She frowned. “You’re the truth serum guy, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re supposed to go straight back.”
Agent Travis’s office looked surprisingly like a dentist’s—cold waiting room with magazines on the tiny tables, a stark hallway, and then a room with a weird chair and lots of scary looking lights and tools. There was also an office chair facing the dentist and/or torture chair. No way was I getting in the dentist’s chair.
Agent Travis walked in, eating something out of a small paper cup. He noticed me sitting in his chair and promptly sat down in the dentist’s chair. He felt the arms experimentally, wiggled around a bit, and said, “It’s more comfortable than I thought it would be.” He took a bite of whatever was in his cup. “This is the worst Jell-O I have ever eaten.” He spit into the cup and tossed it aside. “Really, that was horrible.” He smiled at me. “There’s a whole bathtub full of the stuff. I don’t know why they would be making it in the lab. Must be for a party or something. Yuck.”
He stood up, leaned over the desk and shook hands with me.
“My powers are back,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Wow, that’s an awful shirt you’re wearing. Think you can get me to say something I shouldn’t?”
“Sure.” I tapped the desk with my fingers. I couldn’t believe he hated my shirt, too. “Does the government have any idea why all these powers are flaring up?”
He shrugged. “Six months ago the Earth went through some cosmic debris. We think the powers are linked to that.” He rubbed his eyes. “Um. That’s classified, by the way. Don’t mention it to anyone else.”
“So you have a whole bunch of powered individuals on government strike teams or something?”
“Those with interesting powers. Believe me, a lot of them are useless. We had a guy come in who could heal paper cuts. We released him back into society.”
Suddenly, I found myself wishing for the power to heal paper cuts. “You mean some people don’t get released?”
“Most of them get locked away. We had a guy last week who is the world’s strongest telepath. Can’t have him wandering around. The telepathy only activates when he’s peeing, so that makes it easier to keep him under wraps. The poor guy wasn’t going to be able to use a public restroom in peace again, anyway.”
“You locked him up?”
“More or less.” He pointed at me. “That’s classified, now, Jimmy, don’t forget.”
“Right. Are you going to lock me up?”
He sighed, moved some metal arms around the dentist’s chair. “We’ll give you some choices, I suppose. First choice would be to have you join the military and work as an intelligence collector.”
“A what?”
“An interrogator.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Oh, probably vivisection.” He grinned. “Wow, your power is really strong. That whole vivisection thing, Jimmy, that’s classified.”
I choked. “Vivisection? Are you kidding me?”
He laughed. “I don’t think I can when your truth serum is working! It’s better than dissection though, right?”
I shook my head. “I guess. Depending on how you look at it. Not really.”
Agent Travis slapped a folded paper into my hand. “Listen, here are your marching orders. When to show up, all that stuff. And Jimmy, I’ve got a guy who can tell what activates powers if he sees them functioning. He observed you when you arrived and says your truth power comes from your beard.”
“From my beard?”
“Yeah. If you shave, it will go away completely. We’re going to ask you to shave for boot camp, incidentally. We’ll grow your beard back when you report as an interrogator.”
I stood up, holding the papers. “So that’s it, then?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry, Jimmy, it could be worse.”
“How could it be worse?”
“We’ve got a guy right now who is invulnerable but only when he’s sleeping. You wouldn’t believe the missions we give him.”
I shook my head. “I have to get home and talk to Lindsey.”
“His sergeant always says, ‘I hope you don’t wake up during this assignment!’ Ha ha ha.”
“Hilarious,” I said, and walked past him and the dentist’s chair.
“Jimmy,” he called.
“Yeah?”
“That whole sleeping soldier thing, that’s classified.”
“I figured.”
“Jimmy?”
“What?”
“If you don’t show up for boot camp we’re going to kill you. Or catch you and vivisect you, whichever is cheapest.”
I sighed. “I assume that’s classified.”
“Yes. Please don’t mention that to anyone.”
I waved and headed out the door.
• • •
When I got home, Lindsey had a strip of duct tape over her mouth and a pad of paper in her hands. On the paper she wrote, “The agent called and explained about your power and boot camp and everything.”
I nodded and gave her a hug. “You don’t have to wear that tape.”
She wrote, “With you leaving tomorrow, I didn’t want to say anything that would hurt your feelings or make us fight.”
“Tomorrow?” I pulled the paper out. I figured I had a couple of weeks, at least. But no, she was right, I had to report the next day, freshly shaved, and no need to bring personal belongings.
“Well,” I said, “I guess you can go back to Brad now. I’ll probably be gone for months, maybe years.”
She mumbled angrily behind the duct tape and wrote furiously on her pad of paper. She slapped the paper against my hand until I took it. She’d written, “Sometimes things are true but it’s only part of the truth. Sometimes it’s not everything that needs to be said. I think of Brad sometimes, but not because I want to be with him, not really.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just upset about tomorrow, and I’m scared.”
Her pen flew across the paper. “What are you afraid of?”
I ran my hand across my beard. “I just . . . it seems likely that a few weeks after I’m gone you’ll find some new guy, and I’m going to get a letter saying that you’re sorry, but you’ve met someone, and you’re going to be—I don’t know—a trapeze artist in your boyfriend’s circus.”
She rolled her eyes and wrote, “Seriously? A carnie?” She underlined carnie five times.
“Circus performer,” I said. “You always twist my words.”
She wrote, “You’re being a jerk. I wanted us to have a nice night together.”
“Whatever.” I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I couldn’t believe it. Tomorrow I was joining the military with a bunch of powered freaks, and who knew where that would lead? I looked at my beard in the mirror. It really did make me look old and sad. I knew I was acting like a petulant teenager. I sighed, and lathered shaving cream on my face. I planned to shave and shower so Lindsey and I could speak the obligatory lies shared between loved ones when one of them is leaving.
She opened the door and grabbed my hand just before the razor took its first swath down my cheek. She yanked the tape from her mouth and said, “Jimmy, I’m going to be here when you get back. Because that’s my superpower. Loving you. You’re stuck with me.”
And then she held me for a long time, and I didn’t shave until morning, just before I left to catch my bus for boot camp. As the bus pulled away, the sun shone through the dust on the road. The guy next to me said, “I can see the future. What’s your thing?”
“My beard is a truth serum.”
He nodded. “You and Lindsey are going to be all right, you know.”
Even though my face was smooth, I believed him.
Matt Mikalatos is the author of four novels, the most recent of which is Capeville: Death of the Black Vulture, a YA super-hero novel. You can connect with him online at Capeville.net or Facebook.com/mikalatosbooks.
Over an Embat
tled City
Adam R . Shannon
The people sway and sway, their heads bobbing to the train’s tuneless clicks.
A woman in the row ahead bounces a fussy baby. I can see him in the gap between the seats, struggling as if taken captive by a giant. He fastens his cloudy blue eyes on mine, and I make a wild face, blowing out my cheeks and raising my eyebrows. For a moment, he goes quiet. Then his face collapses, and his wail fills the train car with unfiltered anguish. He weeps huge, adult-size tears.
Nice job, Emma. Frightener of Babies, Ruiner of Train Rides.
• • •
Grand Central has been rebuilt since I moved from the city. Only it wasn’t rebuilt; it was always here. The Unmaker never brought it down on top of thousands of morning commuters, reducing it to shrieking rubble, before Outsider subdued him. From its soaring ceiling to its urine-scented lower corners, it has remained unchanged, reliable. For everyone but me.
Two Hyde cops are leaning against the wall at the end of the platform, bullshitting and watching the disembarking commuters. I resist the urge to pull my hoodie tighter around my face. Try not to look like a criminal, Emma. There’s no way they’re looking for me.
Well, it’s possible.
As soon as my parents discover I’m missing, they’ll know where I’m headed. They might call the cops. And, of course, I’m carrying a gun in my messenger bag, which I basically stole.
Emma, Fugitive from Reality.
They’re not Hyde cops anymore, I remind myself. They’re New York City cops. I’ll never get over that. Of all the insults I’ve endured in sixteen turbulent years, the worst—well, the second-worst—was waking up to find someone had renamed my city.
When I meet the man responsible, I’m going to demand an explanation.
• • •
No one knew Outsider’s exact origin story, but you could always detect in him a restless sorrow, a weariness, even when he streaked through the skies over Hyde on his way toward danger, rattling the skyscrapers with sonic booms.
He broke a few windows in the early flyovers. He was frightening: a man stumbling around in blind grief. He once careened through a flock of Canada Geese, sending lifeless birds spiraling down onto rooftop decks. He was sloppy, but in his carelessness, we saw sadness.
Outsider came from a distant future, a dying Earth. He was the first to step through a painstakingly-constructed wormhole designed to carry the last surviving humans to the safety of the past. They hoped to live out their lives under cover of false identities, refugees scattered in the confusion of our age. Like all of his people, he was augmented at the molecular level, possessing abilities far beyond those of his human ancestors. They planned to conceal their natural advantages from the inhabitants of the time.
There were some amongst his kind who implored him not to go, arguing that humanity’s lifespan was simply at an end. The human story was over, they said. You only do us a disservice by prolonging it.
His mate and two children planned to join him on the other side.
He entered the blinding tunnel and was swept into history.
• • •
What I love about Hyde—or New York—is that in a hundred steps I can pass the apartments of dozens of interesting people. Where we live now, a hundred steps only take me as far as the home of a distracted broker and a “concierge travel specialist,” whatever that is. Together they drive a sleepy, flaccid child between play dates.
I miss Hyde. I can tell my parents do, too, although they think it was always called New York City.
“It was too crazy there,” my mom says. Meaning: you were too crazy there, Emma. You and your stories about Outsider, and the Unmaker, and battles that demolished places you loved. Your frightening insistence that they were real and not the stuff of comic books. “Hasn’t the city been through enough?” my mother would ask. “Do you have to pretend it was worse?”
• • •
Focus, the last surviving hero, lives in a tightly-guarded penthouse atop a metallic modern building. He seldom descends to street level, but my research tells me he’s going to attend a meeting of global financial bodies this afternoon. With no supervillains to fight, Focus campaigns against the evils of corruption.
He’s a shadow of the hero I remember, but he’s the only person who can help me.
I’m not prepared for the throngs of people outside Focus’s building. The street is cordoned off, with New York cops keeping people on the opposite sidewalk. A limo idles at the curb. Many of his admirers hold up signs, appealing for his help: Please find my daughter. Missing since June 1997 and What happened to Flight MH370? They fidget and peer over the heads of the others.
The doors open, and a sigh passes like a breeze through the crowd, but it’s only two hefty men in dark suits, who regard us through mirrored sunglasses. Then I feel the crowd urge forward, and he’s there, wrapped in a hooded black cloak like a monk’s robe, his face obscured. He’s being hustled forward by a female guard in a suit and identical sunglasses, and he seems frail, harried.
“Focus!” people call out. “Focus! Over here!” They hoist their signs, begging for recognition.
If I’m right, I won’t have to shout. If I’m wrong, and he won’t listen, the last superhero is probably a dead man, and I’m on my own.
“Focus,” I say, making no effort to raise my voice. “I believe you’re in danger from Martin Tucker, the comic book writer.”
All at once, the people around me slow and blur, their voices dialing down to mere whispers. The entire world fades—everything except me and the stooped man in black across the street.
“Why do you say that?” he asks. His voice is as clear as if he were standing directly in front of me.
I begin to perceive a web of filaments, a forest of glowing fibers stretching in all directions, connecting everything in a complex lattice. A woman, brandishing a sign with glacial, agonizing slowness, ate at the same table in a diner as the man who is yelling in extreme slow-motion at a taciturn cop. The cop’s neighbor once bummed a cigarette off the man who sold the magic marker that the woman used to make her sign.
This is the power Focus wields: to perceive and make plain the patterning behind the skin of the world.
The people between us move incrementally forward, their details blurred. Here goes nothing.
“He’s somehow related to the disappearance of several dozen superheroes—and villains—over the last ten years,” I say.
The skein of filaments reaches out beyond the city. I see a woman in Malaysia making my shirt, a stooped man strolling the beach somewhere along the Indian Ocean.
“There are no other superheroes,” he says. “I’m the only one.” His face is hidden behind wraps of dark cloth, the eyes barely visible.
“You are now.”
“Please get in the car,” Focus says.
• • •
Outsider’s passage through the wormhole produced an electromagnetic pulse that fried networks within sixty miles of Hyde. He awoke under dark streetlamps and darker buildings, breathing the unfamiliar stink of burning fossil fuels. People began filtering out of doorways, congregating in the streets and talking to strangers in the way you only see during a disaster.
The wormhole inverted and closed with a thunderclap. His children never appeared. Outsider’s passage had led to the total collapse of the timeline he knew as his history. He had erased everyone he loved from existence.
He was alone, angry, and powerful in ways unimaginable to the people around him.
But almost immediately, he began to weaken.
The quantum-level alterations in his mind and body were powered from extra-dimensional realms created in his timeline. When his universe collapsed, this energy source began to fade.
That was Outsider’s great secret. With his powers faltering, he was constantly forced to improvise, to push harder, to discover new capacities within himself. He became more than he ever might have been, had he remained in his own time. But
he sometimes wished he had stayed behind with the people he loved to watch the world die.
Everyone knows that story now. They read it in the comic books, now that Outsider is just a fictional character. But I remember when he rattled the windows of Hyde, and no one knew exactly why. Back then, that little quantum of knowledge in the hands of the Unmaker might have leveled a city.
• • •
Everything speeds up again. The female guard, following whispered instructions, crosses the street and points me out to a cop, who waves me through the cordon tape.
Resentment shimmers through the crowd. “What’s so special about her?” I hear one woman say. A man shouts to the dark, hooded figure, “You only help little girls?”
I duck inside the limo door, and I’m with the last living superhero.
The filaments reach out from me and weave into those growing out of the seats and unraveling like vines from the ceiling. Only Focus remains untouched by the pattern. The fibers bend around him, moving slightly as if to avoid his touch.
“You’ve been found to be . . . delusional,” he says. “I see two— three?—protective orders that forbid you to contact individuals in the comic book industry.”
“There were more,” I admit, “but those people don’t exist anymore. I was trying to get in touch with the Glass Samurai and Fidget. Their people got a little jumpy.”
“Those are fictional characters.”
“They are now.”
He sits back. The filaments fade a bit, retreating into the world. I wonder if he’s about to kick me out of the car. I can’t let it happen. “I remember,” I tell him. “I remember when Outsider was a real man, when New York was called Hyde, and there were villains who nearly leveled the city. One by one, they vanished, and no one else knows they were ever real. Right about the time a superhero disappeared, they showed up for the first time in a comic book.”
“By Martin Tucker,” he nods.
He’s not going to kick me out. Inside my chest, I feel a spring uncoil, the loosening of a tightness I’d forgotten was there, and all at once I’m afraid I’m going to cry. No one has ever believed me. For years, I’ve been sitting across from nodding therapists, who listened intently without rolling their eyes, and just when I began to think they understood, they’d say “I believe you believe it’s true,” and smile as if that was the same thing as “I believe you.”
Behind the Mask Page 26
