Other People's Heroes (The Heroes of Siegel City) (40 page)

She should have known the girl was just a reader -- nobody remembered Lightning anymore. She preferred it that way. And while Nancy Drake was something of a well-known figure, she kept up her hermit’s life. It suited her. She found it comically ironic that the best-selling romance novelist in New England hadn’t so much as brushed hands with a man in over a decade... not since Edward.

As she walked past an old, abandoned bookshop, letting this thought through her mind, she started to feel the corners of her cheeks curl up. Then she started to giggle a little. Then she stopped walking and looked at the shop. It wasn’t natural for her to start laughing like that. Something was wrong. She brushed some of the dust away from the shop window and peered in at a dirty, dusty, empty room. Nancy took a quick glance at her hand to make sure it was clean then ran it across the doorjamb. Her fingers came away with a slight rusty orange residue.

“Soul Wraiths,” she said. It had been twelve years since she and the rest of her team had thought these emotion-consuming spirits exterminated from the Earth. If they were back... well... this was bigger than her problems. Something needed to be done.

She rushed back to her apartment and ran to the telephone, not even bothering to unwrap her figurine. She picked up the receiver and dialed one of the few personal numbers she still knew, although she rarely bothered to call it. There were a series of rings and finally a connection was made. A young male voice resonated in her ear. “Haaaaappy Thanksgiving, this is Jay.”

“Jay. It’s Nancy.”

“Nance? Oh, wow, it’s good to hear from you. What’s--”

“This isn’t a social call, Rookie. Soul Wraiths in Boston. Your people should check up on it.”

“Oh, are you kidding? We’ll be right out there. Say, do you--”

“I’m not getting involved anymore, Rookie, you know that. This is just a heads-up, for old times sake.”

“Well... if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. Happy Thanksgiving.” She hung up the phone and, satisfied that her civic duty was fulfilled, went to the closet and began taking out her Christmas decorations.

Her decorations were pretty meager. The tree was an artificial one-foot sprig that she put away in its box each New Year’s Day, still fully decorated, waiting for the moment in eleven months when she would allow it to see the light again. She put it in the center of her dining room table and plugged it in. All the lights were good this year. Good, she wasn’t up for replacing them.

Then she took out the box with her collection of figurines. The first-year figure, a boy and girl on a holly-decked swing together, she put on her bookshelf facing the room -- after getting a small lion on her charm bracelet caught in the figure and untangling it. The only other charm on the bracelet, a tiny bolt of lightning, escaped. Year two, where the couple was building a snowman, also faced out, as did the dancing couple of year three.

Beginning with year four, the couples faced backwards. She lined up nine of the figures this way, then carefully unwrapped year thirteen and put it at the end of the line, also facing away.

That last figurine was lined up exactly with one of the few magazines she kept on her bookshelf, an old edition of
Powerlines
, the first news magazine devoted exclusively to Capes and Masks. Edward was on the cover. Oh, she was one of the few people on Earth who would call him that, but beneath the red and black uniform, the proud golden emblem, it was her Edward. He, like Nancy and Jay, had been a Cape too, perhaps the finest of them all. But for all that none of the other heroes on Earth had ever been able to do something so simple as avenge him.

“Another year, Edward,” she said, “ten of them now, and we still haven’t found him. I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”

It wasn’t her fault, everyone always said. They all knew the risks. Capes were like cops or firemen, sometimes they fell in the line of duty. And while death, for a superhero, sometimes turned out to be a temporary condition, in ten years there was no sign that Edward could possibly have survived.

She put away the magazine and turned back to her Christmas decorations, although she was already nearly finished.

She picked up a the next few weekly editions of
Powerlines
to see if there was any news about the battle with the Soul Wraiths. She didn’t bother with a television and she didn’t trust newspapers, but
Powerlines
was pretty reliable. It
should
be, their top reporter was really the superhero called Spectrum in disguise. Sooner or later, Nancy was certain, someone would figure out he just created a hologram beard when not in costume and his entire cover would be blown, it was such a lousy disguise. Until then, at least she knew his magazine could be counted on to get the story right.

When the story with the Wraiths broke the week before Christmas, it was Jay who nabbed the spotlight, and the cover. “Hotshot to Soul Wraiths: Get Out of Siegel!,” the cover blurb read. There was also a photo that showed him in midair, delivering a roundhouse blow to one of the glowing red creatures. That would go straight to the Rookie’s head, no doubt. Not that he didn’t deserve it. He’d tried his damndest to fill Edward’s shoes in the past ten years. He couldn’t, of course, but at least he tried.

The battle, it seemed, hadn’t taken place in Boston after all, but in Siegel City, where 99 percent of all superhero activity seemed to center these days. The Wraiths, according to a the story, had tried to leech away the citizen’s “Christmas Spirit” to power their latest attempt at world domination. And as always seemed to be the case, at least once a year since she’d lost Edward, some second-stringer had died in the fighting. A villain this time, a guy named Photon Man. Nancy hoped he didn’t have any family, for their sake, but at this point the news of a death just didn’t faze her that much.

She tossed the magazine aside and turned to her computer, where chapter six of her latest novel was waiting for her. Writing what her mother had always called “trashy romances,” even as she read them by the truckload, turned out to be the perfect occupation for the post-Edward Nancy Drake. Human contact was limited to shopping excursions and the occasional conference call with her editor, plus she had an outlet to focus all the scenarios she kept imagining where Edward miraculously returned. Her first few books had followed pretty much the same pattern -- the long-lost boyfriend or husband or fiancé returned from certain death, each scenario getting more elaborate and unlikely. Sometimes they were reunited. Sometimes not. Nancy didn’t restrict herself to the happy ending. Eventually she got out of the trap of the long-lost hero and began conjuring up more creative plots, but her earliest works were, for the most part, blatantly autobiographical. She suspected the same held true for most writers.

Her powers made the job even easier. Most media outlets -- even
Powerlines
-- had screwed that up pretty consistently over the years. Everyone seemed to be under the misconception that she had super-speed powers. In fact, she had the ability to speed up or slow down time itself, like she’d done to the waitress on Thanksgiving. After only a few hours worth of trials, Nancy had learned how to synchronize her personal typing speed exactly to the rate that her computer could process what she was inputting. She could literally write as fast as she could dream up the stories. In the nine years since her first sale, she’d turned out twenty-six lonely heart novels and, to her utmost shock, people actually seemed to be reading them.

Time slowed down around her as she shifted into the writing groove. A shadow crawled across the window as, in regular time, a bird flew by. The second hand on her clock moved infrequently at best. She and the computer were a perfect match for the time she was going to spend writing.

She’d made it five pages into chapter seven, where the tortured Monica Gacey was finding evidence that her husband had died at the hands of her own father, when the room began resonating with a low, thrumming sound. It was like a drawn-out “whump.” Nancy recognized it at once -- it wasn’t the first time she’d heard this particularly sound while in her writing zone. She restored time to its usual flow and the “whump” shortened and the pitch rose until it was a rapid tapping on her window, which she reluctantly opened. “Come on in, Jay.”

The red-and-black clad Cape drifted into her office from her sixth-floor window, pulling back his mask to reveal the grinning face Edward had recruited only a year before they lost him. “Hey, Nance,” he said. “How are you.”

“Same as usual. What brings you to Boston?”

“Air currents. Heh.” His grin vanished in about as much time as it took him to accept that his joke had fallen flat. “I wanted to let you know we took care of those Wraiths for you.”

“So I read,” she said, pointing to the magazine on her desk. “Good work. How much damage did they do before you got them?”

“It was pretty bad, actually,” Jay said, “they managed to set up shop in nearly every major city in America before we caught them, but we should recover. Particle ran some calculations, said that the worst that will happen is a few less crappy Christmas specials this year. I say as long as they keep rerunning Charlie Brown, I’ll be happy.”

Nancy allowed herself one of her few genuine smiles. The kid (she didn’t care if he
was
29 now, he’d always be “the kid” to her) always
did
know how to make her laugh. “You could have told me that on the phone, you know. And don’t try to convince me that you just happened to be in the area. You guys never leave Siegel anymore if you can help it.”

Jay sat down. “Truth? Some of the guys wanted to check up on you. I volunteered for the job. We just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Hey,
Frontier Trace
just hit number four on the New York Times list. I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know.”

“We just... hell,
I
just know how tough this time of year is on you. It was always... his favorite.”

“Yeah. It was.”

Jay’s smile dimmed a little with guilt -- guilt that he’d survived when Edward didn’t? Yeah, Jay was that type. He glanced over at the mini-tree that served as her primary decoration. “Hey, at least you’re keeping things festive.”

“I try my best. If you don’t mind, Jay, I was in the middle of a chapter. Cut to the chase?”

“Right. Well, Harrison and Erica are having a sort of reunion thing on Christmas Day. Most of us don’t have a family, not in any traditional sense, anyway, and they asked me to extend the invitation.”

Nancy turned it over in her head for a moment... the prospect of seeing Harrison and Erica, known to the world at large as Condor and Oriole, of getting together with her old teammates, of the whole team, the whole LightCorps being reunited.

On Christmas Eve, Nancy went to church more out of habit than out of any remaining faith. She saw a police chase on the streets and, just for an instant, felt the urge to leap in and interfere, but Liberator arrived on the scene and put a stop to it himself. Call it a Christmas present, she thought -- her overactive sense of responsibility didn’t have a chance to flare up and her exhausted guilt complex didn’t suffer an added burden.

There was a Santa Claus on the streetcorner, and a poor excuse for one, too. He was rail-thin, and his beard looked tired and scruffy. His eyes were a deep blue, but sunken into his head, and his cheeks could only have been described as “rosy” if the roses in question were pale as the snow. Nancy tried to walk past him without incident, but as soon as she was within five feet of him, those cold eyes locked onto her. She felt her neck tilting against her will and she stared at him, looking straight down those eyes like a tunnel.

“Help,” he whispered.

“Um... I don’t have any change,” she said. She tried to sidestep him, but he moved in front of her.

“
Help
,” he repeated.

“I really don’t think I have anything,” she said, even as she dropped her hand into her pocket, searching for even a single to give him.

“No,” he said, “help
me.
”

Nancy felt a chill race through her that had nothing to do with the nip in the air. She shuffled past the old man without a word and headed for her apartment, a good five blocks away. She didn’t use her powers, but she got there as fast as any normal human could.

She fished the key to the building out of her purse as she ran, hoping to get in before the strange man -- if he was so inclined -- could catch up to her. She tried to slide the key into the lock, but her hands were quivering a bit more than they should have been. He was probably just some homeless guy trying to get a meal or something, after all. Had it really been so long since she’d dealt with the unexpected that a simple plea scared her?

“Nancy?”

The key fell from her hand and clattered to the concrete steps. She turned remarkably slowly for someone once called the fastest woman on Earth. Five words, that was all she had heard of this tired, gruff voice before. It was unmistakable.

The old man was standing next to her, right up next to her. On the right. She’d been running from the
left.

“Please, Nancy. I need your help.”

Secret identity be damned.

Nancy dropped time down to a crawl. At this speed a snail at a greyhound track would only have two to one odds against it. She scooped up her key, opened the door and charged up six flights of stairs to her apartment. She slammed the door, flicked the lock and deadbolt closed, secured every window and only then restarted time so she could set the security system. She slumped behind the chair in her office and looked at the telephone, briefly contemplating calling Jay. Then she realized how absurd that was -- she had six years of experience on him, even if she
had
been out of practice for ten years. If she called him for a creepy old man, she’d never hear the end of it. Even a creepy old man that could teleport or something. A creepy old man who knew her name.

“I need your help, Nancy.”

She didn’t turn around this time. She didn’t need to. She was looking into the monitor of her computer, which was off, and quite clearly showed the reflection of an anemic Santa Claus with a glowing nimbus of light around him.

“I need
Lightning
, Nancy.”

She turned around, feeling her throat constrict. “Who are you?” she managed to hiss. A small smile upturned his lips.

“Who am
I
Nancy? Surely it hasn’t been
that
long.”

She flicked her leg outwards, tripping him. When he hit the floor she catapulted out of her chair and landed on his back, twisting his arm behind him. “No. I hasn’t been that long, only ten years, and I haven’t forgotten everything. Now you tell me who you are and how you know who I am or you carry your right arm away with your left.”