Vs Reality (10 page)

Chapter Fifteen – Recovery

New York City
August 26, 2011
5:21 am , Eastern Daylight Time

The alley behind Platinum resembles a war zone after a skirmish in a third-world country. Blood. Fire. Asphalt pulverized into dust. A thick plume of black smoke belches from the twisted remains of an overturned police cruiser and bodies litter the crime scene.

Peacekeeper Doug and peacekeeper Reggie are lifeless, limbs folded and twisted in unnatural directions.

Heinreich, however, begins to show signs of life; his chest rises and falls in long labored breaths, wheezing into a shallow puddle of rainwater that’s shot through with crimson.

Paige and Brodie emerge from the warehouse with Jens stumbling a few steps behind. He stops in the doorway and rubs his eyes, gazing out at the carnage in disbelief. He heard the explosion echo inside the warehouse, but had no way of knowing that this was the result.

Brodie, still weak from his manifestation, leans against a nearby dumpster and peers at Paige, his reddened eyes spiderwebbed with tiny veins. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Definitely.” Paige pulls a set of keys from her front pocket and lobs them to Brodie. He catches them with two hands. “Pull the van around and we’ll load these guys in.”

“These guys? You want to bring
Heinreich
back to the penthouse, too? Are you out of your mind?”

Paige tilts her head back, pinching the bridge of her nose under her glasses. “Alright Brodie, what do
you
suggest?”

Jens flicks his eyes between Paige and Brodie, wondering who they are, and why they came to his rescue, and where in the blue hell Cole disappeared to. “Look, I’m glad you guys untied me and everything, but I’m a little out of it here…”

“All right Paige,” Brodie continues, ignoring Jens. “Let’s say we bring this big German bastard back to the penthouse and tie him up.
Then
what? What if he breaks loose and goes all Jurassic Park on our asses? If we want to control him we need some real muscle, which means Cole; and in case you haven’t noticed, he jumped through a portal to The Basement because the dude is clearly out of his freakin’ mind.”

Jens’s confusion deepens, as if that’s even possible at this point. “Hold on dude…Cole jumped where, through a
what
? And what’s going on with that car? Why is it upside down?” Scanning the alley, Jens notices a pair of portly men in bloodstained white shirts. If they’re not dead, they can’t be far off. “Who...wait, are those
peacekeepers
? Did you guys kick the shit out of them? Oh man, this is
so
not good. We need to book, STAT.”

Paige shushes Jens with an outstretched finger, and continues thundering at Brodie. “And in case
you
haven’t noticed,
my
sister
followed him in, which means they could have both been captured. If we want to arrange a trade to get them back we need a bargaining chip; if we have one of their Collectors maybe they’ll negotiate. If we leave him here we have nothing.”

Brodie relents, sagging into the dumpster. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He’s too exhausted to argue.

Tired of being ignored, Jens finally explodes with a face-reddening outburst. “Will someone tell me where Cole is, who those dead guys are, and what the holy
fuck
is going on here?!”

Brodie studies Jens for a moment, confounded, as if he’d just materialized out of thin air like a tiny blond apparition. “Paige…who is this?”

“
OHMYGOD
,” she blurts out, throwing her hands apart. “This is
Jens,
remember? He’s the guy we came here to save. Cole’s friend…?”

Brodie glances at Jens and then back at Paige, unconvinced.

“In the warehouse…?” she adds, gesturing to the building at her side like she’s presenting it as a prize on a game show.

A moment passes before a Brodie’s bloodshot eyes show even the vaguest hint of recognition. “Ahh…right. I remember now.” He reaches out to Jens, palm open. “I’m Brodie Hamilton. Nice to meet you, bro.”

“I know,” Jens mutters. “You said me that a few minutes ago…when we met in the warehouse.”

Paige pushes past Jens and presses her thumb into Brodie’s eyelid, propping it open. “Brodie, how much Muse did you take?”

He shrugs weakly. “I don’t know…how many pills are there in a bottle, usually?”

New York City
August 26, 2011
5:47 am, Eastern Daylight Time

Franco yawns, stretching his arms overhead. A sliver of hazy orange daylight stretches across the lobby’s white marble tiles, past the concierge desk, reflecting off the ornate chandelier that dangles from the ceiling. He breathes a small sigh of relief. It’s morning –
finally
. The graveyard shift is almost over.

A vibration tickles his upper thigh. He pulls the phone from his pocket and glances at the screen, and a moment later he wishes he hadn’t.

It’s a text from Paige Davenport, his
other
employer. Her message doesn’t contain any words (they never do); she’d sent him a simple three-digit number that conveys the nature of her predicament: ‘911’.

“Merda,” he mutters under his breath.

Franco replies with a ‘thumbs up’ emoji and pockets the device. After grumbling a profanity-laced tirade he rolls an uncomfortable stool beneath him and begins to clack away at a bulky desktop computer, accessing the building’s control panel. A few keystrokes trigger a loud clank that reverberates down the elevator shaft, followed by a chime. Emergency protocols – everything on lockdown. A few more clacks shut down the lobby’s security cams; the digital ones, anyway. Another camera still runs on old-school cassettes to provide a back-up copy, but that can be erased easily enough.

He texts her back. ’10-4’.

A moment later the lobby doors crash open. Brodie and a skinny blond kid he doesn’t recognize drag a body by its tree-trunk sized legs; a giant of a man wearing board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. He’s beaten and bruised, streaking the pristine tiles with a river of sticky blood as they inch him towards the elevators.

Under normal circumstances, dragging a bloody, unconscious four-hundred pound man though the lobby of a high-rent condominium, right in the heart of New York City, would be problematic. Impossible, even, if you wanted to escape detection. With over ninety-five thousand surveillance cameras and eighteen million people living inside the cramped city limits,
someone
is bound to see you.

Luckily, Dia and Paige have Franco: an Italian exchange student who works part time as the concierge of their building to help pay his tuition fees. The gawky nineteen-year-old with a week’s worth of beard stubble and a tangled mess of curly black hair might not be the sharpest crayon in the box, but he’s as loyal as they come. And the ungodly pile of cash that Dia deposits into his Swiss bank account on the first of every month is able to purchase a
lot
of loyalty. Misdirecting law enforcement, forging visitor logs and deleting surveillance videos are just some of his regular tasks. But, unfortunately, he has one additional responsibility this evening: mopping.

Paige saunters in behind them sucking a lollypop, her thickly-soled combat boots echoing with every step as she strides across the tile. She sidesteps the crimson streak that stretches across the expansive corridor.

Franco lifts his hand with a semblance of a wave and Paige replies with a perfunctory nod. He’s not sure if they’re dragging a dead body up to the penthouse, or if this man is somehow, miraculously, still alive – and he doesn’t
want
to know. As far as he’s concerned the less he knows about this situation the better.

Without instruction he steps out from behind the crescent-shaped security desk and walks to the service elevator, and types a seven-digit code into a silver keypad on the wall. After a high-pitched ping the doors slide open.

Jens and Brodie groan, struggling to roll Heinreich’s gargantuan frame into the elevator. Like a car stuck in a fresh snow bank, the massive German requires a few rocks back and forth before gaining enough momentum,  finally flopping into the lift.

Paige presses the penthouse button. She flashes Franco a wink before the doors pull shut.

“Merda.” He shuffles towards the janitor’s closet and wheels out a plastic bucket filled with sponges and rags. Before dropping to his knees to scrub the tiles he closes his eyes and repeats the same mantra in his head that he’s been repeating for the last several months, and with increasing frequency:
One more semester. Just one more semester.

New York City
August 26, 2011
6:28 am, Eastern Daylight Time

“So what you’re telling me is that you, Brodie and that tattooed goth chick are all superheroes?” Brodie shakes his head at Paige’s torn concert shirt, black leggings and combat boots. She has the wardrobe totally wrong. He can imagine her entrenched in a sweat-drenched mosh pit at a Nine Inch Nails gig, but definitely not saving the world.

Paige illuminates the theater room with a tap of her phone. “Her name is Dia and no,” she says, exasperated, “that’s
not
what I’m saying at all. Do I need to run you through the entire slideshow again?”

Jens has been treated to the same PowerPoint presentation and speech that Cole had, but seems somewhat less surprised by the revelation. He’d taken the red pill, tumbled down the rabbit hole and seen through the looking glass – and now he was on the other side. And he was surprisingly cool with it.

His mind immediately spins, reeling at the innumerable possibilities. The sheer number of applications that these newfound abilities could be used for was staggering. “Okay, so you’re
not
a superhero, technically,” he clarified, “But you’re all super
powered
…right?”

Paige shrugs. “I guess. In a way.”

“So you’re telling me you’ve never patrolled the city comic book-style? Never put on a gold thong and a metal bra, jumping from one rooftop to the next swinging a giant katana?” He mimes the action of a two-handed sword slicing through the air, making the appropriate whooshing noises to further illustrate his point.

Paige crinkles her nose. “Gold thong? First of all, e
w
, and secondly, no, of course not. What kind of comic books are
you
reading?”

“Mostly stuff from the mid-90s,” he admits.

“Well that explains it. But no, that’s not what we do here; no thongs, no katanas, and no outfits with a copious amount of pouches. We lay low and try to keep off the Collectors radar. Well, we
did
...until tonight, that is. Your boyfriend Cole talked my idiot sister into a suicide mission, and here we are.”

“And Cole’s a superhero too?”

Paige sighs again, massaging her forehead. “Sure.”

“All this time and he never told me.” Jens is impressed, but can’t help feeling left out of the loop. He and Cole are more than best friends, they’re more like brothers. They have been since grade school. Back in the day they played Duck Hunt instead of Halo, and chugged root beer instead of actual beer, but the unbreakable bond has been there nonetheless, and it’s never been broken. How could he keep something like this from me? Jens thinks, his lips curling into a small frown. And why hasn’t he used this power to win more fights? Damn, the bets I could be placing...

“He didn’t know,” Paige assures him. “He couldn’t have.”

He rises from his recliner. “Well now that Cole’s got his powers, he’s going to do some pretty awesome shit with them.”

She scoffs, snorting out a tiny laugh. “Pfft.”

Jens repeats the dismissive sound effect. “‘Pfft? What the hell does ‘pfft’ mean?”

“It means ‘don’t count on it’,” Paige says, her voice leveling off to a monotone.

Jens can’t help but smile. Cole is a boy scout; if anyone can relate to the hackneyed ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ riff, it’s him. There’s no way he’ll let these powers go to waste. “You don’t know him.”

“I know
people
,” she replies. “I’ve been around, and I know what they’re capable of. As soon as someone gets their first taste of power – even if it’s just a tiny sip – they’re hooked. Like a junkie with a needle in their arm. Having power just leads to wanting
more
power, and on and on it goes.”

“Wow,” Jens says with a slow nod, both impressed and a little shocked. “And I thought that
I
was a cynical dick. You make me look like a fuckin’ Disney character.”

“I’ve seen people I care about go down a dark path,” she says gravely. “The kind of power that your buddy has...it’s
scary
. He’s wild, untamed. You didn’t see him go off in the alley. That guy has serious rage built up inside him, and when he finally uncorked...” Jens didn’t see what Paige saw just a few short hours ago. The parking lot behind Platinum was dimly lit and the scene was chaotic, but through the hurricane of violence she could still see Cole’s eyes. His furious, burning eyes that swirled with a madness that sent a cold blade of fear into her gut. It’s a look she’d seen only once before.

“So where are Dia and Cole now?” Jens asks.

“The Basement.”

“Right,” Jens says, holding up a finger. “The Basement. You mentioned that place during your presentation but there wasn’t a slide.”

“Yeah, they don’t exactly have a website, and as far as I know they’re not scheduling tours. Kinda hard to snap a photo.”

“So how do they get out?”

Paige lets out a long breath, eyes trailing the floor. “I don’t know that anyone ever has.”

“You seem pretty calm about this. Too calm.”

“Dia is the toughest person I’ve ever met,” Paige says without a trace of irony. “Always has been. And we were army brats, moving from one base to another, growing up around some very legit bad-asses, so when I say she’s
the
toughest of the tough, I’m not exaggerating. She can hold her own. And she’ll take care of your little friend.”

“So what now?”

“Now we get some answers.” Paige marches out the theater room’s double doors, down the hall, and towards the kitchen. It’s time to interrogate their hostage.