Sidekicks (26 page)

Trent twists under her foot. Something rolls out of his hand. It's a flash grenade. Monkeywrench leaps toward me, pushing me out of the way a split second before the grenade explodes. I try to grab her, but she slips through my arms. There's an enormous
BOOM
, and the world goes white.

Smoke is everywhere. Lab equipment lies broken all around me. “Allison!” I shout. “ALLISON!” I can't see anything. I crawl to my feet. “Allison!”

“SCOTT!” Jake's voice is in my head. “SCOTT!”

“Jake? Where are you?”

“Behind you.”

There's a swarm of people in HazMat suits behind
him; they start going through the wreckage. Maybe later I'll ask who they are, but right now, I don't care.

I go back to yelling. “Allison!”

“Scott! You need to stop this … come on, man.”

“She was here!” I shout, and keep looking.

“I know.”

“No! Not her body! She was here! Alive! Dressed as Monkeywrench! She distracted Trent so I could take him out. Then she saved me when Trent tried to blow us up. She knocked me clear.”

“Are you sure it was Allison?” he asks.

“Well … no … her face was completely covered. But … she moved like Allison.”

“Scott—”

“I have to find her.”

“Not like this. Come on, man … let the professionals do it. If she's under all this, they'll find her.”

“Fine. But I'm not leaving here until this whole place is—”

“Sir,” one of the HazMat suits calls from across the room. “We found something.”

her. She looks exactly the same as she did in the coffin, except now there's some dirt in her hair. I'm trying to brush it out with my fingers, but it's not coming out. I keep brushing.

Jake comes walking over. “The camera was in the stuffed bear, just like you said. Was that what Chaotic meant when he talked about Bear telling the truth?”

I nod.

“Heck of a catch, Scott. Really,” he says. “I've already sent the video out to every news source around the globe. We don't know what happened to Phantom yet, but even if he did get away, he's done.”

I nod, but I don't really care. Not right now. Maybe later. I keep brushing.

Jake puts his hand on my shoulder. “You need to get out of here, Scott. Just go take a walk or something.”

“I can't leave her.”

“She's gone, man … there's nothing—”

“I can't leave her!” I keep brushing.

A woman in a HazMat suit comes over. “There's no one else here, sir.”

Jake sighs, then wipes his hand over his face. “Let's wrap it up, then.”

“Yes, sir,” the woman says. “What do you want us to do about—?” She motions her head toward Allison.

I look up at the woman. She avoids looking back at me.

“Nothing,” Jake says.

“Yes, sir,” she responds, then turns and walks toward the other suits.

Jake squeezes my shoulder. “We'll be upstairs. Exit Four. When you're ready.”

I nod without looking at him.

His hand leaves my shoulder. I can hear the footsteps behind me as everyone leaves.

I cradle Allison's head in my arms and start to cry.

I snap awake. My nose is all stuffed up. My eyes feel swollen. I don't know if I've fallen asleep or blacked out. I don't know if I've been here a couple of minutes or a couple of days. The lighting in this place is the same as it was before, but it's a mile underground, so that doesn't tell me anything. All I know is that I have to get out of here right now.

I pick Allison up and head for Exit Four. After about a half-mile of sprinting through a tunnel, then climbing up ten flights of stairs, I come to a couple of doors. I kick them open and step through; I'm standing in the middle of an old warehouse. It looks a lot like the one where Allison and I first found each other … really found each other.

Jake is there, but he's alone. He looks at me, but doesn't say a word.

I lay Allison on the ground at his feet.

Suddenly, I can't breathe. I feel suffocated. I can't be in here.

Jake is nodding. I see the word
GO
in giant letters in my mind.

I sprint for the doors to the outside … crash through
them without slowing down. I'm outside. It's sunny, which feels like a personal insult. I look around.

There it is. The Brooklyn Bridge.

I leap onto one of the lower rooftops and sprint and leap my way to the river. When I get to it, part of me wants to keep going … jump into the river and swim back to Manhattan. I skid to a stop a foot before the water and fall to my knees. I scream, but I'm too weak to put anything behind it.

I'd cry, but I feel dried out.

I look out at the bridge. I can feel it mocking me, for believing this could've ended any other way.

to school eventually,” Jake says. “It's been three weeks.”

I'm lying on a bed in the room over the Berkshires' garage. I've been here since …

“And you're going to have to eat a little more than one peanut butter and jelly sandwich every two days, especially if you expect to head into the city and run around.”

He looks at me as if he expects me to be embarrassed that I've spent every night of the past three weeks scouring the city for Monkeywrench. I look at him and think about just what he can do with his expectations.

“Oh. OK,” he says. “Thanks for the disturbing image.”

I turn my attention back to the ceiling.

“What if you run into Phantom?” he asks.

I smile. “I'll ask him how the whole hero thing has been working out for him lately.”

Things have not gone well for Trent over the past few weeks. The “stuffed bear video” has made it around the world several times over. All the major news networks, and most of the minor ones, have aired it. And it turns out that Monkeywrench was right: Most people had a pretty strong reaction to Trent's desire to rip the head off a dead girl. So first, Trent lost his “adoring public,” and then he lost everything else. The Feds seized all of his assets, and now they're on standby, waiting for him to make a move. No one knows where he is.

“I still think going out there is a bad idea,” Jake says.

“Tell me how you're involved in all this and I'll think about staying.”

“No, you won't. You'll leave after I tell you.”

“Maybe.”

Jake sighs. I've been asking him this question every day for the past three weeks.

“My dad was a doctor for supers for years.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Well, that doesn't really explain why you have a bunch of people in HazMat suits at your beck and call,” I say.

“The feds contacted my dad a few years ago. Bodies of plus/pluses started turning up … one by one.”

“Why him? Why not call the supers?”

“The deaths all appeared medical in nature … accidental, or by natural causes, but they were starting to add up. The Feds wanted to keep it hush-hush until they could figure out what was going on. They didn't want a panic on their hands.”

“That doesn't make sense,” I say. “Unless they suspected that the deaths were actually murders, and they thought a super was committing them.”

Jake smiles. “Kind of. They were suspicious, but it wasn't that cut and dry.” He pauses. “Apart from the report on supers that you read, how much do you really know about your powers?” he asks.

I shrug. “I'm guessing by your question that I don't know as much as I think I know.”

“Well, you already know about the heart thing … but there's something else: In physical plus/pluses like you, bone density starts to decrease at a certain age,” he says. “The average is about 35 years old. You'll still have
your powers, but your body won't be able to support them.

“It's like putting a Ferrari engine in a moped,” he continues. “Fast and strong on the inside, really fragile on the outside. It's way too easy to have an accident, and most of those accidents are fatal.”

“Oh. Well, that's depressing.”

“So, most of the deaths my dad and I were investigating fell into two categories: heart attacks in young kids who accidentally pushed themselves too fast, too soon, and people thirty-five and older who met with some kind of unfortunate ‘accident.'

“And some of them probably were accidental,” he continues, “but about a month ago, my dad and I went through the old records. Guess what we found …”

“Unexplained needle marks on the heart attack kids,” I say.

“Eighty-nine percent of them. And now we're thinking, who knows how many of those older pluses got ‘accidentally' bumped in front of trains, or down a flight of stairs.”

“But what happened to all the ones about in their prime like Trent?”

“We think he killed them first … quietly. He's been
the biggest ‘hero' for a while. They trusted him, right? He probably waited for just the right opportunity, then offed them and got rid of the bodies. Most likely, he picked them off one by one. There weren't
that
many of them, and communication between masked vigilantes has never been great. I'm sorry, but you physical pluses have never been great organizers.”

“Well, what about the plus intelligences?”

“They've always been harder to track,” he says. “There's no physical characteristic that identifies us. There's not really that many of us to begin with, and the ones that do exist aren't exactly social. Only a few of us are even ‘out in the open' … and I use that term generously.”

“So there's no way of telling how many Trent got to,” I say.

“We know of a few whose deaths were always a little … suspicious, especially when added to the big picture. The problem is that we don't have any way of finding new plus intelligences, or tracking the ones we know about if they don't want to be found. So, there might be a few who, over the years, contacted Phantom with the hopes that he might mentor them. I'm guessing there's more than a few plus intelligences in shallow graves across the country.”