Action Figures - Issue Five: Team-Ups

by Michael C Bailey

  The meeting ended with me giving Colonel Coffin my personal number, and the colonel sternly reiterating her instructions to have my phone on and on me at all times until Concorde returns.

  At precisely oh-eight-hundred hours, Tuesday, eleven September, I settle into a state of constant vigilance. I slip on one of my dad’s old work shirts that somehow wound up in my wardrobe, a sun-faded blue oxford shirt, which gives me a front pocket to hide my phone in. School rules forbid students from turning their ringers on during class, so I set the phone to vibrate. I’d keep the ringer on, but teachers are supposed to confiscate phones that go off in their classes, and that I can’t risk.

  “Interesting fashion choice,” Sara remarks over breakfast.

  “Necessary fashion choice,” I say, giving her a peek in my breast pocket.

  “Ah. Does that mean you’re officially on-duty?”

  “Uh-huh, but I’ve been unofficially on-duty all night. I barely slept. I apologize in advance for being useless for homework tonight.”

  “No worries. Oh, that reminds me! Would it be cool if some of the kids from the LGBTQ group come over?”

  “Absolutely. I think Mom’s spending the night at Ben’s, so we’d have the place all to ourselves.”

  “Cool,” Sara says with a grin. I smile back, but there’s nothing behind it. I love that she got involved with the school’s LGBTQ after-school club, I love that she’s making new friends — I do, really, but I wonder if she misses her old friends anymore. Has she resigned herself to never seeing Stuart and Missy again?

  Great. Now I’m exhausted, anxious, and depressed.

  That all adds up to render me little more than a symbolic presence at school. A couple of my teachers ask me if I’m sick or if something’s wrong, but I wave their concerns off with an honest reply of, “I didn’t sleep last night.” I spend more time stealing peeks at my phone than I do on my schoolwork.

  I head right home after school and lie down on the couch, intending to relax a little. Instead, I nod off and sleep through the afternoon. Sara wakes me up when she comes home with two of her new friends in tow.

  “Oh, Carrie, sorry, I didn’t know you were napping,” Sara says.

  “S’okay,” I slur as I fumble for my shirt pocket. My pulse spikes as I unlock my phone, terrified I’ll see a missed call. A rational corner of my brain tells me not to freak out, I didn’t miss anything, nothing happened, everything’s cool. I release a long sigh of relief when that little voice is proven right; I have no missed calls or texts.

  “Everything good?” Sara asks.

  “Yeah. Everything’s good. I’m good. Hi,” I say to my guests. “Ignore me. I’m a basket case today.”

  “Guys, this is my best friend, Carrie,” Sara says, kindly stepping in to make formal introductions since I’ve obviously forgotten how to interact with people. “Carrie, this is Dale and Ashlyn.”

  Dale, a slightly heavy-set Asian boy with spiky hair, waves at me with his fingers.

  “Dale doesn’t talk much. I talk a lot. Hi,” Ashlyn says, practically leaping across the living room to shake my hand. She has eyes that are simultaneously dark and bright, a big smile, and short-cropped black hair offset by hot pink bangs. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Hi. Would anyone like any coffee or tea?”

  “M’good,” Dale mumbles.

  “I’d love some coffee,” Ashlyn says as if I’d offered her a sack full of twenties.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Sara says. She follows me into the kitchen and says in a half-whisper, “I do believe you have an admirer.”

  “I do?”

  “I get the feeling Ashlyn’s smitten with you.” Ah. Well, that explains that. “I told her you didn’t like girls.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Heck, I’ll take the ego boost.”

  Sara frowns. “Are you okay?”

  “Just tired. Tired, stressed out...I have so much going on between school, work, team stuff, working with Dr. Quentin...all work and no play, you know?”

  “I might have a solution to that,” Sara says, but she doesn’t elaborate.

  Sara tells me a couple more kids are coming over but are running late, so the four of us kill time chatting, getting to know each other, and oh yes, Ashlyn is definitely crushing on me. She sits next to me on the couch and all but ignores Dale and Sara, who occasionally slips me an amused smirk.

  Around six Sara’s last two invitees arrive: Bo, a tall, lean boy with tousled bed head hair, and Tylyn, a light-skinned African-American girl. Their first order of business is to apologize for their tardiness.

  “We had to sit in on auditions today,” Bo explains.

  “Auditions?” I say.

  “For the stage band. Half the band graduated last year, so...”

  “A lot of people tried out,” Tylyn adds. “I thought we were going to be there all night.”

  “Hope it was worth it,” Sara says.

  “I think so,” Bo says, looking at Tylyn for confirmation. She nods. “There was that one girl...”

  “She was amazing,” Tylyn says. “Girl walks out, tiny little thing with a Gibson SG as big as she was, introduces herself, then tears into Rope by the Foo Fighters like she had jumper cables hooked to her spine.”

  “She was like an adorable Tasmanian devil with a guitar.”

  Oh ho. “By any chance, was her name Missy?” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s her. You know her?”

  “Yeah, we’re friends.”

  “Your friend is crazy,” Tylyn says. “Which I mean in the best way possible.”

  “Oh, we completely understand,” Sara says.

  With everyone here, we settle in to start our homework, and right away a sense of melancholy settles over me. Maybe it’s the exhaustion talking, but it feels wrong sitting here with a bunch of total strangers instead of my friends. The banter, a mix of small talk and good-natured ribbing, feels uncomfortably familiar. Ashlyn is a chatterbox, Ty is low-key and laid back, Bo makes smart-ass cracks and drops a lot obscure references to musicians I maybe know by name...it’s the right conversation coming out of the wrong mouths.

  “Why so glum, sugar plum?” Ashlyn says, poking me in the ribs with her elbow.

  “What? Oh, sorry. I’m sorry, everyone, I’m not in the best headspace today,” I say. “I have a lot of stuff going on and it’s wearing me down.”

  Ashlyn makes a sympathetic sound and pats my hand.

  “Like you said, all work and no play,” Sara says, “which is why you should come with us to the school dance on Saturday.”

  “Yes! Yes, you should totally come with us!” Ashlyn says, bouncing in her seat.

  “The what now?” I say.

  “The LGBTQ club is sponsoring the fall school dance,” Bo says. “We’re doing something bold and daring for the theme: no theme.”

  “It’ll be very Zen,” Ty says.

  My instinct is to say thanks but no thanks. The last time I was at a school dance, I was on Malcolm’s arm. He never misses a dance, which means he’ll probably be there.

  Maybe with someone else.

  “I don’t have a date,” I say, but Bo’s not accepting my implied refusal gracefully.

  “So? A lot of us are going stag,” he says. “Just because you don’t have an official date doesn’t mean you can’t go and have fun with friends.”

  “I think you’d have fun,” Sara says. “And I think it’d be good for you. You need to blow off some steam, big time.”

  “Mm. Maybe.” She means well. They all do. And Sara’s right, I do need to dump some of this stress...

  “Why don’t you come with me? You can be my fake date,” Ashlyn says with no pretense of subtlety.

  “I will not go to the dance with you as your fake date,” I say. “If you want me to go with you, ask me for real or don’t ask at all.”

  Ashlyn’s eyes light up, and she seizes my hand. “Carrie I don’t know what your middle name is Hauser, will you go to the fall dance with me?”


  “I like to dance a lot,” I warn her.

  “All night, if you want.”

  “I’m holding you to that.”

  Ashlyn squeals and clutches my hand to her chest. “I’m going to the dance with the hottest girl in school!”

  I did say I wanted an ego boost...

  And just as quickly, I’m rudely jerked back to earth by my phone blaring “Danger Zone” — the ringtone I assigned to Colonel Coffin. It somehow isn’t as funny as I thought it’d be.

  I make a small show of glancing at my phone before excusing myself to take an important work call. I run upstairs, shut and lock the door, and put the call on speakerphone so I can talk and suit up at the same time.

  “This is Lightstorm. Go ahead, colonel,” I say.

  “I need you airborne now,” Colonel Coffin says. “We have an unconfirmed incoming hostile.”

  “Unconfirmed?” I say as I wrestle into my uniform. Oh, man, how am I going to slip by everyone? My long raincoat’s downstairs, and I sure can’t run out of the house in my bathrobe. Nuts, I might have to turn invisible and jump out the window and trust Sara to dream up a cover story as to why I vanished all of a sudden. Ha. Invisible, vanished...

  “We have a transponder code that’s on our red-flag list as a suspected dummy signal.” What she says next hits me like a bucket of ice water to the face. “We believe it’s Manticore.”

  Manticore.

  Colonel Coffin tells me Stafford got a hit on the dummy signal earlier this evening, its owner on a northbound course, heading into New Hampshire. It dropped off the radar a several miles over the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border, just as Stafford’s systems raised the red flag. The signal reappeared a minute ago heading south, and it’s projected pass over Springfield in approximately fifteen minutes.

  “Let me make this very clear to you,” Colonel Coffin says as I fire up my headset. “Manticore is wanted by federal authorities on a list of offenses as long as my arm. If it’s him, I want the son of a bitch taken down — alive, preferably, but I won’t shed any tears if you can’t make that happen. You read me?”

  Loud and clear, colonel.

  There’s a knock on my door. “Carrie?” Sara says.

  “Duty calls,” I say. “If I can sneak by your friends, that is.”

  “Got you covered.” I open the door, and Sara thrusts my long raincoat into my hands. “Thought you might need this. I figured it’d be easier to explain away why you’re wearing a raincoat on a nice night than why you left through a window.”

  “You, Miss Danvers, are my hero.”

  “I know. Be careful.”

  I offer Sara’s friends a quickie excuse about a work emergency (technically not a lie) then sprint to my secret launch pad. I slip my headset on as I take to the air; synch it to Stafford’s systems; fire up the comm; and as soon as I hit a safe altitude, I go supersonic.

  “Stafford, this is Lightstorm,” I report. “I am on an intercept course with the bogey, estimate contact twenty miles south of Springfield in ten minutes.”

  “Roger that,” Colonel Coffin replies. “Our jets are also en route.”

  The target signal appears as a red dot on my heads-up display, which tells me the bogey is traveling at a brisk Mach one. I crank my speed up to Mach two, adjust my course, and start psyching myself up for what I pray will be a very short and very one-sided fight. I need to take Manticore out before he can even think about playing his favorite “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Whenever he’s cornered, Manticore’s preferred response is to set one of the nuclear micro-cells that power his suit to overload. Essentially, he turns the micro-cell in his suit’s tail into a low-yield nuclear bomb that he then drops in a population center, forcing me to choose between letting him go and letting the bomb go off. He’s pulled that trick on me twice.

  Let’s see how he likes my new trick. It took some practice, but I can slide into stealth mode on command, turning completely invisible. In theory, he will literally never see me coming to blow him out of the sky.

  I close the distance between us within minutes, and according to my HUD, we’re going to cross paths over Windsor, Connecticut. His course doesn’t change — until it does. I make visual contact with Manticore a quarter mile before our courses intersect, at which point he drops into a power dive.

  My comm system comes to life with a soft crackle of static. “Nice try, kid. You almost got me that time,” Manticore says, his voice humming in my ears, flat and electronically filtered to rob it of any personality.

  What? How? I’m invisible! He can’t see me!

  ...But he can see my radar signature because I haven’t learned how to go full stealth mode yet. And if I can pick up his transponder, it’s a safe bet he can pick up mine. Dammit! Dammit dammit!

  “You know the drill by now,” Manticore says. “You try anything I don’t like and Connecticut gets itself a nice, new nuclear hot zone.”

  “All right. You got me,” I growl, biting back a stream of profanity. “I’ll back off.”

  “I didn’t tell you to back off. You’re going to keep your distance and follow me down.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “And why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re curious. And because I have no interest in tangling with your buddies in the two fighter jets coming in hot on our three o’clock.”

  Again, dammit.

  I do as instructed and follow him to the ground — specifically, to a parking lot of a second-rate donut shop called Buck’s Star Coffee. The sign by the side of the road, rendered in weather-faded green and white, bears the image of a crudely drawn mermaid. Why this place hasn’t been sued for copyright infringement...

  Manticore touches down at the edge of the parking lot, which is empty except for a single beaten, road-weary car with a garbage bag for a rear passenger’s side window. The overhead lights flutter and flash, struggling to stay alive. It’s oddly isolated. Manticore usually prefers locations with a high potential body count. I land at a respectable distance and drop the invisibility field.

  “That’s new,” Manticore says.

  “What do you want?”

  “We’re going to go inside,” he says, jerking a thumb toward the front door, “and we’re going to have a civilized chat, you and I.”

  I don’t bother masking my skepticism. “Uh-huh. Care to give me a reason why I should trust you?”

  “There’s no money in killing you, revenge is unprofessional, and the last thing I need is your buddies in the Protectorate making it their life’s mission to hunt me down for murdering you in the parking lot of a second-rate coffee shop.”

  Valid reasons all, and yet...

  Manticore turns his back on me. He’s giving me a clear shot. He knows I won’t take it, but this is as close to a display of good faith I’m going to get.

  I follow him inside.

  The clerk on duty, a middle-aged woman in a stained green apron, stands behind the register, frozen with terror as Manticore looks over the menu board mounted on the wall behind her.

  “Stay calm, ma’am,” I say in my best reassuring voice. “I promise you, everything will be okay, but I need you to cooperate and do exactly what this...um...gentleman says.”

  “You heard the girl...” Manticore leans in to read the woman’s nametag. “Clarice. Play nice and you get to go home. Try to call the police or run away and...well, let’s just say it won’t end well for you.” Manticore glances my way. “What are you having?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m getting a snack. You want anything?”

  Okay, this is taking a surreal turn.

  “Large coffee, black, light sugar — light sugar — and two of those Cronut knock-offs you’re selling,” Manticore says, haphazardly tossing a twenty on the counter. “Last chance, kid. I’d go for the fake Cronuts. You’ll love ‘em. Not as good as the real deal, but when you’re on the road as much as I am, you learn to take what you can get.”

  “One, please,” I say
to Clarice. “And a small coffee, regular cream and sugar.”

  With trembling hands, Clarice pours our drinks, slopping half the pot all over the counter in the process, and drops our treats into a paper bag. Manticore slides the twenty across the counter and tells her to keep the change. Snack in hand, he grabs a straw and takes a seat at a table near the counter, where he can keep a close eye on Clarice in case she has an attack of courage (or poor judgment). I sit across from him, my entire body tense, ready for a sneak attack. I repress a flinch when his suit makes a whispery hissing noise — the seal on his mask releasing. The silvery faceplate, fashioned to resemble a skull, lifts away from his face with an almost imperceptible whirring of servos. Manticore pops a chunk of faux-Cronut into his mouth. At this angle, I can’t catch a glimpse of the man underneath.

  “So. Here we are,” I say. “You said you wanted to chat...”

  Manticore slides the straw into his Styrofoam cup and takes a sip before sealing up his mask again. He’s being extremely careful to hide any clue as to his true identity, which I actually find comforting. If he planned to kill me, he wouldn’t take such pains to keep me from learning anything about him.

  Unless he wants me to think that so I’ll drop my guard.

  Worst. Coffee date. Ever.

  “I like you, kid,” Manticore says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seriously. You’re a brave girl. I respect that.”

  “Brave? Don’t you mean naïve? Clueless? Stupid? In way over my head?”

  “I’ve seen naïve. I’ve seen clueless. I’ve seen stupid aplenty. You’re none of those,” Manticore says, pointing at me for emphasis. “But you’re right about being in over your head. You’re playing a dangerous game on a big board, and you’ve only met a handful of the players.”

  “This conversation is, what, then? A friendly warning to watch my step?”

  “Stating a fact is all. You have a target on your back and you don’t even know it. Use those brains and step away before I have to take you out of the equation. Me, or someone worse.”

  “Considering your track record, I’m hard pressed to think of anyone worse. Maybe Dr. Skyfall, but I guess he’s not a problem anymore, thanks to you.”