Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (27 page)

If he was surprised she knew who he was, he didn’t show it. “Those days are over.”

“Not for Quanta, apparently,” she said.

“How’s the TV reception in here?” the Carpenter chipped in. He just couldn’t keep his damn mouth shut. “I take it you caught the evening news. Old buddy of yours in the cage, right?”

Frank paused, and a moment later the blade was gone from her throat and his hands were in his pockets. Still, she knew Frank could slit both their throats before either of them could react. Omegaman wasn’t a speedster—though he could still thrash any normal in a foot race—but he was agile.

“Hayne was a terrible man,” Frank said. He turned away from them. “He always was. Smarter than he looked, though. He never let his guard down when we were active.”

She tried again to get enough give in the rope to reach her utilities, but the bonds just dug into her wrists.

“We know who Sam is,” she said.

No reaction.

“Ever think some of that information might have been relevant to our investigation?” the Carpenter said.

“It was too risky to tell you,” Frank said. “It’s always been too risky. I had to protect him.”

“And a fine job of that you did,” the Carpenter said.

Frank’s back stiffened, but he didn’t raise his voice. “I still haven’t decided if I can let you walk out of here knowing what you know. Don’t test me.”

“Quanta already knows,” Niobe said, trying to suppress a growing frustration. “How much longer do you think your precious secret’s going to last?”

“I need to protect Sam,” he said again.

“No. You need us to do our jobs. I don’t care about you, Frank, and I don’t trust you. We’ve got a bunch of ex-heroes aligning themselves with that supervillain, and for all I know you might be one of them. I’m here for Sam. I don’t know what Quanta wants with him, but given what he just did to Iron Justice, I don’t think the son of Dr Atomic is going to have a long, fruitful life ahead of him. Not unless you let us go and let us do our fucking jobs.”

Her hands had formed fists so tight her nails dug into her palms. With a conscious effort, she forced herself to relax and breathe. She couldn’t let her emotions get out of control.

For a few minutes, silence filled the room. Far away, she could still hear the wail of sirens through the city. The coppers were wasting their time. Quanta was way out of Met Div’s league.

Finally, Frank turned back to face them. “I think I believe you. I heard how you went after Quanta’s people last night. There aren’t many metas who throw trees around.” He sighed. “And I suppose I don’t have any other choice.”

“Swell,” the Carpenter said. He wriggled his hand beneath the ropes. “If you don’t mind…?”

Frank nodded, and he held up the sword-cane. Her stomach clenched at the sight of it, but he just sliced through the bonds around her wrists and ankles and then moved to free the Carpenter. A thousand needles prickled her fingers as the blood rushed back. She pulled back the sleeves of her jacket and rubbed her wrists where the ropes had left purple marks.

She stood up—slowly. Oppenheimer made no move to stop her. Stretching felt good. Whatever Frank had drugged her with was potent stuff. She stepped outside the ring of lights, and for a moment she pressed herself into the darkest corner she could find, avoiding the morning light coming through the window. It was heaven to be out of the glare.

She found her gun sitting on the table. A sudden, insane urge gripped her, telling her to put a stun round in Frank Oppenheimer and get some real answers. But she just slipped the gun back into its holster beneath her jacket. She wasn’t going to solve this with violence. Not when Omegaman could kill her before she could blink.

She picked up the Carpenter’s hatchet and tossed it to him. It slowed and stopped in mid-air, then settled gently into the loop on his belt. He tipped his hat to her.

“All right, Frank,” she said, “here’s how I see it. You need us, that much is clear. If you didn’t, you would’ve already gone after Quanta yourself.”

He said nothing while he busied himself unplugging a cord from the wall socket. All the lamps and torches went out at once.

Niobe checked her pockets and utility belt to make sure he hadn’t helped himself to anything while she was out. Everything was in place. She continued.

“I figure you’re afraid to go out. You know Quanta knows too much about you.”

Silence for a moment. Then he began to speak. “It’s not fear. Twenty-five years ago, when I stopped being a physicist and became a weapon, when I found myself crawling through German bunkers in Berlin, hunting down the last of Hitler’s inner circle to put my knife in their spines, that was fear. This is logic. Pure, cold logic. Something happened, and now Quanta has a line on me. If I try to move against him, he’ll know, and he’ll kill me before I can kill him.” His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Sam needs me more than he knows. If I die, he’s lost. I won’t die.”

“So Quanta already tried to make a play for you,” the Carpenter said.

Frank grunted. “I came to New Zealand to meet someone. Someone I’d known for thirty years. We went to college together, for God’s sake. He’d moved out here to work in Unity Corporation’s agricultural research subsidiary. Their main work was in genetics, improving beef and milk yields, but they’d also been studying the effects of the Auckland bomb on livestock. He got a message to me through a series of old friends, saying he had something I would want to look at. Something that would keep Sam safe forever. We set sail for New Zealand the next day.”

“A trap?” Niobe asked.

He nodded, and his thick eyebrows drew down low over his eyes. “They nearly had me. Metahumans, maybe a dozen of them. They’d stunned me before I knew what was happening, before I could phase away through the walls or the floor. There was a psychic there, I think he put a trace on me.”

So that was why he couldn’t do this himself. The psychic would sense it as soon as Frank came within half a mile of him. Without surprise, even Omegaman couldn’t fight all of Quanta’s metas at once.

Frank paused for a moment, then continued. “I only got away because one of them tripped when they were putting me in the cage. I fought my way free and went straight back to the boat. I had to get Sam and get out. But something was wrong. I could tell someone was watching the boat. I got in the water a few hundred yards up and swam back, staying underwater as much as I could. Phased up through the hull of the boat. But Sam was already gone.” He scowled. “I grabbed what I needed and left.”

She was having trouble summoning sympathy for him. He’d dragged the kid halfway round the world for this crap, only to be stupid enough to walk into something like that. So much for all the cautious uncle bullshit. Sam would’ve been better on his own.

She fished out her now-crumpled cigarette pack and extracted a Pall Mall. Frank frowned at her, but he didn’t say anything when she lit up.

“All righty,” the Carpenter said. He crossed his arms and perched himself on the edge of a table. “Maybe you should explain to us kids at the back of the class how the heck Dr Atomic managed to get himself an extra son no one knew about.”

“Not to mention one apparently born years after Robert’s death,” she added.

If the subject of his brother’s death was painful to him, Frank didn’t show it. “It’s complicated.”

“Simplify it,” the Carpenter said.

Frank sighed. “The world considers Dr Atomic to be the world’s most multi-talented superhero, as well as the most powerful. Speed, flight, telekinesis, bullet-resistance. The jack of all trades, and master of them all, too. But really, all his powers were manifestations of a single ability. He was a psychic, an impossibly strong one. There was almost no limit to how he could manipulate the world around him.” He locked eyes with her. “Like I said, in those early days, we were weapons. Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project, they were military projects, and so were we. No one could kill Nazis like Dr Atomic.”

His eyes caught the glint of a lamp’s bulb, and she could tell Frank wasn’t there in the room with her. She breathed out a lungful of smoke into the silent room, and waited.

“One night in forty-five we were hiding out in a farmhouse a few miles from Berlin. I found him huddled in the corner, crying. I hadn’t seen him do that since we were children. It took a while before I could get him to tell me what was wrong. But in the end it came out. He’d been hearing voices. And not just any voices. The voices of those he’d killed. For the last two months, there had been an ever increasing chorus of babbling and screaming and begging inside his head.”

“Psychosis?” she said. “Or a tumour?”

He shook his head. “When we were stateside again, the metahuman doctor gave him a psych evaluation and brain scan. No tumour, no atrophy, no simple psychosis. But with Mr October’s psychic help, the doctor figured it out. It wasn’t a hallucination. Whenever my brother killed someone, their mind left an imprint on his hypersensitive psyche. Like voices on a gramophone record. And each new imprint fractured his mind a little more.”

She’d never heard this story. It wasn’t impossible. Psychics often had problems with mental instability. But in all the comic books and propaganda films, Dr Atomic was infallible. If there was someone standing in the way of freedom, he could always be counted on for a quip and a fast right hook. Through the haze of her cigarette smoke, Frank started to look old again.

“What do you know of Dr Atomic’s retirement?” he asked.

“His wife and kids got caught in a bomb meant for him.” It was one of the earliest events she could still remember since the Blind Man had taken her memories. The papers ran the story on Dr Atomic’s family for weeks. The assassins were never caught, though the Manhattan Eight had shaken down every major supercriminal they could get their hands on. Dr Atomic withdrew from the public limelight after that. A few years later, he was dead from throat cancer, and the world mourned.

“I never thought everyone would buy the story, but Mr October sold it. They’d left the world in our hands for years by then. They’d believe anything we told them.”

“Believe what, Frank?” she said.

“There was no assassin, no bomb,” he said. His voice was thin. “It was Robert. Dr Atomic killed his wife and children with his own hands.”

Her cigarette had almost burned down to nothing. Ash dropped onto her boots, but she barely noticed.

Frank closed his eyes. “He didn’t mean to. To this day, I believe that. My brother was a good man. He was the best of men. But the voices in his head did things to him. Those last few months, he never knew what he was doing, where he was. He screamed through the night. We all tried to help; we thought we could fix him. But after he killed his family, we knew what we had to do.

“It took all seven of us to bring him down. Protos and Mr October were in intensive care at the base for nearly three months after his psy-blast hit them. Protos left the hospital in a body bag. In the end, it came down to me and Iron Justice to bring down Robert. Hayne was the only one tough enough to take his attacks, and I was the only one quick enough to get behind him.”

“You killed him?” The Carpenter sounded incredulous. She wasn’t sure she believed it either. “You killed Dr Atomic?”

For a moment, he didn’t move. Then, slowly, he shook his head. “Hayne wanted to. We probably could have. But when I went before the House Un-American Activities Committee and they accused me of being a Communist, Robert spoke for me. He was the one who brought me onboard at Los Alamos. We shared summers at the family cabin in New Mexico. The world loved Dr Atomic. But I loved Robert. He was my brother.”

“What did you do with him, then?” she asked.

“We imprisoned him. We built the strongest prison the world has ever seen, right in the middle of New Mexico, and we left him there. And there he stayed, out of his mind, never knowing what he had done, until the cancer got him.” He shrugged slowly. “Perhaps that was all the mercy we could hope for.”

She stubbed out the pitiful remnant of her cigarette, flicked it into the kitchenette sink, and stood awkwardly in place, hands in her pockets. She still didn’t trust Frank, but she couldn’t exactly be angry at him, either. She could barely remember her own brothers, but she tried to picture herself in Frank’s situation with Gabby or the Carpenter on the other side. The thought sent ice through her veins.

The Carpenter stepped up and put a hand on Frank’s shoulder. “Sorry, Frank. Really. That’s rough.” Solomon glanced at her and nodded towards the man.

“Yeah,” she said. “Condolences.”

Once more, the room was silent. She had a head full of questions, but interrogating him now seemed a tad on the insensitive side. She ran through what she knew of Dr Atomic’s deeds in her mind. It was around 1950 when he “retired”, and maybe ’53 or ’54 when he died. The accident at Los Alamos that led to the creation of the first heroes was in ’44, so Dr Atomic was active for around five or six years.

The Manhattan Eight had their share of enemies back in those days. The Russians weren’t too happy to get beaten in the race to Berlin, and there were rumours that at least some of the Manhattan Eight were sent on covert missions in the Soviet Union soon after the war. They were nearly sent to Japan as well, but Truman and his generals decided to show the world their other secret weapon, the atomic bomb. The US was making it clear that it wasn’t to be messed with.

But when the war was done, public support for military-backed superheroes waned. The Manhattan Eight—like many of the other fresh-faced heroes emerging at the time—were scientists at heart, not soldiers. Eventually, the government relented, and the Manhattan Eight became independent, dedicated to protecting the world and the innocent, not the interests of any one nation. Or so the comics went. Dozens of corrupt politicians, rogue states, supercriminals, and organised crime rings fell to them.

The Carpenter was the first to break the silence. “Question,” he said, raising his hand like a schoolboy. “If Dr Atomic killed his wife and kids, where does Sam come in?”

Frank nodded. “Kitty—Robert’s wife—figured out how sick he was long before the rest of us. When she found out she was pregnant again, she came to me. She was so scared. I don’t know what he’d done to her, and I didn’t understand then, not really, but I agreed to keep the pregnancy a secret. Robert was away for months at a time in those days, on mission after mission. Even when he was in the States, he barely visited her.” He shook his head. “God, I don’t know why it took me so long to understand how sick he was.”