on a steady diet of comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, Saturday morning cartoons, sci-fi television, and horror movies…which explains a lot.
An effort to parlay his love of geek culture into a career as a comic book artist failed when he figured out he wasn’t that good, so he turned to writing as means of artistic expression. Since then, Michael has written several scripts for New England-area renaissance faires, as well as a number of articles based on faire culture for Renaissance Magazine.
In 2013, Michael left his job of 15 years as a reporter and blogger for his hometown newspaper, the Falmouth Enterprise, to pursue his writing career. His debut novel, Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins made its debut in September 2013.
Michael lives in Massachusetts with his wife Veronica, four cats, and an English bulldog.
Visit Michael online at www.innsmouthlook.com, and find him on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Goodreads.
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