Shades of Gray (31 page)

“I’m sorry,” says the Good Cop.

“Thanks.” Garth says a silent prayer for Julie, then continues. “So I walk around to the side. And there I see a man laying into a woman. Girl, really. Looked to be all of sixteen. He’s hitting her, and maybe getting ready to do worse. So I go up to him and tap him on the shoulder. And when he turns to me, I punch his face in.”

“Don’t you think maybe that was a little aggressive, Mr. McFarlane?”

He eyes Joe the Bad Cop. “Maybe I should’ve waited for him to blacken her other eye, yeah?”

Good Cop says, “You understand, sir, that the problem is Ms. Lang is saying that Mr. Jordan wasn’t beating her.”

“So I guess she accidentally fell face-first onto his fist. Jaysus!” Garth wants to spit. He manages to only scowl.

“You’re lucky that Mr. Jordan isn’t pressing charges.”

“That’s me,” Garth says bitterly. “Mister Lucky.”

“Let’s talk about your … condition,” says Bad Cop.

Here we go again
. “Sure.”

Joe scans his notes. “You’re not in the data banks as a known extrahuman.”

“That would be because I’m not an extrahuman.” More like a sortaextrahuman. But whatever. It’s always been enough to keep him off Corp-Co’s radar.

“But your eyes glow, Mr. McFarlane.”

“They do. It’s a neat party trick. I’m sure it says in my medical records that I was given a high dosage of Praxical when I was three. My folks were rather desperate about me not being so sensitive to light,” he says, shrugging. “You see all the good it’s done me.”

“You really expect us to believe that?”

“Sir, I’ve been sitting here for three hours, all for doing what I thought was a good deed. I don’t really care what you believe. Are you arresting me, or what?”

“You should drop the attitude.”

“Come on, Joe,” says Good Cop. “He’s been through enough.”

He’s let go with a stern warning to leave the policing to the police. Good Cop actually walks him to the precinct door.

“Everyone’s temper’s up,” he says by way of apology. “Lunatic superheroes, rioting citizens. It’s enough to give a cop a case of the nerves.”

“I can see that,” says Garth.

The detective shakes his hand. “For what it’s worth, I think you did good. It’s probably wasted, though. She’s the sort who’ll defend her man up until she wakes up dead one day, thanks to his not-beating her.”

Garth leaves.

The big problem with vigilantism, he muses, isn’t the swollen knuckles or the loose teeth. It’s all the time eaten up when cooling one’s heels at the local police station.

Maybe he should wear a costume. That seems to make people impervious to getting hauled in for questioning. Garth decides to raid his closet once he gets home; maybe he can find something in basic black.

When he walks into the apartment—still with the temporary wooden panel serving as a front door—he wishes so much for Julie to be there that he almost hears her puttering about in the kitchen, asking him if he wants a drink. Even if he says no, she’ll bring him one anyway, overflowing with cubes, and he’ll thank her, and they’ll find something deadly on the tele and settle down for a cuddle and some mindless fun …

But it’s not Julie. It’s Terry, or one of the others, helping themselves to his food and drink.

Garth sighs, the sound like a sob.
She’ll be okay,
he tells himself. Because really, what else can he tell himself? Julie was strong. She wouldn’t stay a vegetable. A zombie.

She’ll come home to him.

Silently, he kisses the memory of his wife. And now it’s time to move on to other things, to get the report of how many Latents have responded to the emergency calls. To see if anyone has come up with a brilliant plan to help the remaining Squadron stop Hypnotic.

He’s sure Julie would call him three kinds of fool.

“Well,” he calls out, shutting the makeshift door behind him, “I’m back.”

CHAPTER 40

LUSTER

“This is the world I wanted. But there is still pain, and fear, and suffering. I guess at least now we have a chance to fight back. Against evil. Against evolution.”

—Matthew Icarus, unpublished commencement speech
to MIT, class of 1990

L
ester Bradford rarely felt nervous, but he did at this moment, walking down the endless corridors of Blackbird Prison. There were the usual sounds—shouts, screams, crying. The smell of sweat and urine and stale air.

A cell door
clanged
, and Lester flinched. He didn’t like prisons. The long hallways and the flickering light tubes and the close, hopeless quiet reminded him too much of the tower block in East London where he’d grown up. Sleeping in the stairwells when his dad had too much to drink. Watching the world go by through stained, impenetrable glass.

“Thank you for coming,” said the warden. Post, his name was. He was bald and a head shorter than Lester, built like a bulldog and the personality of a rabid ferret.

“Think nothing of it, mate,” Lester murmured.

“He’s been asking—well, screaming—for you for the last six hours,” said the warden. “Sedatives aren’t putting a dent in him, so … talking is a last resort.”

Lester followed the warden as he turned and trundled along the corridor, deeper and deeper into the heart chambers of Blackbird Prison. “You were on his Alpha team,” said the warden. “Any idea what triggered this outburst?”

Of course Lester knew. It was the six-year anniversary of when they’d put Hal in here in the first place. Six years since the Siege of Manhattan ended. Hal did this every year on this day.

But the warden could get stuffed. “No idea, sir,” Lester said. “None whatsoever.”

The regular security wing of the prison ended abruptly at a black wall—tilithium-laced ceramic, indestructible, heatproof, and impervious to sonic interference.

Lester had helped design the security protocols for the man who’d been screaming his name. He’d known what was coming.

A guard collected all of his superfluous objects—belt, cape, and fasteners, gloves, even his boots. Post, also stripping down to the basics, grimaced as he snapped on paper booties. “So undignified. But better than the freak hanging himself with my shoelaces, eh?”

“Oh, Hal’s never been the type to kill himself,” Lester said as he twisted his wedding ring free and dropped it into the bin. “More likely, he’d choke you unconscious and use you as a human shield for escape.”

That was why, when the two men buzzed through the containment scanner and out the other side, only faceless roboguards greeted them. The roboguards rolled on twin tracks and had guns and laser targeting systems mounted to their fronts.

There was only one cell in the maxi wing of Blackbird Prison.

There was only one man who warranted one.

Post let the door scan his biometrics and keyed in his code. Lester stepped in and the door hissed shut behind him.

After a moment, a robotic voice announced. “Inmate walking. Gibbons, Harold Wyatt. Code name Doctor Hypnotic.”

A door rolled up and two roboguards deposited their cargo in the visitor’s cell. On the other side of thick plas-proof glass, Hal Gibbons smiled at Lester.

Lester sat down and waved his hand at the PA sensor to activate it. “Hello, Doctor.”

“Please. At least call me by my right name.”

“Doctor Hypnotic, then.”

The other man sighed. “Still bitter, I take it?”

“You lost any right you had to a human name when you killed those people in New York,
Doctor.
”

“Don’t be so sanctimonious, Bradford. You know it could have been any of us. Little Georgie Porgie.” He smiled. “Your beautiful wife.”

Lester felt a twitch develop in his jaw. “You’re on thin bloody ice, my friend. Make a point or I’m out.”

“Would you hurt me, Lester?” Hypnotic leaned toward the glass. He was thinner, and his eyes were the glassy beads particular to heavy sedation, but he still made Lester jump when he banged one palm flat against the glass. “Would you burn me up, like New York Squadron tried to do?”

“For my family?” Lester knew he was being recorded, but still thought,
Sod it.
“Abso-bloody-lutely.”

Hypnotic sat back with a grin.

Lester rubbed his forehead. “Is this what you were so desperate to talk about?”

“No.” Hypnotic trailed his fingers through the air.

The man was high as a bloody kite and still managed to keep Lester off-balance. Lester didn’t like it one bit.

“No,” Hypnotic repeated. “I wanted to talk about truth, Les. Truth and justice and the Squadron way …” He dissolved into giggles.

Lester stood up. “I don’t have time for this. My daughter has a school play this evening, and I won’t miss it to watch your one-man fuckwit show.” He turned his back on Hypnotic.

“How is the little girl?” From behind, Hypnotic’s voice was chilling as it had ever been. “Calypso?”

“Calista.” Lester turned around and sat back down, carefully, carefully, so he wouldn’t simply melt the glass and wrap his bare hands around Hypnotic’s throat, burn that smirk off his face and call it done.

“Do you think little Calista has any future in this world? This world where men like us are leashed like dogs?”

Lester breathed, in and out, relaxation techniques designed to keep you calm in life or death situations. And this was life or death. For Gibbons. “I won’t discuss my family with you.”

“Then talk to me about truth.” Something almost pleading made its way into Hypnotic’s eyes, Hal’s eyes, swam there under the surface scum of drugs and hopelessness. “I know you aren’t a hero,” Hal whispered. “Not really. I know what you think about when you hope no one is watching. How you chafe under Corp’s controls and how you look at your little girl and pray that her life isn’t this world, this terrible, gleaming world of profit shares and sponsors and corporate heroics.”

Lester started. “You read my mind?”

Hal tapped his temple. “Every day. Before. All of you. Except her.” He slumped. “Does she hate me, Les?”

“She does, mate. You shattered her only hope that her life wasn’t always going to be the nightmare it is now.”

Hal put his face in his hands, as much as he could move in his stun-cuffs. “Nightmare, yes. It is a nightmare, what happens in that house.”

Lester felt his heart skid to a stop. “What did you hear?”

“I know,” Hal purred. “I know exactly what they did to her, and I know what
he’s
doing to her now. Blackout.” The name came out like a curse.

“What?” Lester’s voice sounded foreign, deadened. Valerie hadn’t told him anything was wrong with Holly when she visited. “What
exactly
was said, Hal?”

“He was the worst of us, you know,” Hal murmured. “Scared of his own Shadow …” He dissolved into giggles again. “An abusive maniac, with a pretty distraction to keep him sane so the Squadron can use him. Until he breaks her, and they make him a new one. I
know,
Lester. I was
there.
”

“You could be lying to me,” said Lester. “And I’m going now. Home to my wife and child.” His pulse was back now, and throbbing. Not because he thought Hal was lying—because the cold, dreamy harshness in the man’s voice couldn’t be anything but true.

“You really care about your family,” Hal said, his voice muffled by his hands. “Corp won’t stand for that. Love doesn’t generate revenue. Loyalty doesn’t grab headlines.”

He pressed his palm against the glass. “You were the best of us, Les. Get out while you still can.”

“Time’s up,” the robot voice echoed. “Stand and prepare for containment.”

“Watch the Shadows!” Hal cried as he stumbled away in the grasp of the roboguards. “Watch the Darkness. Break away, Les … do what I couldn’t do!”

His screams cut off when the door shut, and Lester was alone with his own reflection in the glass. It was like Hal Gibbons had ceased to exist.

CHAPTER 41

VIXEN

These special children will receive education tailored specifically to their unique needs. They will be cared for, tutored, and taught to use their abilities for the benefit of all mankind.

—Mission statement of Corp-Co’s Academy
for Extraordinary Youngsters, 2018

M
ore wine?” Holly held out the bottle, but Valerie covered her glass.

“No thanks, hon.”

Holly shrugged and filled her own glass to the rim, killing the bottle. Jamie, one of Holly’s two creepy Runners, swooped in and took it away.

Valerie nibbled on the last of her breadstick, keeping one eye on Callie where she sat on the floor playing dolls with Joan, Holly’s daughter. Everything was going fine until Joan decided she wanted Callie’s Baby Be Mine, and yanked it away.

Callie burst into tears, and a light panel nearby shorted.

“No, sweetie!” Valerie jumped up and separated the two girls. “We don’t use our powers on other people, remember?”

Callie pointed at the doll. “That’s mine!”