When Louise walked into the lab, she found him hunched over what looked vaguely like a woman’s torso, though at the moment it was mostly a skeleton of metal and wires. “Keeping busy?” she asked.
“Always,” he said. From the smell of him, Louise estimated Tim hadn’t showered in about three days, which usually happened when he was busy on a project. “I’m making myself a girlfriend. She won’t be as pretty as you, though.”
“You still aren’t a very convincing liar.”
He finally spun around on his stool. If not for the scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to the right side of his jaw—the result of an attack in prison—Tim would look like an athlete just past his prime. He certainly didn’t need to build himself a girlfriend. Louise felt herself blush as she remembered the crush she’d developed on Tim when Mom brought him home from prison and allowed him to stay in the house until he got on his feet. She had been only five at the time, a little girl who couldn’t cross the street by herself. She still felt that way around him sometimes. “So what brings you here? You want me to help with some enhancements for your mom?”
“No, I need some enhancements for me.”
“You? I don’t think you need any from what I can see.”
“Can I trust you with something? Something important?”
“Of course, Lou. You know I’d do anything for you and your mom. If not for her I’d probably be on the street. Or dead.”
Louise nodded and then took a deep breath. She wondered what Marlin would say about what she planned to do. She didn’t want to involve Tim, but there was no one else to help her, not with Mom crippled and everyone else either dead or missing. “OK, here goes: I’m the Scarlet Knight and I need your help to design some surprises for these bad guys known as Black Dragoons who are the ones who crippled Mom.”
He stared at her for a moment and she waited for him to laugh. He only nodded. “I guess that’s not surprising. I couldn’t think of anyone better to take over for her.”
“You knew about her?”
“She rescued me from TriTech and I helped her get the armor back. Her and that weird friend of hers. The one with the rats.”
“The Sewer Rat? Mom was friends with the Sewer Rat?”
“I guess so. We were a little too busy for me to ask her about it.”
“God, I’m such an idiot. I think Dan and I were the only ones who didn’t know.”
“She made us all promise we wouldn’t tell you. When I got out, that’s the first thing she said to me in the car, that I couldn’t tell you anything about that. I guess I blew it.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” She reached into her pocket for her notes. “I need your help to get this stuff together by tonight. Think you can do it?”
He examined her pages of crude drawings. “Yeah, sure. No problem, so long as you help me.”
“I don’t know, I might just get in the way.” The thought of such close proximity to Tim Cooper for hours was enough to make her blush again.
“It’ll be fun,” he said. “We can borrow some parts from Sylvia.”
“Sylvia?”
He patted the robotic chest on the table. “That’s what I call her. She can’t replace the original, though.”
“I doubt anyone could,” Louise said. She’d never met Aggie’s sister, but she’d heard all the stories from Renee—and Tim, who had loved Sylvia so much he’d never so much as looked at another woman again, especially Louise.
“Let’s get to work,” he said, his voice hoarse.
***
With Mom out of action, Isis had the Dragoons roaming the city to slaughter random citizens and bring the hearts for her to harvest. For lack of better names, Louise and Marlin codenamed them Blades, Balls, and Claws based on the weapons they used. She had tasked the ghost to find one of them that she could go after, to test out the new tactics she’d worked up with Tim Cooper’s help.
She’d left Tim with a sisterly kiss on the cheek in the lab. She supposed that was the best she would ever get from him. If she were healthy enough, Mom probably would have pointed out that he was thirty years older than her and thus not ideal dating material. Or maybe Mom would have approved; she had always liked Tim.
She pushed these childish thoughts from her mind to focus on the mission. Marlin had tracked down the Dragoon with sword blades on his hands down by the waterfront, where he was about to corner some dockworkers and take their hearts for Isis. Louise would do everything possible to make sure that didn’t happen.
She called for the armor with the ridiculous “magic words” Marlin had provided. As she put it on, she imagined she would cut out the Dragoon’s heart and then stomp it into mush. First, she would use the Sword of Justice to slice through the bastard’s spine, to cripple him the way he’d crippled Mom.
“Are you almost ready?” Marlin asked. He floated through the walls of the rusty shipping container she used as her changing room.
“Just about. What’s he up to?”
“Lurking outside a bar. I think he’s waiting for them to get nice and liquored up first. Bugger isn’t even bothering to make himself invisible.”
“Great.” She dropped the helmet over her head and felt the same adrenaline rush as last time. “All right, let’s do it.”
Then she gathered up her equipment and leaped from the shipping container. The moment she landed, she wrapped the cape around her body to go invisible—at least from any dockworkers. From what Marlin said, the Dragoon would be able to see her now. That wouldn’t matter, not if things went as planned.
As Marlin had indicated, the Dragoon lurked outside a seedy bar, the kind of place where Louise and Renee would never go to look for men. The only thing two attractive young women would get in a place like that was raped. She supposed in a way it would almost be a service to the community for the Dragoon to wreck the place. That wasn’t a very Scarlet Knight-type thing to think; she worried for a moment the armor might decide to burn her to a crisp.
She continued to creep along the dock with the cape wrapped around her body. When she was just six feet away from the Dragoon, his body stiffened. He stood up and then spun around. His red eyes turned green, which from what Marlin said meant he was using his night vision to see her. “I see you,” he said.
The Dragoon swiped at her with one of his blades. The blade went through her harmlessly. “Surprise, asshole,” Louise said. She let the cape drop to appear from behind the bar’s dumpster, to the Dragoon’s right.
She yanked the Sword of Justice from its sheath; the golden blade glowed brightly. It was bright enough for her to trigger her next surprise. She tapped the side of her helmet to turn off her night vision. With her free hand she triggered a strobe light about the size of an apple. Tim had modified the light to glow brighter than the lights at a football stadium.
The Dragoon screamed with rage and swiped blindly at her with his blades. She easily ducked under these to jam the Sword of Justice into his chest. The Dragoon staggered back a step before he collapsed to the ground. Louise stood over him a moment and then pulled the sword out. “Is that it?” she said.
It wasn’t. Like a horror movie, the Dragoon sprang back to life. He swung both sword blades at her wildly. Louise jumped back, but not in time to avoid one blade that sliced across her right arm. The Sword of Justice fell from her hand as she dropped to one knee.
The Dragoon stood over her; one foot stood on her golden sword while both of his swords were poised to plunge into her body. “Now you will die,” he growled.
While she wanted to dispute that, she didn’t see any way how. She and Tim hadn’t prepared for this contingency, that the Dragoon could somehow survive a direct blow to the heart. Now she was without the Sword of Justice, unable to call for it with the Dragoon on it, and she didn’t have another weapon while he could easily hit her with both of his and from point-blank range he wouldn’t miss.
She closed her eyes and waited for the killing blow. At least her failure would be far
more spectacular than Mom’s. Maybe whoever Marlin found next would be able to win at least one battle before they died.
But she didn’t die. Instead, she felt something heavy push her to the ground, followed by a man’s scream. A smell like rotten garbage filled her nostrils. She opened her eyes and saw a man on top of her, a man with tangled white hair that covered most of his face except for one red-brown eye. In that eye she saw intense pain, the reason for which became clear when she rolled him off of her and her gloves came back covered in blood.
“Go,” the man whispered to her.
She turned around to see dozens of rats swarm around the Dragoon’s feet. These weren’t normal rats but enormous ones that were three or even four feet long. The Dragoon stabbed at them with his blades to pick them off one at a time. Still they came at him.
“Don’t just stand there!” Marlin screamed at her. “Help them, you bloody twit!”
“Right.” Louise waited until the Dragoon skewered a rat before she punched him in the right pectoral. The Dragoon stumbled back; his foot came off the Sword of Justice long enough for her to call it back to her hand.
She swung the sword to cleave the Dragoon’s right arm from his body as easily as carving a Thanksgiving turkey. Yet even as the arm lay on the ground, she saw the wound heal and actually begin to regenerate. “How do I kill this fucker?” she screamed to Marlin.
“Cut his bloody head off!”
“Good idea!” She ducked under his wild swing with his left blade. Then she swung the Sword of Justice with both hands like a baseball bat. The golden blade sliced through the Dragoon’s neck; the head toppled to the ground.
The Dragoon’s body went slack and collapsed to the ground between his severed arm and head. Louise stood over him in case he regenerated again. But it seemed Marlin was right that cutting off his head was the way to go.
The rats sniffed at the Dragoon’s body for a moment before they swarmed over to the man who had saved Louise’s life. From the deference the rats showed him, the mangy fur coat, and the rotten garbage smell, she knew this was the Sewer Rat. She had thought he was only a story, an urban legend, but here he was bleeding to death on a dock—because of her.
She knelt down beside him and tried to roll him over to examine the wounds. “No,” he said. “No point.”
“I’ll get you to a hospital. They can save you.”
“No time.”
“I can’t just let you die. You saved my life.”
“My job.”
“What?” She brushed the tangled white hair away from his face and then she understood. For so long she’d studied Dan’s face for signs of her father without finding anything. She found these signs in the Sewer Rat’s face: the tangled hair, the pointed nose, and the buckteeth, more prominent than hers, which she had wanted to fix with cosmetic surgery, but Mom refused to sign off on it. “There’s nothing wrong with your teeth. They’re a part of who you are.”
A part of who she was—the Sewer Rat’s daughter. She remembered what Tim had said in the lab about Mom and the Sewer Rat being friends. They weren’t just friends; they were lovers.
She tore the helmet from her head and shook out the hair she’d inherited from him so he could see her face. “Daddy?” she said, her voice tiny.
He nodded to her. “Yes.” He reached up with a dirty hand to touch her cheek. “I proud of you,” he said. Then his hand went limp and his eyes closed.
“No, Daddy, don’t go. Don’t leave me!”
She rested her head on his chest and cried. The rats around them made a sort of keening sound as if they too had lost a father.
***
Louise dropped into the chair beside Mom’s bed, still clad in the Scarlet Knight’s armor. She had climbed in through the window and then propped a chair against the door so no one would be able to disturb her. As on the docks, she took off the helmet; this time she let it drop from her numb fingers onto the floor.
The sound of this prompted Mom’s eyes to open. Her eyes widened at the sight of Louise in the armor. “Louise, what are you doing? If anyone sees you—”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Mom? Why didn’t you tell me he was my father?”
“Who?”
“The Sewer Rat.”
Mom flashed her a high-powered Glare at this. “His name is Jim. Jim Rizzard.” She sighed. “Did he finally tell you?”
“I figured it out and he confirmed it.”
“I’m sorry, baby. How did it happen?”
Louise told her mother and watched tears build up in Mom’s eyes as she learned he was dead. “The rats took his body. I don’t know where.” Louise wanted to cry, but she had exhausted her tears on the way to the hospital. “Shouldn’t I find him? To bury him?”
“No. Let them bury him. It’s what he’d want.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Mom? I had a right to know.”
“It wasn’t up to me.”
“What are you talking about? Of course it was!”
“No, baby. He was your father. It was his decision to make.”
“Then why didn’t he tell me? He loved me. I know he did. He wouldn’t have done that otherwise.”
“Yes, he loved you very much. That’s why he did it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!”
“He thought you’d be ashamed of him for what he is—the way he lives.”
“I wouldn’t,” Louise said, though she wasn’t sure this was true. She could only imagine the abuse she would have taken from her classmates in school if she had told them the Sewer Rat was her father. No, she had always dreamed of a normal father—someone like Dan. “I wouldn’t have hated him. He was my father.”
She practically fell off the chair and buried her face on her mother’s shoulder as she’d done when she was little. She heard her mother groan with pain and then felt Mom’s arms around her, to hold her close. “It’s all right, baby,” Mom said. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish it could all be different.”
After a while Louise looked up at her mother to make sure she was still awake. “You really loved him, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, baby. I loved him as much as I love you.” For the rest of the night, Mom told the story of how she and the Sewer Rat had come together. She’d met him in the sewers as the Scarlet Knight and he’d started to make sculptures of her out of trash. Then when the Dragoon had nearly killed her in an explosion, he and his rats saved her life.
Mom phased in and out, drifting off for a few minutes at a time. Still, she willed herself to continue while she held on to Louise. Mom went on to tell Louise the bizarre story of her conception. “Sylvia had brainwashed me with this potion. I thought I was Megan. I was living in her dorm room. There was an explosion. He found me. And he saved me again. He brought me back and we—you know.”
Louise couldn’t help but smile a little at the idea that her mother was forty-seven and still couldn’t talk about sex without her face turning red. “I know. You made me.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t live together or get married or anything, did you?”
“No. We couldn’t. He had his life down there. I couldn’t ask him to leave it. They needed him. And the people up here needed me.”
“Didn’t you still go down to see him?”
“He wouldn’t let me. Not after you were born. He wanted a clean break.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Louise said. Her conception had brought Mom and the Sewer Rat—Jim—together, but it had also torn them apart. Yet Mom had never found anyone else; she hadn’t so much as dated another person that Louise could remember. She had loved him that much.
“It’s not your fault, baby.” Mom actually managed enough dexterity to pat Louise’s head. “I don’t regret it. Not at all.”
They stayed like that for a long time, until Mom finally fell asleep. Louise carefully ducked out of her embrace and then adjusted Mom’s arms to a more natural position. She heard someone knock on the door and th
en turn the knob. “Just a minute!” Louise called.
She took away the chair while she wrapped the cape around her body. Donna the nurse bustled into the room and looked around curiously for a moment. She checked Mom’s vitals before she left. Louise waited until the door closed before she dove out the window and made her way down to the ground.
Before she did, she took one last look at her mother and thought of all the things her parents had given up for her. She still had two Dragoons left and then Isis to get not only for Mom, but now for Daddy as well.
Chapter 24
Renee tasted something salty in her mouth. When she probed around with her tongue, she realized it was her thumb. She shivered not only at this, but also at the dampness between her legs that had turned cold. Her last moments flooded back. Eileen—Isis—had turned her and Aggie into babies. She had tortured Renee to get Aggie to tell her about a book, until Aggie had summoned enough power to transport Renee to the archives.
Renee saw she was still in the archives, on her stomach in her old bed. The thumb in her mouth and wet diaper confirmed she was still a baby. She pulled the thumb out and then began the awkward process to drag herself into a sitting position on the bed. “Mommy?”
The archivist’s quarters had been expanded after Renee found out about her true heritage to give her a tiny room to stay in while she visited. When she moved in at age eleven she had insisted on painting the walls purple, which necessitated a trip into Dublin, where they’d searched through five stores before they found the exact shade Renee wanted. The walls were still that color and looked as fresh as the day she and her parents had painted them. This was because Mom often had nothing to do in the archives and probably because she wanted to keep the place nice for Renee’s infrequent visits. “Mommy?” she said again, louder this time.
The bed was only a twin size, the same one she’d had for the last six years, which had required another trip to Dublin; the smaller towns around the archives had yet to hear of the invention of memory foam. From where she sat, it was like the edge of a cliff; the floor seemed so far away that she might need a parachute. She dragged herself back against the wall and pulled her knees up to her chin. “Mommy!”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 91
