Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (14 page)

Mindforce drops Missy’s
tunic into a bucket marked with a biohazard symbol and labeled MEDICAL WASTE.
It lands in the bucket with a wet splat.

After we change back into
civilian clothes, Mindforce asks us if we can get home all right. We say yes
automatically, but truthfully, Matt and Missy are in no condition to walk home.

As we ride the Wonkavator
back to the Protectorate’s Main Street office, Sara suggests we hit up Matt’s
dad for a ride. “His office is only a block away,” she says, “and he owns the
business. It’s not like anyone can tell him he can’t leave.”

“We can’t tell him we need a
ride because we got smacked around by a super-villain,” Matt says.

“So tell him you don’t feel
well and aren’t up for walking home,” I say. “It’s technically the truth.”

As we pass through the
office, Catherine gives us a sad, sympathetic smile.

The walk to the offices of
Steiger and Associates Financial Services would normally take us two minutes
from the Protectorate’s public office, three minutes tops. We let Matt and
Missy set the pace, so the trip stretches out to a leisurely ten minutes. We
arrive to find a sign reading OUT TO LUNCH – BACK AT ONE hanging inside the
glass door.

“Aw, great,” Matt says,
pulling at the handle, expecting to find the door locked. It almost smacks him
in the face as it swings open. “Hm. That figures. He forgets to lock up the
house all the time, too.”

“Why don’t we wait inside?”
Sara says.

“Yeah,” Matt says, and we
head in.

As it turns out, Mr. Steiger
isn’t out to lunch, but he still should have locked the door. It would have
kept us from walking into the main foyer to find him...um...
entangled
with a woman who is most definitely not Mrs. Steiger.

The world freeze-frames and all
the sound is sucked out of the room. We gawk at Mr. Steiger and he gawks back,
his expression of slack-jawed shock just short of comical thanks to the hot
pink lipstick smeared across his mouth. No one speaks or moves for what feels
like an eternity, and then Mr. Steiger and the woman break free of one another
and retreat to opposite sides of the foyer.

“Matt,” Mr. Steiger says,
but Matt isn’t sticking around to listen to whatever feeble excuse his dad has
to offer. He blows past me and kicks the door open, the safety glass
spiderwebbing from the impact. Mr. Steiger runs to the door and calls after
Matt, begging him to come back, please, he can explain.

No. He can’t.

TWELVE

A ride home obviously isn’t
going to happen, so Stuart takes Missy home — cradled in his arms, which she
objects to as a matter of pride, but she’s in no condition to make the journey
on her own steam. Sara and I retreat to my house to process what has been, so
far, the crappiest day of our lives (which is saying something).

Whenever I’m this stressed I
tend to indulge in some nervous snacking, but the house is sadly lacking in
sweet treats, so I decide to whip something up. After flying, reading, and
eating, baking is a great way to decompress. Sara opts to sit back and watch
the magic happen.

“I’m a disaster in the
kitchen,” she says. “I can’t handle anything more challenging than ‘microwave
on high for two minutes.’”

“We’ll fix that. You’re
helping me,” I say. I put on a pot of coffee and hand one of my mother’s many
cookbooks to Sara. “See what looks good.”

Sara flips through the book.
“Ooooh, maple bars,” she coos. “Oh yes. We are making these. Maple is the best
flavor
ever
.”

“No, mocha is the best flavor
ever,” I say, “but maple is in the top five.”

“Maple
is
the top
five.” Sara shoves the cookbook at me. “Tell me what to do.”

I guide Sara through the
steps: Preheat the oven; gather the ingredients; collect all the bowls and
measuring cups and spoons we’ll need; measure, sift, pour, mix. We succeed in
keeping the uncomfortable topic of the day at bay for a good long while, but
eventually we crack.

“Do you think Concorde is
serious?” Sara says. “About ending the Squad? About arresting you?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’d
like to think we’ve earned better than that...”

“But?”
     “But Concorde isn’t thinking rationally. He might be
dead serious.”

“So we might never be the
Hero Squad again.”

I shrug. “Would that really
be so bad? Disbanding the Hero Squad doesn’t mean we’d all stop being friends.
It means we wouldn’t have to worry about getting shot, stabbed, zapped,
blasted, possessed...we’d get to worry about normal stuff like test scores,
what to wear to the prom, where we’re going to go to college.” I shrug again.
“It might be nice.”

“Well, I’m sold,” Sara says.
“How can I argue against such heartfelt and compelling testimony?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I wasn’t
buying it either.”

We pass the afternoon
munching on oven-fresh maple bars (which, for the record, came out perfectly),
channel-surfing, and generally doing our best to avoid talking about our
craptacular day. It works; we completely fool ourselves into thinking
everything is cool.

And then Mom comes home with
Ben in tow and, well, there goes my mellow.

“Hi, honey, hi, Sara,” Mom
says.

“Mom, Ben.”
You sure he’s
not a serial killer or something?
I say to Sara.

Sorry, he’s clean,
Sara says,
but maybe
he’ll turn out to have a drinking problem?

One can hope.
God, I’m a terrible person.

“It’s obvious you two are
best friends,” Ben says. “I can see you doing that funny psychic thing
girlfriends do, talking to each other without talking to each other.”

“We’re drift compatible,” I
say.

“You’re what?”

“It’s from some stupid movie
Matt inflicted on me. Giant robots punching giant monsters.” Ben furrows his
brow at me. “Never mind.”

“Guess it’s time to head
home,” Sara says, peeling herself off the couch. “See you in the morning?”

“As always. Oh, don’t forget
to take your half of the maple bars.”

“You made maple bars?” Mom
says.

“Sara made maple bars; I
mentored. We were bored, and we couldn’t find anyone to sell us illegal drugs,
so we baked instead.”

“Good choice. Sounds like
we’ll have a good dessert tonight,” Mom says to Ben. Sure, Mom, go ahead, offer
my maple bars to your boyfriend without asking me. I don’t mind.

I hide out in my bedroom
until dinner to avoid awkward chit-chat with Ben, but he dutifully takes the
lead on mealtime conversation to make up for it. I keep my answers short and
sweet, hoping Ben will lose interest in me because I’m such a crashing bore,
but no such luck. The day of eternal suck continues unabated. C’mon, God, throw
a girl a cookie here, huh?

“You okay, honey?” Mom says.
“You seem down.”

“Long day. Tired is all,” I
say as the strains of Bruce Springsteen’s
Out in the Street
drift up
from my pocket. I dig my phone out to see a text from Dad reading, simply, TIX
SCORED, TUES PM VS MONTREAL.

A Bruins game? With Dad? On
my birthday? And they’re playing the Canadiens? Score!

And then Ben ruins the
moment by saying, “Carrie, you shouldn’t answer your phone at the dinner
table.”

He did not just say that to
me.

“It’s my dad, confirming our
plans for my birthday,” I say, my temper simmering.

“What are you doing with
your father?” Mom asks.

“Bruins game. He got us
tickets for next Tuesday’s game.”

“That sounds like a pretty
late night. I don’t know if you should be staying out late on a school night,”
Ben says. My hands ball into fists under the table.

“Hm. Ben might be right,
Carrie,” Mom says. “I’ll call your father after dinner and talk to him, see if
maybe he can find another game you two can —”

“Are you telling me I can’t
go?” I say. “What kind of crap is that?”

“Don’t talk to your mother
that way, young lady,” Ben says, and that’s when I redline.

“You stay out of this! You
haven’t been around long enough to have an opinion about my life, and you sure
as hell haven’t earned reprimand privileges!”

“Carrie!” Mom snaps.

“What? Are you seriously telling
me he gets to weigh in on what Dad wants to do with me on my birthday? Screw
that,” I say, standing so quickly I knock my chair to the floor.

“Where do you think you’re
going?”

“Out!”

Mom shouts after me, tells
me I’m not going anywhere, tells me to get back to the table and apologize to
Ben or there’s going to be trouble. Please. After taking away my birthday
outing with Dad, nothing you can possibly do to me could punish me any worse.

I grab my coat, throw the
front door open and storm off, down the walkway, down the street, into the
woods near my home so I can take off in private and blow off some steam before
my head explodes. Breaking the sound barrier always makes me feel better.

I jam my hands into my coat
pocket, searching for my headset, and that’s when I remember: I don’t have it
anymore. Concorde took it from me.

Concorde took my sky from
me.

Goddammit.

Buzzkill Joy waits at the
crosswalk like a good little pedestrian, hiding in plain sight among a group of
teenagers recently ousted from a coffee shop closing up for the night. A police
cruiser rolls up to the intersection, slows down. The cop inside glances in her
direction. Joy fidgets in her stolen clothes, jeans and a T-shirt filched from
a laundromat, and forces herself to smile and nod, as if amused by her friends’
antics. Of course they’re her friends. She’s one of them. She belongs.

The cop drives off. Joy
keeps the cruiser in the corner of her eye as she crosses the street, watching
for a sudden U-turn, the flare of red and blue strobes. The teens reach the
corner and turn left as a unit. Joy continues on down the block, looking for a
specific storefront — a restaurant she’s never heard of, let alone eaten at.

She finds it quickly enough.
A stratum of newspaper, yellowed from the sun, covers the insides of the tall
plate glass windows. A “for sale” sign, weather-beaten and faded with age, is
taped over the name on the door: JEAN’S CAFÉ. Joy frowns; nothing about the
place strikes her as remotely familiar — so why did she feel compelled to come
here?

A narrow alley takes her to
the rear of the restaurant. None of the lights back here work, which feels too
convenient — as does the unlocked rear entrance.

Joy glances around,
searching for potential witnesses and, seeing none, slips inside.

Her eyes adjust instantly to
the perfect darkness, allowing her to navigate through a haphazard maze of
kitchen equipment left behind to rust and rot. She pauses near a wall rack
bearing an assortment of butcher’s knives and takes the largest one. True, nature
saw fit to provide her with knives in the tips of her fingers, but those
weapons are too distinct; if someone needs to die tonight, better to let the
cops think someone normal did it.

Joy peeks through the door
separating the kitchen and the dining area, expecting armed police officers,
maybe the Protectorate. A man in a plain black suit, his face bathed in the low
glow of an e-reader, is somehow simultaneously disappointing and shocking.

“You can relax, Miss
Morana,” he says, “there’s no one here but me, and I mean you no harm. Just the
opposite, in fact.”

“Who the hell are —”

“Who am I, what do I want,
what is this place, why did you feel compelled to come here...I’ll answer all
your questions in good time.”

Joy slips out of the
kitchen, her knife taking the lead. “What’re you, psychic?”

“The proper technical term
is telepath, and no, my gift is much more unusual. Unique, as far as I know,”
he says, laying his e-reader down. “I cannot be remembered by anyone, unless I
allow it. For example, we’ve met once before.”