Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (5 page)

Man, this is going to mess with my head for a long time.

“Ow,” Sara says, her face tight.

“What’s wrong?”

Sara shuffles to a halt, and grinds the heel of her palm into her temple. “Something. Headache. I don’t know.”

Suddenly, Missy crashes into me, granting generous passage to a woman who barges past us without breaking stride, and without uttering a word of apology. The boys’ eyes follow the blonde in the long leather coat, and they smile in adolescent admiration.

“Hello, nurse,” Matt says.

“I hate to see her leave but I love to watch her go,” Stuart says.

“Something’s wrong with her,” Missy blurts out, and Sara nods in frantic confirmation.

“Very wrong,” Sara says.

“If that’s wrong, I don’t want her to be right,” Stuart says.

“I’m serious! There’s something wrong with her.”

“What do you mean, wrong?”

“I don’t know. She’s...I don’t know, she’s —”

“She smelled weird,” Missy says. “She didn’t smell like a person. I mean, she smelled like a person but not like a person, not like a normal person.”

“She’s throwing off psychic energy like crazy, but I can’t sense
her
at all,” Sara says. “Her mind’s like a void surrounded by a thunderstorm.”

Uh-oh. Matt has that look on his face. “We should follow her,” he says. “Come on.”

“Follow her? Why?” I say. “She hasn’t done anything.”

“Part of being a good super-hero is trusting your instincts, and we’ve got two sets of instincts telling us something is up.”

I look to Sara. She shrugs in half-hearted agreement. Well, we did want to distract Matt...

“If this goes sideways,” I say, “I think we should all get matching frames for our restraining orders.”

We tail the woman at a respectful distance, watching for anything that marks her as a danger rather than a mere curiosity. At first she does nothing noteworthy, nothing to justify our suspicions, but then she swerves off the sidewalk and marches into the street, never pausing to check traffic. Brakes squeal, tires screech, and a Toyota fishtails to a crooked stop. The woman doesn’t so much as blink at any of it.

“HEY!” the driver of the Toyota shouts, leaning out his window to better launch a profane tirade. Finally, the woman stops. She turns, giving us a good look at her. She’s all in black, and the number 666 sprawls across her chest, the characters sloppy, like graffiti. She considers the car for a moment, holds up her hands as if in surrender.

If only.

FIVE

Her hands burst into flames, but she’s not showing any signs of pain. Fat bullets of white fire leap from her hands onto the Toyota, chewing it up. The noise — a series of pops, like the
pwoof
of a gas stove burner coming to life, amplified a thousand times — echoes down Main Street. The driver runs for the hills as his car erupts — not an explosion per se, but in the blink of an eye it transforms from an object to a blazing tower, the flames leaping ten, fifteen feet high. The air shimmers and twists from the heat. Pavement bubbles. The paint on nearby vehicles blisters and blackens.

“That’s not good,” says Matt, master of the understatement.

“Get dressed, fast,” I say, slapping my goggles on. “I’ll keep her occupied.”

The gang dashes off for a quick-change, while I take to the air. Powering up in plain sight like this isn’t the brightest thing to do, but civilians are too busy running for their lives to pay any attention to me.

“Hey!” I shout.

The woman turns to face me. “And who might you be, sunshine?” she says. Her grin is as good as a neon sign reading I AM MONKEYHOUSE CRAZY. Whose dumb idea was it to buy time for the Squad?

Oh, yes, mine. Never mind.

“The name’s Lightstorm,” I say. “And you are?”

“You can call me Stacy Hellfire, sweetheart, and I’m just passing through,” she says. “Don’t mind me.”

“You want to tell me what happened here?” And take your time so my back-up can do whatever they plan to do. God, I hope they have a plan.

She considers the slagheap-in-the-making thoughtfully, then says, “He was rude.”

“Okay. So, Stacy, how about I ask you, politely, to put the...uh, fire down and tell me what you’re doing here?”

“Can’t talk. Woman on a mission.”

She raises her hands, thus ending our cordial exchange, but before she can nail me, she flies backwards, as though a psionic with an excellent sense of timing nailed her with a telekinetic battering ram. Stacy hits the ground hard enough to leave a crater.

Now what?
Sara says.

Stay on her!
I say. She might be down, but something tells me she’s far from out.

Matt’s voice joins the mental chat room.
Don’t have to tell us twice, we saw what she did to that car.

The aftermath is a show in and of itself. The fire thins out, revealing the charred skeleton of the car’s frame as the body panels melt into a pool of molten goo. It’s like watching a candle burn away at high speed. The flames, hungry for more, spread to the road and show no signs of slowing down.

Is there a plan?

Beat her into unconsciousness
, Matt says.
Duh
.

Oh, brilliant.

Before I can ask how we’re going to get close enough to do that, Stuart sails past me, the apex of his leap taking him directly over my head (!), and lands near our new friend. At first thought it’s a sound theory: get Stuart, he of the invulnerable skin, to take her down. However, as one old science teacher of mine liked to say, nothing ruins a great theory like an ugly fact — and in this case, the fact is: she reduced a car to puddle in under two minutes.

Stacy sits up. I shout out a warning that comes too late. Stuarts yelps and staggers back, gouts of flame splashing off his chest. He screams and flails away, tearing his leather vest off. The thing is ash before it hits the ground.

What happens next is nothing less than a miracle of good timing. I power up for a blast, planning to flatten Stacy Hellfire, while Matt and Sara converge on Stuart. Matt pulls a fire extinguisher out of his coat, and Sara assumes a defensive position, ready to deflect a follow-up attack that doesn’t come because Missy, in no more of her costume than her ninja hood, springs out of nowhere. She rakes the woman across the face, leaving four ragged red streaks. Missy is barely clear when my energy blast connects, knocking Miss Flamey-Hands back to the ground. If either Missy or I had been a fraction of a second off, we’d all be dodging crazy flaming mayhem, and Missy would be a smear on the sidewalk.

Like I said: a miracle.

A short-lived miracle at that: Stacy gets right back up, shooting wildly. Bullets (or whatever they are) punch holes in the sides of buildings, dig fist-sized craters in the ground, slice through abandoned cars. Everything they touch catches fire; metal, stone, whatever, it all goes up like paper. Liquid fire splatters over the invisible dome of Sara’s telekinetic shield. The shots aren’t penetrating, but who knows if that will last.

Stacy pauses, her face a mask of rage. She spots Missy crouched behind an SUV, and the reckless assault finds its focus.

This woman has taken a fair beating so far, so I decide to amp up my attack, thinking (hoping) a solid blast won’t kill her. My aim, which isn’t fantastic in the best of circumstances, is a little off: I tag her in the shoulder, causing her to jerk as she fires. That saves Missy, but it doesn’t take Stacy down. I expect her to swing around toward me, but instead she finds a target in the street and throws a swirling tornado of white flame at —

Oh, crap.
Missy, run!

I tell Sara to close her shield and brace herself, and me, I hit the open sky, because that’s the only way I’m getting out of range of the tanker truck full of home heating oil before it goes up.

Sara has her own ideas. She gestures at the truck as though reaching out to grab it. There’s a flash and a throaty WHOMP, and for a fraction of a second there is a perfect globe of roiling flame in the middle of the street. Sara cries out, then collapses. The fireball loses cohesion and hits the pavement with a splash, as though someone had dropped a gigantic water balloon filled with napalm.

I can’t help but gawk stupidly at the scenario in front of me: Sara and Stuart are flat on their backs, unmoving and injured, and Main Street is one step away from pulling a full Chicago.

(You know: the Great Chicago Fire? Mrs. O’Leary’s cow? Look it up.)

Matt waves to me from the ground, points at something. The phrase
better late than never
pops into my head as Concorde appears next to me, demanding to know what the hell is going on. I’d love to point a finger of blame at Stacy Hellfire, but I don’t see her anywhere. She’s gone.

I’m getting mighty sick of the bad guys giving us the slip.

Within minutes, the fire department arrived on the scene and began spraying down everything, the police handled crowd control and took initial statements, and paramedics tended to the injured. There were no fatalities, thank God, but lots of nasty burns, and enough psychological trauma to keep Kingsport’s shrinks busy for the next decade. Mindforce and Nina kept to the side, letting Concorde direct traffic. Everyone followed his orders, immediately and to the letter. No one challenged him or gave him any lip. Watching him in action reminded me that, as infuriating as he could be, he was the seasoned pro here.

Concorde didn’t lay into us right away; he knew his priorities. When he did start in, he was courteous enough to wait until we were all back at Protectorate HQ, so the Hero Squad wouldn’t make the front page of the paper for getting dressed down in public. Better yet, we weren’t subjected to his standard rant about what a bunch of amateurs we were. Oh no. Instead, he gave us grief for trying to handle things on our own instead of calling him in — like I personally promised I would.

“That woman was blowing the bejesus out of everything,” Matt argues. “Did you really want us to stand there with our thumbs up our butts while we waited for you to show up?”

“Yes, because then they wouldn’t have gotten injured,” Concorde says, waving at the far wall of the medical bay, where Mindforce is bent over an examination table, gently probing a six-pack of extremely nasty burns spread across Stuart’s torso. His skin is lobster red and covered in blisters the size of quarters, and no one is more shocked about this than Stuart.

“I wasn’t injured,” Sara protests from the neighboring table, but she’s not very convincing. Her face is pinched and tight, and she’s paler than normal.

“Maybe not in the conventional sense,” Mindforce says, “but you did experience heavy psychic backlash.”

“Keeping a tanker full of oil from turning Main Street into a crater,” Matt says, never one to squander an opportunity to throw our success, however small, in Concorde’s face.

Concorde, never one to squander an opportunity to put Matt in his place, responds, “And she was lucky she succeeded.”

“Why is everything we do
lucky
?” Matt shoots back. “Would it kill you to admit we did something right?”

“No, but it might kill you.”

“Could we not do this now?” I say. “There’s a crazy woman out there with flaming hands and serious impulse control issues. Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, be back out there looking for her?”

“She’s got a point,” Nina says.

“First things first,” Mindforce says. “We need to know exactly what we’re up against.”

“You mean you don’t know who she is?” I say.

“Based on your description of her, no, she’s no one I’ve ever heard of.”

“Me either,” Concorde says.

“I think we should call in Enigma,” Nina says. “This sounds like it might be in her wheelhouse.”

Concorde makes a noise that’s half sigh, half grumble. “Yeah, you’re right,” he concedes. “Hold on.”

While he fires up his helmet-phone, Matt and I check in on our wounded. Missy is perched on a stool next to Stuart’s bed, eyes wide with worry. Stuart offers her a wobbly smile.

“I’m good, Muppet, don’t you worry,” he says, propping himself up on his elbows.

“You better be,” Missy says. “Otherwise I’m kicking your butt.”

“Warning received.”

“Enigma’s en route,” Concorde says, rejoining us. “Should be here in ten, fifteen minutes.”

The room suddenly goes black — not as in, the lights have gone out, more like the light has pulled a 180 and become impenetrable darkness. Things return to normal as quickly as they went wonky, and there’s a soft
whoof
of displaced air.

“Or now,” Concorde says.

“Everyone,” Nina says, “this is my girl Dr. Enigma, our resident expert on all things magical, mystical, and supernatural. Enigma, this is the Hero Squad.”

“Hey, guys. Where’s my patient?” says the most drop-dead gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen in my life. I may be attractive (I say immodestly), but next to her, I’m a monkfish. She’s tall, shapely, and has a face I can only describe as angelic. Hair a vivid shade of flame red, which I refuse to believe is natural, cascades from her head in wild waves. Two matching locks of pure white, one above each temple, frame her face, giving her a slightly punky edge that only makes her more fetching. Jeans and a T-shirt shouldn’t look that amazing on anyone.