by Gregg Taylor
Suddenly, the throng seemed to freeze at some new terror. Coming from directly behind them was a long, bloodcurdling battle cry, sending chills up every spine, and parting the mobsters like the Red Sea as each turned to have their worst fears confirmed. Somehow, the Flying Squirrel had gotten loose.
All at once, she burst through the doorway to a chorus of small-arms fire. The Red Panda carved his way through the throng towards her with a shout. Parker, largely ignored by the crooks, gave the best covering fire that he could. He could not help but stop and watch her as she charged into the room, ran straight up the wall as if it were not there and shot forward with amazing force, sparks flying from the base of her boots. From under her arms, the remarkable gliders of her costume unfurled and she flew forward at tremendous speed, the soldiers of the Cabal scattering before her.
She flew directly towards the Red Panda, who had his wrists crossed and arms out to meet her. For a moment Parker felt a sharp pang of irrational jealousy as he expected them to embrace. Far from it, she joined hands with him and, in a maneuver clearly long-practiced, he spun her, windmill-style, through the air towards the crowd of toughs now charging them from the back. She twisted mid-air and turned the full force of their combined kinetic energy into a mighty kick that sent one gangster thundering back through the air, taking out three of his fellows behind him in the process.
Parker was a man of action, and had seen some remarkable displays of courage and teamwork in his time on the force. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the sight of these two heroes, reunited, routing their enemies with such skill, such determination and most of all, such overwhelming joy at the activity. If he spun with a high kick, she ducked under it, though to Parker’s eyes, she could not possibly have seen it coming. When she turned to throw a punch, he was there to cover her back. They knew which attackers to take, and which to leave for the other, and fought always with perfect trust in the other’s abilities.
They each read the flow of battle as if it were a dance to which they had long-ago learned the steps, and which their foes were seeing for the very first time. There could not have been more than four or five left standing when there came a sudden clatter of machine gun fire, and the last soldiers of the Crime Cabal were cut down mercilessly from behind.
Parker gasped from his vantage point as he saw a small man with a pleasantly round face beaming a great smile as he leveled a Thompson submachine gun at the two heroes.
“Sorry,” he said with a grin, “I got fed up waiting.”
The two masked heroes froze where they stood. They were twenty feet from their opponent, with no cover beyond the carpet of unconscious forms scattered around them on the floor.
“Boss, you remember Kid Chaos?” the Flying Squirrel panted sarcastically.
“Chaos… Chaos…,” the masked man feigned an effort of memory, “doesn’t ring a bell.”
The little man strafed the ground in front of them with bullets. Neither of them flinched.
“Surprised to see me?” he beamed.
“After those sequenced explosions?” the Red Panda said. “You might as well have signed your name in lights.”
“Always the gentleman,” Chaos sneered, tightening his grip on the weapon.
Parker stepped forward from the shadows, his service revolver extended. He had Kid Chaos dead to rights.
“Don’t move–!” he managed to say before he felt a crush of pain against the back of his head and staggered forward, sprawling on to the cold cement floor. He rolled once, groping for the pistol he had lost in the fall. Towering above him he saw a tall, dour woman with raven hair and a long flowing cloak. She was swinging something in her hand which Parker couldn’t quite force his eyes to focus on.
“A blackjack, Antonia?” the Red Panda scolded. “Not very subtle for a brilliant chemist like you.”
Professor Zombie shrugged a little. “When in Rome,” she smiled. “I see you came for your little pet.”
“I thought I’d drop by and stop her from killing you,” the Red Panda smiled.
The Flying Squirrel gaped at Andy Parker on the floor.
“You brought him?” she said with disbelief.
“Jealous?” her partner teased.
There was a sudden clatter of machine gun fire into the ceiling above.
“I think somebody wants some attention,” Kit said under her breath.
“I am trying to have a final confrontation here!” Kid Chaos pouted. “Something with a little dignity, for once!”
Parker lifted himself to his knees, gazing at the destruction around him. This was dignified? Kid Chaos seemed not to see him, but stepped closer to the Red Panda, his finger squeezing the trigger as hard as he could without firing.
“After what you did to me…,” Kid Chaos breathed between gritted teeth, “you deserve worse than the quick death you will get.”
“What did I do, exactly?” The Red Panda seemed confused. “I stopped you from destroying the world, yet somehow you’ve survived again. What makes this time so very different?”
Parker was amazed at the casual ease with which these old foes exchanged unpleasantries on the knife’s edge of destruction.
Kid Chaos seemed to blink back tears. “You have no idea how long it took me to escape. How much I suffered. The crushing boredom of eternity!”
Kit interjected, “And so this time, he decided to take on some partners.”
“Partners, nothing!” Chaos snarled. “They were bait! I knew you couldn’t resist the urge to break up the last big gang in the city! And I’d be waiting to have my revenge at last!”
“That explains why you’re slumming with this Crime Cabal.” The Red Panda turned to Professor Zombie. “What about you?”
She shrugged again. “I needed the money,” she sighed. “But it’s so hard to work with humans. I really don’t work or play well with others.”
As if on cue, Parker could just see a single, shadowy form staggering up the hallway behind the villains. He almost spoke, and got the side of the Flying Squirrel’s boot jabbed quickly into his leg for his trouble.
“And now it’s over.” The Red Panda smiled in spite of the odds. “There is nothing left here for you to gain.”
“That’s just where you’re wrong, masked menace!” Kid Chaos drew back a step to spray his enemies with bullets. At that second he was suddenly picked up and thrown backwards, strafing the ceiling above as he flew bodily, head and shoulders above his unseen foe. He fell hard against the cement floor, and the Tommy-gun went clattering across the floor, the ammunition drum flying apart as it did so.
Chaos was still recovering, still trying to see who his assailant was when he heard Professor Zombie cry in a commanding tone,
“Malcolm! Stop!”
The gangster leader’s walking corpse was still intact, and, as predicted, he had become unpredictable. He lashed out at Professor Zombie with a blow that sent her reeling and left no doubt that what was left of Malcolm was beyond her control. She turned and ran in the opposite direction, deeper into the tunnels, as if returning to her laboratory. The zombie glared at the masked heroes a moment. The Red Panda’s hand returned to his sword-hilt. The Flying Squirrel stayed his attack.
“Boss, wait.”
“Wait?” Parker sputtered, horrified at what he saw.
Suddenly, Malcolm turned on his heels and thrust himself bodily at the form of Kid Chaos, who was staggering to his feet. Malcolm’s eyes fixed coldly on the raised portion of Kid Chaos’ shirt that obscured the device fixed to his chest. He reached for it clumsily, but forcefully. Kid Chaos fought him as hard as he could, squealing in terror all the while.
“What in blazes–?” the Red Panda began.
The Flying Squirrel pulled at his arm. “Explain later!” she cried. “Run now!”
They broke for the great steel door with all speed, Parker struggling to keep up with them.
“Why are we running?” he called as his legs pumped as fast as they could down the
long, underground hallway.
“Ask her!” the Red Panda called back. “She never says, ‘Run!’ unless there’s a good–”
Suddenly there came the first in a series of mighty explosions, as large as any that had destroyed the Golden Goose. The first shock of it pushed all three of them off their feet, and the blasts kept coming from deep within the fortress behind them. From a distance they saw the light grow as a wall of fire roared up the hallways of the once-mighty sanctum of the Crime Cabal, rolling on, meeting other great fires, rolling…
…right towards them.
“Run!” Kit called again, and the three did. Another twenty yards to the first gate, now unmanned and unguarded. Past the first steel door, which even for all its thickness could never stand against what was coming, and up the ladder.
The Red Panda burst through the trapdoor in the floor of Fong’s Laundromat to the screams of the employees and customers alike.
“Out of here! All of you!” he roared in a voice that no one dared disobey as the Flying Squirrel helped Constable Parker up the last rungs. The three of them broke for the door as a great tongue of flame burst forth from the trapdoor, shattering the ceiling of the laundromat.
The store was evacuated immediately. No one appeared to follow out the trap door… nothing but fiery death that quickly spread to every surface in the place. Fong’s Laundromat quickly became an inferno.
From his position of safety across the street, Mister Fong wailed in despair. His feeling of dread had been right. Nothing good had come of his aiding crime. Nothing good ever could.
Thirty-Two
Andy Parker stood on the rooftop of his building. It had rained most of the day, and had washed the thick grime from the air, along with much of the evidence left behind by the destruction of the Crime Cabal’s headquarters the night before. There was something of a chill in the air tonight, and he drew his light jacket closer to him as he stared out at the lights of the city.
It had been a difficult day, to say the least. After the inferno had claimed Fong’s Laundromat, he had turned around and found the Red Panda and the Flying Squirrel gone. He supposed it was folly for him to expect anything else, especially since they must surely have guessed that his original mission was not the destruction of the Crime Cabal, but exposing their secret identities, at least to the police. But there was still a pang of disappointment. A feeling that he couldn’t escape told him that he had been a part of something larger for a brief time, and now he was once again just a man.
It had been even more difficult to explain what had happened, and how he knew that this subterranean disturbance was the death knell for the city’s last big gang. Chief O’Mally alone had known of his mission, and it was in private conference with O’Mally that he was able to persuade the Chief to excavate the supposed empty lot at the end of the tunnel under the rubble that had been Fong’s shop.
The newspapers were all over it already, and Jack Peters at the Chronicle had taken it upon himself to brand the entire enterprise a triumph for the Toronto Police Force in general, and O’Mally in particular. The other papers had followed suit, and O’Mally had been forced to deflect requests for more information on the police operation that spelled doom for the Cabal, without actually admitting that such an operation existed.
Of course, that hadn’t deterred Peters in the least. The Chronicle evening edition declared that unnamed police sources insisted that the Chief’s denials were to protect undercover men still in place, ready to protect the citizens of Toronto from a repeat of the vicious crimes of the past weeks. The entire thing seemed a little hasty to Parker, though he had seen such things happen in the press before. For the first time he found himself wondering if the masked mystery man he had fought beside had a hand in any of it. He made a mental note to ask Jack Peters, knowing full well that the newspaperman would never reveal a “source.”
O’Mally had taken it all with more than a little humbug, but Parker knew that he was secretly pleased. He had seemed less pleased with Parker’s investigation. Parker had not told him everything, of course. Far from it. And as he repeated his paper-thin version of events for the fourth time, Parker began to wonder just who he was protecting. His own career, which made a certain sense to him, or these remarkable two people who flouted the law at every turn.
O’Mally accepted that Parker had found himself more than once tangling with the forces of the Crime Cabal in his efforts to seek out the Red Panda, but he found it difficult to accept that Parker was ready to give up the chase.
“I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed Parker,” the Chief had growled. “You came closer to unmasking this menace than anyone ever has.”
“No disrespect, sir,” Parker had begun, “but don’t you think… well…”
“Go on,” O’Mally had said, gripping his pipe between his teeth.
“As you say, sir… I got close.” Parker had to swallow hard to keep from tripping over the truth. “But I got there by looking for the places where criminals were most likely to strike, and on a grand scale. Places where you’d try to be if your mission was to help ordinary people, and bust up rackets.”
“And it nearly worked!” the Chief had growled. “With a little more time–”
“Sir!” Parker had raised his voice in protest. “If that’s how you find the Red Panda… do we really want to stop him, sir? Can we really do everything he can do, and do it better? I don’t know the answer, sir. But maybe it’s time we finally asked the question.”
O’Mally had regarded Parker with a cold stare for a long moment, then had dismissed him without another word. He had thought a minute after Parker left, then had picked up the telephone and arranged to have Constable Parker transferred downtown permanently. He would have to keep an eye on that young man. Andy Parker very well might turn out to be something of a cowboy himself. Or the next Chief of Police.
“Maybe both,” O’Mally had thought with a smile. “Maybe both.”
Parker had finally returned home to his little apartment, tired and in need of a wash. He had felt the cool night air blow through from the little kitchen when he opened the door. He wondered how long he had left that window open.
To his astonishment, as he crossed the floor to close the window, he saw his own service revolver sitting on the counter. This would not be remarkable, except that he had lost the pistol when Professor Zombie had sapped him back in the lair of the Crime Cabal. Attached to the .38 was a small note, bearing a paw print in red ink and a single word:
“ROOF.”
That was half an hour ago, and as Parker stamped his feet and waited, he wondered why they would call him and let him cool his heels. Finally, he turned to go back inside. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he found himself face to face with a bright red mask. The Red Panda had been standing silently behind him.
The masked man grinned at Parker’s reaction. “Anything?” he called.
Parker stammered for a reply to a question that was not meant for him. At last he heard a voice call from across the rooftop.
“Nothin’, Boss.” It was the Flying Squirrel, balanced on the ledge, peering down the street. “I think he came alone.”
“Of course I came alone!” Parker sputtered. “Who would I tell? Who would believe me?”
“An interesting point.” She smiled as she sidled past him to stand beside her partner. She took a position at his right hand, just a step behind, and her eyes quietly darted to every possible shadow. With such a perfect sentinel, the Red Panda focused his unblinking eyes directly on Constable Andy Parker.
“You were hunting us, Parker,” his voice challenged.
“Yes,” Parker replied, meeting the gaze.
“What did you find?”
The Flying Squirrel turned towards Parker slightly, as if his answer were more important than any possible threat from outside.
“Only more questions,” Parker said simply. The Flying Squirrel smiled and went back to her duty with a toss of her hair.
Parker opened and closed his mouth in astonishment. He had not been expecting to be asked. There were too many… far too many…
“Why?” he said at last, as if this single word could encompass every possible question. “Why?”
“Because someone has to,” the Red Panda said simply. “Look out at this city, Constable Parker. It is a great thing. Almost a living creature. And yet it is as fragile as the weakest soul in it. And as dark as the darkest heart. The gaslights can’t dispel all of the shadows. And within those shadows are men made desperate by hard times. Such men are more dangerous than beasts. People need a reason to hope. Someone has to bring the light of justice to those dark places, Constable Parker. It is what we do, because someone must.”
Parker turned back to face them. “But now that the Crime Cabal’s been routed… They were the last. You’ve cleaned out the organized gangs in the city.”
“They’ll be back,” the Flying Squirrel declared. “Besides, they aren’t the only menace. We made a special project of them because every dollar and every dime they grift with their rackets comes out of the pockets of decent, hard-working people that don’t have a thing to spare. But there are muggers in the alleys, and rich men in the clubs who’ve lost it all and will do anything to get it back.”
“And there are always high-powered lone wolves like Professor Zombie or Kid Chaos,” the Red Panda took over. “They stooped to conquer this time, but next time it may be something on a much grander scale.”
“Next time?” Parker stammered. “But… they must have died.”
“Yes.” The Red Panda smiled. “I’ve said that too many times to believe it until I see a body. Besides, there are others. And things you can’t even begin to imagine, Constable.”
“I see,” Parker said simply. “That was my question. What’s yours?”
