Chapter 38:
The Alley Hawk
When the Alley Hawk told Kate the City was built on a honeycomb of caverns and tunnels, he was not exaggerating. Over the years, he'd used these tunnels as a means of escape, a way to monitor villains undetected, a place to store extra equipment, and more. But even he had only explored a small percentage of these passageways. There was a time that Doc Silence, Coldwall and the Alley Hawk had uncovered an entire civilization of humanoids living deeper down, miles below the surface of the City, a blind and violent species dying rapidly from germs they'd picked up on scavenging visits to the surface.
They're probably all dead now, Hawk thought as he made his way into the Labyrinth's sewer system through one of these honeycomb branches. One of the first things the Alley Hawk did when the Labyrinth was built was find a way in. It had been a six-month spelunking project, poking around the outskirts of the Labyrinth in long-forgotten tunnels before finding a chink in the armor of the prison.
He'd been back here countless times. Mostly to make sure his secret entrance was still viable and had not yet been discovered, but sometimes to visit old enemies in the Labyrinth. One might suggest he was taunting them by visiting them in the shadows when no guards were around, but the enemies the Alley Hawk had locked up in the Labyrinth were a strange lot. Most were happy to have the company.
Over the decades, your nemeses become like old friends, Hawk thought. Because they are your polar opposite, but they are also sometimes the only ones who truly understand what it is you do.
Doc and Coldwall had multiple and often competing theories on where the city's tunnels came from. Doc thought they were the remnants of some pre-human civilization, some species so long gone from the Earth as to be completely forgotten. Alternately, Doc suspected the tunnels were what he called the Lower Realms bubbling up, a break in reality.
Coldwall, the scientist of the group, thought they were post-volcanic, natural if unique formations. He tried mapping them once and found nothing but interference below a certain depth.
For the Alley Hawk, though, what happened too far below street level mattered little. He just needed those veins nearest the surface to help him get around.
The Alley Hawk came to the ventilation shaft he had used year after year to sneak inside the Labyrinth and climbed inside. The other side was a long, empty corridor, dank with condensation, a forgotten tunnel far below the cells. He had some climbing to do, but the mission itself was straightforward. Open the main gates. There were plenty of ways to get those doors open if you knew how. It was just a matter of getting a dozen stories higher and finding the right computer terminal to abuse.
And once that was done, the Alley Hawk had a few people to visit, to remind them why they were on the inside.
He cocked his head to one side, listening.
Things might have become more complicated, he thought. Because those are definitely alarms.
Chapter 39:
Storm Front
The clouds rolled in with deliberate malice over the Labyrinth, a towering sheaf of black and purple, veined with blue lightning. The air around the prison dropped in temperature with incredible speed, turning a warm day into a dark and threatening afternoon. Rain soon followed, sheeting rain, the kind that kicks up a veil of mist as it strikes pavement. The storm was large enough to cover the Labyrinth's island footprint, and no more, a perfect umbrella over the building, where it came to a complete stop and simply remained, as if some supernatural force had turned its angry eye on the place.
Huge bolts of lightning struck the building, once, twice, three times in quick succession, rocking the structure and shorting out electronics.
In the main office of the Labyrinth, guards and techs worked together to make sure surveillance equipment still operated properly. Still others looked out the window at the torrential downpour, swearing under their breath as they watched rain fall so hard it splashed back up into the sky — as if the ground was not strong enough to contain it.
Prevention strode into the office and threw her arms up in annoyance.
"Someone want to tell me what's going on?" she said.
Rourke, one of her own officers, had been standing over the shoulder of one of the surveillance techs. He answered without taking his eyes off the screen.
"Big old storm front just settled on top of us," he said. "This can't be a natural occurrence."
"Of course not," Prevention said. "Want to make a bet these little freaks made buddies with the mobile storm they fought last year?"
"Any orders, Agent?" Rourke said.
"Stay on high alert, but don't do anything yet," she said. "This place is built to lock up monsters, it can withstand a few lightning strikes. Tell me if something more pressing shows up."
"Like this?" Rourke said, gesturing at a monitor.
Prevention joined him and hovered over the computer screen. Standing outside the front gates were two hooded figures. Their faces were obscured by shadow, one wore a hooded sweatshirt, the other some kind of oversized parka. The one in the sweatshirt had a spear resting against his shoulder. Prevention almost started laughing. A spear.
"Oh you've got to be kidding me," Prevention said.
"It looks like they're waiting for an invitation to come inside," Rourke said.
"Pretty much," Prevention said. "Scramble two Distribution suit pilots. If these two idiots are still standing there in five minutes, I want both suits outside. It looks like the werewolf and the vigilante have come to try to spring their friends."
"Do you want them to engage?"
"Cautiously," Prevention said. "I want them brought in alive. Especially the vigilante. She and I have some things to talk about."
And then the room went red as a warning alarm sounded.
"Oh please tell me what wonderful thing just happened?" Prevention said.
"Ma'am? Sir?" one of the surveillance techs chimed in. "We have a problem."
"Of course we have a problem. Why wouldn't we have a problem," Prevention said. "What now?"
"We appear to have an issue with some of our cell doors."
"Let me guess," Prevention said. "The Indestructibles are loose."
"Their door is one of the cells that's no longer locked," the tech said.
"One of?"
"Don't murder me," the tech said.
"One of how many? Answer before I make you bleed out through your nostrils," Prevention said.
"At least five doors are no longer locked."
Prevention looked at Rourke, who nodded back at her.
"You deal with the internal threat. Make sure the pilots are ready with the Distribution suits."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to see where I can do the most harm, and I'm going to go there," Prevention said. "Now move."
Chapter 40:
Inmates
Golem had sat in his cell patiently for years. That's what Golem did, he waited. What else does six hundred pounds of sentient clay do but wait?
Guards delivered food. They gave him books. They even set up a television for him. Other inmates were jealous of Golem, because they saw he was often given strange perks others had to work for, but these other inmates didn't realize that the perks weren't gifts or rewards. The warden and his men simply could not figure out what Golem did, sitting there alone in the dark, and so they looked for distractions, for entertainment, for anything that might shake him out of his fugue state, staring at the wall, yellowed eyes moving only to blink. Once a day someone would spray him down, not as torture, but because the heroes who brought him here said Golem's body required water to stay healthy and pliant, and this was part of their conditions for releasing him to the prison for captivity. He wasn't to be treated cruelly, because, as the heroes once told the warden, Golem was not at fault for what he was. A terrible man had made a terrible weapon and breathed life into it, and this is where the monster named Golem came from. He was an automaton, a living machine, and all he knew in this world was destruction and pain.
So they watered him, and they gave him gifts, and they tried to find some way to bring about a human reaction from the clay creature.
But for years, Golem waited, and dreamed. He waited for his release, and he dreamed of destroying his captors and returning to his master.
And then, one ordinary night, his door clicked open.
Golem rose to his full height and walked out into the hallway. His dreams had been answered.
* * *
No one liked guard duty on the Improviser's cell.
The main reason was the most obvious. He had been given, as a concession, a number of rubber balls to occupy himself with in solitary confinement. The Improviser would spend almost all of his waking hours bouncing the balls against his cell walls, more than a normal human mind should be able to keep track of, whipping the toys — an older generation might have called them Super Balls — against flat surfaces and either dodging them expertly to let the balls ricochet off a different surface or catching one and throwing it against another wall to build its momentum back up.
This went on all day, every day, the
pock pock pock
of bouncing balls, the soft hiss as the prisoner threw the balls with incredible dexterity and speed.
And when the insanity-inducing bouncing noises weren't happening, the Improviser would talk to his captors. He had a way of getting you caught up in a normal conversation, but then the man would start sneaking in probing questions, uncomfortable questions, queries designed to make you angry or self-conscious, or just to simply leave you squirming.
The Improviser had been waging a psychological war on the Labyrinth's staff for years. He ended up here after a normal prison failed to hold him more than once, and a high security prison became a killing zone as he tried to fight his way out using a broken dinner tray and a sharpened piece of tile.
And so he ended up here, nestled between science experiments and monstrous mutations, a man whose reputation for turning anything into a weapon simply wasn't sufficient enough to explain just how dangerous he was.
The Improviser was in the middle of one of his bouncing sessions when he heard his cell door unlock. He waited, listening for an approaching guard's footsteps. Many times his jailors had taken to sitting further down the hall, out of earshot of his taunts or his bouncing rubber balls. Hearing nothing, the Improviser scooped up two handfuls of rubber balls and went into the hallway, knowing in his hands, even a child's toy could be used for murder.
* * *
The woman meditating in her cell would have easily been mistaken for someone far less exotic, a school teacher, perhaps, someone with a wholesome job and a healthy family. This was part of her success as one of the world's most successful professional assassins, moving among ordinary folk, never standing out, never making a scene. The most common thing said about the woman, who was known professionally as the Knife, was that she reminded each person of their mother, or sister, or best friend from school, some coworker they remembered having nice conversations with but couldn't quite place.
The most common expression on her victims' faces was one of bewilderment as they lay dying, their last thought: how do I know her?
Ordinary prisons couldn't hold her, where she blended in, disappeared, became hard to track, even harder to control. Other inmates and guards would vanish and be found dead days later, no sign that they had ever encountered the Knife, often without any immediate sign there had been any reason to earn her wrath. Eventually something would come to light, a threat, a bribe, but by then the trail would have grown cold.
It took superhuman heroes to capture her and the Labyrinth to hold her. Each night she would run through the list of people she would enact revenge on for doing her wrong. Specific guards, specific heroes, and at the top of her list, the international criminal warlord who hired her for her last job, and abandoned her to a life of captivity. He would die last, she thought, and die slowest.
Her cell door clicked open, and the Knife walked out, calmly and smoothly, as if she had been expecting an invitation to go on a stroll the entire time.
* * *
The December Man's cell was slick with ice, the walls crusted like a neglected freezer. The Labyrinth pumped in excess heat through armored vents, a move made years ago when they realized the December Man's control over the cold could reach out through any opening in his cell, weakening doors, turning the hallway outside into an ice slick. The warden ordered cells on either side kept empty for fear that the December Man's impact on the adjoining rooms' temperatures would cause those inmates irreparable harm.
And so they kept the December man under control through forced hot hair and exceptional insulation.
He appeared from the outside to be made of nothing but ice, a crystalline man who had, in captivity, let himself go to seed. Long spiky tendrils of ice formed a beard and that spilled down his chest, and his hair had grown into sharp icicles running down his back. Sometimes he paced, but mostly, like his neighbor the Golem, the December Man sat still, sleeping deeply, his red, red eyes sometimes becoming dark slits in his face made of frostbite.
He wasn't always this empty. Once he had been a king among men, a small god. But like all fairy tales before they are cleansed and purified, his was a tragic story, when the Woman of May was taken from him, when his world was destroyed, when everything he loved was torn from his grasp.
All he had ever wanted was revenge. He never knew who he wanted revenge from, or who to enact it on, but when your world is shattered like a fallen icicle onto the hard ground, reason doesn't matter, rational thought is useless.
He just wanted to share his sadness with the world by making it as joyless as he had become.
But heroes of men had stood up against him, had stopped his rampage, stopped it more than once, and finally imprisoned him here. They called him a Shakespearean tragedy. But the December Man discovered nothing in the works of Shakespeare, nor any writer, which reached the depths of his despair. And so he sat in his cell, afloat on his own sadness, wondering if the powers that turned him into the December Man would grant him immortality, or if there was some final end on the horizon. He would have welcomed it, but with each passing year he grew more and more sure that he, like the winter, would always return. No oblivion awaited him at the end.
But when the door unlocked, the December Man decided it had been far too long since someone else felt the way he felt. He held out his hand and a shaft of ice began to take shape, branching into three points, becoming a razor-tipped trident.
He walked into the hall, leaving trails of ice and snow in his wake, looking for someone to vent his unhappiness upon.
* * *
The guards did their best not to look at the Vermin King. He knew this, and enjoyed it, waiting in the bronze, dim light of his cell, his strange face, skin stretched tight over needle-like teeth, eyes black and without pupils, his pitted ears sweeping back unnaturally from his head. He would smile broadly when they made eye contact, his mouth unnaturally wide, so misshapen you could see his molars when he grinned. If they refused to make eye contact, he would drag sharp claws across the floor,
clitter clatter, scritch scratch.
This place was strangely clean, he thought, so sterile that he rarely saw bugs let alone mice or rats roaming the dark hallways. He wondered how they kept the place so clean. It didn't seem possible. Perhaps they believed the rumors that he could control infestations and kept him in a vacuum-sealed zone. Sadly, he thought, he had no magical ability over rats. He just thought they were good company.
He often spoke in riddles, and in the past few years had taken to scratching poetry and songs into the walls with his nails. Dark fairy tales, often based on his own experiences, the murders he committed, the crimes he planned. The dragon in those stories was always part hawk, an ugly, scarred beast roaming rooftops looking for prey. The hawk had always been his enemy, never rising to his bait, never going too far in retaliation.
No, rarely going too far. The Vermin King had pushed the Alley Hawk to the edge a few times over the years. He was not immune to The Vermin King's games, simply slower to rise to anger.
The Vermin King scratched at his pink, wrinkled skin and swished his prehensile tail around, trying to remember a song, a dirty little ditty he might sing to taunt the guards. It had been a few days since he'd been so overt, but the guards were distant tonight for some reason. It had been hours since anyone had come to check on him. He knew this was an odd occurrence, because they didn't trust him alone. He got into mischief too easily.
And then the alarm sounded, and the Vermin King's heart began to race. He'd been so bored for so very long.
His cell door unlocked.
Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity, he pushed the door open and headed out into the hallway, the tiles of the corridor cool and new beneath his bare, clawed feet. He looked left, he looked right, he took a deep breath.
A familiar smell in the air. An old enemy. The man who put him here.
"Have you come to visit?" the Vermin King said, to himself. "I've missed you so."
He took off down the hallway, back hunched like some hairless rat's, in search of a man he had wanted to kill for most of his life.