Tales of Capes and Cowls, page 21
The pressure against my windpipe increases. The stars begin to sing.
“What?” Wozniak snarls. “What did you say, freak?”
“Wallace Cranberry. You shot him… in the back.”
Wozniak’s forearm drops away from my throat and suddenly I can breathe. City air the flavor of emeralds brings me back. I inhale, filling my lungs with green hallelujahs.
“Who the hell are you?”
Holding my breath, I reach up and peel away the remnants of the crimson mask.
“Wait a minute,” Wozniak says. “Hey…I know you.”
I open my mouth and exhale a lash of shadowforce. The black-light noose whips itself around Wozniak’s right wrist and breaks it. The big man squeals and drops his gun. Then I call the phantoms. They come from every direction, a menagerie of malign shapes; some hulking, others serpentine… winged nightmares bearing human faces.”
“Jesus,” Wozniak cries. “Stop! Stop them!”
The living shadows swirl around him, feeding on Wozniak’s terror, until they merge to form a black whirlwind. The eye of the twister flashes from its center like the blinding glare of a cyclopean eye as the mindstorm turns faster and faster.
“Please…” Wozniak wails. “I’m a good cop!”
Then the mindstorm plunges into Wozniak’s open mouth. Telepathically linked now, I give him the sleepless grief of Wallace Cranberry’s mother, Martine, the impotent agony of his father, Neville. I let him taste the misery of his own estranged family. Wozniak won’t repent so I teach him regret. I peel his pride, leaving him naked, raw and exposed. Then I force-feed him, piece by howling piece, to the ravaging spirits that made him what he is: a murderer. A monster.
The black-light flickers and goes out, then Wozniak collapses. He’ll live, trapped in a kind of half-life and tormented by the demons that made a home of his soul. It’s still better than what he gave Wallace Cranberry.
“Wow,” a familiar voice says. “That was nasty.”
Sam.
I’m already growing accustomed to the pressure of his soul as it settles into a space that’s been empty for too long.
“It was you,” I say, aloud. “I couldn’t do all that by myself.”
“Late bloomer,” Sam replies. “My brain repaired itself, just like your body can heal itself. It just took me a little longer to catch up.”
Twenty years.
“But you were a kid, and now you…your mind feels….”
“I hate to break up the reunion, Matty, but we got a bigger problem.”
Then Sam shows me.
“Holy…”
“Pretty much.”
Another power.
It’s moving toward us like the shockwave from an atomic detonation, and it’s stronger than a thousand scared cops. The news outlets say he’s powerful enough to dim the sun, and even after all this, I know I’m not ready to face the “Man From the 29th Dimension.”
A noise like the horn of Judgment Day blasts my shadowforce to tatters. It fills the world with light as the new power burns mine away: I can feel him mentally sifting through my dwindling darkness like a golden god hunting…
Hunting me.
The Far Traveler.
“Mathias!” Samuel shouts; a telepathic alarm. “He’s comin’ in hot! We gotta go!”
“Wait,” I cry. “We’re on the same side, Sam. Maybe…”
From his bed, two-hundred miles away, Samuel takes control. The world returns to normal as my connection to the shadowforce winks out.
“I’ve been playing in the dark way longer than you, Matty.”
Dawn is on the horizon. I can see what look like the entire Chicago PD and the Illinois National Guard massing at both ends of the bridge. A few dozen dazed cops are still wandering along the elevated roadway like stunned sheep searching for their shepherd.
There’s a man standing in the sky. He’s tall, long-limbed: more dancer than linebacker. Brown-skinned with curly black hair. He looks Afro-Latino, maybe Dominican, like my dad’s family. And he’s shining like the sun.
“I can see you,” he says in a voice that smells like chocolate chip cookies. “We should talk.”
The golden god descends. His shimmering skin-tight bodysuit gleams like a polished golden mirror, and I can only stare, awestruck as he drifts slowly earthward: the most beautiful thing I’ve ever imagined.
“Snap out of it, estupido,” Sam barks. “He’s way out of our league!”
Sam bends the remaining shadowforce into a configuration too complex for me to recognize, and suddenly I’m standing inside a shining white tunnel. One end of the tunnel opens into what looks like a hospital room. Above me, the Far Traveler pauses, a look of perfectly human puzzlement contorting a face that could shame Adonis.
“Where did you go?”
Invisible, exhausted, exhilarated, I wonder if an alien powerhouse who smells like expensive pastry and travels between the stars could ever understand the people I serve and protect. I wonder how alien he really is.
We’ll meet again, Traveler.
Then I let my brother bring me home.
The Freelancer’s Cunning Plan
A Supervillainy Saga side-story
By C.T. Phipps
There is only one thing worse than a dusted-up wannabe supervillain pointing a gun to the back of your head when you’re behind the wheel of a getaway car. That’s an amateur dusted-up wannabe supervillain doing it.
“You, human, drive!” The forked-tongue creature hissed, waving the pistol around like a madman. He was mostly human-looking with a bald head, tattoos, muscular frame, white t-shirt, and army fatigue cargo pants. This one styled himself Thrax the Goblin King and was the one who’d hired me. He and his gang were Bygones, those Supers who decided to pretend to be fairies or monsters despite the fact they were just people with powers.
Looking up, I saw it was about fifteen minutes until sunrise. Police sirens were blaring in the distance. The imaginatively named Tolkien Ravagers had purchased my services to provide them an exit once they finished ripping-off pro-human “legitimate businessman” Argyle Thompson’s personal bank.
The robbery wasn’t political, it was just convenient because he was the richest asshole in town. Given there was no sign of any cash, jewelry, bearer bonds, or the other two Tolkien Ravagers who’d gone in with Thrax—I had to assume their plan had gone awry. Unicorn and Deathmonger seemed like okay folk for superpowered people who wanted to be orcs.
Calculating we still had about thirty-seconds before it was the optimal time to pull out, I asked, “I take it your associates won’t be joining us?”
“I said, drive!” Thrax hissed, firing his gun into the passenger’s side window. The window, whose enhancements against bullets were only functional from the outside in, shattered. Barbara was going to tan my hide for that.
“First of all, it’s not time.” I glared at him through my rear-view mirror. “Second, this is a customized work of art in 2020 Japanese Supra shell, created by the Mechanic six months ago at exquisite cost to myself, with which you will have to pay for the repairs in addition to my fee now. Third, it’s David or Mister Karkofsky, not human. I’ll even go by the Freelancer. I am a professional and will be treated accordingly. My cousin doesn’t put up with this shit and neither will I.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? The fucking Transporter? Drive!”
I sighed, mentally apologizing to Jason Statham and the new guy. “I’m a Super, like you. My abilities are just a bit less…obvious.”
Fifteen seconds left.
Two Atlas City police cars pulled around the end of the street with their windows rolled down. Another pair pulled behind me, blocking my exit. They, too, had their windows rolled down. With the aid of the Sight, I saw inside and knew they weren’t actual policemen but Thompson’s private security contractors. The guys he paid the actual police to ignore when they made problems like us disappear. It certainly explained the things I’d seen in my precognitions when I’d agreed to take this job. I thought I’d been playing too much Grand Theft Auto V.
Five seconds.
Leaning out the side of all four vehicles, the passenger side officers had Uzis in their hands and were firing at my windows. This time, my car’s enhancements held, and a series of sparks danced across the vehicle’s front and back like the bullets were made of rubber.
“Holy shit!” Thrax panicked, dropping his gun and covered his ears. I moved my foot from the brake to the gas.
“Now it’s time to go,” I said, swerving the car to the right. We bounced onto the sidewalk as the police cars behind me were in a poor position to follow. Moving back onto streets, my car handled like a dream, maneuvering around the wall-to-wall traffic, and giving me an ample head start on my pursuers.
If I only had to deal with crooked mercenaries, I would have been able to get through this without difficulty. Unfortunately, big shots like Argyle Thompson weren’t inclined to rely on rent-a-soldiers when protecting their treasures. My vision had indicated I would be dealing with worse here in a few minutes—unfortunately, it hadn’t been exact. That was the problem with being a psychic, your powers were never as precise as you wanted past the immediate future.
Unlike the majority of the assholes I dealt with in my day-to-day business, I was a native to Atlas City. I was there before the city had been rebuilt by Omega Corp and the dozen other Super research corporations funded by the government to treat (read: experiment on) the “medical condition” I’d manifested twenty-years ago. You know, after the Thran invasion of Eighty-Eight.
My father used to talk about Atlas City being the City of Superheroes under Ultragod’s protection, but I’d grown up with it as just shy of a Robocop-esque urban wasteland. The only thing we’d lacked were cyborgs and megalomaniac super-corporations. Well, we had the latter now and if we didn’t have Robocop then we certainly had killer cops. Ultragod was too busy playing President to do anything about his old city. Now, without the Man of Forever looking over their shoulder, the cops shot first and asked questions never. Especially if you were a Super.
The funny part? Supers kept coming to the city despite the fact we had a higher murder rate than Kabul when I’d served. They believed the song and dance by the tourist board that Atlas City was a place they could live a new life surrounded by people like them. They usually left off the part about finding a cure these days but that was a jingle most heard anyway.
If it wasn’t the mammoth medical debt, ten-year-exclusive power contracts, or psycho pro-human vigilantes screwing them over then it was designer drugs, racist cops, and Super gangs out to prey on the weak of their kind. That didn’t even cover the antiheroes who thought not-killing drug addicts was a mistake. If I hadn’t been making so much money of the out-of-towners, I would have lit a giant sign outside the city saying, “Keep away, fools!”
“Are we safe?” Thrax asked, looking out the side of the window he’d busted.
“Not by a long shot,” I muttered.
“I thought you were supposed to be good! Like a B-class psychic or something.”
“First of all, I reject the alphabet soup labels. I can see things before they happen and that makes me an awesome driver.” I could also read people’s minds and when I was really wasted, move a quarter with my mind but I generally avoided telling people the latter. Telepaths were some of the most heavily persecuted Supers alive. “Second of all, it’s my skills which make me such an awesome driver.”
Adjusting my mirror, I saw a trio of black Ferrari 488 Spiders. There were other black cars behind them, four-door sedans and a number of others I couldn’t quite make out, all possessing blacked-out windows. The Ferraris, though, were the only ones which had a chance of catching up to me. They were extremely modified, souped-up, lightweight armored chase vehicles created for the Headhunters.
The Headhunters were a completely illegal, most wanted, and completely ignored by the police group of ‘superheroes’ who killed ‘abusive’ Supers. The fact they had access to such wonderful toys was totally not because they were funded by Omega Corp and other patrons who made sure their ‘Atlas City Experiment’ didn’t get out of control. They weren’t exactly the Human Defender, but they were a pain in the ass of every supervillain and gang around town. Their sudden appearance could only mean they’d started taking bribes from Thompson too.
Or they’d gotten lucky.
Either way, I was prepared for them
Kind of.
“Drive faster!” Thrax shouted, staring out the rear-view window.
I bit my tongue, not wanting to distract myself by explaining to an idiot there was a time and a place for speed versus fine control.
“Sure!” I lied.
One of the Ferraris managed to catch up to me as I had to slow my car ever-so-slightly to avoid hitting a pedestrian. The vehicle slammed into the back of my bumper and started to move to my side, preparing to smash me into one of the crowded city streets. So much for superheroism. They’d probably end up blaming it on me. After all, looks aside, I was one of the freaks. Biting my lip, I did the modified vehicle one better and knocked it back, sending it bashing into its fellows. The three cars recovered fast but it was too late.
Three seconds.
This part I’d timed just right.
Too bad I was a second and a half behind.
Hitting the accelerator, I pulled forward and the three Ferraris formed a line of three cars in almost perfect side-by-side formation, which was perfect for the next part of my plan. A dump truck slammed into the side of the leftmost one, which bashed into the one to its right, and again until the Ferraris skidded to a complete halt.
“Ten points!” I shouted, shaking my fist in the air.
Thrax just looked back, stunned. “Did you plan that?”
“Yes,” I said, staring forward at the road. “If you’d shelled out an additional two thousand for this job, you might have been told ahead of time.”
Reaching down to my dashboard, I put in the Scarface soundtrack, which triggered the ‘magic paint’ I’d received from Graffiti Grace that turned my car from a bright green to a straight black. The bullet hole in the window would make it a bit too memorable for my tastes but it would, hopefully, confuse the police a little—especially when I rolled the back window down to draw less attention. Slowing down and moving through several side streets, I brought my client to the agreed-upon drop-off point.
It was the back of a used car lot, most vehicles being various high speed Japanese cars my Supra could fit in amongst. The lot belonged to a friend of mine, Joe Hernandez, aka Ironbeard, a mythological Super who resembled a fantasy dwarf. Jokes aside, he could get it to the Mechanic without problems. For a cut I didn’t want to give him. Balls. I’d be lucky if I made any profit whatsoever on the job.
Bringing the vehicle to a halt, I prepared for the sudden but inevitable betrayal ahead. You’d think fewer guys would try it on someone who could see the future, even if they didn’t know he could read minds. I turned off the ignition, stepped out, and looked over at the rooftop of the abandoned gas station across the street. There, I saw the briefest flash of light signal me back.
Everything was set up right.
Thrax stepped out of the backseat, having picked up his gun and regained his composure. Watching me pull out a car cover for my Supra, I could see a predatory glint forming in his eyes. It was a look I’d seen hundreds of times before on Supers. They believed their powers made them invincible, so they didn’t think they had to treat other people as human beings. Then again, almost all those people were criminals, so maybe it was more about the company I kept than the fact they were Supers.
My cousin, Merciless: The Supervillain without Mercy TM, had told me this was a danger when I’d started my getaway driver business, but I’d stupidly ignored him. I’d figured if that idiot could be drowning in hot henchwomen and cash that I could do the same. A decade later? Well, I was still lower mid-tier at best.
“Job didn’t work out. No cash for us, no cash for you.” Thrax aimed his gun at my chest. It was a Mark VII Desert Eagle, a gun way too nice for a punk like him. I could already tell he was thinking he could make up for his losses on this by taking them out on me. He’d ask for an increasingly large number of demands until I refused, then would shoot me. Strangely, he thought this meant he’d be justified somehow. Human minds were strange, Super or otherwise.
“There’s just no trust in this business.”
“Give back advance,” Thrax said, shaking the gun a bit.
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, because the ten thousand dollars you paid me didn’t go immediately to my bank account. It’s not like I have bills to pay, a mortgage, or family.”
Thrax hissed and aimed his gun. “Then die.”
I raised my left hand into the air and made a fist. It was the signal to the sniper I’d pre-arranged to be on the roof across the street.
Thrax’s head exploded.
I sighed, looking down. I wasn’t quite to the level of movie-style badass or complete sociopath that seeing a man’s brains leaking out on the ground didn’t affect me. I had a lot of nightmares about the people I’d killed or had killed.
But I dealt with it.
Leaning down, I checked his pockets and found an envelope containing about four-thousand-dollars cash. My fee. “Cheap bastard.”
I then made a phone call. The numbers appeared in my head just by concentrating on the keypad. “Hey, Mister Thompson? Yeah, don’t ask how I got this number. I was curious if you’d be interested in getting that asshole who tried robbing you today. Alive? That’ll be extra. A lot extra.”
His answer was what I expected.
Cheap bastards all the way up.
“Five grand? Yeah, transfer the money to the account I text you and I’ll see to it you find the guy in a ditch somewhere.” I paused for his response. It was also what I expected. “And a kind fuck you too.”
Well, at least I’d got something out of this.
Then I turned to the window and grimaced.
Not much, though.
Especially after Mihailo collected his fee.
