Trista pointed to a window on her screen with boxes connected by a network of lines. “I mapped the Handler’s spyware network. It’s in everything, from your phone to the White House.”
“Good. What’s he up to?”
“He’s calling two moving points in the city.” She started typing again. “The Handler picked highly populated areas in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Each has at least point-of-contact who unloads his villains and tells them to attack.”
“Can we intercept their communications? Maybe tell them to retreat and take all the villains they can with them?”
“The Handler mainly makes phone calls. I don't have a microphone and couldn't imitate his voice if I did.”
“Does he use text messages?”
“He only does that for mass communication. There’s one that went to places that weren’t on the CIA’s map of his locations. All it said was to wait for his order.”
“They’re probably reinforcements,” said Alex. “When the superheroes come back and restore order, they can hit those.”
On the other side of the partition, Noah chuckled. “Sure. Send idiots in tights to fight other idiots in tights.”
Alex ignored him. “Do you know how many people are in each location?”
“I can’t get into his video feed,” said Trista. “The hospital’s router doesn’t have enough bandwidth.”
“When has not knowing what you’re up against ever stopped you stupid-heroes?” said Noah.
“Shut the hell up,” said Alex.
Trista stopped typing. “Wait. He’s right.”
“Tell me you’re not taking his side.”
“Alex, you used to be at the front line of the New York Guardians' battles. How often did you rush in without knowing what you were getting into?”
Alex rubbed his chin. “That is how we met.”
“It’s your damn egos,” said Noah. “You shove everyone aside because you don’t think anyone else can save the world.”
“Superheroes do that so often it's predictable,” said Trista. “Remember how Mister Griffin said the Handler called himself the artist of war? He planned what everyone would do, and we're following his script.”
“I don’t care about glory,” said Alex. “I don’t even care much about catching him. I only want this to end with as few deaths as possible.”
“An agent of authority working to restore peace. Jus ad bellum.”
“You’re right. I am an agent of authority, and the Handler is a rogue operative. But the CIA, MAB, FBI, and superheroes don’t communicate. We're already divided.”
Noah turned on the TV. A news anchor said, “Wayne Penobscot, rumored to be the real identity of the Midnight Rider, is a hostage at the Langham Hotel.”
He changed the channel. “Philadelphia is in flames as …”
He changed the channel again. “In New York, the local superheroes are out in force, but the Scientific Six and New York Guardians are gone. As you can see behind me, Griffin Tower is under attack.”
Trista stopped typing. “Did he say Griffin Tower is under attack?”
Alex rubbed his head. “A truck slam into it and a bunch of goons come out. Emily and Calvin are in there. I hope the security system and Gale Force will be enough to save them.”
Trista grabbed her rosary and mouthed a prayer.
“Thanks,” said Alex. “I’d do that if I knew how.”
Trista tapped a few more keys. “I don’t think the Handler can remotely shut down Griffin Tower's security system, but I won't take a chance. I’ll disconnect the intranet from his spyware network.” A square disappeared on the map of the Handler’s spyware network. “He won’t know it’s gone unless he tries to activate it.”
“Don’t stop there. Tear it all apart.”
“But he loses a lot of connections quickly, he’ll think there’s something black in the lentil.”
“There’s ... what?”
“It’s something Vijay’s mother used to say.'Daal me kuch kala hai.’ I got a lot of his personal memories when I took his skills.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means something fishy. He’ll get suspicious if everything shuts down.”
“His power comes from information. The less he has, the weaker he is.”
“Fine. Where should I start?”
Alex pulled out his smartphone. “He’s throwing our enemies against us, so I’ll throw his at him. First free my phone, and if he’s hacked into Agent Breugnon’s phone free that too.”
“What about the New York Guardians? Shouldn’t you call them?”
“Deon is running them down. Arbalest always loses his, and I don’t know how to call Magna. Stormhead can't answer his phone while flying for some electro-magnetic reason I don't understand.”
“Guess that’s why he didn’t answer last night.”
“But Agent Breugnon reached Midnight Rider without the Handler noticing before. He can save Boston. After that, take off the major superhero teams. I’ll get them back to their cities. Then disconnect the MAB’s main headquarters, and then the CIA, FBI, NSA, and Homeland Security. We'll use them to destroy the Handler’s reinforcements. Let's save as much as we can before he notices us.”
Trista clicked the mouse button. “Your phone is disconnected from his network.”
Alex unlocked his smartphone’s security screen. He saw the picture of himself and Emily back when she was pregnant. The lingering guilt he felt from leaving them behind stabbed his heart. Even if Emily cheated on him, he couldn’t deny he was happy at that moment.
No. That moment was gone. There was no time to look back.
Trista clicked her mouse again. “Agent Breugnon is off the network.”
“Good. Get the address for the hidden base near Boston.”
Noah said, “Agent, I can see the redheaded girl and the not-gay boy from my window. They’re taking a beating.”
Knockout Rose and Pinwheel ran around the hospital's corner.
The rest of the Young Sentinels huddled in the middle of an intersection. A young boy in a rainbow colored suit lay motionless on the sidewalk. Stardancer danced madly to control anyone who would watch. Cantrip threw hoops, handkerchiefs, and playing cards, which did nothing but annoy the encroaching monsters and madmen. A brunette who wore only a few strategically placed pieces of golden tape cowered.
“Is your replacement the nearly-naked girl?” asked Pinwheel.
“The manager wanted me to wear less,” said Knockout Rose. “I had to argue like hell to add bodypaint.”
Pinwheel put his hands together. He tried to shoot a laser at a club-wielding man who got close to Stardancer. He held his hands the same way he did when he fired a laser at the tyrannosaurus-man. Only a weak beam of light came out. The energy wouldn’t gather and explode. He was scared for Knockout Rose and Agent O'Farrell. He had no trouble focusing on his grief and fear then. He could not muster that feeling for Stardancer. In fact, he wanted to see her get hurt for all the times she humiliated him.
No, he couldn’t think that way. Heroes had to save everyone they could.
Pinwheel threw a flash of light at the club-wielder.
Knockout Rose she focused on a heavily scarred hunchbacked mutant with large red eyes. Even though she only trained with Alex for a few days, she remembered his words: “A good takedown eliminates the size advantage.”
Knockout Rose ducked punched the mutant’s thighs with her charged gloves. He fell forward. She rolled to avoid being under him. She pressed a capsule on her wrist and coated his face with capsaicin.
A wiry rat-faced fiend grabbed her from behind. She shifted her head and threw her leg high enough to hit his face. He loosened his arms. She spun and punch him twice. He fell to the ground, twitching.
Stardancer stopped dancing. “About time you got here, Steve. Do you have any idea how tired I am?”
Pinwheel’s hands flashed like a powerful strobe light. Each burst of light was a little wea
ker than the previous one. Beads of sweat appeared in his close-cropped hair. It got harder and harder to generate the energy.
“I didn’t say take five,” said Stardancer. “Come on, you’ve got an audience. Act like you deserve applause.”
Steve brought forth all the bitterness he felt towards Stardancer. He made another flash. This time tiny shards of hard light scattered with the burst. They struck an encroaching gang of villains in identical doll masks like razor-sharp hail.
Stardancer saw a gap in the doll-masked mob. “Exit stage left.” She ran through it.
Pinwheel didn’t see a heavy fist before it hit his cheek.
He landed face-to-face with the replacement Pinwheel. The slender young man had a costume identical to his except for a bullet hole in the middle of the mask. The boy’s dead eyes stared back at him.
Knockout Rose narrowly dodged a tiger-man’s clawed hand and got up in time to jab him with a charged glove. He didn’t hit the ground before a walking pile of scrap metal smacked her back with a lead ball on the end of a pipe-like arm.
Her suit’s automatic fabric contraction and her harness’s reinforced frame kept her bones from breaking, but it hit hard enough to knock her down.
A man with spiked armor kicked the downed Pinwheel. Knockout Rose blasted the attacker with a burst of capsaicin.
Pinwheel found the energy to shoot a laser at the scrap-metal man. The beam shot a hole through him.
The brunette wrapped herself around Pinwheel’s leg. “Please,” she said, crying from a combination of fear and capsaicin mist, “save me.”
Cantrip wrapped around Knockout Rose’s leg. “Save me too.”
Knockout Rose and Pinwheel stood back to back. All around them were monsters, miscreants, and minor villains.
Another burst of machine-gun fire echoed through Griffin Tower.
Gary said, “You want me to take the elevator during an emergency?”
“It’s a direct route to the basement,” said Gale Force. “Get down there and move the O’Farrells to the bunker.”
The doors opened. Gary went in. “Hope we make it.”
After the doors closed, Gale Force turned back to the medical ward. “Lou, protect Joey.”
Lou nodded.
“Ujimushi, last chance to help. I’ll ask Agent O’Farrell to drop the charges against you.”
Ujimushi said nothing.
Bosillos put his tools and assortment of machine parts back into his pockets. “You want me to open the elevator doors now?”
“Yes. How easy would it be to open a door from the inside if I was on top of the elevator?”
A long needle popped out of Bosillos’s mechanical hand. He stuck it into a small hole in the corner of the elevator. “All you gotta do is trip the safety latch. You should also pull the safety break so it doesn’t move.”
The elevator doors clicked and opened. Gale Force peered into the dark shaft. “I can barely see the elevator’s top. How do I trip the latch and engage the break? I’m not even sure what those look like.”
“It’s your plan, gorda.”
“Stop calling me that.” Gale Force tapped Bosillos’s cybernetic eye. “Can you see in the dark?”
“Hey, I’m not going …”
Gale Force threw aside her crutches, grabbed Bosillos's arms, created a burst of wind behind him, and pulled him into the elevator shaft by falling backwards. She created a mini-tornado to cushion their landing on the roof of the elevator.
There was another burst of machine fire, followed by a shout: “Only two more guns.”
“The deal was I help you,” said Bosillos, “not get killed.”
“Then hide,” said Gale Force. “Engage the break when the elevator stops. Open the door to the ground floor.”
Bosillos’s eye glowed. “How far should I open it?”
“Enough for me to get my hands through so I can generate wind.”
“Wind? These guys took out machine guns, and you’re going to use air?”
“I’ll repel them as long as I can.”
The elevator stopped. Bosillos activated the security break. “I see the latch. Sure you want to do this?”
A single weak burst of gunfire ended mid-burst. “That’s the last gun. Charge!”
Gale Force said, “Do it.”
Bosillos moved the safety latch and opened the door a few inches.
The bullet-gouged marble flagstones of Griffin Tower’s lobby were coated in blood. Body parts from various minor villains, most of them barely human, littered the floor along with shells and pieces of destroyed machine guns.
Flayer stood in the shattered glass that used to be the lobby’s doors. A dozen minor villains ran straight towards the elevator.
Gale Force thought of everyone who said she didn’t have what it took to be a superhero. She remembered every fat joke, every racist comment, every insult she ever heard. She also remembered how she stopped two angry kids with guns from committing mass murder at her high school and how, in the same floor in front of her, she helped Alex defeat the Bone Horror.
Those were her finest moments. This could be one too. Rage and honor engulfed her. She stood as well as could on a cast-encased leg, put her hands together, and with a thought made the air molecules around her heavier.
The air got cold enough to freeze the blood on the floor before a howling gust of wind filled the lobby. Chunks of stone and broken machine guns flew against the invaders as they struggled not to fall on the now-icy floor. Jets of fire flew back onto Icy Fingers' face as tips of icicles cut Backburner’s orange-and-red costume.
Flayer shot his whips out and caught the front desk’s top. All-Beef Patty flew into him. Her broad body caught wind like a sail and pushed him back onto the street.
Flayer pulled himself to the side of the door to dodge the tumbling bodies coming out. The villains, rendered mindlessly obedient by the stimoceiver microchips, tried to run back in.
“Fall back and wait.” Flayer grabbed Junkyard Kat. “Show me your claws.”
She popped her claws out.
Flayer took a Semtex bomb from the truck’s glove compartment and set the timer for one minute. “Go around the corner and climb to the closest window. Hold this against the corner of a metal sheet.”
Her face twitched in frustrated agony. She took the bomb, went around the corner, and climbed.
Puca felt nothing for New York City's tall impersonal skyscrapers and grid of streets. She pretended it was London. It was the only way she could ignore the coughing fits and sick feeling in her stomach.
London. Such a fragile city, an ancient place beneath modern layers. Every bomb she planted there wiped away centuries of history. Each explosion brought her homeland a step closer to freedom. But then the Irish Republic Army signed that stupid ceasefire. The Real IRA had no strategy or plan, but she still had the overwhelming urge to blow things up.
She held the bomb and kept count while enduring another coughing fit. For four years the new body she got from the Hander was perfectly healthy. The sensation of being sick was strange to her.
Her mouth filled with the tang of blood. This really wasn’t good.
The last bomb had four seconds left on it. She counted a beat and pressed the timer’s start button.
The counter read zero-ten.
Something flashed past her.
Deon kicked up a cloud of dust when he stopped. “She has a bomb!”
“Ya soddin’ wog.” Without depositing the bomb she teleported herself up and over to the nearest roof. She coughed again. Her mental count told her the bomb had nine seconds left.
Had Puca looked, she would’ve seen her bomb didn’t have an eight on the timer. It had a one.
It exploded.
Deon held the bomb that he snatched from Puca's hands while she coughed. He took off running before parts of Puca rained over the city.
The timer showed zero-zero-two when he reached the Hudson River. Without stopping he threw it overhand. It made
a small splash before it exploded. The burst of cold water drenched Deon.
He was exhausted. He used most of his energy running around in Vijay's brain. Chasing down Puca took all he had left.
He looked back at New York City. Sure, it was loud and filthy and expensive and full of idiots, but it was his home. This is where his family and his friends lived. He had to help them.
He found enough strength to run through the Lincoln Tunnel at a hundred miles-per-hour.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Not Every Flowering Dream Bloomed
Gary hadn't been to the basement of Griffin Tower before. He had no idea why there was a big empty room with a mirrored wall in front of him or a smooth circular hole through another wall.
A burst of machine gun fire followed by a man’s shout: “That’s the last gun. Charge!”
“Mrs. O’Farrell?” He ran down the hallway opposite of the LED lights. “Where are you?
A deafening howl of wind drowned his words.
Gary opened each door. He only saw unmade beds. The door at the end of the hallways was locked.
He was far enough from the rush of wind to hear Emily say on the other side of the door, “Go away or I’ll shoot.”
“It’s Gary. I want to take you to a safe place.”
“Aren’t you the bug-eyed freak who took me hostage?”
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
The whistling of wind overhead stopped.
Gary knew enough about guns to recognize the click of a hammer hitting an empty chamber. He dropped to the ground. “Don’t shoot! I’m trying to help you.”
“Go away.” A few more clicks. “Why won’t this stupid thing fire?”
“Is it loaded?”
“I put a clip in it.”
“Is the safety on?”
“I know how to turn that off.”
“What kind of gun is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s one of Alex’s rifles.”
“Maybe it has a bolt release button. Try pressing that.”
“Why are you helping me? If I get this thing to work, I’ll shoot you.”
“And if I were you, I’d want to shoot me too. I’m sorry about what happened upstairs.”
The Prospects (Book 2): Nothing Poorer Than Gods Page 24
