Masked

by Lou Anders

  “They’re well armed,” said Witness. “Assault rifles and fancy-looking pistols. They’ve got cases of C4 in the back of the warehouse. Also, five or six small helicopters. At least I think they’re helicopters; they don’t have rotors attached. They’re planning to blow something up, but no one said what.”

  “The Supreme Court,” said Retaliator.

  “Is this anything more than a guess?” said Atomahawk.

  “Tomorrow is when they’re hearing arguments on Prime Mover’s appeals. They’re being asked to decide if a murder conviction can stand if the victim is later restored to life by a time-travel paradox.”

  “Even if he gets off on that technicality, he’s guilty of hundreds of other murders,” said Atomahawk. “He’s not going to walk. Also, why blow up a hearing that might lead to a ruling in his favor?”

  “It’s too big a coincidence that his goons are stocking up on explosives. Security is going to be high tomorrow. He would blow the place up just to prove he still runs the world even from a prison cell.”

  “Is he that crazy?”

  “Maybe,” said Retaliator. “Or maybe the guy rotting in prison isn’t the real Prime Mover. When they put him in jail, Prime Mover claimed he was a cop named Jason Reid who’d somehow been put into Prime Mover’s body. An hour later, though, he was back to normal. Assuming ‘normal’ is the right word for a man who believes he’s God.”

  “You’re taking the idea he can swap his soul into other bodies seriously?” asked Atomahawk.

  “I’m talking to the ghost of a Siamese twin and an Indian with a fusion reactor where his heart should be,” said Retaliator. “I’m not in a position to dismiss anything as impossible.”

  Atomahawk nodded toward the warehouse. “We going to do this thing?”

  “Go,” said Retaliator. “Make it loud.”

  Retaliator jumped onto his zip line and slid down to the Dump ster behind the warehouse as Atomahawk blazed through the night sky like a comet. He landed on the trash bin as a thunderous crack came from the front of the warehouse. The ground shook as the steel door near the Dumpster blew from its hinges, a victim of the rapid change in air pressure inside the building as Atomahawk blasted through the front doors.

  Retaliator’s muscles tensed. He toyed with the closed switchblade in his palm. Any second, at least one of the goons would make the sensible decision to flee. That would be Retaliator’s cue to drag him into the Dumpster and have a few private moments during which he would make the goon tell everything he knew about Prime Mover’s plans.

  The seconds passed in odd silence. Normally by now hired muscle would be shooting at Atomahawk, not believing in his well-documented invulnerability. Nothing short of an antispace grenade was going to hurt Atomahawk, and Retaliator had secured the last of the five prototypes.

  A full minute went by. At last, someone stuck his head out of the door. It was Atomahawk.

  “You should probably take a look at this,” he said.

  Retaliator jumped from the Dumpster and looked into the warehouse.

  The vast space was well lit by a few atomaflares drifting in the air. The warehouse was completely empty. There weren’t even any cobwebs.

  “I’ve scanned all spectrums. Nothing is hiding invisibly. There’s chaotic heat residue from people who were here, but I’m afraid I wiped out any useful IR information with the blast that took out the front doors.”

  “I swear they were here two minutes ago,” said Witness, who’d joined them.

  Retaliator sighed as he rubbed the bridge of his nose through his mask. “Prime Mover must have activated another power of the God Clock. Teleportation? Time Travel?”

  “She-Devil might know the next power,” said Atomahawk. “After all, she was around when they built the Antikythera mechanism.”

  “Go to DC,” said Retaliator. “Keep an eye on the courthouse.”

  “They aren’t going to let me anywhere near the building,” said Atomahawk.

  “That’s why you have a secret identity,” said Retaliator.

  “I’m six-foot-five, I don’t wear a mask, and I set off Geiger counters from twenty feet away,” said Atomahawk. “My secret identity isn’t as useful as yours, rich boy.”

  “Figure out something,” said Retaliator.

  Witness said, “It’s no problem for me to get in. I’ll contact you the second I spot anything suspicious.” He faded from sight, back into the ghoststream.

  Atomahawk lifted into the air. “It might not be him,” he said.

  “It’s always him,” said Retaliator. “Every time I think Prime Mover is finished, he comes back stronger than ever.”

  “Lucky thing for the world you’re always waiting for him,” said Atomahawk.

  “Yeah,” said Retaliator, his shoulders sagging, as leaned against the Dumpster.

  “What?” asked Atomahawk, pausing twenty feet up.

  “What what?” asked Retaliator.

  “You look so down. This isn’t like you.”

  Retaliator reached back and unzipped his mask. He tugged it off, letting the chill November night cool his sweaty hair. “How do you know it’s not like me? What makes you think you know anything about me?”

  “I’ve watched you die three times and seen you get married twice,” said Atomahawk with a wry smile. “I’ve literally been to hell and back with you, man. If I don’t know you, who does?”

  Retaliator scratched the callus on his neck left by the mask. “So what was it about my last funeral?”

  “That made me start smoking again?” said Atomahawk.

  “Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “The first time we thought you were dead, it was right after the Snarthling invasion. Half of the Law Legion still had alien duplicates running around, so it wasn’t a big surprise when we pulled the real you out of the goo-coffin on that captured saucer. The second time, of course, we both died when Dr. Novy blasted us with the antispace grenades, and we were too busy fighting our way out of hell for me to get stressed out. But the third time you died… I thought it had really happened. We didn’t know you’d been pulled into the twenty-eighth century by Fan Boy, and that the corpse we buried was only a matter-balancing time-echo. It felt final. I should have known it wasn’t. We Law Legionnaires never stay dead.”

  “Or the villains,” said Retaliator, shaking his head wearily. “I’ve seen Prime Mover get torn apart by alligators. I’ve watched him fall from planes, get run over by a tank, get shot by his own henchman, and decapitated by a helicopter. I get a few months of something almost like peace… then he’s back again. It never ends.”

  “People come back,” said Atomahawk. “It’s a crazy world.”

  “My father didn’t come back,” said Retaliator. “Amelia didn’t come back.”

  Atomahawk’s face fell. He said, apologetically, “I didn’t mention the weddings to—”

  “Torture me?” said Retaliator. Not a day went by when thoughts of his shattered lovers didn’t haunt him. His first wife, Amelia, had taken too many sleeping pills; she’d found out the truth of his second life and never learned to cope with the stress of knowing where her husband really spent his nights. His second wife had known the truth, of course. When Nubile had joined the Law Legion, she told everyone she was nineteen, although, in truth, she was fourteen, exactly half Retaliator’s age at the time. She’d passed as older due to her shape-shifting. Fortunately, the first four years they’d fought side-by-side, their relationship had never advanced past teasing flirtation. When they’d finally taken off their masks and progressed to the next phase, Retaliator was no longer technically a pedophile.

  “I’m not trying to torture anyone,” said Atomahawk. “Don’t let events bring you down, is all I’m saying. We’re fighting the good fight. A war can’t be judged by a single battle.”

  “Get to DC,” said Retaliator, pulling his mask back on. “We’ve got work to do. I’m going to talk to She-Devil.”

  As Atomahawk vanished into the night sky, Retal
iator walked to the nearest manhole cover. “Going to talk to She-Devil” was both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world. She-Devil claimed to be Uruk, a five-thousand-year-old woman who’d met Satan in Mesopotamia and broken his heart after a torrid love affair. As a result, he’d cursed her with eternal life and his own duty of punishing the souls of the wicked. But, save for her inability to die, he hadn’t given her any special powers to carry out her mission. Thus, she’d started her career constantly drawn to confront the wickedest men on earth utterly without the power to harm them. Her first thousand years had been hellish, as she’d fallen again and again into the hands of men so vile and depraved they made Ghengis Khan look well-adjusted. Unfortunately for Satan, he’d underestimated the human ability to adapt. Angels and demons were created knowing everything they would ever know. They had little capacity to learn. Humans, on the other hand, improved with age. As the centuries went by, Uruk became nearly unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat, and eventually mastered the mystic arts as well.

  Arc and Tempo had a conspiracy theory that She-Devil had formed the Law Legion specifically so that they could all be killed by Dr. Novy and sent to hell to serve as allies in her final battle with Satan. It was too much for Retaliator to think about, to be honest. Before the Law Legion, his career had consisted of beating up muggers and drug dealers. It was easy to make the judgment that a man peddling junk to school kids deserved to have his teeth pounded from his mouth. Moral clarity became more difficult when he was called upon to judge alien bureaucrats, time-traveling machine men, and antimatter refugees from the seventh dimension.

  Retaliator rolled aside the manhole cover and beamed his flashlight down into the darkness. Below him was nothing but the muck of a storm drain. He leapt, pulling his arms in as he dropped through the hole. He landed, not in knee-deep water, but in a large cavern lit by the reddish glow of the lava river that bisected it. This was the Devil Cave, filled with memorabilia gathered over five millennia of adventures. The place looked like a graveyard for props from a thousand B-movies. He jumped across the lava river and approached the golden throne. Supposedly, Midas himself had used this chair.

  “I know you’re here,” said Retaliator. “I couldn’t be here if you weren’t.”

  “I was just waiting for you to say hello,” a woman’s voice answered behind him.

  “Hello,” he said, turning around.

  Retaliator was a tall man at six foot three, but She-Devil was at least a head taller, and taller still if you counted the long black horns curving up from her brow. Her skin was red; not American flag–stripe red like Atomahawk’s armor, but blood-red. A pair of leathery wings jutted from her shoulders. She wore armor made from black scales of the dragon she’d slain when they’d escaped hell together.

  “What brings you here, Eric?” Her voice was disturbingly normal coming from a black-lipped mouth with white fangs flashing within. She sounded like a gray-haired librarian from Kansas, not an immortal vanquisher of evil. She was also the only one of the Law Legion to ever call him by his first name.

  “I need you to tell me what you know about the Antikythera Mechanism.”

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “There’s more than one?”

  “Of course. There’s the original that was pulled out of its watery grave as little more than a slab, and the new one built by the Red Alchemist from the gamma-ray analysis of the old one, then stolen by Prime Mover.”

  “That’s the one. The God Clock. The last time Prime Mover had it in his possession, he fed it one hundred souls to move the Heaven Wheel and it gave him the power of invisibility. What’s the next power on the wheel?”

  “What does it matter?” asked She-Devil. “The God Clock is safely locked away in the pit of souls.”

  “Is it?”

  She frowned. “I know that Prime Mover keeps getting trickier, but, really, he’s only a delusional old man once you strip away his gizmos. There’s no way he could have stolen the mechanism.”

  “What’s the next power?”

  “Soul walking, but—”

  “Soul walking?”

  “It would allow him to exchange his mind and soul with that of another person for a one-hour period.”

  “So the man in prison—”

  “No,” said She-Devil. “It’s him. A body swap could only last an hour. Even if he had the power, he’s been in prison for months.”

  “Would his victims recall what had happened during that hour?”

  She shrugged. “These things don’t really come with instruction manuals.”

  “What’s next on the wheel? After soul-walking?”

  “Extradimensional portals. You could use the wheel to create an unseen gate into a hidden dimension. Sort of like my Devil Cave, or the pit of souls, which is a hidden dimension inside a hidden dimension.”

  “Show me the mechanism,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes, in a fashion that reminded him of Amelia when she was exasperated. “Fine,” she said, taking a seat on the throne. She used her long black fingernail to trace a circle in the air. Then, she poked the circle in the center, as if the air was a sheet of glass that she’d just cut a hole into. The air fell away in a jumble of sharp-edged fragments, leaving a perfect black circle behind.

  A chill wind cut through the Devil Cave, moaning like lost souls. She reached her hand into the hole. Her lips pressed together as her eyes narrowed.

  “It’s gone, isn’t it?” said Retaliator.

  She gave him a look that chilled his bones. In the many years he’d fought by her side, never once had he seen her eyes filled with fear.

  “He possessed you,” said Retaliator. “He’d already activated the soul-walking before we captured him. He possessed you and retrieved the God Clock. When the hour was up, you didn’t remember.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Don’t you dare say that’s not possible!” snapped Retaliator. “It’s the only thing that makes sense!”

  Her red cheeks turned pink as the blood drained from her face. She closed the portal as she slumped into her chair.

  “There… there was a day, back in August, when I woke up in my mortal form of Eula Leahy and I had no memory of what I’d done the night before.”

  “You didn’t find this unusual? You didn’t think this might be worth mentioning to your teammates? You’re the most powerful woman in the world. You skewered Satan with his own sword! Don’t you think it might be important to keep track of where you are and what you’re doing at all times?”

  “Don’t judge me, Eric,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “You haven’t lived my life. You’ve never seen the horrors I’ve seen. Sometimes… sometimes in order to get to sleep, I have a drink or two or three. It’s something… it’s something I’m in control of… most of the time.”

  Retaliator took a long, slow breath. Sometimes it was difficult to remember that underneath all the magic, She-Devil was only a woman doing a job she didn’t want to do.

  “Look,” he said. “The next time you feel like your only hope of getting some peace is a bottle, give me a call. We’re teammates, Eula. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing and talk you through the darkness.”

  She responded with a dry chuckle. “For the sake of the world, let’s hope that my mood is never so dark that I need to turn to the Retaliator for a pep talk. Leave here, Eric. I need to do further research. There will be forces at play in this cave which no mere mortal can witness and hope to retain his sanity.”

  “Fine,” said Retaliator, “but—”

  But he was talking to a wall. He was back in Gray Manor in his own bedroom, facing the Annie Leibovitz portrait of himself and Nubile on their wedding day. It’s funny; he knew Sarah first as Nubile, and even now thought of her by that name, even though she would never fight crime again after Prime Mover had put three bullets into the base of her skull. Without her powers, she’d likely be dead. As it was, she was merely an empty shell who didn’t understand wh
at people were saying to her in the few moments a day she drifted into wakefulness. She would never be Nubile again. She might never be Sarah again.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his mask as tears rolled down his cheeks. He lived in a world where a select subgroup of people never really died. He’d cheated death three times, Atomahawk had been dead twice, and Reset’s whole power was resurrecting himself; he sometimes died two or three times a day.

  He knew, he knew, he knew that these were the exceptions, that every single day thousands of ordinary people died, and stayed dead. It made his pain so much sharper to know that he was alive while his father was still dead from strangulation, that he was alive while his mother was still dead from cancer, that he was alive after Amelia swallowed all those pills and choked on her own vomit. And Sarah, poor Sarah—why was she a vegetable while he was walking around healthier than ever thanks to a heart from the future?

  He wiped his cheeks and sucked up the pain, turning the leather mask in his hands, until his true face stared up at him, judging, the empty eye slots full of scorn.

  He rose, pulled on a robe that hung down to his ankles, and walked down the hall. He squinted as he stepped through the door at the end, moving from lamp light into overly bright fluorescent whiteness. The last three rooms of the wing had been transformed into a private hospital. On the other side of the glass, a doctor looked up at him, then turned away.

  He went to her room.

  Sarah Kontis Gray was sleeping in her white hospital bed. The room was oddly silent now that the respirator had been removed. The nurse by the bedside, a thin black woman with streaks of gray in her hair, rose as he entered.

  “She’s been sleeping well,” she whispered.

  He nodded. In truth, though, he didn’t believe the words. In the three years they’d been together, he’d never seen Nubile sleep on her back. She always slept on her side, with her head pressed up against his shoulder. She looked so wrong on her back, with every muscle slack. The crisp white linens lay neatly across her. Normally when she slept, she was murder on blankets, tugging and tucking and stuffing them under body parts until everything was just right.