Masked

by Lou Anders

  Dizzy and disoriented, he watched Bryerson step into view and casually empty his clip into his target. Then, he turned and addressed Marshall. But Marshall couldn’t hear him. All was silence as the darkness crept in on him, closing out all but a tunnel to his former reality, growing tighter and dimmer. Bryerson, at the other end of that tunnel, yelling something at him.

  And in a sudden moment of clarity, Marshall marveled at their ingenuity. If only his cluttered mind had caught it earlier: that group shot of The Terror Syndicate, the pixyish Silver Sylph practically leaning up against her teammate Doc Arcanum, Virtue’s endless benevolence. His whole life, the answers had been there all along. He’d simply been asking the wrong questions. And he thought of Allison and how different things could have been and how he would have loved to start over with her one more time, really start over. And then the darkness claimed him.

  Contusions, abrasions, multiple lacerations, concussion, occipital bone fracture, shattered left clavicle, compound wrist fracture, multiple rib fractures, dislocated right shoulder, punctured lung, right elbow fracture, multiple fractures to both hands, fractured jaw, fractured nose, rotator cuff tear, ankle strain, groin pull, and a partial tear of the left ACL. All in all, he got off lucky. By the time they wheeled him into the OR, his bones had already started to reknit, much to the amazement of the medical staff, who were then forced to rebreak and set the radius and ulna of both forearms.

  He was in terrible pain through those initial twenty-four hours as his advanced regenerative abilities kicked in to repair the damaged muscles, patches of scar tissue fibers taking form overnight and guaranteeing a less than restful sleep. By morning, however, his body was breaking down the scar tissue, restoring muscular alignment, and he was feeling well enough to go for a short walk—down the hall to Room 217 to pay McNeil a visit—only to be intercepted by a cantankerous nurse and ushered back to bed. When he tried again later that day, slipping out during what seemed like a quiet enough moment, she was waiting for him. After that, a large intern of Samoan descent stationed outside his room ensured there would be no third attempt.

  The following day, he was discharged. While waiting for Allison to pick him up, he took another stroll down to 217. This time, he encountered no obstacles and managed to complete the journey, finding a recuperating and spirited McNeil in the company of his fiancée, a pretty blonde who had just landed herself a position at a boutique East Coast law firm. According to McNeil, he had already requested a transfer and, once well enough, would be making the move. Marshall sat with them for a while and then, at the appointed time, wished them all the best and excused himself. “See you at the wedding then?” McNeil asked him.

  “Sure,” said Marshall, holding up at the doorway and throwing them a wink. “See you then.”

  By the time he got downstairs, Allison was already there. “Waiting long?” he asked as he made his uncertain approach. Her response was a long, drawn-out sigh of unmistakable relief. She fell into his arms. They held each other wordlessly until they began to draw curious looks from passersby. Then, Allison said, “Let’s go home.”

  Months passed. His mother was given a clean bill of health and moved into a place twelve blocks away. “Close enough,” as Allison was fond of saying. They settled in. She was promoted, joined several weekend charity drives. He landed a job with the local branch of a major pharmaceutical company and finally got that library card he’d been putting off. In early February, Allison announced she was pregnant. Time passed. They were happy.

  Finally, that spring, while in the area on company business, Marshall drove the forty miles out to pay Agent Bryerson a visit.

  “What’s this?” asked the stone-faced bruiser when Marshall presented him with the gift-wrapped bottle.

  “An overdue thank-you present,” said Marshall.

  Bryerson sized up the bottle, gave a satisfied nod, and set it down on his desk. “Yep,” he said. “I save your life, you get me a bottle of wine. Sounds about right.”

  “A great bottle of wine,” Marshall clarified.

  “No doubt,” said Bryerson, throwing him his shark grin. He motioned toward the doorway. “Come on. Let’s go do this and then you can take me to lunch.”

  It was a request Marshall had made months ago and Bryerson was happy to accommodate. No rush. Even though the case was closed, its evidentiary material wasn’t going anywhere. It would be drawing the scrutiny of investigators and eggheads for some time to come.

  Bryerson led him to a room at the end of a long corridor, unlocked the door, and waved him in. The halogen lights flickered to life, casting their ice-blue illumination down on the facts and figures of the investigation. “The Downfall suit isn’t here, of course,” Bryerson informed him.

  “Didn’t think it would be,” Marshall said as he scanned the various photos and documents laid out in front of him.

  “The army hired that little brainiac, QuickThink—you know him—?”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “—to reverse-engineer the suit. He thinks he can have special forces outfitted by middle of next year.”

  But Marshall’s mind was elsewhere. He’d already spotted what he’d come for—confirmation sitting on a table at the back of the room. He approached it, pointed. “This how the ferenium-17 was delivered?”

  “Yeah. They figure it was dusted on a copy of his own book he was asked to sign. The return address was bogus, but he never got around to sending it anyway. I mean, isn’t that a kick in the pants. No special bullet or elaborate trap. It was just sent regular mail.”

  Marshall picked up the box and studied its Chinese motif—a gold dragon embossed on a crimson red backdrop. Incredibly, after so many months, it still held the scent of jasmine and sandalwood.

  A two-time winner of the British Fantasy Award, Mark Chadbourn is the critically acclaimed author of sixteen novels and one nonfiction book, including the Age of Misrule series of World’s End, Darkest Hour, and Always Forever, and the Swords of Albion series that begins with The Silver Skull. A former journalist, he is now a screenwriter for BBC television drama. In the world of comic books, Mark is the author of Hellboy: The Ice Wolves, a novel-length tale of Mike Mignolia’s famous creation. Whether his imagination takes him to the distant past or peels back the curtain on the darkness lurking in our present reality, Mark always presents us with strong, accessible characters dealing with supernatural horrors, the invasion of the numinous on the everyday.

  By My Works You Shall Know Me

  MARK CHADBOURN

  One hour after the body had been buried in an unmarked grave, he set fire to the box of memories on the roof and prepared to greet the dawn with something approaching hope.

  When the embers of his past had cooled, he was ready to take the steps down into the penthouse, where he could finally remove the mask. Every muscle burned, and blood still leaked from the knife wound in his side.

  Only a shadow was reflected in the mirror in the lounge, bisected by the lightning strike that cracked the glass from top to bottom. Black, tight-fitting body armor, nano-engineered to absorb all light so he could ghost across the surface of life, a shimmer of dark against a darker world.

  Nox, the name he had chosen for himself when he had been reborn. In mythology, Nox was a she, but as the personification of the night, it was too fitting to pass up. It was only later he realized Nox gave birth to sleep and death, fate and blame.

  Stripping off his mask, he thought briefly of how haunted his face appeared. But what did he expect from a man who had just killed the person closest to him? As his eyes glistened, his acute vision saw it like a flare at sea; a distress call.

  Locating the medical supplies, he sprawled in a chair while he tended to his wounds, looking out the picture window over San Francisco at its darkest, in that hour before dawn. Soon it would be waking; soon he would be sleeping.

  Once he’d stanched the blood flow, he began the digital recording, his nightly ritual, a confessional and a chance to make
sense of what his life had become. One day he would have to play all the recordings back, review his experiences. But why would he want to do that? Living through them once was enough.

  “October tenth. It was cold out there tonight.” He paused in the flood of devastating images. “Everything’s changed. There’s no longer a need for Nox, for this secret life. For everything I’ve been doing this past year. My enemy is dead. The architect of all my misery, all this city’s suffering. Killed by my hand, buried where he’ll never be discovered. I didn’t plan it that way, of course I didn’t. It was the last ending I wanted. But what happened was inevitable. I know that now. All those seemingly unconnected strands drawing together. If only I’d been able to see it at the start. I remember…”

  Waking.

  “Matt?” Her hand closed on his.

  As he surfaced from the depths of his head, he opened his eyes to painfully bright illumination. “Owww!”

  “Dim the lights!”

  Daniel, his best friend. His savior? Yes, of course—it would have to have been Daniel. And Rose. God, he’d put her through so much.

  “How are you feeling?” The concern in Daniel’s voice had an edge of excitement.

  As his thoughts settled, Matt understood the reason for Daniel’s exuberance. “Finally got an experiment that can talk back?” The words trailed away when he realized he could see so clearly in the hospital room’s gloom, it was as though it were flooded with sunlight. Daniel, with his faintly baffled expression and untamed blond hair sticking out at angles like a clichéd mad scientist. Rose, never a cliché, her hair sapphire blue today, her eyes glistening with tears that flared in his acute vision; a beacon of hope.

  “Hey,” he said gently. She gave a pale smile that did little to hide the pain that lay between them. “I feel… great?”

  The explosion. The shock wave and heat. He looked down at his hands, the skin flawless.

  “Phenomenal healing is just one small part of it,” Daniel said. “I’d never have gotten here if not for Roger Penrose. He was right: brains are hypercomputers. The Quantum Mind gives massive scope for reapplication of function.”

  “How bad was I?”

  “Third-degree burns over eighty percent of your body. And a metal spike rammed through your skull, puncturing both hemispheres of the brain. But mechanics really don’t matter, just like Penrose said. Consciousness is created and maintained on the quantum level.”

  “So, I’m okay now?”

  “Well… there may be some side effects.”

  “Looks like my decision to invest in your research was the right one after all.”

  “And there was me thinking you were just helping out an old friend,” Daniel responded wryly. “It’s self-interest all the way with you, Matthew.”

  Rose leaned in so that he could smell her perfume, so rich and powerful it was intoxicating; all of his senses had been magnified. “I’m glad you’re okay, Matt. We thought we’d lost you that first night.”

  “I’m sorry.” The tremor in his voice gave away the depth of his feelings. “What I put you through—”

  “Later,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”

  They never did.

  “Side effects? Just one or two. Like my mind shutting down completely when the first rays of the sun hit me. In return, I get super night vision and magnified senses, optimum strength when I need it, and a healing capacity a thousand times better than anyone else’s. Superhuman abilities. Anyone would want it. But… would I have lost so much if I’d been a typical guy, just muddling through, trying to survive without thinking of the consequences of my actions? Maybe that’s the way the world works at the quantum level—the more good you do, the more shit rains down on your head. There are patterns all over the place, but most of the time you’re too close up to see them for what they are.

  “Before Daniel’s process, I was never a good guy, not really. I didn’t see that at the time, but everybody thinks they’re the hero of their own particular story. The only superpower I had back then was making money, and I pursued it relentlessly. Nothing, nobody, stood in my way. It was all legal, sure. But moral? Part of my new existence… part of my curse… is that I can now look back at who I was with new eyes. The joke at the time was that nobody gets to be a billionaire by being a saint. Funny. But I had my army of creative accountants and business managers to shield me from the harsh glare of judgment, and I set about buying up, and stripping down, with a relish that increased with every extra dollar. Jobs were discarded. Lives discarded. People. They were assets. Desks and chairs and computer servers.

  “When I was setting out, I bought out the company owned by Rose’s father. It was a way to win her over, some kind of pathetic peacock display. The company was her father’s life’s work, and I gave it a lifeline. Everybody loved me. Then when I was too busy to pay it any attention, some drone in the accounting department shut it down and sold it off. Everybody thought it was my direct order. Rose’s father killed himself. She never forgave me.

  “Then, as the recession bit, I became a hate figure all over, not just in Rose’s house. That’s when I got caught in the bomb blast at the company I was closing down in Modesto. Some guy who’d lost everything wanted to take out the big supervillain. And he never knew how close he came to doing it. Nobody knew.

  “Daniel’s Quantum Mind process gave me a chance to be someone different. I cashed in everything, retreated to this penthouse, cut off ties with everyone who knew me, except Rose and Daniel, and thought about what I wanted to do with my second chance. But maybe I really was cursed, like the Flying Dutchman or something, and all I gained was just a chance to cause misery on a greater scale.

  “Right at the start, there was still a chance of breaking the pattern. I didn’t have to be a hero. I could have made the most of my permanent night shift, while the world went on with its business just around the corner of my life.

  “All I had to do was turn away when I saw the writing on the wall. Ignore the mystery. Cut the threads that held the pattern together. Refuse to keep…”

  Running.

  Choking smoke filled the pitch-black corridors of the medical research facility at UCSF. Rescue workers stumbled blindly around the fringes of the blast, but Matt moved through it with clear purpose. He saw in bright, unwavering detail, felt the shifting air currents, selected and processed distant sounds that others would have lost in the confusion. His brain regulated oxygen, adrenaline, and a host of other processes with an efficiency far beyond that of even the greatest athlete.

  His memory recalled the route to Daniel’s suite of labs with perfect clarity. The center of the blast had been somewhere near there, according to Daniel’s garbled message left on his phone.

  As he reveled in his abilities, he recalled Daniel’s long, dense explanation about quantum coherence in the ion channels of the brain, and Godel’s theorem, and how the brain really wasn’t a computer like the mechanistic biologists said. “It’s not algorithm-based, you see,” Daniel had said, not realizing he’d left Matt behind long ago. “It has abilities far beyond any computer. And now I think I can manipulate it at the quantum level to magnify those abilities. Imagine what we could do.”

  Imagine what we could do.

  Another blast. Chunks of concrete and burning pieces of shrapnel hurtled toward him. Matt avoided them as if they were moving in syrup. He didn’t even feel his heart beating fast. Everything was still. No stress, no confusion; golden, perfect.

  Feeling her way along the wall, a woman staggered from the billowing smoke, crying and coughing at once. Matt paused to guide her down a branching corridor, which he knew was the quickest route away from the disaster zone.

  The area around Daniel’s labs was devastated. Fires raged out of control around a dense pile of fallen masonry. Staggering around in the half-light, Daniel tore at the wreckage.

  “Are you crazy? You need to get out of here. I can show—” Matt began as he tried to lead his friend away.

 
Daniel threw him off. “No! You’ve got to help Rose.”

  “Rose? What’s she doing here?” His incomprehension was washed away by a rising tide of anxiety as he looked around what remained of the research facility.

  Thrusting Daniel to one side, he threw himself into the worst area, letting the clarity fall on him. As irrelevant sounds and sights faded, he quickly processed what remained. A murmur. Fingernails scraping weakly against a door hidden behind the debris. Hints that would have been missed for hours by any other rescuers.

  Futilely, Daniel attempted to lift a steel roof beam barring the door. Calmly, Matt eased him away. When he gripped the beam, his abilities optimized in an instant. On past experience, he wouldn’t be able to maintain it for long, but as he felt the beam shift, he knew it would be enough.

  With an effort that exhausted all his strength, he threw the beam to one side and tore away the remaining chunks of masonry. Wrenching open the door, he found Rose, coughing from the smoke but unharmed. Sweeping her up in his arms, he raced through the corridors, with Daniel unable to keep up in the dark and the confusion. Matt could feel her eyes on him, sense her gratitude and a hint of the emotion that had existed before her father’s death, and a notion began to form deep in the core of his enhanced Quantum Mind.

  Finally he broke out into the night awash with the glare of the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles. He didn’t move from her side until the paramedics told him she would be okay, and then, as Rose hurtled away in the back of the ambulance for observation, he was overcome with exhilaration.

  “You couldn’t have planned a better test of what I can do,” Matt said. “She could have died in there. I saved her.” He turned his attention from the disappearing lights to Daniel’s puzzled expression. “What I did… that meant something. It was important. I can do it again.”

  “Save Rose?”

  “Save people !”

  Understanding, Daniel led him to one side. “You don’t have to make up for your past life.”