“Pretty good. There was one time when someone tried to mug us, but Apex Man saved us,” Starla says. She hopes this might show him she’s not an enemy.
“The streets can be pretty dangerous,” Stan says. Starla takes this as a warning.
“Apex Man has saved me more times than I can count,” Kate says. “It’s kind of embarrassing, really.”
“Apex Girl saved you a few times too,” Billy says. This is probably intended to help Starla’s self-esteem.
“Oh, sure. You know, I haven’t seen her around lately.”
“She probably went back into space or something,” Starla says.
“No big loss there, not when the big guy is back. So you still working at that shelter?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in working for a newspaper? We’re still short a copy editor since our last one disappeared.”
Starla forces herself to laugh. “I’m not much good at spelling.”
“Too bad. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“You’re not giving me much to work with here, kid.”
“I’m sorry.” Starla wishes Kate would take the hint and leave. Of course she won’t; she must sense there’s a story here somewhere, but her well-trained nose for the scoop hasn’t found it yet.
“I don’t think Star wants to be interviewed right now,” Stan says.
Kate turns and points to a pitching game like the one Starla had dismantled back in Rockford. “Why don’t you go win me a giant bear while us girls talk?”
Stan grumbles something, but then stalks over to the booth. Kate doesn’t watch him thrust his money at the carney and then take the balls. She says to Starla, “I’d really like to do an exposé on kids who live on the streets. You think you and I could sit down sometime for that?”
“I’d have to talk to Greta about it.”
“She’s the one who found you, right?” When Starla nods, Kate continues, “Good, I’d like to talk to her too. Let me give you my number—”
There’s a crash all too familiar to Starla, followed by a carney shouting, “Holy shit!”
Starla and Kate turn to see Stan has shattered all of the bottles in the game. From the holes in the back of the booth, the balls are probably halfway across the Atlantic by now. He snatches a giant pink bear from off the rack and then stomps over to Kate. “Here you are. Now let’s get out of here.”
He tries to take her arm, but she shakes it away. “We’re not finished yet.”
“We’re leaving. Now.”
“I said—” Stan takes her arm hard enough that she cries out with pain.
Billy launches himself forward. “Mr. Shaw—” He doesn’t get to finish as Stan wheels around with his free hand to bat Billy across the midway. He fortunately lands in the dunk tank, probably saving him from a few broken bones.
Kate’s finally able to shake him off again. “What the hell are you doing? You think I’m some goddamned cow you can boss around like back on the farm?”
“Kate—”
“Get this through you’re head, farmboy: We are over!” She slaps him across the face, which probably hurts her hand more than it hurts him.
He could easily catch her as she stomps off, but instead he turns to Starla. His eyes begin to glow bright red. “You! This is your fault! I told you to stay away.” He grabs her by the front of her blouse. “You think she still loves you? She’s mine! It’s all mine. This city belongs to me!”
Starla can only tremble in his grasp, far too weak now to stop Apex Man. There’s probably no one on this planet who can stop him now, except probably Robin. Knowing Midnight Spectre, she’ll have already planned for this contingency, when Apex Man might finally snap and go on a rampage. But by the time she could get here, Starla will probably be dead.
A crowd has formed around them now. A beefy security guard puts a hand on Stan’s shoulder, probably thinking he’s an ordinary drunk. “All right, pal, put the little lady down.”
“Whatever you say,” Stan growls. He hurls Starla in the opposite direction from Billy. She sails through the air, but like Billy she’s fortunate not to land on something that might snap her like a twig. She crashes through the webbing of a bounce castle to land amongst a bunch of toddlers who until that moment had been laughing with glee. Now they take to screaming as the bounce castle begins to deflate around them.
Though her body feels as bad as it did when she first woke up in this body, she gets to her feet. She grabs the nearest child’s hand. “Come on, kids, let’s go.” She ushers them towards the rapidly shrinking exit. A little boy remains frozen in shock. Starla hurries over to him and grabs him around the waist. That finally gets him to react; he screams in her ear and whips around in her grip like a fish out of water.
She thrashes through layers of deflated plastic until she finally collapses onto the ground. Only then does she let the boy go. He runs into his mother’s arms. “Thank you so much,” the woman says.
“Just doing my job,” Starla says.
Then she goes to find Billy.
Stan Shaw has vanished by the time Starla reaches the dunk tank, where a couple of carnies have set Billy on the ground. She kneels down next to him. He doesn’t look too bad, just a few minor cuts from the edge of the tank and some water in his lungs.
His eyes flutter open. “Starla. Are you—?”
“I’m fine. I landed in the bounce house.”
“I hope they didn’t charge you.”
He tries to get up, but she presses him back down. “Stay here. The paramedics should be here soon. They’ll get you all fixed up.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to check on Greta. He might try to do something to her if he’s mad at me.”
He nods slightly and then passes out again. She waits until she sees the medics coming before she sprints away towards the exit. There’s a crush of people trying to get out, but for once Starla’s smaller body comes in handy. She’s able to wriggle through openings in the stampede to find her way outside.
Chapter 22
On the way home, Starla thinks of calling the police to put Greta and Kate in protective custody. But what can she tell the police: that a crazed superhero might be out to get her friends? They’d throw her in a mental asylum. She’ll have to hope he hasn’t taken things that far yet.
She continues to think that until she sees the flames rising in the distance. They’re coming from St. Jerome’s. “Oh no,” she whispers. She pounds against the divider until the cabbie stops. Then she slips him some money and says, “Call the fire department. Tell them St. Jerome’s shelter is on fire!”
The front entrance is already too hot for her to enter through. She goes around to the side of the building, where for the first time she’s relieved to see Bertha. The dishwasher and cook are helping some of the homeless into the alley.
“There you are,” Bertha says. “You missed all the excitement.”
“Where’s Greta?”
“I thought she was with you.”
“No. I went out tonight. Does someone have a phone?”
“A cell phone? Where do you think you are?”
“Sorry.” Starla races off towards Greta’s house. Her worst fears are realized when she sees it too is in flames. She hurries up the front steps only to get thrown down by a backdraft. While she lies on the pavement, watching the house burn, tears come to her eyes. He couldn’t have killed Greta. She’s a sweet old lady. Apex Man would never do that.
He’s not the real Apex Man. She was supposed to be. She was supposed to be the one to protect this city. Instead she let an impostor take over, an impostor who has now turned into a monster.
Starla gets back to her feet. She runs around to the back, wishing at this moment she still had her superpowers so she might get there quicker. If she did have her powers it would be easy enough to dart into the flames to look for Greta.
Then she thinks of Robin, who for years has been one of the planet’s greatest heroes while not having any special powers. It’s what’s inside that makes you a hero, she tells herself. With this thought in mind, she lunges into the burning building.
She’s short, but not short enough to avoid the smoke in the kitchen. Starla gets down on her knees, but smoke still stings her eyes. “Greta!” she calls out. There’s no answer.
She knows where Greta would be at this time of night; she’ll be in her bedroom. She might not even have woke up yet. Starla prays the fire hasn’t spread that far or else she might be in time to find only a charred corpse.
She flails around through the smoke until she finds the stairs. Then she gets up as much as she can to ascend the steps. “Greta!” she shouts again, followed by a fit of coughing. Her entire body is warm and dripping with sweat now. She shrugs out of Greta’s sister’s green sweater. She keeps this with her to bat at pockets of flame, not that it does much good.
The hallway is filled with smoke. Starla staggers along until she stumbles into her room. An idea comes to her as she sees the dresser. She gets back down on her knees to open the bottom drawer.
Her old Apex Girl costume is still in there. It’s still much too large for her, but she doesn’t care at the moment. The top half of the costume goes down to her ankles. She drapes the skirt over her hair like a scarf and then slips into the boots; the cape she takes with her.
While the costume is an awkward fit, it is fire resistant. She hurries down the hallway to Greta’s room. As Starla feared, her friend lies on the bed, though at the moment she’s not burnt to a cinder. “Greta!”
The old woman finally stirs. “Star?”
“I’m here! Just stay put!” Starla bursts through the smoke, over to Greta’s side. The old woman begins to cough violently. Starla presses the cape into her hands. “Get this over you as best you can. Then we’ll get out of here.”
Greta’s hands fumble with the cape, until Starla has to help her. The cape is long enough, but not quite wide enough to cover Greta entirely. Still, it’s better than nothing. Starla takes the old woman’s hand. “Let’s go.”
They have to go slow owing to the awkwardness of their clothes and Greta’s age. Starla wills herself to be patient and not let the fear nagging in her belly drive her to leave Greta behind. The old woman saved her life; now she’s going to return the favor.
With the costume covering most of her body, Starla descends the stairs, into an inferno. Before she enters the flames, she presses closer to Greta. “We have to stay together and face each other. Understand?”
“Yes, dear,” Greta gets out. They cough at the same time.
Starla wraps her arms around Greta, keeping her hands beneath the cape so they won’t get burned. They shuffle into the flames; Starla’s glad they can’t actually see what’s going on around them. She can feel heat licking at exposed parts of her hair, but she ignores this. I’ll have to see Harriet again to fix it, she thinks and then laughs like a maniac probably from a lack of oxygen.
Hands seize her to yank her through an opening. She finds herself torn from Greta. Cool air blasts her. It takes her oxygen-depleted brain a moment to realize she’s outside and that firefighters have pulled her and Greta out of the burning house.
One of them leads her over to an ambulance. He swipes the skirt away from her head. “You all right, kid?” She nods slightly. “That was a hell of a thing. You are one brave little girl.”
“Greta—”
“Your friend will be fine. You stay here and rest.” She doesn’t have the strength to argue at the moment. A paramedic puts an oxygen mask to Starla’s face to let some untainted air into her lungs.
The fireman is wrong, though. Greta won’t be fine. Neither will Billy or Kate or anyone in this city—on Earth for that matter—as long as that maniac is still out there. She has to get back to the Crystal Lair. Maybe there’s a way to change her back or at least to stop him. But she can’t get there on her own. She needs help.
There’s only one person to call.
***
As she sucks on her index finger, Robin wonders why tiny injuries are so much more annoying than major ones. In her career as Midnight Spectre she has been stabbed, shot, and burned—sometimes more than one of these at a time—and yet she didn’t make as much of a fuss as when Melanie pricked her finger with a needle. Melanie looks up from her microscope. “Do you need a band-aid for that?”
“I’m fine,” Robin says around her finger. “I’ll go keep a lookout.”
The latter is necessary because they are not in the lab at MIT legally. Melanie is a student, but the building is supposed to be closed at two in the morning. Not that the school’s security posed any problem at all to Melanie. The only way they might be caught now is for some guard or student to stumble across them.
Robin crouches in the doorway, where she can see both ends of the hallway. There’s no one around at the moment, which is just as well. She doesn’t have any of her gear, so anyone she encounters would have to get taken down manually. That would be painful—for them at least.
The one she worries about is that impostor. He has probably already followed them to Cambridge, where he knows Melanie goes to school. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think he might search this building while looking for them. If so, things could turn ugly quick.
Maybe she should have left Melanie back at the motel with Jasper. Robin knows enough about chemistry to analyze the samples. But Melanie is better at it and short of knocking her out, there was no way for Robin to keep her at the motel. It’s a testament to Melanie’s courage that even after she got turned into a girl by following Robin to Dr. Roboto’s monster she still volunteers to help with something like this.
She really wishes Allison were here. She’s one of the best biochemists in the world. Except apparently now Allison is back in middle school; this would be after her curfew. Robin still has no idea what happened to her or Elise, but as soon as she can she’ll find out.
This is a situation Robin always feared would happen. She had always worried someday the military might try to dispose of the Super Squad. This fear was realized to some extent with Dalton’s betrayal. Robin had convinced herself that was an isolated incident, one rogue agent. This time it seems like more than one rogue agent. This time it’s the top levels of the government deciding to do away with the female Squad, to put the world’s safety in the hands of a bunch of impostors. Provided they all survive this, Robin is going to have some words with her fellow superheroes about their arrangement with the Pentagon.
No one shows up for them after two hours. When the door opens, Robin strikes a defensive pose. It’s just Melanie. “I have something to show you,” she says.
Robin follows her back into the lab. Melanie gestures to a pair of computer screens. On these Robin can see the lengthy code that makes up strands of DNA. The question is which one belongs to which Robin Holloway. “What am I looking at?”
“The one on the left is the sample you took from the impostor. The one on the right is the sample I took from your finger.”
Robin squints at the screens. “They’re the same?”
“Almost. They match so closely that a standard DNA test wouldn’t show the difference. But when I looked deeper, I found the differences.” A few characters on the left screen turn red. “Buried deep in the code are a few slight differences. I decided to check the contents of both samples down to the subatomic level. That’s where things got interesting.”
“You can stop beating around the bush already. Just tell me what you found.”
“Fine. There are synthetic compounds in his blood. They’re really more like cellular residue than anything. I’m about ninety-nine percent sure those compounds aren’t anything from this planet.”
“He’s an alien?”
“No, he’s human. Or at least a clone of a human. But I think he was made by alien technology.”
Robin sighs. Alien techno
logy again. Alien tech in the hands of the Feminazi had already changed Robin and Melanie into girls. Now more of it is trying to destroy them. “Back up all this stuff on a thumb drive. Tomorrow we can send that and a summary to Kate King. See how enamored she is with her precious Apex Man then.” Robin leans forward to give Melanie a kiss. “Good work.”
“Thanks.”
On the way back to the Hampton, Robin almost sighs with relief. She had always told herself the male Midnight Spectre was an impostor, but it’s still good to have some proof. If the results had been reversed—if she were the alien clone—she didn’t know what she would do then. Would her own sense of duty obligate her to destroy herself? She doesn’t think she can do that to Melanie.
Back in the room they find Jasper asleep on the bed. There’s plenty of room on the king-size bed for all three of them, but the thought of sharing a bed with Jasper is far too creepy for Robin to handle. She and Melanie curl up on the floor. “After we send the information to Ms. King, what do we do?”
“We unravel the rest of this conspiracy,” Robin says, “and burn down anyone responsible.”
***
Mrs. Tanner pulls Allison aside when she gets to class. “There’s a delivery here for you.”
“Really?”
Mrs. Tanner takes her to a supply room, where Allison sees barrels of chemicals. “What is all of this stuff for?”
Allison needs a hit from the inhaler before she says, “My experiment.”
“What kind of experiment is this?”
“Can you…can you promise…not to tell?”
“If it’s something illegal—”
“No. It’s not. I don’t think.”
“You don’t think?”
Allison needs the inhaler again. She was hoping she could keep this from Mrs. Tanner, but she should have realized she couldn’t. Drums of commercial chemicals showing up at school couldn’t be concealed.
She waves the inhaler. “I’m trying…I’m trying to…cure this.”
“That’s very sweet, Allison, but I think that’s a little beyond seventh-grade science.”
Girl Power Omnibus (Gender Swap Superhero Fiction) Page 37
