Masked (2010) (19 page)

I should have explained myself better to the warden. Dear Reader, do they have Bazooka Bubblegum in your world? Every piece has a tiny Bazooka Joe comic strip wrapped around the pink gum, and at the bottom of every strip is a fortune. The summer Dad fell to earth, I opened one while I was in the dugout and the fortune said, “Help, I’m trapped in a bubblegum factory.” I thought that was hilarious. I was too young to recognize an old joke.

The older I get, the more I realize that there are no new jokes. There are only minor variations and endless repetition.

I wake up when the door makes a sound like a shotgun racking a shell. My stomach thinks of lunch. Then the door swings open and a guard stumbles in, holding his face. Except he has no face,
only a blank patch of skin covering his eyes and nose and mouth. He stumbles blindly, then abruptly kneels down.

I told him I’d open an air hole if he cooperated,
Plex says in my ear.
Could you knock him out, please?

I glance up at the lenses in the ceiling. There’s no way to tell if they’ve been blinded, but I have to trust Plex.

There’s a truncheon strapped to the guard’s belt. They don’t carry guns on the floor, for good reason, but I know from recent personal experience that these guys
love
to use their truncheons. I pull it free, step behind the man, and take a batter’s stance, aiming carefully at the back of his head.

I know how it must sound to you, Dear Reader. You’re thinking, a blow like that could kill the man. Paralyze him, perhaps. Would it reassure you to know that I’ve been hit from behind like this more times than I can count? In any reasonable world, my brain should be hamburger by now. I should be dead or gibbering in the corner of a state hospital.

Yet I live on. I persist. And this man will live on, not because of who he is, but because of what he is. Yes, he is a minion whose real face is as blank as the Plexo-covered one, but he is a minion working for the U.S. of A., a good-hearted lawman trying to do his part in the war on crime. At this moment, in this circumstance, he is as invulnerable to permanent harm as I am. And when he wakes up in the morning, perhaps with a headache and a nasty bruise, he will not even wonder at his good fortune. For men like him, the rules of this world prevent even the self-reflection that would expose its irrationality.

I swing, and the baton makes a sickening sound against the back of his skull. He pitches forward.

“Eddie? Hey, Eddie?” I get the impression Plex has been calling my name for a while. He’s slipped free of the man’s face and formed into a thin little figure, a doughboy after a fight with the rolling pin. “You okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine.” I toss the truncheon onto the bed and start stripping the guard of his clothes. “I take it you found the control room.”

“I’m in about twenty pieces, crawling through the electrical panels. So far they haven’t figured out why the cameras are out on this cell, but they’re sending a couple guys to investigate. They’ll be here in about two minutes, Naked Man.”

I toss the jumper across the room.

“By the way,” he says, “do you know they have Icer in here?” He’s trying to sound casual.

“We don’t have time for vendettas, Plex.”

“What? I thought that was the whole point.”

“Just tell me if you found out where they’re keeping Teresa.”

“Same floor as this one. They’ve got her knocked out, hooked up to some kinda I.V.”

Not good news. My main plan, such as it is, depends on her being awake, mobile, and pissed off. “Okay, you go try to wake her up.”

“Where are you—? Wait, not Ray.”

“How many floors down is he from here?”

“You told me Ray was optional.”

“He’s still our best chance of getting out of here.” I button my new black Ant Hill security shirt. As for the pants, the legs are too short and the waist too wide. At least the shoes fit. “Plus, I owe it to him.”

“He’s a crybaby! A boy scout crybaby, which is the worse kind.” Several of him sigh. “Okay, fine. Though I have to tell you, he’s halfway to China. Take the elevator down until you smell magma.”

In the hallway we split up: I go right, and Plex goes left and up the wall to the ceiling. We haven’t really separated, however—Plex is in my ear whispering directions like a GPS. I tuck in the back of my shirt and hustle toward the elevators, head down. Unfortunately, the staff dress code doesn’t include face-covering helmets, so my disguise will be useless if I come face-to-face with anyone; I just hope it fools the people behind the cameras.

The elevator is waiting for me, the door thoughtfully held open by whatever chip off the ol’ Plexo has gained access to the Hill’s
control systems. I step in just as the two guards come around the corner. The door slides shut.

“Thanks, man,” I say.

De nada.

The ride seems to take forever, though mostly that’s nerves. The LED numbers go up as I go down, and at Level 13 Plex directs me down another hallway to a huge freight elevator. That one is supposed to take me the rest of the way down, though the gap between 14 and 15 is half a minute long. Finally the carriage jolts to a stop and the door opens on a cool, dimly lit room. Opposite is a huge door like a submarine hatch. It’s pasted with yellow and black radiation warnings.

Two Demron radiation suits hang on hooks next to a rack of oxygen bottles. I pull on one of the suits even though I know it’ll be useless at the kind of levels Ray is capable of putting out. I decide to skip the SCBA and just go with the hood. Before I zip up I scoop Plex out of my ear and paste him to the wall. He squeaks in protest.

“You don’t need to pick up any more REMs,” I say. “Look what happened last time.”

I walk stiffly up to the door. There’s no doorbell. I knock, and when there’s no answer, I start cranking. I immediately break into a sweat and the mask fogs.

After two minutes of work the hatch opens and I step into a cavern.

Sodium vapor lights hang from the high ceiling. The space is huge, but crowded: Yellow and blue barrels stretch into the dark, around piles of rusted scaffolding, stacks of construction equipment, even vehicles—all the irradiated garbage of Antioch. I may be imagining it, but my fillings seem to tingle.

There’s a path through the barrels. As I walk I become aware of the thump of music coming from distant speakers. I circle around a yellow backhoe on deflated tires and see an open space decorated like the set for a high school play: A couch, several chairs, a kitchen
table, bookshelves. Huge black rectangles are set up along the back of the space on makeshift easels. Ray stands in front of one with a paint brush, layering more black onto black.

He’s a big man, almost seven feet tall, but he’s hard to see clearly through the yellow haze surrounding him.

I don’t want to get close when he’s throwing off MeVs like this. I shout, but he doesn’t hear me over the huge stereo. I find a length of rebar, bang it against a steel drum: nothing. Finally I cock my arm and heave the rebar into his living room.

He turns, looks at the bar on the floor, then looks around until he sees me. He squints. I can almost feel the x-rays through my hood. He says, “Ed?!”

He starts toward me, arms open, then pauses when I take a step back. “Oh, sorry,” he says. He concentrates, and the light show around his skin fades.

I take off my hood. “Just keep sucking in those neutrinos, okay?”

He grabs me in a bear hug. “I can’t believe it! I heard you were in the hospital! What are you doing here?”

“Breaking you out, of course.” He frowns and releases me. “Unless you don’t want to.”

He decides I’m joking. “Come on and sit down,” he says, and leads me to the couch. “You want a beer? No, second thought, better not. You should keep the suit on, too.” He walks to a stereo sitting on a bookshelf and silences it.

“So, Ray. What’s up with the paintings?”

“I dunno. Just something I’ve always wanted to do.” He nods at the canvas in front of me. “That one’s called
Girls at the Circus.
”

“They’re very, uh. . .”

He looks at me expectantly.

“. . . dark?”

He laughs. “To you, maybe.”

I shake my head. “Listen, I came to ask you something, and I don’t have much time.”

He sits down on the couch. “You really did break in here. Just to see me.”

“You, and Teresa.”

“She’s
here
?”

“Where else would they keep her? They’ve got her drugged up and locked down. I thought I would. . .” I smile, feeling embarrassed. I’ve only shared the plan with Plexo before now, and he’s not quite a critical audience. “I’m putting the band back together, Ray.”

He laughs. “I thought you were just the roadie.” I give him my wounded look and he laughs harder. “Besides, Soliton and Gazelle already did that, didn’t they?”

“Fuck the New Protectors. I’m talking about the real Protectors: You, me, Lady Justice, the Dead Detective, Plexo—”

“Flexo? He’s alive?”

“He goes by Plexo now—the Multiplex Man. He’s not just rubber anymore. After Chicago he became sort of. . . It’s hard to explain.”

Ray shakes his head. “He was always such a pain in the ass. But I’m glad he’s alive. That makes me. . .” He purses his lips, controlling some emotion. “I’m glad.”

“Chicago wasn’t your fault, Ray.”

He doesn’t bother to answer.

“Ray, you know whose fault it is.”

“I know what you’re trying to do, Eddie, but when the Headhunter did that to me, it’s because there was something in me that—”

“That’s bullshit. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t even the fucking Headhunter! We have to go back to first causes, Ray. Before Soliton, we didn’t have telepathic masterminds trying to turn you into a bomb. Yes, there were problems before Dad landed—wars, disease, regular crime. But we didn’t have
supervillains.
When somebody got dropped into a vat of chemicals, they
died,
they didn’t turn into fucking Johann the Lizard Man.”

“Or me,” Ray says.

“Or you.” He was just a janitor, a poor schmuck caught in the tunnels when 3,000 degrees of radioactive steam hit him. In any sane universe he would have been instantly transformed into a
broiled corpse. “Sometimes one of the good guys gets lucky,” I say. “But the point is, we wouldn’t
need
heroes like you if our world hadn’t taken a left turn. Chicago was. . . unspeakable. But it wasn’t the start of it and it sure ain’t the end. How many innocent bystanders are still getting killed each year from all this brawling?”

“Soliton saves people every day.”

“Mostly from other superfreaks! Think about all those city blocks destroyed, governments toppled—”

“Evil governments.”

“Do you think America is
supposed
to be occupying all those countries he overthrew? Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Trovenia, Ukraine—what the fuck are we doing there? Our soldiers are getting blown up because he can’t be everywhere at once. Thanks to him, the entire world
hates
us.”

“Eddie, is this about Jackie?”

“What? No. This has nothing to do with her.’”

“She didn’t just join the team, she married him. That makes her your stepmom, kind of.”

“You can shut up now.”

“It’s just, you seem to hate him so much, Eddie, and you two used to be so close. When you talk like this. . . It’s like that night on the TV. You sound crazy.”

“Someone had to speak up,” I say. “Teresa didn’t deserve to go to jail, not when it wasn’t her fault.”

“Eddie, she cut off Hunter’s head.”

“So, extra points for irony. She only corrected the problem Soliton refused to solve.”

Ray looks sad. “You can talk that way in front of me, maybe. You can say that to other people in the Protectors. But not in front of the public, Eddie. They look up to us.”

“They shouldn’t be looking up to superheroes, Ray. They should be looking up to themselves. Okay, that didn’t come out right, but you know what I mean.” I stand up. “I just came to tell you, I’m getting Teresa out of here, and you’re welcome to come with me.”

Escape Plan A: Ray realizes that yes, Eddie was right all along, and leads us through the very steam tunnels that created him, absorbing deadly residual radiation, until we reach the coolant tower and our magic carriage swoops down to take us away.

Ray stares at his feet.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Really. But you should know that in the next few months, well, people will probably be saying lots of bad things about us. They’re going to call us criminals. I just wanted you to hear from me first, so you’d know why I was doing it.”

He looks up. “Doing what? What are you planning?”

“What we should have been doing all along. Saving the world.”