Minister Faust (43 page)

“Y’hear that?” slurred André, still sobering up. “How he gonna…‘explode’ a ‘conspiracy…by any means necessary’? We can’t wait any longer! If we don’put the smackdown on that psycho now, who knows what he gon do? An how many people he gon hurt?”

“Where do y’all think he’s gon strike?” asked Wally. His voice echoed in the Hollow beyond its solitary sonic power. In the shadowy chamber, he, Hnossi, and Syndi seemed to be glowing.

Festus addressed his computer array rather than look toward the golden triangle. He swatted flies away from his ears. His voice was ice.

“Since Edgerton’s attempting to blame the good doctor here for everything wrong in his misbegotten life, clearly he’s going to attack her wherever he thinks she could be—which means her home, the Squirrel Tree, or her Hyper-Potentiality Clinic. Don’t worry, Doct—”

“Now don’tchu worry, lil lady,” said Wally. “We’ll protect ya.”

Festus bit his lower lip, hard, then keyboarded his console like Bach playing his organ. The honeycomb monitors flared, fluttered and flashed with millions of random images, and while we watched, the data flood began channeling into select motifs.

“Good goddamn,” said Festus. Then, distracted by the buzz whining in the air, he turned around to glare at André.

“Hey, it ain’me!” said the Brotherfly.

“Vut is it, Festus?”

He shook his head disgustedly. “I should’ve caught this, but with everything going on, the conspiracy, me taking care of you—I can’t keep absolutely everything under control, I never claimed to be a god, just a hardworking—”

“Festus!”
snapped the Iron Lass, the syllables evoking the slash of a whip. “Vut.
Is
it?”

Still without looking toward her, he pointed at various monitors while electronically highlighting them.

“Here,” he said, clicking on a hexagon of a black man and an Asian man in an office. “Footage recorded several days ago. Our X-Hero’s retained legal counsel.
With Tran.
” He snorted heavily enough to dislodge his pancreas. “Quite a turnaround for an ambulance-chasing backstabbing barrister employed by an antisuperhero watchdog agency!”

Click.
A desert canyon in searing daylight. The image scoped down to a network of drill holes. One after the other, four black baboons emerged from the holes, carrying tiny sacks and running. “Yucca Flats. The abandoned mine sites.”

“So?” said Syndi, swatting at and missing the insects buzzing in the Hollow.

“That’s where th’gubment was drillin f’argonium,” said Wally, his tabernacle voice Pavarotting my brain. “I always told ’em there hadda still be some left down there.”

I asked Festus why Kareem would send his shadow creatures to retrieve argonium.

“Who knows? A dirty bomb? Insurance against…someone who might finally bother to return to active duty? Combine that with the argonium data he downloaded…We’ve seen close-up how addictive it is. What if Edgerton could shadow-extract it or shadow-synthesize it, combine it with something else, and mass-produce it? That racist reprobate has sworn revenge for the F*O*O*J ‘denying’ him his ‘rightful place.’ What if he’s planning to drown white America in a tidal wave of argonium-crack?”

“That’s complete bullshit, Festus,” said Syndi, “and you know it!”

“
Ja,
Festus…Kareem may be a schwarzextremist, but still, I caun’t believe—”

“Oh no?” he said, trying and failing to swat the insect buzzing near his ear. “Then what do you make of these?”

Festus clicked several hexagons: multiple angles of Sunhawk Island and the Blue Pyramid, time-jumping imagery of a black falcon entering and later exiting the Pyramid from the aperture of the mysterious shaft on the forty-second tier.

“The Ka-Sentinels
sealed
the Blue Pyramid,” growled Festus, “three days after Hawk King’s death. The drones wouldn’t even let Major Ursa or the Spectacle back into the crime scene. And after the divine apparition at the funeral, no one wanted to risk trying to break in. And yet
here,
” he said, pointing, “we see that Edgerton’s been sending his shadows inside! For what purpose? What’s he been doing?”

Suddenly Festus hammered his fist into his console. Syndi, André, and I jumped in reaction. Festus looked down at what he’d crushed: glistening black fragments. Which then
poofed
into nothingness.

“That bastard! He’s been monitoring us this entire time! I should have crushed him with my bare hands!” he yelled, his voice resounding in the Hollow:
BARE HANDS BARE hands barehands…
Panting with rage, he muttered almost inaudibly, “But that would be messy.
Gas
is neater for bugs.”

A comm call came in from the Fortress of Freedom. Festus stabbed the
HOLD
key on his console.

I confessed to Festus that I failed to see why the situation was as dire as he seemed to think.

“How can you fail to comprehend this, Miss Brain? That fanatic’s been sending his word-things
inside
the Blue Pyramid!
He
killed Hawk King! And if he could do that to a god, how long do you think a defenseless human being could last against one of his nightmarish creations? And why murder Hawk King at all, unless he’d gone to the King under this delusional negroid–Hawk King theory, shared his plans with the King and expected support, and when the King refused him any further access to the Blue Pyramid and its technology and threatened to turn him in, or attempted to capture him right there—”

“Technology? Inside the Blue Pyramid?”

“The ancient technology inside Hawk King’s fortress, Miss Brain, could incinerate half the United States. If the X-Man were to use the Pyramid as his command and control center, he could prosecute a one-man global race war…and possibly even win it.”

Psychesituational Presentation of XTremism

D
etermined to go into battle immediately, Festus sketched out his strategy, accepting as-brief-as-possible interventions from Hnossi and fitting Wally with a device he called an “OM Meter” so he could monitor Wally’s health in case the X-Man had acquired sufficient supplies of argonium to pose a threat. When I pressed him quietly on the “OM Meter,” Festus conceded that he was more concerned that this “brave new Wally” was unstable, and he “refused to risk the success of the mission on the cultic conversion of any Kentucky-fried fanatic.”

The monitors beeped impatiently with the call Festus had forgotten was on hold. He tapped his keyboard, and the central hexagons of the honeycomb united into a single image: the black-furred Major Ursa, surrounded by a hundred F*O*O*Jsters, gathered inside the majestically muralled auditorium of Heroes’ Hall.

“What is it, Major?”

“Uh, well—we’ve, we’ve all been waiting for you, sir.”

“Waiting for
me
? What are you on about?”

“Your speech, sir—you were supposed to begin your speech ten minutes ago.”

“Speech? I’m not giving any speech, Major!”

“But you used the Alpha-One channel, you asked us to—”

“I certainly did not use the—” He stopped. His eyes grew tiny.
“Major Ursa, evacuate the Fortress forthwith! Condition Red! REPEAT, EVACUATE ALL PERSONNEL FORTHWITH—”

The honeycomb flared with sound and fury, and then went null, into default blue.

Festus stammered, “Good God—even
I
didn’t think that madman would—”

Everyone gazed at the empty blue, dumb with horror.

Festus dialed into his hexagon-screen comm system, patching into both the Alpha and Zeta Channels.

“Ah…attention…cuh-calling all F*O*O*Jsters,” he said. “Calling all retired F*O*O*Jsters and all independents. This is an Alpha-One and Zeta-One priority message, invoked under the authority of FEMA Protocol SH Two. The Fortress of Freedom has been bombed. Everyone inside has been…everyone is presumed dead.”

“NO!” cried Syndi. “Kareem would never do that! It must just be, like, knockout-gas bombs or something—”

Festus muted the comm to face Syndi. “You
still
believe that fanatic isn’t dangerous? You heard him in therapy, in his note to Miss Brain! That he’d ‘explode’ a conspiracy! Well he’s done it! With bombs!”

He unmuted his comm. “Stand by for scrambled mission strategy. Converge as outlined. Flying Squirrel out.”

Festus turned, facing his troops. “Professor Icegaard. Contact the Spook directly—try him at Langley; I think he’s speaking to the graduating class. He’ll want a piece of this bastard boiled and dipped in butter. Wally. Try using your omni-hearing to locate Edgerton. We have to assume he’s heading to the Blue Pyramid immediately—assuming he hasn’t taken it already.

“Everyone: the only people we can count on now are us. We in this room may be the only surviving active members of the F*O*O*J. We have one mission, perhaps our most important ever: to neutralize the X-Man and his L*A*B fanatics tonight before they neutralize us all.”

Failing to Fight the Supervillain Within

S
till unsure of the extant conditions and locked inside a psychemotional grand mal seizure of their own combative, antagonistic paradigm, the F*O*O*Jsters were determined to defeat their former colleague—not with reason, visualization, feelings-work, journaling, or an intervention—but with naked, brute violence.

Even if the F*O*O*Jsters could somehow manage not to destroy one another, their capacity for psychic healing would be all the more diminished by their refusal to engage the most important hyper-battle of all: against the supervillain within.

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 7:12 P.M.

I
n the bowels of Langston-Douglas, terror was growing like
a radioactive polyp. With news helicopters ratcheting overhead in the choking 110 degree smog and the streets bloodied by sunset, the QRIB HQ of the League of Angry Blackmen stood in dark defiance of the noose tightening every second around it.

Having divided all responding heroes into attack squads for three separate targets, the Flying Squirrel waited at ready with his own strike force from an undisclosed location, monitoring the shrinking cordon around the faux–Egyptian temple of the QRIB.

Including Power Grrrl, Red Squad was composed of eight trained and armed fighters, warriors straining at the ropes to begin combat, valiantly ignoring the shouted curses and tossed garbage of neighborhood residents: fifty-three-year-old
Kid Kombat Sr.
with his wrecking-ball arms, buzzsaw “wings,” and missile-launcher backpack; forty-three-year-old
Saber-Tooth Beaver,
scourge of Treemasons and environmentalists, and champion of the nation’s forestry industry; fifty-five-year-old
Smithing Wesson,
lord of firearms; fifty-one-year-old
King’s English,
the superbobby; the sixty-four-year-old
Rock Breaker,
armed with his mystic hammer John Henry; thirty-eight-year-old
Super Bastard,
half lawyer, half trailer park; and the commander, legend among legends (despite lingering court cases surrounding a few dozen friendly-fire deaths), the sixty-three-year-old military master, the
Spook.

Safely ensconced inside the Squirrel Tree’s crime lab, I was able to observe the approaching melee two ways: visually through the honeycomb of monitors, and empathically through the OM Meters the Flying Squirrel had ordered everyone to wear so he could coordinate the battle. Perhaps due to a malfunction, I couldn’t pick up Festus’s own cognistream, but I could experience the unfolding crisis from as many other psi-POVs as I could handle.

“I can’t believe, like, what a bunch of pathetic, fossilized old geezers I’m stuck with,” complained public-persona Syndi, perhaps having forgotten that her comm was active (or perhaps not forgetting).

“Cut the chatter, Red Two,” snapped the Spook.

“Quit calling me that, Sanford! My name is Power Grrrl!”

The Spook: “Red Squad, lock weapons and prime powers in attack readiness.”

Kid Kombat Sr.: “Red Three, standing by.”

Saber-Tooth Beaver: “Red Four, standing by.”

Smithing Wesson: “Red Five, standing by.”

King’s English: “I say, old chap, Red Six, standing by.”

The Rock Breaker: “Yessuh, Red Seven hyah, stannin by-anby.”

Super Bastard: “Red Eight, frickin ready to
rawk an ro-o-oll,
good buddy!” (Pause) “Stanning by.”

(Pause)

The Spook: “Red Two, confirm readiness!”

Power Grrrl (sighing): “What
ever.
”

Still monitoring visuals only, I watched as the Spook, suddenly lit by red and blue lights stroking him and the buildings around him, stood to address those bunkered inside the QRIB.

“ATTENTION, PHILIP K. EDGERTON AND OTHER L*A*B MILITANTS!” boomed the amplified voice of Red Squad Leader. “SURRENDER IMMEDIATELY. WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.”

Seconds gouged into everyone’s nerves. There was no response.