by Greg James
11
The Posse
“I’m home!” Murph called out, still in fine spirits as he let himself into the ugly new house. But even its ugly newness wasn’t getting to him today. He threw his bag down in the hall and wandered around looking for someone to share his mood with. He thought he could hear his mom’s voice coming from the kitchen, and as he got closer he realized she was on the phone.
“I just want some kind of guarantee that you’re going to be able to keep me on after next summer is all . . .” he heard her say.
Murph’s spirit dropped at least five notches on the spirit scale (it’s out of ten by the way and had been nudging a good seven). He hated these conversations and recognized them immediately. It was an “I want to make absolutely sure we’re not going to have to move again” sort of conversation, and he’d become depressingly familiar with them over the past three years. He was also familiar with his mom’s various acting techniques as she tried to disguise what was going on and make everything seem okay. Sadly, in terms of acting ability, she was about as natural as Astroturf.
“But I thought things were going we—” She cut herself off as she noticed Murph hovering in the kitchen doorway like a novice ghost. “Look, we’ll talk more next week, just please do what you can. Okay, thanks, Ben, bye.” She put the phone down and ushered Murph in for a hug.
“That was work, right?” said Murph. “Didn’t sound great.”
“We’ll sort it out,” his mom reassured him.
Murph suddenly remembered what Flora had said to him, and it felt appropriate to repeat it. “These things have a way of coming out in the wash.”
“I suppose they do,” she sighed and hugged him tighter.
Despite these encouraging words, Murph’s spirit scale didn’t get beyond a wobbly five that evening. He decided to cheer himself up with a pre-bedtime treat and some alone time, so he wandered out of the house toward the row of small shops nearby. It was getting late now and they were mostly closed. Murph squinted up into the chilly, sleety drizzle that had begun to fall and stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets. He was just about to make a dash for the warm, inviting windows of the one shop that was open, Mickey’s News, when something caught his eye from the triangular patch of grass across the street.
It was a tiny, winking green light. And he’d seen it before.
As you may have noticed, Murph is an inquisitive kid. Mysterious green lights, unexpected popping sounds, strangely colored liquids, or birds with the power of speech: none of these things will go uninvestigated if Murph’s around. So he casually crossed the road, leaving the circle of streetlight to move cautiously onto the damp grass and pick his way between some pale, unimpressive trees.
The tiny, bright light was beaming from a bench near a bus stop on the main road. There were two people sitting on it, chatting to each other in low voices. Murph watched as a green shaft of light lit up the girl’s pocket. She slapped her hand to it instantly and pulled out a phone.
“Posse receiving,” she said. Murph slowly realized who they were. It was the pair who’d directed him to Mr. Souperman’s office: Deborah, the tall girl with the dark hair, and beside her, Dirk, the cool-looking boy in the blazer.
Posse receiving? thought Murph. It was an odd way to answer your phone. What on earth was wrong with a standard “Hello”?
But the girl had started speaking again.
“Cowgirl active. The Sheriff active. Ready to respond. Over.” Deborah was plugging a wireless earpiece into her ear with her other hand. She listened intently, then nodded: “Accepted. Posse active and responding. Let’s move.”
The last two words were directed at Dirk, and without a second’s hesitation they both got up from the bench and sprinted away, the spray from their shoes making a mist behind them on the wet street.
Without thinking, Murph darted across the road after them. Whatever was going on, he wanted a look at it. Thirty seconds later and he’d have been flattened by a bus, but luckily for him this isn’t that sort of story.
The pair was already well ahead of him, but Murph put on a burst of speed and was just in time to see them take a right into a side road. Murph cranked his pace up as far as it would go. Like a cheetah with its back legs on fire, he pelted toward the corner, and by a nanosecond he was in time to catch a glimpse of their silhouetted figures going right again into an alleyway some distance down the narrow road.
By now Murph’s lungs felt as though they had been pumped full of hot sand. He leaned against a lamppost on the corner of the side street, heart twanging like a demented ukulele, and concentrated on doing some really high-quality panting for twenty full seconds.
When Murph regained the use of his legs, he walked cautiously down the road. There were strange noises coming from the alley. There was a clang as if a garbage can had been knocked over, followed by shouted words he couldn’t quite make out.
Suddenly, someone came dashing out of the alley. It was a man, and he was running as fast as he could.
Murph was too shocked to do anything—he gazed openmouthed as the man bore down on him, legs pumping like pistons. He was carrying an expensive-looking leather handbag in one hand, which, though lovely, didn’t quite blend with the sneakers, jeans, and blue T-shirt he was wearing. If he hadn’t stolen the bag it would have been a crime against fashion. As he had, in fact, stolen the bag, it was just a crime.
Behind the thief, Murph saw the silhouette of Deborah Lamington as she stepped out into the street, holding something large and round.
“Stop him!” she yelled.
Startled, Murph glanced behind him to see who she was talking to. By the time he looked back, the man was upon him. He shoved Murph roughly out of the way, knocking him into the wet road between two parked cars.
Murph heard the man’s running footsteps recede down the street, and then there was another trash can–like clang and everything fell silent.
Exhausted, bruised, and scared, Murph had just made the decision to lie a little longer in the nice, comfortable oily puddle he’d discovered, when someone spoke to him:
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I think so,” said Murph, slightly embarrassed that he’d chickened out, then been knocked over like an ineffectual bowling pin.
Deborah—or Cowgirl as she seemed to call herself in this kind of situation—had appeared in the gap between the cars. She held out her hand to haul him up.
“Who’s this?” said another voice. It was Dirk—he’d arrived seemingly out of nowhere, very quickly, much to Murph’s surprise.
“It’s that kid from school, the one we directed to Souperman,” replied Cowgirl. She turned back to Murph. “You could have at least tried to give me an assist. Or are you one of Mr. Drench’s lot—the hiders?”
“Meeeerm . . . ,” started Murph, brushing the front of his jeans casually, as if that would help remove the gallon of oily water that had soaked into the back of them.
“Hang on, I know who it is,” said the boy suddenly. “It’s that new kid! The one with no Cape . . . Kid—”
“Normal, yeah,” said Murph gloomily.
“I’m Debs,” said Deborah Lamington, “Cowgirl when I’m operational.”
“Right,” hedged Murph, “and . . . the Sheriff, right?”
“How did you know his code name?” asked Deborah. “Did one of the older kids at school tell you? Or did you hear me on the HALO unit?”
“The, uh, HALO unit, yeah. Right.”
“Well, we’d better call this one in,” continued Deborah/Debs/Cowgirl.
She produced the smooth black handset again and spoke into it. “Posse transmitting . . . Suspect neutralized . . . Repeat that? . . . En route now? . . . Understood. We’ll clear.” She turned to Dirk. “We’ve got police on the way. Better secure Mr. Mugger over there.”
With a jerk of her head, she motioned up the road and, jolted, Murph saw the man who’d been running away lying unconscious on the sidewalk. He trailed after the other t
wo as they headed toward the dark shape on the ground.
As he got closer, he spotted an old-fashioned metal trash-can lid on the floor beside the man’s head.
Deborah picked it up, spun on her heel in just about the coolest way you can imagine, and threw it back down the road like a Frisbee. It skimmed above the cars, turned an elegant corner, and disappeared into the alleyway, where there was a loud bedoinggg noise, followed by clattering. It was the exact sound a metal trash-can lid makes when it comes to rest on top of a metal trash can. Pop outside and have a try if you want to know what it sounds like, and you have really retro trash cans.
Deborah then produced a length of rope that had been wound around her waist like a belt and flicked it toward the unconscious man. It seemed to animate itself like a snake, tying his hands and feet securely together.
Murph was beginning to think that Deborah Lamington was kind of awesome. She picked up the handbag and handed it to the Sheriff, raising her eyebrows.
“I’m on it,” he declared, before following this up with dramatic mouth-trumpet fan fare. Deborah rolled her eyes as he started to run down the road, blurred, and vanished.
“Whoa!” marveled Murph. “He’s got the same Cape as Mr. Flash, only faster!”
“Don’t let Flash hear you say that,” warned Deborah. “Now, you get out of here. I’ve got to deal with these people.” Blue lights were reflecting off her face as a police car pulled up. “And listen,” she continued, “don’t follow us again, okay? This isn’t a game, and it certainly isn’t safe for someone like you.”
Murph’s stomach felt like it had hit the floor and rolled around in something stinky. For a minute there he’d almost been able to kid himself that he was on a mission with a pair of real superheroes. But Deborah’s words had made the reality of it clear; he’d creepily followed them, been too cowardly to help when they needed it, and now he was being told to scram.
Without another word Murph turned and wandered away down the street. As he reached the corner he looked back to see Deborah showing some kind of identity card in a leather wallet to two police officers. “Refer it to CAMU,” he overheard her saying. But he was too miserable to wonder what that meant, or to stay and find out.
Murph spent a few days kicking himself for not sticking a foot out and tripping up the mugger. But it’s never a good idea to spend too long kicking yourself—you just get a sore bottom and end up falling over. In the end he decided that even if he had tripped him up, it wouldn’t have done much good. What was he expecting? It wasn’t as if the pair was suddenly going to ask him to join their crime-fighting gang, which seemed to be called the Posse. What was he going to be alongside Cowgirl and the Sheriff? The Amazing Trip Boy? Captain Ankle?
But the sight of two real-life Heroes in action had got him itching to find out more about the Alliance, even if it meant resorting to extreme measures, like speaking to Mr. Flash.
“Sir,” began Murph toward the end of a CT lesson a few days later. A gangly kid from the front row had just been demonstrating his Cape, the ability to communicate with cats. But the cat that the janitor had brought in on a cart hadn’t seemed especially interested. Eventually it had just curled up and gone to sleep.
“Yes, Kid Normal?” replied Mr. Flash, never missing an opportunity to rub Murph’s nose in his own nickname.
“How do you join the Heroes’ Alliance?” he asked boldly.
“Nothing you ever need to worry about, Cooper,” said Mr. Flash dismissively, but the question had got the rest of the class excited.
“Oh, come on, sir, please, yes, tell us about becoming a Hero,” begged Hilda from the other side of the room.
“Nobody calls them Heroes anymore, horsey,” snapped Mr. Flash, but his eyes glinted. Murph realized he’d hit on a subject Mr. Flash loved talking about.
“Well, the Heroes’ Alliance, as I explained to most of you in your first week here, is an organization that ninety-nine percent of you will never be asked to join. It was originally formed over thirty years ago to combat . . .” He stopped himself briefly, then continued, “Well, you don’t need to know exactly why it was formed. But these days it coordinates the activities of a small number of secret operatives who assist our normal law enforcement agencies when needed. Alliance operatives are highly trained, highly skilled—and their activities are kept top secret. So you can forget any silly ideas you might have gotten from comics about flying about town in plain sight or wearing some oddball costume.”
Hilda looked a little crestfallen. “But I thought Heroes used to wear costumes,” she said in a small voice. Mr. Flash flashed over to her desk and loomed above her like a bald cloud.
“They USED to wear costumes? Of course they used to, back in the day. Before any interfering dimwit with a video camera could blow your whole secret identity in seconds! And don’t even get me started on the blasted internet.” He whooshed back to his desk and continued muttering something angry-sounding about “twits and face pages.”
“They must have been great days, I bet, eh, Mr. Flash?” asked Mary, glancing across and smiling at Murph. If they played this right, the rest of the period could easily be taken up with the teacher’s reminiscences.
“Indeed they were, Ms. Perkins,” said Mr. Flash, going a bit dewy-eyed at the thought. “Genuine Heroes, with genuine costumes, sidekicks, you name it. Even you might have stood a chance back in the day, with your little yellow umbrella.” He looked at her almost sentimentally, but Mary bristled.
“What’s wrong with my umbrella?”
“What’s wrong with it? You can’t fly without it, that’s what’s wrong with it! Craziest thing I’ve seen in thirty years teaching here.” Murph looked across at Mary with interest. He’d always assumed her umbrella was just part of her unique fashion sense.
She was blushing. “Well, it’s not my fault I can’t skim without it.”
Mr. Flash made a dismissive snorting noise. “Wouldn’t be much good on a real mission though, would ya?” he taunted. “What happens if you lost your ’brella, eh? You’d be as much use as a solar-powered owl!”
Murph decided to try and get the conversation back to what Mr. Flash had referred to as the “Golden Age” to save Mary any further embarrassment. “Tell us about some of the old Heroes, then, sir,” he prompted him.
“Oooh, yes, please, Mr. Flash,” pleaded Hilda. “Tell us about a Hero from this town.”
“None of the really cool Heroes would have come from this town,” countered Charlie, the eye-heat-beams boy. “They all would have operated out of the big cities.”
“This town? This town? THIS TOWN IS ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS IN THE WHOLE ANNALS OF CAPABILITY!” spluttered Mr. Flash, who seemed as insulted as if Charlie had made an unkind comment about the size of his mother’s bottom. “This town was rumored to be the home base of the most celebrated and mysterious Hero of them all, I’ll have you know!”
The whole class was now desperate to know more: “Who was that, sir? Tell us about him! Tell us, Mr. Flash, pleeeeease!”
“All right, all right,” said Mr. Flash, seating himself in the internationally recognized teacher storytelling pose: standing half upright with his military-fatigued behind braced against his desk.
He proceeded to tell them a story about the most powerful and most mysterious of all the Heroes of the Golden Age, a figure not seen for more than thirty years, who disappeared into the shadows as suddenly as they had once appeared.
12
The Legend of the Blue Phantom
1965
It was the middle of the decade nicknamed the “Swinging Sixties” because of the large number of new playgrounds that were built around that time. As usual, Great Britain’s most suave and famous secret agent, James James, was taking a long lunch.
He sidled up to the bar at his favorite restaurant and beckoned the white-jacketed, brown-mustached bartender over with a casual wave of his left eyebrow.
“Chocolate milkshake, please, Gaston,” he drawled.
“Shaken or stirred, sir?” asked Gaston.
James James was thrown slightly by this, but he didn’t let it show. “Stirred, please,” he demanded confidently.
The bartender turned his back for a moment, then presented to him a glass of milk with all the chocolate syrup sunk to the bottom.
James James thought for a moment. “Now shake it, please, Gaston,” he demanded. “A chocolate milkshake, stirred . . . then shaken.”
Gaston poured the milkshake into a shaker and shook it, which, as the name “milkshake” implies, is what you’re supposed to do.
But the super-spy failed to notice this, as his attention had been diverted by the woman next to him at the bar. She was wearing a long evening dress, even though it was only long lunchtime, and had wavy dark hair that hid half her face in exactly the way secret agents really, really like.
The spy slid down the bar so he was a bit closer to her, stumbling slightly at the halfway point.
“Well, hello there. The name’s James. James James,” he oozed.
The woman turned to face him with a puzzled expression. “James James James?” she queried.
“No, not James James James, just James James. But please”—he raised his more powerful right eyebrow—“don’t let’s be formal. Call me James.”
“I’m Jane. Jane Jane,” said the woman, flicking her hair back over her shoulder like she was in a shampoo commercial.
“Really?” asked James James.
“No, not really. That would be ridiculous,” she replied. “Jane Smith.”
James James had rather hoped her name would be something more like Slinky McSpy; he was a big fan of a novelty name on a lady. But he didn’t let his disappointment show. Instead, he took a long sip on his drink through a stripy straw.
He gagged.
“Aargh! Gaston, this hot chocolate is stone cold!”
“It’s a milkshake, sir,” replied Gaston coolly. “And there’s a telephone call for you.”
He handed James James an old-fashioned black phone on a silver tray, although the phone didn’t look old-fashioned to any of them because it was the 1960s. They thought it looked really quite up-to-date, even though it was plugged into the wall with a wire, which made carting it around on a tray very inconvenient.
