by James Maxey
"Naw," said Pit. There was a pause. Then he added, "I'd eat one, though."
"I'm sure you would."
There was another moment of silence.
"So," Pit said. "I, uh, I might be another step up the evolutionary chain as well."
"Maybe," said Sunday. "But you don't brush your teeth. You make it easy to say no."
Pit nodded slowly. He turned his head and furtively slipped a finger between his lips, running it along his new chompers. They didn't feel dirty.
"So," he said. "What if I---"
"Give up, Pit."
"Whatever. What next?" he asked, getting back on the bike.
"We go find some hotel in the sticks and watch TV. See if the world collapses. If it doesn't, we rob a bigger bank. Hell, we'll take out Fort Knox if we have too."
"But that's all we're spending the money on? Hotel rooms?"
She shrugged as she got on the bike behind him. "What's your idea?"
"Step one, we go buy us some more nice duds, then find a saloon where we can get plastered and dance the night away."
"I don't drink or dance."
"You don't dance?" Pit said, starting the engine. "It's right in your name!"
"I picked that name when I was fifteen. I . . . lord, this sounds silly. I'd been taking ballet since I was a little girl. I really wasn't good at it, but at fifteen I still thought I'd be a ballerina."
"I don't think that sounds silly. Girls like that stuff."
"Only because we're brainwashed by a culture of subservience. I can see now how sick it is that people trot out their prepubescent daughters in tights and tutus to advertise their sexual desirability. The world is just one horrible ongoing nightmare once you truly wake up inside it."
"I don't know about all that," said Pit, gliding the bike forward around the speed bumps beside the K-Mart. "I just know it's fun to do the two-step with Merle Haggard spinning on the juke box."
"What's step two?" she asked.
"The two-step is a dance," said Pit.
"No. I know that. I said what's step two? You started your idea with, 'step one.'"
"Right," said Pit. "I was thinking about monkeys 'cause of what you said. And, you know, there is one place we can go to spend our dough and live like kings."
"Pangea?"
"Monkeyland!" Pit nodded. "The law couldn't touch us!"
"The whole place is made of garbage!" Sunday said.
"Garbage might start to look valuable if you kill off the dollar," Pit said with a laugh, though she might not have heard him since that was the instant he gunned the motor and they roared back onto the highway. Sunday wrapped her arms tightly around him, her breasts pressed up against his back, the cheek of her helmet pushed against his shoulder blade.
The gray skies began to drizzle. The wind howled as if it were in pain as the bike knifed through the air. Sunday let loose just enough heat to warm them.
It was a fine morning to be a supervillain.
It's quiet here. Occasionally, I hear a goat or a chicken off in the distance, but normally it's silent as a tomb. There was a time in my life when I wanted a little peace and quiet.
Be careful what you wish for.
Chapter Five
* * *
The Covenant
THE SUPERMEN arrived via private jet at Guantanamo Bay. Sarah was at the controls, Clint was seated next to her, and Johnny was in the back staring out the window at the blue sea below as they drew closer to the base. The sea changed to a lighter hue as they neared land. The sun was behind them, casting the shadow of the plane on the giant plastic dome that covered the base.
Guantanamo was where they kept captured aliens, as well as human terrorists considered too dangerous for ordinary prisons. Johnny watched Sarah closely as she guided the plane. Nothing about her body language indicated she was worried they were heading for a trap. She had a lot more experience in these situations, even though she was technically only a few years older than Johnny. But Johnny had spent most of the last decade as a dematerialized cluster of fundamental particles, which meant he was effectively a good deal younger than the date on his birth certificate would suggest.
The sunlight dimmed as they glided through the jet gate of the dome. All of Johnny's data streams in his retinal display died off instantly. They were now cut off from radio contact with the outside world. If they were headed into a trap, they would have no way of calling for help.
They disembarked on the runway surrounded by acres of featureless beige sand. The air was cool, dank and stale, with a faint tone of bleach reminding Johnny of the smell of his first boyfriend's basement apartment. The dome recycled all its air to keep any alien contagions inside, though Simpson back at the base had assured him that alien germs were utterly harmless, since they hadn't evolved to infect human cells.
They were met by a jeep that carried them to General Shepard's residence. Johnny had expected fancier digs, but the Shepard made his home in the same kind of one-story tin-roofed shack that the rest of the base was composed off. His house was walled off with twelve-foot-tall chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Johnny counted at least thirty cameras pointed at the structure. If he hadn't known better, he would have assumed the place was built to keep the general a prisoner.
The interior was as gray and Spartan as the exterior. Piles of money were being thrown into the defense of earth from aliens and terrorists, but apparently the money wasn't landing here. They were taken to a conference room with a long metal table and folding chairs. There was a calendar on the wall, with the November photo showing a kitten staring at a turkey.
Johnny and Sarah took a seat. Clint remained standing, his arms crossed. He stared at the gray metal table.
"It looks like a good place to strap down a prisoner for interrogation," he said.
"This isn't a trap," Sarah said. She still had her helmet on. It resembled a motorcycle helmet with a mirrored visor and hid her face completely. Her plastic surgery made it safe for her to move around in public now, but she still needed the voice modulators. This conversation was no doubt going to be recorded. If the government found a match with a previous recording of Sarah, it would be game over.
The door opened. General Shepard came into the room alone. He was a man in his sixties, with a comb-over of about a dozen gray hairs. The leathery skin of his face seemed to have come detached from his skull, reminding Johnny of a basset hound.
Shepard cleared his throat. "Let me cut straight to the most important thing for you to keep in mind during this meeting. Public use of meta-human powers has been an official act of terrorism for seven years now. If any of you try anything, I have a patriotic duty to lock you into cells for the rest of your lives."
"Nice to meet you too," Clint said, gruffly.
"Yes," said Sarah, in a warmer tone. "It's nice to meet you, sir. We recognize that our presence here creates a difficult situation for you. We appreciate your willingness to listen to our proposal."
The general took a seat. "Let's hear it."
"We're the first to admit that the world has gotten along fine without superheroes for the last seven years," said Sarah. "That's changed with the return of Sundancer and Pit Geek. If supervillains are back, you need us on your side."
"Ma'am, I think you underestimate the advances we've made in the last couple of years in the field of meta-human controls."
Sarah nodded. "I'm sure you have some impressive toys, but the undeniable fact is that you haven't caught them yet. They've hit five banks in ten days, and now that footage of Sundancer's little speeches were captured on a cell phone and placed on You-Tube, the runs on banks have gotten out of hand. When Bank of America closed its branches early in Atlanta yesterday, it set off riots. Today was the fourth day in a row the stock market has fallen over five percent. If Sundancer and Pit Geek continue their crime spree another ten days, we could face total economic collapse."
Shepard stared at Sarah as she made her case. He said nothing when she finished, bu
t turned his gaze to study them one by one. Johnny's palms grew sweaty.
Finally, Shepard asked, "What makes you think you can find them?"
"We don't need to find them. We just need to respond to their next robbery in time to catch them."
"Is that all?" Shepard grumbled. "For all our analysts can figure out, they might be picking targets by throwing darts at a map. How can you know what city to be in before they strike again?"
"It doesn't matter," said Sarah. "We have access to technology that will allow us to respond instantly the second that another sighting is made."
Shepard drummed his fingers on the table as he contemplated these words. "Then it's true. Katrina Knowbokov has Rex Monday's space machine. You know possessing that technology is illegal."
"In the U.S. Not where we're keeping it."
"The space machine is the most dangerous weapon ever created," said Shepard. "In theory, a terrorist could simply cut and paste a whole city into the sun."
Sarah shook her head. "If that were possible, don't you think Rex Monday would have done it? The machine isn't magic. It takes energy to operate. Moving a single human around the globe is a costly process. I assure you, cities are safe."
"Fine. But you could still toss the president into the sun if you wanted to."
"Snatching a remote target is next to impossible unless it's been laced with tracer nanites. Otherwise, we'd already have Pit Geek and Sundancer in custody."
Shepard crossed his arms and gave Sarah a skeptical look. "Let's pretend you haven't just confessed to possessing illegal technology. I'll also pretend that I don't know who you really are. You've come here to make a case that you're the right people for the crisis at hand. Make it. Who are you, and what can you do?"
"Skyrider," said Sarah. "I can fly and neutralize the gravity of anything I touch, giving me super-strength. My flight uniform is Kevlar with an energy dampening mesh beneath it. I'm not invulnerable, but I can take most things that are thrown at me."
Sarah's flight uniform was sky blue with navy blue trim. It clung to her curvy body like a glove. Her helmet was the darker blue. She didn't have an inch of exposed skin. With her voice modulator, she sounded suspiciously robotic. "My real name is Sarah Sandlin," she continued. "Our contact has provided your people with the documentation you need to confirm out identities. Unlike previous superheroes, we've nothing to hide. We want to work with authorities instead of taking the law into our own hands. We call ourselves the Covenant. We intend to be heroes the world can trust."
Shepard looked toward Clint. Clint was a big man, built like a linebacker. Save for his logo, his uniform was all white, so bright and pure it hurt to stare at it. On the center of his chest there was a large red "S."
"Clint Christianson," Clint said. "My code name is Servant. My body generates force fields that produce various effects. I'm completely invulnerable. I don't need to breathe. I can run two hundred miles an hour by compressing the time dimension caught within my fields. I can bend steel with my bare hands."
"You fly?" asked Shepard.
"Not really. I can jump about a quarter mile."
Shepard turned to Johnny. "Son, you're a little young for this game."
Johnny shook his head. "Name's Johnny Appleton. The birth certificate we sent in should show you I'm twenty seven." Of course, ten of those years he hadn't aged. Biologically, he was only seventeen.
"Code name?" asked Shepard.
"Call me Ap," said Johnny. "I'm the world's first open source superhero. Ten years ago, Rex Monday was trying to design a teleportation belt. He needed a guinea pig, so he had his henchmen kidnap some random victim off the street. Lucky me, I'm the guy they snatched. Monday strapped the belt on me, fiddled with the dials, and tore me down to a cloud of quantum particles. Unfortunately, the supercomputer he was using to piece me back together wasn't up to the task. I was stuck in a dematerialized state until a few months ago, when the Katrina Knowbokov Foundation rescued me."
The Foundation was an independent team of the world's best scientists who'd been assembled to make sense of the mad-scientist inventions of Rex Monday and Dr. Nicholas Knowbokov, both now deceased. The team had been able to put Johnny back together, but his years in a diffuse quantum state had left his atomic structure highly unstable. The belt now essentially was constantly rematerializing him in order to keep him from fading back into nothingness.
One side effect of his instability was that by making minor programming alterations to the belt, he could change his body. The scientists at the foundation had written a few superpowers for him, sort of as a consolation prize for his missing years. Johnny had since published the belt's code on the internet. Now, thousands of programmers around the world uploaded new programs daily for him to test. He now had thousands of different powers, and since his old life was pretty much over he'd lobbied to join the Covenant. He wanted to make the world a safer place than it had been for him growing up.
Shepard leaned back in his chair. His cheeks swayed as he shook his head sadly. "For a team making a pact to be open and honest, you're getting off to a damn shitty start."
"How so?" Johnny asked.
"First off all, you check out," said Shepard. "You've given us your real name and verifiable contact information. But nowhere in this information did you tell us anything about your criminal record."
Johnny rolled his eyes. "What?" he said. "Just because I'm black you think I have a criminal record?"
"I think you have a criminal record because I've read it," said Shepard.
Johnny felt the blood drain from his face. "I was a juvenile. Those records are sealed."
"I unsealed them," said Shepard. "You've been arrested for prostitution, what, seven times?"
Johnny's mouth went dry.
"You started smoking crack when you were sixteen," said Shepard. "Dropped out of school. Ran away from home a few weeks after that. First actual arrest for solicitation was in San Diego six months later. Then, pretty much once every other week until Monday's men grabbed you."
Johnny let out his breath slowly. He was determined not to lose his temper. "I understand you may feel the need to judge me," he said. "But I haven't used drugs in over a decade. When the team put me back together, I was clean. I've been given a new lease on life. I don't need artificial substances to make me feel good about myself."
"Very inspirational," said Shepard. "But if I authorize the Covenant to operate openly, how long do you think it will take others to discover your past? How much of a hero are you going to be once the National Enquirer tracks down some of your old clients for their opinions of you?"
"If it happens, I'll deal with it," said Johnny.
Shepard turned to Clint. "Your birth certificate checks out. So, we checked out your contacts. They also passed."
"I've got nothing to hide," said Clint.
"Don't you?" asked Shepard. "Because you've got the same biometric energy signature as a super-powered drug lord that used to operate out of Detroit. Called himself Ogre. He ran the seedier parts of that town like a two-bit king, until Rail Blade sealed him in a cube of solid steel thirty feet on each side."
"I didn't really keep up with the news back then," said Clint.
Shepard shifted his gaze toward Sarah. "You barely even tried, girl. Sarah Sandlin? You're Sarah Knowbokov, the Thrill. You played a role in the destruction of Jerusalem. You're just as much a fugitive as Sundancer."
Sarah shrugged. "An interesting theory."
"No, it's an interesting fact," said Shepard. "The other interesting fact is that your mother is Katrina Knowbokov, and since she inherited all your father's patents, she's the richest woman in the world. If she hadn't backed the purchase of nine trillion dollars in debt in US and European bonds this week, the entire financial system might have collapsed."
"Yes," said Sarah. "It might have."
"That kind of money buys a lot of second chances," said Shepard. "Whoever you are."
"We are who we appear to be," sa
id Sarah. "We're three people who want to help save the world."
"I got a call from the President this morning. Apparently Mrs. Knowbokov called to discuss the possibility of further bond purchases, and the subject of the swift authorization of your activities came up. Not that there is any quid pro quo."
"Of course not," said Sarah.
Shepard once again drummed his fingers on the table. "So. How do I reach you? Some kind of fancy laser that paints a big 'C' on the moon?"
"I've got a cell phone in my helmet," said Sarah. "Ap has one in his belt. We'll give you both numbers."
Shepard eyed Clint. "Why don't you have one?"
Clint shrugged. "No pockets."
"He's the strong and silent type anyway," said Sarah. "Johnny and I handle the talking."
"Nope," said Shepard. "Before I turn you loose on Sundancer and Pit Geek, there's going to be a press conference. If we play it right, just announcing that we have three meta-humans working on our side is going to reverse some of the damage these two have inflicted on the financial markets. For maximum positive press, Servant will be your spokesman."
"I don't like public speaking," said Servant.
Sarah said, "And I'm completely comfortable---"
Shepard cut her off. "You're hiding your face and your voice is plainly altered. It's hard to sell the idea that your team has nothing to hide if the spokesman is so blatantly hiding something."
"Then I'll handle the media," said Johnny. Like Clint, he wore no mask. His costume was a set of red tights with a large 'A' on the chest, with black gloves and boots to match the black teleporter belt. Between the three costumes, they were red, white, and blue. It wasn't the most subtle appeal to gain people's trust.
Shepard shook his head. "No offense son, but even if I hadn't read your record, the first time I heard you speak I knew you were queer as a three dollar bill."
Johnny felt like he'd been slapped.
Sarah jumped in, "Sir, I hardly think Johnny's sexuality will be an issue."
"You're nuts," said Shepard. "And, even if he was straight, he's still a damn teenager, and practically a midget."
