The Temporary Hero

by Nick Svolos

  “But—”

  Wells cut off his protest. “Agent Forney, please escort Agent LaBlanc to the airport. Wouldn’t want him to miss his flight.”

  “LaBlanc,” I called out, “you know what happens next. You’re the only one who can stop it.”

  I looked up to see Forney hustle LaBlanc out of the room. I don’t know what I was expecting. LaBlanc was just one guy. Wells was ERD, and Forney had a good forty pounds of muscle on him. The smaller man just gave up.

  When they were gone, Wells said, “I’ll take it from here, Assistant Director.”

  He nodded. “Good. See that it gets done. No more screw-ups.” He left the room.

  Lucy Wells came to my bedside. I strained against my restraints. I might as well have tried to pull my arms out of a vice.

  “Oh, Mr. Conway, no need to be so melodramatic.” She smiled, stuck a needle into the IV attached to my arm and injected some clear liquid. “After all, nobody can stop the future.”

  Her face went all swirly and everything went black.

  ***

  When idle, I find my mind tends to wonder. Not wander, wonder. I guess it’s just the way my brain is wired. It’s never quiet in there.

  There’re always plenty of things for it to wonder about. Mundane things like, is this story worth following? Should I take this job offer? Who thought The Love Boat warranted a remake? At the top end of the hierarchy of ponderings I get into more meaty subjects, like the existence of God, concerns about my life choices and the like. Somewhere off to the side are the questions so silly I never thought I’d get around to asking them. Right now, my mind wondered at one of those.

  When the hell were these guys going to get around to killing me?

  I woke up, an act I never thought I'd perform again, on the floor of a windowless cell. I wasn’t restrained, but I didn’t need to see the orange light to know my powers were nullified. The weakness in my limbs and the sharp throbbing pain in my head gave testimony to that.

  I was still woozy from whatever Wells injected into me, and it took a while for me to get to my feet and take stock of my surroundings. Not much to report. A four-by-eight room, a locked door, a cot, and a toilet. I’d seen better. Of course, I’d seen worse, too. If I was to rank it with all the jail cells I’d wound up in, I’d put it between the drunk tank at the Santa Monica P.D. and the brig at Dr. Schadenfreude’s secret lair. At least it was clean.

  Without much else to do, I plopped down on the cot and waited. While I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, my continued existence had me mystified. Forney and Wells tried to kill me, that much was a fact. Now that the fix was in and LaBlanc was out of the picture, the smart play would be to finish the job. Why keep me around?

  Overconfidence? Supervillains often exhibit a tendency, once they get victory in their evil clutches, to let it slip through their fingers. Absurd as it may seem, it’s a documented fact. There’ve been several psychological profiles done over the last sixty or so years examining the phenomenon. Could they be falling prey to this madness?

  No. Wells wasn’t the type. Too smart. I’d done enough background on her to know she was a professional. A natural, she’d spent her teen years soloing as a hero under the moniker Screamstress before joining the Bureau and volunteering for service with the ERD. She’d graduated at the top of her class at Quantico. Up until last year, when she’d lost her cool at the worst time possible, she had a spotless record. She was the FBI’s superhuman poster girl, fast-tracked for a leadership position. She knew the profiles and the symptoms. No way would she fall for the Blofeld Syndrome.

  See? We even have a name for it.

  Forney? Naw, I had him pegged for a goon. Not the type you’d put in charge of anything more complex than beating a reporter to death, and he couldn’t even get that right. But, that voice. That voice….

  Oh, my God. That’s where I heard it!

  The rooftop. When I’d first met LaBlanc.

  “I wasn’t there,” ERD Agent Eighteen said.

  Forney’s voice.

  My mind latched onto this new discovery and shifted into analysis mode. If they let Forney run around in plainclothes flashing a badge, then he must have been a volunteer, like Wells. What powers did he have? Well, I’d just received a demonstration of how comfortable he was with his fists. Even under a Kunai field, he had the bulk and speed to dismantle me without working up a sweat. I pegged him as a brawler. It was a safe bet. Statistically, it was the most common powerset among American males. So, he’d have the ability to both give and take a lot of damage up close, and probably flight powers to get him there. Good to know.

  With that little success under my belt, I went back to my current predicament. First these guys were going to kill me and now they weren’t, even though I knew more now then I did going in. That was a pretty drastic shift.

  Think it through. Something had changed between the interrogation chamber and the infirmary. How did this new puzzle piece fit into that?

  Ideas came and went, but none were promising enough to hold my attention. And while the cot was far from comfortable, I was still loopy enough from the knock-out drug to nod off. Sometimes, not even the threat of death can keep you awake.

  ***

  I had no way to tell how long I slept, and I would have still been in dreamland if not for a series of loud noises, like the tearing of thick sheets of construction paper, outside the door. The sounds were soon joined by the shouts of people in combat. The thick cell walls muffled them, but it didn’t take a Quantico graduate to know something was up.

  It also didn’t take any special training to notice the room was a dingy gray. Not orange. The containment field was down.

  The door to my cell blew in on a wave of bright blue energy and I barely had time to raise my arm to ward off the twisted rectangle of steel before it slammed into me. Good thing they shut off the nullifier first. The other way around and I’d have been a stain on the wall.

  A Latino man in a skintight V-necked costume and a domino mask stepped in. “Time to go, amigo.”

  “Suave, what the hell are you doing?” I saw a couple of guys in Angel Security uniforms run past him. More paper-tearing noises followed, and somewhere down the hall I heard a man grunt and crumple to the floor. I recognized the ripping sound now. The Angel Security team were using stunners, the same type as the ones used by the guards at Lompoc.

  “La evasión, of course! Ultiman’s orders. Now, come! We have not much time.”

  This had to be the next step in the little game they were running on me. There was no way Ultiman ordered an attack on the FBI. But a false flag attack would be just the sort of thing Wells would come up with.

  I saw her new plan, laid out in all its glory. Stage a jailbreak, make me look guilty as hell, and implicate The Angels in the bargain. Wells knew I had no choice but to play ball. If I didn’t, she was more than capable of having me killed, alone and powerless in a containment cell.

  It was a perfect trap, and I had no choice but to walk into it.

  XIV

  I followed Suave down the hall as Angel Security men fell in behind us, leapfrogging down the corridor and providing cover fire as needed. Soon, we hit a section of corridor with a fresh hole in the exterior wall. Looking out, I could see the veterans’ cemetery across Wilshire Boulevard, bathed in early morning light. We were on the fifteenth floor. Admiring Suave’s handiwork, I commented, “Got the right floor on the first try, eh?”

  “Si. Archangel had the building’s plans, though we did not know which cell you’d be in.”

  He hopped on my back, and I flew us out and down, clearing space for the security guys to rappel down the nylon ropes they had hanging over the lip of the breach. Suave directed my attention to a van done up in The Angels’ colors, so I took us there. Moments later, we were joined by the rest of his little team, and the van sped off down Wilshire in the general direction of the sunrise. I took a quick look out the rear window. There was no pursuit.

  I
took a seat on the bench across from Suave. “So, where’s Ben Johnson? Shouldn't he be running an op like this?” I asked the nearest security guy, trying to sound casual.

  “He’s running tactical from the Tower, sir,” the trooper said, his stun rifle resting on his lap. “Redirecting the police to cover our extraction.”

  I nodded and turned to Suave. “So, what are you? A shapechanger?”

  “Suave” looked at me in surprise but spared me the unnecessary protest. “What gave us away?” The ersatz Angel Security team pointed their weapons at me. I knew better than to push them at this point. Even with my powers restored, the stunners they carried would have me down in a heartbeat. Besides, “Suave” seemed like the type to talk. He had Blofeld Syndrome written all over him.

  “Besides the fact that Ultiman would never sanction a stunt like this? Little things.” I nodded toward the gunmen. “Ben’s last name is Jefferson, not Johnson. I know all the people on his team, but these guys are all new to me. And those are Galestorm Tech Mk. IV stun projectors. Government issue. They don’t sell ‘em to us.”

  “Ah, it’s always the little things that trip us up, isn’t it?” he said with a smile.

  “Yeah, that seems to be the way it goes. So, you got a moniker? Feels kind of silly calling you ‘Suave’.”

  “You can call me Pseudonym,” he said with no small amount of pride, even though he stuck with the Suave form. A lot of guys would have dropped it after being found out. Might be something there I could use. Maybe changing took him a while or needed to be precipitated by something.

  “So, how do your powers work? You got the Suave act down pat, but I can’t figure out how you do his blasts.” That’s the trick, you know. Keep ‘em talking.

  “Believe it or not, this is all me.” He waved his hand. “If I study a target long enough, I can mimic his abilities. Comes in handy.”

  “Damn, that’s cool.” I grinned, geeking out a little. I told myself it was to feed his ego, but in truth, I really did think stuff like that was cool. “Makes framing somebody a cinch.”

  “Yeah. Sorry ‘bout that, but you know, business is business. Nothing personal.”

  I leaned back in relief as my nanobot-based mind-control theory crumbled into dust. The tension died away, which helped me keep things calm and casual while I worked out a way to avoid getting stunned into next week. “Say no more. I just don’t get what framing me does for you. Is this just an ego thing from Wells? Screw up my life because she thinks I screwed up hers?”

  He laughed. “Does seem kinda unprofessional, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, putting my hands where I needed them to be. “I usually need to date a woman a couple of times before she gets this mad at me.”

  The shapechanger laughed again. I even got a chuckle or two out of the security guys. Good. Laughter makes people relax, and I needed that.

  “Well, I guess you’ve already figured out you’re worth more to us alive than dead.”

  “Glad to hear it.” I smiled to show my ‘gratitude’. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me why.”

  “Ah, you know I can’t tell you that,” he said. He was kidding himself. I could see it in his eyes. He couldn’t wait to spill the beans. The guy was Blofelding on all eight cylinders.

  Yeah, I just made up a word again. I’m a writer. I get to do that. Who do you think makes up words in the first place?

  Keep the ball rolling, Reuben. “Oh, well,” I said with a shrug, keeping the smile as genuine as I could. “Can’t blame a guy for tryin’.”

  “Guess I can’t. Let’s just say our benefactors have bigger fish to fry.”

  There it was. The first glimpse of insight. “Geez, is this about The Angels again?”

  The shift got a wary look in his eye. He knew he was giving up too much. But what he didn’t know was he lacked the discipline to stop himself. I just needed to give him a gentle nudge.

  “Okay, so let me see if I got this straight. You guys smuggle that stuff from Colorado to LA and have Backdraft erase the trail. Then you frame me to implicate The Angels when you use it. We take the blame and Ultiman has to break up the team. Am I getting close?” I didn’t wait for an answer. The look on “Suave’s” face told me I was spot-on. “Why the hell do your bosses have such a bug up their butts about The Angels?”

  He shrugged. “They keep getting in their way.”

  Pseudonym went silent after that. I figured I had about as much of the plan as he knew. He was too talkative for his bosses to give him more than he actually needed to do his job. I glanced out the back window, spotted a couple of landmarks, and figured we were still on Wilshire, heading east and getting close to La Cienega. Not exactly the ideal place to do what I intended, but I didn’t think I’d get anything better.

  “I gotta hand it to ya,” I began. “You’ve got Suave’s mannerisms down pat.”

  He took to the flattery with a smile. He was probably a frustrated actor. “Took quite a few hours watching that soap opera of his to get it right.”

  “Well, it was time well spent. You could almost fool his abuelita, but there’s one thing about him you don’t have quite right.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. He’s not bulletproof.”

  My left index finger shot forward like the tip of a spear, hard as diamond, and buried itself in his knee. I felt cartilage snap and crush from the impact. I curled my finger and twisted. “Suave” screamed in the sort of pain few people ever experience.

  While my left hand did its thing, my right was just as busy. It swept the stunner held by the trooper to my right out of the way, grabbed the collar of his ballistic vest, and pulled him into his buddies’ line of fire.

  Pure, glorious chaos followed.

  ***

  Stun rifles started going off everywhere in the confined space. The sound of the shifter’s screams, tearing paper, and the smell of ionized air filled the cramped compartment.

  The guy I held took the worst of it. He went limp from a salvo of static electricity. Some of it worked its way through to me. My right arm went a little numb, but the man served his purpose, allowing me time to get my back against the rear doors.

  Let’s call that step one.

  I kicked off step two by twisting the limp security guy horizontal and throwing him back at his compatriots. I gave the throw a bit of relish, and he crashed into the crowd with enough force to stall everyone while I thrust myself backwards, through the doors, and out to the street. The doors came off their hinges and followed me.

  Step two complete.

  I twisted myself to get a look behind me and get my flight under control as one of the doors spun toward the windshield of a terrified mom in an SUV. I focused my eyes on the hunk of careening metal and willed myself forward with everything I had. I caught it just before impact, twisted, and hurled it back at the faux security van.

  The door buried itself in the yawning opening in the back of the van, preventing Pseudonym and his goon squad from interfering for the moment.

  I had other things to worry about. Around me, brakes squealed, cars swerved, and I heard at least one wince-inducing collision to my left.

  Step three, getting away without civilian casualties, wasn’t looking so good.

  I took a quick scan around me. In addition to the fender-bender between a delivery truck and a brand new, gunmetal gray Porsche 718 Boxter, the soccer mom had swerved into the wrong lane, lost control, and plowed into a street lamp. I could see the driver’s-side airbag deployed, the top of her head resting on it. A bunch of pre-pubescent soccer players struggled to open the rear doors.

  I could see the guys inside the paddy wagon were moving around, but they hadn’t managed to free themselves yet. Good. I flew down to the SUV, yanked off both of the doors on the driver-side, and worked on getting the woman free. It was then I caught the look of wide-eyed wonder on a gaggle of kids in the back seats.

  “Everybo
dy out, girls.” I smiled, trying to sound heroic and in charge. I nodded at a storefront behind me. “Go into the shop, take cover, and ask a grown-up to call 911. Got it?” Little heads nodded adorably and the bigger ones took charge, herding the gang across the sidewalk while I followed close behind with the stumbling mom.

  As I secured the bright, shining future of the AYSO, I heard a deep, throaty growl of rage and the wrenching sound of tearing metal from the center of the intersection. I sped away from the storefront as fast as I could. Couldn’t risk that building getting caught in the line of fire. I rose into the air to get a look at just how bad this mess was going to get.

  Turned out, it was pretty bad. A hulking mass of brown fur and horns tore the door away and limped into the street, followed by the three security men who were still operational. The Minotaur saw me and drowned out the noisy scene with a bellow of fury.

  Lovely. Pseudonym knew how to become Unstoppabull.

  Stunner beams crisscrossed the sky around me and I dodged, cursing my luck. I’d hoped to grab the van while the guys were still in it and get high enough that they couldn’t do anything about it. Drop it at a police station and put this whole matter to rest with one fell swoop.

  Such are the absurd fantasies of stupid, stupid men.

  The half man, half bull, all jerk shapeshifter limped to a recently-abandoned car, grabbed it by the front axle, and hurled it at me. I dodged it easily, but as it passed by, I had second thoughts about letting a ton and a half of hurtling automotive crash into a random location at the corner of Wilshire and La Cienega. Something like that couldn’t possibly end well. I sped after it.

  I managed to catch up to it before it could slam into a discount furniture store, and plucked it from the air, almost dislocating my right shoulder in the process. The poor machine. It was an older-model VW bug protesting at the abuse but holding together. I had to hand it to the Germans. They sure could build ‘em. I twisted around and sent it back at “Unstoppabull” and his pals.