Masked (2010) (15 page)

By the miracle of superspeed, teleportation, time manipulation, and dimension-jumping, we were suddenly surrounded by heroes. We were expecting them, of course, but Altered State, Beast Man, Telstar, Green Glow and Razor Wire, Cy-Bug and the Zen-tity make a pretty impressive entrance. If the truth be told, I pissed my pants. Only slightly, but credit where it’s due: these guys were ready to kick our arses all the way to Land’s End, and they looked like they could do it without even getting an elevated heart rate.

Vessell took them in his stride, though. He just jabbed backward with the butt of the gun and broke Gallo’s elbow with it.

That part wasn’t in the plan, and it probably wasn’t even necessary. Gallo had been standing in line since 10:10 a.m., waiting for us to come up the stairs and the whole thing to kick off. He’d probably been fighting off panic for much of that time, so the like
lihood is that his powers would have manifested as soon as he got a good look at the opposition. But Vessell wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

Gallo howled and crashed to his knees, clutching his injured arm. Then the howl modulated into something else: something that wasn’t sound or sight or fish or fowl or anything human beings have a name for—an invisible energy that curdled the air and rippled outward from Gallo (if invisible things can do that) to saturate the room in an instant and permeate through its walls into the wider world.

For a mile or more on all sides of us, things stopped happening. Car engines misfired. Phone calls got disconnected. Card readers on ATM machines became dyslexic. BIC lighters refused to spark. Even the wind died.

But these were just side effects. The full brunt of the Non-Event’s terrible power was felt by those of us belonging to the super-normal persuasion. Tin lost two-thirds of his body mass between one moment and the next: he staggered and almost fell as he changed back into flesh, screaming out a breath that was now too big for his altered lungs. The Zen-tity crashed even more painfully into reality, his liminal forms coalescing into one with a sound like a flag cracking in the wind. He groaned and crumpled to the ground in a heap. Green Glow’s flames guttered and died; Beast Man shed all his fur in a second and stood before us stark naked, conclusively answering that question about his sexual equipment; Altered State turned from cobalt blue to ordinary flesh tones, made a sound like a hamster being stepped on, and fell neatly on top of the Zen-tity.

All of which left Pete Vessell holding the only gun in the room, and facing a clutch of heroes who were suddenly powerless.

This is how it should have gone, then. We should have corralled the impotent fuckers into a corner of the room, backed out through the door where Guesswork was waiting with a van, and vanished into the sunset to the tune of a humorously twanging banjo.

What we’d lost sight of in all this, of course, was Perspective. Gallo’s ripple wave went through her, too, and while we were all
watching the heroes dropping like autumn leaves, she lost control of the contents of the jewel case. Sure, it was lead-lined, and therefore impermeable to Gallo’s null-wave; but the lining had broken open in one corner when she dropped it on the stairs: just a tiny crack, but it was enough.

Fifty bags of bullion and close to four hundred steel deposit boxes expanded to full size in half a heartbeat. It was like a fountain—except that a fountain doesn’t weigh two and a half tons, and it doesn’t explode outward at mach two in big, hard, sharp-edged pieces.

Naseem caught one of the boxes in the face as it sprang back to full size: it punched her off her feet and she hit the floor hard, her head hitting the tiles with a sickening crack.

The mother with the twins went down under the bullion bags, still trying to shield them with her own body. It was impossible to tell how much weight landed on top of them: they just disappeared from sight in an avalanche of glittering gold.

The fat man got a deposit box slammed into his chest, and fell backward, pole-axed. The movie star was pulped by a cascade of the damn things, and got a death scene more visually impressive than anything he’d ever managed onscreen.

It was all over in a second, and we were left staring open-mouthed at the carnage. There was an appalled silence that was absolute except for a patter of blood on stone from away to my left: I resolutely didn’t turn my head to look. Then the screams and the sobs started up from all around.

“Okay,” Vessell said, in a strangled voice. “Nobody make a—”

Razor Wire gave a wordless yell and threw himself at Vessell. More by instinct than anything else, Vessell pressed down on the trigger and the gun spat staccato fire. Razor Wire was chopped to pieces in midair.

“Nobody move!” Vessell bellowed, more authoritatively. “Nobody fucking move!” He looked around at us wildly, desperately. “Davey, Naseem, Gruber, pick up those bags and drag them out to the car.”

None of us made a move: Naseem because she was unconscious on the floor with blood pooling underneath her fractured skull, George and me because we couldn’t have made our legs work right then if God himself had leaned down out of heaven and given us the order to quick-march.

“Vessell,” George said inanely. “Oh my God, Vessell. Look what happened!” He was staring at Naseem, and I saw tears running down his cheeks.

“The job’s not finished yet,” Vessell spat. “Let’s go, let’s go!”

There was a distant wail of sirens.

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” I said. A great weight of exhaustion and misery hit me like a bag of bullion to the back of the head. It was the kids: I think it was, anyway. On Tuesday they wouldn’t have been there, and I wouldn’t have seen them get buried. Something inside me wouldn’t let go of that image, as much as I wanted to. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere, Vessell.”

“Drop the gun,” said Telstar, grimly, “and give yourselves up. One of Zen-tity’s other selves has healing powers. You have to let him work.”

She had a point, as far as that went. But it was going to take a lot more than throwing our hands in the air and saying “Kamarade!” I held out my hand to Vessell.

“Give me the gun, Pete,” I said.

He pointed it at me instead. “The job’s not over,” he repeated, his eyes wild and his teeth bared in a snarl. “We’re walking out that door, with as many bags as we can—”

Tin slammed a deposit box into the side of Vessell’s head and dropped him. Telstar went for the gun at the same time as I did, but I got to it first and she skidded to a dead stop as I swung it up to cover the heroes.

“Easy,” I said. “You just stay back there. There’s something I’ve got to do.”

I found Gallo among the wreckage, half buried. His breathing was loud and harsh, like a broken bellows. There was blood trickling out of his nose and the side of his mouth.

“Davey,” he quavered, his voice weak and ragged. “Did anyone get hurt?”

I nodded solemnly. “A lot of people got hurt, Rizzo. Kids and all. A lot of people. You think you can turn your powers off?”

His face took on a distant look for a moment or two as he concentrated. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Too scared. And it hurts too much. I have to be quiet, by myself, to make it stop.”

He noticed the gun in my hands for the first time. He stared at it in total mystification for a moment, as though it was a copy of
The Sound of Music
he’d inexplicably found in his porn stash. Then he looked up at me, and we sort of understood each other.

“Oh,” Gallo said. “Oh.”

“I’m really sorry, Rizzo,” I said. “I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”

He shook his head wordlessly. I don’t know if he was disagreeing, or if he just meant it wasn’t worth talking about. I started to explain about Zen-tity and the healing thing, but I think he got the broad idea without needing to know the details.

“I’m scared,” he said. “I’m really scared. I don’t want to see it coming.”

“Close your eyes,” I said. He closed his eyes.

“Now count backward from a hundred.”

“A—a hundred—”

The gun was on full automatic. At that distance, it turned his head and shoulders and upper torso to paste.

That’s the meat and potatoes, isn’t it? Armed robbery. Assault. Murder. Anything else you want, feel free to add it on: it won’t make any difference at this stage.

We worked with the heroes to excavate the survivors from under the bullion bags and deposit boxes. Zen-tity did his miraculous thing, and most of them were okay again: the woman with the twins, the fat man, even Naseem. The movie star stayed dead, though, and so did Gallo: even miracles have limits. And it turned out the guard on the stairs, who Tin had trampled down, was dead
too. So there you go. Even if everything had gone according to plan, we’d still have had blood on our hands.

Look at us, eh? The endoclasm turned us into gods, and all we do is play cowboys and fucking Indians. I reckon we deserve what we get. Most of us, anyway. I feel a little bit sorry for the likes of Gallo, who don’t want to play but get sucked in anyway.

That’s all I’ve got to say. You’d better put the gag back on, now, and lock it tight. Otherwise I’m going to start sweet-talking these manacles, and you’ll have a jail-break on your hands.

This the transcript? Okay, somebody give me a pen.

I’m all yours, fuckers.

Best known
as the creator of
Nexus
(with artist Steve Rude), multiple Eisner Award–winning author Mike Baron is also the cocreator of
Badger, Feud,
and
Spyke
, and has written for such mainstream comics as Marvel’s
The Punisher
and DC’s
The Flash
and
Batman
. In addition to his Eisner Awards, he is a multiple nominee for Best Writer in the Kirby, Harvey, and (additional) Eisner awards. A longtime martial artist, he applies this knowledge to what might happen if a “superhero” ever arose in our own world.

M
IKE
B
ARON

Hoyt Beryl, tall
and gangly, flowed through the intricate precision of
Bo Sai
like water flowing downhill. He’d been testing for three hours, but if he was fatigued he didn’t show it. Finishing the form with a flourish, he snapped into the ready position and bowed toward a table where three men sat: head instructor James Gilfoyle, Gilfoyle’s master Sun Pak Kim, and Filipino Eskrima master Fenton Garcia.

When Hoyt finished there was a moment of silence. Then the applause began, led by Garcia. The whole school, plus friends and family, had gathered for the test, four men and one woman earning their black belts. Hoyt had no friends except for those he made at karate. Hoyt’s father had been an alcoholic cocaine abuser who’d bugged out when Hoyt was five.

Hoyt’s mother, Ashley, was in Blackhawk gambling with her new, younger boyfriend. Hoyt was on his own, as he had been
through most of his life. His decision four years ago to step inside the storefront dojo had marked a precipitous change in direction and had probably saved his life. He’d slept many a night on Gilfoyle’s sofa, gone to school with Gilfoyle’s son Charlie, currently a Marine in Fallujah, and trained every day at Gilfoyle’s Karate.

After the belt presentation they posed for pictures. Fellow classmates slapped Hoyt on the back and Gilfoyle said, “Come on, kid. I’ll buy you dinner and a root beer.”

“No, thank you, sir,” Hoyt replied. He’d learned to use the honorarium in karate. His mother would have been shocked, if she were capable of shock.

“You’re not going home to an empty house, are you?” Gilfoyle asked.

“No, sir,” Hoyt lied. “My mom’s taking me out for dinner.”

“When am I going to meet your mother, Hoyt? You’ve only been with me for four years.”

Hoyt shrugged, smiled. “She’s a busy woman, sir, what with her two jobs and all.”

“Well, she must be some kind of saint to raise a kid like you while holding down two jobs. Say hello to her for me and let’s see if we can’t get together next week sometime.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hoyt hit the showers, changed into his civvies, and left the storefront dojo on West Colfax in Denver. He was stoked. He was pumped. He was fifteen. He’d wanted to be a martial artist since seeing
Enter the Dragon
on a friend’s DVD player. It was a warm June night, perfect for what Hoyt had in mind. He ran, leaping over parking meters, cutting through an alley where a cat squalled in protest, over a fence, off a Dumpster onto the roof of a commercial mall like a chimp launched from a catapult, down again onto a concrete landing on all four limbs like a cat, past the scary apartment building where the gangs hung out to a shabby two-bedroom wood-frame house in a largely Latino neighborhood south of Colfax. The dirt yard served as a comfort station for dogs.

A light had been left on in the living room to discourage bur
glars, not that Hoyt or his mother had anything worth stealing. It was their third dwelling in three years, all in the neighborhood, all obtained through desperate pleas and federal assistance. Like they were some kind of white trash.

Well, we are white trash
, Hoyt thought as he slipped silently into the kitchen through the back door. The first time he and Ashley had moved it was because a pair of tweakers broke into their apartment, trashed everything, tipped the refrigerator over, shit on the dining room table, pissed on the beds, and stole twenty-three dollars and Hoyt’s
Street Fighter IV.
He’d play that sucker for hours, losing himself in his avatar, Thunderhawk. It was make-believe, and the robbers took it away.

Hoyt had suffered nightmares for months afterward. All his life he’d been kicked around like a soccer ball. When they’d first moved to Denver from Cheyenne, Hoyt had been easy pickings for the neighborhood bullies. The karate studio had sucked him in like the gaping maw of a jet engine and had yet to spit him out. During the interim he had grown six inches and packed on forty pounds of muscle.

It was “Uncle” James who marched down to the local school and helped Hoyt enroll, forging Ashley’s signature on the application. It was Gilfoyle who’d partnered Hoyt with his son Charlie, who tutored him in math and history.