The Totally Secret Origin of Foxman (3 page)

“Hamilton said, ‘Did I hear you tell those paramedics to take my client somewhere while he's unconscious and against the wishes of Camilla Hammer, his mother and legal guardian?'”

“The woman with the weird hair looked at him then and sniffed. ‘Do I smell lawyer?'”

“Hamilton handed her his card. ‘I am the chief legal officer for Foxhammer Industries, and my client is the primary shareholder and ex officio chairman of the board.'”

“I'm what now?” Blinking owlishly, I interrupted my mother's retelling of the earlier scene.

The voice of Marcus Hamilton spoke from somewhere behind her now. “You own a controlling interest in Foxhammer, worth one-point-seven billion dollars, though it's to remain in trust until you reach eighteen or pass a series of tests your father left for you. Likewise, about another billion and a half in mixed assets.”

That was terrifying. “Oh. My.”

The lawyer stepped forward. “Now that you're properly awake I need your authorization to make some phone calls—you are properly awake, aren't you?”

“I think so. Phone calls?”

“I need to speak with the woman your mother was telling you about. She's the director of OSIRIS, a government intelligence organization that is taking the lead on the aftermath of the bomb that killed your father. She became much more cooperative after I pointed out the sensitivity of grabbing the owner of one of America's most important defense contractors in the middle of a military emergency, but she was most insistent that she have the opportunity to talk with you if you recovered.”

“If?” I said.

My mother gripped my wrist. “We were so worried.”

“I guess I better talk with the lady from OSIRIS,” I said.

Marcus nodded. “I'll see to it. She calls herself Backflash.”

*   *   *

The next few weeks passed in a sort of manic blur.

I had a number of conversations with Backflash as she outlined the effects of what has since come to be known as the Hero Bomb on those with the right gene complexes. How we had been granted special gifts that we could use for good or evil, and how OSIRIS was hoping to steer our talents in the proper direction.

I also watched a lot of TV where the exploits of some of my fellow metahumans were making big news, and a whole new language was growing up to describe them. Most notable was Captain Commanding, with his amazing strength and near invulnerability, but there were many others, both heroic Masks and villainous Hoods. Some of the crimes sounded incredibly surreal, like the Dayton's department store where the entire contents of the menswear section had assembled themselves into matching outfits, broken out a glass door, and marched away into the night.

When I wasn't doing that or listening to mind-numbingly intense lectures about the family holdings and Foxhammer Industries from Hamilton, I was out in my dad's workshop behind the main house. Say what you will about my father, he made his money the hard way, by dint of a true engineering genius and an absolutely ruthless pursuit of the commercial ends of that genius. The carriage house he'd converted to a workshop was amazing, and I was … three-quarters out of my mind.

The machinery spoke to me.
All
machinery spoke to me, but especially the tools in the workshop. They wanted me to use them to build something amazing. I think much of my dad's soul, if such a thing exists, is there, tied forever to the machines he loved more than people. Working with them made that cold, empty place where my anger used to live feel less … dead.

I don't know if I can really express it properly. I didn't hate what my dad had done to my mom one tiny bit less. But the rage was gone and I had begun to admit to myself that much of the fire I'd felt was a desire to prove my father wrong. To make him admit how unfair his treatment of my mom had been, how unfair it was that he had forced me to choose between them, how unfair it was that he'd put me in a position where the only answer I could give the judge was the one I had. He took everything from her, everything but me. If I'd chosen him, it would have killed her. I loved them both, and I would have sold my soul not to have to make that choice, but because of him, I had to.

He forced me to push him away. I had wanted to make him see that, to apologize to me for making me destroy the relationship between us. Now that couldn't ever happen. My father was gone, and I could never make him ask me to forgive him. And if he didn't ask …

“Sir, are you all right?” Denmother's cool voice cut across my memories. “Your heart rate and blood pressure are both spiking into the red zone. Do you need me to administer a tranquilizer?”

I shook my head. “No.
This
is the point of the exercise. I need to do this, to feel it … I'll be all right.” I didn't believe that, but I couldn't stop now. It really was the point.

Working with my dad's tools, I built the first iteration of the Foxman suit. On TV I'd watched Captain Commanding and some of the others picking up
tanks
and throwing them around. I wasn't anything like that strong, but I
knew
that I could be. Stronger even. I just had to build my own muscles. My dad had gone beyond my reach, but his spirit spoke to me in the sizzle of the welder and the whine of the metal saw. I hammered out my new identity on the forge of his soul.

*   *   *

Most of the world thinks of the battle with Spartanicus—when I saved Captain Commanding's life—as the first appearance of Foxman. That's because I never told anyone about my fight with the Haberdasher—the day I broke my best friend …

I went over every inch of the suit again. I'd been able to run isolation trials with all of the weapons, and with the force amplification generated by the muscle boosters one arm or leg at a time, but the rockets didn't work that way. Testing them was an all-in kind of bet. Either the crude flight AI I'd built would allow me to successfully pilot something with the lift aspect of a brick, or it wouldn't, and I would run into something solid at several hundred miles per hour. If the latter happened, the armor
might
save me. Or, then again, it might not.

I don't think I'd have tried it if I was completely sane, but I wasn't even close at that point. In addition to the changes the Hero Bomb had wrought in making my body stronger and tougher, it had done a major rewiring job on my brain. And those aspects weren't even close to settled at that point. I suspect that all of us who have acquired powers of the mind through exposure to the radiation that triggers the metahuman gene cascade go a bit mad for a time. Especially those of us who came to it young, when the brain is stewing in hormones.

When I finished with the maintenance checklist on the armor proper, I took the tail off and ran one last pressure test before filling it with a special hydrazine-based fuel mix I'd concocted. That was the original reason for the tail—somebody always asks. It provided me with an external tank for rocket fuel, and that made sense for all kinds of reasons, starting with ease of separation if something went wrong, and ending with keeping the major explosives on the other side of the armor from my precious hide. The tail was never just about decoration, though I've always thought it looked great. Tails are cool.

Once I armored up, I slipped into the darkened yard and toggled the fuel valve. Hydrazine flowed through armored lines on the outside of my legs down to the ports in the rocket nozzles in my boots. Taking a deep breath, I lowered my hands to my sides and engaged the catches on the steel bat wings that I used on that first version of the suit. Raising my arms to ninety degrees gave me something of the look of a flying squirrel.

I engaged the rockets …

FWOOOOSH!

The next five minutes involved more direction changes than a bouncy ball shot into an empty concrete mixer and more close calls than a tap-dancing buffalo in a crowded antique shop. I had to open my helmet and throw up—twice. But at the end of that time, I was flying in a more or less controlled fashion. That wanted a destination, so I decided to stop back at our secret clubhouse and pick up some of the gear I'd left there. I landed at the back door a few minutes later, opened it, and …

Picture the storeroom for a costume shop at the largest theater you ever heard of—filled with endless rows and heaps of the most bizarre and wonderful outfits you can imagine. Picture several such rooms. Toss the contents into the biggest clothes dryer in the whole world. Start it up. When it's spinning its fastest, open the door. The inside of the warehouse looked like the laundromat in the middle of that clothing explosion.

There were clothes everywhere and in every possible attitude. Heaps of clothes, racks of clothes, entire outfits hanging in the air like sales displays sans the mannequins, shirts arranged like the petals of some gigantic sartorial rose, rows of pants caught seemingly mid–dance number. It was a pandemonium of sartorial excess, and it filled the warehouse from floor to ceiling.

What had been going on while I was away?

I started picking my way toward the offices and my own little workroom. I had crossed perhaps fifteen feet when a green-faced figure in a gray suit and a bowler hat leaped at me out of one of the piles of clothing, swinging an umbrella at my face. It happened so quickly I didn't have time to do anything before the umbrella hit my steel muzzle and snapped. Then I overreacted, pointing my left fist at the thing's chest and firing both of my wrist-mounted rockets.

They punched straight through and blew up a huge mound of clothing on the other side. For one horrified moment I was certain I'd killed someone. But despite the gaping holes in its chest, the figure didn't fall, and once I had a moment to really look at it, I realized it was nothing more than an empty suit. Literally. There was no one inside the gray wool coat and pants, and what I had initially taken for a face was actually a handbag made to look like a huge green apple perched between the white shirt's collar and the bowler hanging above.

Creepy!

The suit lunged. Extending the broken umbrella like a rapier, it drove the jagged end into the eye socket of my helmet. That startled me, but didn't do any harm, as it encountered an inch-thick circle of bulletproof glass and bent double. Spinning, I extended the blades that took the place of rockets on my left wrist and sliced the outfit in half. It crumpled and fell to the floor. But even as I started to breathe a little sigh of relief, I saw other outfits staggering up from the piles—an entire army of empty suits rising to assault me like some twisted allegory for corporate America.

I should have turned back, but I was closer to the offices than the exits, and I fought my way forward, slicing down one faceless attacker after another until a great wave of sweatpants tumbled me and I broke my blades on the concrete floor. I might have gone under and stayed under then, but I saw the office block through a gap in the fleecy waves and triggered a brief burst from my boot rockets, launching me forward through the open doorway. Before I'd even come to a stop I kicked the door shut behind me.

Rising to hands and knees, I glanced around. Through the inner door on my left, I could see Michael working away on his sewing machine. At least, I presumed it was Michael—it certainly looked like him from the back, though what I could see of his outfit looked even wilder than his usual style. A natty bottle-green collar was just visible above the red velvet of his long coat, while a tall black top hat rose above.

“Is that you under all that banal ironmongery, Rand?” It was Michael's voice, but wrong somehow—simultaneously muffled and manic.

I nodded, then realized he couldn't see me without turning around—which made me wonder about his comment on my armor. “Yeah, are you all right, Michael?”

“Michael is dead,” he replied. Then he stood and slowly turned around.

In addition to the tall hat and what was now revealed to be a Regency-style velvet topcoat, he wore a pair of tight black trousers and high, polished riding boots. His face was partially hidden behind a sort of veil made from black netting that fell all the way to his cravat. Wide measuring tapes crossed his chest in an X, like a pair of bandoliers. They were studded with dozens of shining needles, as well as a wide variety of pearl and shell buttons, tiny spools of thread, thimbles, and other tools of the sewing trade.

“If Michael's dead, who are you?” I asked. “And how did he die?”

“I am the Haberdasher, though I was Michael Damian right up until you killed him.”

“I … What now?”

“You murdered him along with that ruined suit you so casually discarded.”

“Suit, wha—” But then I remembered staggering home after the Hero Bomb and borrowing a suit from the rack here. “Wait, that thing?” I leaned forward into the doorway. “It was more than half wrecked when I put it on. Surely you're not going to freak out about
that
?”

“That was the suit that founded a stitchery empire,” replied the Haberdasher. “My mother hand sewed it for my father so that he'd have something appropriate to wear to the bank when he asked for a loan to start their haberdashery business. It was the one true thing I had left from my parents' life, and you practically destroyed it! It told me all about your abuse and the way you threw it out the window—threw it away like garbage!”

Before I could so much as take one step farther a whole swarm of designer jeans leaped on me from behind, squeezing and tugging—half blinding me. I had to do something quickly, or the horrible Haberdasher's army of animate apparel would be the end of me! I activated the tiny circular saw in the back of my right gauntlet. If I could just cut through the death-dealing denim without slicing my own throat …

But even as I cautiously applied saw to fabric, a precisely aimed fedora wedged under the edge of the spinning blade, causing it to seize with a sharp whining sound. Within seconds I had strips of denim pressing deep into the hinge mechanisms of my armor at knees and elbows, binding them up and rendering much of my amplified strength moot. When a seam slipped past my neckpiece and started to cut off the blood to my brain I knew I only had seconds to act …