Seven Wonders (53 page)
Authors: Adam Christopher
Tony was aware of this as he showered. He'd grown used to it over the past six months. As he was left alone, mostly, the lack of privacy ceased to become an issue. He was comfortable, he didn't care.
The superheroes had grown bored of him too. For the first few weeks of his captivity, Bluebell had tried to read his mind, Linear had tried to strike up friendly conversation, and that lame-ass detective (Sam the superhero? Puh-lease!) had just come and stood on the gantry and stared.
Then one day Bluebell didn't show. Tony hadn't seen her since. Sam was the only constant. She came every day and sat and stared, teleported from the US to Europe in the blink of an eye. Tony had no idea what she was doing. Perhaps the Seven Wonders were giving her training in Jedi mind tricks or some bullshit. Whatever. He ignored her. That was easy. She'd always been a wallflower.
Except Sam hadn't turned up today. Tony registered her absence early, and found himself pacing the cell all morning. He didn't care, tried not to care, didn't want to care, but her absence made him anxious. His routine was spoilt. He wanted to sit and read and ignore her. If she wasn't there, he couldn't. It bugged him. Eventually he stopped pacing and stood by the wall of the cell, looking out at the gantry.
Tony tried to remember what San Ventura had looked like before the meteors came. He frowned. He couldn't remember anything. San Ventura had been totaled, that he did know. He probably wouldn't recognize the place now, rebuilt with the help of the superheroes of the world. Not that he'd ever be in a position to visit the outside world again.
There was a bang, far away. It was hardly a sound at all, more a subtle thud against his eardrums from somewhere way beyond the security area. It was only because the cell, and the surrounding security zone, were so completely silent that he registered it at all. His superheroic guard was also absent.
There it was again. Louder this time. Judging direction was meaningless, but perhaps it had come from the other side of the door. Or perhaps the door was thinner than the walls and acted as a natural soundboard. Who knew?
The door to the gantry opened. Someone ran in, and the door stayed open behind them. Black-skinned, lithe, athletic, female. Not blackskinned, someone wearing a skintight black suit. A costume. The weird head bobbed as she got closer, until Tony recognized the angled triangular front of the mask and the twin curved surfaces that swept back and up past the back of the head. Tony's flat, empty black eyes blinked and he smiled for the first time in half a year.
"Stand back, pretty boy," said Blackbird. She fished something out of her belt, some small, silver rectangle. A red LED flickered madly on its front edge as her thumb caressed the upper surface. The light switched to a steady bright blue, and the transparent cell door swung open and down, forming a twenty-foot drawbridge connecting the box to the gantry.
Blackbird pocketed the device, stood for a moment, then cocked her head. Her mask exaggerated the movement, making it look like the inquisitive stare of a magpie.
"You coming or what?"
There were two more thuds from beyond the main door. Blackbird half-turned, her right hand slipping down her thigh to slide an impressively large gun from a holster. That was new.
"Tony, hurry the fuck up. I'm rescuing you, like, now. Come on, dammit."
Tony smiled again and stepped onto the bridge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Christopher was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and grew up watching Pertwee-era
Doctor Who
and listening to The Beatles, which isn't a bad start for a child of the Eighties. In 2006, Adam moved to the sunny North West of England, where he now lives in domestic bliss with his wife and cat in a house next to a canal, although he has yet to take up any fishing-related activities.
When not writing Adam can be found drinking tea and obsessing over DC Comics, Stephen King, and The Cure. He is also a strong advocate for social media, especially Twitter, which he spends far too much time on avoiding work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the result of years of reading and enjoying and loving comics. I'm something of a latecomer to the medium, having waited until the ripe old age of about 23 to pick up my first issue of
2000AD.
I was hooked from page one, and after a while decided to give Marvel and DC Comics a go. It was then that I made a somewhat surprising discovery: I love superheroes. Discovering superhero comics was like
coming home
. Maybe it's the heroics. Maybe it's the ideals. Maybe it's the spandex and silly names. But superheroes changed my life, and all for the better. So I owe a huge debt to the legion of creators, writers, artists and editors going right back to the late 1930s. It would be foolish to try and name them all (I don't have that much room here!), but if it weren't for the greats of the Golden and Silver Ages of the American comic book,
Seven Wonders
wouldn't exist. My thanks then to Otto Binder, Steve Ditko, Bill Finger, Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino, Bob Kane, Gill Kane, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Jerry Robinson, John Romita Sr, Julius Schwartz, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Curt Swan, and of course Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, as well as a thousand others who over the span of the 20th century created a body of work truly mythological in scale.
Their work is continued, of course, by the modern greats. Once again they are too numerous to mention, but my special thanks to Kurt Busiek, whose epic
Astro City
remains a fundamental to my love of superhero comics. And thanks also Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Geoff Johns, Paul Levitz, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Gail Simone.
And if we're talking about inspiration, long before I started reading comics, the spark of
Seven Wonders
was lit many,
many
years ago by one of my favourite bands, Pixies. Interested readers may want to check out their 1988 album
Surfer Rosa
, in particular, track nine: "Tony's Theme". If
Seven Wonders
ever needs a song to play out over the end credits, that's the one.
My thanks to my dynamic duo of beta-readers, Kate Sherrod and Taylor B Wright, and to my international league of super-friends who I can rely on for support, encouragement, and the occasional saving of the Earth from diabolical masterminds: Lizzie Barrett, Lauren Beukes, Joelle Charbonneau, Paul Cornell, Kim Curran, Dale Halvorsen, Nick Harkaway, Tom Hunter, Laura Lam, Mur Lafferty, Matthew McBride, Lou Morgan, Tom Pollock, Adrian Tchiakovsky, Chuck Wendig and Jen Williams. Special thanks also to Mark "The Cowl" Nelson, Emma Vieceli, and the superhero known only as Your Imaginary Pal over at the Comic Book Resources forum.
Thanks as always to the Angry Robots themselves, Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris and the rest, and to the remarkable Will Staehle. I'm a lucky boy, and I sure know it. And thanks to Stacia Decker, my exceptionally kick-ass agent, for being exceptionally kick-ass.
Finally, to Sandra, my wife, who puts up with late nights and lost weekends and still continues to provide all the love, encouragement and support her writer husband needs.
That
is what I call superheroic. I love you.
DELETED SCENES
#1: TONY AND THE ATM
Author's note: Some parts of
Seven Wonders
were written as a series of vignettes, as I wanted to explore all the different things Tony might do as his superpowers developed. This deleted scene originally took place after the police raid on Tony and Jeannie's apartment and the pair fee. It was supposed to be the frst time Tony killed anyone, fuelling his journey to the dark side. However, after shuffing the book's timeline a little, it made more sense for Tony to take the police out in the apartment, so this sequence became superfuous. The
Smallville
reference is a nod to the second episode of season three
, Phoenix,
in which Clark smashes ATMs to steal thousands of dollars while under the infuence of red kryptonite.
Tony eyed the machine with vague uncertainty. Being in a less-travelled back street behind the Moore-Reppion shopping plaza, the ATM was an older model, scuffed but functional, a half-hearted attempt at graffti scrawled across the sliding panel that hid the keypad. Tony hadn't seen a machine this old for a long time. He looked around, but at four in the morning there was nobody around except Jeannie.
Jeannie took a couple of steps backwards, unconsciously checking around her like Tony did, just in case. She rolled her hands together, motioning towards the cash machine.
"Go on!"
Tony frowned. "I don't know about this."
"Tony," Jeannie hissed. Tony didn't fnd her quite so attractive when she was like this. "We need cash. You think being a superhero comes cheap?"
"Um…" Tony turned to stare at the machine. She was right. His job was history. So was the apartment. They needed fundage, but…
stealing
? Didn't that kinda go against the whole superhero thing?
"Old machines like this don't hold much cash," said Jeannie. "The bank'll just write it off."
Tony shuffed. Jeannie sighed.
"And when you're a member of the Seven Wonders and money is no object, you can make it up with a charitable donation, okay?"
Tony nodded, trying to convince himself. She was right, right? A little cash would go a long way. The ends justifed the means, right? If he could clean the city up and remove the Cowl, nobody would begrudge him a few readies.
He glanced at Jeannie. "Like in
Smallville
?"
"
Just
like in
Smallville
."
Tony balled his right hand into a fst. Still uncertain, he raised it to his face and inspected his knuckles. He ran the fngers of his other hand over bones, almost testing them to make sure they were as solid as he remembered. Actually, they were nothing like he remembered. They looked the same and felt the same but he knew that somehow, miraculously, they were as hard as diamond. Even the skin, warm, pale, stretched over the knuckles on a bed of subcutaneous fat – even that soft, pliable surface was completely impenetrable. Tony frowned again, then took a step back himself.
"Stand back."
"Standing."
Tony aimed for the center of the machine, throwing his fst forward with as much force as he could muster. He had no idea of the internal schematics of an ATM, but assumed that the money would be inside some kind of safe. He half-remembered stories of crooks ripping machines out of bank walls with tow trucks, then spending a month trying to cut the intact machine open with blowtorches in an abandoned farmhouse somewhere in the country. ATMs were tough to crack. On the face of it they were easy targets, so they had to be.
Tony's train of thought was only broken when he realized he'd punched through the machine's front as far as his elbow. The tiny green computer monitor (hell, this really was an
old
machine) popped with a sharp bang and a fash, and somewhere inside the severed electronics sparked, lighting Tony and Jeannie up briefy with fickering blue light. Tony swore and looked around, but they were still alone in the street. He extricated his arm from the hole and tried to decide what to do next. Jeannie peered into the machine's dark innards.
"Cash?"
"Not sure…" Tony reached in again. "Can't feel anything."
Jeannie tapped her foot. "Pull it out. Let's get a better look."
Tony reached into the hole with both hands and tugged. Part of the plastic façade of the machine few off. He tried again and gripped something more substantial, and lifted. The heavy frame of the machine squealed in protest as the ATM was pulled from the wall, shattering the brick on either side. Tony dropped the machine onto its back on the pavement and leaned over it. He pushed at the sides of the hole he'd made in its front, splitting the workings of the machine like papier-mâché. A black metal box lay at the center, with a variety of slots and metal attachments surrounding it.
"Bingo," said Jeannie. Tony saw her grin caught by the dim streetlights. He couldn't stop himself from smiling either. How much money did an ATM hold? If this machine was a less-used one, and one of a virtually antique design, did that mean it was full, or did they only load it with enough cash to meet demand?
Tony realized it didn't matter. Cracking the machine had been easy. Too easy. And the city was full of them. They were going to go home with pockets of cash after just a couple of hours work. Wherever home was now of course. Jeannie seemed to know where she was going, at least.
Tony allowed himself a smile. It would be okay, once he'd saved the city. Cash would rain down on his head.
"Open it, come on!"
Tony felt around the edges of the black container and, not entirely sure what he should do, pulled a few wires and a couple of support brackets out to separate the safe from the machine itself. It slid without much diffculty from the heart of the ATM, but when he set it down on the pavement the thud was audible – the thing was heavy, and he hadn't even noticed.
He turned it over and found the door at the back. That looked like the easiest option, but when he yanked the handle but the heavy steel snapped in his hand. He swore, and resorted to something more primitive, punching the door until it caved enough to give him an edge to get his fngertips on. Then he pulled, bending the door around its locking mechanism which rattled but remained otherwise intact. Eventually, he managed to pull enough of the inch-thick metal down to see the stacked cartridges inside.