Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Page 2

  “What? Pitch sandbags? We didn’t come all this way to do grunt-work, and now you’re dogging our saves.”

  “That’s not—” Kindrake tried to interject as Boomer moved up behind Spinner.

  “Shut up! You’re in this, too! Miss Kiddie-Show Star, coming on like you can teach us all about cape-work.” The background hum rose in pitch.

  I put out my hands. “I think we all need to—” Boomer swung and the concussive power released from his fist lit up my world.

  “Hope! Get up!”

  When you’re clocked hard you don’t feel it, or what happens in the next few seconds, really—your shaken brain-stem isn’t letting any information into your head until it clears. Hearing Shell yelling at me wasn’t unwelcome, and after months of fight-club style training with Watchman and Grendel I bounced back to full wakefulness pretty quick. And tasted rain. I was back outside.

  Boomer had blasted me through the wall.

  We’d just wrecked a church.

  “Hope!” Shell gasped when I sat up. “Get back in there! It’s on!”

  Instead they joined me, Boomer first. He widened the hole on the way out, arriving in a rain of bricks. Whoever had ejected him had practically aimed him at me and I took full advantage, catching him as he skidded on his knees to kick him behind the ear. Ajax-type or not, he dropped without a sound. Watchman would be proud.

  Grendel followed him out in a charge that carried Slamazon with him and I breathed a sigh of relief; not that he was needed out here, but if he’d gone on the offense that meant that the civilians were safe—probably evacuated by Crash.

  “Shell?” I asked. She’d be getting everyone’s dispatch-cam feeds.

  “Ozma used her scepter and magic belt to grow a forest from the wood of the rec room floor and Crash and Spaz are evacuating the bystanders behind it,” she reported. “Tsuris is fighting Spinner, burying the creep under his own weave, and—”

  The final bit got cut off by the huge beast that dropped out of the night. That I hadn’t seen before, but it had to be Kindrake’s. The thing’s landing shook the street, its rainbow-colored body making elephants look small as its wings covered us.

  Wow.

  “Is it a fusion?” I asked needlessly; the rainbow-patched hide was a big hint that all Kindrake’s flying friends had joined up to become greater than the sum of their parts. Well, now I know how she flew the passenger frame here. “Where’s Kindrake?” I spotted her before Shell replied, standing in the hole in the wall and pointing at Grendel and Slamazon. She shouted over the storm, and my heart sank as I lunged forward. The dragon’s head darted down, lizard-quick, and Grendel disappeared into its jaws.

  “Brian!”

  “Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” Shell said, wide-eyed. I smacked into the beast’s side and it was like hitting a leather sack full of sand; it bellowed, slammed back against the passenger frame, and I hit it again before Slamazon hard-blocked me. Not braced, I flew backwards. Kindrake’s projection or not, the thing had a sense of self-preservation; it took to the air, the sweep of its wings adding to my tumble. Then the wind hit in a blasting roar. Tsuris.

  The column of air wouldn’t have pushed me if I was braced for it, but I didn’t have a hundred foot wingspan for it to grab onto, and it caught the escaping beast—Great Drake?—like a helpless leaf, throwing it back down to crush through the parked FEMA vehicles and roll away into the night. It roared its frustration, getting some height only to get smacked down again, this time right into— No no no…

  “Oh, shit!” Shell swore.

  It hit the nearest wall of raised levee like a ton of—like tons of dragon. Then it exploded into rainbow confetti as Grendel ripped his way out of its stomach. Kindrake screamed in pain and collapsed behind me, caught by Ozma as she stepped through the holed wall wearing a new green fedora.

  “Ozma!” I yelled. “If you’re wearing Spinner, I need him now!”

  * * *

  Spinner was too shaken by his experience as a fashion accessory to stay pissy at being ordered around (Ozma’s victims tended to find their memory of contentedly snuggling her head disturbing), and I let all of them know that, as the senior officer of the Illinois State Militia in an Emergency Zone, I could arrest them just for being complete idiots (officially I’m a 1st lieutenant and nobody finds that funnier than me).

  An hour later we’d patched the hole in the levee. It took all of the FEMA team’s reserve sandbags and countless yards of de-hatted Spinner’s threads, but we were able to use the temporary patch to buy time for me to fly more levee sections in and Cairo didn’t get more than a couple of inches of Mississippi floodwater before we finished. Six inches, tops.

  By then we were all bone-tired—even I could feel my thoughts drowning in cold black fatigue. Powerteam’s crew manager explained that Kindrake’s feedback-trauma would be fine by morning and that she’d be able to reconstruct Terraflore (nice name for a big rainbow-lizard) and fly the battered passenger-frame out of Cairo. Job done, I ordered everyone to bed.

  Half of Powerteam thought that would be a good idea, so Spinner backed down. He even slapped a patch on the hole we’d made in the church. Ozma couldn’t turn the wall of trees she’d made back into the smooth wood floor it had been, but there was enough open space left that we could set up cots and dividers so everyone, capes, evacuees, crews, and engineers, could get some sleep.

  * * *

  The warm grass felt like the memory of a summer day and the stars shown as bright as they only could without air or light pollution to dim their glory. The snow of petals from the blooming cherry tree danced across the hill in the warm night breeze, and the silver fox beside me sighed contentedly as I stroked its ears. Together we watched the town below us burn and vanish.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling, still smelling smoke and cherry blossoms.

  Nuts. Not again.

  Chapter Two

  You’d think I could have a “normal” superhero career. After all, I might be strong but my powers are as common as dirt. But no, apparently I’m a Chosen One. Like the Teatime Anarchist hung a glowing neon sign on me for all inscrutable meddlers to see. It makes life way too exciting.

  From the journal of Hope Corrigan.

  * * *

  Everybody dreams, unless something has happened to leave them with damaged parietal lobes. Some people never remember their dreams, and others are natural lucid dreamers, oneironauts. I’m a vivid dreamer with high recall, which sometimes creates more awkwardness than I need. But once upon a time, no matter how weird or embarrassingly blushworthy my dream life occasionally got, I could at least say it was All In My Head. Not anymore.

  I hadn’t experienced a Kitsune dream since the end of the Villains Inc. mess, but last night’s had the same undreamlike quality, as crystal-clear as any waking memory. That made it Important, but the fox had snuck into my dreams just before morning light and I had stuff to do. I found a notebook and quickly wrote out everything I could remember, details like the eagle-in-a star design on the burning town’s water tower. After two minutes of tapping my pen and blanking on more details, I gulped down a couple of energy bars from my go-bag, washed them down with bottled water, and got moving.

  The latest storm front had moved on, which made a morning flyover of my search grid easier. Not that I expected to find any more holdouts after this many days of flooding, but I hadn’t expected to meet the Carletons and Stewarts last night, either. With the rain past, the predawn gloom actually made it easier for my infrared sight to pick up on the glowing lights of body heat but the only people I spotted in my area of responsibility were emergency crews who were supposed to be there. I waved.

  “Good morning, Astra,” Blackstone greeted me through Dispatch. His power-set wasn’t really useful for this kind of emergency, so he’d remained at the Dome. “Shell tells me that Powerteam has decamped from Cairo. How do things look to you this fine day?”

  I smiled but kept the laugh out of
my voice as I reported in. Decamped was a polite way of putting it; I imagined that they got yanked out of Cairo so fast that they left a vacuum behind them. Last night I hadn’t been interested in speaking with Spinner beyond stuff like “Do it here” so I still had no idea why FEMA had even let them into the operation zone, and now my day was brighter just knowing I wouldn’t have to deal with them again.

  “Can you give me a report of last night?” Blackstone asked when I finished.

  Frowning, I looked for a place to land. Sure I could talk and fly at the same time (Shell would have gotten me killed long ago if I couldn’t) but I was supposed to be flying a patrol and if I had to think then I might miss something. An abandoned and half-drowned farmhouse offered a convenient roof for me to touch down on, and I absently tucked my cape under me to sit.

  “Sir? Is there a reason it can’t wait for the after-action report?” Something was obviously going on; team regs didn’t require a report until we’d stood down from the current emergency. His pause wasn’t reassuring.

  “Humor an old man, my dear.”

  Okay… I started with spotting the tiny glowing drake and kept the commentary out; Blackstone liked facts first, then impressions. He was silent when I finished and I watched the sun rise to throw a bar of gold across the water. Then he said the last thing I could have expected.

  “Thank you, Astra. And now please return to Cairo. The Young Sentinels are being recalled.”

  * * *

  “That’s just bullshit!” Tsuris’ response was typical. Crash’s easygoing shrug was, too. Blackstone had left the announcement to me, but Ozma didn’t seem too surprised. Grendel simply nodded—he didn’t talk much, but didn’t miss much either. Shell had stayed remarkably silent and out of sight.

  I sighed.

  “Blackstone didn’t say why, but with the levees secure FEMA can handle things with a quick drop-by from another assigned CAI team. Since over half our senior team strength is down here, too, it’s a good idea for us to go home anyway. Regardless,” I shut down Tsuris with a glare, “our ride is on its way so we need to be lifting in fifteen.”

  Blackstone hadn’t explained, just let me know our pickup was coming, and I didn’t ask Shell. Months of weekly packing drill meant that we had our kits and go-bags closed up and stowed on our field pallet before our ride had time to arrive and circle Cairo more than once. Crash, Grendel, and Ozma climbed on and clipped themselves down, and I attached myself to the lift harness and took us up and away. We climbed smoothly, and with Tsuris flying alongside to stabilize the pallet, even the cargo plane’s turbulence didn’t rock us as we slid into the open bay. The loadmaster guided us in and I dropped us inside the painted yellow lines with barely a bump. Crash unclipped and locked the pallet down in a blur the instant the bay doors closed. The load-light went green, and we were safely in.

  Touching down, I unhitched with another sigh.

  “Kick back, everybody,” I said needlessly. We had nothing to do until we reached Chicago, then we’d reverse the drill and be home in the Dome. Heading forward to the passenger section, I took a seat and relaxed. Shell popped in to virtually take the seat beside me. She wasn’t smiling, and the levity of last night was gone.

  “Do you want to hear what’s going on?”

  Yes. “Can I do anything about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then nope. Could you do something else?” My notebook was back in my go-bag, but if I gave her permission then she could access and replay the Teatime Anarchist’ implanted sensory-net “download” of me writing in it. I did and her eyes widened as she processed it.

  “No freaking way! Kitsune’s back?”

  “I don’t know.” I closed my eyes and leaned back. “It might have been just a dream. I really, really hope it was, but I’m going to ask Chakra to check me out.”

  Shell went quiet for a minute.

  “No agencies admit to catching up to him, at least the files I have legit access to don’t have a whisper. Do you think I should…” She made the offer tentatively, and I opened my eyes with a smile. The fact that she even asked approval to perform cyber hackery was serious progress.

  “No. If he is back, then it’s up to Blackstone to tell us if there’s anything we need to know. But thanks.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Can you find the town? If it’s a real place, looking for that water tower might help you find it.”

  “Did it look at all like a military base?”

  I gave it serious consideration, shook my head. “But Midwest, maybe? The kind of place with one stoplight you find in the middle of hundreds of miles of cornfield? Not that I saw any corn, but it’s spring.”

  “Maybe, if the town burning—and disappearing—is happening now.” She laced the qualifying statement with doubt.

  “Yeah…” I closed my eyes again. Last year’s Kitsune dreams—all two of them—had never been literal, but nothing as mundane as buildings had shown up in them, either. I wanted to shrug it off, but as different as it had been from the others, it still had that same realer-than-real clarity. And although I’d felt no sense of alarm while I’d been in the dream, a weight was growing, cold and heavy in my chest. Not quite panic but close, a growing gut-certainty of looming awfulness. What I’d seen was real.

  With no more from me to go on, Shell faded out (she’d added a nice whispery sound effect and a feel like a puff of cool mist on my skin). Off to play the Ghost in the Machine, she’d shake the data-built foundations of cyberspace. If an image even remotely matching what I’d seen existed she’d find it.

  Why did I feel like that wouldn’t be a good thing?

  * * *

  We could have landed at the airport, but doing a loaded drop was always good practice and the pallet had to come home anyway for repacking. We bailed out high over Chicago. The storms had hit us here, too, but the major cells passed to the south and east.

  Looking down at Grant Park, I almost couldn’t have said that the Green Man had ever been there. After a lot of debate, the business-owners on Michigan Avenue had won and most of the dense thickets of trees left over from his last attack had been removed. Ozma had “walked” a bunch of them into orderly rows along the avenues and a couple of groves were preserved. The Atlas Memorial and Buckingham Fountain had been restored.

  With the load blocking my line of sight, Tsuris guided me down for a perfect insertion through the Dome’s bay doors, where Shell welcomed us wearing her new Shellbot shell.

  “Off the clock, everybody,” I said as Crash, Ozma, and Grendel unclipped. “Don’t leave the Dome. Five hours, then we inventory and repack the pallet and go-bags.” Some CAI teams let their staff pack their kits but not ours, especially since Lei Zi had taken over as field leader; when we went away from Chicago we had to know that we had everything we needed.

  Crash saluted and everybody else just nodded; we all knew the system. I stayed to watch the bay doors close above us, and Shell and I headed downstairs. She didn’t say anything in the elevator or the hallway, waiting for my apartment door to close behind us before she opened her mouth.

  “Tired?”

  “You think?” I stripped off my mask and wig, running fingers through my much shorter, bobbed hair, and kept stripping. The new costume bodysuit covered me from neck to toes in layered Vulcan-created fabric styled by Andrew. The new stuff wasn’t just enormously damage-resistant, it wick’d sweat and oils away from my skin into its layers and shed dirt and field stains away like nobody’s business, but I still wanted a shower so bad I could taste it. Especially since I’d been in a fight and even been knocked out for a second. Dr. Beth was going to want to poke at me.

  Shell sat on my bed and watched, wincing at the bruises that came into sight. The twist of sympathy in her lips looked totally natural—Vulcan had done a great job again.

  “How’s the new Shell-shell?” I asked before she could open her mouth.

  She wiggled her new eyebrows, stuck out her tongue and
curled it. “Feels real, and there’s no signal loss as long as I stay close to the Dome. The Galatea shell can go farther since it doesn’t require as much signal load to drive. I still couldn’t have gone with you guys.”

  “Shell…”

  “I know, I’m useful riding along through Dispatch. It’s not like I’ll be risking myself with the Galatea shell.”

  Shell didn’t remember the months when she’d completely downloaded herself into the last Galatea, or almost dying in the last Green Man attack, but she’d learned from her downloaded self’s experiences anyway; she wasn’t going to expose herself to direct harm again. Not that I’d let her—she’d only won my approval the last time by lying to me, letting me believe that she’d been uploading a running backup of herself into memory. The future quantum-tech to Verne-tech interface hadn’t worked that way, and the first I’d known about that was when I’d almost lost her.

  I had lost her in a way; the Shelly who’d downloaded herself and spent months as Shelly-Galatea, gotten close to Crash, fought beside me, was flesh-and-blood now and living with her mother in Springfield. The Shelly sitting cross-legged on my bed was Shelly 3.0 and she knew it. She insisted we all call her ‘Shell’, not just as a nickname anymore, and now she’d styled her hair as short as my own shoulder-length bob and colored it black as Artemis’ raven locks. She’d also “aged” herself a bit, and looked like her chronological age of 20 instead of the 16 years she'd experienced.

  Shell and Shelly, one a quantum-ghost and wingman and the other a high school freshman who texted and video-chatted a lot. Neither talked about the other much. Shelly still hadn’t used the bio-seed she’d taken with her to establish a neural link with Shell and I didn’t know why.

  Shell read my look and stuck out her tongue again, an attitude display instead of a demonstration of Vulcan’s craftsmanship. She hopped up and followed me into the bathroom.