Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  My stomach flutters in time with my racing pulse. “How do I know he isn’t already dead?”

  The line falls silent for a few seconds.

  “Say hello, Malcolm,” the King of Pain says.

  “What? Hello? Is someone there? Please help me!” Malcolm shouts into the phone, but I feel only the smallest sense of relief. He’s alive, but he’s absolutely terrified.

  “Carrie?” Bart says. “Everything okay?”

  I turn around and give him my best game face, but he can tell something is wrong. Bury it, Carrie. Throw him off.

  “Boyfriend troubles,” I say.

  He buys it. “Oh. Sorry.” He steps outside so I can deal with my “boyfriend troubles” in private.

  “Good girl,” the King of Pain says. “You have fifteen minutes, starting now.”

  “Why?” I say. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I can. Because I want to.” I can practically hear his smarmy grin. “Because I am the King of Pain. Welcome to my kingdom.”

  Funny man.

  Let’s see how funny it is when I burn your kingdom to the ground, you son of a bitch.

  Bart saves me the hassle of coming up with a cover story. He tells me to go home, and he’ll go to the hospital with the Danverses. He promises to contact me after he touches base with Edison.

  I run back to my house, change into my uniform and, throwing caution to the wind, take off from my back yard. I cover the distance to the school within seconds.

  As I come in for a landing, I notice that the grounds are empty — which you’d think wouldn’t be a big deal considering it’s a Sunday, but the general public often takes advantage of the weekends to run laps on the track or sneak in a pick-up game at the baseball diamond. Today the parking lot is barren and there isn’t a soul in sight — except for the person standing in front of the main entrance.

  The hooded figure turns away as I touch down, a dark cloak flaring as she pivots. The shape slips into the school without a sound. I follow at a jog, slowing as I reach the entrance, just in case the King of Pain plans to spring his very obvious trap on me sooner rather than later.

  I creep into the foyer, marveling at how silent it is. I’ve never heard the school so quiet. It feels wrong. The only sound is the faintest rustle of cloth as my greeter leads me deeper into the building. I catch a fleeting glimpse of the cloak ducking around a corner. I don’t rush to catch up. She isn’t trying to elude me; she wants me to follow.

  A few twists and turns later, I find myself standing at the rear entrance to the school auditorium. The door eases closed and shuts with a soft click. I grab the handle and take a breath to steady my nerves. It doesn’t work.

  I open the door.

  The school auditorium is a stadium-style set-up. The seats filling the back half of the auditorium rise at a steep angle, affording every seat a clear view of the stage. The stairs are marked with reflective yellow stripes at the edge of each step, but it’s almost too dark to see them. The only source of light comes from above the stage itself, a single spotlight falling on the King of Pain. Can’t say the guy lacks a sense of theatricality.

  He leans on the back of a wooden chair at center stage. The person tied to the chair has a cloth sack over his head, a makeshift hood, but I know who it is. The sight turns my blood to acid.

  “Are you alone?” the King of Pain says. His voice echoes dully off the auditorium walls.

  “I came alone. No police, no Protectorate,” I say.

  The King of Pain’s smile gleams under the spotlight, like it’s radioactive. “Excellent.”

  I descend to the second level of the auditorium, where the front section of seats sits on a gentle slope. A freshman sitting behind a junior would get a nice view of the older student’s head here. A walkway splits the upper and lower sections. I cross to the center of the walkway until I’m directly across from the King of Pain. I can be dramatic too.

  “I swear to God, if you’ve hurt him, I will incinerate you where you stand,” I say with absolute conviction, even though at this range, with my target tucked behind my boyfriend, I doubt I could tag him with a clean shot.

  The King of Pain calls my bluff and steps out from behind Malcolm. “By all means,” he says, “do your worst.”

  Yeah, you cocky piece of crap, you think you’re safe. You’re working your influence on my subconscious, using your power to make me believe that I can’t use mine. It’s what you do. You deceive people. You’re a living lie.

  I refuse to believe the lie. He thinks he can take away my power? Been there. Done that. Not happening again. I won’t let it. Despite what the King of Pain would have me believe, I know my power is there, in my hands, waiting for me to call it forth.

  So I do.

  My body burns with the intensity of the sun, eradicating the darkness. A whiff of burning fiber hits my nose as a black, charred circle of carpet spreads beneath my feet. The King of Pain squints and shields his eyes with a hand. He cringes, shrinking behind Malcolm.

  He’s afraid.

  He better be.

  “I was right. You are strong,” he says, and the words hit me like an iron fist to the teeth.

  He said the exact same thing to me at my grandfather’s wake.

  The King of Pain yanks off Malcolm’s hood. Malcolm’s face screws up as he turns away from my blinding radiance. The King of Pain grabs a handful of his hair and pulls him as upright as his bonds will allow.

  “Power down or I snap his neck,” the King of Pain says.

  Darkness reclaims the auditorium, save for that small circle of white surrounding Malcolm and his captor.

  “Good girl.” The King of Pain gestures grandly. The house lights snap on. I glance back toward the control booth at the very rear of the auditorium. A watery blur moves behind the smoked glass. “Take off your visor. Let this fine young man see the face of his savior.”

  I see what he’s doing. He started to lose control of the situation, now he’s trying to take it back an inch at a time using the only leverage he has — which, to be fair, is the best leverage he could have over me.

  I remove my headset. Malcolm doesn’t react at first. Then his expression shifts from shock to disbelief to one that I can only interpret as betrayal; I’m not sharing my deepest secret because I love and trust him, but because I’ve been forced into a corner and have no other choice. My impulse is to apologize, to beg his forgiveness, but that’s what the King of Pain wants. He wants me to be weak and afraid and desperate.

  Screw him.

  “Malcolm. It’ll be okay,” I say. “I will get you out of this. I promise.”

  He smiles. It’s shaky, and he looks like he might puke, but it’s a smile.

  “I know you will,” he says, and the King of Pain’s eyes burn with rage.

  “Now now. You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep, Miss Hauser,” the King of Pain says, stepping forward defiantly — and quite conveniently.

  “I don’t,” I say.

  Dr. Quentin said the King of Pain was a control freak. He needs to name the game, set the rules, and stack the deck in his favor, and as long as everything goes according to plan, he’s damn near impossible to beat — but when things go off the rails, that’s when he’s vulnerable. He can’t improvise. His plan here was to use Malcolm against me. I’m supposed to be a blubbering mess. I’m supposed to be begging for Malcolm’s life, offering to throw myself on the King of Pain’s mercy. That I’m not playing along is royally pissing him off, and angry people make dumb mistakes.

  Dumb mistakes like stepping away from their human shield.

  Missy’s oni mask appears in the shadows of the backstage area, a ghost coming out to haunt. She doesn’t make a sound as she streaks across the stage and nails the King of Pain from behind. It’s not so much a tackle as it is a driving full-body ram that launches the King of Pain off the stage. He flails through the air and crashes into the first row of seats.

  Stuart bursts out from a side doo
r to the left of the stage, Matt from the door on the right. Stuart seizes the King of Pain, pinning his arms to his side, and lifts him off his feet. Matt pulls a stun gun out from his coat, a blue-white arc dancing at its tip with a sharp SNAP SNAP SNAP, and drives it into the King of Pain’s chest. He screams through clenched teeth. He screams for a good long time.

  Matt eases off the trigger but keeps the stun gun pressed against the King of Pain. Stuart’s arms remain tense, flexed, ready to crush the King of Pain flat. Missy slips back to the stage to cut Malcolm’s bonds. Her claws make quick work of the rope.

  “You lied to me,” the King of Pain wheezes.

  “They arrived separately from me,” I say, “and they’re neither the police nor the Protectorate.”

  “Technicality, suckah,” Stuart mocks.

  “I can cheat too. You have your advantages, I have mine,” I say with a gesture of presentation. “It’s good to have friends.”

  “Yes. It is,” the King of Pain agrees, his smile returning. “Why, I brought one myself.”

  Something hits me — hits all of us, hurling us away from the King of Pain. I hit the floor hard but recover right away (I’ve gotten maybe a little too used to rough landings). I sit up to see the cloaked figure coming down the stairs, floating down like a phantom. She pulls her hood back as she reaches the central walkway. Sara’s skin appears chalk white under the house lights, and her eyes are dark pits, giving her an almost skeletal appearance.

  The others are too shocked to speak, but I knew it was her the second I spotted her outside the school. I knew it, but I didn’t want to believe it. I still don’t.

  “You know my friend here,” the King of Pain says.

  I get to my feet. “She is not your friend. She’s our friend.”

  “Let’s put that to the test, shall we? Sara. Why don’t you show your friends what you’re truly capable of.”

  Sara grins. “Gladly.”

  She raises her fist and makes a sharp twisting motion. The King of Pain’s head whips to the side, like he’s been punched hard — like, punched by Stuart hard. There’s a strange sound, wet and crunching, and then the King of Pain collapses.

  When I saw the Danverses lying on the kitchen floor, I was sure they were dead. They were so still, their eyes were so blank — it was an understandable assumption. But as I inch toward the King of Pain, braced for that slasher movie moment when the bad guy sits up to renew his assault on his hapless teenage victims, I realize what dead really looks like. The King of Pain has become an inanimate object, a thing with no more life than a department store mannequin.

  “Sara,” I say, unable to speak above a horrified whisper, “what have you done?”

  She descends to join us. “I made sure the King of Pain will never hurt anyone again. Ever.”

  “...You killed him.”

  “He was a murderer. He was headed for the death chamber anyway. All I did was speed up the process.”

  “But you killed him.”

  “He showed up at my house again, Carrie. He was going to kill me. And my parents,” Sara adds, almost as an afterthought. “That’s when I realized he would never stop coming after me, not unless I stopped him.”

  My temper flares. “And where, exactly, does my boyfriend enter into this?” I say through my teeth.

  “I needed to convince the King of Pain I was playing along with his game, get him to drop his guard.” She shrugs. “What was I going to do, kidnap your mom? I couldn’t do that to her. Malcolm was the best choice.”

  “You did this to me?” Malcolm says, his shock giving way to hysteria. “You kidnapped me? You and that — oh, Jesus, that man’s really dead? You killed him?!”

  Sara flicks her hand. Malcolm crumples into a heap at Missy’s feet.

  “MALCOLM!” I shriek. Panic seizes me. I try to push it away, but it bullies through and takes over. I scramble onto the stage and crawl over to Malcolm. I slap his face to rouse him, call out his name, shake him, but he’s out cold. No response. No movement. Oh God. Oh God no no no.

  “Jeez, Carrie, don’t freak. I put him to sleep is all. He’ll wake up in a while and, bonus, he won’t remember anything that happened to him. Trust me, he’ll be fine.”

  “What, like your parents are fine?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Your parents aren’t fine, Sara. You erased their minds.”

  That sends a fresh wave of horror through the others. Sara looks at me like I’m the crazy one.

  “What? No. I knocked them out, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t knock them out. Bart said you erased their minds. Every memory is gone. Your parents, they...they don’t exist anymore.”

  I watch Sara rip through the stages of grief, jumping from shock to denial to anger with each blink of her eyes before slipping all too easily into acceptance.

  “I don’t see a downside,” she says, and the last gossamer thread of my self-control snaps.

  “Are you listening to yourself?! Do you have any idea how insane you sound? My God, you kidnapped an innocent person and nearly killed your parents so you could murder someone! What the hell is wrong with you?!”

  “I’m sorry, did I neglect to run my plan past our self-appointed leader and moral compass? This is so typical of you,” Sara spits. “I get the job done and you whine because, for once, you weren’t the one saving the day. You arrogant bitch. God forbid anyone but you calls the shots.”

  “Hey!” Matt says. “You know that’s not —”

  “Are you defending her?” Sara says, rounding on Matt. “You? This team was your idea. She stole it away from you, and now you’re on her side?”

  “Don’t be stupid. I’m on your side. You know that.”

  She sneers. “Of course you are. I could stick a knife in your eye —” Sara mimes the action. “— and you’d beg me on hands and knees to do it again because you love me.”

  “You better calm the hell down, girl,” Stuart says, drawing her simmering rage in his direction.

  “Oh, here we go! Here’s the part where you play the good little lapdog and stick up for your idiot of a best friend, and then Missy sticks up for you, and next thing you know, everyone’s ganging up to remind me what a pathetic loser I am!”

  “Maybe if you stopped acting like such a loser,” Missy snarls. From here I can see her claws slide out from her fingertips.

  “Missy, shut up! You’re not helping!” Matt shouts.

  This is bad. This mess is going to boil over if we don’t pull back, but we’re all losing control, feeding off each other’s emotions —

  Oh, God. I know what’s happening.

  As a psionic, Sara is inherently empathic; she can pick up on other people’s emotions and broadcast her own. Last year, when Archimedes attacked the school, Sara got the staff and students to evacuate by creating a psychic feedback loop: she drew in their fear and sent it back out, amplifying it with each cycle, until their flight instincts kicked in and they fled the building. The same thing’s happening now, and unless we get our emotions under control...

  It has to be me. If I could overcome the King of Pain’s telepathic whammy, I can block out Sara. I’ve been in her head enough times...

  Of course, she’s been in mine, too.

  “SARA.”

  Everyone shuts up and looks at me. Good. I’ve broken the cycle, or at least interrupted it.

  My temples throb. My chest tightens. Keep it together, Carrie. For them. For Malcolm. For Sara.

  Keep.

  It.

  Together.

  “We don’t think you’re a loser,” I say. My voice barely trembles. “We don’t think you’re pathetic. We’re your friends. Sara, we love you.”

  “You love me,” Sara says. “You’re looking out for me. You only want what’s best for me.”

  “Yes. We do.”

  She laughs bitterly. “How about that? The King of Pain was right.”

  I have no clue what she’s talking about, but rational conv
ersation ran screaming out the door a long time ago.

  Sara sweeps her gaze over us, something dark and dangerous playing in her eyes. Missy, crouched down near my feet, tenses. Stuart takes a step to his left, adjusting his line of attack. My fists clench involuntarily. I might have stopped the buildup, but it’s too little, too late: we’re all primed and ready to go off. It’s Matt who triggers the explosion when, accidentally or intentionally, his finger tightens on the stun gun.

  SNAP SNAP SNAP.

  The noise echoes like the report of gunfire in the cavernous auditorium, drawing Sara’s attention. Missy, seeing her opportunity, launches herself off the stage. Sara reaches for her with an open hand, but it’s her telekinesis that does the work, plucking Missy mid-leap and flinging her away. Missy spins, tumbles, and crashes into the rear seating with a scream of pain.

  Stuart manages to close half the distance between him and Sara. She gestures, but instead of flying away, Stuart freezes. His face goes slack for a split-second then becomes a mask of bottomless despair. He wails in anguish and falls to his knees, weeping, sobbing, then shrinks into a ball.

  She goes for me next, nailing me with a telekinetic ram to the gut that lifts me off my feet. I stagger back and fall to the stage, unable to breathe, stars dancing in my vision.

  “Sara, stop!” Matt says. “Please, stop.”

  “Make me.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “I can’t say the same.”

  I push up to my knees, my head spinning. Matt and Sara are two dark blobs just past the edge of the stage. I can’t tell them apart. I can’t blast one without tagging the other.

  Get up, Carrie. Damn it, get up or someone else is going to die.

  I pull myself to my feet, using the chair for support. In a total desperation move, I pick up the chair and throw it. I don’t expect it to hit anyone, but that isn’t my intention. If it distracts Sara even for a moment, it’ll give Matt the opening he needs to subdue Sara with the stun gun.

  My vision clears in time to watch the chair bounce off Sara. It’s a perfect hit, right across the back. She cries out and careens into Matt. They fall into the front row, sprawling across the seats.