Then, what he prayed wouldn’t happen, did. The spotlight found him and he raised his hand to cover his eyes. His jaw was taut as he waited to feel the first impact of a bullet in his chest . . . but it didn’t come.
At the exact instant the trooper in the chopper began to fire, the Cowl’s jet plane soared in from the west. On its nose was a pincer, one that caught the balloon and wire, then as the wire slid through the closing pincer, the balloon halted the movement and the wire snapped taut.
Off the warehouse roof, the Cowl was yanked into the air. Wind whistled around his ears as just below him, where his feet were only a second ago, the gravel was chopped up by bullets.
He was gone in less than a second, lost in the night sky. The plane banked to the north and his waiting lair.
As he floated in the clear winter sky, the wind cold on his exposed flesh, his entire body aching from his battle with the walking dead, he still felt alive, more alive than he had in years.
The wire began to be retracted and he rose up. He prepared to climb back into the plane, a difficult task when he was at his peak—let alone now—but he knew he would be able to do it.
He idly wondered if the Puppet Master would have truly been able to rule the city with the walking dead.
Pushing the thoughts from his mind, he decided it didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was he was alive, and once recovered, would soon be back to prowl the night, to take down evil, wherever it might be.
Coda to the Golden Age
by
Lorne Dixon
The President of the United States of America was still speaking when, in an impatient huff, Missouri Madison hung up the phone. The President, half his age, had called to wish him a happy one hundredth birthday and to take the opportunity to again express his appreciation for his service during, and after, the Second World War. Missouri was well past tired of being thanked; it was rare that he visited the upstairs room where he kept, in ramshackle piles, the plaques, awards, ribbons, citations, statuettes, and metals that had been bestowed upon him over the years. He’d considered, on more than one occasion, selling the entire lot to a memorabilia collector, or failing that, as scrap. In today’s economy, he figured he could earn a pretty penny.
There was an exception, though: six months ago he rummaged through the stacks of awards to find a framed newspaper from 1945 with a headline which read germany surrenders. Under the headline, in the largest photograph he’d ever seen on a front page, was a shot of Missouri standing in front of Hitler’s overtaken bunker holding a battered German helmet over his head. The image was iconic. In the first few years after it was taken it appeared everywhere: on fine art prints, magazines, posters. When he’d handed it over to Kory Leeks, the kid’s face lit up and for a magical moment the ravages of cancer and the scars of surgery vanished. Kory lived across the street from Missouri, but most days he just barely lived at all. That birthday, with that old newspaper photo in his hands, he glowed.
Kory was his best friend. At thirteen, the boy had endured more pain and sickness than anyone should in a lifetime, but he never let the agony inside stop him from greeting Missouri with a warm hug and a sing-song salutation, “Hey there Fearless Fantom.”
Fantom, with an F, he never quite understood why. He guessed that the reporters covering the war in Europe just had a thing for alliteration, but in any case, it stuck, and after returning to America they continued to use it. Kory was the only one who called him by the name anymore, and while Missouri’d always sneered at all the articles over the years, he didn’t mind when the boy called him by that ridiculous name, not one bit.
Something buzzed in the other room. There was a time when he would have been able to hear the footfall of a cricket a mile off, but that was a long time ago. Now, he reached into his ear, turned up his hearing aid, and pulled himself up to his walker. Grunting with each step, he headed into the sitting room. The sound came from a two-way radio perched on its charger on the center coffee table. Smiling, he heard Kory’s voice calling his name. But the smile died down as he realized that instead of his usual excited boyish shout, Kory’s voice was filled with fright. “Fantom—Are you there, Fantom? I need you to answer, I really need you to—”
Settling down into his easy chair, Missouri fumbled for the radio, bringing it up to his lips with shaking hands. With some concentration, he managed to press the send button, all the while wishing the controls were twice their size. “I’m here, Kory. What’s your twenty?”
Usually, the boy would give a fantastic location—the jungles of Sumatra or the deserts outside Karnak; wherever his imaginary games had taken him that day—but not today. “My bedroom. I’m scared, Fantom.”
In the fifties, he’d stared down the approach of an entire battalion of Red Army super soldiers and not felt a single twinge of worry. But the quiver in Kory’s voice tightened a knot in Missouri’s gut that forced the air out of his lungs.
“What’s wrong?” Missouri asked.
“There are people in the backyard,” Kory whispered, breathing into the microphone, each exhale transmitting a seashore wave of static to Missouri’s ear. “They’re trying to get inside through the back door. And . . .”
“What is it? You can tell me. Remember, the better the intelligence—”
Kory finished the sentence in the same panicked voice. “—the easier the victory. This is . . . different, though. I don’t know that you’ll believe me.”
“Try me,” he said. Those were the same words he’d spoken to Minister Mayhem when the rogue German rocket scientist had told him that even he couldn’t stop the simultaneous launch of ten missiles bound for Washington D.C. Mayhem had been wrong. Once the press printed an account of their confrontation, it had become something of a catch phrase that reporters injected into all stories of his exploits, whether he’d actually said the words that time or not.
“I th-th-think,” the boy stuttered, “they’re dead.”
Missouri let the radio slip from his hand. It dropped down onto the table with a hard plastic thud. Dead people trying to invade Kory’s house. It should have seemed ludicrous, something to be taken as nothing more than a product of a frightened child’s imagination. The rational side of his brain insisted they must have been crooks wearing scary masks, and yet—
A memory lingered, fighting to surface after being buried under half a century of adventures, indistinct in detail but overpowering in dread. He couldn’t remember the name of the Khmer Rouge general’s name, but the curling scar under the man’s blood-red right eye remained in his mind. It had formed a question mark. The general had practiced a form of Far East black magic and successfully resurrected hundreds of murdered peasants from the Vietnam border. They’d come back as murderous zombies, lifeless but animated, using their hands and teeth as weapons to terrorize a cloistered Buddhist sanctuary that had resisted the Rouge. Missouri couldn’t remember the battles he’d fought with the dead—he’d drank all those memories away decades ago—but what little he could remember sent an electric chill across his wrinkled flesh.
Picking up the radio, he said, “I . . . believe you.”
“I’m scared,” Kory repeated.
“Where are your parents?”
“They went . . .” —his voice trailed off— “. . . out.”
Missouri shook his head and clenched down on his dentures. He wasn’t sure whether Kory knew it or not, but he knew where the boy’s parents went when they were “out.” There were two bars in town: one on Third Street where they served bar food, the other on Cannon Boulevard, where they served the same food topless. When she worked at all, Kory’s mom earned the mortgage payment in the parking lot of the latter bar.
“Hold on a moment, partner. I’ll be right back,” Missouri said, lowered the radio, and groaned as he worked himself back up to stand. Balancing on the walker, knees cracking, he made his way across the room to the window. Plucking a pair of World War Two government-issue binoculars off the s
ill, he raised them to his eyes and squinted. He’d bought them at a swap meet a decade earlier when his vision began to deteriorate. In the old days he could have counted all eight legs on a deer tick from a hundred yards out. These days he needed reading glasses to make out the labels on his prescriptions.
Across the street, Kory’s house sat behind an untrimmed hedge row that wrapped around the property. The angle wasn’t the best, but through a gap in the foliage he could see a small wedge of the backyard. Even with his limited view, he saw three men pounding the back door with fists. One left bloodstains behind with each blow. None of them had a healthy complexion.
Shifting his view to the street, Missouri saw a dozen more of them, shuffling and creeping, some dragging lame feet, a few bloodied, all unmistakably dead. Turning to the other end of the street, he spied eight more. Among these, he recognized George Pawelczyk, his mailman. Even on a good day George walked with a stubborn limp, but now he stumbled along, nearly falling with every step, and left a trail of first class letters and blood drops behind him.
Into the radio: “Hang tight, kidderoo. I’ll be right over.”
Pivoting, Missouri made his way to the foyer, moving as fast as he could, prodding out with the tennis balls at the end of his walker’s front legs and then pulling himself close to the bars. He was out of breath by the time he plucked his coat off the hallway rack but he didn’t pause, not for a moment. He headed into his garage.
He’d given up his license in ’95 but not his car. The Fury waited like an obedient dog. She was sleek and black and beautiful, with red rear fins and twin chrome exhaust pipes giving her the look of an exotic, mechanized marine mammal. On many nights, thieves and murderers had fled the scenes of their crimes when her four white-hot headlights focused in on them like converging spotlights. She’d been upgraded several times over the years, body shape changing with the times, but always a decade ahead, her V-8 swapped out for a hemi, then for an experimental nuclear-capacitor-driven engine. The Fury was royalty among cars.
Sliding behind the wheel, Missouri breathed in. Her leather upholstery had aged into a sweet, rustic bouquet. Reaching up, he flipped over the sun visor and let the keys fall into the palm of his hand. Sliding the key into the ignition, he held his breath. The sound of her engine roaring to life always brought a wild, primal thrill. He turned the key.
The Fury’s engine whined, a weak and sniveling sound, coughed twice, and died.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
But Missouri was.
Huffing, he nudged the door open, swung himself out, and pulled himself up to his walker. Straining, he reached back into the Fury and snatched the remote control off the dash. Slamming the door, he worked his way up to the grill and stood in front of the double-wide garage door. He thumbed the remote’s button and stood up straight.
The garage door climbed, revealing the street beyond. The dead, roaming in small clusters of three or four, turned toward the whine of the garage door’s motor. Their slack faces remained expressionless, but something in their empty stares did change—lazy eyes hardening, pupils focusing.
Leveraging the walker, Missouri took a step out onto the short driveway. He flinched as the loud crack of a shotgun blast sounded from some corner of the housing development’s maze. He’d never carried a gun, not even when he’d crawled up that French beach under heavy fire; not when he’d invaded the bunkers under Berlin in the last days of the European fight; not when he’d crossed into Red Russia to sabotage the death ray before Khrushchev could ferry it to Cuba. All of the new guys in his former line of work carried guns nowadays. He wondered if any of them really knew what courage was all about.
The zombies lurched forward, their moans taking on an urgent, hungry tone. Missouri calculated his path to Kory’s front door. Each of his strides would bring him a foot and a half closer. The road was twenty-two feet wide. Add in his driveway, Kory’s driveway, and the short length of front porch, and he was looking at twenty-eight steps. The dead were slow, but so was he.
“Let’s race, boys,” he told them.
Missouri heaved the walker forward and hobbled a step, leaned heavily on the handlebars, straightened up, and repeated the process. The zombies stumbled toward him, their own motion a ragged pantomime of his struggles, arms raised, mouths gaping open. He pushed the walker, pulled himself up, pushed, pulled. His heart felt like it was using his breastplate as a gong, each beat pounding his chest, reminding him of the impact of Maschinengewehr 131 rounds on body armor.
Push. Pull. Push.
They were coming in too fast, he knew. He’d just crossed the road’s broken yellow line. They’d overtake him in less than a minute. It was a depressing thought. Once he’d been the fastest man on the planet, even proved it in a friendly race with The Masked Lightning, but now even dead men could outrun him. That thought started a fire in his head. As the anger spread, warmth bloomed in hands and legs in a way he hadn’t felt for decades.
Pushing away from the walker, he turned to face the approaching threat. Although he felt stronger, it was still a far cry from his prime. Still, it felt incredible to stand on his own with fists curled. Glancing up at Kory’s window, he saw the boy staring down at the street with worried eyes. Missouri cocked a thumb in the air.
The first zombie closed in, arms swinging, fingers curled into talons. Missouri drew back his arm, gritted his teeth, and swung. His fist exploded the walking cadaver’s jaw, sending a shower of teeth down to the asphalt. Reeling from the impact, the dead man staggered back, lost its balance, and fell.
Two more rushed in. The Fantom landed simultaneous punches, a reverse breaststroke. Colliding, the zombies’ heads fused together as they fell, conjoined, to the road. Whipping his walker off the ground, Missouri pulled off the tennis balls, spun, and removed the bargaining chips from three zombies. Their severed heads landed in a huddle, nose to nose to nose, mouths still chattering.
More were on the way. Feeling his energy wane, Missouri decided against continuing the fight. He righted the walker and headed for Kory’s front door. The power was draining from his body, legs cramping with arthritis, old muscles straining. Glancing down at his feet, no longer walking but now shuffling, he saw he was still wearing his morning slippers. It had slipped his mind to change footwear. So many things fell through the cracks these days.
One zombie broke away from the others—a twisted stick figure in a policeman’s uniform—moving faster, lurching forward, back bent. As Missouri crossed the threshold onto Kory’s driveway, the dead cop rushed into his path and grabbed hold of the walker. Pulling, the Fantom found the tug-o-war to be a stalemate, neither living man nor deceased able to tear it away from the other. Eyes scanning down the zombie’s body, Missouri saw the cop’s sidearm still rested in its belt holster. It would be easy to reach down, retrieve it, and fire a bullet through the monster’s head.
But he didn’t believe in fixing what wasn’t broken.
Instead, he snatched the cop’s handcuffs, snapped one end around the dead man’s wrist and the other to the walker. Letting go, he watched as the cop tried to shrug off the baggage. Missouri reached out and pushed the handlebars, overturning the zombie into the street. It fought to right itself like an overturned beetle, but tethered to a metal contraption, could not.
Legs wobbling, he shuffled to the porch landing and reached for the guide rail. The zombies had reached the dead cop and were navigating around the fallen, convulsing corpse. Missouri had no time to pause, though his heart and lungs insisted that he should. Pulling himself up the short column of stairs, his arms shook and he felt lightheaded, close to passing out, his knees buckling as he pushed up onto the porch.
His footing failed and he fell, his body slamming against the wooden floor. He heard bones break and felt a wave of nausea and confusion flood his senses. Rolling onto his back, he saw the zombies rush onto the stairs, mere steps away.
Ignoring the pain as best he could, he pushed off the floor with both hands, sat
up, and rowed, dragging himself backwards across the porch. A dead woman in a torn kimono cleared the stairs. Missouri reached out for one of Kory’s mother’s potted plants—a sickly geranium—and, without aiming, hurled it at the zombie. The pottery exploded as it struck her in the head, releasing a cloud of black soil and orange pedals.
Twisting, Missouri forced himself to stand up, his left side from armpit to hipbone in fierce pain, and threw open the screen door. Beyond it, the front door was locked.
That detail had slipped his mind as well.
Climbing over kimono woman, a pair of zombies in blue construction worker’s overalls took the lead and blundered onto the porch. The malicious, bloodthirsty grins on their faces reminded him of the Grimm Brothers, a pair of evil gangsters who used faery tales as the basis for their criminal schemes.
Summoning his remaining strength, Missouri pulled back his hand, curled it into the fist that had sent Bruno Grimm into a four-week coma, and swung at the front door with all his might. He’d pushed into many fortified hideouts this way, reducing six-inch-thick lumber to sawdust, bending galvanized steel, even forcing his way through an extraterrestrial force field.
But not this time.
Every bone in his hand surrendered to the simple sugar pine door, knuckles rupturing, phalanges fracturing. He howled in pain and crumbled to the foot of the door. The screen door rattled as it swung back and bounced against the side of his face.
The Grimm Brothers zombies approached with groping hands.
Missouri thought of Brendon Best—Best Boy—the kid he’d taken under his wing as a sidekick so many years ago. Best, never popular with the press—who preferred their national heroes to work solo—had died at the hands of a mob of Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Missouri hadn’t been able to save the boy. The Fantom had failed—only once, true—in such a long career, but it had always haunted him. Maybe he’d see Brendon again soon and could finally deliver the apology he’d rehearsed so often in the bathroom mirror.
Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology Page 7
