Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (31 page)

“Stuart,” Missy says, laying a hand on his forearm, and her touch snaps Stuart out of his daze. Ronny does not move a muscle, does not so much as blink, as Stuart circles around and, with Missy as his guide, clomps up the stairs like a man in a trance. We reach the top of the stairs. Ronny hasn’t budged.

I’m not so much proud of Stuart as I am relieved. The hardest part’s over. Stuart came face-to-face with his boogeyman and they both walked away from the encounter.

Matt starts to say something but Stuart doesn’t stick around to hear it; he storms off, and it’s the last we see of him all day.

We learn later that Stuart left school—as in, he walked straight out the front entrance without telling anyone and kept on going. This we learned when Mr. Dent stopped me in the hall between classes and asked me where he might have gone.

He doesn’t answer his phone when Matt and Missy try it, but Stuart is not a hard person to track down. After school we head to Carnivore’s Cave and, lo and behold, there he is in our corner booth, picking at a plate of chili cheese fries that grew cold and rubbery a long time ago.

“Stuart. The hell, man?” Matt says, tactful as ev
er.

“I had to get out of there,” Stuart says. “I thought I was ready to see him again. I thought I could handle it.” He picks up a French fry, raises it to his mouth, then puts it back on the plate. “I can’t go back to school. Not as long as he’s there.”

“Stuart,” I say, but he doesn’t give me a chance to talk sense into him.

“I wanted to kill him. At first I was...I don’t know. I saw him and my brain went blank, you know? Everything I ever wanted to say or do to the guy, I couldn’t remember any of it, and then it hit me all at once and...” He mimes grabbing Ronny Vick by the throat, his hands trembling as though even now he was fighting the impulse to crush the life from his brother’s killer.

“You have to go back to school some time.”

“Screw that noise. My parents can get me a tutor and home-school me. They can afford it.” He fixes me with a gaze full of desperation, of utter defeat. “If I go back there, I’m going to kill him.”

It’s not that I don’t believe Stuart when he says that. I don’t think he would sink that low, but I don’t truly know what’s in his heart. Maybe he would and he knows it, and maybe that’s why he’s talking about leaving school. He’s sure not looking out for Ronny’s wellbeing, and he’s not scared of the guy; he’s scared of what he might do in a moment of weakness. He’s scared of becoming the thing—the
person
in the world—he hates the most.

“At least the rest of this week is taken care of,” Matt says. “I think you’re getting suspended for leaving school.”

Stuart shrugs it off. “Whatever.”

Matt called it. Sara and I arrive at his house for the nightly homework jam, and he informs us it’ll be a not-so-happy foursome; Stuart got suspended for two days, to which his parents added a total grounding, absolutely no contact with the outside world until Thursday.

During his absence, a funny thing happens: Ronny loses his anonymity. On Tuesday we pass Ronny at the cafeteria entrance after lunch, and Gerry Yannick shouts out (and I do mean
shouts out
) “Hey, killer! How’s it going?” This isn’t a friendly nickname either but a verbal kidney punch, full of venom. The next day, on the two occasions I see Ronny in the halls, I notice other kids staring at him, giving him a wide berth as they pass, occasionally greeting him as
killer
.

I ask Matt if he outed Ronny. He denies it and I have no reason to doubt him. For good or ill, Matt is the type of guy who will tell you to your face if he hates your guts and give you an itemized list of reasons why. That said, he’s none too broken up over the attention Ronny’s getting. Heck, he’s positively reveling in the kid’s newfound infamy.

My late great-grandmother (and namesake) Carolin (without the ‘e’), a woman of stout German stock, called this feeling
schadenfreude
: a sense of happiness derived from someone else’s misery. She told me it was a natural reaction, but certainly nothing to be proud of. She’d probably be a bit disappointed in me because, honestly, I’m not feeling a lick of sympathy for Ronny.

To my surprise, when Stuart is released from
home confinement and returns to school on Thursday, very begrudgingly, he’s not the least bit pleased to hear of Ronny’s torment. He’s not sorry for the guy, not at all, but it’s not cheering him up at all.

“I know what you need,” Matt says at lunch. “Penguins.”

“Penguins!” Missy echoes gleefully.

“Penguins?” I say.

“There’s a penguin tank at the aquarium in the city,” Sara says. “We go there whenever we’re in need of a super-strength pick-me-up. You’ll love it.”

“I’m sure I will, but it’s not about me, right, big guy?” I say. Stuart’s mouth gets halfway to a smile before giving up.

His uncharacteristic melancholy is concerning enough, but what really worries me is his reaction, or lack of one, to what we witness as we’re leaving the cafeteria. At the bottom of the stairs Gerry and Angus, deliberately and with malice aforethought, plow into Ronny. Ronny falls hard and whacks his head on the railing. The jocks, they put on blatantly false expressions of surprise and offer lavish but utterly insincere apologies. Ronny says nothing. He touches a hand to his scalp and his fingers come away pink with blood.

“Oh, did you crack your skull on the stairs?” Gerry says, bending over Ronny. “Gee, killer, that must suck. At least you’re getting back up.”

Gerry flashes Stuart a smile and slaps him on the shoulder, a gesture of camaraderie, and Angus gives him that upward-chin-tilt-reverse-nod guys give each other, as if to say,
Got your back, buddy
. Angus freakin’ Parr! The same meathead Stuart almost flattened last week!

To a casual observer, Stuart might seem indifferent to the whole episode, but I’m close enough to see the faintest of smirks playing on his lips.

This isn’t the Stuart Lumley I know.

THIRTY-ONE

Matt checks his copy of the train schedule and then his cell phone, comparing the times. “Seven minutes late,” he says as the commuter train rolls to a lazy stop. “All right, gamblers, check your slips.”

Sara unfolds a piece of paper the size of a playing card. “Nuts. I had one to five minutes late.”

“I had sixteen to twenty,” I say.

“I got eleven to fifteen,” Stuart says.

“Six to ten!” says Missy, winner of today’s round of Late-Running Train Lottery. “Free lunch for me!”

“Better than free lunch for Stuart,” Matt says. “I only have a couple hundred in my bank account.”

“A couple hundred? Woo-hoo, look out Harvard, here comes Matt Steiger,” Stuart says, and we smile at the first joke we’ve heard from him in days.

We climb aboard the nearest car and take the center seats, which face each other across a table riddled with graffiti. “That one’s imaginative,” Matt says, pointing to a particularly vulgar phrase written in magic marker.

“I don’t know what that means and I don’t want to because it might be icky,” Missy says. “Is it icky?”

“Oh yeah,” Stuart says.

“Ew.”

“You just said you don’t know what it means,” I say.

“Ew on principle.”

“Here we go,” Matt says as the train jerks beneath us. “Boston ahoy!”

“Boston ahoy?” I say.

“It’s a seaside city.
Ahoy
is appropriate.”

“I’d’ve gone with ‘Boston ho!’ ” Stuart says.

“Are we going to make it to the aquarium in time to see the morning feeding? ‘cause the only thing better than penguins is watching penguins eat,” Missy says. “And swim. And slide on their bellies. And waddle around. Okay, penguins are always awesome but I want to see them eat.”

“If the transit system doesn’t screw us,” Matt says.

“Big if, dude,” Stuart says.

“
Shyeah
. Anyway, if there’re no more delays we’ll get there in time for the nine o’clock feeding. If we miss that, I say we putter around for a while, grab lunch, then head over for the two-thirty feeding.”

“I like this plan and am proud to be a part of it.” Stuart says. “Seriously, guys, I appreciate this.”

“It’s what we’re here for, brother. Today’s a day off from downer life crap,” Matt declares. “No Ronny Vick, no Angus Parr, no Concorde, no super-villains. Any further mention of these forbidden topics will be met with swift and brutal punishment.”

“Such as?” I say.

“Depends on the person. Like, if Missy breaks protocol, I’ll tell her dad she’s planning to major in
philosophy at a community college.”

“Harsh!” Missy says.

“Mwa ha ha.”

The evil laugh goes to waste; none of us tempts fate, nor wants to. Stuart’s not bearing this burden alone. It stretches across the shoulders of his friends who knew Jeffrey and feel his loss—not as keenly as Stuart, certainly, but Ronny’s return opened more than one old wound. This day is a day of recovery, of reinvigoration, for everyone.

Nothing bad will happen. I declare it so.

News. News. Cartoon so simplistic it insults the intelligence of the children for whom it was meant. News. News. Infomercial. News. Insulting cartoon imported from Japan. News.

No wonder shut-ins tend toward the eccentric, Archimedes thinks; modern television programming is enough to rot the strongest of minds. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.

Nevertheless, Archimedes has been unable to go for more than a half-hour without the drone of the TV, his only company aside from the two guards stationed outside his room to prevent him from straying off his level.
You haven’t earned wandering privileges yet
, the Foreman had told him. Or unsupervised Internet access privileges, premium cable stations privileges, or talking to people privileges. Oh, he’s free to talk to the guards, his support team, the various and sundry support staff he encounters in-between his room and his office, but they say nothing to him in return.

(He assumes they’re under orders to keep silent. He asked his guards if that was the case. They didn’t
answer.)

They’re saying something now though, to someone in the hall, and they do not sound welcoming. Who could it be? Archimedes wonders. Whoever his employer is, he believes in the sanctity of weekends; the facility runs on a skeleton crew Saturdays and Sundays, and everyone here is someone who should be here, but whoever the guards are addressing...

Someone shouts, then utters a brief, shrill cry. Someone opens the door without unlocking it, splitting the door jamb effortlessly. The man who enters has to duck under the top of the frame, and when he straightens, his bald head almost brushes the ceiling.

“I want to talk to you,” he says. “You’re the Internet guy, right? The guy who can control computers and junk?”

“And you are...?”

“I’m Minotaur. One of Manticore’s—”

“Yes, I know you now. By reputation, that is. You should have worn that foolish helmet of yours, I might have—”

Minotaur pokes a finger into Archimedes’ sternum. Archimedes tries to wail in pain, to call for help, but his lungs refuse to work.

“I got more where that came from if you give me lip again,” Minotaur says, picking Archimedes off the floor one-handed and tossing him onto his bed. “Answer the question. You the Internet guy?”

Archimedes nods from a fetal position.

“You can control computers and cell phones and stuff like that?” Archimedes nods. “Good. You’re going to help me with something.”

“Help...you?” Archimedes croaks.

“That punk kid I fought when we grabbed your fancy robot suits. I want to know where he is.”

“Where...I can’t...”

“Don’t screw with me, man.”

“I’m not—
aaaagggh
! Give...I can’t...give me...” Minotaur folds his arms and waits until Archimedes can breathe again. “I’m not screwing with you. I can’t find him.”

“Can’t as in can’t, or can’t as in
won’t
?”

“I
can
, as in it’s within my capabilities,” Archimedes says, “but I can’t, as in the Foreman hasn’t given me clearance to do anything he hasn’t directly ordered me to do.”

“He’s not the boss of me, I’m freelance. You think I care what that guy says?”

“No, but I do. My entire life is in his hands.”

Minotaur’s fingers wrap around Archimedes’ face, covering it like a catcher’s mask. The stinging stink of sweat fills his nose. “Then here’s what we’re going to do,” Minotaur says. “You’re going to tell your weird boss I threatened you. You’re going to tell him I said if you didn’t do what I told you, I was going to pop your head like a zit. Got it?”

He presents the scenario as a ruse, but Archimedes has no doubt the threat is quite real.

“Are they dead?” Archimedes says, stepping over one of the two guards now lying face down in front of his apartment.

“Nah. Don’t worry. They’ll be fine.”

“Doubtful. While popular entertainment would have you believe otherwise, a person who does not revive right away after being knocked out has almost certainly suffered a concussion. The longer they’re out,
the more likely it is they’ve suffered serious brain damage.”

“That a fact?” Minotaur says, unconcerned. “Huh. Learn something new every day.”

Minotaur makes short work of the office door. The interior lights flicker out automatically. As Archimedes sets to work booting up the system, he dares to ask, “What do you plan to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you’re looking for one of the Hero Squad. Why? What are you going to do?”

“Going to pay back the little turd for showing me up in front of the others is what I’m going to do.”

Archimedes pauses. “Revenge? Really? Because someone, briefly, got the better of you in a fight?”

“Hey, pal, you know how humiliating it is to get owned by a kid?”

“Why no,” Archimedes drawls, “I have absolutely no idea what that feels like.”

“It sucks. Kobold and Hydra have been riding me ever since that job and I’m sick of it.”

“So you plan to do what, exactly? Ambush the boy in public and beat him up?”

“Short and sweet and to the point.”