Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (22 page)

She spun together something that might pass for a plan. She should’ve left straight after the archives, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that now. “Away from the door,” she said, waving her gun. Her hands were steady despite the adrenaline pounding through her. “I’ll be outta your hair soon. I figured you’d gone home. Burning the midnight oil, eh?”

He edged towards the centre of the room where she directed him. His jaw was clenched, and his moustache quivered. For a moment, they stared at each other, then his eyes narrowed. “You’re the one who attacked my men.” It wasn’t a question.

She thought back to the coppers she’d chained to the apartment building stairwell after they tried to drag the McClellan widow downtown. “I didn’t attack anyone. We just had a disagreement on what constituted lawful detainment.”

“Lawful…?!” A muscle in his neck twitched. “Do you have any idea what you’ll get for threatening officers?”

“I threatened people trying to abduct an innocent woman.”

“The woman violated international law, hiding that child. We were obligated to bring her in.” His voice was like gravel. “Now get that gun out of my face.”

The bull of a man took a step forwards, and the vein pulsing in his forehead looked like it might blow at any minute.

“Easy, Senior Sergeant.” The last thing she wanted was to shoot the bastard, stun rounds or not.

“What do you want? I’m a shit hostage, if that’s what you’re after. I’m just a bloody civil servant. Or is this supposed to be some kind of vigilante justice?”

“All I want is information for a job.”

His face twisted into a scowl. “Shove it up your arse.”

It’s like trying to reason with a gorilla.
She fought down a sigh. “You hear of any kids being nabbed lately?”

“What do I look like, Missing Persons? I’m a cape copper.”

She studied his face, but it revealed nothing but anger. Beneath her mask, she chewed her lip, then made a decision. “The kid was grabbed by one of your boys. Daniel O’Connor. Know him?”

A pause. “No.”

She pulled the handful of crumpled papers from her pocket. “Then why’s his name stamped over all this crap I found in your desk?”

His lips formed a line, and he said nothing. The son of a bitch wasn’t going to hang one of his people out to dry. It was always the same with ex-military guys. Like a goddamn old boys’ club.

“Tell me something else then. What’s going on with Doll Face?”

His scowl managed to get even deeper.

The building’s intercom system crackled to life, and Niobe almost had a heart attack.
Easy
, she told herself.

“All officers to briefing room one,” the intercom said. “Six eighty-five in progress. Repeat: all staff to briefing room one.” A hiss of static, then silence.

She didn’t take her eyes from Wallace, but her mind tried to decipher the police code.
Hostage situation involving metahumans.
Was that right?

She opened her mouth to confirm it with the Senior Sergeant, but a red light blinked twice on the inside of her goggles. A signal from the Carpenter.

Keeping her gun on Wallace, she dropped her free hand and depressed a button on her belt. “Go ahead.”

“Spook, you wanna see this,” the Carpenter said through the radio.

“Kind of in the middle of something,” she said. Wallace’s glare was almost painful.

“Postpone it. I got a feeling you’ll be pissed if you miss this.”

“Roger,” she said, and she released the button.

Wallace licked his lips. She could see every muscle in his body quivering with rage. “I’ll get you,” he said.

“Not today.”

She brought the gun up and fired.

The light bulb shattered, and darkness flooded the room. She caught the sound of metal sliding free of a leather holster, but she’d already drawn darkness around her.

She fled under the door and reformed on the other side. No doubt the gunshot would’ve been heard throughout the building. She needed an exit, fast.

The door crashed open behind her, and the floor creaked under Wallace’s weight. Without slowing, she blew out another light bulb, slipped back into shadow, and fled into another office. Shouts and footsteps reverberated against the surface she travelled along.

She came out of shadow still gripping her gun. With a flick of a switch on the modified cylinder, the revolver hissed and clicked. Live rounds armed.

Still running, she pointed the gun at the window and squeezed the trigger twice. Glass shattered and the blinds shuddered. Her ears rang with the sound of the shots. Once more she inhaled, and then she was a shadow again, slipping over the broken shards of glass and out onto the rough brick surface of the building’s outer wall.

She didn’t stop when she reached the ground. She was on the wrong side of the building, so she skirted away from the streetlights and fled around the rear of the building. Met Div officers scrambled to their vehicles in the car park. Were all of them searching for her?
No, something else is going on. The hostage situation.

She kept going, darkness pressing in on her. She was staying in shadow too long. Too long without air. Her senses dimmed.

Finally, she emerged from the alley, back onto the street where Solomon had parked. Her lungs burned as she reformed herself, and she gulped down air.
Too close.

She holstered her gun, checked her pockets to make sure she had all the files she’d grabbed, and touched the brim of her bowler hat to confirm it was still in place. Where was Solomon? She stayed in the shelter of the alley and scanned the street.

He pulled up a moment later. With another glance around to make sure the coppers weren’t following, she dashed from the alley and into the car.

“This better be good,” she said, pulling off her mask and goggles and wiping the sweat from her forehead.

The Carpenter peeled away from the side of the road. Sirens filled the air, but they were getting further away, not closer. He flipped open a panel in the centre of the dashboard and switched on the small television concealed there. “Take a look.”

The television hummed, and a black-and-white picture expanded to fill the screen. She was about to ask him what channel to switch to, but saw there was no need.

The picture showed the local newscaster’s desk at the TVNZ studio, but the man who sat and smiled at the camera was no news presenter. He wore an unusual suit jacket so white it was almost blinding. A few patches of pale skin disfigured his face, disappearing behind a black domino mask. Objectively, she supposed he had the sort of sculpted features that could be considered handsome, but the cold eyes that stared out at her would freeze the hormones of any horny schoolgirl.

He seemed to be reaching the pinnacle of some rousing speech. His accent was faintly British, but it was tainted with so many others she couldn’t pick out a region.

“So here we are, in the world you people so desired.” His smile was flat, painted on. “The people who used to protect you lie in gutters, drinking wine from paper bags. A generation of superheroes lie in unmarked graves. And the only ones left, the only ones who could save you, live hundreds of thousands of miles away on the surface of the Moon. The only place they could escape your persecution.”

Outside the car, the night was lit with flashing police lights. A pair of police vehicles tore past, sirens screaming. Solomon drove quietly past an appliance store, where late-night pedestrians crowded around the televisions in the store window.

“He’s been going like this for five minutes,” Solomon said, eyes fixed on the road. “Guess what he calls himself?”

She’d already guessed. “Quanta.”

“Right on, little lady.”

Whoever was wielding the camera was either an amateur or scared out of their skull. It shifted constantly, altering focus and moving Quanta out of the centre of the frame. As it moved, she caught glimpses of other costumed figures in the background. They were shifting something into position. One of the metas caught her eye. A skinny man in a skin-tight suit came into view, a visor covering his face. A pattern of sea-green waves shifted along the surface of the fabric.

“Does that look like Screecher to you?” she asked.

Solomon glanced at the TV. “Hey, yeah, maybe. What’s he hanging out with these wackos for?”

She chewed her lip. The file said Avin knew Screecher, and here he was. Too many coincidences. “These are our people. They’ve got Sam. They’ve got my picture.”

He shot her a look, then returned his attention to the road and shook his head slightly. “We sure can pick ‘em, huh?”

Quanta folded his gloved hands on the desk and smiled his dead smile. “My demands are simple. First, all incarcerated metahumans in the Asian-Australasian Union are to be released. All such metahumans are invited to seek me out and join me. You will be richly rewarded for your service. Failure on the part of the AAU to comply with this demand within thirty-six hours would be unwise. Needless to say, the civilian death toll would be significant.”

“Can you believe this guy?” the Carpenter said. “I’m getting all nostalgic here. He’s playing all the old classics.”

Niobe didn’t take her eyes from the screen. Something about this guy was off. His words didn’t gel with the look in his eyes.

She could hear the faint wail of sirens from the TV now. Quanta didn’t take any notice of them. “I have another request to make. I’m looking for a man, someone very important to me. He is currently calling himself Frank Julius.”

Solomon grunted, and Niobe’s grip tightened on the mask in her hands.
Oh, bloody hell.

“Frank,” Quanta said, “if you’re listening, and I’m sure you are, I want you to seek me out. I know you’ve lost something precious to you. It’s safe.”
For now
, his smile seemed to add. “All you have to do is return to the place you lost it. I’ll find you there. Or you can try to find me another way. If you stay in hiding, however….” He turned his hands palm up and shrugged. “Well, I think I can show you.”

He stood, and the camera clumsily tracked him as he moved to the side of the newscaster’s desk. In the background, the television studio’s crew and presenters huddled, watched by a metahuman in desert camouflage. But the camera continued to track, and a darker sight came into view.

A huge, musclebound man with a pug-nosed face sat cramped inside a cage that crackled with energy. He glared at Quanta as the supercriminal crouched beside the cage. Quanta’s pure white suit stood in stark contrast to the huge man’s sweat-stained shirt.

“Tell them your name,” Quanta said.

“Go fuck yourself, cocksucker,” the giant man growled.

Morgan didn’t react except to press a button on a panel on the side of the cage. Lightning arced inside the cage, and the man screamed.

“Jesus Christ,” Niobe said. She could hear Solomon grinding his teeth together.

Quanta released the button. The screams were replaced by moans.

“Tell them,” he said.

The man seemed to be having trouble breathing. “Hayne. Name’s Will Hayne. Happy, you motherfucker?”

Solomon’s knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “Did he just say…?”

“Yeah,” she said.
What the hell’s going on?

Quanta smiled at Hayne. “There might be some viewers out there who don’t remember that name. But maybe if you were more recognisable, they’d remember. I’ve disabled the field. How about you show them?”

Hayne panted and glanced at the button, where Quanta’s finger hovered. He licked his lips, staring at Quanta with uncertainty in his eyes. Then he began to change.

It only took a second. The metal scales seemed to slide out of his skin all at once, flattening against his muscles, moving with them. The scales caught the studio lights and shone with a perfect gleam. In an instant, he was covered from head to toe in shimmering steel. A metal war machine, the living tank of the Manhattan Eight.

Quanta turned to the camera. “Ladies and gentlemen, behold one of your greatest heroes. Iron Justice.”

Niobe’s insides churned. There was only one way this could end. She wanted to switch off the television, go home, and wrap her arms around Gabby, but she couldn’t take her eyes from the screen.

Iron Justice threw himself against the side of the cage. It crackled, sparked, but barely budged. Quanta regarded the raging hero. For a moment, he seemed conflicted. Then he returned his gaze to the television, the fake smile gone.

“A caged superhero. You people should be enjoying this. This is what you wanted. Behold your perfect world.” He paused, took a deep breath. “Now let me show you what I can do to your perfect world.”

Turn it off,
she told herself, but she couldn’t. Quanta pressed his hand against the side of the cage and closed his eyes. For a moment, nothing happened. Then something seemed to form around him. The studio got darker, but Quanta got brighter. Energy flowed around him like honey, dripping from his white suit. Light flowed from his hand and began to fill the cage.

Iron Justice screamed again, a scream that turned Niobe’s spine to ice. The liquid energy filled the cage and flowed into Hayne’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Anywhere unprotected by the scales. His screams became the gurgling of a drowning man. He thrashed against the side of the cage, but it barely shuddered.

It seemed to take hours. Quanta’s face betrayed nothing as the superhero died. The agonizing movements slowly stilled. Vomit pooled in the back of Niobe’s throat, but she swallowed it back. Sweat trickled down the Carpenter’s cheek. He was shaking a little.

It’s over
, she assured herself.

Then Hayne’s body exploded. Like a bomb had been placed in his chest, he detonated from the inside out. She turned away, covering her face, but not before she saw the hero’s flesh and metal painting the cage’s shields.

“Oh, Christ,” she whispered. “Bloody hell.” The Carpenter was a statue.

When she turned back to the TV, the cage was gone from view. Quanta’s face filled the screen. In an instant, she knew she hated him. She hated him beyond reason or possibility.
He’s got Sam. Jesus.