Masked

by Lou Anders

  My stomach lurches, and a ball of peach-colored goo flies out of my mouth and splats against the floor. It looks like Silly Putty, but it gleams with silvery veins like snail tracks. It’s still connected to my gullet by a long, shiny tail, and I can feel the stuff shifting in my belly. “Gahh!” I say. Which means, roughly, Hurry the hell up.

  The long stream of putty reels out of my stomach and out my throat like a magician’s scarf trick. The glob on the floor grows as it absorbs mass, becoming a sphere about ten inches in diameter. With a final, discomfiting fwip! the last of it snaps free from my throat. The sphere starts to quiver like a wet dog, flinging silvery flecks in all directions.

  I fall back against the cot.

  A tiny, warbling voice says, “Just for the record? I am never doing that again.”

  A tiny hand appears beside my head, and then a doll-size thing climbs onto the cot next to my head. It looks like a miniature Michelin Man, all peachy beige, including round white eyes and a Kermit the Frog mouth. “What the hell took you so long?” he says. “The gel was starting to burn off, I was in there so long. You know what it smells like in there? Exactly what you think it smells like.”

  “I wasn’t enjoying it either, Plex.”

  He squints at my face. “You provoked them, didn’t you? I couldn’t make out what the hell you did to the warden.”

  I sit up. “He was going to send me back to the hospital. Now at least we get to stay the night.” I nod toward the door. “You think you can get through it?”

  “Please,” he says, and rolls his Ping Pong ball eyes. “Take this.” He holds up a three-fingered hand. The middle finger bulges, becomes a sphere, and then falls off with a wet pop.

  I pick up the blob, mush it a bit between thumb and index finger, and press it into my ear. It’s uncomfortably warm, like fresh-chewed gum. “Match the skin tone, okay?” I tell him. “I don’t need to look like I’ve got a wad of white boy in my ear. Okay, give me a test.”

  Check one, check two. Sibilance. Sibilance. The voice is loud in my ear. The vibration tickles.

  “Don’t scream or you’ll blow out another ear drum,” I say.

  You know, he says in a confidential voice. If I go up any more of your orifices, we’re registering for place settings.

  “Just get going. I’ll wait here for you.” I fall back against the cot. No pillow, but I don’t think it’s going to interrupt my sleep.

  Guards come for me hours later. I assume it’s morning. They put shackles on my wrists and legs, then frog-march me to an elevator. According to my research there are fifteen levels in the Ant Hill. We start on Level 5 and then go up to Level 1. The administration offices are just a short walk from there.

  The warden looks upset. He tells the guards to secure me to the guest chair and then get out. Then he picks up a sheaf of papers, glances at them, and looks at me with an expression of fresh disgust. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “This nonsense about wanting to tell me Soliton’s true identity.”

  You told them that? Plex says in my ear.

  “I didn’t think you’d want me to tell your employees.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Warden, I was a member of the Protectors—sorry, ‘Soliton and the Protectors.’” The big guy always insisted we say it that way: He Gladys, we Pips.

  “You weren’t one of them. You just followed them around.”

  “Again with the demeaning statements. Just because I wasn’t one of the people in capes didn’t mean I wasn’t part of the team. I was the first member, if you want to know. I was there on Day One. If you look at the first pictures of when he landed—”

  “I’ve seen them. You’re the boy dressed up in the baseball suit.”

  “I wasn’t dressed up, I was the bat boy. That was an official Cubs uniform.”

  I loved that suit. Loved everything about that job, but especially hanging out with the players, chewing gum in the dugout while they chewed tobacco. A guy in my small group at the hospital said it proved I had an early tendency toward hero worship. Another patient said I had a costume fetish. I’m not saying they’re wrong.

  I was standing in the bullpen when somebody shouted and there he was, a man in T-shirt and jeans tumbling out of the empty sky like a shot bird. At first I thought a drunk had jumped from the upper deck. But no, the angle was all wrong, he was directly over center field and falling at tremendous speed. He hit and the turf exploded and the stadium went silent. Everyone just stood there. I don’t know why I moved first.

  “I was the first one to help him out of the crater,” I tell the warden. “The first person he spoke to on the planet. He took off his glasses, shook my hand, and said, ‘Thanks, Eddie.’”

  “He knew your name?”

  “Spooky, huh? I didn’t think much of it at the time. But later—twenty years later, embarrassingly enough—I realized that was the first clue. The first bit of evidence telling me what he was. Have you have ever read the Gnostic Gospels, Warden? No, of course not. But maybe you’ve heard of them. National Geographic ran a translation of the Gospel of Judas a few years ago that suggested that the man had no choice but to—”

  “Stop babbling. You’re not making any sense.”

  “Fine, let me bring it down to your level. How about Bazooka Joe comics?”

  “What do you want, Mr. King?”

  Well, I tried. “I want to talk to Ray Wisnewski,” I say.

  He pauses half a second too long. “Who?”

  Eddie, is it part of the plan to tell them the plan?

  “Come on,” I say to the warden. “Ray Wisnewski—WarHead? The man who killed two million people in Chicago?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “The glowing guy in your basement. I know he’s here. All I need is a half-hour conversation. See, I’m doing a kind of informal deposition. I’m putting together a case against Soliton.”

  “You really are insane.”

  “No, you’re supposed to say, ‘Case against Soliton? He’s a hero, what did he ever do?’ And then I tell you that he’s responsible for the deaths of millions, not to mention everyone on the planet who’s been injured, widowed, made into an orphan, generally had their lives destroyed every time Soliton and the Protectors went toe-to-toe with some—”

  “You’re blaming him for Chicago? He didn’t set off WarHead—that was the Headhunter.”

  “Ah. Let’s talk about the late Dr. Hunter. Did you know that Soliton captured him not two months before Chicago? And then he was sent here, to your prison. Even though he’d escaped from the Ant Hill four times before.”

  “You think I’m responsible?”

  “I think you’re incompetent, but no, not responsible. You’re just a cog—a malfunctioning cog, maybe, with a couple teeth missing, whose very flaws may be necessary to the continued running of the system—but not the prime mover. Not by a long shot. Soliton is the one responsible. Not just for Chicago—for everything. ” I can see he’s too angry to listen properly. “So how about it? You walk me down to wherever you’re keeping WarHead—”

  “Absolutely not! You can’t come in here trying to sell a hero’s secrets to get some—”

  “Warden, I’m not selling secrets, I’m selling silence.” He still doesn’t understand. “If you let me talk to Ray,” I say slowly, “I promise not to tell the world Soliton’s real name.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “That I know his name? Sure I do, it’s D—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “Why not? You afraid he’ll hear you?”

  It’s not an unreasonable fear. As far as anyone knows, Soliton doesn’t possess superhearing, but he has a tendency to develop new powers whenever he gets bored.

  “You can’t do that.” He grimaces. “You can’t just… give away a hero’s secret identity.”

  Funny, they didn’t have a problem outing Teresa at her trial. “How ab
out this.” I lean forward. “I’ll just whisper a clue.”

  “You’ll do no such—”

  “He’s my dad.”

  That shuts him up.

  “Well, not biologically,” I say. “You may have noticed that Soliton’s white. Though I guess that could be one of his superpowers.” I lean back in my chair. “Anyway, I was twelve years old the day he fell—that kind of rules out paternity at the chronological level. No, I mean, legally. He became my guardian after my parents were killed when I was fifteen—by two different supervillains, by the way. My backstory’s a little complicated. But basically, he’s my father.”

  He said he wanted everything, Plex says.

  The warden stares at me. It’s too late for him now; the idea is in his head and he can’t get it out. He knows he can look up my record, find out who my guardian used to be. He doesn’t know Soliton’s name yet, but forever after he will know that he can know it. Every day he’ll have to decide whether or not to act on that knowledge.

  Also, he can’t get rid of me. “So. Do we have a deal?”

  The trip down to my new cell in the ultra max wing—an upgrade that I consider quite the compliment for a person with no powers—is a brisk affair. We ride the elevator down many floors below my original cell, and then the four guards hoist me by each limb and carry me like a battering ram, stomach-side down, at trotting speed through the corridors. I don’t have much opportunity to look around, but the cell doors have small windows, some of them with familiar faces pressed close to the glass. Reptilian faces, deathly pale faces, faces with elaborate tattoos. If my mouth wasn’t taped shut, I would point out to the guards which of these residents I helped put in here.

  My new cell is identical to the old one, except for the lenses set into the ceiling. For the next several hours I lie still on the bed, breathing through my nose. I know I’m on Prison TV, but I’m intent on becoming the most boring channel imaginable, the C-SPAN of inmates.

  I should have explained myself better to the warden. Dear Reader, do they have Bazooka Bubblegum in your world? Every piece has a tiny Bazooka Joe comic strip wrapped around the pink gum, and at the bottom of every strip is a fortune. The summer Dad fell to earth, I opened one while I was in the dugout and the fortune said, “Help, I’m trapped in a bubblegum factory.” I thought that was hilarious. I was too young to recognize an old joke.

  The older I get, the more I realize that there are no new jokes. There are only minor variations and endless repetition.

  I wake up when the door makes a sound like a shotgun racking a shell. My stomach thinks of lunch. Then the door swings open and a guard stumbles in, holding his face. Except he has no face, only a blank patch of skin covering his eyes and nose and mouth. He stumbles blindly, then abruptly kneels down.

  I told him I’d open an air hole if he cooperated, Plex says in my ear. Could you knock him out, please?

  I glance up at the lenses in the ceiling. There’s no way to tell if they’ve been blinded, but I have to trust Plex.

  There’s a truncheon strapped to the guard’s belt. They don’t carry guns on the floor, for good reason, but I know from recent personal experience that these guys love to use their truncheons. I pull it free, step behind the man, and take a batter’s stance, aiming carefully at the back of his head.

  I know how it must sound to you, Dear Reader. You’re thinking, a blow like that could kill the man. Paralyze him, perhaps. Would it reassure you to know that I’ve been hit from behind like this more times than I can count? In any reasonable world, my brain should be hamburger by now. I should be dead or gibbering in the corner of a state hospital.

  Yet I live on. I persist. And this man will live on, not because of who he is, but because of what he is. Yes, he is a minion whose real face is as blank as the Plexo-covered one, but he is a minion working for the U.S. of A., a good-hearted lawman trying to do his part in the war on crime. At this moment, in this circumstance, he is as invulnerable to permanent harm as I am. And when he wakes up in the morning, perhaps with a headache and a nasty bruise, he will not even wonder at his good fortune. For men like him, the rules of this world prevent even the self-reflection that would expose its irrationality.

  I swing, and the baton makes a sickening sound against the back of his skull. He pitches forward.

  “Eddie? Hey, Eddie?” I get the impression Plex has been calling my name for a while. He’s slipped free of the man’s face and formed into a thin little figure, a doughboy after a fight with the rolling pin. “You okay?” he asks.

  “I’m fine.” I toss the truncheon onto the bed and start stripping the guard of his clothes. “I take it you found the control room.”

  “I’m in about twenty pieces, crawling through the electrical panels. So far they haven’t figured out why the cameras are out on this cell, but they’re sending a couple guys to investigate. They’ll be here in about two minutes, Naked Man.”

  I toss the jumper across the room.

  “By the way,” he says, “do you know they have Icer in here?” He’s trying to sound casual.

  “We don’t have time for vendettas, Plex.”

  “What? I thought that was the whole point.”

  “Just tell me if you found out where they’re keeping Teresa.”

  “Same floor as this one. They’ve got her knocked out, hooked up to some kinda I.V.”

  Not good news. My main plan, such as it is, depends on her being awake, mobile, and pissed off. “Okay, you go try to wake her up.”

  “Where are you—? Wait, not Ray.”

  “How many floors down is he from here?”

  “You told me Ray was optional.”

  “He’s still our best chance of getting out of here.” I button my new black Ant Hill security shirt. As for the pants, the legs are too short and the waist too wide. At least the shoes fit. “Plus, I owe it to him.”

  “He’s a crybaby! A boy scout crybaby, which is the worse kind.” Several of him sigh. “Okay, fine. Though I have to tell you, he’s halfway to China. Take the elevator down until you smell magma.”

  In the hallway we split up: I go right, and Plex goes left and up the wall to the ceiling. We haven’t really separated, however—Plex is in my ear whispering directions like a GPS. I tuck in the back of my shirt and hustle toward the elevators, head down. Unfortunately, the staff dress code doesn’t include face-covering helmets, so my disguise will be useless if I come face-to-face with anyone; I just hope it fools the people behind the cameras.

  The elevator is waiting for me, the door thoughtfully held open by whatever chip off the ol’ Plexo has gained access to the Hill’s control systems. I step in just as the two guards come around the corner. The door slides shut.

  “Thanks, man,” I say.

  De nada.

  The ride seems to take forever, though mostly that’s nerves. The LED numbers go up as I go down, and at Level 13 Plex directs me down another hallway to a huge freight elevator. That one is supposed to take me the rest of the way down, though the gap between 14 and 15 is half a minute long. Finally the carriage jolts to a stop and the door opens on a cool, dimly lit room. Opposite is a huge door like a submarine hatch. It’s pasted with yellow and black radiation warnings.

  Two Demron radiation suits hang on hooks next to a rack of oxygen bottles. I pull on one of the suits even though I know it’ll be useless at the kind of levels Ray is capable of putting out. I decide to skip the SCBA and just go with the hood. Before I zip up I scoop Plex out of my ear and paste him to the wall. He squeaks in protest.

  “You don’t need to pick up any more REMs,” I say. “Look what happened last time.”

  I walk stiffly up to the door. There’s no doorbell. I knock, and when there’s no answer, I start cranking. I immediately break into a sweat and the mask fogs.

  After two minutes of work the hatch opens and I step into a cavern.

  Sodium vapor lights hang from the high ceiling. The space is huge, but crowded: Yellow and blue barrels stretch
into the dark, around piles of rusted scaffolding, stacks of construction equipment, even vehicles—all the irradiated garbage of Antioch. I may be imagining it, but my fillings seem to tingle.

  There’s a path through the barrels. As I walk I become aware of the thump of music coming from distant speakers. I circle around a yellow backhoe on deflated tires and see an open space decorated like the set for a high school play: A couch, several chairs, a kitchen table, bookshelves. Huge black rectangles are set up along the back of the space on makeshift easels. Ray stands in front of one with a paint brush, layering more black onto black.

  He’s a big man, almost seven feet tall, but he’s hard to see clearly through the yellow haze surrounding him.

  I don’t want to get close when he’s throwing off MeVs like this. I shout, but he doesn’t hear me over the huge stereo. I find a length of rebar, bang it against a steel drum: nothing. Finally I cock my arm and heave the rebar into his living room.

  He turns, looks at the bar on the floor, then looks around until he sees me. He squints. I can almost feel the x-rays through my hood. He says, “Ed?!”

  He starts toward me, arms open, then pauses when I take a step back. “Oh, sorry,” he says. He concentrates, and the light show around his skin fades.

  I take off my hood. “Just keep sucking in those neutrinos, okay?”

  He grabs me in a bear hug. “I can’t believe it! I heard you were in the hospital! What are you doing here?”

  “Breaking you out, of course.” He frowns and releases me. “Unless you don’t want to.”

  He decides I’m joking. “Come on and sit down,” he says, and leads me to the couch. “You want a beer? No, second thought, better not. You should keep the suit on, too.” He walks to a stereo sitting on a bookshelf and silences it.

  “So, Ray. What’s up with the paintings?”

  “I dunno. Just something I’ve always wanted to do.” He nods at the canvas in front of me. “That one’s called Girls at the Circus. ”

  “They’re very, uh…”

  He looks at me expectantly.

  “… dark?”

  He laughs. “To you, maybe.”

  I shake my head. “Listen, I came to ask you something, and I don’t have much time.”