Masked (2010) (9 page)

“That’s not—”

“Don’t you dare say that’s not possible!” snapped Retaliator. “It’s the only thing that makes sense!”

Her red cheeks turned pink as the blood drained from her face. She closed the portal as she slumped into her chair.

“There. . . there was a day, back in August, when I woke up in my mortal form of Eula Leahy and I had no memory of what I’d done the night before.”

“You didn’t find this unusual? You didn’t think this might be worth mentioning to your teammates? You’re the most powerful woman in the world. You skewered Satan with his own sword! Don’t you think it might be important to keep track of where you are and what you’re doing at all times?”

“Don’t judge me, Eric,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “You haven’t lived my life. You’ve never seen the horrors I’ve seen. Sometimes. . . sometimes in order to get to sleep, I have a drink or two or three. It’s something. . . it’s something I’m in control of. . . most of the time.”

Retaliator took a long, slow breath. Sometimes it was difficult to remember that underneath all the magic, She-Devil was only a woman doing a job she didn’t want to do.

“Look,” he said. “The next time you feel like your only hope of getting some peace is a bottle, give me a call. We’re teammates, Eula. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing and talk you through the darkness.”

She responded with a dry chuckle. “For the sake of the world, let’s hope that my mood is never so dark that I need to turn to the Retaliator for a pep talk. Leave here, Eric. I need to do further research. There will be forces at play in this cave which no mere mortal can witness and hope to retain his sanity.”

“Fine,” said Retaliator, “but—”

But he was talking to a wall. He was back in Gray Manor in his own bedroom, facing the Annie Leibovitz portrait of himself and Nubile on their wedding day. It’s funny; he knew Sarah first as Nubile, and even now thought of her by that name, even though she would never fight crime again after Prime Mover had put three bullets into the base of her skull. Without her powers, she’d likely be dead. As it was, she was merely an empty shell who didn’t understand what people were saying to her in the few moments a day she drifted into wakefulness. She would never be Nubile again. She might never be Sarah again.

He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his mask as tears rolled down his cheeks. He lived in a world where a select subgroup of people never really died. He’d cheated death three times, Atomahawk had been dead twice, and Reset’s whole power was resurrecting himself; he sometimes died two or three times a day.

He knew, he knew, he knew that these were the exceptions, that every single day thousands of ordinary people died, and stayed dead. It made his pain so much sharper to know that he was alive while his father was still dead from strangulation, that he was alive while his mother was still dead from cancer, that he was alive after Amelia swallowed all those pills and choked on her own vomit. And Sarah, poor Sarah—why was she a vegetable while he was walking around healthier than ever thanks to a heart from the future?

He wiped his cheeks and sucked up the pain, turning the leather mask in his hands, until his true face stared up at him, judging, the empty eye slots full of scorn.

He rose, pulled on a robe that hung down to his ankles, and walked down the hall. He squinted as he stepped through the door at the end, moving from lamp light into overly bright fluorescent whiteness. The last three rooms of the wing had been transformed into a private hospital. On the other side of the glass, a doctor looked up at him, then turned away.

He went to her room.

Sarah Kontis Gray was sleeping in her white hospital bed. The room was oddly silent now that the respirator had been removed.
The nurse by the bedside, a thin black woman with streaks of gray in her hair, rose as he entered.

“She’s been sleeping well,” she whispered.

He nodded. In truth, though, he didn’t believe the words. In the three years they’d been together, he’d never seen Nubile sleep on her back. She always slept on her side, with her head pressed up against his shoulder. She looked so wrong on her back, with every muscle slack. The crisp white linens lay neatly across her. Normally when she slept, she was murder on blankets, tugging and tucking and stuffing them under body parts until everything was just right.

“Thank you,” Eric whispered as he turned away.

If he wanted to find comfort for his aching soul, this was not the place to look for it. He walked to the library, activated the hidden elevator, and rode down to the quiet room. He tossed the robe aside and pulled on his mask. The door slid open on the stone-lined chamber.

Lawrence David Rambo was slumped on the stone floor, snoring. His ankle was red and raw where the iron manacle held it. He was naked save for the leather bands around his neck and wrists. His body was covered with welts and purple bruises haloed in yellow.

Lawrence David Rambo wasn’t a supervillain. He was a petty scoundrel, seventeen years old, from a suburb near Baltimore. He’d discovered it was easy money to wave a gun around in small mom-and-pop stores out in the boonies, where he’d get away with a hundred bucks if he was lucky, a case of beer, maybe a roll of scratch-off lottery tickets. He’d never shot anyone, but he’d pistol-whipped a sixty-year-old woman who hadn’t been moving fast enough, and had once pointed his gun at an eight-year-old boy who’d been coming out of the restroom, forcing him to lie down and count to a hundred, shouting that if he stopped counting he’d die.

Lawrence David Rambo was white. His parents were middle-class. He’d been arrested twice for trivial crimes, but never even spent a full night in jail. He was the sort of kid the broken justice system would allow to slip through the cracks until he killed someone.

Retaliator doused him with a bucket of cold water.

The young man gasped awake, trembling.

“Ohgoddon’t,” he whimpered as he curled into a fetal position. “Ohpleaseohpleasedon’t.”

Retaliator looked down through his zippered eye-slits at the very worst of humanity. When other men thought of evil, they thought of villains like Hitler, or Osama bin Laden, or Prime Mover. But Retaliator saw the truth. The true evil of the world was insidious in its smallness, the petty, pointless meanness that would pistol-whip a grandmother or badger a crying child. The big evils of the world were easy to manage. Armies were sent after men like bin Laden. But the same governments that raised the armies would provide lawyers to men like Rambo, subhuman scum who had hurt people not for any grand plan of world conquest, but simply because it was easy to bully those weaker than him.

Save for his rebuilt heart, Retaliator possessed no superpowers. What he did possess that allowed him to stand beside demigods like Atomahawk was clarity of vision. He could see through the veil of excuses and justifications that society wove to hide the reality of the evil in their midst.

Eric Gray’s great power was his ability to see the world in black and white.

He selected a bullwhip from the wall, its tip studded with shards of broken glass.

His prisoner released a series of incoherent whimpers that Retaliator recognized as pleas for mercy.

Retaliator dropped his voice to a cold bass rumble. “Begging will only make me beat you harder.”

The young man slowly stilled his voice in a series of choked sobs.

“Or perhaps it’s silence that will infuriate me,” said Retaliator, raising the whip, knowing, in truth, nothing the boy did mattered anymore. He would never leave this room alive.

As Eric Gray, it was simple enough to obtain a seat in the gallery of the Supreme Court, even at the last second. She-Devil was in her human identity of Eula Leahy and accompanied him as his guest.
Ordinarily if he was seen around town in the company of a woman, it would be fodder for the tabloids, but Eula was a small-town librarian from Kansas who looked to be in her mid-sixties. In her gray pantsuit, she was nearly invisible in her normalness.

“Where’s Atomahawk?” she whispered as they took their seats.

“Fifty miles straight up,” Eric whispered back. “He can be here inside of five seconds once Prime Mover’s thugs show.”

“If they come,” said Eula. “Prime Mover stands a good chance of prevailing. Why would he pull something big like this?”

Retaliator didn’t answer her question before the bailiff called the room to silence and ordered everyone to rise. The nine judges filed into the room. Eric felt a stirring of sadness as he watched their black robes sway. He remembered his father’s robes from long ago.

Eight of the judges sat.

The chief justice, Lucas Shoen, remained standing. With a swift motion, a silver revolver dropped into his hand from his black sleeve. He placed the gun against his temple.

“Bring me the Law Legion,” he said, in a crisp British accent that Eric recognized immediately. There was a flurry of confusion as the guards stationed around the rooms drew their guns. Eric grabbed Eula and pushed her to the floor, hiding behind the benches.

“How could he soul-swap with Schoen?” Eula whispered. “When would they ever make eye contact? Prime Mover’s still in jail! I checked the magic mirror before I came here.”

Eric instantly saw the only possible answer. “The power must work no matter what body he’s in. He could jump from person to person for months, swapping every hour, until he arrived in the body he wanted. . . to. . .” His voice trailed off. “You have to leave,” he said.

Eula nodded, understanding. There was circumstantial evidence he’d possessed her once. She was among the most difficult of the Law Legion to track down; this whole event could have been staged just for the chance to possess her again.

In the time it took Eric to blink, Eula had vanished, slipping back into the Devil Cave.

Eric reached under the bench and grabbed his utility belt. There had been no way to get through security while wearing it, which is why he’d had Tempo time-walk into the building at five in the morning to plant it. He crushed a sleeping-gas pellet between his fingers. The people immediately around him fell like flies. Seconds later, people cried out in panic as the gas spread, incapacitating everyone. Retaliator pulled on his mask and sprinkled his five-thousand-dollar suit with the nanites he’d taken from Mothmaster. Instantly the wool fell to dust, revealing his costume. He fastened his utility belt as he stood, palming a concussion grenade.

Nearly everyone in the room had fallen now, save for the chief justice, who was held conscious by the full power of Prime Mover’s nearly matchless will.

“Hello, Eric,” said Prime Mover.

Retaliator didn’t blink.

“Surprised that I know your secret?” Prime Mover taunted.

“You were inside She-Devil for at least an hour,” said Retaliator. “I could uncover every secret of the Law Legion if I had ten unguarded minutes with the central computer. I imagine it might have taken you twenty.”

“Where are your friends, Eric?” said Prime Mover, pressing the pistol more tightly to his temple.

“It’s just you and me this time,” said Retaliator.

The chief justice’s left eye twitched. While his expression of satisfied smugness didn’t change, Retaliator knew that Prime Mover had to be disappointed by this news. No doubt he hoped to possess a more powerful hero, someone like—

A concentrated burst of energy flashed above them, leaving a perfect circle in the ceiling. The bright red form of Atomahawk streaked down from the sky, landing in the middle of the room, his fists wreathed with balls of white plasma. He stood with his back to Retaliator, facing the chief justice.

Retaliator started to scream a warning.

He got out the word “close” when the gun at the chief justice’s
temple disintegrated as Atomahawk’s atomavision ripped it apart at a subatomic level.

The word “your” ripped from his throat as the chief justice smiled.

The word, “eyes” crossed his lips as Atomahawk whirled around, now wearing the very same smile.

“Shit,” said Retaliator.

“Language,” said Prime Mover as he floated into the air, flexing Atomahawk’s fingers as if testing to see how well they fit.

Retaliator reached for the antispace grenade, a small box the size of a deck of cards that could destroy all matter within a three- foot sphere by creating a pocket of alternate physics where the Higgs boson had no mass.

His fingers never reached his belt before Atomahawk’s impossibly hot fingers closed around his throat and jerked him from his feet.

“This is more like it,” Prime Mover giggled. “The power of a living sun at my command! I’m going to kill a lot of people in the next sixty minutes, Eric. You, however, will not be one of them. You’ve humiliated me so often, Eric, that I don’t want your misery to ever end, Eric, Eric, Eric! When you learn what I’ve done to—”

Suddenly Atomahawk jerked backward, gasping as if he’d been stabbed. Retaliator fell from his slack grasp, landing, appropriately enough, on the prone form of Vance Davis, the attorney who’d been prepared to argue Prime Mover’s case.

Witness floated behind Atomahawk, his ghostly forearm reaching into the radioactive Indian’s back. Retaliator could tell from the position of the boy’s arm that his fingers were closed around Atomahawk’s heart. Prime Mover was getting a full dose of the graveyard touch.