Arc Angel (3 page)

She stumbled into her bedroom and over to her sleek metal shelving unit. Proof. She needed proof.

Top shelf, first box on the left. Alphabetical order. Standing on her tiptoes, she managed to snag the box off the shelf and carried it to her bed. After shoving the tangle of covers aside, she put the box down in the center, sat down next to it, and, as carefully as if it were a grenade with a pulled pin, opened the lid. A drawing of a tall, buxom woman, held captive in midair by a green-skinned man’s brainwaves stared up at her from the top of the pile. Ah yes, Grendor. Not the best villain, since Arc Angel easily defeated him by sending 200 amps of energy into his brain amplification device, turning him into a green, well, vegetable.

Stop procrastinating, Miranda.
She looked again, this time ignoring the green guy and forcing herself to focus on the woman. She exhaled a long sigh, wanting to collapse in a puddle on her bed. Yep. Arc Angel had beautiful flowing brunette locks with one white streak over the right temple.

Connection confirmed; one far too big to write off as coincidence or hallucination. And it couldn’t all be
in
her head, since the streak showed visibly
on
her head. She hadn’t lost her mind; she had a very real connection to a character in a comic book.

Not simply a connection. She appeared to have
become
a character in a comic book.

She had to remind herself to breathe.

Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Maybe it was a one time thing, leaving her only the new ‘do as some kind of souvenir. Her spirits lifted at the possibility. She held up her hands and began to inspect them carefully. They looked normal. They felt normal. No strange tingle or twitch. She flexed her fingers carefully. Nothing. It was gone! Whatever had happened to her, it had been temporary! Sheer happiness poured through her entire body. She jumped up from the bed and did a little dance of joy, laughing out loud in her empty room.

A loud creak echoed through the room. Miranda jumped and instinctively raised both hands.

Settle down, Miranda. It was just the crappy building shifting in the wind.

She relaxed and lowered her hands, brushing one of her palms against her thigh. She felt a buzz, almost a tickle, and froze. She brought her hands up and looked down at them in disbelief. No! It was supposed to be gone. But when she flexed her fingers, she could see a fine sheen of energy flowing millimeters above the surface of her skin. It wasn’t gone.

She was still Arc Angel.

How the hell had this happened? She leapt at the box on her bed and upended it, dumping the pile of plastic bag-covered issues onto her mattress. No longer caring about keeping things in pristine condition, Miranda rummaged through the pile until she found Issue #20, the Arc Angel origin story. Sweeping the remaining issues aside, she flopped down on her stomach, pulled #20 out of its bag and started to read. If she could study how and why the original, fictional, Arc Angel came to be, maybe she could fill in some blanks on her own origin story. And maybe she could find some clues as to how to make her powers go away.

She’d read Issue #20 several times before, as she often re-read her entire Arc Angel collection. She’d always felt a vague kinship with the heroine, probably because they had similar hair: long and dark. But their similarities stopped with the hair. Physically, the two women were vastly different, with Arc Angel conforming to the typical Amazonian shape and curves of most women in comics versus Miranda’s size 4, flat-chested physique. Their personalities were as dissimilar as their appearances. Arc Angel was brave, strong, and so witty and charming that men—super powered or not—constantly threw themselves at her feet. Miranda had such bad social anxiety disorder she could barely leave her apartment or answer her phone, and the only man she ever talked to was Hector, the delivery guy, and their entire weekly conversation consisted of “Thanks,” as she took the bags he’d brought.

But now the disparities didn’t matter. She needed to know what connection she had to this pen and ink drawing.

The origin story appeared self-contained in the one issue, probably because it wasn’t very complicated. Arc Angel had been a regular woman—albeit an already beautiful, curvaceous one—named Karen Crawford, who worked as a scientist in a research lab. One day, she’d discovered the director of the lab, Dr. Lance Kendrick conducting an experiment that would test the effects of lightning on humans. The director had found a way to channel the lightning through some type of filter so that it wouldn’t kill the person, but would turn the body into a strange kind of generator. The electricity would loop repeatedly through the central nervous system, essentially turning the person into a human battery. If the final experiment succeeded, it would be run on hundreds of people, who would then be plugged into an undercover electrical grid, where they could produce enough voltage, at no cost, to power entire towns. This would subvert the federal electrical grid, forcing the government to purchase power directly from Dr. Kendrick.

Karen immediately saw the injustice of the plan, but it wasn’t until she learned that all the test subjects were homeless people who’d been abducted off the street that she knew she had to act. She ran to Dr. Kendrick’s private lab and forced her way in. She began to free the poor unconscious man strapped to the table when Dr. Kendrick burst in. Kendrick threw the switch, trapping Karen in the lightning beam. When she regained consciousness—now with a few tastefully revealing rips in her clothing and the white streak in her hair—she channeled her new electrical powers into blasting Dr. Kendrick’s equipment, including the filter. The story ended with the lab destroyed, the homeless people saved, and Dr. Kendrick escaping to become Dr. Malevolent, Arc Angel’s nemesis.

Miranda enjoyed the story as usual, but she didn’t think she’d learned anything new, anything helpful. She tossed the comic on the floor and rolled onto her back. She stared at the ceiling, going over the story again and again, hoping something useful would jump out at her.

As she lay still, thinking, she heard a faint beeping. She sat up and scanned the room, looking for the source. She finally identified it as the BlackBerry on her dresser. She must have a voicemail. No wonder she hadn’t recognized the noise. No one ever called her. All her work clients knew to text or e-mail her. She wasn’t good on the phone.

She hauled herself off the bed and over to her dresser. The screen blinked at her: five new messages. What the hell? She stared at the screen for a minute and then entered her password and listened to the first message.

“Ms. James, hello. This is Gavin Brooks at WIMT-TV. I tried to talk to you outside earlier about your heroics tonight, and I wanted to see if you’d be willing to sit down for an interview with me tomorrow. I’m available any time, you just say the word. Give me a call back at 555-2094, and we can set something up. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.”

The second, third and fourth messages, also from Brooks, were quite similar: a reminder about his interview request and a request for a call back. The fifth call from the tenacious reporter started in the same way as the first four, but the message’s tone shifted at the end.

“Ms. James. I’m sure you’d like to tell your side of this story. If you talk to me, I can be sure that what gets out there is… flattering. If you don’t talk to me, well, I’d hate to see your name dragged through the mud. Call me.”

His tone remained as smooth and professional as it had been, but his words sent a shiver down Miranda’s spine. Even if she wanted to tell “her side of the story,” no way in hell would she talk to Mr. Brooks. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she could feel a hint of electricity in her fingertips. Apparently Arc Angel didn’t want to talk to Mr. Brooks either.

Chapter 4

Bryce woke up again, this time in his bed and at his usual waking time of a little after 9 a.m. He’d pulled on his robe and wandered into his den before his brain had cleared enough to remember the odd events of last night. What had it been? Some strange dream about Arc Angel. It had seemed so urgent and intense last night. The dark-haired woman… Interesting timing, to say the least. Was it some strange way for his subconscious to deal with his conflicted feelings about what he’d just done to his heroine? Some attempt to change his own plans? Or had it simply been too much of Matthews’ lasagna last night? In the bright morning light, he could shrug the whole thing off as only a dream. He settled in on his plush sofa for his habitual dark decaf coffee, light breakfast and light TV.

Bryce took a large bite of one of the flaxseed muffins Matthews had set out for him, leaned back in his seat and flipped on the 60” flatscreen. He started with the local morning shows, now on their second broadcast of the day. He flipped past a report about a local politician’s latest re-election strategy and a story on a man suing the city for shooting his dog before he stopped on the third network. He’d missed the beginning of the segment, but something caught his attention, and he stared, mesmerized, muffin forgotten in his hand.

“…again, is an eyewitness account of what happened here tonight, but we may never know what truly happened. All we do know is that a crime seems to have been prevented, and that the only person hurt is the suspect himself, who has been taken to St. Mary’s in critical condition. So was the mystery woman who intervened tonight a hero? Or simply a woman in the wrong place at the right time? This is Gavin Brooks, for WIMT TV.”

Bryce’s attention had been hooked like a fish on a particularly juicy worm, but not by Gavin Brooks, the overly smiley ace reporter. No, Bryce fixated on a woman in the background, barely visible on the left corner of the screen. As the reporter talked, she’d walked across the screen, heading toward the dreary apartment building. When she’d almost reached the steps, she’d paused and looked back over her shoulder for a minute, said something and then hurried out of camera range.

“Thank you Gavin,” the blonde anchorwoman said. “And now we go to David Chang for an update on the new exhibit at the Elder’s Grove Museum…”

The muffin slipped from his grasp and bounced onto the sisal rug. Bryce didn’t care about losing his breakfast or the mess. All he could think about was the woman he’d seen onscreen. The woman from his dream.

When he finally recovered from the shock of recognition, he jumped up and hurried to his desk in the library, where his sleek laptop sat. He threw himself into his chair and, fingers flying, started his search. He needed to identify that woman. What did she have to do with some late night crime, and why had he dreamed about her?

Within seconds, he’d accessed the television station’s site and had found the clip of the news story. He watched it from the beginning and then played it through again, jotting down notes each time on the pad of paper he always kept handy. When he’d seen the whole thing twice, he had a better idea of the story as a whole and a list of leads to follow up.

The eyewitness account, from a Mrs. Jeannie Dobrusky, seemed remarkably lucid, considering that the woman looked like a regular reader of the
Weekly World News
and the story she told could easily have appeared on the pages of that very publication. Mrs. D had nearly been mugged, but had been saved by a woman—here the old lady pointed behind the reporter to the dark-haired figure he’d noticed on the newscast—who had apparently “zapped” the attacker. Follow-up questions from the reporter didn’t get much more out of the eyewitness, though she did say something about her “guardian angel.”

So what were the odds this story was connected to his dream? The incident had taken place last night around 11 p.m., the same time he’d woken up at his drafting table. His dream had featured quite a storm. The news story had been filmed under clear skies, but the streets behind the reporter contained numerous puddles, which implied a storm had recently passed through the area. And even more telling, the woman who appeared to him as Arc Angel had at that moment allegedly manipulated electricity to fend off an evildoer. Yeah, the odds of a connection were looking pretty good.

Despite his every effort, his heart picked up speed. He took a deep breath and leaned over and pushed the call button on the intercom that linked every room in his house to the guesthouse 30 yards behind it. “Matthews, I need you.”

He needed to know everything about what had happened on that dark street last night, and most importantly, he needed to find that woman. He needed to find Arc Angel. His very life depended on it.

***

“Interesting.”

Mr. Brown paused the local morning show and tossed the remote onto his sleek glass-topped desk.

“Definitely worth tuning in for.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I must say, I’m quite intrigued. This could solve a number of my current challenges.”

He turned to the man standing to his left in a suit only slightly less expensive than his own. “You said you had something else for me, something connected to this intriguing video?”

John produced a folded sheaf of papers from his breast pocket. He flipped to the last page and laid it on the desk in front of his boss. He pointed to the last line on the page.

Mr. Brown’s eyes widened slightly. “Fascinating. It seems the stars have truly begun to align for our upcoming project.” He slid his finger over the smudge of ink on the page. “John, I need to know more about this woman.”

At the other man’s raised eyebrow, he frowned.

“No, nothing that dramatic yet. I think it would be prudent for us to simply observe for a little while longer. If the data looks solid, we’ll proceed to the next level.”

John nodded once, almost a bow, and turned to go.

“Oh, and John, contact the lab for me. We may need to tweak the design on the prototype.”

John nodded again and strode from the luxurious office.

Mr. Brown picked up the remote and rewound the broadcast to the moment before the anchorwoman led into the next story and paused it again. The handsome reporter filled the majority of the foreground, but the small figure in the background, barely distinguishable, intrigued him most.