Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology (12 page)

The cavalry had come in full force, only they didn’t come to save him. If they caught him, he would go to jail, but worse, his secret identity would be exposed when he was unmasked. His stock would plummet and all the money accumulated made to fight crime would be lost.

“
Put your hands in the air
!” came an electronic voice from overhead, amplified by a bullhorn.

He began to run across the roof, knowing he needed to get out into the open for his escape plan to work. As he ran, he punched in the return code for his jet plane to come back and retrieve him. It had been continuously circling in a one-mile radius. He could only hope it wasn’t a mile out at the moment.

“
Cowl, hold it right there or we’ll shoot!”
came the voice again.

They knew it was him, and with his history with the police, there would be no warning shots.

Darting behind an air conditioning unit, the first bullets peppered the rooftop.

“So
much
for
a
warning,”
the
Cowl
mumbled
under his breath.

Searching the rooftop, he spotted a three-inch piece of iron leftover from a welding job on the unit he was hiding behind. After picking it up and hefting it, he ran to the right and popped out into the open. As the spotlight turned to find him, he used the piece of iron like it was one of his
Cowlarangs
and threw it as hard as he could at the spotlight. His aim was true and it blinked out, glass shards raining down on to the roof as cursing rose loud and clear over the chopper’s engine.

More bullets peppered the roof, but they were more than six feet from his last location.

Now buying himself some time, he ran out to the far side of the roof, his battle suit and cape allowing him to be just another shadow. He heard another helicopter approaching, and this one would have a spotlight as well.

He pulled a small balloon from his belt and it inflated when he pressed a button on the small canister attached to it. The lighter-than-air gas filled the twelve-inch balloon and it began to rise. A thin, unbreakable wire filament was attached to it, and as the balloon rose into the night sky, the Cowl attached the other end of the wire to the harness beneath his suit.

Then he had to wait. Sweat trickled under his mask as he counted the seconds. He was entirely exposed but had no choice, he had to remain still.

As the second helicopter approached, the spotlight began to sway back and forth as it searched for him. Once it found him, he would be exposed and a second later he would be peppered with armor-piercing rounds that even the chest plate on his battle suit couldn’t stop.

Then, what he prayed wouldn’t happen, did. The spotlight found him and he raised his hand to cover his eyes. His jaw was taut as he waited to feel the first impact of a bullet in his chest . . . but it didn’t come.

At the exact instant the trooper in the chopper began to fire, the Cowl’s jet plane soared in from the west. On its nose was a pincer, one that caught the balloon and wire, then as the wire slid through the closing pincer, the balloon halted the movement and the wire snapped taut.

Off the warehouse roof, the Cowl was yanked into the air. Wind whistled around his ears as just below him, where his feet were only a second ago, the gravel was chopped up by bullets.

He was gone in less than a second, lost in the night sky. The plane banked to the north and his waiting lair.

As he floated in the clear winter sky, the wind cold on his exposed flesh, his entire body aching from his battle with the walking dead, he still felt alive, more alive than he had in years.

The wire began to be retracted and he rose up. He prepared to climb back into the plane, a difficult task when he was at his peak
—
let alone now
—
but he knew he would be able to do it.

He idly wondered if the Puppet Master would have truly been able to rule the city with the walking dead.

Pushing the thoughts from his mind, he decided it didn’t matter.

The only thing that mattered was he was alive, and once recovered, would soon be back to prowl the night, to take down evil, wherever it might be.

Coda to the Golden Age

by

Lorne Dixon

T
he President of
the United States of America was still speaking when, in an impatient huff, Missouri Madison hung up the phone. The President, half his age, had called to wish him a happy one hundredth birthday and to take the opportunity to
again
express his appreciation for his service during, and after, the Second World War. Missouri was well past tired of being thanked; it was rare that he visited the upstairs room where he kept, in ramshackle piles, the plaques, awards, ribbons, citations, statuettes, and metals that had been bestowed upon him over the years. He’d considered, on more than one occasion, selling the entire lot to a memorabilia collector, or failing that, as scrap. In today’s economy, he figured he could earn a pretty penny.

There was an exception, though: six months ago he rummaged through the stacks of awards to find a framed newspaper from 1945 with a headline which read
germany
surrenders
. Under the headline, in the largest photograph he’d ever seen on a front page, was a shot of Missouri standing in front of Hitler’s overtaken bunker holding a battered German helmet over his head. The image was iconic. In the first few years after it was taken it appeared everywhere: on fine art prints, magazines, posters. When he’d handed it over to Kory Leeks, the kid’s face lit up and for a magical moment the ravages of cancer and the scars of surgery vanished. Kory lived across the street from Missouri, but most days he just barely lived at all. That birthday, with that old newspaper photo in his hands, he glowed.

Kory was his best friend. At thirteen, the boy had endured more pain and sickness than anyone should in a lifetime, but he never let the agony inside stop him from greeting Missouri with a warm hug and a sing-song salutation, “Hey there Fearless
Fantom
.”

Fantom
, with an F, he never quite understood why. He guessed that the reporters covering the war in Europe just had a thing for alliteration, but in any case, it stuck, and after returning to America they continued to use it. Kory was the only one who called him by the name anymore, and while
Missouri’d
always sneered at all the articles over the years, he didn’t mind when the boy called him by that ridiculous name, not one bit.

Something buzzed in the other room. There was a time when he would have been able to hear the footfall of a cricket a mile off, but that was a long time ago. Now, he reached into his ear, turned up his hearing aid, and pulled himself up to his walker. Grunting with each step, he headed into the sitting room. The sound came from a two-way radio perched on its charger on the center coffee table. Smiling, he heard Kory’s voice calling his name. But the smile died down as he realized that instead of his usual excited boyish shout, Kory’s voice was filled with fright. “
Fantom
—
Are you there,
Fantom
? I need you to answer, I really need you to
—
”

Settling down into his easy chair, Missouri fumbled for the radio, bringing it up to his lips with shaking hands. With some concentration, he managed to press the
send
button, all the while wishing the controls were twice their size. “I’m here, Kory. What’s your twenty?”

Usually, the boy would give a fantastic location
—
the jungles of Sumatra or the deserts outside
Karnak
; wherever his imaginary games had taken him that day
—
but not today. “My bedroom. I’m scared,
Fantom
.”

 
In the fifties, he’d stared down the approach of an entire battalion of Red Army super soldiers and not felt a single twinge of worry. But the quiver in Kory’s voice tightened a knot in Missouri’s gut that forced the air out of his lungs.

“What’s wrong?” Missouri asked.

“There are people in the backyard,” Kory whispered, breathing into the microphone, each exhale transmitting a seashore wave of static to Missouri’s ear. “They’re trying to get inside through the back door. And . . .”

“What is it? You can tell me. Remember, the better the intelligence
—
”

Kory finished the sentence in the same panicked voice. “
—
the easier the victory. This is . . .
different
, though. I don’t know that you’ll believe me.”

“Try me,” he said. Those were the same words he’d spoken to Minister Mayhem when the rogue German rocket scientist had told him that even
he
couldn’t stop the simultaneous launch of ten missiles bound for Washington D.C. Mayhem had been wrong. Once the press printed an account of their confrontation, it had become something of a catch phrase that reporters injected into all stories of his exploits, whether he’d actually said the words that time or not.

“I
th
-
th
-think,” the boy stuttered, “they’re dead.”

Missouri let the radio slip from his hand. It dropped down onto the table with a hard plastic thud.
Dead people trying to invade Kory’s house.
It should have seemed ludicrous, something to be taken as nothing more than a product of a frightened child’s imagination. The rational side of his brain insisted they must have been crooks wearing scary masks, and yet
—

A memory lingered, fighting to surface after being buried under half a century of adventures, indistinct in detail but overpowering in dread. He couldn’t remember the name of the Khmer Rouge general’s name, but the curling scar under the man’s blood-red right eye remained in his mind. It had formed a question mark. The general had practiced a form of Far East black magic and successfully resurrected hundreds of murdered peasants from the Vietnam border. They’d come back as murderous zombies, lifeless but animated, using their hands and teeth as weapons to terrorize a cloistered Buddhist sanctuary that had resisted the Rouge. Missouri couldn’t remember the battles he’d fought with the dead
—
he’d drank all those memories away decades ago
—
but what little he could remember sent an electric chill across his wrinkled flesh.

Picking up the radio, he said, “I . . . believe you.”

“I’m scared,” Kory repeated.

“Where are your parents?”

“They went . . .”
—
his voice trailed off
—
“. . . out.”

Missouri shook his head and clenched down on his dentures. He wasn’t sure whether
Kory
knew it or not, but
he
knew where the boy’s parents went when they were “out.” There were two bars in town: one on Third Street where they served bar food, the other on Cannon Boulevard, where they served the same food topless. When she worked at all, Kory’s mom earned the mortgage payment in the parking lot of the latter bar.

“Hold on a moment, partner. I’ll be right back,” Missouri said, lowered the radio, and groaned as he worked himself back up to stand. Balancing on the walker, knees cracking, he made his way across the room to the window. Plucking a pair of World War Two government-issue binoculars off the sill, he raised them to his eyes and squinted. He’d bought them at a swap meet a decade earlier when his vision began to deteriorate. In the old days he could have counted all eight legs on a deer tick from a hundred yards out. These days he needed reading glasses to make out the labels on his prescriptions.

Across the street, Kory’s house sat behind an untrimmed hedge row that wrapped around the property. The angle wasn’t the best, but through a gap in the foliage he could see a small wedge of the backyard. Even with his limited view, he saw three men pounding the back door with fists. One left bloodstains behind with each blow. None of them had a healthy complexion.