Devil's Cape

by Rob Rogers

  With the exoskeleton, she was able to set up her new lab in the hidden room, hauling her equipment up the stairs, setting up what she needed for her planned war on the Cirque d’Obscurité: ammunition for her various weapons, replacement parts, batteries for the armor’s systems, and a high-end computer with back doors to tools she’d need, like the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) databases, the records of the Devil’s Cape Police Department, and 911 data. She’d studied more than engineering at MIT She’d excelled at computer science and befriended an eccentric professor with a background as a hacker. He’d focused most of his hacking skills on pranks against counterparts at Caltech, but the principles applied elsewhere, as well.

  And, of course, there was the Doctor Camelot armor itself. She’d modified the exoskeleton years ago—that had been an interesting challenge and a useful tool from time to time, though she’d had to keep it a secret to protect her father’s identity. But the armor she’d left alone. Until her “aunts” and “uncles” had been murdered, she’d never seriously considered using the armor itself. It was a fascinating piece of workmanship, to be sure. Inspired, even. But not for her. Only now, that had changed. Now, someone had to bring the Cirque d’Obscurité to justice, and she couldn’t entrust that job to anyone else.

  Her father had been taller than she was and, of course, their bodies were considerably different. The first order of business had been resizing the armor. Or, more accurately, recreating the armor from scratch in her own dimensions. She modified it, too, along the way. She replaced heavy steel plating and the metal supports with a combination of ceramics, carbon nanotubes, and graphite and plastic polymers. In doing so, she made it exponentially more resistant to damage while cutting its weight by two-thirds. The armaments weren’t her strong suit, and she left them more or less alone, only replacing pieces when technological advances made such selections obvious. The armor was armed with a high-pressure air cannon, a flamethrower, flash-bang grenades, a fast-bonding glue her father had affectionately referred to in his notes as “goop,” tear gas, disruptive sonics, pepper spray, tasers, fire extinguishing foam, microwave bursts disruptive to electronics, and more.

  Kate’s father’s specialty had been armaments, but her own specialty was information processing, and that’s where she really pulled out all the stops. She’d studied digital signal processing first at MIT, and then as a design engineer at Texas Instruments, where she’d collected five patents. Her enhancements to the armor’s strength and toughness would be helpful to her. But her enhancements to its sensors were real technical breakthroughs. She added a global positioning system, of course. Her father’s suit had allowed him to listen and transmit to local police band radio. Her suit automatically scanned police radios; broadcast radio and television; and even nearby cell phone chatter, and could be programmed to flag conversations with certain key words or phrases. Her father’s suit had an AM/FM radio. Hers had satellite television and allowed her to surf the Internet and the databases she’d plugged into through her base. She gave the armor sophisticated facial recognition programs connected to government and private databases, electromagnetic scanners, a bomb and drug sniffer, microscopes, telescopes, parabolic hearing, laser-Doppler vibrometry, and an X-ray scanner. Her armor allowed her to see in infrared and ultraviolet, and its polarized faceplate protected her from sudden changes in light and allowed a variety of heads-up displays and targeting systems.

  She wondered if it would be enough. Her armor was clearly superior to the armor her father had worn when he’d died, but he’d had experience. And allies.

  Carrying her cooling fried dumplings and soup up the creaky stairs to her lab, she tried to plan her next actions. The armor needed tweaking, of course, and testing. But more importantly, she needed training. To a certain extent, she could do that on her own. But she needed assistance, insights, guidance. An ally. Using her key, she entered the secret door to her lab, then set up a secure, untraceable line and picked up the telephone. When the voice at the other end grunted a hoarse hello, she spoke softly, knowing that she would be aggravating wounds that hadn’t even begun to heal. “Uncle Samuel,” she said, “this is Kate. I have a proposition for you.”

  WTDC News: Covering the Cape, covering the world, covering your lives.

  From a station ad

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Five days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  4 p.m.

  The WTDC station wasn’t much to look at. A ’70s-era building made of chunks of concrete stuck at odd angles, it jutted out from a strip of small buildings that included three low-rent law offices, two massage parlors, and a fried chicken restaurant, all clustered along the interstate. The transmission tower was surrounded by anemic banana trees that reached little more than a third of its height. The station’s large sign had been designed in fat, curvy letters and numbers considered “groovy” at the time. It was a bit of an embarrassment today, but no one ever budgeted the money to replace it.

  Despite the cosmetics he’d caked onto his face, Jason Kale didn’t even make it out of the parking lot before hearing the first crack about his eye. “Trying to peep through the keyhole, Kale? Get the doorknob in your eye?” He deflected that one with a wave and a smile. But it wouldn’t be the last razzing he’d receive. While walking through the foyer—decorated with late-’80s photos of Devil’s Cape and its citizens—he encountered the makeup artist who usually worked on him before a broadcast.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she asked with customary bluntness. A lean woman with a large nose and lined face, she rarely smiled, hiding cracked, tobacco-stained teeth behind pursed lips. Her makeup, though, was of course impeccable.

  Jason shrugged, smiled, and pushed his glasses slightly up his nose. “I was investigating a lead and, well, someone wasn’t too happy about it.” He’d decided before heading into work that afternoon that a vague answer might serve him better than a specific one.

  “Uh huh,” she said, voice disdainful. “You down talking to the strippers? That looks like a BRI.”

  He sighed, but went for the bait. “BRI?” he asked.

  “Brassiere removal injury.”

  He forced a smile. “No, ma’am,” he said. He’d found that a well-placed “ma’am” would occasionally pacify her.

  It didn’t work this time. She glared at him. “That’ll be almost impossible to cover up,” she said, unceremoniously pulling his face down toward hers and peering at the injury, pulling his glasses out of her way and scraping away some of the makeup with a sharp fingernail.

  “I’m not on the air tonight,” he said. “I’m just here to work on one of my stories. Tomorrow, probably. It’ll have a day to heal.”

  She clucked her tongue scornfully. “It will be worse tomorrow,” she said, releasing his face. She shook her head. “Tell you what,” she said. “Don’t put that junk on your face tomorrow and I won’t try to break any crime stories.”

  He delivered what he hoped was a winning smile, though she was already walking away. “Deal,” he said.

  It galled him that he’d fought and captured the Troll with little consequence, but had been laid low by a kid too young to drive. He was lucky, he realized, sitting down at his unadorned desk. He’d been shot five times, once directly in the eye, and the worst he had to show for it was a shiner. He’d jumped into this Argonaut business based on a dream. He and Julian had long acted as though invulnerable, but they had no real clue as to their limitations. Or at least, if Julian had tested them, he hadn’t passed on the information. That would be just like him, though. To test himself methodically, to withhold what he’d learned, to use the knowledge as a lever against Jason if the opportunity presented itself.

  Devil’s Cape needed someone. That much was clear.

  But perhaps he’d been arrogant to decide that he was what the city needed. The Storm Raiders were experienced veterans, ye
t they’d been slaughtered by the Cirque d’Obscurité. He thought, too, of the city’s last real superhero, the Gray Fog, and how terribly that man’s life had been ripped asunder—his secret identity revealed to the world, his lover murdered, his own death the subject of conspiracy theories, though the only real question seemed to be whether his enemies had driven him to suicide or just outright murdered him.

  And then there was Jason. He’d launched himself into a life as Argonaut, flying hero of Devil’s Cape, taped himself vanquishing a monstrous foe. And now what? He’d been sent flying away with his tail between his legs by a kid with a pistol. He’d had these abilities all his life, but didn’t know, really, what they were or where they came from.

  Argonaut.

  The name had come to him in a dream.

  Why?

  He’d read about the Argonauts as a child, read their stories from a battered volume he’d picked up at a flea market, its red leather tattered by age, its pages warped by water damage, thin and musty. And then one day, the book had simply disappeared from his room. He’d always suspected that Julian had taken it for some reason, though his brother denied it. And the stories gradually faded from his mind. Why was he thinking about the Argonauts now?

  And what, really, was his goal here? To wipe out crime in Devil’s Cape? It was impossible. He’d be like Sisyphus, condemned for eternity by the gods to roll a stone up a hill, then watch as it rolled down the other side.

  And besides, powers or no, he’d just been beaten by a kid.

  Staring into space, he rubbed absently at his bruised eye.

  His hand was reaching out to answer the phone before it even rang. That instinct could only mean one caller. “Hello, Julian,” he said before his brother even spoke. “You’ve never called me at work before. I don’t remember giving you the number.”

  “What the hell were you doing last night?” his brother snapped. “I woke up weeping blood.”

  “Oh,” said Jason, sitting straighter. “I’m a little surprised.” And he was. It hadn’t occurred to him that their odd connection would still be that strong.

  “So was the woman in bed with me.”

  Jason grunted, pulling a pen from his drawer and tapping it against his desk. He caught a whiff of perfume. Musk and jasmine. He turned around, but no one was nearby. “Is she still there?”

  “She just left.”

  “Nice perfume.”

  Jason could hear his brother breathing. Then Julian said, “You never answered my question.”

  Jason’s eyes scanned the room. Again, no one was close by. “Gunshots,” he whispered.

  Julian clucked his tongue. “Huh,” he said. “Clumsy of you.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you doing, Jason? What are you hoping to accomplish?”

  “I was just wondering that myself.”

  “You should stop.”

  Jason tapped his cheek with the pen. His eye ached. His ribs ached. He had another dark bruise over his left kidney, a long scratch across one knee, a lump over one ear. Five shots. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  He could hear Julian pacing. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  “What? Are you worried I’ll take you with me?”

  Julian released a martyred sighed. “It goes beyond that, you know. This is not a good place to be doing what you’re doing. This is not a good time. Pop—”

  “Don’t bring him into this.”

  “I wouldn’t bring him into this. If you screw up again, and you will screw up again, no matter how careful you are, you could be the one bringing him into it.”

  The pen snapped in Jason’s hand, black ink running down his palm like blood. He threw it into the trash, wiped the ink off with a paper towel. “Do you ever wonder why we are what we are, Julian?”

  His brother’s laugh barked through the phone, harsh and with little humor. “What?” he said. “You mean you don’t know?”

  And then Jason heard the dial tone.

  Patriot slugged me into a pinball machine once. Glass blew everywhere, the machine started beeping, and those little silver balls were rolling around the floor. For a second I thought she’d knocked one of my eyeballs out. Another time, Swashbuckler elbowed me in the ribs and I heard a couple of them snap just like that. But you know the hardest hit I ever took? It was from Sam Small. He jumped off a table and gave me just one pop to the jaw, and then I saw a gray light and I woke up in a prison hospital. It was those tiny fists—all that strength, so concentrated. It was like getting hit with a bullet.

  From I Wore a Black Mask: Memoirs of Mr. Cyanide

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Six days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  7 a.m.

  Kate Brauer met Uncle Samuel—Samuel Cunningham—at a small news stand at the edge of the Lady Danger River. At Samuel’s request, both wore running outfits, hers a sleeveless black tank top with red shorts and tennis shoes, his a gray Vanguard City Heroes T-shirt over tan shorts and some expensive kind of cross-trainer shoes. The headline “Search continues for Storm Raider killers” taunted them from the front page of the Devil’s Cape Daily Courier, a stack of the papers squeezed between copies of The Times-Picayune and the National Enquirer.

  The Lady Danger River, a thin tributary of the looming Lake Pontchartrain, was named after a masked English privateer who often crossed swords with St. Diable. One day, years into their rivalry, she simply disappeared from her ship, the Silver Swan. No one ever definitively proved what had happened to her, and her disappearance remained a local mystery and legend. Today, many believed that St. Diable had finally killed her, perhaps bribing one of her crewmen to poison her or slit her throat and toss her into the Gulf. Others believed that she had retired and actually married St. Diable in secret. Still others—an odd, but persistent faction—maintained that she had actually killed St. Diable then assumed his pirate identity, passing herself off as a masked man for the rest of her life.

  The river itself was a thin one, once best known for its pollution due to a paper mill upstream, a failed competitor to Worldwide Papyrus’s Fyke paper mill. Now, though, with the mill abandoned for the better part of a decade, the river was flanked by vegetation. Once, row after row of shotgun houses had stood on the river banks, populated largely by the families of mill workers and those who worked on Devil’s Cape’s docks. Now, many of them had been torn down, replaced with lively condominiums with pretentious French names and pinkish roofs.

  Samuel looked older than Kate had remembered, though quite fit. A contemporary of her father’s, he was probably in his late fifties. Five feet tall, he was tanned and muscular, his umber hair streaked with gray like ash. As he had walked up to her at their arranged meeting spot at the park, he’d seemed more confident than she’d remembered, his brown eyes watching her with a hint of amusement. “You’re still spending too much time working on your circuits,” he said, “and not enough time working on your circulatory system.” He winked, taking any bite out of the comment. “You look good, though, Kate.” They embraced quickly, then he nodded at a bench. “Stretch first,” he said, “then run.” His hands on the back of the bench, he began to stretch out one leg, then the other.

  “I’d kind of been planning on talking to you over café au lait and beignets,” she said, standing beside him and beginning some stretches of her own. Popular in Devil’s Cape and its sister city New Orleans, beignets were French pastries dusted with powdered sugar, though the Devil’s Cape bakers tended to add a little extra cinnamon, too.

  He gave her a half-smile and shrugged. “Might as well start things off running,” he said. “We’ve got a lot to cover.”

  She stopped her stretches for a moment, eyes seeking his. A street vendor was roasting almonds nearby and the scent of honey filled the air. “I also figured you’d try to talk me out of this,” she said.

  The half-smile remained on his face as he turned toward her. “Would it have worked?�
�� he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Didn’t think so,” he said. He pulled an antique brass watch from one pocket, glanced at it, and reset a pedometer at his waist. Then he gestured at the paved jogging trail. “Shall we?”

  As answer, she began moving down the trail, already sweating in the heat and humidity.

  He quickly caught up with her, his shoes nearly silent on the paved path.

  They jogged together in quiet tandem for several minutes. A pair of scarlet tanagers flew by overhead.

  He finally broke the silence. “You’re surprised, aren’t you, to see me not so broken up?”

  She turned to look at him. They were moving past a flower cart, its wares bright and fragrant, many of the petals already wilting in the hot Devil’s Cape sun. “I’m glad,” she said.

  He shrugged that off. “Look,” he said finally, jogging around a puddle in the sidewalk where one of the condos was over-watering its emerald grass, “we’re not going to dance around what we know, are we?”

  She shook her head, squinting in the harsh sunlight, refracted through a haze of smog and thin clouds. She wasn’t used to jogging, and her calves were beginning to ache. “No,” she said. “Dad was Doctor Camelot. You are Sam Small. You were in the Storm Raiders together. I’ve known since college.” She said the words like she was checking items off a list.