Masked (2010) (4 page)

I help Captain Salem up from the ground. He looks like hell. His face is bleeding; one of his ears is practically torn from his head. He says, “One more minute and I would have had him, Dave.”

He goes heavy in my arms without warning and I stumble. He’s unconscious before we hit the ground.

I’m at my apartment watching TV with the sound off when Toni Evins rings the bell. The ticker running beneath the footage of yesterday’s antics in Chicago reads
CAPTAIN SALEM FIGHTS GHOUL KING TO STALEMATE
. That’s a pretty generous assessment of events as I witnessed them, but we need all the moral support we can get. The alternative headline,
CAPTAIN SALEM NEARLY GUTTED BY GHOUL KING
, doesn’t have the proper optimistic tone.

Toni Evins is wearing a suit that would be conservative if the skirt were a little longer. She’s wearing makeup, her hair pulled back nicely. She wants to make sure I know how pretty she is. This is supposed to disarm me. It does.

“Nice work yesterday, by the way,” she says, sitting gingerly on my sofa. The place is a bit of a mess, and in a brief fit of passive-aggressiveness, I failed to clean it on purpose. “You paid eight to five in Vegas with six kills.”

“Well, it’s nice to know that I’m exceeding expectations,” I say. I feel like I’m supposed to say something else, but I’ve got nothing. I wonder if this is a journalistic trick, a deliberate silence on her part to keep me talking.

She puts a recorder on the table and the interview begins in earnest. She starts with a few questions about Verlaine’s death.
What was it like? How did it make me feel? Describe what you saw, and leave nothing out. This is the sort of interview I’ve done after more than one battle, and the rhythm of it lulls me into a false sense of security.

“You and Russell Verlaine were close, right? In an interview last year, in fact, you referred to him as your ‘best friend.’”

“I don’t remember saying that, but yes. We were close.”

“And it didn’t bother you that Verlaine chose Captain Salem to be his best man?” She pauses, looking me in the eye. “I wonder if maybe you weren’t
his
best friend.”

“Russ had a lot of friends,” I say. I believe I could come to despise Toni Evins. This is another one of those tricks, I suppose. Catch you off guard; get you to say something incendiary.

Then she goes for the throat. “So, David, how long do you think it’ll be before you show up at some battle with
Verlaine’s
powers?”

Before she arrived, I felt a little guilty about what I’m about to do to her. But all of my reservations instantly melt away.

“You clearly have some kind of theory about me that you’d like to discuss, Ms. Evins,” I say, with a bit of calculated outrage. “So let’s hear it.”

She stares at me silently for a moment, her gaze flowing over me and through me. More alpha-dog reporter bullshit, I guess.

“Well, the conventional wisdom about you is that you possess an array of powers, and that you can only use one of them at a time.”

“That is what they say.”

“I’m not sure exactly
what
it is that you do,” she says. “What I do know is that I’ve researched you fairly thoroughly and I’ve noticed a very disturbing pattern.”

I lean back on the sofa, trying to look casual, prolonging the moment for as long as possible. “Which is?”

“That in each instance that you’ve displayed any kind of extranormal aspect, you appear to have inherited it from a recently deceased hero.” Again the alpha-dog gaze. “Or villain.”

“And?” I say.

“I have two main questions. First, do you kill them, or do you wait for them to die?”

She pauses again, waits for a response, and when she gets none, plows ahead. “Second, what do you
do
to them?”

I can’t resist smiling just a little. Then I choke down the smile and put my hands up in mock surrender.

“Okay, Toni. You got me. You got me dead to rights.”

I stand up from the couch and start to pace the living room. “I’ll tell you everything. But on one condition.”

She perks up. “Which is?”

“That after I tell you, you agree to give me two days to leave the country before you print my story. That’s all I ask.”

Now I’ve hit her where she lives. There’s no way she’ll say no. “Well?” I ask, giving her my own practiced gaze. “What do you say?”

She stands. “I’d say you’ve got yourself a deal.”

Toni’s impressed by the false wall at the back of my closet, and the secret, silent elevator that takes us down to the basement of my building. When the elevator door slides open, the chill of the refrigeration units hits her and she flinches.

“Oh. . . my. . . God,” she says.

There are five tables lined up in the room. A few bare light fixtures illuminate the concrete floors and walls with a harsh, unforgiving light. On each table is a body covered in a sheet. Each body was placed there on purpose this morning, each occupant chosen for the fullest effect. On the far side of the room is a set of freezers with glass fronts, each holding several shelves of plastic containers, clearly labeled.

“What is this?” she says, and for the first time her composure slips. She’s forgotten her alpha-dog moves.

“You wanted to know the truth, and here it is,” I say.

I lift the sheet from the body closest to us. His skin is pale and wan in the harsh light. I put his helmet on earlier to make sure that
he’d be instantly recognizable. “The Human Shield,” I say.

I pull the sheet down from the next table. “Terri Day. The See-Through Girl.”

Another sheet. “King Stryker.”

Toni Evins backs away from me, her head cocked to one side. “What. . . what do you
do
down here?”

I take a step toward her, smiling what I hope is a wicked smile. “I eat them, Toni.”

I take another step and she flinches back. “I eat the flesh right off their dead bones. That’s how I get my powers.”

“You’re lying. You’re just screwing with me.”

I pull the sheet entirely away from the Human Shield’s body, pointing to the neatly carved-out sections of his thighs. “Sorry. No.”

Toni struggles to regain her composure. “How. . . how do you live with yourself?” she asks.

I can’t hold the act any longer. I shove the sheet back over Human Shield’s naked body. “Do you think I
like
this?” I shout. “Do you think this is what I
wanted
?”

I shove Human Shield’s gurney and it rolls a few feet, tapping against the one holding Terri Day. “I am disgusted by myself. Every time I get a call from the League I have to force myself to come down here. I gag every single time I put a piece of them in my mouth. Can you imagine the horror of this? The horror of being me?”

Toni comes a bit unglued. “Then why do you do it?” she asks.

“I ask myself that question every single day,” I say. “But then I see some pregnant mother get shot by a bad guy in pink tights, or some Ghoul tear apart a bus full of kids and. . . what would you have me do?”

I get right up in her face. “What would
you
do?”

Toni walks the length of the room, reaching out to touch each gurney in turn, but finding herself unable. “You realize that I can’t keep something like this to myself.” She looks back and forth, from the bodies to me. “The world needs to know about this.”

It’s time for this to end. I walk to the far end of the room, to the
one body that I haven’t yet uncovered.

I pull the sheet back, gently. Donna Porter’s world-weary face looks blankly up at nothing. “Do you recognize her?” I ask.

“No,” says Toni, forcing herself to look.

“No, of course you don’t. Donna wasn’t much of a hero. She was terrified of fighting, couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Her power was a curse to her. She hated using it, and I think—and this is just a theory, okay?—I think she let herself get killed.”

I pull the sheet down from her, exposing her nakedness, her total vulnerability. “You know what Donna’s power was?” I ask.

Toni shakes her head, unable to speak.

I pick up a scalpel and carefully cut away a square of Donna Porter’s leg. I hold the morsel up for Toni to see.

I pop the bit of meat into my mouth, chew slowly, swallow, making sure that Toni watches it all. Not for her sake, but for mine. “Donna’s power was mind control.”

Toni’s eyes widen. She steps back from the table, stumbling over her own feet.

“Donna could have ruled the world with her power,” I say. “But it disgusted her, just like mine disgusts me. The difference, though, is that I keep doing it, despite how much I hate myself.”

I can feel Donna’s power rushing into me. I can feel Toni’s mind in my mind. It’s like an intricate web, constantly in motion. The tendrils of that web are clearly outlined in my mind, each strand representing a thought or a memory. I can feel the currents in her mind: the disgust, the fear, the nausea. I can sense her decision to turn and run.

“Stop,” I say, feeling the nerve impulse rush down to her feet and stopping it. Toni freezes, wavering.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I say. “You’re going to take your little recorder and you’re going to erase any evidence of your time here today. Then you’re going to go back to your office and destroy any notes you may have about me.”

I take her by the chin, gently, forcing her to look at me. “Are
we clear so far?”

I allow her to nod.

“If you’ve discussed your suspicions about me with anybody—an editor, say—and they ask you about me, you just tell them that there’s no story there. Tell them that the UNC student’s dissertation turns out to be right on the money.

“And then you forget all about this. Whenever you think of me in the future, you’ll think about how uninteresting I am. Thinking about me at all will make you feel bored.” I’m saying all this aloud, but the words aren’t really necessary. I’m rearranging the web of thoughts in her mind, putting all of this information directly into her cerebrum.

“You’re going to leave here now, and you’re going to forget you were ever here. By the time you get back to your apartment, you’ll already be thinking about other things. Nice things.

“And you’ll feel good about yourself. You’ll think of things that you always wanted to do and you’ll make plans to do them. You’ll let yourself love freely. You’ll forgive yourself for everything you’ve ever done that you regret.

“Do you understand all of that?”

Toni nods and I let go of her.

“Let’s go, then.” I lead her gently by the elbow back to the elevator.

At the door to my apartment, I kiss her on the cheek. “I’m sorry about this,” I say. “I really am. But I’ve reached a point where one more immoral act barely weighs in the balance. And I don’t think you’ll suffer for it.”

“You had it all worked out,” she says, her voice weak. I admire her willpower. Speaking at all under Donna Porter’s spell must be nearly impossible.

“You’re not the first reporter who’s asked those questions,” I say.

After she leaves, I sit down on the couch and try not to throw up. I give myself five minutes to despise myself, and then I put it out
of my mind and move on. I have to.

Someday I really need to send that bastard at UNC a thank-you note.