Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (32 page)

He doesn’t deserve the advice—in the lingo of the institution, he hasn’t
earned the privilege
—but Archimedes offers it nonetheless. “It’s a bad idea. You may think you have all the angles covered but you don’t. Too much can go wrong and if—
when
it does, you’ll be worse off than you are now. Trust me, I’m speaking from bitter experience. The smartest thing you can do is—”

“The smartest thing
you
can do,” Minotaur says,
“is shut up and find. That. Kid.”

“Your funeral.”

Archimedes plugs himself in and settles into his seat. Minotaur stands at his head and rests his hands on either side of the headrest, a silent threat: no funny business, no excuses. A portion of Archimedes’ mind enters the virtual world and he begins the necessary detective work, using what little he knows about the Hero Squad as a starting point. The Kingsport High School network, hardly a challenge the first time he hacked it, welcomes him with open arms. It takes one second to find the database containing students’ academic and personal records, less than a second to sift out the females, and another full second to scan the photographs.

Hello, Stuart Dean Lumley of 23 Forest View Drive.

The next stop is the customer database for the nation’s largest cell phone carrier, which produces no results, but he hits pay dirt with the second-largest carrier in the form of records for LUMLEY, FOSTER of 23 Forest View Drive. Two numbers are listed under his name, one of which was assigned six years ago, the other only two. Within a nanosecond he’s located that number and tapped the phone’s GPS chip.

“Perhaps this is your lucky day,” Archimedes says. “It appears your friend is on his way into the city. Based on his current location and heading, the speed at which he’s moving, I would say he’s on a commuter train en route to South Station. Conservative estimate, he should be at the station in ten minutes.”

Minotaur grins. “Perfect.”

***

The gods of travel remain uncooperative; thanks to a couple of short delays (both of them unexplained, as is typical for Boston’s public transit system) the train enters South Station at 8:45 AM, “Which means there’s no way we’re going to make it to the aquarium for the morning feeding,” Matt says sourly.

“Then we go with Plan B,” I say. “Let’s go to Faneuil Hall, poke around there for a while, get food, then head over to the aquarium.”

“Yeah, minor setback, man,” Stuart says. “The penguins will still be there after lunch, waddling for our amusement.”

It’s cold out but not unbearably so, so we opt to make the rest of the trip on foot rather than leave ourselves to the tender mercies of the MBTA. We can only deal with so much tardiness in one day.

“Y’know, I have heard rumors of Boston trains running on time,” Matt quips, “but I always thought it was a local urban legend. Like the Boston Clown Scare of 1981.”

“The what what now?” Stuart says.

“My dad told me about it. He said in 1981 the whole city was freaked out by stories that men dressed as clowns were driving through the city kidnapping kids. Police actually issued a public warning and everything, even though they couldn’t confirm a single report.”

“Dude. That’s wicked creepy.”

“Even if it isn’t true,” Sara says over her shoulder. Her eyes pop, and as I’m asking her what’s wrong, she whirls around and her hands snap out. I turn.
There’s an SUV hovering two feet from my face. Sara lets it drop to the sidewalk and topples into Matt’s arms, her skin as white as chalk.

That means she’s in no condition to stop the flying Toyota. We scatter as the car skips off the SUV like a stone on a pond, flips in midair, and lands on its roof.

“Hey, kid! Remember me?” It’d be darn near impossible to forget that stupid helmet, which, at the moment, is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen, because its wearer is standing in the middle of the street.

Minotaur found us. He knows who we are.

“I owe you some pain, son! You come take your beating like a man,” he says, spreading his arms wide in invitation, “and maybe I’ll let your friends leave in an ambulance instead of a hearse!”

“Five against one,” Matt says. “We can take this guy.”

That’s optimistic. Sara’s fighting to stay awake, I doubt Missy’s fingernails could penetrate Minotaur’s hide, and Matt...well, he’s Matt.

“Matt, get Sara clear,” I say.

“Missy can get Sara clear,” Matt protests. “Who put you in charge anyway?”

“Do what she says!” Sara says.

Minotaur doesn’t give us time to finish our poorly timed argument. The motorists and pedestrians have wisely cleared the scene, but there are plenty of light poles around. Minotaur snaps one off at the base and, gripping it like the world’s largest baseball bat, charges.

Screw Concorde’s ground order. I shoot skyward while Matt and Missy carry Sara clear. Stuart, he stands his ground. It looks like he’s going to take the attack but he dodges to the side at the last minute. The
steel light pole hits the street with a deafening ring. Stuart grasps the end, wrenches it from Minotaur’s grip, and swings for the bleachers. The blow staggers Minotaur—momentarily.

“Not bad, boy,” he says, laughing. Stuart, foolishly, barrels toward him. Minotaur stops the charge cold with a kick to the chest. He grabs Stuart by the hair and pitches him overhand. He spins in a high arc over Atlantic Avenue and caves in the side of a tour trolley abandoned by its riders.

I hit Minotaur from above. It takes him off his feet but again, he recovers quickly. Fortunately, so does Stuart. The tackle would snap a normal man in half. Minotaur, he folds under the impact but doesn’t break. They hit the sidewalk, shattering concrete like it was glass, and let the fists fly. There is no martial artistry in their brawl, no grace, only brute force channeled into punches thrown helter-skelter like two boys scuffling in a schoolyard—boys capable of bench-pressing Cadillacs.

Sara enters my head.
Carrie, we have to do something, he’s going to kill Stuart!

No he’s not
, Matt says.
Stuart can take this chump.

We can’t just stand around and do nothing!
Missy says, and I’m with her. This may be a grudge match as far as Minotaur is concerned, but playing by his rules will get us all killed.

Things go from bad to worse when a Boston police cruiser flies in, siren screaming, and screeches to a stop. The officer jumps out, gun drawn, shouting instructions neither Minotaur nor Stuart are about to heed.

Minotaur kicks Stuart away and he goes skitter
ing down the street. Minotaur, almost casually, advances on the cop. The cop opens fire, point blank. Bullets spark as they ricochet off Minotaur’s skin. I prepare to fire but I freeze up; my aim hasn’t improved so much I trust myself to make the shot at this distance without hitting the officer.

Minotaur raises his fists. My hesitation is about to cost a man his life.

Missy is moving so fast Minotaur doesn’t see her until well after she’s reached the cop and pulled him out of the way at the last possible instant. They hit the ground rolling. Minotaur’s hammer-blow bends the cruiser in half.

I expect my blast to fling Minotaur halfway across the city, but he’s braced for me this time and only staggers back a little. He shouts a curse at me. In two steps he reaches Missy and the cop, and before I can react, even think of reacting, Minotaur grabs a handful of the cop’s jacket and—

“Go fetch!”

Oh God...

“Oh God,” Matt says as a dark form hurtles skyward as if launched by a catapult. A streak of light gives chase.

“GUYS!” Missy’s warning cry reaches Matt and Sara a split-second before she does. She shoves them away as she passes, giving herself and her juggernaut of a pursuer a clear path.

Missy keeps running. Minotaur slows, stops, turns. “You’ll do,” he says.

Matt’s brain goes into free fall as Minotaur towers over him, his giant hands clenching and unclench
ing in anticipation, a sadistic leer playing on his face. A hundred, a thousand possibilities race through Matt’s mind in the space of a heartbeat and are discarded as unworkable, useless against something no physical force he could muster could possibly stop.

Minotaur cocks a fist. Matt closes his eyes. He prays and braces for the end.

He waits.

And waits.

Matt dares to crack an eye and wonders if he’s experiencing a kind of pre-death time distortion. He’s often heard that one’s perception of time slows to a crawl in the face of an imminent threat, but to experience it...

No, he realizes; time hasn’t stopped. Minotaur has.

“Don’t move don’t move don’t move don’t move don’t move—”

It doesn’t register right away, the connection between Sara’s frantic mantra and Minotaur’s sudden paralysis. Stuart’s warning, however, does.

“MOVE!”

Minotaur blinks as though awakening from a dream. His victim is nowhere to be seen.

The police cruiser drops like a war hammer wielded by some ancient, angry god. It rises and falls again on the prone form of the man calling himself Minotaur, rises and falls, again and again, until the vehicle is little more than two fistfuls of twisted, shredded steel in Stuart’s hands.

“I think,” Stuart pants, “that should do it.”

The police band is going crazy. Soon the site will
be swarming with cops, perhaps a SWAT team, all of them too late to do anything useful, and soon after that the Protectorate will arrive to collect Minotaur and ship him off to Byrne.

No less than the idiot deserves.

Archimedes orders a traffic camera to zoom in on the Hero Squad as the skinny kid pulls an assortment of goggles and hoods and facemasks out of his trench coat—where does he keep it all?—and doles them out to his friends. He scans each of their faces before they disappear behind their flimsy disguises and tucks the information into a file on the main server labeled HERO SQUAD, along with video of the fight that, he hopes, will save him from losing any more of his precious few privileges.

Not that he had a choice in the matter. After all, he
was
threatened...

THIRTY-TWO

The good news is, the cop is fine—a dozen different kinds of freaked out, but physically okay (for the record: catching people in mid-air? Not an easy thing to do).

Unfortunately, the nugget of good news is outweighed by ten tons of bad news. For starters, there’s the obvious fact that, despite the Protectorate’s assurances to the contrary, we had a bad guy come after us—Minotaur was
looking for us
. To his credit, Concorde is not brushing this off as a one-time thing, but it’s a small comfort...as is the fact that Minotaur is in no shape to tell us if his attack was part of some larger plan or he was playing lone gunman. Not that I feel sorry for him, but Stuart’s smackdown apparently resulted in mild brain trauma. Minotaur has been in and out of something bearing a passing resemblance to consciousness and isn’t going to be spilling his guts anytime soon.

Like I said, I’m not sympathetic. Not for a killer like him.

And that there is the capper: the Toyota Minotaur threw at us had people in it. Two of them survived
but are in rough shape. The other...

One more life forever changed, forever ruined—
ended
—by something beyond their control.

Mindforce dropped that bombshell on us as soon as we arrived at HQ the next morning for the post-incident de-brief. I spent the first half of my time in the interview room in a state of shock and the second half crying. He said there was absolutely nothing we could have done. It wasn’t an empty reassurance but it didn’t make me feel any better or any less guilty.

At one point I looked over at Concorde in his corner, arms folded in judgment, and waited for him to lay into me. He didn’t say anything. He said nothing the whole time I was in the room. I thought he was too angry to speak until, as I was leaving, he said, “You can’t save everyone.”

Before we left HQ to spend Sunday afternoon trying to lose ourselves in Kevin Smith movies, Mindforce gave each of us a small box with a belt clip. I remarked it looked like a beeper like my dad used to carry, and as it turned out, that’s what they were in a past life. Concorde repurposed the housings and made panic buttons with GPS trackers.

“Keep them on you at all times. If anything happens, push the red button and hold it for five seconds,” Mindforce said.

“And then?”

“...Hold out as best you can until we get there.”

Hold out as best we can. Real comforting—and useless if we get ambushed again.

“I don’t know if we have a lot of other options,” Sara says, picking up on my thought, not because I’m broadcasting all that loudly but because she’s let her
defenses down, completely, so she can act as our early-warning system. It’s a decent theory, but who knows if a sudden murderous impulse aimed at us is going to cut through the psychic cacophony of twelve hundred teenagers and their adult zookeepers. I suggest she save herself a migraine and put her defenses back up but she refuses, out of loyalty to us. Or out of fear for her own safety.

“Little of both,” she says. “Sorry, I can’t—”

“No, I understand, it’s okay, but please promise me something: if it gets to be too much, put the wall up.”

“I will.”

She’s lying.

It’s twisted, admittedly, but I find the best way to keep my own fear in check is to worry about the others, and there’s plenty to worry about. Sara’s teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, Missy hasn’t been able to eat (correction: she hasn’t been able to keep anything down), Matt has buried it deep and is acting like everything’s perfectly normal, and Stuart...I don’t know what’s going on in his head. I run into Stuart at his locker and say hello. There’s an odd hesitation before he replies, like he can’t quite remember who I am or what he’s supposed to say to me. He’s been this way since—you know. Throw that on top of the Ronny Vick issue and, well, suffice it to say, the boy has a
lot
on his mind.

“Oh. Hey.”

It feels foolish on my part to ask him how he’s doing. I ask him anyway. I’ve noticed a bad habit in this group of avoiding touchy subjects and backing away whenever someone shows the slightest resistance
to talking about anything that’s bothering them. It reminds me, in a way, of my Dark Period friends, who never wanted to hear about anyone’s problems (such as a certain girl’s divorcing parents) because it harshed their buzz.