I look over at my father, his gaze almost desperately diverted away from the body.
It's not as hard as I would have thought to know what I have to do.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I slip Nate's little plastic present from where I've hidden it inside my cleavage, flip open the small clasp with a flick of my thumb and remove the prepared syringe filled with blood.
Nate's blood. Immortal blood. It revived a zombie. I can't imagine a normal corpse would be much more difficult for it to fix.
Dad makes a choked sound as I pull off the cap over the needle with my teeth and jam the syringe into the pasty skin of Morris's chest directly over his long-dead heart. I force down the plunger and hold my breath as the miniscule amount of blood threads its way through the needle into Morris's inert body. As soon as it's been emptied I pull the needle out and pitch it across the room, ignoring the tinny clatter as it skids across the linoleum.
Dad's voice has an unsteady ring as he whispers, “What did you do?”
“I'm getting us a weapon,” I say, unable to look away from the body.
I fix my eyes on Morris, and I wait.
And wait.
And wait some more, until the tightly held air hitches out of my lungs and Dad's hands appear out of nowhere to skim over the surface of Morris's flesh. Even Graham turns to look, waiting, waiting –
When Morris breathes – finally,
finally –
the high wheezy sound of it sends us all scrambling backwards in shock.
“Morris?”
Dad's voice barely carries, and when he speaks the words choke off in a brittle gasp.
Morris coughs, a ragged awful sound that somehow brings a healthy flush to too-pale skin. “You had better be Everett,” he rasps, “because I've had quite enough of pummeling imposters for one day.”
No one corrects him on how long it's been since he died. Dad's too busy laughing, lowering his voice as he cups Morris's cheek. I back away to give him space. It's hard to ignore everyone else in the room shooting me dark looks laced with disgust or resignation or maybe even a little relief, but I manage it quite nicely, if I do say so myself.
I may be the only one who looks away when Dad and Morris kiss simply to give them their privacy.
Mom, on the other hand, has no problem glaring at the both of them.
She must be in a better mood than I thought. Normally when she stares at someone like that, they're melting into a puddle of meat sauce due to her heat vision by now.
Graham signals to me with a few deliberate clicks of his tongue, summoning me to his new place by the door as though we're on some ludicrous secret mission for the Brigade like we used to be. I make a face as I swerve around my glaring mother to come to his side. He cocks his chin towards the window in the door for me to look out into the hallway.
“He's using the bodies as weapons,” Graham hisses my way.
I roll my eyes. “Of course he is,” I say, peering out to spot a pair of glassy-eyed scientists from another section of the building hacking into the touchscreen beside the door to the crypt opposite and to the left of us.
“They're more powerful weapons than they look to be.” Dr. Hale sidles up beside us and eyes the makeshift minions with barely veiled contempt through the glass. They don't appear to notice or care that we're watching. “Most folks don't quite let it sink in why we keep these bodies in storage here. If they did, we might actually warrant a real goddamn security team for a change.”
She points to the crypt John's mental slaves have taken to task, first with highly delicate electronic lock-breakers and, when frustration gets the best of them in some cases we can see, then with the nearest blunt object. One mind-controlled janitor pounds away with a sledgehammer at the touchscreen for the crypt three doors down from us. From the sound of things, if he hasn't thwacked a significant dent in the door, it's certainly not from lack of trying.
“The Ferret is in that crypt. He and Lord Spirit are both scheduled to go nuclear within the week. Their crypts are set specifically for containment under those circumstances. Penny Rocket's gestating a dozen minor interdimensional alien gods we can't destroy without breaking half a dozen anti-abortion treaties spanning four universes. Twelve infant gods who think you're their daddy are some pretty powerful weapons in and of themselves. And the Plague is carrying the plague. Unsurprisingly.”
“The Plague died?” I blurt out, unable to resist a mournful sigh. He was a nice guy, the incurable diseases he passed around like free candy on Halloween notwithstanding. “Nobody tells me anything.”
Mom barks out a derisive, “Ha!”, but thankfully restrains herself from starting in on yet another insult to what I might have been up to the past five years when I could have been calling home.
Looking for a distraction, I glance over at Morris, my grin mischievous and tempting.
“Say, Morris, what can you build with what's available in this room?”
Morris smiles wide as his gaze sweeps over the room. We can almost hear him plotting, categorizing the contents of the room in his mind and assembling them into whichever toy he plans on making. His powers to manipulate matter on the molecular level may not be working, but his mind is still sharpened to a fine point.
He heads straight for the coolant system against the far wall and bangs against the edges with his fist until the metal grate covering it pops out. “Don't worry, my dear,” he says when Dr. Hale lets out an affronted gasp. “I'm sure a notorious supervillain easily disassembling your internal atmosphere stabilizers is more than enough leverage for you to requisition the SLB for something a bit sturdier. And perhaps a raise or two, all kidnappings considered.”
The murderous look she shoots him as he tears into the contents of the coolant system's hardware could melt the yellow lines off a highway.
I'm used to being useless. It's never been unusual for me to be the one just standing around twiddling my thumbs while someone with more power or more experience fights the giant lizard or smothers the threatening volcano. But aside from Dr. Hale, I'm the only one in the room with vast experience in the area of defeating boredom, and it shows.
Morris is busy, of course, elbow-deep in the innards of the crypt's computer systems and pasting together something undeniably brilliant with whatever he can scrounge together. Dad hovers at his side with concern and fascination and glee bubbling under the surface, but he still shifts his weight anxiously from one foot to the other, wanting to do something, anything,
everything.
Mom paces behind me like a caged jungle cat, flexing fists that now carry no more strength behind them than mine do and hating every minute of it. Graham glares out through the glass as though shooting John's minions dirty looks will cause them to jolt out of John's mental control in self-defense.
Dr. Hale curls up in the corner of the room with Sierra in her lap. She snuggles the little girl close and takes in the coiled-tight energy in my unsettled family before tossing a quizzical look in my direction.
I wish I could claim to be able to tame any of them
, I think with a frown.
A few short minutes later, as Morris screws together the last of whatever contraption he's assembling with the edge of a dime he rummaged out of Dad's utility belt, John shouts something neither I nor Graham can understand and waves one of his human puppets towards the crypt.
“Morris,” I warn as a business man with empty eyes and a gruesome lump in his arms approaches.
“I'm almost finished.”
He secures the elaborate rat's nest of braided wires and misplaced screws around his wrist just as the minion dumps the body in his arms out onto the pale green linoleum. It rolls in a limp thump-thump-thump all the way to the front of the crypt door.
For a long strained moment, those of us crowded into the crypt stare at the window in the door. I wonder if everyone else is thinking the same thing as I am, expecting a massive explosion or a flaming whirlwind to rise up and suck us from the relative safety of the crypt.
Instead, it's an almost surreal level of silence when the first tentacle slithers a slimy trail across the glass.
Tentacles could mean any number of things. Some tentacle monsters are harmless and almost cuddly. Then again, if you were hooked on “Captain Manny's Hero Quest” like the rest of us were as a kid and demanded a real copy of his pet bio-engineered octopus puppy, you know that. Mom never was all that keen on any pet that could reasonably be named Cthulhu, but it didn't stop her from accepting one when it was freely given to us by a major network for my eighth birthday. I loved that weird little dog.
Most tentacle monsters, though, are monsters, any way you look at it. The majority of tentacle-wielding creatures may start out all sugar and spice. But a lifetime of people cringing away from you or making hentai jokes behind your back is bound to turn out someone who's just not quite right.
Outside the door, the tentacle slathers a thin layer of goo across the glass, tiny arcs of lightning sparking in its wake.
The electrical traces skimming over the surface of the door bounce and sing before we hear the unmistakable sound of the lock unclicking.
“Oh, that was a mistake,” Morris says almost joyfully, and throws open the door to the crypt before any of us can stop him.
The hideous creature emerging from the formerly bloated corpse of some elderly woman I thankfully don't recognize as either a hero or a villain rears back as soon as Morris peers down at it. Its tentacles flail madly through the air for a moment, flinging sparking globs of slime all over. Morris is the only one of us who doesn't dodge the disgusting drizzle, which hits the floor in a blinding array of sparks as it splashes down and melts the linoleum underneath our feet.
“Hello, Edgar,” Morris says, his voice droll.
The tentacles slither in a trembling mockery of a bow before sucking back into the corpse and pushing it away from us in a deferential crawl.
It takes a moment for one of us – namely, me – to blurt out, “Edgar?”
Morris shoots a wry smile over his shoulder at me. “My dear, I might not still rule over Ferlo, but I do still have a bit of pull with its citizens. They did so appreciate my saving them from their self-destructing planet.”
Ah. I suppose that would explain it. It's not as though any of us would be able to recognize a Ferlian, after all. Oddly enough, Ferlians don't enjoy taking long vacations on the planet of their short-lived and supposedly terrifying dictator.
Then again, if Morris's last comment is correct, perhaps they're less terrified of Morris and more terrified of the millions who think Morris is some sort of diabolical madman. I'm not sure I want to know the difference.
Still, I can't help but repeat myself. “But … Edgar?”
Morris shrugs. “It was on his nametag,” he says, before peering out into the hall once again.
I think I'd prefer not to know where a Ferlian parasite is hiding a nametag.
Mom makes a mad dash for the door while Morris still has it pried open, but he slams it shut once again before she can get out.
“Wait!” Morris says, latching onto my mother's arm, his grip intentionally loose.
Mom jerks to a stop. She turns to face him in an eerie slow maneuver and her smile grows, sweet and deadly. “I'll tear your arms off,” she swears, positively gleeful about the prospect.
“Of course you may,” he allows, playing the gentleman just to get a rise out of her. “But perhaps you'd like to save your dismembering for after your powers return.”
She tenses at that but backs down immediately. She doesn't curl in on herself like a terrified animal, doesn't hide in the corner like a shaky punished dog avoiding the next kick from its abusive master, but the blow is low and inside. I've only rarely seen my mother attempt to get by without her abilities, and it's never pretty.
I sidle up beside him and peer out the door. “Can we still get out?”
“The door won't lock again anytime soon. Ferlian slime packs quite a wallop.”
That's good to know. So now that we have an avenue of escape, I shoot his bracelet of wires a deliberate look. “So, what's your shiny new toy for?”
“Oh, this? Why, I'm delighted you asked,” he declares in a voice far too cheery for our current circumstances. He lifts his wrist to eye level and, with a wink in my direction, flips the sole metal toggle sticking up from the device.
A burst of warm static energy explodes out from the makeshift machinery, harmless to the rest of us but a shock to every computerized system it comes in contact with. The already disabled lock whirrs and sputters, while outside the crypt the touchscreen on the wall dies a quick death.
“It is,” Morris says, “a very small, painfully cheap, garage-level EMP.”
As if on cue, John screams in frustration.
My smile grows five miles wide.
Morris takes a quick look out at the hallway. “Be a dear and clean up some of that mess, would you?”
It's only then that I can feel the lock on my powers crumble apart, falling to pieces in an instant. The others aren't so lucky, it seems, not quite as used to dealing with dampening fields as I am lately. Their abilities crawl from an unwanted slumber while mine burst forth in an instant, and I grin before popping out of the room.