Infiltration (7 page)

I recognized one of them — a seven-foot brute with blond hair that had been buzz-cut military-style. Built like a block of granite and with a head that seemed too small for his body (and brains to match), he went by the name Imo. It was supposed to be short for “Immovable Object,” so one would think that he’d have chosen the name “Io,” but the last person who brought that to his attention won a free trip to the emergency room, along with shattered ribs and a broken jaw.

The second guy had an odd appearance. Although nearly as tall as my father, he was extremely rotund, almost round, in fact. His face and the other exposed areas of his skin had grooves, ribs, and dimples like a tire — as if he’d been run over by a tractor-trailer, with the wheels leaving impressions on his skin. He wasn’t anyone I’d ever run across before (no pun intended), but I knew him by reputation. He went by the name Retread Fred, and as a result of a hi-tech lab accident, his body was formed of some kind of futuristic, vulcanized rubber and steel. His skin was purportedly impenetrable.

The last member of the landing party was someone I hadn’t seen before and couldn’t pin a name to. He was about my height, but so heavily muscled you would have thought he started lifting weights in the womb. He also had long, dark hair that came to the middle of his back, so luxurious that most women would have envied it.

Each of the three carried the same type of weapon: a two-foot length of metal with a heavy, rounded ended — like a mace or a morningstar, except that the end of their weapons glowed with a red light. They also radiated a certain menace that I couldn’t help picking up on, but you didn’t need any special powers to figure out that these guys were dangerous.

The three fanned out, totally focused on Alpha Prime as he stepped back from the now-cracked pillar. I doubted that he was seriously injured. (There wasn’t much that could hurt the world’s greatest superhero.) He turned around to get a look at who had attacked him.

By now his three assailants had taken up triangular positions around Alpha Prime — Retread Fred in front, and the other two on either side. Retread Fred held up his mace and pointed it in my father’s direction; another short beam of light lanced out, striking Alpha Prime in the mid-section. Obviously, these weren’t ordinary weapons.

My father frowned slightly, but didn’t otherwise react. Retread Fred pointed his mace again, and this time, instead of just a short laser bolt, a continuous ray of light blasted out. Alpha Prime braced himself as the laser beam struck him. Like before, I didn’t think this was likely to hurt him, so I was surprised to see him grimace slightly in pain. Still, when I reached for him empathically, I didn’t get the sense that he was in any real danger so I stayed put.

While my father’s attention was focused on Retread Fred, Imo rushed in from the side. He didn’t have super speed, but was far faster than a normal human being. As he approached Alpha Prime, Imo shifted his mace into a two-handed grip above his shoulder, like a baseball player getting ready to knock one out of the park.

When he got close, Imo swung for the fences, with Alpha Prime’s face poised to connect with the glowing head of his weapon. The mace whistled through the air, swung with a speed, power, and ferocity that almost defied belief, its glowing head tracing an arc of ruby light through the air. Even as strong as he was, I couldn’t help but think that my father’s head would be taken off if the blow connected.

At the last second, his hand moving impossibly fast, Alpha Prime reached up and grabbed the head of the mace, halting its momentum less than an inch from his nose. Still frowning from the assault being waged upon him by Retread Fred, my father snapped his head in Imo’s direction. On his part, Imo didn’t just seem surprised that his attack had failed; he looked almost catatonic.

The red glow of Imo’s mace intensified, and wisps of smoke began rising up where Alpha Prime gripped it. However, if it was harming him to any degree, my father did a great job of masking it. Imo, seeming to come to his senses, tugged frantically at his weapon, trying to release it from Alpha Prime’s grip. It was almost comical, like watching a toddler engaging in a tug-of-war with an adult.

Unfortunately for Imo, Alpha Prime seemed to tire of the game after a few seconds. He yanked on the mace, jerking Imo off his feet. At the same time, the guy with the long mane of hair rushed into the fray.

As Imo flew towards him, Alpha Prime headbutted him, sending the big man soaring backwards. Surprisingly, Imo actually cleared the rubble from the collapse of the overpass before hitting the ground like a block of granite; he then skidded for another twenty feet, plowing up pavement along the way.

Without hesitating, my father casually flipped Imo’s mace — which he still held — in the air so that he now gripped it by the proper end. Ignoring whatever discomfort he felt from the laser beam that was still focused on him, he flung the weapon towards Retread Fred. It struck the tire-faced fiend square on the nose, snapping his head back slightly (and apparently breaking his concentration, since the ray of light that had been trained on my father winked out).

Retread Fred’s face seemed to collapse inward, folding under the force of the mace as it hit. Like a balloon being squeezed between someone’s hands, his cheeks and jaws spread out symmetrically to an almost impossible degree, as if under enormous pressure. In truth, seeing how his face seemed to expand after being hit, I half-expected his head to burst. To my great surprise, however, the mace’s forward progress appeared to get checked, and its assault on poor Fred’s visage ground to a halt. Moreover, Retread Fred’s face began to resume its natural (for him) shape and appearance, pushing the mace back out.

Almost immediately, I realized what had happened. What I had assumed was Retread Fred’s face getting mangled by the mace was actually his head absorbing the force of the weapon’s impact. It wasn’t exactly proof of the rumor that his body was impenetrable, but it was obvious that his rubberized frame could take a lot of punishment.

As I was reaching this conclusion, Fred’s features resumed their original positions of repose when his nose finally popped back out, sending the mace sailing through the air in a lazy arc. Retread Fred shook his head groggily for a second but looked none the worse for wear, the only evidence of what he’d just experienced being a few wobbly steps backwards that he took.

To the extent that my father felt any satisfaction in the way he’d handled Imo and Retread Fred, he had no opportunity to gloat. The longhaired guy was on him the next second, attacking from a direction that put his back to me and swinging his mace with the expertise of a medieval knight. Unlike Imo, however, his blow actually connected — a mighty swing to Alpha Prime’s abdomen that made my father double over. This was enough to make me sit up and take notice.

I’d seen dozens of clips of Alpha Prime being struck by metal — projectiles, clubs (much like the maces in our current encounter), etc. The result was invariably the same: the metal always proved to be the less durable material, with bullets bouncing away deformed, clubs bending, and so on. Thus, I had anticipated something similar here, but the mace that had hit Alpha Prime appeared undamaged. The fact that these weapons actually seemed capable of inflicting pain on my father meant that they were even more unusual than I had suspected.

The guy with the mane swung again, this time bringing the mace down from overhead while Alpha Prime was still bent over. The weapon struck my father between the shoulder blades, knocking him to his hands and knees. Before his longhaired attacker could swing again, Alpha Prime’s fist shot out like a cannon, striking the inside of his assailant’s right knee and wrenching it painfully to the side. His attacker went down to one knee, grunting in agony, as the leg collapsed.

Alpha Prime rose up and cocked his fist back, preparing to hit the longhaired man before he could recover. Before he could swing, however, his attacker’s head seemed to come alive, sprouting a dozen boneless limbs that squirmed and writhed madly, like an octopus touching the third rail of a subway station.

The man’s back was still to me, and it took me a second to realize that the wildly wriggling mass on his head was actually his hair, moving as if it were a living thing. And in front of the man, arm still drawn back to throw a punch, Alpha Prime stood as if frozen — like someone had turned him into a statue.

He was still in that position when, a moment later, Imo and Retread Fred, maces in hand, rushed in and started pummeling him with their weapons. While his comrades attacked my father, the third man slowly came to his feet, his gaze never seeming to waver from Alpha Prime’s face.

I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening, but empathically I was picking up two distinct sets of emotions. The first was an overall sense of smug satisfaction that emanated in triplicate and which I recognized as coming from Alpha Prime’s attackers. The other emotion obviously came from my father, and while there was a slight underpinning of pain from the maces, it was by and large an overwhelming sense of agonizing frustration.

I telepathically shouted.

Alpha Prime mentally shouted.

Resentfully, I broke off contact, but I had already made my decision; there was no way I was just going to idly sit by and watch them bludgeon my father — even if it wasn’t really hurting him. At the same time, though, I’d promised to stay in the car — out of harm’s way, as Alpha Prime had put it. Of course, there was a way to kill two birds with one stone here…

I teleported myself and the SUV en masse to the heart of the action, appearing maybe five feet behind the man with the long hair. The moment we arrived, I switched on the vehicle’s high beams and leaned on the horn for all I was worth.

Startled at having someone crash the party, the guy with the long hair spun around so that he was facing me, his free hand raised to shield his eyes from the bright lights of the SUV. He barely hesitated before taking a quick step forward and swatting at the front of the SUV in an upward manner with the mace, like a pitcher throwing a baseball underhanded.

Just before the weapon hit, I phased, becoming insubstantial. Under the force of the impact, the SUV crumpled like an old tomato can (although it passed harmlessly through my ghost-like form) and went flying end-over-end, spewing fluid and debris along its trajectory. It hit the ground about fifty feet away, turning a few cartwheels and throwing off fragments before coming to rest on its side.

With the SUV gone, the guy with the mane of hair lowered the hand that had been shielding his eyes from the vehicle’s high beams. His hair was still wiggling ferociously, as if it had a mind of its own, but that turned out to be his second most-distinguishing feature; the real show pony was his eyes. They glowed with a pulsing, amber light that was almost mesmerizing.

I was entranced. I tried leaning in to get a better look – and then came to the horrifying realization that I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed! I wasn’t even able to break eye contact with him, and was only able to stop staring at those amber orbs when
he
averted
his
eyes to peek behind him and check on his colleagues. Even then I still couldn’t move and found myself stuck staring straight ahead to where the other two thugs were still pummeling Alpha Prime. In short, eye contact may have induced the paralytic state that I found myself in, but wasn’t required to maintain it.

I concentrated ferociously, mentally straining so hard to move that I’m surprised I didn’t burst a blood vessel. Nothing worked. I couldn’t even blink.

Now I understood not only why Alpha Prime had stood still while being attacked, but also why he felt so tremendously frustrated. The third attacker had some kind of ability to induce paralysis.

The guy in question passed in front of my line of sight, smiling evilly and tapping the head of his mace into his open palm several times with a satisfying smack on each occasion. (His companions only spared a quick glance in my direction to see what was going on before turning their attention back to Alpha Prime.) Then he swung the weapon at me…and went sprawling off- balance as it passed right through my body.

I was still phased. That being the case — despite the inability to move — I was essentially safe from harm. My assailant didn’t seem to grasp that fact, however. He stood up, dusted himself off, and went back to swinging at me repeatedly, somehow confident that at some juncture he’d make contact with something solid.

Now it was his turn to be frustrated; no matter how hard he tried, it simply didn’t seem possible to inflict any damage on me. That was one piece of good news, and mentally I was tempted to laugh at him.

In addition, my assailant’s preoccupation with me seemingly caused a critical lapse in judgment on his part. While I had no clue exactly how my attacker’s power of paralysis worked (
Was it permanent? Did it require continuous effort? What?
), he either overestimated its effect on my father, wholly forgot about him, or something along those lines. Regardless, it would prove to be a fatal error.

Alpha Prime was still directly across from me, and a few seconds after my attacker began his relentless assault on my phased form, I saw my father blink. Then he blinked again.

Apparently Retread Fred and Imo didn’t notice, because they never let up with their maces, despite the fact that the weapons were clearly ineffective for the task at hand. The first indication they had that my father had come out of his stupor was when he suddenly reached out, gripped their heads in his hands, and then slammed them against each other like a couple of stooges in a vaudeville show. The sound of their two skulls clacking together was like one coconut being used to crack another one open, and they slumped to the ground, unconscious.