Masked (2010) (55 page)

“Perhaps if you get closer,” Dormouse said.

“Wouldn’t help,” Visionary said. “That would just narrow my focus even further. I need the perspective of this distance to give me even a slight chance of catching her. Why are you here, anyway? The big guns are on the way. This isn’t going to be the sort of fight you could survive. No offense, but it’s out of your league.”

“Believe me, I know it. But I was already here last night, tracking down a lead. When I woke yesterday I took a look at the reports from my mousetraps. It’s what I always do when I wake up, to see what’s happened while I was out of commission. One of the mousetraps in Liberty had caught a partial picture of one of Strangeface’s robots. I figured this must be where he’d sent them all, so this was the most likely place to find him.”

“You have every city under surveillance by your electronic bugs?”

“Hardly. As inexpensive as they may be individually, I’m a girl on a budget. But I served my internship year here, after graduating from Pelion. Pissed me off at the time, let me tell you. I was top of my class. Valedictorian. And yet the Kyron sentences me to a year in Liberty? What did I ever do to him?”

“Not overly fond of the place?”

“Who could be, after what they did to Sergeant Liberty? I did my job though. Exactly three hundred and sixty-five days of first-rate superhero work. Saved lives. Cats out of trees. The whole package. In my time here I brought in the Ling Brothers, broke up the Jolly Rogers, and even survived a throwdown with Thun
derhead once. Then, when I was reprieved, I moved on and never looked back. Well—except that I check in through my mousetraps from time to time. I still have some here, left over from back then. The little things are designed to be hard to spot, and randomly change location, making them not quite as easy to recover as they are to deploy. A few always get left behind. And even three years later, some of my guys here still work.”

“Here they come,” Visionary said.

Saint George flew in from the west, fast, like a launched missile. In the sky over Liberty he rendezvoused with Doc Jerusalem in her chariot of fire.

“Achilles and Underman are in the chariot with her,” Visionary said. “Must have picked them up on the way.”

“How can you tell?” Dormouse said, shading her eyes from the stab of brightness overhead. “I can’t see a thing.” Visionary didn’t answer. Instead his attention shot back toward the center of town. A brief smile flitted across his face.

“There she is,” he said. His eyes flashed bright blue for an instant. “Got her!”

“Dirty Bomb?”

“Yep. I froze her in place, right in front of Anthony’s Café. Couldn’t be certain of killing her with Red. If she can recover from blowing herself to bits, maybe she could recover from being disintegrated by an outside force. Why take the chance? Had to zap her with Blue instead.”

“You would have killed her?” Dormouse said.

“Of course.”

“But we don’t do that.”

“Open your eyes, Miss,” he said. “This isn’t going to be police work today. This time someone started a war. Different rules. Better make yourself scarce now. It’s about to get rough.”

There were no further explosions, but the heart of Liberty continued to burn.

I is for Imaginary

A Friend in Need

Like a swarm of gnats off an animal’s carcass, a sparkling cloud rose up from the burning heart of the town, into the sky. Then the twinkling motes began to disperse over the city. Hundreds of them moved toward the newly arrived heroes, resolving themselves into individual shapes as they came closer.

“Here comes Strangeface’s robot army,” Saint George broadcast to the others. The robots were giants and they were miniatures. Some were shaped like men. Some looked like featureless small metal boxes or shiny baseballs. They floated on invisible suspensor fields, or shot forward on plumes of fire, mimicking Saint George’s own rocket jets. Most bristled with weapons, and all were incased in a carapace of mirror-bright chrome.

“I’ll take them,” Saint George said. He pointed his laser finger at the approaching figures and slowly fanned a bright red pencil-thin beam back and forth through their ranks. Pieces of metal bodies began to rain down from the sky.

On the ground, giant tracked monsters rumbled along the streets, mowing down people wherever they went with their canons and machine guns and grenade launchers. Strangeface’s amplified voice boomed from every vehicle. “Attention, heroes! The time for ultimate sacrifice has come upon you at last! All you have to do is kill yourselves and we stop killing civilians! That’s your only choice! Those are the only terms we’ll accept! Do you have what it takes to give the last full measure of devotion? Are you true heroes after all? Kill yourselves and we stop killing civilians!” The message repeated continuously. It was also simultaneously broadcast from every TV and radio in town.

Achilles leapt down from Jerusalem’s chariot, still suspended in the sky. He advanced toward one of the tracked robot tanks and began tearing it apart, ignoring the bullets and bombs that shot at him or exploded around him.

Achilles wore his own piece of shining steel armor, a single
protective brace around one ankle. Most of the ground robots concentrated their fire there, not realizing it was a simple but effective trick, designed to distract and divert an enemy’s efforts and attention. It had worked for fifty years. To this day no one knew that this Achilles had no special weakness to exploit.

Other heroes began to arrive. The new generation, with names like Xenoboy, Razorheart, and Wonder Child.

A convoy of black vans roared into the city, and then pulled up at the edges of the rapidly expanding battle zone. Armed federal agents helped a thin young man out of one of the vehicles. It was immediately clear the man wasn’t cooperating.

“Take me back!” he shouted. “I’m no superhero, you idiots! I tell you I can’t help in a fight! Only afterward!”

“This is a special situation, Mr. Faust!” one of the agents said. “We need your imaginary men! As many as you can conjure!”

Fagan Faust was known in public as The Imaginary Friend, and he was indeed a proven friend to the entire civilized world. His Zero Men had created many public works that fed and housed thousands. They worked tirelessly, after earthquake or flood, or any other sort of disaster or national emergency, and in peaceful times turned wastelands into parks, deserts into farmlands, slums into palaces. But Fagan Faust was something of a dedicated coward.

“Don’t you get it? I can’t use my imaginary men in a fight, because I can’t imagine myself in a fight! I couldn’t conjure a single one under these conditions if my life depended on it! Take me out of here!”

And, with utmost reluctance, they did.

J is for Jerusalem

Legend in Song and Deed

Jenny Green was better known as Doc Jerusalem, champion of England’s green and pleasant land. She took up her bow of burning
gold and shot the arrows of desire into one deadly machine after another. She never missed, and each robot so struck died instantly. On her hip the Sleeping Sword began to stir in its sheath, waking to the din of battle, aching to once more be in her hand, where it wouldn’t sleep again until the struggle was ended.

K is for Kyron

In the Black Tower

The black tower floated stately and serenely, suspended on its four powerful gravity subtraction engines, high above the forested valley below. It was over southern Minnesota today, drifting east toward the Wisconsin Dells. This was the Mount Pelion School, the most elite, prestigious, expensive superhero training academy in the planet’s history. Pelion had been in continuous operation since it was actually located in a cave on the original Mount Pelion, when Jason and Heracles were numbered among its original student body.

High up on one of its smooth obsidian flanks a hanger door was open, to let the natural daylight flood the large chamber. Owen Dixon, the current Kyron of the school, operated the remote control of an electronic winch with one hand, slowly and carefully lowering himself into the strange vessel directly underneath him. It was a robotic horse’s body, missing a head, built on a scale to match a knight’s heavy warhorse of old—a copper-colored metal Clydesdale or Percheron. With small touches on the control, Owen continued lowering himself in his cradle, until the burn-scarred stumps of his missing legs dangled just over the robot’s cockpit, located where the missing head would be, were this an actual steed. Then he thumbed the switch that caused the three direct-interface cables to rise up from the cockpit and attach themselves to him. He winced only slightly as the long needles inserted themselves. When that was done, he disengaged the cradle straps and settled his body
the remaining few inches with arm strength alone. He engaged the locks and tightened the harness belts. Then he began systems tests. The horse’s powerful legs responded to his mental commands. The jump jets flashed green-for-go in his mind’s eye. One by one, various weapons systems reported themselves as loaded, armed, and ready. He walked forward a few tentative steps. Heavy metal hooves boomed a watch bell’s dull toll against the metal floor. Moving over to a rack against the near wall, he began to take up the helmet and additional pieces of armor that would protect his exposed upper torso, arms, and head.

“Kye Owen, would you like to tell me what you’re doing?”

Owen turned, and the robot horse body turned with him, becoming more a part of him with every second. Melvin Agerholm, the only currently living Kye emeritus of the school, was standing in the smaller open doorway leading back into the tower’s greater depths.

“Good morning, Kye Agerholm,” Owen said. “I’m just on my way out.”

“To do what?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Owen gestured to the large flat-screen TV mounted on one wall. It showed live news coverage of the battle in Liberty. At the moment the camera was following a wild-eyed young man, dressed all in red, madly cutting down one person after another with what may have been a knife. It was hard to be certain, as his weapon hand moved too swiftly to follow. Then another man in a cape landed next to the knife-wielder, was clearly about to strike him, but suddenly looked pained, weak, and confused. The knife hand moved in a blur. There was a spray of crimson and then the caped man fell headless to the ground.

“I’m going to Liberty, to help,” Owen said.

“No you don’t,” Melvin said. There were liver spots visible on the pleated folds of his neck. “You aren’t in the superhero business anymore. Those days ended when Gravesmith took your legs. You’re a teacher now. Your job is to create new heroes to take up the mantle.”

“But with this battle wagon—” Owen began.

“Which isn’t yours. It’s school property, created at great expense to help you train your students. Period. School’s not in session now, so you’ve no business fiddling with it. Park it back in its stall, Owen, and stand down. I see a number of your former students are already in Liberty, doing what you’ve so ably educated them to do. Let that be enough.”

Owen moved a few steps toward one of the shuttles parked in the hanger—the heavy one, big enough to carry him and his borrowed robot half to Liberty in a matter of minutes.

“Leave now and I’ll convene an emergency meeting of the board,” Melvin said. “You’ll be dismissed within the hour.”

The two men, equally stubborn and willful, stared at each other as the black tower drifted silently through untroubled skies.

L is for Liberty

Man of the Hour

Only five short years ago, Liberty, Pennsylvania, was the safest of all major American cities in which to live, work, and raise a family, because Sergeant Liberty, its beloved hometown champion and protector, kept it so.

Then Sergeant Liberty fought the (now infamous) duel with his arch nemesis King Ogre, and everything changed suddenly and, it seems, irrevocably.

Everyone knows the details. It was a long and terrible battle, ending only when Sergeant Liberty finally threw his foe down from the top of the Codex Tower’s revolving restaurant. King Ogre went to the morgue. Liberty went to the hospital.

In the emergency room, dedicated doctors worked tirelessly to save him. Of course, they had to cut away his mask. The wounds to his face and head were too severe. And of course, the entire incident was recorded by the treatment room’s cameras. It was strict hospital
policy to record all medical procedures for educational and insurance purposes. But it wasn’t policy for one of the hospital’s many employees (the specific offender was never discovered) to isolate a few key frames of that recording and sell the pictures to the
Liberty Post.

Before he was out of the critical care ward, while he was still in a medically induced coma, the
Post
had identified Sergeant Liberty as none other than one Joseph Armstrong Wilcox, a contractor specializing in decorative stonework for new home construction. Afterward they never adequately explained, nor unconditionally apologized for, their decision to publish. One reporter described it as “more of a case of no one deciding not to publish.” Within a day of the news hitting the streets (Saturday morning bulldog edition) Joe’s wife and three children had been slaughtered in their Cedar Valley neighborhood home. The killers were never found. It was widely known that Sergeant Liberty had many enemies, most of whom were certainly the sort to carry a grudge and have the will to act on it in so brutal a fashion.

When he’d recovered, of course, Joe Wilcox left Liberty, never to return. Nor was Sergeant Liberty ever seen again.

M is for Max

Master of the Blade

There was a pause in the battle for a moment and The Ordinary Man couldn’t help himself. He was standing next to Max the Knife and he had to ask. “You know the song is ‘
Mack
the Knife,’ right? Not Max.”

“Yeah, so? My name happens to be Max.”

“Okay, but some part of you has to realize it’s dumb to use one of your real names as part of your trade name. And it’s even dumber, because that isn’t actually the name in the song.”

“You’d best let it drop,” Strangeface interrupted. “Max doesn’t like to be corrected.”