Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (7 page)

“It’s not necessarily
flattering,” Natalie says. “It means we’re using some dirty tricks and fuzzy
morality to get what we want, and rationalizing it by telling ourselves it’s all
for the greater good.”

“So, like, the ends justify
the means?”

“Exactly.”

“Should’ve just said so.”

“I know this sucks, but I
won’t lie to you, we were in a corner. This was the best bet on a list of bad
options,” Natalie says. “If we’re lucky, Archimedes will realize he’s facing a
life sentence in a dinky cell in a supermax, crack under the pressure and spill
his guts, and we’ll never even have to wheel out the plea deal.”

“Do you think we’ll get
lucky?” I say.

“Us?” Natalie laughs. “No
way.”

SEVEN

Due to my extracurricular
activities, I often have to lie to Mom about my whereabouts. Call me crazy, but
I don’t expect
Hey, Mom, I have to go risk my life fighting a super-powered
whackadoo
would go over well. This time around, I got to tell her the truth
— mostly. I left out the part about sitting for the Quantum Quintet’s youngest
member.

I know, a lie of omission is
still a lie. Cut me some slack, huh?

There’s a patch of woods
near my house, which I use as a secret landing pad. Once I get far enough into
the woods, far enough that no one can see me from the street, I slip on my
headset. Once it boots up, I lay in my course to the Quantum Compound, then
power up. If I wanted to, I could haul some serious ass (and let off some steam
in the process) and cover the sixty-odd miles between Kingsport and Sturbridge
in five minutes easy, but I choose to fly at a more leisurely one hundred fifty
miles per hour.

Upon approach, I make radio
contact with the compound. “Quantum Compound, this is Lightstorm. ETA two
minutes.”

Joe replies. “Roger that,
Lightstorm. I’ll meet you on the pad.”

Joe “Rockjaw” Quentin is a
startling sight the first time around, and I think he’s the main reason the
Quentins don’t go in for the whole secret identity thing. He’s seven feet tall,
for starters, almost as wide, and his skin is the color of desert sandstone and
the texture of polished marble. I once described him as one of those Easter
Island heads with a body attached. Usually, that body is not clad in a tuxedo.

“Evening, Joe,” I say as I
touch down. “Wow, check you out, all fancied up.”

“And off-the-rack, too,” he
jokes.

“Well, you look very
dapper.”

“Thanks. Come on in.” I
follow Joe into the compound, into the family’s common room, which boasts one
of the largest TV screens in the northern hemisphere — which, at present, is
filled with the hi-res mayhem of a heated first-person shooter deathmatch
between Joe’s towheaded twins, Kilroy and Megan.

“Hey, Carrie!” Meg says over
the din of simulated machine gun fire.

The greeting is more than a
nicety; it’s a clever distraction. Kilroy, dumb ol’ teenage boy that he is,
suddenly loses all interest in the game because, oh, hey, pretty girl in the
room, at which point Meg blasts his avatar into pixilated red goo.

“Hey!” he protests. “No
fair!”

“All’s fair in love and war,
Monkeywrench,” Meg says, abandoning her controller to greet me properly. She’s
wearing an absolutely adorable vintage cocktail dress, formal yet fun.

“Would it be bad form on my
part to rifle through your closet while you’re out,” I say, “because that dress
is totally theft-worthy.”

“Thanks! I found it at the
vintage clothing store in town, along with the shoes,” she says, beveling to
show off the matching pumps. “You and Sara and Missy should come over sometime,
we can have a girly day.”

“Definitely.”

“And how do I look?” Kilroy
says, doing a little catwalk strut for me. Meg rolls her eyes on my behalf.
Thanks, Meg.

“You look very nice,” I say,
and yes, Kilroy wears a tux quite well, but I don’t want to encourage his
rampant flirting — but, as I said, he’s a teenage boy, so the blandest of
compliments is as good as me gushing all over him. He’s probably planning our
wedding even now.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” Dr.
Quentin says, and the only reason I recognize her is because she’s carrying
Farley. Dr. Quentin’s default mode is somewhere between dowdy lab rat and hot
librarian: lab coat, clunky glasses, hair up in a bun, conservative skirt,
sensible shoes. Tonight her hair is arranged in a loose updo, and she’s traded
the scientist-mom look for a sleek strapless evening gown — black, with a hint
of sparkle.

“Now I
really
don’t want
to go to this thing,” Joe says, eyeing his wife appreciatively. The twins
squirm, as kids are wont to do whenever their parents hint they might be human
beings with natural desires.

(For the record: I do not
begrudge them their reaction. In my reality, my parents are both virgins and
they made me out of Legos.)

“You be good,” Dr. Quentin
says, trying (and failing) to hide a smile. “That goes for you too, my little
man,” she says, depositing Farley on the floor. “Carrie is a guest in our
house, so treat her appropriately.”

“Okay!” Farley says, and he
dashes over to give me a big smile and hello wave. “Hi, Carrie!”

“Hi, Farley,” I say. “Ready
to have a fun night?”

“Yeah!”

“Should you two feel the
need to get out of the house for a little while,” Dr. Quentin says, “there’s a
small ice cream shop at the bottom of the hill. Farley may have one small ice
cream cone,” she says, directing this more to Farley than to me.

“One small ice cream cone,”
Farley confirms.

“We should be home by
eleven. I’ll call if we run late.” Dr. Quentin starts to herd her family out of
the common room. “Oh, yes, there’s a panic room two floors down, accessible by
stairs, elevator, and an emergency chute in that wall,” she says, pointing out
a panel that looks like the door to a laundry chute.

“Oh. Okay,” I say. Panic
room? “That’s in case of a super-villain attack?”

“Or if Farley has a
tantrum.”

Right, I forgot: Farley has
super-powers too. The twins tried to describe his powers to me once, and all I
know for sure is that when Farley gets angry or frightened, something really
scary happens to him — so scary it necessitates his family installing a
Farley-proof panic room.

I should have asked for my
money in advance.

“All right, Farley,” I say,
settling in on the couch. “What would you like to do? Play a game? Read a
story?”

“Read with me!” Farley races
out of the room, returning a couple minutes later with (be still my heart) a
well-read copy of
The Hobbit
.

“You’re my kind of kid,
Farley. Come on, sit next to me.” Farley climbs up onto the couch. I do most of
the reading, while Farley recites, in a more than passable British accent,
Bilbo’s dialog. I don’t care if I’m not even sixteen, this kid is pushing my
maternal instincts button something fierce.

We blow through the first
four chapters, then Farley says to me, with the affected thoughtfulness and
gravitas only young children are capable of, “I am feeling the need to get out
of the house.”

“Oh, you are, are you?”

“I am.”

“And where, pray tell, might
we go?” He shrugs. “Perhaps to a certain ice cream shop?” Yes, ice cream in
February. It’s a New Englander thing.

He shrugs again.
“Mmmmmmmaaaaaaybe.”

Real smooth, Farley. “Go get
your coat.”

The compound sits near the
top of a large hill overlooking the town of Sturbridge. The Quentins own the
entire hill, so they’ve thoughtfully installed a convenient concrete stairway
leading all the way down to the main road. A series of overhead lights pumps
out an impressive amount of heat, which means we stay nice and toasty warm.
Farley, in his comically bulky winter coat, works up a light sweat during the
walk.

The ice cream shop is a
little mom-and-pop deal, with a take-out window and a small indoor seating
area. Looks like we aren’t the only ones indulging an ice cream craving this
evening; the parking lot is about half-full.

We head inside, and the girl
working the counter greets Farley by name. “How’s my favorite guy?” she says,
peering down at the boy.

“Hi, June. I’m good. This is
Carrie,” he says. “We’re getting out of the house.”

“Hi, Carrie. What can I get
you two?”

The menu boasts a staggering
fifty flavors of ice cream, twenty of those available in soft-serve or frozen
yogurt. It’s an overwhelming selection, yet I immediately zone in on mocha
swirl. Mocha detection is my other super-power.

“Mocha swirl cone for me,
double scoop. Farley?”

He pretends to ponder his
options. “Mocha swirl cone for me,” he says, “one scoop, please.”

“Kid’s a charmer,” June says
to me, then she’s off to grab our snacks.

We sit inside with our cones
and talk about
The Hobbit
, which Farley has read almost as many times as
I have. He definitely inherited his mom’s brains, because he remembers
everything
about the story: he can name all twelve of the dwarves, he knows
The Song of
the Lonely Mountain
by heart, he knows every riddle Bilbo trades with
Gollum. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more engaging discussion about
The
Hobbit
with anyone except my dad. It’s a perfectly delightful little
outing.

...So, of course, some ass
has to go and ruin it by crash-landing in the middle of the parking lot.

 When things like this
happen, people react in one of two ways: They run screaming in the opposite
direction, or they whip out their cell phones and start taking video. This
shop’s clientele is an intelligent bunch; they choose to make themselves
scarce. June, with admirable aplomb, shoos everyone out through a rear exit.

“You call the police,” I
tell her, “I’ll run up to the compound and see if I can get hold of the
Quantums.”

“Right,” she says. I let
June guide me outside, and then Farley and I get the hell out of Dodge —
rather, we run far enough up the hill to make a good show of it.

“Farley, you listen to me,”
I say. “You run home and lock yourself in. Let me take care of this, all
right?”

“Okay,” Farley says. He’s young,
but growing up in a super-hero family means he knows exactly what’s going on,
so I don’t have to worry about him staying out of the way.

I slip on my headset, power
up, and shoot into the sky. I swoop around, and my heart leaps into my throat when
I see a monstrous mech rising from the wreckage of several cars. At first
glance it looks like a Thrasher, but once I get a better look, I realize it’s
not a Thrasher but some second-rate, low-budget cousin. It looks like it’s been
cobbled together from scavenged parts; I swear its chest plate is the hood from
a school bus. There are exposed hydraulics, crude welds and, no lie,
pump-action shotguns bolted to its arms. It’s a Transformer filtered through
Larry the Cable Guy. I’d laugh if it hadn’t just caused several thousand
dollars in damage simply by landing.

The mech sways on wobbly
legs, its hydraulics hissing like an old radiator. The man inside, his head
encased in a football helmet and surrounded by a dented roll cage of thick
steel pipes, swears under his breath.

“Excuse me! You, in the
suit!” I shout. The pilot’s eyes pop when he sees me. “Hi. Could you do me a
favor and deactivate your, uh...this thing, before you cause any more damage?”

“I didn’t do anything
wrong!” the man says. “And you’re not a cop, so you can’t arrest me!”

What the huh? Okay, the guy
is on-edge, but I suppose that’s understandable, what with the crash landing
and all.

“I didn’t plan to arrest
you, sir,” I say in my most soothing tone. This is what police call
de-escalation, an effort to put a jittery suspect at ease so he doesn’t do
something stupid and potentially harmful, to himself or others. “I do want you
to power down your suit, though. I don’t want anyone getting hurt here.”

He eyes me, more than a
little suspiciously. “I don’t want to go to jail,” he says. Nervous sweat rolls
out from beneath his helmet.

“Then I think you should
deactivate your suit and come on out. I’m thinking this was some sort of
accident, yeah?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t — the
fuel mixture in the rockets — I didn’t think...”