Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (32 page)

She studied it for a moment, then nodded. There were two bigger than all the others, far in the distance. From their tips, steam rolled into the sky. She’d seen them before.

“The power station,” she and the Carpenter said together.

The Carpenter swept a bunch of documents off the map of Neo-Auckland on the table. He stabbed the point with his finger. The power station was a few miles south of central Neo-Auckland, a little way past the edge of the industrial district. It was a coal and gas station that provided power for most of Neo-Auckland and the surrounding towns.

Solomon looked at the picture again, then back at the map. “The land’s flat there. You can see those chimneys for miles around.”

Damn it, he was right. She glanced back at Quick-fire, who stood forgotten in the corner. “This is all he’s got? He can’t pinpoint it more closely?”

Quick-fire shrugged. “Sorry, lady.”

She put a hand on her forehead and tried to think. “It’s no good. There’s too many places for him to hide.”

“When he was yakking to us on the radio,” the Carpenter said, “there was all that noise, and that echo. A factory, or a warehouse maybe.”

A warehouse.
Something dim sparked inside her head. She snatched a pile of documents off the floor and started rifling through them.
Where was it?

“Spook?” the Carpenter said.

“Daniel O’Connor was involved in a raid back in the late fifties before he joined Met Div. A kidnapping. There were these three low-level supercriminals doing ransom jobs. They got busted, and their hideout was a warehouse in the industrial district. They’d outfitted it for holding captives. Just the place for a budding supervillain.” She dropped the stack and moved to another.
Where the bloody hell was it?

Her hands seized the report. “Got it.” She scanned the page and flicked through the summarised case notes. “The coppers seized the warehouse. It doesn’t say what happened to it, but after the trial it would have had to be returned to the owners or auctioned off to a private party.” Maybe O’Connor himself bought it. He’d get it for a song, and who would be better placed to know it was available?

“Private party, eh?” Solomon tapped the address of the warehouse. “I think we just scored ourselves an invitation.”

Her heart was doing a trapeze act in her chest. She matched the address to the map and circled the spot with her pen. “We have to move. No telling how long he’s going to stay there.”

The Carpenter nodded, his face split with an infectious grin.

Quick-fire hadn’t moved. She put her hand on his shoulder and firmly directed him towards the door. “Thank the Blind Man for us.”

“Sure.”

“One more thing,” she said as she pushed him into the hallway. “Tell him the next person he sends to my house gets returned without kneecaps.”

The boy’s eyes widened. Niobe shut the door in his face. She heard a rush of air as he streaked away.

“Poor kid,” Solomon said. “Sounds like he’s running fast enough to set the stairs on fire.”

“They’ve gotta learn somehow.” She pulled off her mask.

Solomon folded up the map and shoved it in his pocket. “Meet you downstairs?”

She nodded and put the note with Quanta’s real name on the table.
We’re coming for you, Morgan Shepherd.

Solomon opened the front door, checked outside to see if Quick-fire was gone, then turned back. “Hey. Good work, mate.”

She smiled, and it felt good. “Yeah, you too, partner.”

He tipped his hat and disappeared into the hallway.

Gabby was standing when Niobe went back into the bedroom. The tearstains on her cheeks were gone, but her eyes were still bloodshot and rimmed with pink. For a moment, they stared at each other. Niobe’s excitement deflated when she saw the lines straining Gabby’s face.

—
It’s okay,
Niobe finally signed.
It was a friend. Kind of. We’ve got a location on the kid.
She tried another smile, but it was harder this time.

The corners of Gabby’s lips twitched upwards as well, just for an instant, but her eyes didn’t match the smile.

—
Tell the police. Stay.

—
Gabby….

“Stay,” Gabby said.

Niobe’s heart dropped into her toes.

—
I can’t. The kid’s a meta. Maybe a powerful one. If Met Div gets their hands on him….
Her hands fell. She pictured McClellan lying stretched and dead in the street, his baby in the hands of those arseholes.

Gabby took her by the front of her coat and pulled her close. “Please don’t go alone.”

“I’ll have Solomon with me.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Niobe tried to kiss her, but Gabby turned her face away. God, she felt like such a piece of shit. She settled for giving Gabby a peck on the cheek. No reaction.

Niobe sighed, took her holster from where it hung on the bedpost, and strapped it over her shoulder.

—
I’ll be back soon,
she signed.

Gabby turned away and put a hand across her eyes. All Niobe wanted to do was take her in her arms, pull her close, kiss her, tell her she was sorry, she’d stay, she wasn’t going anywhere. She reached out a hand…

…and let it drop. She had a job to do.

“I love you,” she said, knowing Gabby wouldn’t hear her with her back turned. “More than anything. I’ll get you out of this place. I promise.”

She slipped her gun into its holster and went out of the room.

20: Packaged and Delivered

Grim

Real name:

Kang Shen

Powers:

Danger sense, luck.

Notes:

The most controversial member of the Wardens. Claims to have become metahuman in 1941, a full three years before Robert Oppenheimer became Dr Atomic. Whether he was actually metahuman or not was hotly debated. During the battle against the Nagasaki Horrors, Grim developed a reputation amongst Japanese civilians as an infallible good luck charm. When mandatory metahuman registration began, he fled the country, always escaping pursuing police officers by minutes through improbably lucky circumstances.

—Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #0556]

It rang once, then he picked up. “Senior Sergeant Wallace.”

“Do you know who this is?” Niobe said into the phone.

There was a pause. “Vigilante bitch.”

“Spare me.” Niobe leaned against the wall of the public phone box and stared at the rows of chimneys billowing smoke into the evening sky. “How are those metas we took out for you? Any of them squealed on Quanta yet?”

Silence.

“Didn’t think so,” she said. She cradled the phone against her shoulder, put a Pall Mall between her lips, and lit up. “Look, I didn’t call for a pissing contest.”

“Could’ve fooled me. Want to turn yourself in?”

“Not particularly. I’ll send you a cheque for that window I broke when all this is done. Then we can call it even.”

The grunt he gave was probably the closest he ever came to laughing. “What about the light bulb you shot?”

“Add it to my tab.”

Neither of them said anything for a moment. The Carpenter was leaning on the car, a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes. Nothing moved at Quanta’s warehouse, but that didn’t mean nobody was home. Old shipping crates and a simple chain-link fence surrounded the building. Unlike the rest of Neo-Auckland, the industrial district didn’t take much design advice from
Flash Gordon
.

“We’ve got a common enemy,” she said. “Quanta.”

“That right? Here I was thinking you two might be good friends.”

“I don’t care if you believe me or not.” She took a long drag on the cigarette. “But if I were you, I’d want to come pay a visit to thirty-three Hakea Avenue. I’d want to bring a lot of guys.”

He grunted. “I’ll find you, vigilante.”

“Until then, Senior Sergeant.” She hung up.

A few more puffs of the cigarette, then she stubbed it out half-finished and pulled her mask back down. She made her way back to Solomon and the car. Gabby had done a fine job on the Ford. It ran better than ever. Niobe wished she’d remembered to thank her properly.

“Met Div will be here in twenty,” she said. “See a way in?” She adjusted her goggles to get a better look at the warehouse in the darkening evening. The main warehouse had a handful of smaller buildings attached to it, all painted a horrible not-quite-pine-green colour that had never been fashionable.

He lowered the binoculars and pointed. “There’s a couple of roller doors there, the kind you back a truck up to. And when we were driving past, I saw another entrance that you could get a forklift through. I don’t know about you, but I’m not too keen to try opening any of those.”

She shook her head. They looked like they were locked down tight, and besides, Quanta and his goons would poke them full of holes the instant they went in. “What, then?”

“You see there, on the south-west corner?”

She adjusted her magnification. Just peeking around the corner she could see…. “Stairs.”

“I figure it’ll take us up to an office,” he said. “Maybe even a switchbox if we’re lucky. Then we just do a top-down sweep. Easy-peasy.”

She drew her gun, checked the rounds, and tugged her bowler hat down. “Still remember how to do this, old man?”

He grinned and brandished his freshly-grown quarterstaff. “Kids these days. No respect, I tells ya.”

They broke into a run, sticking to the shadows. Solomon led the way down the side of the chain-link fence, taking them away from the road. Nothing else moved.

The Carpenter sped up to a sprint, raised his quarterstaff, and thrust it onto the concrete in front of him. The wood bent like a pole-vaulter’s pole for an instant. Then something in his eyes flared, and the staff snapped straight. She got a last look at him launching himself over the fence, cape flying behind him, before she sucked in a lungful of air and slipped into shadow.

She went through the fence and kept moving for the stairs on the warehouse’s exterior wall. The concrete shuddered as Solomon landed behind her, hatchet and staff at the ready. A moment later, she exhaled and came out of the shadow, gun aimed up the metal stairs, scanning for threats.
Clear
.

She glanced at the Carpenter and jerked her head. He nodded and silently backed towards her, guarding their rear. A floodlight cast the side of the warehouse into sharp relief, which wasn’t doing it any favours. The green paint was faded and peeling, and the concrete bore half a hundred dried oil stains. Nothing fresh, though. It didn’t look like anyone had bothered to show up here in a decade.
Is this really Quanta’s hideout?
It had to be.

She led the way up the stairs. The door at the top said
NO ADMITTANCE
in scratched red. She put her ear to the door. Voices. A lot of them. She couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Oh yes, this is the place.

The door was locked. Her picks saw to that. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the Carpenter bounce on the balls of his feet. Her stomach was doing a similar dance. For a moment, doubt crept into her heart. Gabby was right. They shouldn’t be doing this alone. In the old days, they’d have half the Wardens along to deal with someone as crafty as Quanta and his band of metas. Avin and Screecher were classically trained. God knew how many others were pros. It wasn’t quite a suicide mission, but it wasn’t far off.

Then she thought of Sam, of the chill that ran through him when O’Connor elbowed him in the throat. She thought of him sitting alone in darkness, at the mercy of Quanta. Screw the old days. She wasn’t a hero anymore, but she still had a job to do. She could still save this one kid, do this one last good thing, before she left Earth. Frank had fucked up. She couldn’t.

“Remember the old oath?” the Carpenter whispered. “We are the masked, the hidden, the endless watchers. We are the strangers who guard the world through the night.”

We are every man
, the words came automatically.

Their fate is our fate.

So we will stand,

And we will hold back the storm,

Until the light shines through,

Or the night takes us.

She glanced at the Carpenter. He grinned and gave her a thumbs up.

“Shut up and fight.” She cocked her gun and threw open the door.