18
For the next two days, I worked feverishly on Malefica’s identity, stopping only to eat and collapse into bed at night. There were no more intimate moments with Sam. No more long talks. No more make-out sessions in the kitchen. I kept my distance from him, and he did the same. I didn’t know whether to be hurt or relieved the superhero didn’t press the issue. It was for the best, but I still wanted him desperately. Dreamed about him even.
After dinner, the others put on their superhero suits and went out to apprehend the criminals that prowled the streets of Bigtime. There were no run-ins with the Triad, but it was only a matter of time. Malefica, Frost, and Scorpion were out there somewhere, plotting their next move. They were up to something. My inner voice constantly grumbled about it. I just didn’t know what it could possibly be.
While the Fearless Five made the streets safe, I was left alone to pace through the halls of Sublime. I never went with the Fearless Five on any of their forays into the real world. They kept that part of themselves separate from me, and I respected their privacy.
But that didn’t keep me from watching them on TV. Every night I went down to the underground library and tuned the monitors to SNN, the Superhero News Network. The round-the-clock TV station was dedicated to, you guessed it, all things superhero. From in-depth profiles to the latest action-figure and video-game releases, the station covered everything that had anything to do with superheroes. But the station got its biggest ratings from its live coverage. At least once a day, the anchor went out to some reporter on the scene of an ongoing superhero-ubervillain battle. Or one of the reporters interviewed Swifte or some other hero about his latest, greatest rescue of a grandma wandering out into traffic or a kitten from a towering tree. Sometimes, they even read the latest diatribes and demands from ubervillains like Mad Maria or Noxious or Captain Sushi.
I sat down, put my feet up on my table, and flipped on SNN. When I’d first come to Bigtime, I hadn’t watched SNN. I hadn’t wanted the station’s stories to influence my own reporting or color my investigations into the Fearless Five. I hadn’t wanted to hear something on SNN and spend weeks investigating it only to discover that some newbie had gotten her facts wrong.
But now, I watched the channel every night. It was the only way I could keep track of the Fearless Five on their missions. The only way I had of knowing whether or not Sam was coming back safe and sound. That had suddenly become very important to me.
I sat through a program about how the Invisible Ingénues were, well, invisible to men and had a hard time finding dates. Suddenly, the anchor touched his earpiece. His words grew sharp and clipped.
“We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to take you out live to the streets of Bigtime.” The anchor turned to two chairs that looked empty. “Sorry, girls.”
“Don’t worry. We’re used to it.” A soft, feminine voice floated through the monitor.
“We now take you to our woman on the street, Kelly Caleb. Kelly, what’s the situation?”
The camera cut to a young, thin, pretty blond woman with a wide smile and unnaturally white teeth. “Well, James, it seems that Bigtime’s favorite superheroes, the Fearless Five, have cornered a gang of armed robbers in an alley across the street. The superheroes picked up the robbers’ trail after they tripped the silent alarm at Jewel’s Jewel Emporium in downtown Bigtime. Let’s see how the Five are faring.”
The camera zoomed over to the alley, and I perched on the edge of my seat. I had an urge for popcorn.
A body flew out of the dark hole and landed with an audible crack on the sidewalk. The robber, who was wearing black clothes and a tattered ski mask, let out a low groan. Five more bodies followed in quick succession.
Striker strode out of the shadows, followed by Fiera and Mr. Sage. My mouth went dry. Good grief, the man knew how to wear leather well. Especially on TV. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The camera panned across the street, where a large group of twenty- and thirty-something women stood behind a police barricade.
“Striker! Striker! He’s our man! If he can’t spank us, no one can!” the women cheered in unison.
They shook their booties and waved and clapped. A couple of them even sported cheerleader uniforms and sparkling silver pom-poms. Tramps.
Kelly Caleb trotted over to the superheroes as fast as her stilettos would let her. She ignored Fiera and Mr. Sage and stuck her microphone in Striker’s face.
“Striker, Kelly Caleb with SNN. What’s the situation?”
Striker seemed baffled by her obvious question. He gestured at the moaning, groaning robbers. A couple of cops came over and started slapping handcuffs on them. “The robbers have been apprehended, as you can see. The police are taking them into custody.”
Kelly opened her mouth to ask him something else, when a woman shoved past her.
“Striker! I love you! Be mine!”
The woman, one of the pom-pom carriers, wrapped something that looked like a bra around Striker’s neck, pulled his head down, and kissed him on the mouth.
I gasped. The brazen hussy!
The kiss went on . . . and on . . . and on . . . I threw my Rubik’s Cube at one of the monitors. It bounced off and dropped to the floor.
“Get your hands off him, you slut!” I shouted.
Fiera came to Striker’s rescue and yanked the woman back. “That’s enough of that,” she snapped. “Have a little respect for yourself, lady.”
For once, I was grateful to the hotheaded superhero. Any other time, I would have thought Striker looked like a clown with a white bra draped over his black suit. But I wasn’t in a humorous mood now.
“Time to go,” Mr. Sage said. “Kelly, thank you for your interest and stellar reporting, as usual. Until next time.”
Mr. Sage kissed her hand. Kelly blushed and stuttered something incoherent. Smooth. Very smooth. Mr. Sage was another hero who knew how to work the media.
The Fearless Five jogged away. The women screamed for Striker to stop. Bras, panties, and other articles of clothing sailed after the sexy superhero. My hands curled into fists. A large black van skidded to a halt at the end of the street. The door slid back, and the superheroes dived inside. The van sped away, trailed by sex-starved women shouting phone numbers and lewd suggestions.
I snapped off the monitor and glared into space. Striker wasn’t their man. He was mine. I sighed. No, he wasn’t mine either. No matter how much I wanted him to be.
Another day passed, and I was still no closer to uncovering Malefica’s identity. I threw down my pen in disgust. I’d been over and over all the information that I had. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Malefica might as well have not even existed as far as I was getting.
I picked up a Rubik’s Cube from my makeshift desk in the library, slid the rows of colors round and round, and muttered obscenities about Malefica’s parentage.
“Carmen, that’s not very nice,” Henry chided, staring at me over the top of his computer monitor.
“Well, Malefica’s not a very nice person,” I snapped.
I finished the Rubik’s Cube, put it down, and scooted over to the far side of my desk, where I had started a jigsaw puzzle. I’d completed the border yesterday. Now, I was trying to fill in the center of the puzzle, a picture of purple pansies. However, the cheery colors did little to ease my frustrations.
After a few minutes, the puzzle pieces blurred. My head started to throb. I groaned and closed my eyes.
“Another headache?”
“Unfortunately.” I rubbed my aching temples.
According to Chief Newman, I was still feeling the after-effects from the dart Frost had shot me with. The chief hadn’t been able to identify the exact drug the ubervillain used. I reached for the giant bottle of aspirin perched on my desk, poured out two pills, and swallowed them.
“Maybe you need a break,” Henry suggested. “We’re going to do some training this afternoon. Would you like to watch?”
“Training?”
“It’s something we do once a month. We go through battle simulations, plot strategies, test our powers, things like that. War games. It’s Sam’s way of making sure we stay fresh and sharp.”
I eyed the piles of papers on my desk. Anything sounded better than sorting through more boring articles detailing Malefica’s impeccable sense of style and expensive tastes. Plus, I was more than a little curious to see the Fearless Five in action again.
“Let the games begin,” I said.
Henry led me down a hallway I hadn’t explored. This one twisted and turned like a snake writhing along the floor. It went deeper and deeper underground until it seemed as though we were in the middle of the earth itself.
We reached a thick metal door, and Henry punched in the 555 code. The door slid open, revealing a long hallway with various rooms branching off it. Sam, Fiona, and Chief Newman stood in the center of the hallway, already in costume.
“There you are, Henry. We’ve been waiting for you,” Mr. Sage said.
I drank in the sight of Striker. His black leather suit hugged every part of his firm body. Our eyes met. The superhero shot me a quick smile, which I shyly returned.
“What’s she doing here?” Fiera hissed. Her hair sparked and cracked with fire. “Don’t we have any secrets left?”
“She wanted to watch,” Henry said.
The tall black man went to a door marked EQUIPMENT and punched in the code. He gestured at me, and I walked inside. The others followed.
My mouth dropped open. Rows and rows of superhero suits hung behind glass doors along one side of the room. The colorful costumes provided a bright, almost gaudy, contrast to the gray, metal walls. Another glass case contained boots and gloves and masks galore, all lined up from largest to smallest and sorted by color. Stacks of swords identical to the two Striker carried glistened from their place on steel racks anchored to another wall. Whips, utility belts, and various other odds and ends sat on stands in the middle of the room just waiting to be grabbed and used. The area contained enough suits and gizmos to equip an entire army of superheroes. I truly was in Superhero Central.
“This is incredible. How much money do you spend on all this stuff?” I whispered.
“Too much. Why do you think I’m such a ruthless businessman? Somebody’s got to pay for all of this,” Striker quipped. “Being a superhero isn’t cheap.”
Fiera put her hands on her hips. “My fashion designs accounted for a good portion of our budget last year. Certainly more than Henry and my father’s meager contributions.”
“Yes, well, some of us aren’t independently wealthy,” Henry replied. “Ask Carmen. She knows how badly journalists are paid, especially those at The Exposé. Morgana Madison has Striker beat in the ruthless category.”
“She’s something, all right,” Striker said in a wry tone.
A vague thought swirled around in my mind. Something connected to karma—
“Can we get started already?” Fiera asked. “I have clients I need to see later.”
The thought went down the drain of my brain.
Henry walked to a door marked TRAINING. He entered the code, and it slid open. We trooped inside. The room reminded me of a recording studio. A control panel with thousands of buttons and switches and lights lined one wall. A window situated over the panel overlooked a sunken, metal room the size of a football field. I eyed the scorch marks on the walls and floor below. Interesting.
Striker, Fiera, and Mr. Sage clustered around a locker. Each one grabbed a silver helmet and put it on. The helmets had black visors that covered the superheroes’ eyes, along with microphones attached to one side. Henry punched buttons and threw switches on the control panel.
“Everybody turn his or her helmet on,” he said.
The visors darkened, and flickering lights reflected down onto the superheroes’ faces. The visor seemed to be some sort of interactive screen. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Now the chinstrap,” Henry said.
The three superheroes ran the straps underneath their chins and snapped them to the opposite side of the helmet.
“Whenever you’re ready, guys,” Henry said.
“Enjoy the show.” Fiera gave us a mock salute.
The three superheroes opened a metal door and pounded down a flight of stairs to the room below. The door clanged shut behind them.
“Aren’t you going downstairs too?” I asked Henry.
“No, I don’t need to. This is my job—to stay in the van and provide technical support. Today, I’m running the simulation instead.”
Henry waited until the superheroes had made their way to the middle of the gigantic area. Then, he hit more buttons. “We’re going to replay the incident in the park when the Triad attacked you. Watch the room.”
I peered out of the window and scanned the walls and floor. The big metal room was a big metal room. Not much else to see . . .
Wait a minute. I squinted. Something was coming up out of the metal floor. It looked like . . . grass.
Grass?
I leaned forward until my nose pressed up against the window. I squinted. My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me this time. It was grass.
A green, velvety carpet sprouted up out of the floor, while the roof took on the appearance of the night sky, complete with a crescent moon and a sprinkling of stars. Trashcans popped up out of nowhere, along with picnic tables. Walking trails zigged and zagged over the grass. In less than a minute, the room went from an empty metal box to a perfect replica of Laurel Park.
“It looks so real,” I whispered.
“Doesn’t it?” Henry aka Hermit said. His bow tie perked up with pride. “Computer chips and monitors embedded in the walls and floors project the 3-D images. Some other adjustments I’ve made pump in sounds, smells, wind, everything. The grass even feels real.”
A woman walked on one of the paths and sat down on a bench near the swing set. I blinked.
“Is that me?”
“You bet. I recorded the whole incident. All of our costumes have cameras imbedded in the F5 insignia, so I was able to record the battle from different perspectives. I took the images of you, digitized them, and inserted a composite into this simulation. We try to make things as authentic as possible.”
I didn’t know whether to be flattered or creeped out that I was starring in a Fearless Five training simulation. I stared at the image of myself. One thing was for sure—I needed to do something different with my hair. It looked like a rat’s nest of auburn tangles.
A series of beeps caught my attention. “What’s that?”
Hermit pointed to five monitors, three of which had rows of pulsing lines. “There are a variety of sensors embedded in the chinstraps that tell me everybody’s heart rate, blood pressure, other vitals signs, and the intensity of any pain they feel.”
“Pain?”
“Not only do things look and feel real, so do any injuries that occur, even though it’s just a mixture of holograms and computer images. Nobody actually gets hurt. Sort of like a Jedi mind trick.”
“That’s incredible,” I said. “Did you think of all this by yourself?”
Hermit shrugged in a modest sort of way. “Most of it. Striker came up with some of the concepts and told me what he wanted. I designed all of the electronics. Mr. Sage helped with some of the illusions and sensations.”
“Speaking of Striker, where did he and the others go?”
The superheroes had disappeared.
“They’ve gone to wait in the spots where they started the attack from.”
I watched myself sit on the bench. Moments later, an image of Scorpion appeared, followed by ones of Frost and Malefica. It was a bit disconcerting and disorienting to see myself clutching a bomb trigger and threatening ubervillains with annihilation. What the hell had I been thinking? I felt as though I’d stepped outside my body. In a way, I had.
Striker launched himself out from behind a tree. He crashed into the image of Scorpion, and the two of them fell to the ground. Fiera lit up another tree, and the battle was on. Things progressed just as they had in real life, with the Fearless Five defeating the Terrible Triad.
I frowned. Something wasn’t right. It almost looked as if the Triad had retreated on purpose, instead of being beaten back. Something about the smile on Malefica’s face bothered me. The ubervillain was cocky, but her ear-to-ear grin seemed out of place when she was under attack from three of the world’s greatest superheroes. Something was wrong with the whole scenario. My inner voice murmured.
The battle ended. I watched myself pass out. Striker picked up my body. Too bad I wasn’t really in the room. I wouldn’t have minded being close to the superhero again, even if I was drugged and unconscious.
“That was the first run. We always do the first one just the way events transpired in real life,” Hermit explained. “Now, we’ll do other configurations and methods of attack and see how things might have played out differently.
“Okay, guys. Mix it up this time.” Hermit spoke into one of the microphones that jutted up from the control panel. His voice echoed in the enormous metal room.
The scene reset itself. Once again, I watched myself walk through the park, sit down on the bench, and threaten Malefica with my bomb. The Fearless Five appeared, and the fight commenced.
Fiera threw a fireball at Malefica, who used her telekinesis to send it flying through the air. The red-hot ball of energy smacked into the window in front of me. I screamed and threw my hands up, expecting to be burned alive.
“Don’t worry,” Hermit said. “The glass is bulletproof, shatterproof, and Fiera-proof.”
I lowered my hands. My face turned tomato red. Of course the glass was fireproof. It would have to be to withstand Fiera’s fury. Despite the computer guru’s reassurance, I took a small step back. Just in case.
The rest of the battle didn’t go as well as it had before. Malefica knocked out Mr. Sage with a trashcan to the head, Frost hit Fiera with his freezoray gun and gave her frostbite, and Scorpion body-slammed Striker to the ground and raked his poisoned talons across the superhero’s face. Even though it wasn’t real, I had to stop myself from screaming at the sight of Striker being injured.
“Everybody catch their breath, and let’s go again,” Hermit said.
The superheroes got to their feet. The scene rewound.
They fought battle after battle after battle. Sometimes, the Fearless Five won, but more often than not, the Terrible Triad triumphed. The groups were fairly evenly matched, but the Fearless Five seemed out of sync during the fights. They bumped into each other, made mistakes, and targeted the wrong members of the Triad with their powers. Striker against Scorpion was a fair matchup, as was Fiera against Frost. Regeneration versus poison, fire versus ice. Their powers balanced out. But Mr. Sage versus Scorpion ended in disaster every time, as did Fiera against Malefica. In short, the Fearless Five needed another superhero, someone to round out their attacks and powers.
A wave of guilt swallowed me. They used to have someone else, someone to watch their backs and turn the tide in their favor. The Fearless Five used to have Tornado.
Hermit ran a final simulation, which the Fearless Five won, and the superheroes quit for the day.
“So what did you think?” Striker asked when we were back in the equipment room. He peeled off his mask, grabbed a towel from a nearby locker, and wiped the sweat from his face.
All I could do was just stare at Sam. The man was gorgeous, even when covered in shimmering sweat. My eyes traced over his costume. I wanted to strip the smooth fabric away from his body and . . .
“Carmen?” Sam asked.
I pushed away my lustful thoughts and opened my mouth to respond when Fiona cut in.
“We kicked ass like we usually do. We’re superheroes, for crying out loud. Enough said,” Fiona crowed.
Evidently, Fiona had already forgotten the simulation in which Frost had turned her into a giant, flame-shaped ice sculpture.
“Ah, you must be one of those,” I said.
“One of those?” Fiona’s red-and-orange catsuit glowed. “What do you mean by that?”
Sweat popped out on my forehead. I wanted to kick myself as soon as the words left my mouth. Why did I say things like that out loud where other people could hear them? The others looked at me with questions in their eyes. In for a penny.
“It has been my experience that a great many superheroes and ubervillains think their powers make them special, make them better than everybody else. And that because of this, they have the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want.”
Fiona sniffed. “Of course our powers make us special. That’s why they call us superheroes.”
I shook my head. “No, actually they don’t. Your powers just make you different, not special. It’s a common misconception, particularly among ubervillains. It’s where a lot of your I’m-all-powerful-and-destined-to-rule-the-world psychotic dreams and schemes come from.”
“Really? Can you melt metal with your eyeballs? Make fireballs shoot out of your fingertips? Defeat ubervillains with one hand tied behind your back?”
“No, I can’t,” I replied in an even tone.
“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t last two seconds against Malefica.”
Fiona took a seat on a nearby bench and unzipped her chunky boots. The superhero ignored me like I was a bug crawling on the wall. My temper flared up, and my foot tapped out an angry, staccato rhythm.
“Can you play the piano like Beethoven? Or sing like Carly Simon? Can you take five pages’ worth of quotes and turn them into a usable story ten minutes before deadline? I don’t think so, unless you have more hidden talents I don’t know about. We all have our special skills. They don’t make us better or worse than each other. Just different.”
“You’re just jealous,” Fiona snapped. “Most people are.”
“No, I’m not. I don’t want superpowers. I have enough problems, in case you haven’t noticed, which is why I’m here with you.”
“Hopefully, not for long,” she growled.
I glared at Fiona. My hands curled into fists. She was getting on my last nerve. If the superhero didn’t have the ability to reduce me to a pile of ash, I would have punched her. Fiona should be grateful for her superpowers—they were all that was saving her from a knuckle sandwich.
Sensing my dark, violent thoughts, Chief Newman stepped between us. “That’s an interesting theory, Carmen. Why don’t you meet me in the library? We can discuss it further.”
“Fine.”
I continued to glare at Fiona. Suddenly, the superhero’s face blurred, and a massive headache roared to life inside my skull. My veins quivered and pulsed with every breath. A chill ran down my spine, and I put my hands on my head.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked. His silver eyes darkened with concern.
“Nothing,” I muttered. “Just another superhero-induced headache.”