I went around the corner and ducked down an alley. I checked to make sure no one was watching, then teleported back to my condo.
Chapter 2
The complex that housed my condo was one of the latest outposts of a twenty-year gentrification project. Cash-rich developers had spent the last two decades buying up dilapidated homes and public housing projects in the inner city. The typical pattern usually involved demolishing said domiciles, and then constructing uber-chic residences that young professionals would pay through the nose for. The desire to have the places where they lived close to their jobs (as well as the nearby bars, clubs, etc.) had led to a revitalization of the downtown area where most of the young people worked.
I popped into my condo in the master bedroom. Normally, I would have materialized a few blocks away as George Boring (the identity I used to buy the place) and walked into my building, which is a converted apartment complex. Even though, as a teleporter, I never have to bother with doors, I have to keep up appearances and being “normal” by letting the neighbors and staff see me once in a while. (I learned this the hard way when, a few months after buying the condo, the off-duty cop who works security at night asked me for some ID and proof of residence.)
The condo itself was a nice three-bedroom, two-bath unit furnished in a modern contemporary style. Looking around, I could see that the place could use a little dusting, although I really didn’t care if it got done or not. The truth of the matter is that I really didn’t live there. It was little more than a way station for me, a place I popped into occasionally to change clothes (or my appearance) so it didn’t see a lot of regular use – especially during the school year.
Still, my grandfather had insisted that if I was going to be creeping around behind my mother’s back acting out as Mohawk, then I needed to have a separate base of operations. Thus, the condo, which my grandfather actually loaned me the money for (and which I had since paid back with the bounties I’d earned).
It wasn’t exactly a secret lair, but I had come to appreciate having a place that was solely mine, even if I didn’t spend a whole lot of time there. But I guess that had been my grandfather’s experience talking, and as with so many other things, he had been right.
Wasting no time, I tossed the duffel bag with Mohawk’s clothes on the bed, catching a glimpse of myself in the dresser mirror. I was back to being me again – a tall, slender sixteen-year-old guy with short, dark curly hair and a natural complexion that looked something between fair and moderately tan. Thankfully, the recently-purchased clothes still fit. Obviously I had chosen a body type close to my own true state.
I checked my watch: five minutes until my meeting with Braintrust. I contemplated teleporting to our meeting place – one of Braintrust’s safe houses – but it always seems rude to just pop up like that, even when people are expecting you. Flying there was a possibility, but flight – while not uncommon – is a rare enough ability that people flying under their own power get noticed, and BT would kill me if I inadvertently brought attention to one of his hideouts. That left me with the option of running.
Being a speedster is cool, but it does have a couple of drawbacks. First and foremost, it’s hell on your clothes. The friction caused by someone zipping along at 1,000 miles per hour, arms whipping back and forth and legs rubbing together, will usually wear a hole in ordinary fabric in less time that it takes to tell about it. (Assuming it doesn’t catch fire, which has actually happened to some speedsters on occasion). In short, you need specially designed clothes – or rather, clothes manufactured with special material.
Fortunately, I had a nice range of clothes that fit the bill. After super speed manifested as another one of my powers, my grandfather had called in a couple of favors (one of the benefits of having a former superhero in the family) and had some items made. They looked and felt just like regular clothes – you couldn’t tell the difference between the jeans and t-shirt I decided to wear and normal apparel – but wouldn’t go to pieces if you zipped across a couple of state lines in them.
Dressed, I teleported to a nearby park. I typically only ran at super speed from open spaces, having discovered early on that speeding from indoors tends to have certain disadvantages, like wearing a trail through your carpet in a hurry, leaving a whirlwind behind you, and more.
It was summer, but there were surprisingly few people in the park. I didn’t worry about anybody seeing me pop in, as I wouldn’t be there long enough for them to notice much about me. As I prepared to run, my vision telescoped, and faraway details came neatly into view. Super-vision is an ancillary power of super speed; it doesn’t do you much good to be able to run at Mach 3 if you can’t see something like a car coming until it’s right on top of you. People assume that a lot of the old-time speedsters – like Zipp and The Bullet – retired because they were slowing down and had lost a step. Most of them, however, still had their speed when they hung up their capes. Their eyes had just gone bad.
I was meeting Braintrust at a sprawling but rundown estate about five miles outside of town – roughly fifteen miles away. I took off, calculating that I could get there in about two minutes without pushing it. As I ran, I either sidestepped or gently moved insects and various bits of debris out of my way. The movements of speedsters – when they run slow enough to be seen – often tend to appear kind of herky-jerky, with random hand movements. The truth of the matter is that, unless you wanted to arrive at your destination as bug-spattered as the windshield of a ’57 Chevy on the highway, you had to either go around or move a lot of things.
I arrived at BT’s hideout (a place I had mentally dubbed “The Compound”) about five seconds ahead of schedule. It was about a ten-acre spread, with various buildings seemingly scattered at random across the property. The main building was a hundred-year-old mansion that, from the outside, looked like it would collapse if someone sneezed too hard around it. Waist-high weeds sprouted on both sides of the road that led up to the house.
I dropped out of super speed about a hundred yards from the front door. I was expected, but it seemed polite to give BT notice that I was on the grounds. I casually sauntered up to the door, which opened up before I even got close enough to knock.
A man stood in the doorway. He was slim, of average height, with dark hair. He sported a goatee, and wore a golf shirt and khaki pants. He was a Braintrust clone.
Braintrust, as I understood it, wasn’t just a single person but rather a huge cluster of clones that shared a single hive mind, for lack of a better term. The clone at the door was the first that I’d met and the one that I had the most interaction with, so I mentally named him BT-1. Although I tended to think of Braintrust as a “he,” some of the clones were actually female. Once, when I was younger, I had asked him about it. He had laughed at that, then explained to me that – up to a certain stage of their development in the womb – all babies were the same. However, with the right controls in place, you could manipulate the gender, among other things, whichever way you wanted.
Thus, I didn’t really know if the original Braintrust was male or female. To be honest, I didn’t really know whether he – it – was even human. Once, when he was helping me with my telepathy, I’d tried to secretly probe him and find out if he was a man or a woman. All I got was the impression of a massive intellect and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. As to physical appearance, I could sense its existence, but not its shape or form. (Of course, telepathy isn’t my forte, so I can be forgiven if I botched that particular operation.)
“You made it,” said the clone, reaching out to shake my hand.
“Naturally,” I replied as I shook his hand and then stepped by him into the house.
The inside was a complete contrast to the exterior. Whereas the outside looked like it was ready to fall down, the interior was well-kept and expensively maintained. I was in an enormous living room, which was decorated in an early twentieth-century style. Both walls had a winding staircase that crept up to what appeared to be an opule
nt second floor. The entire place was decked out in some expensive brand of marble that covered the floor from wall to wall. In short, it always reminded me of my great-grandmother’s house, on the few occasions I had visited her when she had been alive. Everything in her home had looked old and expensive, and I had been afraid to touch anything.
BT (all of the Braintrust clones answer to “BT”) started walking towards the kitchen, obviously expecting me to follow. “So, tell me how it went.”
I fell into step just behind him. “About as expected. Your info was good, as always. He was right where you said he’d be.”
I then prepared to launch into a rehash of the morning’s events, how I (as Mohawk) had captured and claimed the bounty on another wanted fugitive with super powers. This time it had been Drillbit. He basically had hands that could punch through just about anything, although some things (like bank vaults) took longer than others.
“And the inhibitor collar worked fine?” BT asked, cutting me off before I even began to speak.
“If by fine you mean ‘terribly’ or ‘like crap,’ then yeah, it was great. You’ll get a Nobel Prize for your work.”
Inhibitor collars were, as the name implies, devices that inhibit or block supers from using their powers. The idea had been around for decades and various prototypes had even been developed. The problem was that inhibitor collars didn’t come in a one-size-fits-all model. Each had to be specialized for a particular person. A collar meant to stop a speedster wouldn’t have an effect on a mind reader. One meant to prevent a flyer might not work on someone with super-agility.
In essence, inhibitor collars had to be custom-made to block a specific individual from using his powers. However, few supers were going to let you use them as a guinea pig to design something meant to take away their powers. In fact, some were downright proactive about it – especially those who were part of the criminal element. The result was that people found to be, or thought to be, working on inhibitor projects had a nasty habit of disappearing. Forever.
BT’s inhibitors worked maybe twenty-five percent of the time. In an ideal world, once I knew where a criminal was, I should have only had to (a) wait for an opportunity to teleport next to him as Mohawk, and then (b) put the inhibitor around his neck before he knew what was happening, thereby taking away any special abilities he had. In actuality, what usually happened was that the criminal retained his full powers, then came at Mohawk with murder in his eyes.
That’s when we’d usually go to Plan B, which typically involved me teleporting the fugitive to a nullifier cage. A nullifier is different than an inhibitor. It’s a field generated through the use of quantum mechanics. It’s not really something I fully understand, but it causes some kind of temporal shift, so that someone with super abilities is unable to access their powers. But nullifiers were expensive and not really practical, although they had their uses (primarily in special jail cells and prisons).
Our nullifier cage was essentially a cell in an abandoned warehouse. After teleporting someone into it, the room would fill with knockout gas, and then Mohawk would haul them, unconscious, into the nearest police station for the reward. That was essentially what had happened with Drillbit.
BT groaned at my comments, as I gave him a ten-second spiel of the capture and returned his inhibitor to him. It was basically a circular metal band about three inches in length and half an inch thick, with a number of colored diodes that flashed when it was in operation. To be frank, it bore something of a resemblance to an ancient Egyptian necklace.
Braintrust and I were partners to a certain extent. He located wanted super criminals, and I would bring them in and collect the reward. However, we never split the money. Knowledge was the coin of the realm where BT was concerned. Although the inhibitor hadn’t taken away Drillbit’s powers, it had scanned him and taken biometric readings, which BT would use to further refine the device. That was his payment.
BT walked through a swinging door and into the kitchen. Without breaking stride, I phased – becoming insubstantial – and literally passed through the door like a ghost, then re-solidified on the other side. A huge granite-top island stood in the center of the kitchen, covered with grilled steaks, hot dogs, hamburgers, donuts, cheesecake, and a number of other delectable treats. This spread was meant for me, so I pulled up a nearby stool and started eating, beginning with a juicy steak.
Running at super speed switches my metabolism into high gear. The result was that I needed to replace the calories I’d burned, and – per our usual routine – BT always had a buffet laid out for me. Nearby, a cook stood working over a six-burner gas stove, with all of the burners covered. The cook was another BT clone; this one had four arms.
BT’s clones tended to be specialized. In other words, they were designed to perform a distinct function, and therefore tended to have the necessary characteristics to do their jobs. Thus, the cook had twice the usual number of arms. For the millionth time I wondered how BT formed these clones – whether there was some unique biological process that let him grow them off his own physical body (whatever that was), or if he created them through some artificial means in a lab.
BT took a seat while I ate. “I really thought the inhibitor would work this time.”
“Not a big deal,” I shrugged, talking around a mouth full of food. “No harm, no foul.”
“Well, I’ll need some time to find the next target, as well as tweak the inhibitor and reset the nullifier.”
I simply nodded, shoving a piece of cheesecake into my mouth. Because of the nullifier, I usually had about a two-month break in-between going after fugitives. Standard nullifiers give off a particular energy signature when in use. Because that signature can be traced, BT designed a nullifier that operates on a slightly different principal. I didn’t really understand it, but the end result was that - although it doesn’t give off an energy signature - our nullifier had to be “reset” after each use, which usually took about sixty days.
There were actually a lot of non-powered criminals out there I could have gotten the reward for whenever the nullifier was out of commission, but there were normal bounty hunters who could take them down. There was no need for me to take food out of the mouth of another working stiff. (Not to mention the fact that I was still in high school and – at least during the school year – had class during the day.)
“So,” BT continued, “other than the occasional capture of wanted felons, how’s the rest of your summer been?”
I held out my hand and wobbled it side-to-side. “So-so.”
Speaking frankly, summer vacation wasn’t anything that got me particularly excited the way it did most kids. I didn’t have a lot of friends. My summers were normally spent hanging out with my grandfather, which usually meant training. Not that I was complaining.
“Well,” he continued, “don’t forget that there’s a game tomorrow.”
I frowned. I knew where this was headed. “Yeah, I’m still thinking about it.”
“And don’t forget that there are tryouts in about two weeks.”
This is where I knew he’d been going with the conversation, and I didn’t want to think about it.
Every year, kids from ages fourteen to eighteen could, if they had a super power, try out to join one of the superhero teams. If you were good enough, or had enough potential, you’d get recruited to go study in-residence at the Academy (where they help develop your powers) with one of the superhero teams as your sponsor. If you succeeded there, the expectation was that you’d eventually get an offer to join the team that had supported you. In a sense, it was a lot like being a high school athlete who college scouts were trying to recruit.
My tryout two years earlier had been a disaster of epic proportions. (It was also what had landed me my own “Wanted” poster.) It was something that I tried, unsuccessfully, to put out of my mind almost every day of the week. Being reminded of it now didn’t help.
“It’s time you put the past behind you,” he went on.
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“Yeah, right. Because my tryout last time was such a rousing success.”
“You know, when you think about it, you didn’t really do anything wrong. And you can’t tell me that you haven’t been giving it some thought.”
“Well, I haven’t,” I lied. “I’ve had other things on my mind – like who’s been following me.”
BT was a little startled. “What?”
“Yeah, someone was following me today. Some guy I haven’t seen before.”
“When? Where?”
“In the shopping district today, after I brought in Drillbit.”
I launched into a quick explanation of how I’d sensed Pinchface and then given him the slip.
BT frowned in thought for a moment before asking a question.
“Can you show me what he looked like?”
“Sure.”
I closed my eyes in concentration. My intent was to plant an image of Pinchface in BT’s mind. Normally, I don’t go mucking about in other people’s brains. As I already mentioned, the telepathic stuff really isn’t in my wheelhouse. In fact, reading minds was, for me, like taking a bath in someone else’s vomit. (From my standpoint, people had a lot of mental “filth” in their brains.) It usually made me nauseous - my grandfather once compared it to a doctor who gets squeamish at the sight of blood - so in my opinion, it’s not a talent that I truly possess, despite technically being a telepath.
Reading BT was different, though. His mind was the exact opposite of other people’s: clean, sterile – antiseptic, in fact.
BT opened his mind to me, so I had no trouble getting inside. As I said, though, he had a titanic intellect, and I knew that he could shut most telepaths out if he wanted to. Right now, however, his mind was a clear, open space, a dimensional void where nothing existed but bright, pervasive light.
The Kid Sensation Series Box Set Page 2