Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women

by Michael Bailey

  “That’s not good,” says Matt, master of the understatement.

  “Get dressed, fast,” I say, slapping my goggles on. “I’ll keep her occupied.”

  The gang dashes off for a quick-change, while I take to the air. Powering up in plain sight like this isn’t the brightest thing to do, but civilians are too busy running for their lives to pay any attention to me.

  “Hey!” I shout.

  The woman turns to face me. “And who might you be, sunshine?” she says. Her grin is as good as a neon sign reading I AM MONKEYHOUSE CRAZY. Whose dumb idea was it to buy time for the Squad?

  Oh, yes, mine. Never mind.

  “The name’s Lightstorm,” I say. “And you are?”

  “You can call me Stacy Hellfire, sweetheart, and I’m just passing through,” she says. “Don’t mind me.”

  “You want to tell me what happened here?” And take your time so my back-up can do whatever they plan to do. God, I hope they have a plan.

  She considers the slagheap-in-the-making thoughtfully, then says, “He was rude.”

  “Okay. So, Stacy, how about I ask you, politely, to put the...uh, fire down and tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “Can’t talk. Woman on a mission.”

  She raises her hands, thus ending our cordial exchange, but before she can nail me, she flies backwards, as though a psionic with an excellent sense of timing nailed her with a telekinetic battering ram. Stacy hits the ground hard enough to leave a crater.

  Now what? Sara says.

  Stay on her! I say. She might be down, but something tells me she’s far from out.

  Matt’s voice joins the mental chat room. Don’t have to tell us twice, we saw what she did to that car.

  The aftermath is a show in and of itself. The fire thins out, revealing the charred skeleton of the car’s frame as the body panels melt into a pool of molten goo. It’s like watching a candle burn away at high speed. The flames, hungry for more, spread to the road and show no signs of slowing down.

  Is there a plan?

  Beat her into unconsciousness, Matt says. Duh.

  Oh, brilliant.

  Before I can ask how we’re going to get close enough to do that, Stuart sails past me, the apex of his leap taking him directly over my head (!), and lands near our new friend. At first thought it’s a sound theory: get Stuart, he of the invulnerable skin, to take her down. However, as one old science teacher of mine liked to say, nothing ruins a great theory like an ugly fact — and in this case, the fact is: she reduced a car to puddle in under two minutes.

  Stacy sits up. I shout out a warning that comes too late. Stuarts yelps and staggers back, gouts of flame splashing off his chest. He screams and flails away, tearing his leather vest off. The thing is ash before it hits the ground.

  What happens next is nothing less than a miracle of good timing. I power up for a blast, planning to flatten Stacy Hellfire, while Matt and Sara converge on Stuart. Matt pulls a fire extinguisher out of his coat, and Sara assumes a defensive position, ready to deflect a follow-up attack that doesn’t come because Missy, in no more of her costume than her ninja hood, springs out of nowhere. She rakes the woman across the face, leaving four ragged red streaks. Missy is barely clear when my energy blast connects, knocking Miss Flamey-Hands back to the ground. If either Missy or I had been a fraction of a second off, we’d all be dodging crazy flaming mayhem, and Missy would be a smear on the sidewalk.

  Like I said: a miracle.

  A short-lived miracle at that: Stacy gets right back up, shooting wildly. Bullets (or whatever they are) punch holes in the sides of buildings, dig fist-sized craters in the ground, slice through abandoned cars. Everything they touch catches fire; metal, stone, whatever, it all goes up like paper. Liquid fire splatters over the invisible dome of Sara’s telekinetic shield. The shots aren’t penetrating, but who knows if that will last.

  Stacy pauses, her face a mask of rage. She spots Missy crouched behind an SUV, and the reckless assault finds its focus.

  This woman has taken a fair beating so far, so I decide to amp up my attack, thinking (hoping) a solid blast won’t kill her. My aim, which isn’t fantastic in the best of circumstances, is a little off: I tag her in the shoulder, causing her to jerk as she fires. That saves Missy, but it doesn’t take Stacy down. I expect her to swing around toward me, but instead she finds a target in the street and throws a swirling tornado of white flame at —

  Oh, crap. Missy, run!

  I tell Sara to close her shield and brace herself, and me, I hit the open sky, because that’s the only way I’m getting out of range of the tanker truck full of home heating oil before it goes up.

  Sara has her own ideas. She gestures at the truck as though reaching out to grab it. There’s a flash and a throaty WHOMP, and for a fraction of a second there is a perfect globe of roiling flame in the middle of the street. Sara cries out, then collapses. The fireball loses cohesion and hits the pavement with a splash, as though someone had dropped a gigantic water balloon filled with napalm.

  I can’t help but gawk stupidly at the scenario in front of me: Sara and Stuart are flat on their backs, unmoving and injured, and Main Street is one step away from pulling a full Chicago.

  (You know: the Great Chicago Fire? Mrs. O’Leary’s cow? Look it up.)

  Matt waves to me from the ground, points at something. The phrase better late than never pops into my head as Concorde appears next to me, demanding to know what the hell is going on. I’d love to point a finger of blame at Stacy Hellfire, but I don’t see her anywhere. She’s gone.

  I’m getting mighty sick of the bad guys giving us the slip.

  Within minutes, the fire department arrived on the scene and began spraying down everything, the police handled crowd control and took initial statements, and paramedics tended to the injured. There were no fatalities, thank God, but lots of nasty burns, and enough psychological trauma to keep Kingsport’s shrinks busy for the next decade. Mindforce and Nina kept to the side, letting Concorde direct traffic. Everyone followed his orders, immediately and to the letter. No one challenged him or gave him any lip. Watching him in action reminded me that, as infuriating as he could be, he was the seasoned pro here.

  Concorde didn’t lay into us right away; he knew his priorities. When he did start in, he was courteous enough to wait until we were all back at Protectorate HQ, so the Hero Squad wouldn’t make the front page of the paper for getting dressed down in public. Better yet, we weren’t subjected to his standard rant about what a bunch of amateurs we were. Oh no. Instead, he gave us grief for trying to handle things on our own instead of calling him in — like I personally promised I would.

  “That woman was blowing the bejesus out of everything,” Matt argues. “Did you really want us to stand there with our thumbs up our butts while we waited for you to show up?”

  “Yes, because then they wouldn’t have gotten injured,” Concorde says, waving at the far wall of the medical bay, where Mindforce is bent over an examination table, gently probing a six-pack of extremely nasty burns spread across Stuart’s torso. His skin is lobster red and covered in blisters the size of quarters, and no one is more shocked about this than Stuart.

  “I wasn’t injured,” Sara protests from the neighboring table, but she’s not very convincing. Her face is pinched and tight, and she’s paler than normal.

  “Maybe not in the conventional sense,” Mindforce says, “but you did experience heavy psychic backlash.”

  “Keeping a tanker full of oil from turning Main Street into a crater,” Matt says, never one to squander an opportunity to throw our success, however small, in Concorde’s face.

  Concorde, never one to squander an opportunity to put Matt in his place, responds, “And she was lucky she succeeded.”

  “Why is everything we do lucky?” Matt shoots back. “Would it kill you to admit we did something right?”

  “No, but it might kill you.”

  “Could we not do this now?” I say. “Ther
e’s a crazy woman out there with flaming hands and serious impulse control issues. Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, be back out there looking for her?”

  “She’s got a point,” Nina says.

  “First things first,” Mindforce says. “We need to know exactly what we’re up against.”

  “You mean you don’t know who she is?” I say.

  “Based on your description of her, no, she’s no one I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Me either,” Concorde says.

  “I think we should call in Enigma,” Nina says. “This sounds like it might be in her wheelhouse.”

  Concorde makes a noise that’s half sigh, half grumble. “Yeah, you’re right,” he concedes. “Hold on.”

  While he fires up his helmet-phone, Matt and I check in on our wounded. Missy is perched on a stool next to Stuart’s bed, eyes wide with worry. Stuart offers her a wobbly smile.

  “I’m good, Muppet, don’t you worry,” he says, propping himself up on his elbows.

  “You better be,” Missy says. “Otherwise I’m kicking your butt.”

  “Warning received.”

  “Enigma’s en route,” Concorde says, rejoining us. “Should be here in ten, fifteen minutes.”

  The room suddenly goes black — not as in, the lights have gone out, more like the light has pulled a 180 and become impenetrable darkness. Things return to normal as quickly as they went wonky, and there’s a soft whoof of displaced air.

  “Or now,” Concorde says.

  “Everyone,” Nina says, “this is my girl Dr. Enigma, our resident expert on all things magical, mystical, and supernatural. Enigma, this is the Hero Squad.”

  “Hey, guys. Where’s my patient?” says the most drop-dead gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen in my life. I may be attractive (I say immodestly), but next to her, I’m a monkfish. She’s tall, shapely, and has a face I can only describe as angelic. Hair a vivid shade of flame red, which I refuse to believe is natural, cascades from her head in wild waves. Two matching locks of pure white, one above each temple, frame her face, giving her a slightly punky edge that only makes her more fetching. Jeans and a T-shirt shouldn’t look that amazing on anyone.

  Nina gestures at Stuart. Enigma shrugs off her leather jacket, then slides in next to Mindforce to take in Stuart’s injuries. Eager to impress, he chokes back the pain and offers his best roguish smile.

  “Hey. How you doin’?”

  “Hey there, cutey,” Enigma says. “And what happened to you, hmm?”

  “Injured in the line of duty,” Stuart says. “Protecting the public. Fighting the good fight. You know how it goes.”

  “Oh, please,” Concorde mutters.

  “Pay no attention to him,” Enigma says. “I don’t.”

  “Stuart’s invulnerable,” Mindforce says.

  “Uh-huh,” Enigma says, her curiosity piqued. “Someone want to tell me who or what did this to him?”

  “He got burned,” Matt says, his eye glazed over in adolescent lust. I can’t blame him, honestly, but come on.

  “He was blasted by a woman who shot impossibly hot fire from her hands,” I say, and Enigma shoots me a hard look.

  “Fire from her hands?” she says. “You’re positive?”

  “I’m positive. Not the kind of thing you see every day.”

  “Shoulder-length brunette hair, by any chance? Little on the chunky side?”

  “No, blonde and slim.”

  “Son of a...” Enigma says, mumbling something under her breath I can’t quite make out, something that sounds like “jumped hosts.”

  “Then we are dealing with someone or something supernatural?” Mindforce says.

  “The evidence doesn’t lie. Sorry to break it to you,” she says to Stuart, “but physical invulnerability doesn’t count for jack against magic.”

  “And you know who did this?” Concorde says.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Suggestions?”

  “I want to check a few things first.”

  “Make it quick. She’s still on the loose.”

  “Ask me nicely.”

  “This is part of your job.”

  “No, it actually isn’t,” Enigma says with the sunniest of smiles, “so until it’s your name on the bottom of my paycheck, you do not order, you ask.”

  “...Please, put a rush on this,” Concorde says.

  “I will do my best. In the meantime,” she says to Stuart, “apply holy water three times a day until the blisters fade. It’ll help with the pain and speed up healing.”

  “Uh...seriously?” he says, but there’s no mistaking her tone; she is not joking.

  SIX

  It took us until Sunday to get around to gaming, and by then none of us were up for anything too involved; instead of our planned daylong Arkham Horror game, we played traditional board games with some decidedly non-traditional house rules. In Monopoly, for example, rolling double sixes causes Godzilla to roam the board, destroying houses and hotels.

  Matt’s invention, of course. Don’t get me started on how the kid likes to play Clue.

  School resumed on Monday with its usual post-Christmas vacation mix of quiet resignation, and that weird high that comes with starting a new year. It’s all psychological, I know, but there is with each January first an undeniable sense of renewal that invigorates the soul. Everyone’s like, All that crap I dealt with last year? So done with it. Everything I never got around to doing? I’m going to do it, this time for sure!

  For me, that attitude is usually dead by the middle of the month — and yet, I want to believe this year will in fact be different, better, less strange. No traumatic family issues, no personal upheavals, no near-death experiences at the hands of a murderous mercenary — nothing but puppies and sunshine for the next 362 days.

  This time for sure.

  “Did you make any New Year’s resolutions?” I ask Sara as I finish transferring my books from my locker into my backpack. God, this thing’s heavy. Mountain climbers tackling Everest probably carry less on their backs.

  “I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions,” Sara says. “If I wanted to improve myself, why should I wait until the first of the year? Besides, I’m half-Jewish; my New Year was, like, three months ago. Heads up, authority figure coming.”

  By which she means Mr. Dent, the assistant principal, who’s coming straight at me with a businesslike look on his face. “Carrie, good, there you are,” he says.

  “Here I am. What’s up?”

  “Mrs. Zylinski would like to see you after homeroom.”

  I rack my brain to match a title to the name and come up blank. “Mrs. Zylinski?”

  “Guidance counselor,” Sara says.

  “Ah. Okay. Sure. No problem.”

  Mr. Dent smiles, nods, then dashes off to perform other assistant principally duties.

  “Wonder why Mrs. Zylinski wants to see me?”

  “It’s nothing big,” Sara says. “Every sophomore gets called in at some point to talk about their future plans. You know, what you want to do for a career, where you want to go to college, blah blah.”

  “Oh, okay. Did you have your conference already?”

  “Yeah, few months ago.”

  “And?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I’m not really interested in much of anything I could turn into a career.”

  “No, not true. You love to sing and dance, you’re into musical theater, you could go to school for that.”

  “A theater degree?” Sara scoffs. “Might as well quit school and start waitressing right now.”

  The first bell rings and, after checking in at homeroom, I head to the guidance office and meet Mrs. Zylinski, a heavy-set woman in a sweater one could charitably describe as festive (and, uncharitably, as a visual interpretation of an acid trip). She leads me into her office, shuts the door, sits at her desk, and makes a bit of a show of flipping open a file folder with my name on it.

  “Sorry to call you in so
abruptly,” she says without looking up from the paperwork she’s pretending to read. “You should have been scheduled for a meeting with me last month, but you got lost in the shuffle because you transferred in after the start of the school year.”

  “Bureaucracy,” I say. “Whatcha gonna do?”

  She gives me a thin smile. “Hm. Yes. So. Carrie. Let’s talk about your future.”

  “Okay.”

  “Kingsport High is very involved in helping students realize their full potential, and that involves looking ahead to life after graduation,” Mrs. Z says. It doesn’t sound entirely rehearsed. “I know you might think now that you’re too young to plan for college and a career, but believe me, graduation day sneaks up on you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me, where do you see yourself after high school?”

  Good question. I don’t have a good answer. Considering my unusual side interests, I first see myself alive and in one piece, but that’s not what Mrs. Z wants to hear.

  “I haven’t thought about it,” I confess.

  Mrs. Z quirks an eyebrow at me. She sighs through her nose, flips through a couple of pages in my file. “According to your academic records, you were a solid A student throughout elementary school, and then in eighth grade your performance took a bit of a downturn.”

  A downturn? Try a nosedive, Mrs. Z.

  “Yeah, I, uh, I guess you could say I fell in with a bad crowd,” I say. “Nothing serious, it wasn’t like I was spending all my time drunk or stoned or anything stupid like that. I started hanging around people who didn’t much care about school, and I let them drag me down, but that stuff, that’s all in my rear-view mirror. I’m all about turning things around and getting back on track, academically speaking.”