Rogues

by Darius Brasher

  Jason wasn’t about to volunteer to someone as erratic as Alchemy the things he had hidden. He avoided Alchemy’s question about his suits. “Though Theo’s older now than when I tangled with him, not all that much time has passed. Surely he’s still just a hayseed from South Carolina. He had his hands full dealing with just little ol’ me. Why would someone like you need my or anyone else’s help in taking him out?”

  “His power level has increased exponentially since your encounters with him,” Doctor Alchemy. He seemed sheepish. It was a look Jason was not accustomed to seeing on Alchemy’s normally supremely confident face. “I am not certain I can defeat him on my own.” The sheepish look faded, replaced by a slightly crazed one. “Besides, I seek to not merely defeat Omega,” he spat. “I’m looking to humiliate him. Embarrass him. Shame him. Who better to help me do that than people Omega defeated in the past and have an ax to grind against him? As the light fades from his eyes, he will realize that the seeds sown in his past have grown into a bitter harvest that have choked the life out of him.

  “And you certainly have an ax to grind,” Alchemy added, glancing down at Jason’s frail, broken body. “Look at you—a once proud, powerful man brought low by that murdering Meta. I will pay you handsomely for your assistance, of course. A craftsman like you deserves to be compensated for his efforts.”

  “How much?” Jason asked. Greed had roused itself like sexual need within him. Though he had plenty of money socked away, old habits died hard.

  Doctor Alchemy told him. Jason whistled at the number. That amount of money would buy—or at least rent—plenty of voluptuous vixens. Not that either renting or buying a bunch of busty babes would do Jason any good in his current condition, he thought. It would be like a crippled man buying a fleet of bicycles.

  “What say you?” Doctor Alchemy asked impatiently. “There are other MetaHold inmates I need to visit before the time freeze wears off.”

  Jason did not hesitate. “No,” he said.

  “No?” Alchemy frowned.

  “No,” Jason repeated firmly. “I’m not going to lie and say the thought of getting out of this cage isn’t appealing. But, I went into this business knowing the risks. I did not expect to spend my life killing people, then grow old and die peacefully in my sleep. I got paid a lot of money to do a very illegal, very dangerous job, and my employers expected results. Normally I got them. But as good as I was, I knew it was only a matter of time before I ran into someone who was better. That person would put me down, just as I had put down so many others. I didn’t expect that person to be a wet behind the ears farm boy from Nowhereville, South Carolina, but life rarely turns out the way you expect. I had a good run. Theo ended it fair and square. The better man won. And to continue with my honesty kick—all these meds must’ve addled my brain because I never told the truth so much in one clip before—I gotta admit that I kinda liked the kid. I’ve known a lot of people with powers over the years. Far worse people than Theo have had them. If he’s using them to help people instead of enriching himself like so many others do—me, for example—I say good luck and godspeed to him. Who am I to piss in his Wheaties? I had my shot and flubbed it.”

  Jason had researched Theo and his family before he confronted the kid years ago. Jason had spent a lot of time staring at MetaHold’s ceiling and thinking about how different his own life might have been if his parents had loved him the way Theo’s had. Jason had never met his own father, and he wished he never met his mother. His earliest memory was of her beating him. His last memory of her was her beating him when he was 15-years-old, right before he turned her into solid ice and then shattered her body into bloody ice shards with a fireball. It had been the first time his powers had manifested.

  Jason’s mouth twisted into a slight smile at the thought of his mother. Remembering her bloody bits was the only time she ever made him happy. “And even if I was inclined to help you, I’m still a cripple. Outside the confines of this prison I imagine my powers will return, but a cripple with superpowers is still a cripple.” Jason shook his head. “Most people would say that what I did for a living was wrong. Certainly the judge who sentenced me to multiple life sentences thought so. Shit, maybe she and the rest of them are right. How the hell would I know? I never thought too much about wrong and right. I just lucked into superpowers and used them the best way I knew how to make a buck. Maybe that makes me a bad guy. Compared to someone like Theo, I suppose I am. But whether I was a good guy or a bad guy, what I was—what I took pride in being—was a professional. Paid well to do a job well.” He looked down at his useless body. “I can’t do a professional job like this. I won’t even try.”

  Jason took a breath. He didn’t think he’d talked this much in one stretch the entire time he had been in MetaHold. Doctor Alchemy’s wordiness was rubbing off on him.

  “So again, the answer is no. The only thing that would even tempt me to change my mind is if you waved a magic wand and gave me my arms and legs back. For them, I’d help you. As much as I liked the kid, I still gotta look out for number one.”

  Alchemy had remained uncharacteristically quiet during Jason’s monologue. “I cannot say I am terribly surprised to hear you say that,” he said. “In your own way, you are a man of honor. You always have been. It is why I trusted you in the past when I needed to eliminate someone I could not spare the time to take care of myself. It is part of the reason why I did you the honor of coming to you first.”

  Alchemy fished in his utility belt as he spoke. He pulled out a clear vial, several inches long, filled with a florescent yellow liquid. He held the vial out in front of Jason’s eyes.

  “What this?” Jason asked. “Something to quench my thirst after my long speech? You think of everything.”

  “I took the liberty of reviewing your medical records before coming here. The security of MetaHold’s computerized medical records is even more laughable than that of the Heroes’ Guild. This,” Alchemy said, shaking the vial, “is a healing potion specially formulated for you.”

  Alchemy smiled with smug pride, like a new father might.

  He said, “Or you may prefer to call it the magic wand that will give you your arms and legs back.”

  CHAPTER 18

  One Week and Several Days Ago

  Anastasia Wyoming, once known as the licensed Hero Seer, sat on her cot in her cell in MetaHold. She wore the gray and white jumpsuit all MetaHold inmates did. She silently counted brushstrokes as she ran her brush through long hair so white that it seemed to almost glow.

  234, 235, 236, 237, 238 . . . This life of confinement was not as exciting as her life as a Hero on the Sentinels had been. Not even close. Then again, what was? Not even the President’s job was as exciting as being a Sentinel. Anastasia knew that for a fact. She had gotten an inside look at the mostly dull life of the occupant of the Oval Office years ago, back when Avatar was still alive, long before Anastasia had been imprisoned, disgraced, and had her Hero’s license revoked.

  Back then, Anastasia had taken turns with the other Sentinels guarding the chief executive when it was rumored Doctor Alchemy planned to assassinate her. Nothing had come of the threat, though, other than the President’s right wrist breaking. Doctor Alchemy did not break it. He had never made an appearance at all. Anastasia herself had broken the President’s wrist when the President had grabbed her ass. Anastasia not seeing the grope coming with her precognition had confirmed the Sentinels’ long-held suspicion that the President was an unregistered and closeted Metahuman with the ability to dampen others’ powers. The bruise the President left on Anastasia’s ass had also confirmed their suspicion that the President was a closeted lesbian. A particularly aggressive one at that. “Tall, thin, and pale is just my type,” the President had murmured about Anastasia’s body while trying to stick her tongue down Anastasia’s throat. Fending the President off without hurting her too badly had been like fending off an octopus.

  444, 445, 446, 447, 448 . . . Anastasia focused on her brush
strokes, tuning out the chatter, howls, and yells of the prisoners who filled the cubical concrete cells near her own. She was aiming for two thousand strokes, which would beat her all-time record. She had to kill time somehow. She still had twenty years left to serve before release. Already no spring chicken, Anastasia would be elderly when she finally got out. Unless she got an early release for good behavior. Or unless she succumbed to temptation and implemented one of the several escape plans she had contemplated. Unlike most of the Metas here, she was not a common crook. MetaHold had not been designed with people of her unique set of skills in mind. She was a Hero. Or at least she had been. Unlike her cape and license, her years of Heroic training and experience could not be stripped from her. Since the moment she had stepped foot into MetaHold, her mind had instinctively formulated ways to break out:

  Mechano had done the initial design of the cells at MetaHold. Though Anastasia certainly was not an engineer like her robotic former teammate had been, she had paid enough attention over the years to him bragging and droning on about his technological achievements that she had a rough understanding of how the Metahuman power dampening field in her cell worked. She would just need a strip of metal to punch a hole through the ceiling to access the field’s circuit boards. Perhaps a fork or knife smuggled into her panties or, safer still, her vagina—ouch!—so the guards would not find it when they searched her leaving the mess hall. That piece of metal, bent out of shape to bridge the appropriate parts of the dampening field’s circuits, could be used to short the field out. With it gone, Anastasia could then use her telekinesis to rip a hole from the cell ceiling all the way through the top of the prison building, fly through the hole, and be a state or two away before the prison could scramble guards in armored flying suits to stop her.

  Or, she could use her prison laundry job to slip out of the facility. The laundry truck came twice a week—to pick up dirty laundry, and then again to drop off the freshly laundered clothes. It would make a lot more sense for laundry to be done on site by the prisoners themselves. Anastasia knew the laundry contract was pork, a favor to a powerful United States Senator from New York who had a nephew in the laundry business. The nephew’s truck driver was a creature of habit, always taking a three-minute smoke before getting back in his truck and driving off. It would be a simple matter for Anastasia to slip under the truck while the driver was away getting his nicotine fix. She could cling to the truck’s long undercarriage, flat as a board, until it left the MetaHold facility. The truck was wide enough, Anastasia was skinny enough, and the guards who checked under outbound vehicles were sloppy enough that they would not see her. By the time her supervisor in the laundry department noticed her absence, she would be long gone. Out of boredom and curiosity, she had practiced the hanging under the truck maneuver by clinging to the underside of her cot. She had increasing her grip strength over the course of several weeks until she was certain it could be done.

  Or Anastasia could escape from MetaHold using any number of other ploys and strategies her agile mind had presented her with. She had escaped from worse spots than this during her Heroic career, usually because a Rogue had put her into one.

  And yet, Anastasia had not lifted a finger to escape. She would serve every minute of her time. She deserved to be punished. She knew that now.

  523, 524, 525, 526, 527 . . . Anastasia felt the weight of someone’s gaze. She looked up. Directly across the corridor was another cell. Through the nearly transparent front walls of the cells, she saw that the big man in the opposing cell glared at her. Leviathan. As meaty as a professional wrestler, but a lot less smart. He stared daggers at Anastasia as she continued to brush her hair.

  Leviathan shifted now that he saw Anastasia looked back at him. He started humping his cell’s transparent front wall while making choking motions with his hands. He was pantomiming what he would do to Anastasia if he had the chance. Anastasia winked at him and blew him a kiss. Deprived of his super strength by the prison’s dampening fields, she knew Leviathan would be in for a nasty surprise if he did somehow manage to get his hands on her. Just as the Rogues who had jumped her in the yard during the first month of her incarceration had gotten a nasty surprise. They were laid up in the infirmary for two weeks afterward. Anastasia’s willowy build was deceiving.

  Anastasia was not popular among her fellow inmates. After all, most of them were in MetaHold because a Hero had captured them. Many had been subdued by the Sentinels themselves, including Chaos, the Omega-level Rogue who was held in his own special section of MetaHold. The inmates would happily take their anger toward Heroes generally out on Anastasia specifically. Also, they thought she was a snitch because she had confessed to the crimes she, Mechano, and Millennium had engaged in. If there was one thing the inmates hated more than a Hero, it was a snitch. Snitches got stitches. Even the prison officials hated her. She was a disgraced Hero, after all.

  Because she was so hated by the rest of MetaHold, Anastasia was forced to keep to herself. Even her cell, which was large enough to accommodate two inmates, she occupied alone. After at first giving her a series of cellmates, the prison’s administrators had thrown up their hands at the constant fights between her and her cellmates, and decreed she would be housed alone going forward.

  Being reviled by everyone around her wore on Anastasia’s soul, like the steady drip of Chinese water torture. She was heartbreakingly lonely. It was like being a child on the Sioux reservation she had grown up on all over again. Because of a genetic mutation, she had been born with white hair, milky white eyes, and alabaster white skin tinged with blue instead of shiny black hair, brown eyes, and mahogany skin like her relatives. The Sioux kids she grew up with called her Paleface, Fish Belly, or Ghost when they had bothered to speak to her at all. Once Anastasia became a Hero in her early twenties, she finally felt like she had found her true people and a place where she truly belonged. That was all gone now.

  And yet, despite how awful her prison life was with its disgrace, loneliness, hatred, and lack of freedom, Anastasia knew she deserved every bit of it.

  810, 811, 812, 813, 814 . . . Anastasia had not always felt that way. Before she was in MetaHold, back when she still had her precognitive powers, she saw the dark hell the world would plunge into if a competent carrier of the Omega spirit was not available to help stave off that future. Seeing what the future could be had made it all too easy for Anastasia to justify what she, Mechano, and Millennium had done to Theodore Conley and others. They had tried to kill Theodore multiple times, hoping that someone more suitable to be the vessel for the Omega spirit would take his place once he was dead. Their attempts on Theodore’s life had resulted in the death of his father James, and the deaths of many other innocents in an Oregon wildfire set by their agent Iceburn to flush Theodore out of the sanctuary of Hero Academy. The three Sentinels had killed the young Hero Smoke both to cover their tracks and in their last attempt to kill Theodore. They had done things a young and idealistic Anastasia would never have imagined her older self would do.

  All in pursuit of the greater good, the three Sentinels had told themselves. The ends justify the means, were the words they had comforted themselves with when they violated their Hero’s Oaths time and time again. With a bleak vision of a possible future in her head, Anastasia had participated in all of it. Was it so terrible, she had thought at the time, that a few should die to save the many?

  Both awake and asleep, Anastasia used to dream of the future. Its possibilities, when it was far in the distance. Its certainties, when it was close by. But when she arrived at MetaHold and her powers were shut off by the facility’s dampening fields, her precognitive dreams of a dark future had turned into nightmares of an all too real past. Every night when she first arrived in MetaHold, she had relived the terrible things she and the other Sentinels had done. Constant nightmares had plagued her, haunting her with all the people who were dead because of her and the Sentinels.

  Finally, she could not stand it anymore.


  She had then confessed to each and every crime the Sentinels had committed. That confession led to the revocation of her Hero’s license and the imposition of her twenty-year prison sentence for felony murder and other charges. Only the fact that Anastasia took full responsibility for her crimes, the judge had said at her sentencing, stopped him from giving her life in prison.

  Though all the evils she and the other two Sentinels had committed still haunted her, at least she was able to sleep at night now.

  1025, 1026, 1027— Anastasia’s silent count was interrupted when something hit her in the chest. Startled, she dropped her brush.

  Or rather, the brush should have dropped with Anastasia’s hand no longer on it. Instead, the brush hung in the air like it rested on an invisible shelf.

  Anastasia looked down to see what had struck her in the chest—a small metal cartridge, broken in two. A chill ran down her spine. Only one person used cartridges like this. It was as distinctive as a fingerprint.

  “Hello Seer,” Doctor Alchemy said.

  Her heart pounding, Anastasia looked up. Doctor Alchemy stood at the front of her cell, having appeared there as soundlessly as the ghost kids had once called her. The nearly transparent front cell wall that only the guards could open with their keycards was gone. The always noisy cellblock was now as still and quiet as a grave. The sudden silence was deafening. Across the hall, Leviathan was frozen in place. His erect manhood pressed motionlessly against the clear wall of his cell.

  The Sentinels had foiled Doctor Alchemy’s fiendish plots many times in the past. Anastasia could not imagine he was here to ask how prison life was treating her. Especially since she had been involved in the death of his daughter Smoke. The fact Doctor Alchemy held one of the guard’s futuristic-looking guns stoked her fears. Doctor Alchemy was as dangerous as a rabid dog, and equally as predictable.