Masked (2010) (10 page)

If Witness could distract Atomahawk for another thirty seconds. . .

It took only three seconds for Atomahawk’s reddish skin to flash through every color of the spectrum, then beyond. His skin turned clear as glass. Sparks leapt from the silver buckles on Retaliator’s boots. Witness wailed, then disappeared.

Atomahawk fell to his knees as his skin returned to its normal hue. He chuckled breathlessly for a few seconds. “I always. . . suspected. . . there was an electromagnetic frequency. . . that could reach the bloody ghoststream,” Prime Mover said, wiping his lips.

“You sound winded,” said Retaliator.

“Perhaps I’ll massage your heart and see how you sound,” Prime Mover grumbled.

“I was going to blame the smoking,” said Retaliator, holding up the pack of unfiltered Camels he’d swapped on Atomahawk’s utility belt. In his mind, he counted down six, five, four,. . .

“I’m so sorry, John,” he said, despite the lump in his throat.

“What are you—”

Prime Mover never finished his sentence. There was a silent flash. In the aftermath, there was a perfectly concave indention in the marble floor where Atomahawk had knelt.

He’d just killed his worst enemy and best friend with a single act, but he had no time to contemplate what had happened. The goons in the warehouse, with the helicopters and the high explosives—this had never been their target. In the pit of his stomach, he knew where Prime Mover had sent them.

Eric Gray, the man who saw things in black and white, sat amid the mound of black cinders that had once been his mansion as pure white clouds the shape of comic book thought balloons drifted in the November sky. He had his mask wadded into a ball in his left hand; the island was completely silent. While the place was technically a crime scene, he had enough pull to allow him these few precious, private moments alone in the remains of the house he’d grown up in.

Only, as an even darker shadow fell across the charcoal that had once been the hardwood of his living room floor, he realized that this was no longer a private moment.

“I’m sorry about Nubile,” said She-Devil. “Also. . . well. . . you know.”

“She’ll be back,” he whispered, through a voice wet with tears. “John, too.”

“I understand it’s hard to let go,” said She-Devil. The outline of her wings and horns were sharply defined as they stretched out before him.

“She’s not dead,” he said, shaking his head. “We thought she was dead when she was shot. But she was alive, even if her mind was gone. Now her body’s gone. You’ve played this game long enough. No body, no death. That’s how I know Atomahawk will be back, with a story of how he got shunted into another dimension, or backward in time, or whatever. We never stay dead.”

She-Devil’s shadow horns shook slowly.

“Eric, there’s a time when hope is healthy, and a point where it’s just a form of self-torture.”

Retaliator nodded. “I know a thing or two about torture. There’s a pain you can create with despair. And there’s a deeper, darker, more desperate pain you can fuel with hope.”

Black ash swirled in the chill breeze.

“Things look bleak now,” said She-Devil. “You paid a high price. But you won. You finally stopped Prime Mover. He’s in hell now. Find comfort in that, if you can.”

“You know a lot about hell,” said Retaliator.

She-Devil’s shadow shrugged. He didn’t have the strength to turn his head to face her.

“So you know the myth of Sisyphus.”

She-Devil said nothing.

“Condemned to eternally push a rock up a hill. Every time he reaches the top, the stone rolls right back to the bottom.”

“I’ve heard the myth,” she said.

“We go out every week and fight bad guys and save the world,” said Retaliator. “We die. They die. We all come back. We thwart their plans and lock them in prison cells and two months later they’re standing on the Eiffel Tower waving around the latest and greatest doomsday ray and shouting demands. It never ends. It
never ends. We get the rock to the top of the hill, and have to watch it roll back to the bottom.”

“You’re understandably depressed, Eric. You’ve lost your wife and home. You’ve lost your best friend. And now the police are hunting Retaliator for the murder of Atomahawk. But you’ll bounce back. You’ll make it to the top of the hill again. You always do. Maybe this time, the rock will stay put.”

Eric rolled his mask into a cylinder and kneaded it back and forth in his fists. He swallowed his tears, then said, “You told us that you’d been tasked by Satan to find the most wicked men who ever lived and punish them.”

She-Devil’s shadow froze.

His voice dropped to a near whisper as he asked the question that terrified him most. “Is this. . . is this hell? Am I Sisyphus? Is this how you’ve chosen to punish me?”

He turned to see her face.

She was no longer there.

He dropped his mask, as tears streamed down his cheeks. His hands shook as he unsnapped the pouch on the front of his belt. The pouch held an antique, ivory-handled derringer that had belonged to his great-grandfather. Atomahawk had teased him about keeping it in his belt along with all his high-tech toys and gizmos. If he had to carry a gun, certainly Retaliator could have afforded something with a bit more heft.

But it doesn’t require that much force to drive a lead slug through the roof of one’s mouth. The steel barrel was cold as ice against his lips, and brought forth the most exquisite and terrifying sense of déjà vu.

He wondered, when this all began again, if he would remember pulling the trigger.

The writer
of such Marvel comics titles as
Wisdom
,
Captain Britain and MI-13
,
Dark Reign: Young Avengers
, and
Black Widow: Deadly Origin
, Paul Cornell is perhaps best known for his work on the BBC’s new
Doctor Who
series, for which he has twice been nominated for the prestigious Hugo Award. He is also the author of the novels
Something More
and
British Summertime
, and the creator of Bernice Summerfield, a
Doctor Who
companion who has gone on to spawn her own series of books, short story anthologies, and audio dramas. A fantastic writer in any form, Cornell gives us a tale that pushes the limits of double identities.

P
AUL
C
ORNELL

Jim Ashton heard
the magic explosion. So could all of Mantos. He tried to look surprised. He put down his pint, spun around, looking out across the canal. Pretending he didn’t know what that was.

“Look at Lois Lane,” said Hugh, sitting beside him. He, typically, hadn’t flinched at the noise.

“What?” Jim turned back from the window, annoyed at the other man’s grin.

“Is Chris really going to come out of the loo and sit back down here? Come on. It’s all right. If anyone can keep a secret, this lot can.”

“You reckon? And,” he quickly added, “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

Hugh lowered his voice. “Chris is the Manchester Guardian. Everyone knows they’re the same bloke.”

Jim found himself wearing a sad smile as the sound of another
explosion echoed over the water. “Do they?”

The Guardian caught the second of the Top Hat’s magic spikes a nanosecond after he’d thrown it, clenched his fist on it, and dumped the energy into the atomic void in his palm. This magic villain really could do anything: change time and space. The first throw had caught him off guard, spun him round in a whiplash of colors. But now he was closing on his opponent, flashing through the air toward him as their enhanced senses calculated the impact—

He had a second to see the shocked expression on the Top Hat’s face—

He was there faster.

His senses were better.

He deflected the bolt intended for his head up into the sky. He wouldn’t let it hit Canal Street.

Enough of this! He broke through the Top Hat’s magical shields with one punch.

He grabbed the magician by the collar and slapped the hat off his head.

It went spiraling down into the lights of the bars and restaurants along the canal.

The Top Hat tried to say something, his hands flailing, his expression demanding mercy now that he was powerless. He knew where the Guardian would send him. His eyes reflected the moon.

The Guardian grabbed him with both hands and spun three times, until he was at maximum magical velocity—

He released the magician. Straight at the moon.

The Top Hat blazed a sudden bright line into the stratosphere. A reverse meteor. Faster than escape velocity.

He’d hit the lunar surface in about three days.

Without his hat to grant the wishes that gave him his powers, this time it might actually take him a while to escape.

The Guardian glanced down and used his magical vision to find the hat. A group of students had grabbed it, were laughing about it,
trying it on. Gay lads from the Uni, a couple of fag hags with them. They’d been queuing outside one of the bars while watching the battle. The people of Manchester had always watched the magic “hero fights” in their skies, treating them like the weather.

The group of straight sightseers in front of them had also been watching, but now they’d gone back to arguing with the doormen. That bar had a door policy of quizzing people who wanted to get in, trying to enforce gays only.

The Guardian didn’t understand how people could be like that.

With a thought and a rainbow blur, he was there.

He took the hat from the kid who was holding it. “Dangerous magic. Would you please let me deal with that, sir?”

“Sure, sorry.” The kids were beaming at him. “Bloody hell, it’s you!”

“It is!”

“He’ll tell you!” one of the girls from the party by the door called out. “We’re mates of his!” She gestured over her shoulder at the party of grinning straight lads with her. “Tell him we’re all very very gay!”

The kid who’d given the Guardian the hat looked at him with a twinkle in his eye.
Go on!

The Guardian turned to Tall Ben, who was the one who stood at the door of this place on busy nights now, asking the embarrassing questions, with a hefty bouncer on either side of him. Ben met his gaze. The Guardian had never liked Ben, even before Ben had license to not just tell people they weren’t gay, but that they weren’t gay
enough
.

“What can I do for you, hero of all gay people?” Tall Ben asked.

The Guardian gestured to the girl and her boozed-up mates. “You’ve humiliated them enough.”

“No, mate, I’ve just started. That lot just want to have a look at what they’ll never have. They want to point and laugh.”

The Guardian frowned the frown of a man impatient with debate.

Ben’s clothes were suddenly ruffled by a blur of air. And there
was the concussive noise of the door opening and closing too fast to see—

And the group of kids had vanished inside.

And the Guardian was back, his hands behind his back, whistling nonchalantly.

The kids from the Uni tried to hide that they were laughing.

Ben looked at the bouncers, and they tiredly headed inside to find the straight boys. “Guardian, or should I say Chris Rackham—”

The Guardian found himself taking a step toward the man, provoked despite himself. “I am not—”

“Oh, right, it’s different when it’s
you
being pointed at. Whatever. You do that again and you’re barred. Whatever you’re calling yourself.” And he let the party from the Uni in, just to show he was on the side of good.

The Guardian stood sizing the man up, feeling lost in a way that didn’t suit the costume he wore.

It was then he heard the noise.

The applause his magic hearing had picked up came from the tower of the old Refuge Assurance building.

It was the sound, across the city, of one woman clapping.