Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (18 page)

I reached out without thinking, touched the angry red flesh and flinched back. He was already healing the way Ajax-Types did—on a normal person they’d be at least a week old—but even with soft bandages between cuffs and skin it still had to hurt to be manacled.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Huh? Girl, you think
that
hurt?”

“No— I mean, sorry about the shoulder. I didn’t need to do that after I got you down and broke your arm.”

His forehead creased into a network of wrinkles, then he barked a laugh. “Hey, it was a good fight! You win, you get your licks in. You’ve gotten better since Chicago, so have I, maybe next time I’ll last longer.”

“But—” I stopped. The distance across the table was an entire world. I licked dry lips. “Why do you do it?”

“What, fight? I’m good at it. It’s my good time. Girl like you, you’d never understand. Doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy the next time.”

What did I say to that? See you then? All the other questions I wanted to ask, who, why, had already been asked and not answered. My social brain took over.

“It was…”
too weird for words
. “Good to speak to you, Brick.” I collected Malleus and stood. “I hope you’re wrists are better soon.”
And I never see you again
. I turned to signal the captain.

“Hey!” I turned back. Brick sat thinking, brow wrinkled, and then a grin stretched his face. He shrugged again, ignoring the pain.

“Call me Ernest. And you might want to go back to that bar tomorrow night and look for a guy with a white hat and a blue flower on him. He was going to give me a job, but hey, it could be fun for you.”

“There are three types of supersoldiers: soldiers who achieved their breakthroughs under the rigors of basic training or tailored stress-programs; civilian superhumans who couldn’t pass up the huge recruiting bonus, excellent pay, and lifelong benefits; and the parolees. The military recruits from federal and state prisons, because it can’t get enough of the first two types. Parolees’ benefits are different, as are their missions and often their rules of engagement. Some of them finish their parole tours and move into the regular ranks, others return to civilian life. Many of them don’t survive to finish their tours.”

US Senate Military Briefing Extract.

“Well that was interesting.” Veritas came as close to a real smile as he ever did. The captain’s eyebrows were still halfway to his hairline. “And it wasn’t a joke. He really thinks a drink at the bar would be interesting.” He looked at me and his eyes sparkled. “If you’re game I can arrange it.”

“No, you can’t.” The captain wasn’t protesting, he just said it like it was so. He looked around the lounge at the rest of us, back at me. “Astra, thank you for that. Now would you care to speak with me in my office?”

Jacky snorted and I almost saluted; I knew an order when I heard one. She pulled out her cell. “You guys do that, I need to make a call.”

“Corporal Balini, show her a room. Astra?”

I left with the captain. Five minutes and three security checkpoints later he ushered me into his office, closing the door behind us.

“Well that was interesting. Not an original thought, but true. Water?”

“Thank you. Captain Lauer—”

“Call me Frank.” He took off his uniform hat to sit and stretch out in the visitor’s chair across from me. His office didn’t have a single picture or knickknack. Seeing me look around, he nodded. “I’m here on assignment, too. Your assignment, actually.”

“
My
assignment?”

“The one you made for yourself, anyway. To stop bad things from happening. The difference is,
my
focus is on the Institute and the base.
Yours
is on the town.” He held up a hand. “And I understand. You get intel that it’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight, you come. You’re a goddam hero. Well, I’ve seen towns burn before, and I’ll see more. I’m tasked with assessing and responding to the threat to our research facilities, here and in Littleton, and our base holding facility which just happens to hold some of the most dangerous enemies the civilized world has ever seen. We lose control of them, or we lose our projects, we might just lose the long war.

“And of course there’s the conference—Washington has tasked me with giving the go or no-go on it. If our most secure facility isn’t as secure as we thought, the conference will need to be scrapped and we have less than three days to decide.”

He took a sip of water and leaned forward, not in my face but close and not looking away.

“
But
. The only intel we have on a threat is you.
Your
warning. If I say ‘go’, half the projects will shut down and fly away, and we’ll lose months, years, not to mention losing a meeting a year in the planning. So I have to believe that there is a credible threat first, but Veritas has been shaking the trees and beating the grass at the Institute for two days and he’s got nothing. An army of accountants and computer specialists have crawled through every resident’s bank-account, travel history, sex life, checked every firewall and security system. They’ve got nothing, and I’m coming up with bupkis on the military side, in a place where the only way in is for someone inside the walls to open the gate to the enemy.”

He sat back.

“So, go or no-go? Based on a dream sent by an international criminal known for complicated games, the kind where other people take the hits?” Fixed on me, his eyes glinted in the overhead lights. “I don’t know, I really don’t. But then comes ‘Brick.’”

He put his bottle down.

“It’s interesting that you have a history with him, but the superhuman world isn’t so big it’s unbelievable. But is he a probe? A decoy? A Trojan Horse? Or a coincidence? Guantánamo City’s airport is a gateway to the Gulf and the Caribbean. And then there’s you.”

“Me?” My throat had gone dry.

“You. My first instinct after getting the background was to send you right back to Chicago just to remove a piece from the board that this Kitsune put there.”

“You can’t.” My mouth was dry.

“I could have. I still can. The US Navy holds seniority in the base and town. Kayle would have to go to the Chief of Naval Operations to trump my authority, and Ricky would tell him to pound sand.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Doesn’t mean I won’t. I sent you out with the Garage team when Brick popped up, and I wasn’t too impressed. You made a rookie mistake for your opening move, pulled it out in the end by luck. I don’t like luck. And there’s the discrepancy between your report and the video record. You don’t remember half your fight.”

“Why—” I hadn’t come here expecting to get attacked, and he gave me a moment to think. Finally remembering I held a water bottle, I took a sip too extend the moment and wet my throat.

“So you think I’m unreliable?”

“I wondered.” He kept his eyes on me. “I understand you do full-contact fight training?”

I nodded.

“Then you’ve been trained to ‘play through the pain.’ You were utterly focused on the next thing you could do, so the hits you took first weren’t important enough for your brain to file away.”

He played with his own bottle. “Combat-amnesia is actually pretty common. In extreme cases whole sequences of events are blocked, and not just traumatic ones. You’ve probably experienced it before—actions in combat that took longer than they seemed to, or happened more quickly than you remember. It’s simply that you’ve never had as big a contradiction between memory and reality caught on camera. Do you remember anything else that didn’t look the same when you watched in the review?”

“I… Yes! Lance Corporal Tsen…”

“Go on.”

“When Brick hit him— I remember his breastplate just, just completely caving in, right through his chest. It would have killed him, wouldn’t it? Ajax-type or not.”

“Very likely. You’ve seen that kind of hit before? It’s what you feared most when you saw him take the hit, and your mind manufactured a completely illusory memory. You’ve heard the cliché, ‘Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?’” His mouth creased in a humorless smile. “In the stress of combat our eyes do often lie—or at least our minds play tricks with what our eyes tell us. At this point, even a telepath walking through the memory with you couldn’t tell us the story the video showed.”

“So, it’s normal? I’m okay?”

“Probably. That’s why I brought you out to watch you with Brick. If it was deeper, if he was a source of trauma for you, you’d have showed it in there and I could send you home.” He took another sip, laughed. “Did
not
expect to get more intel from it.”

“What are you going to do now?”

He smiled crookedly. “Keep my own assets in position. Do
you
want to go have fun?”

“No, we’re not. Not until dark.”
 
Jacky stated it as a simple fact. She’d still been on her call when the sailor escorting me showed me into the empty conference room they’d given her, and she barely heard me out before stepping on my plan to go
now
. “We’ll have to rain-check dinner.”

“But—”

“Don’t worry, we’ll still get to dress up.”

“
Are you two always like this?
” The voice on the other end of her cellphone dripped warm Nola honey, all masculine amusement at our girl-talk.

“No.” Her glare should have melted her cell.

“Jacky, are you
sure
? And who’s that? Do I get to meet him?”

“Yes.” She scanned the walls of the conference room we’d been given for privacy, and I could just
see
her thinking. The Navy had to be listening, if not on the line then to the room—but whatever she didn’t say now, she wasn’t going to keep them in the dark for long.

She decided, and relaxed. “That’s Darren. He confirmed your White Hat and you’ll meet him tonight. I thought we might need backup so I stopped in New Orleans on the way and brought some friends. You’ll meet them, too.”

Oooh
, I practically hallucinated Shell’s—or Shelly’s—response to that tidbit. I opened my mouth, closed it because even if the Navy knew she’d still be uncomfortable confirming that she’d brought vampire backup—the only thing it could be if we had to wait till
night
.

“
Got it.”
Darren said
. “So what do you need, sweetheart?
”

“Hope and I are going to go change and get our party stuff together,” she said, ignoring me as I mouthed
sweetheart?
“We’ll meet you at the hotel where all of you can get your curiosity out of your system, then
we’ll
all
go dancing. And don’t worry, we have a ride.”

She cut the connection before he could say anything else, glared at me. “What?”

“Are you sure about missing dinner? ‘Cause Mrs. B— Mrs. H makes a great pot roast. To die for, not that you want to do
that
again. Hey, you could bring Darren…” Yes I was being evil, but it was too much fun and I needed a little.

“Are you finished?”

“I suppose. Wait— Yes. Shelly is going to yell at you, though.”

“I can live with that.” She barely gave me time to grab Malleus before she was out the door. I flew us back to the Garage and Littleton, getting us back just in time to hear the wailing sirens.