Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (13 page)

“Superbeast! Clear!”
Concorde says. Stuart hesitates, looks around, spots Concorde, and pays for
taking his eyes off his enemy: The big man nails him with an uppercut that
literally launches Stuart into the ceiling. He bounces off the concrete and
lands with an undignified splat.

Silver lining number one:
Stuart can take that kind of intense punishment. Silver lining two: At least
he’s clear. Concorde tags the big man with a concussion blast that blows him
across the garage.

“Whoever you are, stand
down,” Concorde says, “or the next one will knock you into Connecticut.”

The man sits up, glares at
us, considers his options, then compliantly slips his hands behind his head in
surrender.

“Call in,” Concorde says
over the comm.

“Nina Nitro calling in. I
have Kobold,” Nina says. “Someone needs to secure Harpy.”

“Mindforce calling in. I’ll
get her.”

“Um, Psyche calling in? Is
that right?”

“Lightstorm calling in,
covering the big guy with Concorde.”

“That’s the new Minotaur, I
think,” Stuart says. “Oh, uh, Superbeast calling in and whatever.”

And then nothing.

“Trenchcoat, Kunoichi, call
in,” Concorde says. More nothing. “Call in! Where are you?”

“I-I’m here,” Missy sobs.
“I’m...oh, God...someone help me...”

“Minotaur, get Archimedes
out of there,” Hydra says. Minotaur casually tosses two of the guards to the floor,
unburying the Bestiary’s prize — as well as the man who once laid claim to the
Minotaur identity. “Oliver?”

“What? Oliver’s in there?”
Kobold says.

“Uh-huh. Hey, Ollie, you
okay? Hey. Hey! Anyone home?” Hydra says, snapping his fingers at Minotaur the
First. Oliver blinks at Hydra, squints at him vacantly. “Guess not. Good news,
new guy: You get to keep your job.”

“Found the control unit,”
Harpy says, waving a small black box. “Collars are deactivated, locks have been
popped.”

“Hey, we’re not leaving
Ollie here, are we?” Kobold says.

“Oliver wasn’t part of the
plan,” Hydra says. “Besides, he’s dead weight. No offense, Ollie, but you’re
useless.”

“Behind you,” Oliver says.

Her equilibrium is off,
she’s outnumbered, almost certainly outgunned, and if things go south, there’s
no guarantee any of her teammates will have recovered sufficiently to save her.
All things considered, it’s the height of recklessness to take on the Bestiary
by herself.

Fortunately for her,
reckless is what Nina Nitro does best.

A leaping palm-heel strike
to the base of the skull sends Hydra sprawling. A knife-edge chop to the
throat, to Harpy’s cybernetically enhanced vocal chords, short-circuits her
sonic scream. A spinning mule kick crushes Kobold’s nose. He collapses to his
knees, blood spurting from between his fingers.

Three down, one to go: a
tower of muscle, shocked into inaction by Nina’s whirlwind assault.
Big man
.
Strong. Probably invulnerable
, she reasons — which means setting off a
fireball in his face won’t seriously hurt him.

In theory.

The garage reverberates with
the deep
fwhoomp
of oxygen igniting, suddenly and violently. Minotaur
staggers back, tears pouring from eyes that cannot see anything but searing
white. He’s as vulnerable as he’s going to get, but Nina knows better than to
directly engage a tank.

“Superbeast! Get punching!”

Nina’s command ends there. A
pair of manacles, still binding their wearer, crashes down on her head.
Buzzkill Joy gives her a kick to the gut for good measure, then scrambles back
into the hearse.

“Hey, mungo, do a girl a
favor and get me out of these things, huh?” Joy says, presenting her cuffs to
Oliver. The restraints, designed to withstand Joy’s physical strength, part
easily when subjected to Oliver’s superior might. “You’re a doll. Toodles.”

“Wait!” Archimedes cries
out. “Wait for me!”

Joy laughs. “And why the
hell would I do that? You’re on your own, freakshow.”

She hesitates a moment
longer to snatch up an assault rifle from one of her fallen captors. Not her
thing, guns, but better safe than sorry.

Recalling her last visit to
the courthouse, Joy dashes toward the heavy door separating the garage from the
detention area — a door that is normally closed and locked. She does not notice
the hole, blackened and melted around the edges, right where the push-button
combination lock used to be — just as she fails to notice Matt’s clumsy effort
to snag her foot as she sprints by.

“Crud!” Matt scans the
garage, looking for someone, anyone else who appears remotely functional. “Hey,
Kunoichi! C’mon, we’ve got an escapee!”

Missy rises to her feet and
shakes the last of the disorientation from her brain. “Shouldn’t we wait for
the —”

“Come on!”

“...back-up,” Missy says to
no one.

She follows Matt into the
holding cell area, a narrow corridor that is solid wall on one side and a
series of sliding steel doors on the other, then into another hallway — this
one wider, more welcoming than the dank gray cell block, but empty. A door at
the far end eases closed.

“I got her,” Missy says.

Matt has to sprint to keep
up with Missy as she charges through the door. As Matt clears the doorway, the
world downshifts into slow motion. Every detail becomes razor-sharp and crystal
clear. It’s another hallway, wide and tall, meant to accommodate several people
at once. Doors with fogged glass windows line the hall, each of them marked
with black plastic signs that jut out above the doors like flags in a stiff
wind. White lettering indicates where the COURT CLERK and RECORDS and other
offices are. Wooden benches are spaced along either wall, providing ample
seating. The tile floor, gleaming from its most recent polishing, reflects a
watery ghost of Buzzkill Joy, bright in her prison jumpsuit, and of the rifle
in her hands, raised and ready.

Matt seizes Missy from
behind, wrapping her in his arms. He lets his momentum spin them around. He
closes his eyes.

Thunder erupts.

Missy squeals as Matt’s grip
on her tightens, squeezing the breath from her body. Just as suddenly, his arms
go slack. He slides off of her, settling into a pile at her feet.

Missy turns, locking eyes
with Buzzkill Joy through a haze of gunsmoke. Joy smirks at her weapon, at her
handiwork, at Missy, then jams the rifle’s stock into her shoulder. She
squeezes the trigger. The rifle tries to jump from her hands, but this time
she’s ready for it; she holds the firearm steady. Her aim is true.

So are Missy’s reflexes.

The first spray cuts through
the space occupied a split-second earlier by Missy’s head. Joy shifts her
stance, adjusts her aim, and lays into the trigger. Bullets stitch the walls,
chasing after the black blur as it closes the distance.

Missy lunges, hitting Joy
low. They tumble to the floor. Missy rips the rifle from Joy’s grip and flings
it away, then Missy’s nails slide out from the recesses in her fingertips.

So do Joy’s.

Missy strikes first, her
claws plunging deep into Joy’s shoulder. Joy bites back a scream, then responds
by sinking her hooked fingernails into Missy’s ribcage. Joy gets a leg between
them and shoves, kicking Missy off.  Missy rolls with the momentum and
lands on all fours, then hisses challenge at her foe.

“You’re pretty bad-ass,
girl,” Joy says, pressing a hand to her wound. “You want to go another round?
I’m cool with that. Your boy there, he might not be.”

Matt
.

“Him or me, cupcake.” Joy
backs away a step, making a show of it: a silent dare. “Him or me.”

Missy doesn’t take her eyes
off of Joy until she slips out of sight. She spends those precious seconds
memorizing the girl’s face.

“Trenchcoat, Kunoichi, call
in,” Concorde barks in her ear. “Call in! Where are you?”

“I-I’m here,” Missy sobs.
“I’m...oh, God...someone help me...Matt’s been shot.”

ELEVEN

The words hit me like a
brick to the face, stunning me into silence.

“Did...did she say Matt got
shot?” Sara says.

“Mindforce, take over here.
Nina,” Concorde says.

“Right,” Nina says.

I chase after Concorde and
Nina, weaving through a series of hallways, but my body is acting on its own;
my mind is somewhere else, unable — unwilling — to process what Missy said. We
burst through one last door and nearly fall over Matt.

Nothing’s right here. Matt’s
on the floor, curled on his side, not moving. Missy kneels at his head, her
hood in her hands, her face red and wet from crying. Concorde pulls her away,
giving Nina room to work. She peels off Matt’s facemask, presses two fingers to
his neck.

“He got hurt protecting me,”
Missy whimpers. “That girl had a gun and she was going to shoot me and Matt
grabbed me and...” The rest is lost to racking sobs.

“There’s no blood,” I say. I
feel disconnected from my own body. It’s like someone else is speaking. “Is
that good? That’s good, right?”

“Nina, dammit, talk to me,”
Concorde says, and I hear something in his voice I’ve never heard before:
gut-wrenching fear.

“Hold on,” Nina says,
rolling Matt onto his stomach. She runs her hand across his back, brushing off
a layer of dust or powder coating Matt’s coat – which, I realize, is neither
bloody nor riddled with bullet holes. She sniffs her fingertips, winces, then
breathes a sigh of relief. “It’s okay. He’s okay.”

“Says you,” Matt slurs, and
my God, I have never been so relieved, so overjoyed to hear Matt’s snark.

“Hey, you only got pelted by
hornet rounds. Lucky for you Byrne likes to take its escapees down alive.
C’mon, let’s sit you up.” Matt bites back a groan as Nina assists him in
rolling onto his back, then into a sitting position. “Congratulations, buddy: You
just took your first gunshot in the line of duty. Today you are a man, my son.
Mazel
tov
.”

“I’m so happy you can joke
about this,” Concorde growls, pushing —
shoving
Missy away, practically
throwing her to the floor. “What if he’d been shot with real bullets, huh? What
if this kid was lying at your feet dead? Would you be laughing then?!”

“Chill, boss. You know stuff
like this is a work-related hazard. It happens.”

“Not anymore it doesn’t.
They’re done.”

“We’re what? What are you
saying?” I say.

“I’ve let this go on too
long,” Concorde says with all the finality of a cheesed-off father sending his
kids to their rooms because he’s had it
up to here
with us. “I’m putting
an end to the Hero Squad.”

Concorde, roaring like a
drill sergeant, orders Nina to escort us back to the Pelican, keep us there,
and take care of any injuries. She shoots him a cold glare but does as told,
refraining from any sass-back. A bleeding teenage girl does wonders for keeping
your priorities straight.

“Carrie, break out the
first-aid kit, will you? Okay, Missy, here we go,” Nina says. She gently pulls
Missy’s top up, peeling it away from her blood-soaked skin, to reveal a set of
nasty puncture wounds in her left side, just under the line of her ribcage.
Nina presses a wad of gauze to the injuries. “Hold this in place, kiddo, and
keep pressure on it.”

“Jeez, that girl did that to
you?” Stuart says.

“She had claws like me,”
Missy says.

Claws?
Claws like her?
No one else blinks at that little bombshell, but it sure doesn’t escape my
notice.

“Guess Concorde wasn’t
kidding when he said she was like an evil you.”

“Speaking of Concorde, what
did he mean, he’s putting an end to the team?” Sara says.

“Don’t listen to him. It’s
Concorde being Concorde,” Nina says. “Matt, you’re up.”

Matt shrugs off his coat
easily enough, but it takes him a solid minute to worm out of his shirt, and no
wonder he’s in agony: Matt’s back is a mass of red welts.

“Oh, Matt,” I gasp.

“Man, you took a pounding
all right,” Nina says, as though impressed by Matt’s war wounds (which, knowing
her, she is). “Imagine how much this would’ve hurt if you
hadn’t’ve
had
your swanky new gear on.”

“Lucky me,” Matt grunts.

“Buck up, bud, doesn’t look
like you took any serious damage. My advice: regular doses of Tylenol, lots of
ice packs, sleep on your stomach, you’ll be good in a few days.”

“Any advice on how to deal
with Concorde?”

“Carrie, I told you, it’s
nothing to worry about. Concorde freaks out about stuff, that’s his thing. He
lost his mind the first time I got hurt on the job, too. Give him a day to cool
down and everything will go back to normal.”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen
Concorde lose it before. This time was different.”

“I’ve seen Concorde lose it
before a lot more often than you have, so trust me when I say: he’ll get over
it.”

Looks like we’re about to
find out: the bay door slides open and Concorde steps inside. “Nina, give us a
moment,” he says.

Nina slips me an
I told
you so
look and hops out of the Pelican, closing the door behind her.
Concorde folds his arms, sighs.

“Today was an unmitigated
disaster,” he begins, and it definitely sounds like one of Concorde’s standard
dress-downs. “Too much went wrong. Too many people got hurt. I will not allow
it to happen again. Carrie.” Concorde holds out a hand. “Your headset.”

“What?” I say.

“Give me your headset. Now.”

“How am I supposed to fly if
I don’t have my transponder?”

“You don’t,” Concorde snaps.
“You’re not a super-hero anymore, you understand me? None of you are.”

“Seriously, we’re going through
this again?” Matt says. “Come on, Concorde, you’ve tried to stop us before —”

Concorde has yelled at us
plenty of times. He’s chewed us out, criticized us, insulted us, but he has
never once gotten physical with us — until now, when he shoves Matt, slamming
him back into the bulkhead.

“And look what it got you!”
Concorde then rounds on Missy, snatching the blood-soaked gauze out of her
hand. “Look what it got you!” he says, throwing the gauze in Matt’s face. “Do
you know how close you came to getting killed?”

“We’ve had close calls
before,” I point out.

“And you know what’s kept
you alive? Dumb luck. Well, guess what, Carrie? Luck runs out!” Concorde says
as he rips my headset right off my face and throws it across the bay. “I will
not have your blood on my hands.”

Concorde throws open the bay
door and storms off, shouldering past Nina, who, judging by her stunned
expression, heard everything. I brush by her and chase after Concorde, because
there is no way I’m going to let this go without a fight.

“Concorde. Concorde! Dammit,
will you talk to me?”

“There’s nothing to talk
about,” he says without stopping.

“The hell there isn’t. You
can’t disband
our team!
You’re not our father, Concorde, you can’t
ground us!”

Concorde whirls around. He
glares at me through his smoked outer visor, giving nothing away.

“We’ve had this discussion
before,” I say, although that “discussion” was as much of a shouting match as
this one is. “What I do with my life is my decision, not yours, and you can’t
stop me.”

“I’m going to spell this out
for you, Carrie, so you’d be wise to listen very closely,” Concorde says in a
low growl. “You are, as of this second, an unregistered superhuman flyer. If
you go up, for any reason, I’ll have no choice but to report you to the
Department of Homeland Security, and they’ll send men to arrest you. You’ll end
up in Byrne. Is that what you want?”

I want to laugh in his face.
The feds are going to put me in Byrne? Yeah, right, they throw kids in supermax
prisons all the time.

Then I flash back to
Buzzkill Joy in her orange jumpsuit, marching to the hearse in her shackles.

“I can’t believe you’re
threatening me,” I manage.

“I’m not threatening you,
Carrie, I’m warning you what will happen if you go up without my
authorization,” Concorde says. “The feds can overlook a new flyer going up once
or twice, excuse it as ignorance, but you’ve been in the game. You don’t get
leniency, you get arrested for willfully violating US airspace. Whether that
happens is your choice.”

“My
choice
?” I say,
seething. “I don’t have a choice anymore.”

I wait for a retort, but all
I get is Concorde turning his back on me and walking away.

I return to the Pelican and
tell the others what happened. Even Nina is stunned that Concorde would go so
far as to slap my name on a government watch list.

We sit there stewing for a
good hour while Concorde and Mindforce finish up in the courthouse. Mindforce
returns, alone, to inform Nina that Concorde will be accompanying Minotaur and
Archimedes back to Byrne, and she’s to remain at the scene and assist with the
manhunt for Buzzkill Joy.

As she’s shutting the bay
door on us, I say, “Natalie? What do we do?”

She sighs. “There’s a time
to push Concorde, and there’s a time to back off and give him space. This is a
time to give him space. Let him cool off, let Mindforce talk to him,” she says,
nodding toward the cockpit, where Mindforce is running a preflight check. “For
what it’s worth? I’m on your side.”

That helps. Not a lot, but
it helps.

Once we’re in the air, I step
into the cockpit. Before I can speak, Mindforce says, “I’ll talk to him,” but
the way he says it doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

“Will it do any good?”

“All I can do is try.”

“But you’re not promising
anything.” He says nothing. “What did we do? We’ve all been hurt before and
it’s never set Concorde off like this. He didn’t freak out this badly when
Manticore...you know...and he freaked out a lot.”

“I know, but this is...it’s
complicated.”

Yeah, I know what that
means. When adults tell kids “it’s complicated,” what they’re really saying is
“I don’t want to explain it to you” — but getting into another fight isn’t
going to advance our cause any, so I withdraw back to the passenger bay.

“Well?” Matt says.

“He said he’ll talk to
Concorde,” I say, “but I don’t think we should hold our breaths.”

“This is such bull, man,”
Stuart says. “Concorde gave us this mission. Where does he get off dumping on
us because things went south? Wasn’t our fault.”

“I don’t think it has
anything to do with the mission,” Matt says. “This is my fault.”

Matt has a tendency to make
things about himself, but in this case he’s not wrong. Since we became
super-heroes, I’ve been maimed by Manticore and nearly blown up by a nuke,
Sara’s suffered serious psychic backlash containing an exploding oil tanker,
Stuart’s been scorched by magical hellfire, and Missy got possessed by a demon.
Matt — who, somehow, has escaped the last six months relatively unscathed —
takes a machine-gun full of nonlethal hornet rounds to the back, and all of a
sudden our safety is such an issue Concorde threatens to have me chucked into
prison to keep us in line.

Matt and Concorde have
always had a contentious relationship. When Archimedes first started causing
problems in Kingsport, Matt intervened. Concorde responded to his act of
civic-mindedness by chewing him out. In public. Concorde has yet to cut Matt a
single break or offer the faintest praise when he does something right, yet
he’s managed a few kind words for the rest of the team, and he positively dotes
on me.

He used to, anyway.

“What do we do?” Missy asks.

“What Natalie said: We back
off, leave Concorde alone, and let Mindforce handle this,” I say. “We know
he’ll go to bat for us. He always has. Natalie too.”

“But what if something bad
happens? If someone’s in trouble we can’t stand around and do nothing, but if
we do something you could get thrown in jail.”

“Let’s not worry about
what-ifs, Muppet. One problem at a time,” I say, mostly because I don’t have a
good answer. She’s right: If someone causes trouble and the Hero Squad is in a
position to act, do we stand on the sidelines, which could result in people
getting hurt or killed, or do we do the right thing, which could result in feds
knocking at my door to haul me away to Byrne?

I don’t want to go to
prison.

Okay, Carrie, take a breath,
and take your own advice. No sense in getting wound up over possibilities.

The rest of the flight
passes in silence (aside from the occasional grunt of pain from Matt and
Missy). Once we reach Protectorate HQ, Mindforce attends to Missy’s wounds more
properly, swabbing the area with an antibacterial and slopping over the
punctures some gunk that smells like super-glue and looks like pink latex
paint. Mindforce tells her not to engage in any strenuous physical activity or
she could re-open the wounds.