Sentinels

by Darius Brasher

  Still wary of the glowing orb despite its seeming insubstantiality, I used its light to look around. The parquet floor of the foyer I was in gleamed with polish even in the dim lighting. Straight ahead, on the other side of the glowing ball, was an open doorway. There was an old-fashioned wooden hat rack in the corner by the door I had just passed through. It was the only piece of furniture in the room.

  Some instinct made me try the door which had closed behind me. Though the knob twisted in my hand, I could not open it. I braced myself and really put my back into it. The door did not budge so much as a millimeter. I stopped straining at it before I pulled a muscle. Maybe Avatar and his super strength could have forced the door open again, but I could not seem to. I tried to latch onto the door with my powers and open it. I was as unable to grab onto it with my powers as I had been unable to probe beyond the walls of this room with my telekinetic touch.

  Clearly, someone had wanted me to come inside, but they were not eager to have me leave. Though I did not plan on leaving before finding out if Mechano was here, I did not like the fact I could not simply walk back out if I wanted to.

  Feeling a little like a mouse in a trap, I turned away from the sealed door. Several framed pictures hung in two vertical columns on either side of the open doorway ahead of me. I stepped forward to get a better look at them. The glowing orb moved as well, staying the same distance from me it had started off at. I froze as soon as the orb moved. I thought my skittishness was understandable. Again, my experience with strange glowing objects had not been particularly positive.

  The orb did not move again until I again stepped toward the open doorway. It stopped again when I stopped. Hmmm, interesting. I did a little experimenting. I stepped to the side. The light did not move. I stepped backwards, toward the closed front door. No movement. When I stepped toward the open doorway again, the light started moving as soon as I was about four feet away from it.

  “What, am I supposed to follow you?” My voiced sounded like a shout in the quiet of the mansion. There was no answer. Not that I was expecting one. I was, after all, talking to a glowing ball. What did it say about how weird tonight was that trying to converse with a glowing ball was not the strangest part of it?

  If I tried to search this massive place on my own without the benefit of my powers, it would take forever. If somebody had sent this ball to guide me somewhere, maybe I should let it in the interest of saving time. I would keep my shield up and my wits about me, though. The lack of guards, the property’s defenses being down, the door opening to admit me but refusing to let me out, the haunted house feel of the mansion, an orb that was invisible to my powers leading me down a potential rabbit hole . . . everything about tonight gave me the heebie-jeebies.

  “Lead on, MacDuff,” I said to the ball. It glided away from me as I walked toward it and the open doorway. I hoped the ball appreciated my Shakespearean erudition. If it did, it gave no sign.

  I paused before passing through the doorway to take check out the pictures mounted on either side of it. They were group shots of each Sentinels’ team from the group’s founding in the 1940s until now. Each one contained Millennium, the only current Sentinel who had also been one of the team’s founders. Each picture except the last contained seven Heroes. Since Omega Man, Lady Justice, Avatar, Millennium, and three other Heroes had founded the team, thereafter it was Sentinels tradition that seven Heroes were on the team. From time to time there would be vacancies due to death, retirement and, in one infamous incident years ago Truman had been involved in, arrest and imprisonment, but the team always brought its members back up to seven as soon as it could find an appropriate Hero to fill a vacancy.

  Except, that is, in the case of Avatar. His empty spot on the team had not been filled after his murder. That was why the last picture of the Sentinels contained six Heroes rather the traditional seven. Seer, who had taken over as chairman of the team after Avatar died, once said at a press conference that Avatar’s spot would remain vacant until the team found a Hero worthy of taking his place. Good luck with that, I thought as I looked at the six-member picture, the only one Avatar was not in. Avatar had been an Omega-level Hero with the strength of a god and the morals of a monk. Replacing him was not a simple matter of picking a new one out at Heroes R Us.

  In these pictures of the Sentinels, there were no cheesy grins like there often were in group portraits. Each Hero captured in these pictures looked as serious as a heart attack. I guess world-saving was grim work.

  The glowing orb waited patiently for me in the next room. It started moving again once I stepped through the doorway toward it. I kept walking, following the ball’s glowing guidance. Anytime I did not go where the ball apparently wanted me to go, it froze in place until I started walking in the right direction again.

  With the ball as my guide and only source of illumination, I made my way deeper into the dark mansion, twisting and turning through a multitude of rooms. Though I could see but faintly, the rooms I passed through seemed like they belonged in a castle a couple of centuries ago, not in the headquarters of a modern Hero team. They were full of heavy furniture, tapestries, old-fashioned weapons, relics, and antiques, each one labelled. Before long, I had lost all sense of direction. It was like wandering through a building that was part maze, part museum, and part haunted house full of shadowy objects. I doubted I could make my way back to the front entrance without help. It was a shame I had not thought to unwind a ball of string behind me à la Theseus. I hoped the glowing orb was not taking me to see the Minotaur. Isaac had turned into the Minotaur during our battle in the Trials. It had been terrifying. I had no interest in tangling with the creature again.

  Though I did not see the Minotaur, I saw things equally fantastic as the ball led me through the bowels of the mansion. I hardly believed some of them were real. In one huge room we passed through, I made out the dim outlines of a twin-engine, metal monoplane suspended overhead. A metal plaque on a pedestal under it read Lockheed Model 10 Electra, “The Flying Laboratory,” piloted by Amelia Earhart when she disappeared in 1937. I had always heard that neither Earhart nor her plane had ever been recovered.

  In another room, above a thick mantelpiece, hung a painting I recognized. It was Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpiece The Starry Night. The painting was supposed to be in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I had seen it there when Isaac, Neha and I had taken a trip to New York back when we were the Old Man’s Apprentices. Maybe the painting and Earhart’s plane were mere replicas. I had a feeling they were not.

  Though many of the things I saw made my eyes wide with wonder, two things in particular made my heart skip a beat. They were both in a large room full of animal trophies. Some of the trophies were stuffed, others were merely skeletons. The room was like a miniature museum of natural history. There was nothing as common as elephants and pigs in here, though. At the far end of the room was a Triceratops, which somehow managed to looked fearsome even in its skeletal form. Around the perimeter of the room was a snake’s skeleton. Well, it would be a snake’s skeleton if a snake was the size of a row of subway cars.

  There were even live animals. In a large cage were perhaps a dozen birds, though it was hard to count them since they flapped around so much. Each over a foot long, the birds flew wildly around inside their cage. It was hard to make out their exact coloration between the dim light and their rapid movements. They made loud, harsh sounds that set my teeth on edge. If they were supposed to be songbirds, they were tone-deaf.

  Passenger Pigeons (Ectopistes Migratorius): Extinct, read the plaque next to the cage. The birds were once so plentiful in North America that their annual migration blotted out the sun. Thanks to over-hunting and the destruction of their habitats, they had gone extinct in the early 1900s. At least they were supposed to be extinct. It said so right here on the plaque. If these raucous birds knew they were extinct, they gave no sign of it. Maybe they couldn’t read. I could only hope to be as sprightly as these bi
rds when I was dead.

  The two things that made my heart stop were near the exit to the huge animal room. I froze when I saw them, as of course did the ball I had been following.

  Mounted high up on the wall was an animal head. It was not a tiger, but could have been a modern tiger’s great-great-great-great granddaddy. Its fur was brown with streaks of red, orange, and gold. Its eyes seemed almost alive. They looked down at me hungrily, glittering in the light emitted by the still orb. The way it seemed to look at me, it was as though raw Theo with a side of Kinetic was its favorite food. It had two unbelievably long fangs poking down from its upper jaw. Rows of razor-sharp incisors completed the killing machine that was the animal’s mouth. Even dead and decapitated, the animal was so scary, it made my butt cheeks clench. I had to smother the irrational impulse to run.

  Saber-Toothed Tiger (Smilodon Fatalis): Extinct. Captured in North America by Millennium during the Pleistocene Epoch, read the plaque under the animal’s head. The fact the head was from a saber-toothed tiger was pretty obvious from the animal’s appearance, particularly the two huge fangs. This certainly wasn’t Sylvester the Cat.

  The taxidermied animal to the right of the saber-toothed tiger made my heart palpitate even more than the tiger had. Though clearly in the bear family, it was unlike any bear I had ever seen. For one thing, it was massive, much bigger than any of the black bears I had seen on the farm or the grizzly bears I had seen in zoos. Even if I discounted the short platform the animal was mounted on, the animal on all fours was still taller than I and had a broad, well-muscled body. If it stood on its hind legs, it would be nearly ten feet tall. Its snout was much shorter than the usual bear’s. It was as if someone had taken a grizzly’s snout and mashed it down into its skull some, like a push switch depressed in the “on” position. The animal’s shaggy coat was black with flecks of brown. The lips of its snout were curled in a snarl, exposing teeth clearly designed by Mother Nature to break bones and rip flesh.

  Short-faced Bear (Arctodus simus): Extinct. Captured in the area that would become California by Millennium during the Pleistocene Epoch, read the plaque fixed to the platform the bear stood on. I could see why honey companies put their product into cute bear bottles instead of bottles shaped like this monster. If they did, people would be too scared to buy it.

  What the plaques for the tiger and the bear said about them being captured during the Pleistocene Epoch was what had gotten me so excited about seeing the animals. I was hardly a paleontologist, but I had learned enough about Earth’s history during my training to know that the Pleistocene epoch ended over ten thousand years ago. How had two animals which had gone extinct thousands of years ago been captured by Millennium and then stuffed and mounted? The implication was obvious. Millennium, an Omega-level Hero whose powers were said to be magic-based, must be capable of time travel. Maybe he could send me back in time to correct the mistakes I made. I could save Hannah’s life. I could prevent Iceburn from killing Dad. I could make sure Hammer wasn’t killed by those robots during the Trials. Maybe I could even stop Mom from dying of brain cancer, though that was a tougher nut to crack. Unlike the bastards who had killed Hannah and Dad, you could not stop cancer by punching it in the face. In Mom’s case, maybe I could travel to the future first to see if they have found a cancer cure. With the way medicine advanced by leaps and bounds these days, surely scientists finding a cure was just a matter of time. Once I got the cure from the future, I could then go back into the past and save Mom.

  Though I had of course come here to confront Mechano, I was now excited about the prospect of perhaps meeting Millennium as well. He had been a Sentinel longer than anyone else. Helping people was his business. Surely he would help me.

  With thoughts of time travel swirling in my head, I glanced at the glowing orb. It seemed to be waiting patiently for me. It was time to move on. I was not going to meet Millennium or Mechano standing here staring at extinct animals. I wondered if I would spot lions somewhere in the mansion too. Lions and tigers and bears. I had my “Oh my!” all ready.

  I again stepped toward the orb. It resumed its journey to lead me through the house. Though I saw more things that blew my mind, nothing else inflamed my imagination the way seeing the tiger and the bear had. Maybe the past was not written in stone. Maybe it was written on an Etch A Sketch—one good shake and everything could be different. Better.

  Eventually, the orb led me to a shiny silver door. It was closed, with a shoulder-high metal and glass scanner on the right of it. The orb floated right through the silver door as if it did not exist, and the orb disappeared. I couldn’t follow. The ability to phase through doors was not in my power set. I need not have worried. When I approached the door, it slid open noiselessly. Bright lights spilled out of the other side. I stepped through the open doorway. I stopped, unable to see. I blinked away the sudden brightness.

  My eyes adjusted. Whereas the rest of the house looked like the set from a British period piece, this enormous room looked like the bridge of a starship. It was as if I had stepped out of the eighteenth century into the twenty-fourth. Everything was bright, shiny, glassy or metallic, and high-tech.

  “Welcome to Sentinels Mansion, Mr. Conley,” came a booming masculine voice. I almost jumped out of my skin, both at the unexpected sound and the name of my supposedly secret identity.

  My head snapped toward the voice. Mechano’s big robot body sat at a large transparent table in the middle of the huge room. Seer and Millennium sat with him. All three Heroes were looking at me. As none of them looked quite human, it was like being stared at by aliens. Since all three were living legends, it was intimidating to say the least.

  “We have been expecting you,” Mechano said.

  CHAPTER 18

  “We have much to discuss, Mr. Conley. Please come over and have a seat,” Mechano said. His voice emanated from a circular, gold-colored metal grate located on his robot head where a human’s mouth would be. I presumed the grate covered a speaker.

  Fear clawed its way from the pit of my stomach up to the top of my throat as the three Heroes stared at me. Being afraid of Mechano was understandable. He had tried to kill me, after all. One shouldn’t run up to one’s attempted murderer to give him a hug and a kiss. Not unless one wanted one’s ability to hug and kiss in the future to come to an abrupt and permanent end. Being afraid of Millennium and Seer seemed irrational, though. They were respected Heroes. I had admired them and the rest of the Sentinels for years. They helped people, not hurt them. Besides, after discovering the saber-toothed tiger and the short-faced bear, I should have been particularly delighted to see Millennium and have the chance to talk to him about time travel.

  Why then was my gut shrieking at me to get the hell out of here without bothering to say “goodbye, nice to meet you, I’m a big fan” first?

  Your gut is the voice of your subconscious mind, the Old Man used to say. Ignore it at your peril.

  This would not be the first time I didn’t listen to him or my gut. Despite wanting to, I was not going to flee. I had come here for answers, not to cut and run the moment someone looked at me hard. I did not sit as Mechano asked, though. Considering his past attempts on my life, I had no interest in getting within easy throttling range of his robot body.

  “How do you know my name?” I demanded instead of beating a hasty retreat. First Truman, then Cassandra, now these three Sentinels. At the rate people were learning my secret identity, I should’ve saved everyone time and trouble and put it on a billboard in big bright letters. As I spoke, the glowing orb which had led me here floated over to Millennium. It disappeared inside his body like a raindrop hitting a pond.

  “We know just about everything there is to know about you. We have been closely monitoring you with great interest for quite some time,” Mechano said. Oh no, that doesn’t sound at all stalkerish, I thought, though I kept the sentiment to myself.

  Now that I was recovering from the shock of being in the presence of these three
Heroes, I could hear that Mechano’s deep masculine voice had a slight artificial quality to it, like it was computer generated. As I supposed it was. He said, “Even if I did not already know who you were behind the mask, the feature-camouflaging technology it contains is based on my patents. I can see through it to the real you as easily as looking through a clear window. I could then run your face through my facial recognition software and come up with your real name faster than the time it takes to tell you about it.”

  “Brag about what you’re capable of later,” Seer said impatiently. Her clear, strong voice was in stark contrast to her almost frail appearance. “We’ll be here all night if you don’t cut to the chase.”

  While the two bickered like an unhappily married couple, I scrutinized all three of them. It was not every day I was face to face with famous people I had watched on television and read about for years.

  Seer was not wearing a mask. She never did. Her white skin was pale and tinted slightly blue, like that of a drowning victim. Her long, straight hair was albino white and pulled back into a ponytail. Her face was completely unwrinkled. It made her look both very young and timeless, though I knew she was middle-aged. Her pupils and irises were creamy white. Looking into her eyes was like looking into pools of milk. She wore a robe-like garment that shimmered iridescently, like a soap bubble catching the light. It was partially translucent, giving tantalizing near glimpses of her naked alabaster body underneath. Her figure was willowy, suggestive of a tall adolescent girl whose body had not filled out yet.

  Like me, Seer was telekinetic. I had seen footage of her picking up and throwing a jumbo jet with her powers like it was a dart. As I was Omega-level, my telekinesis had the capacity to be far more powerful than hers, but it was not there yet as I did not have the lifetime of developing and strengthening my powers that she had.