Masked (2010) (18 page)

Picture it from above, Dear Reader, say from a huge, invisible eyeball floating above the plains. From ten thousand feet, the Ant Hill is just a gray dot in the middle of a huge blank square on the North Dakota map, a cement speck surrounded by half a million acres of treeless prairie. Drop a few thousand feet. You make out a single road heading toward the heart of the Ant Hill. And then you make out concentric rings that the road pierces: the outermost ring is just a chain-link fence, easy enough to drive through, but the next two inner rings are taller, reinforced, with sturdy gates. The road ends at the innermost ring, a cement wall twenty feet tall. Inside the ring is an oval of cobalt blue, a manmade lake. Beside the lake is a gray cooling tower like a funeral urn, then the cement dome of the reactor building, and half a dozen shorter buildings huddling close. The familiar shapes of the tower and dome, repeated in nuclear power plants across the globe, have always put me in mind of mosques.

The Antioch Federal Nuclear Facility was built in the ’80s, designed to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium for the hungry guts of America’s ICBMs. A few months after Soliton’s arrival, however, a freak accident shut the plant down. (Freak accidents became a lot more common after the Big S touched down, and we would have had to stop referring to them by that name if they hadn’t created so many freaks.) Before the plant could reopen, Soliton’s ad
ventures had (a) ended the Cold War, and (b) provided a need for a new kind of jail.

So they renovated. You couldn’t see much of the work on the surface. But that’s the thing about ant hills.

The guards drag me through approximately three thousand miles of tunnels. I could be wrong—they smacked me around quite a bit. I’m just happy that I haven’t blacked out or thrown up.

They toss me into the cell. I’m expecting a sarcastic line from the guards—“Welcome to the Ant Hill,” perhaps—but they disappoint me by merely slamming the door.

I pull myself up onto the bunk and lay there for a while. There’s a toilet, a sink, and a cardboard box holding a roll of toilet paper. There don’t seem to be any cameras in the cement ceiling—I’m too low a threat for the expensive rooms.

My stomach rumbles.

“Jesus, hold on a minute,” I say.

I pull myself into a sitting position, put my hands on my knees, and take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say. “One, two—”

My stomach lurches, and a ball of peach-colored goo flies out of my mouth and splats against the floor. It looks like Silly Putty, but it gleams with silvery veins like snail tracks. It’s still connected to my gullet by a long, shiny tail, and I can feel the stuff shifting in my belly. “Gahh!” I say. Which means, roughly, Hurry the hell up.

The long stream of putty reels out of my stomach and out my throat like a magician’s scarf trick. The glob on the floor grows as it absorbs mass, becoming a sphere about ten inches in diameter. With a final, discomfiting
fwip!
the last of it snaps free from my throat. The sphere starts to quiver like a wet dog, flinging silvery flecks in all directions.

I fall back against the cot.

A tiny, warbling voice says, “Just for the record? I am never doing that again.”

A tiny hand appears beside my head, and then a doll-size thing climbs onto the cot next to my head. It looks like a miniature Michelin Man, all peachy beige, including round white eyes and a
Kermit the Frog mouth. “What the hell took you so long?” he says. “The gel was starting to burn off, I was in there so long. You know what it smells like in there? Exactly what you think it smells like.”

“I wasn’t enjoying it either, Plex.”

He squints at my face. “You provoked them, didn’t you? I couldn’t make out what the hell you did to the warden.”

I sit up. “He was going to send me back to the hospital. Now at least we get to stay the night.” I nod toward the door. “You think you can get through it?”

“Please,” he says, and rolls his Ping Pong ball eyes. “Take this.” He holds up a three-fingered hand. The middle finger bulges, becomes a sphere, and then falls off with a wet pop.

I pick up the blob, mush it a bit between thumb and index finger, and press it into my ear. It’s uncomfortably warm, like fresh-chewed gum. “Match the skin tone, okay?” I tell him. “I don’t need to look like I’ve got a wad of white boy in my ear. Okay, give me a test.”

Check one, check two. Sibilance. Sibilance.
The voice is loud in my ear. The vibration tickles.

“Don’t scream or you’ll blow out another ear drum,” I say.

You know,
he says in a confidential voice.
If I go up any more of your orifices, we’re registering for place settings.

“Just get going. I’ll wait here for you.” I fall back against the cot. No pillow, but I don’t think it’s going to interrupt my sleep.

Guards come for me hours later. I assume it’s morning. They put shackles on my wrists and legs, then frog-march me to an elevator. According to my research there are fifteen levels in the Ant Hill. We start on Level 5 and then go up to Level 1. The administration offices are just a short walk from there.

The warden looks upset. He tells the guards to secure me to the guest chair and then get out. Then he picks up a sheaf of papers, glances at them, and looks at me with an expression of fresh disgust. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“This nonsense about wanting to tell me Soliton’s true identity.”

You told them that?
Plex says in my ear.

“I didn’t think you’d want me to tell your employees.”

“You’re lying.”

“Warden, I was a member of the Protectors—sorry, ‘Soliton and the Protectors.’” The big guy always insisted we say it that way: He Gladys, we Pips.

“You weren’t one of them. You just followed them around.”

“Again with the demeaning statements. Just because I wasn’t one of the people in capes didn’t mean I wasn’t part of the team. I was the first member, if you want to know. I was there on Day One. If you look at the first pictures of when he landed—”

“I’ve seen them. You’re the boy dressed up in the baseball suit.”

“I wasn’t
dressed up,
I was the bat boy. That was an official Cubs uniform.”

I loved that suit. Loved everything about that job, but especially hanging out with the players, chewing gum in the dugout while they chewed tobacco. A guy in my small group at the hospital said it proved I had an early tendency toward hero worship. Another patient said I had a costume fetish. I’m not saying they’re wrong.

I was standing in the bullpen when somebody shouted and there he was, a man in T-shirt and jeans tumbling out of the empty sky like a shot bird. At first I thought a drunk had jumped from the upper deck. But no, the angle was all wrong, he was directly over center field and falling at tremendous speed. He hit and the turf exploded and the stadium went silent. Everyone just stood there. I don’t know why I moved first.

“I was the first one to help him out of the crater,” I tell the warden. “The first person he spoke to on the planet. He took off his glasses, shook my hand, and said, ‘Thanks, Eddie.’”

“He knew your name?”

“Spooky, huh? I didn’t think much of it at the time. But later—
twenty years later, embarrassingly enough—I realized that was the first clue. The first bit of evidence telling me what he was. Have you have ever read the Gnostic Gospels, Warden? No, of course not. But maybe you’ve heard of them.
National Geographic
ran a translation of the Gospel of Judas a few years ago that suggested that the man had no choice but to—”

“Stop babbling. You’re not making any sense.”

“Fine, let me bring it down to your level. How about Bazooka Joe comics?”

“What do you
want,
Mr. King?”

Well, I tried. “I want to talk to Ray Wisnewski,” I say.

He pauses half a second too long. “Who?”

Eddie, is it part of the plan to tell them the plan?

“Come on,” I say to the warden. “Ray Wisnewski—WarHead? The man who killed two million people in Chicago?”

“I don’t know what—”

“The glowing guy in your basement. I know he’s here. All I need is a half-hour conversation. See, I’m doing a kind of informal deposition. I’m putting together a case against Soliton.”

“You really are insane.”

“No, you’re supposed to say, ‘Case against Soliton? He’s a hero, what did he ever do?’ And then I tell you that he’s responsible for the deaths of millions, not to mention everyone on the planet who’s been injured, widowed, made into an orphan, generally had their lives destroyed every time Soliton and the Protectors went toe-to-toe with some—”

“You’re blaming
him
for Chicago? He didn’t set off WarHead—that was the Headhunter.”

“Ah. Let’s talk about the late Dr. Hunter. Did you know that Soliton captured him not two months before Chicago? And then he was sent here, to your prison. Even though he’d escaped from the Ant Hill four times before.”

“You think
I’m
responsible?”

“I think you’re incompetent, but no, not responsible. You’re just a cog—a malfunctioning cog, maybe, with a couple teeth miss
ing, whose very flaws may be necessary to the continued running of the system—but not the prime mover. Not by a long shot. Soliton is the one responsible. Not just for Chicago—for
everything.
” I can see he’s too angry to listen properly. “So how about it? You walk me down to wherever you’re keeping WarHead—”

“Absolutely not! You can’t come in here trying to sell a hero’s secrets to get some—”

“Warden, I’m not selling secrets, I’m selling silence.” He still doesn’t understand. “If you let me talk to Ray,” I say slowly, “I promise
not
to tell the world Soliton’s real name.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“That I know his name? Sure I do, it’s D—”

“Don’t say it!”

“Why not? You afraid he’ll hear you?”

It’s not an unreasonable fear. As far as anyone knows, Soliton doesn’t possess superhearing, but he has a tendency to develop new powers whenever he gets bored.

“You can’t do that.” He grimaces. “You can’t just. . . give away a hero’s secret identity.”

Funny, they didn’t have a problem outing Teresa at her trial. “How about this.” I lean forward. “I’ll just whisper a clue.”

“You’ll do no such—”

“He’s my dad.”

That shuts him up.

“Well, not biologically,” I say. “You may have noticed that Soliton’s white. Though I guess that could be one of his superpowers.” I lean back in my chair. “Anyway, I was twelve years old the day he fell—that kind of rules out paternity at the chronological level. No, I mean, legally. He became my guardian after my parents were killed when I was fifteen—by two different supervillains, by the way. My backstory’s a little complicated. But basically, he’s my father.”

He said he wanted everything,
Plex says.

The warden stares at me. It’s too late for him now; the idea is in his head and he can’t get it out. He knows he can look up my record, find out who my guardian used to be. He doesn’t know
Soliton’s name yet, but forever after he will know that he
can
know it. Every day he’ll have to decide whether or not to act on that knowledge.

Also, he can’t get rid of me. “So. Do we have a deal?”

The trip down to my new cell in the ultra max wing—an upgrade that I consider quite the compliment for a person with no powers—is a brisk affair. We ride the elevator down many floors below my original cell, and then the four guards hoist me by each limb and carry me like a battering ram, stomach-side down, at trotting speed through the corridors. I don’t have much opportunity to look around, but the cell doors have small windows, some of them with familiar faces pressed close to the glass. Reptilian faces, deathly pale faces, faces with elaborate tattoos. If my mouth wasn’t taped shut, I would point out to the guards which of these residents I helped put in here.

My new cell is identical to the old one, except for the lenses set into the ceiling. For the next several hours I lie still on the bed, breathing through my nose. I know I’m on Prison TV, but I’m intent on becoming the most boring channel imaginable, the C-SPAN of inmates.