Superheroes Anonymous (5 page)

But I couldn't be sure. I was too busy blacking out to double-­check.

I
OPENED MY
eyes to find myself in Dr. Mobius's basement lair once again.

He leaned over me, his long nose pushed disturbingly close to my face. He smelled rank. “Gah, what are you doing? Get away from me!” I said.

He didn't move. “Who's Naomi Gunn?”

“You'll find her in the file named ‘Business Comma None of Yours.' ”

“You were muttering her name.” Mobius eased back to check his clipboard. “She must be somebody important. From what I can gather from your little outbursts, you've been reliving important moments in your life.”

“I was hallucinating.” I began to search the room for the source of the smell. Surely something that stank that badly would make itself obvious.

Dr. Mobius tapped one finger against a wart on his chin while he studied the clipboard in the flickering light. “You mentioned a Jeremy Collins—­Blaze, understandably. Angus Vanderfeld is a noted entry, and never with happy emotions attached. And Blaze himself, as his superhero identity. Of course.” He looked up from the clipboard and down at me, and I quite suddenly wished he'd go back to the clipboard. His eyes, too large and too bulbous for his sockets, bugged out at me. “I find it curious that you deny even in your subconscious that Jeremy Collins is Blaze.”

“Blaze isn't Jeremy Collins.”

Mobius twitched a shoulder.

And I realized where the smell was coming from: me. I stank. I reeked badly enough that I was causing myself to gag. No wonder I'd been shaking so badly. I'd probably been trying to break the restraints and run away from myself.

“Evidently, I could use a shower.” I breathed shallowly through my mouth. “How long was I out?”

“Eight hours. I felt it best to sedate you during your seizure so that you didn't try to swallow your own tongue and suffocate. Death is such a messy, pointless thing. You're of much more use to me alive.” Mobius put the clipboard away.

Since I'd been kidnapped by villains who hadn't shared that philosophy and hadn't cared whether I lived or died, the sentiment was actually a bit touching. The seizures were worrying, though.

Mobius, of course, ruined the effect. “Granted, if Blaze doesn't show soon, I may have to revise my policy. Every minute you're here is one where we might be discovered. As spry as I am—­I'm quite spry; that's how I was able to escape the guards at Detmer—­I'd rather not have to live with the messiness of a civilian rescue.”

Detmer, where they kept the most dangerous, deranged supervillains. I swallowed hard.

“They had me in solitary, you know.” Mobius's voice took on that distant quality that only supervillains could get while they lectured about their evil plans: smug and with a hint of wistfulness. “It took me nearly two years to come up with the perfect escape plan. I shan't tell you what it was—­it's the most forgotten rule in the Villain Handbook that to give away the intricate details of one's plan or escape is to concede defeat on the spot. And, Girl, I will not be defeated.”

Why did it not surprise me that the villains had a handbook? I probably had my own chapter and designation, and they likely included the words “handy to kidnap in a pinch.”

“Where was I?” Dr. Mobius pushed his scaly index finger up the side of his face, thinking. “Oh, right. You're troublesome. I've had you here thirteen days, and frankly, I'm tiring of cleaning up your messes, of feeding you, and of your lack of gratitude. I mean, even if you weren't forgetting every day left and right, you really are a most ungrateful creature.”

“Sorry I'm not grateful that you strapped me to a table.”

“That's precisely what I mean.” Dr. Mobius stalked to the other side of the laboratory and back, a short trip. His scowl turned into a mutinous frown, and he let out a gusty sigh. “Every day that passes increases the likelihood of you escaping that table, and there are several caustic chemicals around that could hurt me.”

“You think?” I asked, eyeing the bubbling green beaker.

He flicked his fingers at me. “I think it's time for a new location.”

“Where? Will I be able to move around again?”

“Unfortunately.”

“And will I be able to shower?”

“The entire world would be grateful, so I'm tempted to say no. But as I'm the one that has to have to live with your ungodly stink, I will grant you a shower.”

“Hey!” I lifted my head to glare at him better. “You brought this on yourself.”

“There's a chemical shower through there.” Mobius's long fingers undid the shackle around my ankle. Though my skin crawled that he was touching any part of me, I had to sigh when the foot was released. Mobius's eyes narrowed. “No funny business. The solution has the side effect of making you rather weak. So I recommend you don't even bother.”

I didn't roll my eyes though I considered it. After two weeks on a table, I was going to be as useless as a newborn puppy. But I had to try
something,
so when Mobius released my wrist, I swung at him.

Both of us watched my hand as my arm made it halfway into the air and flopped uselessly at my side. He raised his eyebrows at me. “Is that it?”

“Apparently,” I said, sighing. It took everything I had to gingerly ease over the edge of the table and lower my legs. My feet were so frozen that touching the cold concrete did absolutely nothing. I gritted my teeth and slowly transferred my weight to my unused legs. It took everything I had to keep upright.

Mobius seemed to be one of those scientists who had never developed the necessary wells of patience. He grabbed my arm above the elbow and hauled, shoving me over to a door. Inside was a room no larger than a closet with a drain on the floor and a showerhead suspended from the ceiling. A pull chain appeared to be the only type of faucet the chemical shower had.

I stumbled into the shower and braced my hands on the walls as I tried to get my breath back. I wasn't precisely winded, but everything just felt
weird,
like my body had been disassembled and reassembled with different parts. Was that an effect of the radiation?

“Don't come out until you smell better.”

“Kind of not that possible without soap, Doc.”

“Fine, fine.” I heard his muttered grumbling as he puttered around the basement-­lair. A few seconds later, a bar of soap was tossed at my feet.

I plucked at the shoulder of the soiled, rotten gown. “Am I just supposed to wear this?”

He scowled again. “I'll find you something and leave it outside the door. Hostages are a lot of work.”

Even if I weren't Hostage Girl, I could have told him that.

 

Chapter Five

C
HEMICAL SHO
WERS APPARENTLY
aren't very warm. Or at least this one wasn't.

The instant I pulled the cord, cold water sluiced over my head, making me gasp out loud. It was like an icy rain of death, but at least it seemed to shake most of the feebleness out of my limbs. Swearing viciously, I fumbled around in the dark until I found the soap. My hands shook as I yanked off the gown and scrubbed as fast as I could. Thanks to a complete lack of coordination and the danger of frostbite, I stumbled more than I cleaned. I grunted when I banged my shoulder into the wall.

Honestly, would it have killed him to put in a light?

I had to use the soap on my hair since there wasn't any shampoo, but after two weeks, anything was better than nothing. I ducked my head fully under the spray, closed my eyes, and held my breath for ten seconds.

When I eased open the door to find clothes waiting for me outside, I was shivering so hard that it was hard to pull on the ratty corduroy trousers. The white T-­shirt had seen better days, and the flannel shirt made me grimace. Now Mobius and I would both look like lumberjacks. The pants needed a belt and were far too long, so I rolled the waistline over and over until the extra cloth held the pants up on its own. Underwear seemed like too much to hope for, so I went without. The clothing didn't smell exactly fresh or anything, but it had the advantage of being clean. I finger-­combed my hair, pulled it back into a wet knot, and for a moment, just enjoyed the rare feeling of being human.

For all of two seconds.

Mobius had been waiting for me to emerge; he grabbed me by the arm, yanked me out of the lair, up a staircase, and down a brief hallway with bare walls and no defining features. Summarily, he shoved me in a closet and locked the door.

Habit from dozens of other kidnappings made me explore the walls and corners with my hands, searching for any trapdoors (it's amazing how many villains forget to hostage-­proof their lairs), but the storage room was all it appeared to be: a dark, empty hole. Thanks to the corduroy and flannel, I started to warm up almost immediately, but other than that, it didn't have much to offer me.

Leaning against the wall, I dozed off—­maybe I did have narcolepsy—­and when I woke up, my hair was drier. Thumping repeatedly on the door raised no response from Dr. Mobius, so I leaned back and finally took some time to do a mental inventory. By my calculations, I'd spent the past two weeks asleep, or close enough to it. Dr. Mobius had said I'd been awake for part of it, so why was everything during that time blank?

Focusing as hard as I could produce nothing but a vague, blurry memory of watching a giant needle being shoved into my arm, and an accompanying dizzy spell. The entire room seemed to shake, so I fell forward, hugging the ground until the vertigo had passed. It took me nearly a minute of lying on the floor to convince myself that it was all in my head.

I pushed myself back up. Belatedly, I froze. That push-­up had been really easy.

Shouldn't I be as weak as a baby kitten? I didn't know how long it took muscular atrophy to set in, but I was pretty sure two weeks on a table wasn't exactly healthy. Testing, I propped myself up on my hands and my feet and did a push-­up. And then I did another.

I began to count in my head. One. Two. Five. Ten. Thirteen, fourteen. Fifteen.

I wasn't even tired yet.

Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.

My arms felt fine. In fact, they felt better than they had in a long time. I kept going.

Twenty-­nine, thirty.

Forty. Fifty.

Sixty.

Nothing burned. I was doing full, military-­style push-­ups, my palms biting into the ground right below my shoulders.

Seventy.

I hadn't even broken a sweat.

By the time I reached ninety without any signs of fatigue, I began to panic. When I passed a hundred, my hands began to shake. It wasn't exhaustion. I'd just done a hundred push-­ups when twenty usually did me in. Breath scraping against the insides of my lungs in terror, I dropped to the ground and looked around, like the empty walls surrounding me would have an answer.

There was nothing but silence in reply.

What the hell was happened to me? What had Dr. Mobius done to me?

Slowly, hand shaking, I felt my upper arm, where the flab normally had a lot of give. It was like pushing against steel. I yanked off the flannel shirt—­the white shirt beneath was old to the point of see-­through. In the flickering light, every muscle was defined in perfect, video game lines.

“Uh,” was all I could say to that.

Dr. Mobius might have turned me into an addict who would die without her fix, but he'd also apparently given me
muscles.

A part of me had to marvel. Not at the fact that my arms had become streamlined ropes of wiry muscle and sinew, not that I had washboard abs better than my ex-­boyfriend's (and he'd worked several hours a week on those abs). No, I marveled that I'd somehow missed out on all of this during my shower.

You'd think it would have been obvious.

A
BOUT TWENTY MINU
TES
after my bout with the push-­ups, hunger began to gnaw away at my stomach. By the time Dr. Mobius opened the door twenty minutes later, I was curled up on the floor, almost delirious. He sniffed. “There's no need to resort to histrionics,” he said.

I managed to find the energy to lift my head and give him what I hoped was a glare.

He set a plate inside the door. “So you'll stop mewling,” he said, and closed the door again. Two sandwiches using Wonder Bread, a handful of chips covered in orange cheese dust, and a juice box. I hadn't had a lunch like this since I was twelve. But that hardly seemed to matter since I gulped most of the food down without tasting it and licked my finger to pick up any crumbs left on the plate. It seemed to appease the hunger, so I lay back down and waited for my strength to return.

Since I had only the bulb above my head, and no signs of night or day, time became a meaningless entity. It flew, it crawled, it moved in any number of animal ways, while I lay on my back and stared at nothing.

You know what the problem with confinement is? Besides the lack of freedom, I mean? It gives you time to think about everything you've been avoiding. After only a ­couple of hours in my cell, I couldn't help but ruminate on the fact that I hated my job. The problem with being a workaholic is that there's very little to your life but your job. And I'd been too passive to find a new one. In fact, my forced confinement made me realize how passive I was in every area of my life. My boyfriend had dumped me while I was in a hospital bed. Instead of hunting him down and exacting some form of revenge, I'd stood silently by while he'd moved to Miami to date supermodels. I'd let Blaze rescue me over and over without prying to find out why it was always him, and why it was always me. I'd allowed Angus to walk all over me until I was little more than an emotionally stunted pancake on the floor of Mirror Reality.

I defined the word “loser” all too well.

Depression began to sink in, deep and dark and oppressive. Once more, I was a hostage, but now I was an addict as well, hooked on a substance that only one man in the world knew how to create. A man who wasn't exactly sane. Was I going to lie down and accept this as my lot in life, as I had with all of the other villains?

What a depressing thought.

For lack of anything better to do, I lay down on my belly. “Okay, Gail. Let's see what you can do.”

I pushed up so that my back was straight once more. And I lowered myself. Raised myself again. One. Two. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. I hit fifty and kept going steadily, breathing perfectly fine. Soared by seventy-­five. Passed a hundred without a hitch. Even as my mind marveled and balked, my body never stopped. My arms and shoulders just continued to move, lowering my rib cage to the floor—­stopping before it touched—­and lifting again. Every time, my elbows broke the ninety-­degree mark. Perfect, military-­style push-­ups.

A hundred.

Two hundred.

Three
hundred.

Lactic acid began to break through the barrier that my body had formed against pain, leaking in so that I began to really feel my shoulders. At 350, the ache crawled down my arms.

Four hundred.

Near five hundred, I gave in to the pain and the shaking, and collapsed.

For a long time, I lay there, shocked and stunned. I'd completed nearly five hundred push-­ups—­not counting the hundred I'd done earlier. Sure, I had muscles now, but that seemed well beyond ridiculous. I didn't know how many push-­ups the old trainers at the gym could do without stopping. One thing for sure—­it probably wasn't five hundred.

I was still lying on my stomach when the door opened again. A sliver of yellow light cracked the wall, and Dr. Mobius's face loomed over me. With the light behind him giving him a demonic halo, he peered at me. “Why are you sweating?”

“Confinement gives me terror sweats,” I said. The first rule about being a hostage is that if you have an advantage, don't let your captor know. “What do you want? Gonna get me addicted to crack cocaine? Or are we skipping straight to meth? I'll have to clear my schedule.”

He cocked his head. “What use would I have for a meth addict?”

“You don't seem to have any use for a Mobium addict,” I said, pushing myself up to my knees.

“If your Blaze were more diligent in his efforts to protect you, you'd be on your way, and you would only have to see me when the cravings threatened to kill you.”

I didn't figure logic was going to take my side on this one.

“In any case,” he said, “I figure Blaze will catch on eventually, and it might be easier to convince him not to kill me if I present you well fed and well kept. I have a remarkably low pain tolerance, and I'd prefer not to end up dangling from a building or some such nonsense. It's happened before.”

I wasn't surprised. It was one of Blaze's—­and War Hammer's—­trademarks to leave their villains dangling from a building until the police could collect them and send them to Detmer. I imagine that it amused them though it was probably a lot of hassle for the police.

“So it's time I fed you properly. I advise you not to attempt any funny business. The solution should be keeping you pretty weak, and everybody knows you don't fight back, but I'd rather not have to deal with any unpleasantness.”

My stomach sank. It figured that even my passivity was well known among the villains.

Thankfully, I didn't have to play the aching weakling as I rose to my feet. The push-­ups had done that for me. So, meek and docile as a lamb, I followed Dr. Mobius. There was nothing on the walls to give me a clue as to where we were or if we were even in Chicago anymore.

Dr. Mobius led me into a different room. Unlike the dirty storage closet and the dim laboratory, this one was relatively normal. A scarred wooden table with mismatched chairs sat in a room with two doorways, one of which we'd just come through. The doorway opposite led to a small, relatively tidy kitchen area.

We weren't just in Dr. Mobius's evil lair, I realized. He lived here.

“Eat.” Dr. Mobius pushed a plate in front of me. Steam curled off a grilled piece of chicken and the vegetables around it. “I've decided you're no longer a hostage.”

“I'm not?” I perked up. “I'm free to go?”

“That would be rude. You're a guest here now.”

“So . . . a fancy hostage,” I said.

He ignored me. “I'm moving you to the guest bedroom for the duration of your stay. Which, hopefully, won't be long. You'll put in a good word for me with Blaze.”

“I don't know if that's in my best interests,” I said, and took a bite of chicken. A little dry, but not bad. And I'd had much, much worse in previous kidnappings.

He chuckled and took a sip of wine, none of which he offered to me. I had a glass of water that I had to trust wasn't doped with something. “But of course it is.”

“What's your beef with Blaze, anyway?” I cut a large piece of chicken free and managed to chew a ­couple of times before swallowing. The gnawing, pervasive hunger was back, possibly because I'd just pushed myself beyond regular human limits. “Did he run over your dog?”

“Ha!” Mobius sipped his wine again. “Ha, ha.”

“You're not going to answer me, are you?” I asked.

“I like a bit of mystery. It gives me a certain
je ne sais quoi,
don't you think?” He rubbed his rubbery mask of a face. “Makes me debonair.”

I gagged on a bite of vegetables.

Once I cleaned my plate—­and I mean that almost literally, for I nearly began to lick the dish when my belly realized the dry chicken and vegetables had reached its end, and I was still hungry—­Dr. Mobius led me from the dining room to a new room just down the hall. I cringed, expecting another storage closet, but when he pushed the door open, it was obvious that the room belonged to a seven-­year-­old.

A seven-­year-­old in love with the color pink. Light pink wallpaper, dark pink carpet, lacy white curtains, unicorns and rainbows on the bed pillows. “You'll be staying here,” Mobius said, shoving me inside.

I blinked at the light pink wallpaper, dotted with tiny cartoon stars, and the purple carpet. Lacy white curtains hung over a window that had been blacked out. There were rainbows on the pillows on the bed. “What the . . . is this your daughter's bedroom? Where are we?”

Mobius glared. “You ask too many questions,” he said, and shut the door on me.

I prowled around the room after I heard Mobius's footsteps fade down the hall, but there wasn't a single clue that could tell me who it belonged to. The bookshelves told me the owner was probably a voracious reader, for there were fantasy novels stacked atop science-­fiction novels, mingled with romances and other genres that made me reevaluate my idea that the room's owner was seven. At random, I picked up a book with a unicorn on the cover, and a sudden, shrill beeping made me shout. It grew louder and louder until I took a step back from the bookshelf.