Chapter Thirty Four
Only a decade into the superhero era, we are already seeing recycled names. Possibly this is because there are only so many cool
superhero codenames. Certainly in the case of Watchman, Chicago’s new Sentinel, it’s not a legacy-name; its previous owner was a
B Class aerokinetic who worked for Night Patrol in San Francisco. The Sentinels paid Watchman’s estate an undisclosed sum to
acquire all copyright and trademark rights to the name, just so their newest Atlas-type recruit wouldn’t be called Awesome Man.
From Terry Reinhold’s City Watch Column
* * *
When Fisher said he wanted to show me something, it was usually a body. He never said it was, but I was getting good at
anticipating the need to disassociate from the next thing I saw. I didn’t have anything scheduled till the afternoon training
sessions and I’d been ordered to take it easy anyway, so I checked out with Dispatch while Fisher called ahead. Dispatch listed
me as Active, allowing Watchman (who’d stood up for me since Sunday) to fly out to Washington. Since Fisher wanted to talk
enroute, he drove me down to the Cook County Morgue.
To my surprise, the Chief Medical Examiner took time for us herself. Dr. Abigail Sinclair had a warm Southern drawl and a laugh
that dripped like honey. She smelled like vanilla, wore pearls with her suit, and liked to touch whoever she talked to—which was
mostly Fisher. She took us up two floors to a smaller examination room where she’d laid out two bodies.
“Here we are, sugar,” she said. “I kept our last two; we couldn’t keep the family from claiming victim number one.”
Fisher shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem, Doc. Can you tell Astra what you told me?”
Snapping on some gloves, she twitched aside the cover over the first body to bare the head and torso. I swallowed.
“The medical term for this is cooked,” Dr. Sinclair “Call me Abby” said. “Which is impossible.”
The body hadn’t been burned, even I could see that. It—he—still had his dark shock of hair and thick eyebrows.
“The victim’s clothes were intact,” she said to me. “Not even singed, and he collapsed in the middle of a crowd. Until then
nobody noticed him. The first reading of his core temperature was ridiculous; he couldn’t have been alive, let alone walking down
a street, and the degree of...baking…indicated he’d been that hot for hours.”
Fisher watched me, and I forced myself to think about what I was looking at. There was something wrong about it, and not just the
condition of the body.
I opened my mouth, and a different question spilled out. “Was it… did it hurt?”
“No way to tell, kid,” Fisher said softly. “But I don’t think so. Witnesses said he was just walking slowly, and dropped
without a sound. Like he’d passed out. The others were the same.”
That helped, but he didn’t offer anything else, which wasn’t like him. Even Abby looked puzzled.
When I took a step closer, the wrongness grew. I spun to look at Fisher.
“This is—”
“This is what?”
“Magic.” The body didn’t have the same too-real feeling of the special room in the Dome, but it was close—like a lingering
smell or fading after-image.
Fisher didn’t blink. “And the other one?” I stepped around to the second table, shaking my head when Abby offered to uncover
the body. “This one, too. But… not as much.”
He snorted. “That one is the second victim, found on Tuesday. Our man here died last night. Dr. Cornelius told me about your
‘sensitivity’ before he skipped town, and that it might last awhile. Good to know he was right.”
Abby looked interested. “You can sense supernatural effects, honey? That would be very useful. We get a few ‘cause unknown’
cases every year, and we’ve got no magic breakthroughs on staff to sniff out curses.”
I must have let my panic show, because Fisher shook his head. “We can talk about that later, Doc.” He took my elbow. “We really
need to be going.”
“But—”
“I’ll call. Promise.” He got me out of there quick, leaving the doctor with her mouth open, and didn’t say anything else until
we were back in the car.
“Wow,” I said when I could trust my voice. “You’d better apologize with wine and candles.”
He glanced at me. “You’re laughing.”
“Yes,” I giggled. “And thanks for the save. Ugh!” Shuddering, I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying to get the image of the
dead man out of my head. What a wonderful first day back… Think of kitties. “Those were some of the hits you talked about?”
“Actually, no. The first case didn’t even cross my desk—Garfield gave it to Phelps. I caught the second. He’s a John Doe, but
his face came up in our image recognition software.”
“Huh? How?”
“After you told me Mr. Miyamoto was probably Kitsune, I pulled the security footage from The Fortress. Nemesis found his target
because victim number two pointed him out. The weird bit is that, looking at all the tapes, number two got plenty of room—like
everybody could smell him and gave him lots of space, but nobody even looked at him. He had to grab Nemesis to get his attention.
You can watch the files if you want.”
“But you couldn’t ID him.”
“Nope. But his picture went in our database, and two days later he popped up dead on the street.”
“So, what—”
The curbside mailbox shattered the windshield into a million tiny flying slivers and hammered Fisher through his seat and into the
back of the car. I stared at the blue box steel beside me, and then reflexively ducked and covered my head as we swerved, slid,
caught something and rolled end over end. The crunch as we met the tree and wrapped around it ended our trip. I found myself
upside down and pinned against the shredded bark, my window gone.
No. No. No. He’s dead. He’s dead. God, please let us have missed everybody.
“Are you commuting now, Astra?”
Villain-X waited in the air above me, back in his black costume minus the hooded facemask. He flared in my infrared vision while
my inner woogyness told me there was more to him than there should have been. Like the bodies on the slabs.
I pushed, pealing us away from the stricken oak tree, and pulled free of the wreck. “Dispatch! I screamed. “Code-red, A, two,
Rush delivery!” And I launched.
Back arched, fists together, true form, I hit him above his center-of-mass and kept accelerating as we headed back down. He oofed,
the air knocked out of him, and then we cratered in the intersection. Chunks of concrete flew into the air. Around us bystanders
abandoned their cars and ran. The man under me tried to fly, flipping me as I fought to hold us down, and swung me through the
corner gas station and into the brick side of its garage.
I pushed off and flew us through a gas-pump and into the road, digging a trench as I angled us down. My armor-reinforced knee
caught him in the gut as he pulled us up, and I spun us again as he wheezed. A round back-hand to my temple rang my ears and I let
go.
Kicking me away, he laughed as I smacked down into the street.
“I’m going to eat your eyes!” His voice rasped inhumanly and his own eyes flared red. Sweat dripped down his face and he shook
his head. “Nice armor,” he added, sounding normal. “Trying to level-up?”
An eye-twisting blur flashed by me and with a solid smack, Ajax’ huge titanium-headed maul filled my hand. His backup maul; his
original weapon lay in pieces on display in the Dome museum.
“Delivered, RushCrashSprintsSifuevacuatingzonenow,” Rush informed me as fleeing bystanders began disappearing around us.
Villain-X saw the motion and dove, and I launched to meet him, swung the maul with a scream. The shock of impact almost made me
drop it, but he spun away, decapitating a lamp-post and bouncing parked cars aside as their alarms wailed.
“Yes!” I screamed. “You are waxed!” I dropped on him, bringing the maul down to shatter the sidewalk as he desperately rolled
away. He kicked again, but I twisted to take it on my cuirass, swung, and the maul rang again as he flew backwards and into an
abandoned van. Pulling himself out of the wreck, he took off straight up—burning brighter in my infrared sight.
“Astra!” Lei Zi shouted in my ear. I could barely hear her over the roaring in my head. “The zone is clear—keep him there,
help is incoming!”
I launched myself after him, but he didn’t flee; instead he looped around again to dive. Swinging the hundred-pound maul, I took
him in the side with a hit that could have dented main battle-tank armor. He screamed, voice inhuman again, and grabbed my weapon
hand, crushing my fingers around the maul’s haft. Instead of letting go, I pulled him into knee range and hit the same spot with
a crunch. He let go and I back-swung, a ringing strike to his head.
He shook it off. And smiled.
“Delicious,” he said, in that nails-on-chalkboard voice. “You’ll be delicious.” His skin began to blacken and smoke, and my
singing euphoria fled, leaving me cold.
“No,” I said. “No. You’re served.” Then he hit me.
I got the maul up, but the hit drove it back into me, throwing me down through the gas station’s weather-roof onto another pump.
I lost the maul.
At least I’m keeping him in one spot.
Scrambling dazedly, I got to my feet before he hit me again, hammering me into the ground. I twisted and rolled, throwing us
through the corner of the station in an explosion of concrete blocks and glass. Free, I hit the smoking nightmare with a stricken
Chrysler, sweeping him out into the street, and dove for the maul.
I grabbed it as he grabbed me and squeezed. My armor creaked, but it was like he’d forgotten I was wearing it.
“Astra,” Lei Zi shouted in my ear. “Take him up and look west!”
Okay… I tried to find west; it felt like any second he was going to crush my torso armor like a beer can, and then I wasn’t
going to be able to breathe. My takeoff surprised him, and I pulled us around, away from the Lake.
“Brace for incoming!” Shelly cried. Shelly?
I braced, and heard the missiles before they hit. One missed and auto-destructed ahead of me as the others caught us from behind,
the fireball surrounding us. Villain-X took every hit and let go to fall, stunned. I reeled, thrown end over end till I didn’t
know where the sky was.
“I said brace!” Shelly complained as I spun in the air, trying to find her.
And there she was, so not Robotica. Okay, Robotica if you welded shoulder-launchers and hip-launchers onto her, covered her in
molded tank armor, and put her in huge rocket-boots. Even her forearms were Popeye-huge to make room for weapon systems. In the
middle of it all, her robot-head looked tiny.
She launched another volley of missiles, smoke-trails twisting like demented snakes as they bore in on Villain-X and blew him to
the ground—right into the gas station entry. Which blew up.
“Oops,” she said as the fireball climbed.
“Oops?” I dove to catch the flying weather-roof before it came down on an apartment block, tossing it into the street before
dropping down to find my dance partner.
He found me, rising out of the fire, his black jumpsuit shredded and burning and his unhandsome face made demonic by glowing eyes
and bared teeth. He screamed as he climbed. Above me Shelly launched another volley, but I’d had enough; he took Ajax’ maul
right between his eyes. Shelly’s smart-missiles swarmed around and past me, reaching out to hammer him as he fell to crater the
street.
Atlas wouldn’t have stood up after that, but somehow he got to his feet. “You can’t—”
I hit him, maul first, driving him so deep we shattered water mains and collapsed the street into the flood tunnels below. This
time he stayed down, steaming as the water sprayed over us. I stood, panting almost hysterically.
“Astra?” Rush queried. “We’ve got restraints...”
I nodded, gasping, then remembered to speak. “Bring them down,” I said. “He’s safe for now. Blackstone?”
“Yes, my dear?”
Between quick breaths I explained what Fisher had shown me while a blur that might have been Rush twisted our unconscious man into
a titanium-wrapped hogtie. “Hang on,” Blackstone said before I’d half-finished. “Chakra and I are coming out.”
“But—”
They appeared in a puff of white smoke as Shelly and the team floater touched down behind them, Lei Zi, Seven, The Harlequin, and
Riptide piling out. Shelly locked multiple laser-sights on Villain-X, and Blackstone and Chakra carefully climbed down into the
crater while Variforce went to work laying a smothering cover of translucent golden force over the gas fire and Riptide directed
water from the broken main to douse the secondary fires.
Chakra calmly knelt beside our fallen villain while Blackstone stood ready to vanish with her at the slightest hint of danger. She
touched Villain-X’s forehead and her eyes widened. “He really is burning up inside,” she said. “If he were a normal person he
’d be dead now.”
“Can you save him?” Blackstone asked.
She looked up. “It’s a different brand of magic, but if I can clear his chakras it might end the possession.”
“Do it. We need him alive.”
She put her hands on his temples and began a rolling chant, and he instantly relaxed into what I knew from experience was a coma-
like sleep. I turned my back and climbed out of the hole.
Around me, Lei Zi organized the rest of the team to secure the area, assisted by multiple blurs. Rush, Crash, Sprints, and Sifu?
Sprints was an obvious call-in from the South Side Guardians, but Master Li? He’d left the Army when service in China had tipped
his Buddhism into pacifism; just how bad had things really gotten while I was gone?
Quin examined victims our speedsters hadn’t been able to get out of the way in time. Not many, thank God, and no fatalities.
Nobody had been between us and the tree when the car flipped, and Chicagoans knew how to clear a street like nobody’s business.
Customers in the stores had evacuated through the back and down the service alleys if the establishments didn’t have their own
downstairs shelters.
My feet took me back up the ruined street, back to Fisher’s car, upside down, windows gone, bent in half where it lay by the
tree. Sorry, Fisher—I’m sorry. Amazingly, his pack of smokes had been thrown clear, lying intact by the shattered driver-side
windows. I bent down and picked it up.
“Kid? Could you give me that? And give me a hand?”
Of course I screamed.