“True, but I’m signing up for it anyway,” he said firmly. “As much as it would pain my accountant to hear me say it, I’m a Hero first and a businessman second. If a villain needs to be thrashed, I’ve got an obligation to try to thrash him. As Heroes sworn to protect people and yet who are guilty of multiple counts of murder, felony murder, and attempted murder, the Sentinels certainly qualify as villains.” He shook his head in disgust. Then he sighed. “But at the risk of jeopardizing my daredevil reputation, I must admit that if the three of us go up against these three Sentinels, we’re more likely to be the thrashees than the thrashers.”
“Well that’s awfully pessimistic,” Isaac said.
“Nope. It’s realistic. Lying to yourself about what you’re up against doesn’t help you figure out what to do about it. We’re talking about three of the world’s most powerful and experienced Heroes with nearly unlimited resources. No offense, but you two are freshly minted Heroes, even if Theo has the Omega spirit. If I checked behind your ears, you’re likely still wet back there. I’m a lot more experienced than you, but I usually deal with street crime. I’m not going to kid myself by pretending that the Sentinels and I are in the same league.”
I sank lower into the couch. My headache seemed to be getting worse. “That’s quite a pep talk. You really should become a motivational speaker,” I said.
“Just calling a spade a spade.”
The office fell quiet for a bit as the enormity of the odds against us sank in.
“Truman’s right,” Isaac said. “If I had to bet on who would win a fight between the Sentinels and us, I wouldn’t flush my money down the toilet by betting on us. At the risk of you calling me a tattletale again Theo, maybe the right play here is to turn this whole thing over to the Guild and let it sort it out.”
I shook my head. “I hate to agree with Mechano on anything, but he was right about what he said in the Situation Room: I have absolutely no proof the Sentinels did anything wrong other than what they told me. I’m willing to bet Mechano has by now scrubbed from Overlord any trace of him tampering with it. Without that, it’s my word against the Sentinels. I know who I’d believe if I were the Guild. Here’s a hint: Not me. I know I’m telling the truth about all this, yet I can barely believe it myself. How can I expect the Guild to? If I go to the Guild, the only thing I’ll accomplish will be to tell the Sentinels where I am so they can try to kill me again.”
Isaac said, “We could go to the Old Man. He’d believe us. What he says carries a lot a weight in the Guild. He’s on the Guild’s Executive Committee after all.”
“Who’s the Old Man?” Truman interjected. “If you say me, I’ll pull my gun out and shoot you.”
“The Old Man is Amazing Man,” Isaac said. “He was our Hero sponsor. He’s the guy who taught us Laurel and Hardy weren’t Ed Hardy’s less fashionable brothers.”
I shook my head. “The Old Man is just one voice among many on the Executive Committee. Even with him in our corner, the Guild isn’t going to believe our accusations about the Sentinels without proof.” I left out the other reason why I didn’t want to go to the Guild: I had no doubt Mechano would carry out his threat to expose me cheating during the Trials. Though I had no interest in being defrocked and losing my Hero’s license—I had worked too hard and been through too much to get it—if my license was the only one on the line I would give it up with a whistle on my lips and a song in my heart to bring Dad’s killers to justice. My license was not the only one on the line, though. Hacker’s and Isaac’s were too. I would not snatch from them something they had worked so hard to get. I would not risk them going to prison, either.
“Going to the Guild is out,” I said firmly. “We have to figure out a way to deal with this ourselves. I think the key to this whole thing is me being the Omega. The Sentinels said there is an Omega weapon out there that will help me fulfill my power’s potential. If we can find it, maybe it will give us a fighting chance against them.”
Isaac said, “This Omega thing is the most incredible part of all this. Theo, do you really buy the whole savior of the world stuff the Sentinels are peddling? No offense, but the idea of you carrying around some ancient, world-protecting spirit like Dr. McCoy lugging around Spock’s katra in The Search For Spock sounds like woo-woo, crystal healing nonsense. Maybe the Sentinels are lying about that, manipulating you for reasons we don’t understand.”
“I wouldn’t believe the Sentinels if they told me water was wet. But Cassandra also told me that I’m the Omega. What do you think, Truman?”
He said, “While I agree the whole Omega thing sounds incredible, the fact that people like us with superpowers exist is pretty incredible all by itself. I’ve seen too much to think that anything is impossible. Besides, I’ve known Cassandra a long time. I’ve never known her to be wrong.”
“Okay, let’s assume for the sake of discussion that Theo is this world-protecting Omega,” Isaac said. “Let’s further assume that the Omega weapon is not a made-up red herring. How are we three not-on-the-level-of-the-Sentinels knuckleheads supposed to find something that they have already looked for? Especially when their teammate Avatar was the last one to have it? As you said Truman, they have nearly limitless resources. What can we do that they can’t? Rub a lamp and ask a genie where it is?”
“Maybe you don’t need a lamp,” Truman said. He tapped the corner of his book on his desk thoughtfully. “Maybe you just need me. And if one of you gets up and tries to rub my belly, I swear to God I really will shoot you this time. I know where Avatar may have hidden the Omega weapon. Years ago, back when the Sentinels hired me to find Avatar’s killer, I started by trying to figure out his secret identity. The fact he hadn’t told the rest of the Sentinels his real name says something right there about how he didn’t fully trust them. For good reason, as we now know. Anyway, while figuring out his secret identity, I stumbled on a hidey-hole he maintained. He called it ‘The Mountain.’ If there is an Omega weapon, it’s liable to be there. I didn’t see anything that fit the bill the times I was there, but I wasn’t looking for it, either.”
“Surely that would’ve been the first place the Sentinels would look for it,” I objected.
“They don’t know about it,” Truman said. “Avatar didn’t tell them about The Mountain, so I sure as hell didn’t either. I figured if not telling them about The Mountain was good enough for a paragon like Avatar, it was good enough for me. Besides, I didn’t trust them any further than I could throw them considering how shabbily they had treated me during my investigation of Avatar’s death.”
A spark of hope ignited within me. Maybe things weren’t as hopeless as they had first seemed. “The first thing we’ll do is go to this Mountain place and look for the Omega weapon.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Isaac said. He sounded incredulous. “We need to go to Avatar’s secret hideout, find the Omega weapon which may or may not exist and may or may not be hidden at The Mountain, figure out how to utilize it, use it to defeat three of the most powerful Heroes in the world, bring them to justice, and clear Theo’s name. And, after that, there remains the little matter of Theo saving the world.” He scratched his bald head with a look of bemusement on his face. “Oh, is that all?” he said sarcastically. “I’m surprised we haven’t done it already since it’ll surely be a cakewalk. Did I miss something? Anything else we need to do?”
“No,” Truman said. “Once we’re finished, on the seventh day, we’ll rest.”
21
Isaac and I rode the escalator to the top of the exit of the Bladenburg Avenue subway stop in southwest Astor City. We both wore civilian clothes. Since the public had been alerted to be on the lookout for Kinetic, flying in costume to where we needed to go was out of the question. Also, we had paid cash to ride the subway instead of utilizing the monthly passes both Isaac and I normally used on the subway. The passes were registered in our real names, and we had figured that it would be easy for Mechano to hack into the Mar
yland Transit Administration’s computers to see if we had taken public transportation somewhere. For the same reason, we were afraid to use our ATM cards to get cash. Truman had spotted us our subway fare. Being on the run from a group of murderous Metahumans was putting a real damper on my ability to get around.
After leaving the subway station, we walked on Bladenburg Avenue toward the EZ Keep self-storage facility Truman had told us about. We were in a commercial area full of strip malls and fast food restaurants. Truman wasn’t with us. He was off chasing down a fresh lead he had gotten about Antonio’s location. “A Hero has to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” he had said when I questioned him pursuing Antonio at a time like this. While I appreciated his dedication to my case, it had seemed like the Sentinels should take priority. “A hot lead tends to cool off pretty quickly. You have to pursue it while it’s fresh. Besides,” Truman had added, his eyes twinkling, “surely the Omega isn’t afraid to go to a scary old storage facility without a chaperone.”
“Bite me,” I had said.
It felt like everyone we passed stared at me as Isaac and I walked down the street. Since I was not in costume, the stares were likely because I was only a couple of shades away from being beet red thanks to Mechano’s energy blast rather than because people thought I was Kinetic, terrorist and iconic building ruiner. If being a Hero continued to go this disastrously, maybe I could switch gigs and hire myself out as a one-man mansion demolisher.
A young boy walked by, hand in hand with his mother. His mouth fell open as he stared at me. His tongue was purple from sucking on candy. He pointed at me, his eyes big and round as his embarrassed mother pulled him past me.
I pulled my baseball cap down lower on my head, uncomfortable with all the attention. Walking was a chore. The pain I was still in helped keep my mind off all the looks I got. What a crappy silver lining. Thank goodness Isaac had thought to pack me some long-sleeved shirts. I was glad my burned arms were covered despite the warm weather.
“I feel like a circus freak,” I said to Isaac.
“You look like one too.”
“Talking to you never fails to boost my self-esteem.”
Isaac shrugged modestly. “It’s a God-given gift.”
EZ Keep was a fenced-in, three-story building next to a gas station. Though I had never been here, I had walked or driven past self-storage places like this one hundreds of times. Real estate prices in Astor City were sky-high and, unless you were wealthy or had roommates like I did, you could not afford very much living space. A lot of people who moved here from less expensive areas stored their extra stuff in places like EZ Keep. Self-storage businesses were as much a part of big city life as panhandlers and muggings were.
During non-business hours, we would have needed to use the access code Truman had given us to get inside. Since it was business hours, we simply walked through the door of EZ Keep’s front office. A young, pretty brunette behind the counter looked up. She smiled brightly at Isaac. Her smile faltered when her eyes fell on me. Pity mixed with disgust on her face. Now I knew how Frankenstein’s monster felt.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” she said, though she only looked at Isaac when she said it. Look away, I’m hideous.
“We’re just going to our unit,” Isaac said. We breezed past the counter toward a glass door secured with a numeric code access panel on the far side of the office. I punched Truman’s access code into the panel. The door buzzed unlocked. Isaac said to the employee, “When we come back, let’s talk about what you can do to help me. I can think of a few things.” Isaac winked at her. She blushed and giggled.
We passed through the door into a large loading area with two closed commercial bay doors. I hit the button for the elevator. The girl behind the counter looked at Isaac with obvious interest through the glass door we had just passed through.
“I like you better as a wingman when you look like this,” Isaac said. “You make me look even more handsome than usual by comparison.”
“As a matter of fact, when Mechano tried to cook me alive, all I could think was, ‘Gosh, I hope this helps Isaac with the ladies.’”
“I’ve always said selflessness is your greatest virtue. You’re a prince among men.”
I changed the subject. “I’m starting to get worried you haven’t heard back from Neha.” It was the understatement of the century. I had a sickening feeling in my stomach that seemed to get worse with each passing moment. “You’ve left her several messages and we haven’t heard a peep from her.”
“I’m sure she’s fine. Besides, she’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.” Despite his words, Isaac looked as worried as I felt.
We rode the elevator to the third floor. We walked through the wide corridors of the storage space, passing dozens of spaces of various sizes secured behind corrugated metal doors painted blue. Our footsteps on the bare cement floor echoed off the closed doors. The lights, controlled by motion detectors, clicked on and off as we made our way deeper into the facility. We saw only one other person, a middle-aged lady. The door to her storage unit was open. Her unit, the size of a medium-sized walk-in closet, was filled from floor to ceiling with furniture and bric-a-brac. She struggled to squeeze a wooden chair inside. I feared the unit’s contents, already packed tight, would explode under the pressure of the addition, like one of those toy snakes in a can that shoots out when its lid is opened. I happily would have traded my problems for hers.
Each unit was numbered. We found the one we were looking for, Unit 357. Leave it to Truman to store the portal to The Mountain in a storage unit with the same number as a bullet round. I glanced around. A circle of light shone down on us from the overhead automatic lights. Beyond that was darkness. No one was around. I faintly heard the middle-aged woman grunt with exertion as she continued to try to shove her chair into her overstuffed unit. Hope sprang eternal. I admired her optimism, if not her sense of spatial relationships.
I unlocked the padlock securing Unit 357 using the key Truman had given us. I unlatched the door, leaving the open padlock hanging from it. I swung the unit’s door open. Inside the large unit was a single item in the center of the space. It was a brushed metal cylinder, dull silver in color, much wider and taller than I. The top of it almost touched the ceiling of the unit. A man-sized, rounded rectangular opening on the object faced us, letting us see the object was hollow. More brushed metal was inside of it.
This was the portal to The Mountain, just as Truman had described it to us. He had told us he had his super strong Metahuman friend Shadow break into the apartment Avatar leased under the name of his civilian secret identity once Truman grew to distrust the Sentinels. Since Truman did not want them to access The Mountain using the portal, he had Shadow carry it out of Avatar’s apartment and hide it here. When I asked how Shadow had gotten the big portal out of Avatar’s apartment and into this unit without being observed, Truman had said he didn’t know the precise details, but that he did know it could not have been too hard because, as he put it, “Shadow could steal the pulp out of an orange without breaking the skin.” Apparently, Shadow was a professional thief. Between Cassandra and Shadow, clearly Truman kept interesting company.
We stepped inside the storage unit. Despite the portal’s size, there was so much room left inside the storage unit that several more people could have joined us without us jostling each other. I closed the door behind us. We were swallowing by darkness. Isaac flicked on the small penlight he’d brought. Between the dim light and moving shadows, I felt like we’d stepped into a haunted house. After first using my telekinetic touch to ensure no one was around, I used my powers to lift the padlock on the other side of the door, snapping it shut. The point was not to lock us in, but to keep a passerby out. I could unlock the padlock readily enough again with my powers.
Isaac shined the light directly on the portal. We stared up at it in silence.
“What if something goes wrong and one of us gets stuck in that thing and suffocates? The
longer I look at it, the more it looks like an oversized coffin,” Isaac finally whispered.
“It does at that,” I whispered back. “Don’t let that stop you from hopping right on in.”
“Me? You’re the Omega. If you really are the latest in a long line of dashing heroes, leaping before you look and derring-do should be right up your alley. You should go first. I’m just along for the ride to keep you from doing something more stupid than usual, provide comic relief, and hit on the pretty girls. There aren’t any girls, pretty or otherwise, in that thing.”
“Coward.”
“I’d rather be a live jackal than a dead lion.”
“Truman says it’s perfectly safe.”
“If it’s so safe, why isn’t he here with us letting his actions speak louder than his words by being the first to climb in?”
“You make a solid point.” I sighed, and then stepped forward into the portal. The moment I was inside, a panel slid down from the top of the portal. I turned in time to see the portal snick closed. Isaac and his light were gone from view.
I felt a surge of claustrophobia in the enclosed, totally dark space. Before my eyes could adjust to the darkness, the curved walls of the portal glowed slightly. I could see again. Not that there was much to see; the portal’s interior walls were perfectly smooth and featureless, as if the metal structure had been carved rather than constructed.
The glow from the walls dimmed for a moment. My hair stood on end, as if static electricity had built up in my body after walking on thick carpet. The portal was scanning me. The sensation would have freaked me out more than it did had Truman not told me to expect it.
“Unidentified entity,” a computerized voice said, making me jump even though I had been expecting it too, “please state the Hero’s password to gain admittance.” As there was no visible speaker, I had no idea where the voice came from. It seemed to come from all around me. Due to both nerves and my lingering injuries, my mind went completely blank. It was like that time a couple of months ago when a woman on the subway asked me where I worked. Made witless by the fact a cute girl was talking to me, for the life of me I couldn’t remember the name of the newspaper. The girl had looked at me like I was soft in the head, and slowly backed away when I eventually stammered that I couldn’t remember. I knew thanks to Truman that the portal would do more than give me a weird look and treat me like I had cooties if I didn’t enter the password in time. It would hit me with knockout gas.
Omega Superhero Box Set Page 71
