Caped Read online

  The guy on the floor cursed and gurgled.

  “That’s very funny,” the Harlequin said, deadpan, and you could almost hear everyone’s sphincter knot up. You have to be insane to want to be a hero in this city, and the Harlequin backs that up more than anyone. They say he walked into the business offices of the Corlisi syndicate in Midtown and threw the son, Bobby Corlisi, out of a fifteen story window because Bobbi skated on a statutory rape complaint. No one knows the real story, but that’s the point. No one wants to find out how far he’s willing to go up close and personal.

  “The Russian,” he said again, except this time he wasn’t smiling. I looked around. Everyone trying real hard not to look at the guy bleeding on the floor or the splintered pool cue still in the clown’s hand. We all knew who he meant. A Russian sailor named Tretyak was doing rapes on shore leave, sending women to the hospital. I was here for the same reason, but I don’t have the stones or the reputation or the crazy to just walk into The Raven past closing time in costume and expect answers. He took one slow, steady step towards the bar and one of the sailors spoke, a high squeaking voice. I don’t know Italian but I could make out Arlecchino, per l'amore del dio, and something that sounded like don’t homicide. The bartender, who once plead a double homicide down to a five-year bid on manslaughter and kept a shotgun under the bar, stammered something about the Kapitan Kasheyev. The Harlequin nodded and I noticed that the green in his suit matched perfectly the green in his eyes. With that nod, a vigilante known as The Shroud separated from the shadows in the back corner and billowed across the floor, an indefinite mass of ragged black tendrils. He wrapped his cloak around the Harlequin and the two of them disappeared. Everyone started breathing again and the bar that always smelled like stale urine now smelled like fresh.

  * * *

  In the morning, the cops found the Russian zip-tied in the back of a police car parked in a secure lot behind the precinct. He confessed everything.

  That’s how my night went. An established mask got the guy I was after. That, and I damn near got arrested by EXIT. EXtranormal Investigations and Tactics, which is the metropolitan paramilitary meta-human law enforcement division. Federally funded pilot program with a combination of forensic labs like you see on CSI, ex-special forces guys, and military hardware. They’ve got Stryker APCs, sniper teams with Barrett fifties, and Apache helicopters. With the right sequence of response they can get authorization to unload on a meta with 30 millimeter chain guns, Hellfire missiles, or whatever it takes. I saw an armored mech named Paragon machine-gun some thugs who had hijacked an armored car. They ran over an 8-year-old girl leaving the scene. Paragon lost his shit and opened up on them. EXIT waited until he’d emptied his forearm magazines into the crooks then put a HEAT round in his chest and blew him into itty bitty superhero pieces.

  The black helicopters patrol with FLIR, broad-spectrum electromagnetic and chemical sensors, and advanced biometric recognition software that cross-references against the CCTV network at street level and the EXIT and federal databases. My suit’s got some stealth capacity but when the bird wheeled around and hovered for ten minutes overhead I thought they’d made me. The law was proportional force, so they couldn’t cap me without cause. Not legally, but no matter how righteous you were, we all sweated the helos.

  I’m called Nocturnum. Between the comics and the real guys, all the good superhero names are taken. I’m new in the city and haven’t established a rep yet. Selene has some major players but anyone will tell you there’s more than enough evil around here for another hero. We’ve got all the corruption of New Orleans, the blight of Detroit, the population of Los Angeles, and a higher-than-average number of metas. I run with a loose group called the Alliance:

  Fury and Vanguard: fliers and energy projectors, brother and sister. Twins.

  Paramount: near invulnerable strongman.

  Razor Jane: a martial artist who likes to cut people.

  And me. I’m a skills-based guy with a little tech, and not enough money to support that kind of habit. We didn’t have a formal hierarchy, and tried to make decisions by consensus. We met in an abandoned warehouse, surrounded by rats and trash.

  “Fishhook?” Fury said, incredulous. “No. No freakin’ way. That means going down into the sewer system where we can’t fly. There’s no room to maneuver. I don’t even think some of those drains are big enough for Paramount. I’m not dying down there in some fin de siècle shitpipe.”

  “Yeah, it’s nasty down there,” Vanguard said. “You get cut in that environment and who knows what kind of disease you’re gonna pick up. Nightmare. You can’t wash that stink out plus all the trace evidence you pick up. How do you explain that one to the law? Can you afford to burn extra uniforms?”

  I wasn’t going to fight them too hard on this. Fishhook was six feet of meta-human psychopath who filed down his teeth and lurked beneath the streets picking off people for dinner. Lightning fast, strong, and a stone freak. Like Gollum on some kind of super soldier serum. I was using shareware GIS mapping software to narrow down his range. He looked like a classic localized hunter but the software was based on street traffic and I wasn’t sure how well it worked with the sewer system. They didn’t even have maps for everything down there. I wasn’t real keen on getting dragged away through the sludge in one of his barbed nets screaming and begging, where the last thing I would ever hear to be that monster hissing “tasty little fish” in my ear.

  “Plus, he only takes skells, so citizens aren’t gonna throw us a parade for that gig,” Fury said, and I couldn’t argue with him on that either. The way this was going, I’d be out of cash before long, so we needed to draw some good press and patronage.

  “How about Pure Breed Coalition?” Jane said. PBC was a group of white supremacist metas who knocked off banks so they could fight the New World Order and racial miscegenation or some shit.

  “That’d be a good score but I hear they’ve moved up the coast toward Virginia,” said Paramount.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I saw where they pulled a job in Wilmington. How about Fem/Dom?” Fem/Dom was an all-female bondage-themed radical feminist team that beat the living hell out of sexual predators and destroyed targets that were symbolic of the Patriarchy. Jane just shook her head. I knew she would turn that one down as soon as I said it. It was quiet for a while.

  “I think I’ve got a good lead on the Lords,” Paramount said finally. Paramount was a classic brick. Big, strong, tough. Liked to hit things. He wasn’t stupid but was smart enough to let people think he was. The Lords of the New Apocalypse were hardcore. Probably out of our league powers-wise. Paramount laid out how he had a guy that drove around in a tricked out van pulling data. Heat signatures, radiation emissions, the whole spectrum of sensors. If he got a hit, he’d do surveillance and when he thought he had enough he moved the data to supers.

  The leader of the Lords, Appa Clypse, was a brick who could fly and project energy too. Just unfair. He was radiation-based and well-controlled but he was an emitter, which meant that sometimes he’d leak energy. Paramount said his guy picked up a small anomaly, put in some cameras and caught a crazy IR signature which could have been Holocaust. Chemical sniffers picked up a trace of thidiglycol, which almost had to be the third member, Chemos. Three out of four blips on the radar all in the same place.

  “Why haven’t the cops picked up on this?” Fury said.

  “It’s mostly luck that he got the hit, and he said something about a radiation source that you would probably ignore. I’m guessing something industrial that would make a Geiger counter chirp but you wouldn’t think much about it. EXIT’s spread a little thin. Most of their active surveillance is from the helos and they’ve got to reserve those for rapid response. This guy’s a freelancer. Surveillance is all he does.”

  “Great,” I said. “Where are they hiding?”

  “Here’s the thing: he gets five large for the lead. Cash in advance.”

  “What? Fuck that!” Fury scowled.
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  “This is his business.”

  “What if it doesn’t pan out?”

  Paramount shrugged his massive shoulders.

  “Great.”

  It hurt but we each came up with a grand. I had to max out my credit cards but I figured he wasn’t dumb enough to try and rip off a bunch of metas.

  * * *

  We staked out the location for two days: an abandoned industrial plant west of Helltown in the Wasteland, blocks and blocks of empty buildings rotting from a defunded urban renewal project. Nothing there but street gangs and homeless. They don’t even power the street lights. Paramount said that whatever they used to make there wouldn’t leave thidiglycol, which is a metabolite of mustard gas found in the urine of exposure victims. I guess Chemos oozes the stuff. I was ready to go in right away but the twins have day jobs so we had to wait. Paramount used the time to get building plans from City Hall. Probably not current. It was a risk because EXIT might trace it back to him. They never stopped trying to crack your identity. I didn’t think Paramount would rat us out if he went down, but who knew? He could have a family to take care of. Something the Attorney General could use for leverage and force him to take a deal. There wasn’t much activity but on the second day a panel van pulled into the warehouse. It left a lot lighter than it went in, so something illegal and covert was happening in the building. If it wasn’t the Lords, maybe we’d get something else for the investment.

  * * *

  We went under cover of night, Razor Jane and I crept up to the building while the twins hung back. When we were in position, Paramount adjusted his chi or whatever it is he does in order to get buffed and ran flat out through the front door. When he crashed in, the twins flew after him and Jane and I entered from the other side.

  I could hear yelling and destruction as soon as I got in the building. Jane sprinted down the center of a derelict production line. By the time I caught up, Paramount was heading in my direction, flying backwards through a wall in a blast of dust and cement fragments. I dodged him and dove off to the side behind the line to set up for whatever was coming after him. I was outmatched against any of the Lords. All I could do was try to tip the balance.

  Appa Clypse came flying through the hole he made with Paramount. He was in street clothes, but I recognized the face and those long dark ringlets of hair. Clypse had the ego to want to go toe-to-toe with another brick, and I was counting on it as I tried to move up on him. Paramount got to his feet in time to catch him as he charged and attempted to maneuver him into a guillotine choke as Clypse drove him back, crushing machinery as they went. They took out a structural column and debris and asbestos exploded everywhere. I was useless. They were so fast and strong. True metas. Even if I could sneak in the perfect liver shot on Clypse I’d just break my foot. I followed after Jane to the front room in time to see the twins jet up through a new hole in the roof after a trail of fire that must be Holocaust.

  Jane and Sheol were circling each other. She was wearing her grey Kevlar-reinforced jump suit with her raven hair pulled back, finger blades flashing in the harsh light of camping lanterns. Sheol was black and faceless, a half-formed homunculus approximating human shape like a manikin with no well-defined features but for his horrible Pez-dispenser mouth. I jumped in behind him, flipped the safety off of my electric stun gloves and delivered a one-two to his kidneys, the knuckle contacts discharging with a satisfying crackle. There was no give in his flesh and he took the hits without so much as a grunt, so I guess what they said about his nervous system being different must be true. His backhand reached me faster than the smell of ozone from the gloves, snapping my head back like I was hit with a steel pipe, but it was enough for Jane to connect with a vicious slash across the throat. It buckled him and she followed up with a knee to the chest. She’s got an armored strike plates on her knees and I could hear a wet snapping sound of broken ribs. While she gathered herself for the next strike I gave him a spinning roundhouse kick to the head. He dropped and we proceeded to kick the hell out of him until he stopped trying to protect himself. I caught my breath and trussed him up with cuffs, then glued his hands and feet together with a quick setting binary epoxy.

  “You all right?” I said. Jane nodded. She was bleeding from the temple and it was pooling along the upper edge of her mask like rain in a clogged gutter. Razor Jane would have looked hot draped in a blue nylon tarp, but in that skin-tight suit, flushed with combat, she looked amazing. I made a move on her once after some beers, but she brushed me off. She didn’t seem offended though.

  I could hear more crashing and explosions, both outside and back in the room where I’d left Paramount and Clypse fighting. The whole building shuddered under another impact. Jane and I grabbed Sheol by the arms and hauled him out to the street in front.

  Above, Holocaust, Vanguard, and Fury were trading bolts of energy, Holocaust’s fire against the twins’ plasma bolts, the three twisting and wheeling in the dark sky like an old aerial dogfight. There was a massive crunch behind us and Appa Clypse and Paramount came through the side of the building, bringing down the wall and exposing the wreckage inside.

  “We’ve got to help him somehow,” Jane said. “If Clypse flies him up in the air he’ll be in real troub—”

  We could both smell it. Something pungent and nauseating. My eyes started to tear and I saw a bilious yellow cloud rise up behind Jane, topped by a floating head in a WWI-era helmet and gas mask. I looked into the foggy sepia glass covering the eyes and began to cough and feel faint. The rubberized fabric of the mask looked fused to his grey skin.

  He solidified, a lean and twisted specter from a nearly-forgotten war. Chemos grabbed Jane’s wrist and stabbed her in the back with a trench knife. He dropped her and raised his hand toward me. I narrowly dodged the caustic chemical agent that sprayed from his desiccated fingertips. I retreated, trading her safety for mine, told myself I was trying to draw him away from her. I didn’t believe it though. Chemos stalked toward me, the vintage trench knife in one hand, Jane’s blood running down over the brass knuckle guard in the light generated by the energy projectors battling in the sky. He went vaporous again, and billowed toward me, almost on me when he abruptly froze in place and then boiled away in a toxic cloud, retreating into the ruin of the Wasteland.

  I ran to Jane and fumbled for a pressure bandage. Then I heard the helicopter and the loudspeaker ordering Holocaust and the twins to power down and surrender. It warned them a second time, and Holocaust sent a ball of flame in their direction while trying to dodge plasma from Fury and Vanguard. The helicopter’s minigun opened up and Holocaust exploded in the sky like a bladder of napalm. Behind him, Vanguard’s glow sputtered and she dropped like a stone. Fury hovered, watching his sister fall, then he screamed and charged the EXIT chopper, blowing through the armored airframe in a gout of fire. Fury flew down to his sister’s side and gathered her in his arms. In the next moment he went supersonic, shattering the few windows left intact in the abandoned buildings in the area as he carried her away. Chunks of the helo crashed in a field of concrete rubble and burned, ammunition starting to cook off. I helped Jane get to her feet and we staggered off back to the truck. The last thing I heard was the rumble of a building collapsing somewhere in the distance.

  Razor Jane was in bad shape from the knife wound and whatever Chemos had gotten on her arm was blistering her skin. We were both coughing and light-headed. I washed the chemicals off us with a high pressure spray nozzle in a self-serve car wash bay and helped her change out of her costume into street clothes. After an argument I dropped her off at a Helltown clinic with a bad reputation where you could buy them out of the mandatory police report for a knife wound. She couldn’t fight me too much. She’d lost too much blood. I bagged her clothes and gear for disposal.

  * * *

  Paramount turned up at the backup meeting place in two days as planned and we broke into an empty house off Carnival Street to talk. We figured the usual place was compromised; couldn’t take the
chance. He had one arm in an over-the-counter sling from a drugstore. We drank scotch and he ate a fistful of Percocet. I didn’t know enough about his metabolism to know if that was a good idea or not.

  “Fuck, I’ve got headaches,” he said. “I was throwing up all day yesterday. I remember waking up underneath a pile of rubble about a mile from where we started. I think he threw me through a building.”

  A lot of these invulnerable muscle guys ended up with concussion syndromes. It doesn’t matter how hard you are on the outside, if you snap your brain around inside your skull enough it catches up. Short careers from traumatic brain injury. The Subjugator had early dementia by 40. They always showed that video of him rambling and pissing himself when the cops took him away. There’s another guy named Stalwart doing eight to ten in a meta-human ultramax because he tried to break up a kidnapping and hit The Invincible Bastion so hard he had a cerebral hemorrhage and died on the spot. Some types seem immune but I didn’t know why or how you knew which kind you were going to be.

  “You think they can hang a felony murder charge on us?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Fury killed those EXIT cops and we were part of same initial act. If they can make a case that we kidnapped Sheol it’s possible. I don’t see how they’ve got the initial felony, but I’m not a lawyer.”

  “This isn’t good though.”

  “No. Those cops had families. They’ve got Sheol out at Blood Island but that twisted fuck isn’t likely to cooperate. You, me, and Jane might get out of this, but Fury?”

  “I’m pretty much fucked, right?” Fury floated into the room. I handed him the scotch and he took a long pull.