Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (21 page)

“He’s bad,” Stuart says, and
the next part hits me like a dropkick to the stomach. “She said he might not
survive the night.”

I fumble over a thousand
different questions before remembering how our night ended, with Missy grabbing
something to bring to her father at work. “Stuart, did Missy tell you what
happened?”

“She said that girl attacked
them, the one from the jailbreak. Killjoy?”

“Buzzkill Joy?”

“Yeah, her.”

What the huh? That doesn’t
make any sense at all. There’s no way Buzzkill Joy could’ve found out Missy was
the one who beat her up at the courthouse — but why else would Joy show up at
Dr. Hamill’s office, if not to lure Missy into an ambush? On the other hand,
Joy was totally in the wind; why would she risk getting caught just to take a
cheap shot at revenge?

“Missy’s a mess,” Stuart
says, bringing me back to the here and now, “and Mom and Dad won’t drive me up
to the hospital. She’s at Boston Medical Center. Could you fly up?”

“Yeah, I can — no, crap, I
can’t,” I say. “Concorde grounded me, remember?”

“Oh, for — come on, Carrie,
Concorde’s not going to have you arrested for flying.”

“I think he’d have me
arrested for jumping too high without his permission.”

“But this is an emergency!”

“I don’t think Concorde
would — look, I’ll see if Mom or Granddad will drive me up, but I can’t make
any promises. I’ll try my best, okay?”

“Okay,” Stuart mutters, but
he’s obviously not happy with my answer. “Thanks,” he says, hanging up.

I throw on jeans and a
T-shirt, and as I make my way to Mom’s bedroom, I quickly rehearse a short but
utterly compelling argument why she should get out of bed and drive me to
Boston. Should be cake, right? She’ll understand this is a crisis and, bonus,
she really likes Missy. Sure, this’ll be a slam-dunk, no worri—

Oh God, no. No no no don’t listen
walk away walk away fast don’t listen don’t listen!

I back away from the bedroom
door and race back to my room, doubled over from sudden nausea that threatens
to eject my dinner onto the floor. Breathe, Carrie, slow breaths, in and out,
in and out, in and — no, stupid brain, don’t go there!

Dammit all, Ben, I was
starting to like you, too.

It takes a few minutes for
my stomach to settle well enough for me to straighten up and, my hands clamped
tightly over my ears, cross the hall to rouse Granddad. I wonder how
effectively I’ll be able to knock with my elbows?

Nuts, looks like it’s a moot
point; Grandad’s bedroom door is open and his bed is empty, though recently
slept in. I head downstairs and poke my head out the front door, but there’s no
sign of him on the porch and his car is gone. I’m stuck here.

Great.

Robbed of options, I fire up
my iPod to drown out the, ahem, disturbance, and turn on my laptop so I can do
a little reading on Buzzkill Joy.

I find plenty of news
articles online. Holy crap is this girl sick. Joyce Morana, a Roxbury native,
for reasons unknown (due to her refusal to answer investigators’ questions)
walked into her high school one day and, with her bare hands, ripped open her
principal’s throat. She repeated her performance six times, murdering assorted
students and school personnel. A police sniper missed a headshot and plugged
Joy in the shoulder, which put her down long enough for police to charge the
school and arrest her. Joy’s been sitting in Byrne ever since, awaiting trial
as an adult on seven counts of first-degree murder.

My waking nightmare ends
sometime after midnight (seriously, Mom?), so I pull out the earbuds and try to
get some sleep, but it’s no use. I toss and turn until my alarm goes off, at
which point I throw on my jeans and T-shirt, grab my jacket, and get the hell
out of Dodge, because I have no faith in my ability to look either Mom or Ben
in the eye without puking up my entire intestinal tract.

Hey, Sara,
I call out mentally.
You
up?

Yeah, what’s up?
she responds.
Are you
okay? You’re wicked tense.

Oh, God, where do I begin?
I say. I should probably
lead with the important news of the day, but I wait until I get to Sara’s
before I drop that particular bombshell. She deserves to hear it in person.

“Oh my God,” Sara gasps when
I tell her. “Have you heard anything else?”

“No, I haven’t talked to
Stuart since last night,” I say. Sara throws on a coat and, as we head out,
pulls out her phone to call Stuart, but he’s not picking up.

We quicken our pace, hoping
to intercept Stuart before we have to head in for another day of academic
drudgery. We plant ourselves on a bench outside the main entrance and huddle
against the weather, which has taken a turn for the colder; if I didn’t know
better, I’d swear it was January again (thanks a lot, New England).

Stuart shows up a few
minutes later. The dark circles under his eyes rival mine. Sara runs up to him
and throws her arms around his neck. He responds with a listless pat on the
back.

“Have you talked to Missy
since last night?” Sara says. Stuart shakes his head.

“I was up all night waiting
for her to call me but she never did.” He shrugs. “I guess that’s good. Means
Dr. Hamill didn’t die, right? Still would’ve been nice to have an inside man,”
he says, shooting me the hairy eyeball.

“I told you, I couldn’t fly
to the hospital without Concorde coming down on me,” I protest.

“What about your Mom? You
said she’d drive you up.”

“No, I said I’d
ask her
to drive me up.”

“Did you?”

“...I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

I fight off an unwanted
audio flashback. “Because reasons,” I say with a grimace.

“Jeez, one of your best
friends, and you couldn’t even —”

“Hold on,” Sara says, “why
didn’t your parents drive
you
up if it was so important?”

“I asked them to,” Stuart argues,
“which is more than she did.”

“Who’s driving who where?”
Matt says as he joins us.

“Didn’t you tell him?” I say
to Stuart.

“Tell me what?”

I lower my voice. “Buzzkill
Joy attacked Missy and her dad last night. Dr. Hamill’s in really bad shape. As
far as we know, they’ve both been in the hospital all night.”

“What? Why didn’t anyone
call me?”

“Because you’re a mess,
man,” Stuart says, “you didn’t need me dumping more crap on you.”

“You should have called me!
Missy’s my friend too, you know,” Matt says, “and what the hell do you mean,
I’m a mess?”

“Dude, I didn’t mean it like
that.”

“Then how did you mean it?”

“God, why do you have to
overreact to everything?”

“Overreacting?” Sara
interjects. “Something happens to Missy and you don’t bother to tell your best
friend? Or me, for that matter?”

“Oh, jeez, so sorry, I
didn’t know Bearer of Bad News was part of my official job description,” Stuart
growls.

“Guys, stop, stop,” I say.
“Let’s take a breath before any of us say anything we can’t take back, okay? Look,
we’re all stressed out and worried about Missy, but we’re not going to solve
anything by jumping down each other’s throats. I can’t believe I’m saying this,
but maybe school will help us decompress a little.”

One by one, the others nod
in agreement.

“Stuart, keep your eye on
your phone in case Missy texts you. If there’s any news, give us a shout on the
brainphone and we’ll figure it out from there.”

“Yeah, right,” he says.

Good call on my part: We
gather at my locker after the final bell and attitudes have definitely improved
(aside from a sudden melancholy that hit us at lunch due to the prominent
Missy-shaped hole at the table).

Stuart informs us he
received a text from Missy right after we left the cafeteria. All it said was:
home restn dad stil n hosp. There’s a brief debate whether we should head over
to her place and check in on her or leave her alone so she can get some rest,
but like I said: It’s a brief debate. The unanimous decision is that we need to
make sure our Muppet is okay.

She’s alive, but
okay
?
Not even.

Missy opens the door and we
gasp in unison at the wreck of her face. Her left eye is ringed in
blackish-blue, her lips are swollen and puffy, and four lines of tight stitches
cross her forehead and scalp near the hairline — or, more accurately, where her
hairline would be if it hadn’t been shaved away to make room for the sutures.

“Oh, jeez, Muppet,” Stuart
whimpers, arms extended uncertainly, like he’s not sure whether it’s safe to
hug her. Missy hugs him instead, then the rest of us in turn as we file into
the house.

“Mom’s upstairs,” she says
in a half-whisper. “The doctor gave her some pills to help her sleep.”

We follow Missy to the
downstairs bathroom. We crowd in the doorway as she places a fresh square of gauze
over her forehead and secures it with white medical tape. The old pad sits on
the edge of the sink, broken lines of dark red stretching across it in a mirror
image of her stitches.

“Doctor said I have some
broken ribs, too,” Missy says as she tends to her bandage, “but no internal
bleeding or anything like that, so, you know. Yay.”

“How’s your dad?” Stuart
says.

Missy pauses and draws in a
calming breath before speaking. Her voice quivers nevertheless, and her first
words chill me to the bone.

“Joy slashed his throat. He
bled so much. I thought he...I thought he was going to die in my arms.” Missy
looks at her trembling hands, which, I now notice, are tinted with a disturbing
pinkish hue. “The doctors weren’t sure he’d survive the night. They said if he
made it to morning, he should pull through...”

I lay a hand on her
shoulder, which is like granite under my fingers. The girl’s wired to explode.

“Missy, what did Joy want?”
I say gently. “Was she looking for you?”

“No. She didn’t know who I
was. I mean, until I kicked her in the face,” Missy says. “She wanted that hard
drive Daddy asked me to bring him.”

“Hard drive?” Matt says. I
fill him in, not that there’s much to fill him in on.

“Do you have any idea what
was on it?” I ask. Missy shakes her head, leaving countless questions hanging
unanswered, all of them centered on Missy’s father and that hard drive.

I think we might have to pay
Dr. Hamill a visit.

An official visit.

EIGHTEEN

Buzzkill Joy gets off the
bus and looks around, looking for a specific street sign. It was dark the last
time she stood on this street; everything somehow looks very different in the
daytime. She picks a direction at random, wanders a block, finds the sign, and
a strange impulse kicks in. Three blocks down, past a coffee shop, across an
intersection, one more block, and there it is: Jean’s Café — closed,
permanently, newspapers covering all the glass, a “for sale” sign in the door.
The impulse draws her around the corner, down an alley, and to a back door
that, in the daytime, feels extremely exposed.

Joy slips into the building.
It never occurs to her to check whether the door is locked; she somehow knows
it isn’t.

She also knew she had to
call the number preset in her phone, the one with that BS five-five-five
exchange phone numbers in movies always use, as soon as she acquired the hard
drive — though damned if she could say
why
she had to call it. The man
who answered told her to
return to our original meeting place, and bring the
hard drive,
gave her a time, and hung up without further instructions.

“I’m here,” she announces
upon entering the restaurant’s former dining area. “Now tell me who you are and
what the hell is going on before I open you up.”

John Nemo sighs. “That’s the
problem with my gift. Having to repeatedly introduce myself to the same people?
It becomes tedious.” He peers over the top of his sunglasses and
tsk
s at
the fresh scars, red and wet and angry, crossing Joy’s face. “Those are some vicious-looking
wounds. You encountered some interference, then?”

Joy responds with stony
silence.

“Very well. I have no
problem dispensing with the chit-chat. My name is John Nemo. I represent an
organization that, rather spontaneously, contracted with you to recover
information pertaining to the origins of your own distinct abilities.”