Masked

by Lou Anders

  He sits down on the couch. “You really did break in here. Just to see me.”

  “You, and Teresa.”

  “She’s here ?”

  “Where else would they keep her? They’ve got her drugged up and locked down. I thought I would…” I smile, feeling embarrassed. I’ve only shared the plan with Plexo before now, and he’s not quite a critical audience. “I’m putting the band back together, Ray.”

  He laughs. “I thought you were just the roadie.” I give him my wounded look and he laughs harder. “Besides, Soliton and Gazelle already did that, didn’t they?”

  “Fuck the New Protectors. I’m talking about the real Protectors: You, me, Lady Justice, the Dead Detective, Plexo—”

  “Flexo? He’s alive?”

  “He goes by Plexo now—the Multiplex Man. He’s not just rubber anymore. After Chicago he became sort of… It’s hard to explain.”

  Ray shakes his head. “He was always such a pain in the ass. But I’m glad he’s alive. That makes me…” He purses his lips, controlling some emotion. “I’m glad.”

  “Chicago wasn’t your fault, Ray.”

  He doesn’t bother to answer.

  “Ray, you know whose fault it is.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do, Eddie, but when the Headhunter did that to me, it’s because there was something in me that—”

  “That’s bullshit. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t even the fucking Headhunter! We have to go back to first causes, Ray. Before Soliton, we didn’t have telepathic masterminds trying to turn you into a bomb. Yes, there were problems before Dad landed—wars, disease, regular crime. But we didn’t have supervillains. When somebody got dropped into a vat of chemicals, they died, they didn’t turn into fucking Johann the Lizard Man.”

  “Or me,” Ray says.

  “Or you.” He was just a janitor, a poor schmuck caught in the tunnels when 3,000 degrees of radioactive steam hit him. In any sane universe he would have been instantly transformed into a broiled corpse. “Sometimes one of the good guys gets lucky,” I say. “But the point is, we wouldn’t need heroes like you if our world hadn’t taken a left turn. Chicago was… unspeakable. But it wasn’t the start of it and it sure ain’t the end. How many innocent bystanders are still getting killed each year from all this brawling?”

  “Soliton saves people every day.”

  “Mostly from other superfreaks! Think about all those city blocks destroyed, governments toppled—”

  “Evil governments.”

  “Do you think America is supposed to be occupying all those countries he overthrew? Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Trovenia, Ukraine—what the fuck are we doing there? Our soldiers are getting blown up because he can’t be everywhere at once. Thanks to him, the entire world hates us.”

  “Eddie, is this about Jackie?”

  “What? No. This has nothing to do with her.’”

  “She didn’t just join the team, she married him. That makes her your stepmom, kind of.”

  “You can shut up now.”

  “It’s just, you seem to hate him so much, Eddie, and you two used to be so close. When you talk like this… It’s like that night on the TV. You sound crazy.”

  “Someone had to speak up,” I say. “Teresa didn’t deserve to go to jail, not when it wasn’t her fault.”

  “Eddie, she cut off Hunter’s head.”

  “So, extra points for irony. She only corrected the problem Soliton refused to solve.”

  Ray looks sad. “You can talk that way in front of me, maybe. You can say that to other people in the Protectors. But not in front of the public, Eddie. They look up to us.”

  “They shouldn’t be looking up to superheroes, Ray. They should be looking up to themselves. Okay, that didn’t come out right, but you know what I mean.” I stand up. “I just came to tell you, I’m getting Teresa out of here, and you’re welcome to come with me.”

  Escape Plan A: Ray realizes that yes, Eddie was right all along, and leads us through the very steam tunnels that created him, absorbing deadly residual radiation, until we reach the coolant tower and our magic carriage swoops down to take us away.

  Ray stares at his feet.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Really. But you should know that in the next few months, well, people will probably be saying lots of bad things about us. They’re going to call us criminals. I just wanted you to hear from me first, so you’d know why I was doing it.”

  He looks up. “Doing what? What are you planning?”

  “What we should have been doing all along. Saving the world.”

  After I’ve stripped off the Demron suit and mopped the sweat from my ears, I pop Plexo back in.

  Plan B? he says. I can hear the eagerness in his voice. Plan B is chaos. And I don’t have a Plan C.

  “Call the television stations,” I say. “And release the cyber-yetis.”

  He whoops in joy. Probably several of him do.

  They aren’t real yetis, of course, just genetically engineered gibbon/human/Linux hybrids, but they’re eight feet tall, quick, and bitey. It would take pages to detail their origin and complicated history. Suffice it to say that Dad’s fought them half a dozen times and had a hell of a good time on each occasion, because they kept coming back with upgrades and novel tweaks. Also, he likes monkeys.

  I contracted anonymously with their creator to have a score of the Version 8.0’s released in an abandoned amusement park in Newark, New Jersey, booted up in Rage Mode. All we had to do was make sure that Dad knew they were on the loose—the equivalent of showing a toddler a shiny object. That’s always been his Achilles heel: Super A.D.D. Anything interesting, he has to chase after it, then punch it.

  Dialing now, Plex says. Most of his mass is hovering high above the Dakota plains, surrounded by bizarro-tech equipment. Oh, wait, almost forgot. There’s a problem with Teresa. I’ve unplugged her, but she won’t wake up.

  “Heading your way,” I say.

  I’m out of the elevator and hustling down the hallway when I see guards crowding around my most recent cell; they’ve found the man we knocked out. I turn and start back the way I’d come. “Plex, I need an alternate route, pronto.”

  Go right at the next hallway, then right again. It’s a big square.

  I turn the corner, and nearly slam into the warden himself, leading a trio of guards toting scatter guns. I duck my head and step aside. He glances at me, then shouts, “King!”

  I’ve spent a lot of my career running, and I used to be pretty good at it. I knock aside the nearest guard and sprint for the next corner. I swing around that, into a long straight corridor.

  “You’re supposed to be guiding me!” I yell.

  Don’t get snappy. I’m spread a little thin, you know. WNET has me on hold—plus, Teresa just threw up on me.

  That seems like a good sign. At least she’s awake. “Go to phase four!”

  I love it when you talk all mastermind-y.

  The patch of wall next to my head explodes; shrapnel peppers the side of my face. I slow to a stop and put up my hands. Before I can turn around, a guard crashes into me and pins me to the floor. Two other guards pile on. It’s all very reminiscent of my first hour in the Ant Hill.

  They roll me over. We’re next to a cell door, and a long pale face looks down at me through the door’s thick glass. It’s Frank McCandless, or, as he likes to refer to himself, The Hemo-Goblin. (Not even his friends could talk him out of it.) He smiles, showing his fangs.

  The warden gets my attention with a poke of a gun. The double barrels are aimed at my nostrils. “I have half a mind to test that superpower of yours,” he says.

  He won’t pull the trigger, of course. It would be cold-blooded murder, and he’s not that type. But even if he was Lord Grimm himself, he wouldn’t do it. They never do. They all want to talk first. Then move on to the dangling.

  “Did you enjoy your conversation with Mr. Wisnewski?”

  “I did, actually.”

  “But y
ou didn’t come here just to talk to him, did you? You’re here for her.”

  I smile my aw-shucks smile. “You got me there.”

  He presses the barrels to my forehead. “She’s a convicted murderer, Mr. King. You’re not leaving with her. I’ve already—”

  The lights snap off, throwing us into pitch darkness. “What the hell?” the warden says. A few seconds later the yellow emergency lights come on. Alarms blare.

  I haven’t moved a muscle—not with a gun to my head. While I have complete confidence that the universe is bound by the rules I’ve outlined, I don’t believe in taunting it.

  “What did you do, King?” the warden asks. Plaintively, it seems to me.

  The cell door next to me makes a familiar shotgun-loading noise. The warden frowns. The next door clacks, and the next one. Up and down and across the Ant Hill, three hundred and five cells unlock.

  The phrase “And then all hell broke loose” is probably as overused in your world as in mine. But basically, yes.

  By the time I make it to Teresa Panagakos’s cell, she’s sitting upright on a hospital bed, eyelids at half mast—though with her that could mean anything. Plex stands on the pillow beside her, a hand patting her cheek. He’s stretched himself into a stick figure with a lollipop head. He sees me come in and does a double-take, corkscrewing his neck.

  I guess I look pretty bad. I shut the door on the zot and screech and roar of supercriminals having their way with their oppressors and sit down on a corner of the bed. Plex hands me a corner of the sheet and I wipe the blood out of my eyes. I’m not sure whose blood it is.

  “How’s she doing?” I ask.

  Teresa mumbles something in reply. She doesn’t look much like Lady Justice. Her face has no color, and her gray hair is long and straggly. The arms and legs poking out of the hospital gown are almost as thin as Plexo’s.

  “Teresa, it’s me, Eddie. Eddie King. We’ve come to take you out of here, okay?”

  “Stop,” she says.

  “Stop what, hon?”

  “Talking to me. Like a baby.” Her milk-white eyes fasten on mine. “Blindfold,” she says.

  “Oh please,” Plexo says. “We’re pausing to put on uniforms? ” But he makes a spike of his hand, pokes through the sheet, and tears off a clean strip. Teresa leans into me as I knot it behind her head.

  “I’m going to pick you up now, Teresa. Ready?” I put one of her arms over my shoulders and hold tight to her waist. “Here we go.”

  She’s light as foam, but her legs barely take her weight. It takes us half a minute to cross the room. We’re not going to get anywhere at this rate. Plexo’s at the door, tapping his stick foot.

  “I’m going to have to carry you,” I tell Teresa. She makes a disgusted noise, but she doesn’t fight me when I scoop her up.

  At the cell door we pause for a moment to allow a huge armored form to charge past, then step into the hallway.

  “Which way?” I ask Plex.

  “How should I know? I fried every camera I could get my hands on.”

  “Plex…”

  “Go right—that’ll take us to the central stairwells and the elevators.”

  I shake my head. “That’s where metal guy and everybody else will be going. I think there’s another stairwell to our left.”

  “Why did you even ask me then?”

  The corridor is surprisingly clear; the fighting has already moved past us to the floors above. With Teresa in my arms, I can’t manage more than a trot. Plex scampers ahead, and by the time I reach the end of the hallway he’s holding open the stairwell door.

  We start up. Shouts echo down from the floors above, but the way immediately ahead seems clear. After two flights I’m drenched in sweat and my back is killing me. I lower Teresa to the floor.

  “You run like a chain-smoking baby,” Plex says.

  “Shut,” I say to Plex, and take a breath. “Up.”

  He sighs, a neat trick in a body that seems to have no lungs. “I’m going to go scout ahead,” he says. “You two take your time.”

  Plex bounces up the stairs. I try to get my breath back.

  Teresa looks up at me through the blindfold. “I always knew you’d turn to a life of crime,” she says. I can’t tell if she’s joking. I never could tell with her. We’ve known each other for twenty years, but I was just a kid when I met her, and I’ve never completely shaken off that first dose of hero worship.

  “Do you wear your bow tie anymore?” she says.

  That used to be my signature look: suit jacket, good shoes, and bow tie. “I gave it up,” I say. “Everybody thought I was in the Nation of Islam. You think you can hold onto my back?”

  I hoist her up and she fastens her arms around my neck. I walk bent over, pulling myself up the rails with both hands. “Why are you doing this?” she says into my ear. My non-Plex-filled ear as it turns out.

  “Guilt?” I say. “Sense of duty?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  But that is why I’m rescuing her. At least partly. “It’s complicated,” I say. “I need your help with something.”

  “You want to kill him.”

  I miss a step and grip the rail harder to keep my balance. “It’s not like it sounds,” I say. “Soliton has—”

  “I’m in.”

  I stop. I can’t see her face, but I can hear her breathing. “Really?”

  “Really. Keep moving, please.”

  “I never could hide anything from you,” I say, and then I stop talking because Plexo has just said, Uh oh.

  “What?”

  It’s your super ex-girlfriend.

  “Can’t be. She’s in New Jersey. They’re all supposed to be in New Jersey.”

  “Are you talking to Flexo?” Teresa says.

  I tap my ear and nod.

  Well, there’s a plume of dust coming at the Ant Hill at, like, eight hundred miles per hour.

  “But the alarm just went off!” I say. “Even at her top speed she couldn’t have—”

  Oh. The warden. He must have called them. Maybe even before I went down to see Ray.

  Teresa says, “You have a radio?”

  “Kind of. Any sign of the big guy?”

  Not yet.

  I lock my arms under Teresa’s butt and start double-timing up the stairs. Teresa’s a bag of bones jouncing on my back. “They’re coming for us,” she says.

  “So far just the Gazelle.” But we both know that anywhere the Gazelle goes, hubby and the New Protectors won’t be far behind.

  “I can’t hurt him, you know,” she says. “The sword can’t even touch him.”

  “Yeah,” I say. Meaning, Yeah, I noticed that when you tried to chop him in half—but I don’t have the breath for that. I was with Soliton when he went after Teresa a few weeks after Chicago. I was still on his side, then. Still a believer. We’d just discovered what she’d done to Dr. Hunter, and I went along to try to get her to surrender peacefully.

  Yes, I was an idiot.

  She was waiting for us in the Utah desert, a hundred miles from the nearest town, so that they wouldn’t kill anyone when they went at it. Until that day I’d thought that Lady Justice was Soliton’s match—the check to his nearly unlimited power—but no. That’s not the way this world works. Soliton will have no other heroes before him.

  We reach the landing at Level 1 and Plexo’s yelling in my ear: She just ran past me. And me! Down the central stairs. She’s checking the stairwells, man. Move! Somewhere below, a sound like the roll of thunder: titanium boots hammering concrete, fast as machine-gun fire.

  I yank open the door and stumble through into a long hallway hazed with smoke: the row of intake rooms where they processed me. The old woman on my back feels like a cast-iron stove. I drop to my knees, and Teresa slides off and thumps to the ground. I manage a “Sorry.”

  Dim figures wrestle in the distance. Voices shout. I get to my feet, turn toward the stairs, braced for her.

  I’m wrong again. She comes at me
from behind, through the smoke.

  The Gazelle, fastest animal on any number of feet, skids to a stop with a scrape and shriek. I wheel to face her.

  God, she’s beautiful. The costume looks like it’s been redesigned by Jean-Paul Gaultier, but she’s kept the thigh-high golden boots. They still knock me out.

  “Hey, Jackie.”

  Her voice comes out in a squeal—she does that when she’s revved up—but then she concentrates and brings down the speed. “—combing this place for you, Eddie. No, I’ve been looking for you for months. What the hell are you up to? What are you doing with her ?”

  I think it’s pretty obvious, but I want to be helpful. “I’m kind of…” I take a breath, and then cough in the smoke. “I’m in the middle of a jail break.”

  “Oh, Ed. You were doing so well.” I frown. I don’t think I was doing well at all. She says, “Listen to me. I’m going to round up the escapees, so why don’t you get out of the crossfire, and afterward—”

  “You’re using that mom voice again.”

  “Dammit, I don’t have time to argue you with you. Take Teresa into a cell and wait for me to come back.”

  I glance back. Teresa’s on the ground behind me, propped up on her elbows. I say to Jackie, “If you’re trying to talk me into turning myself in again, that only works once.” I cough again. “I will say this, though, you were right about the quality of that hospital. Great doctors, professional staff, decent food. Except for the forced meds, it was—duck.”

  She becomes a blur, and a big green arm swings down through the space where she’d been standing. Her leg comes up in a roundhouse—two loud thwacks as she spins and connects twice before the man can even recoil—and Johann the Lizard Man hits the floor.

  “You still trust me,” I say.

  “I heard him coming.” But there’s a smile in her voice.

  “You know what diagnosis they gave me?” I say. “Adjustment disorder. I’m not much for psychological mumbo jumbo, but I had to admit that that one was dead on.”

  “Eddie—”

  “You ever read the Gnostic gospels, Jackie?”

  She stares at me.

  “It’s like they’re talking about Dad. An insane, capricious god messing with us for his own amusement. That’s when I realized, if God is insane, how can there possibly be a cure for an adjustment disorder?”