In Hero Years... I'm Dead Delux Edition

by Michael Stackpole

  Chapter Two

  So I didn’t get through the lock in world record time. I still got through. Pocketing the picks, I slipped into the corridor, closed the door behind me.

  Things looked promising. Left was the vault and then the lobby beyond it, though a bend in the corridor hid it. To the right were a staff break room, utility closet, and a couple of offices that would have been below Baker’s office suite. Best of all, at the end of the hall stood a fire door. Opening it would set off an alarm.

  First rule of rescue operations: secure an escape route. Not so much for me, but the hostages. The robbers had the front doors covered to keep police out, and the police would have them covered to keep the robbers in, so the fire door would be it. Best part, the bank employees knew exactly where it was.

  Next rule: he who has the most firepower wins. I needed weapons. Thank God for the utility closet. The poor man’s chemistry lab. There’d be enough noxious chemicals in there to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. A little ammonia in an air-conditioning vent and eyes would be watering. Hitting anything those guns would be tough.

  Two steps into the corridor and I had to shift to rule three: don’t get caught. One of the thieves turned the corner. “Hey you, pops. Where do you think you’re going?”

  Without looking at him, I dropped to my knees. I covered my head with my hands and I slumped against the wall. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”

  The guy groaned. Boots clicked as he closed. “Get with this century, old man. No one is going to hurt you. On your feet. “

  “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. I don’t want to die.” I pumped fear into my voice–all too easily, actually. Very convincing. That was all that mattered.

  He stopped and poked my shoulder with his blunderbuss. “You’re not going to die, pal.”

  “Oh, thank God.” I spun quickly, hooking the gun’s barrel with my left elbow, jamming it against the wall. My right hand came up fast. Open-palm strike to the groin.

  He wasn’t expecting that. He gurgled and squeaked. He jackknifed forward. I caught him by the throat and tugged, slamming him face-first into the floor.

  A tooth skittered down the hall. He slumped, moaning.

  I smiled. Not bad for an old man.

  I grabbed him by his web belt and dragged him to the utility closet. Another trip to retrieve his gun, then I closed us both in. I used some handy zip-ties to secure him, then returned to that firepower thing.

  The pistol at his right hip was a taser and a pouch at the small of his back had replaceable electrode packages. Better than nothing. I stripped the gun belt off and tightened it around my waist.

  I cracked the blunderbuss open. It had a short shotgun shell for a load. No shot and a weird configuration for the firing chamber.

  I set it aside. Another handy rule: never mess around with a weapon you don’t understand. The taser I could use, but that thing, nope.

  Had to move fast. The gang already had one man down. When he didn’t return, they’d send two, maybe three to find him. They’d be doing that soon.

  I pillaged the closet. I borrowed someone named Jorge’s coveralls. Big man. They hung on me that way an elephant’s skin would hang on a Shetland pony. I didn’t zip the front all the way up, though. I still wanted access to the taser. An ammonia bottle with sprayer went in one cargo pocket and a bottle of cleaning fluid in the other. I set the nozzles for stream.

  I appropriated a push-broom with the screw-in handle. I pulled a set of white uTiliPod headphones from a lost and found box, wiped them off and stuck them in my ears. The cord I tucked down into my shirt. Disguise complete.

  Almost.

  I grabbed a utility rag, folded it into a triangle, and tied it around the lower half of my face. No mirror to check my appearance. Didn’t need one. Ridiculous is easy to picture. Looks a lot like absurd.

  Jorge the super-janitor, head bobbing to music only he could hear, emerged from the closet. I was still counting on a search party, so I set a trap. Heading back up the hall, I laid down several lines of industrial cleaner. I retreated toward the fire door, exposing my back toward the lobby, and just started sweeping.

  Thirty seconds later, three of them came into the corridor.

  “What the…?”

  “Hey, old man.”

  I ignored them.

  The first voice became insistent. “You. Old. Man.”

  Yeah, slower and louder always works for the deaf.

  My head bobbed. I started dancing. Tossed in a hip wiggle, too, and a quick salsa step. That broom was a hot date in a tiny dress.

  Footsteps echoed. Closer, boys, closer. They obliged me, moving into the heart of my trap.

  Anger filled the voice. Deafness was one thing, but now he figured I didn’t understand English. “You got three seconds, old man. Comprende?”

  I whirled down into a crouch, drawing the taser. “Comprende this, amigo.”

  Evolution: the hero’s best friend.

  The first flash of that taser gushed adrenaline into their blood. The fight or flight reaction kicked in, all turbo-charged. One fighter, two runners. The fighter came at me, not bothering to draw his taser. Three steps in and he hit the soap. He belly-flopped and kept coming, flailing a bit. He went sliding past. I whacked him with the broom, snapping the head off.

  The other two backpedaled hard. That really didn’t work terribly well. The bossy one’s feet flew out and he landed on his head. The way he bounced wasn’t good–he got all loose-limbed and his blunderbuss clattered against the wall.

  The other guy went to his knees. I leaped over the nearest soap line and lashed him with the broomstick’s blunt end. Took two hits to snap it in half. He wavered but didn’t go down. I broke his nose with my knee. That took him out of the fight.

  Something popped behind me. Two impacts, like fat raindrops hitting a canvas awning. Taser electrodes. They’d stuck in the coveralls. I leaned forward, hoping to make space between my body and the fabric.

  My right foot slipped. He who lives by the soap… I went down to a knee, spinning just enough to spot my attacker in the corner of my eye.

  “You should know better than to mess with the Twisters, old man.” The fighter regained his feet. “I’m gonna twist you up bad.”

  I’ve always hated that about villains. The patter’s obvious and predictable. Worse it’s usually corny. In a hero, especially a sidekick, corny can almost be endearing.

  “Shoot already, will you?”

  “Oh, think you’re tough, do you?” The Twister puffed up a bit. “This is gonna hurt.”

  A little laugh prefaced a woman’s words. “If that’s the tune you want to call…” A bullwhip cracked. The electrode clip flew from the taser’s barrel.

  The Twister spun. The whip returned, coiling around his throat. A solid jerk yanked him from my sight. He rebounded noisily from one wall and slipped down against the other.

  I came all the way around. She was a vision.

  “Fox?”

  Can’t be. Tall and slender, with long red hair tied into a pony-tail that lashed her shoulders, the young woman couldn’t have been very far into her twenties. Her costume looked a lot like Scarlet Fox’s, save for the black V on the brow of her red domino mask. The costume had a halter-top and a central strip of cloth that descended over her flat tummy and broadened into a bikini bottom. Knee-high boots, a pistol in a thigh holster and the whip coiling in her gloved hands completed her outfit.

  Not Scarlet Fox. Her daughter, though. She approached me, moving with her mother’s supple grace. She casually clipped her whip to her left hip, then slowed. She looked me up and down. She stared, then took another step closer as I rose to my feet.

  She touched the side of her mask, and the white polarized lenses cleared.

  I saw what she’d seen.

  Her eyes. My eyes.

  A match.

  She dropped me with a backhanded slap.

  Chapter Three

  Her lips curled into a
snarl. “You’re a bastard.”

  “Not me.” I pulled my bandana down. Blood. Great. “My parents were married.”

  Fury flashed through her green eyes. So like her mother.

  She went to kick me. I scissored my legs, but she nimbly jumped over them. I flicked the last bit of the broomstick underfoot. Her feet flew and she landed hard on her tailbone.

  Pain tightened her features.

  My guts twisted. A daughter! She was mine. No doubting it but shouldn’t I have known? Shouldn’t I have felt it somehow? The weight of the years pressed in on me. So much I don’t know.

  I came up on one knee. She pushed off to try to slide back, but her hands skidded in soap. Flat on her back, she pounded a fist against the floor. “Darn it!”

  I extended a hand. “How bad?”

  “Stay away from me. You’re not my father. You’re not. You’re a… a sperm donor.” Her head came up. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “It was big news when I went public. Nets were full of Vixen’s being Scarlet Fox’s daughter.”

  “Never got the press release.” I shook my head. “So you’re Vixen?”

  She sneered. “And you’re Jerkface.”

  “Pleased to meet you, too.” I stood and offered her my hand again. “I guess we’re going to have a conversation about things at some point.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself that I care.”

  Oh yeah, daddy’s little girl.

  “Not here or now, but we will. Agreed? You decide not to show at that time, or come and beat the crap out of me, that’s fine. I’m guessing you’re not here for a family reunion.”

  She took my hand and let me pull her upright. “I work alone. Don’t get in my way, Jerkface.”

  “Fine. I’ll distract them, you deal with them.” I tied the bandana back in place. I stripped the tasers from the three we’d downed and dragged the Twisters to the utility closet. “From what I saw on the Murdoch, there’s a dozen in the lobby. Was a dozen.”

  “There’s another dozen in the street, along with Twistron, their leader. The guys inside are juniors, seniors are outside. Twistron the Twisterian is fairly minor league, but he’s got a following.”

  I frowned. “So we’re going through twenty minions and a villain, just the two of us?”

  “Are you nuts?” Vixen gave me a quizzical look. “I just bid on the interior. Others are handling the outside.”

  I heard her words, but they didn’t make any sense. Jetlag. Had to be.

  She turned to go, but I grabbed her wrist. “One second. Your mother?”

  “Like you care.”

  “I do.”

  She pulled her wrist free. “If that’s true she would’ve heard from you in the last twenty freaking years.”

  “Just because no messages got through doesn’t mean there weren’t any.”

  Vixen posted fists on her slender hips–so like her mother. “It doesn’t mean there were.”

  I cocked my head. “You know your mother. Do you think I wouldn’t have at least tried?”

  Vixen gave me a hard stare, then her eyes disappeared behind polarized lenses again. “She never heard anything.”

  “Dammit.” I snapped an electrode packet into my taser.

  “No other stupid questions?”

  “I’m good for now, thanks.”

  “Don’t think this is father-daughter bonding, Jerkface.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  “Done.” She spun and we waded into battle.

  We burst into the lobby and the hostages’ eyes widened. Penny pointed. “It’s Vixen.”

  “And some old dude,” someone else added.

  The situation really called for snappy patter–something light. Rhyming couplets would have been nice, but I never inherited the knack. Redhawk had been a natural. He could tear off a cheesy line while being fed into a wood-chipper. Or Graviton, he was great at bold and pithy statements of truth and justice–usually Biblical in origin and mostly Old Testament.

  Me, I always went for grim and nasty. Those remarks are best whispered in an ear right before you break an arm. They stick with the guys while they’re in the hospital. Better yet, when you track them down later and squeeze them for information, the line’s encore works wonders. If it doesn’t actually scare the piss out of them, it guarantees they won’t be sleeping for at least the next week.

  And they always sing like a drunken canary on karaoke night.

  But as we boiled into the lobby, I had nothing.

  Vixen leaped onto a writing table and cracked her whip. “Wrong place. Wrong time.”

  Edgy voice. Dramatic delivery. I smiled. Daddy’s girl, definitely.

  Her whip whistled and cracked again, scattering Twisters like gaudy autumn leaves. I triggered two tasers. Missed with one. Hit solid with the other. The Twister danced like water on a hot griddle, then collapsed. The guy I’d missed leveled a blunderbuss at me. Vixen’s whip hit the muzzle, but not before he pulled the trigger.

  I heard the shot a half-second before I felt it. It hit me on the left side, whipping me around like scrap paper in a tornado. My back slammed against a teller’s cage. I flopped to the floor. My left side, from shoulder to hip, ached like I’d been sideswiped by a freight train. No blood. No holes in the coveralls. Near as I could tell I hadn’t been hit with anything, but my body wasn’t buying that.

  The Twister snapped open the blunderbuss, feeding another shell into it. He flipped the weapon closed, then leveled it at me, ready to shoot from the hip. I stared into the gun’s black maw.

  And froze.

  Then the window behind him shattered. Cracks ran up through tinted glass. A curtain of shards rained down and poured like sand up to his ankles. He turned, looking for a target. The chaos outside denied him a clear shot.

  The thing that had broken the window spun to a stop against my right thigh. A silver cylinder as long as my forearm, it had been lathed out of a single piece of metal. One end had been textured for gripping. It filled my hand perfectly, as if it had been made for me.

  Which it had.

  I glanced at the butt-cap. A capital “C” edged it. A metal “K” had been soldered in place over it.

  Outside a dozen Twisters–all looking a bit older and bulkier than their counterparts in the lobby–squared off against two heroes. One, a well-muscled Asian kid dressed in a blue Ninja outfit, flowed through them, laying about with a sword that crackled with electricity.

  Beyond him another young man fought. He wore a sleeveless brown uniform with a tan breast and equipment belt. His cowl covered him from upper lip to hairline, revealing thick brown hair. The same C and K logo appeared in the middle of his chest, on his belt buckle, and the cuffs of his brown gloves. He slid another cylinder from a sheath on his left thigh and hurled it. It caromed off a Twister’s chest. The man jerked and went down.

  My Twister brought his gun back around. “Ha! Kid Coyote missed. I won’t.”

  Kid Coyote? I raised the baton. “Match you...”

  He smiled. “Give it your best shot, old man.”

  Hubris. Okay, so at least one thing hadn’t changed completely in twenty years.

  I backhanded the rod at him. The throw went wide and low. He started laughing. He watched as the cylinder skipped off the floor, turning to follow its flight. The rod bounced off a pillar and came up. Fast. His eyes widened.

  He tried to duck. Too late. It caught him in the chin, snapping his head back. He hit the ground before his gun did.

  I reloaded the tasers, but it was no longer a target-rich environment. A half-dozen Twisters lay scattered about, unconscious or moaning like they wished they were. Two had footprints on their faces. Vixen’d shot a couple more with her pistol. No blood. Anesthetic bullets of some sort, I had to figure. One guy looked like he’d be whipped into a wall, and another hung from the teller’s cage like a scarecrow. The last two cowered while her whip cracked above them, allowing Baker to
grab a blunderbuss and play hero.

  The battle outside was dying, too. A huge figure in power armor as brilliantly colored as the Twisters’ togs, crashed into the street. The impact cracked more windows. Twistron, I assumed. Some other hero–green-skinned, yellow hair, with a yellow and blue uniform featuring a swordfish logo—floated down and delivered a punch that put Twistron out for the count.

  Hostages started cheering and congratulating themselves. They produced their uTiliPods and posed for pictures with Vixen or with their feet on Twisters, as if they’d bagged them on some safari. One guy gathered up spent shells and another was trying to get a half-conscious Twister to sign an autograph.

  I might have been out of the game for a while, but I knew an exit cue.

  I limped off to the examination room and locked myself in. The coveralls and captured weaponry went into the false ceiling. I combed my hair back into place and sat down to wait.

  It took him an hour, but Mr. Baker himself came to let me out. “Mister Smith, we are so sorry. Are you okay?”

  I smiled and stretched, as if I’d been sleeping. It hurt a bit–I’d stiffened up. I even tossed in a yawn, and then pointed at the Murdoch. “I saw it all. I am so glad they didn’t come in here. Does this happen often?”

  “No more so than to any other bank, sir.” The Ingratiator tried on his best smile. “We take every precaution to make sure that our customers and their money remains safe in these situations. We have regular drills and, on days when an event is going to take place, we push to have trained staff on hand.”

  “You knew you were going to be robbed?”

  “Of course, sir, of course.” He laughed. “That’s how it’s done here now. That’s the only way to maximize media coverage. We’re committed to making sure it’s the best robbery experience for everyone involved.”

  Chapter Four

  I didn’t have to fake shock. Baker’s words made no sense. His expression shifted from conviction to compassion as mine shifted from surprise to a complete lack of comprehension.

  It had to be jetlag.