Soon I Will Be Invincible (16 page)

Cough cough. “FAGgot…” Titters. Jason Garner, and a couple of his friends. Peterson was the same as middle school had been, only maybe more so. There had to be a way out of this, all of it. In my head soared louder and louder the sad, sweet songs of science.

Oddly enough, there’s a second name listed in the computer under recent searches. CoreFire was looking for someone, too.

NAME: THE PHARAOH (
2
)

Why the Pharaoh? He wasn’t much of a supervillain at all, just a crank, a nuisance in a costume. I think he called himself the Mummy for a while before I met him. He pulled a few bank jobs in the late 1970s, claiming to be the reincarnation of the pharaoh Ramses. His most notable feature was that he’d chosen the same name as a more famous hero, but he wasn’t important enough for them to fight over it. Some villains make you embarrassed to
be
a villain.

ALIAS: NELSON GERARD.

Nelson the Pharaoh, King of the Nile. I never knew his real name, and I wonder how they did. I’m mildly surprised he has an entry at all. If it weren’t for that hammer he’d have been a complete joke.

BIRTHPLACE: TUCSON, ARIZONA.
KNOWN ASSOCIATES: MISS MINDBENDER. EMBRYARCH.
DOCTOR IMPOSSIBLE.

Known associate. I’m not really used to having friends. We could be in the same room without fighting anyway. I don’t know the others.

NOTES: POSSIBLE MENTAL INSTABILITY.

Maybe. But he was smart, too, that was the thing. You just wouldn’t think it. The irony is, he really did have a serious power in him, more than I ever figured out. I just don’t think he knew what he had.

GOALS: GLOBAL DOMINATION; FOUNDATION OF
NEO-NILOTIC WORLD-STATE; AUTOREINCARNATION
AS RAMSES IV.

I used to yell at him about that lack of ambition, but he didn’t seem to care. He was lazy, and he just didn’t have much patience for the big picture. That business about a revived Nilotic empire, pyramids on the Potomac, was a smoke screen. And as for “autoreincarnation,” he never bothered to figure out which Ramses he was the reincarnation of. When we broke into the Boston MFA that time, he couldn’t even read his own inscriptions.

POWERS: HAND-TO-HAND WEAPON (HAMMER OF RA).
INVINCIBILITY (HAMMER OF RA).

The telling brevity of that notation. The Pharaoh’s invulnerability was just this side of magical, if not on the far side altogether. They never found anything that would get through it, and no one knew how it worked, although I was willing to bet it wasn’t the might of Ra. He’d pick up that hammer and mumble a made-up power word, and a second later he’d be one of the toughest villains on the planet. Then he’d yell, “It’s hammer time!” just to embarrass me. Bastard.

He wasn’t just robust; whatever he had seemed to eat inertia. Bullets didn’t faze him; someone like Battalion would swing a girder, or a parade float, or a railway car, and it would just wrap around him, or he’d tear through it. He took a sixteen-inch shell once, the kind fired from battleships and designed to break down hardened fortifications, but it just dug a hole with Pharaoh at the bottom. This is the kind of technology that shouldn’t exist, and more than once I tried to get the thing away from him, but he’d only laugh.

What was under all that gold paint he’d slathered on? Was it high-tech? An artifact from the future? The effect looked at least half magical, and followed no logic I could see. But it had made him invincible, or just about. He could come in handy.

SOURCE OF ABILITIES: UNKNOWN.
STATUS: AT LARGE. POSSIBLY INACTIVE.
LAST KNOWN SIGHTING: CANCÚN, MEXICO.

Cancún. I lost track of him, too, but that’s not unusual for people like us. We’d met in Thailand, and I never found out where he was from. He talked as if he’d had a little college. Most villains are unusual people, but there’s a fuzzy line with real mental instability. He disappeared into a demimonde of junkies and outpatient care, wherever people like that go. But trust Blackwolf to keep track, even of the Pharaoh.

The Power Staff chimes softly—the energy signature from Blackwolf’s plane is closer than it should be. Enough kidding around. I do one last search to make sure I’m in the right place. I am. Dollface’s effects are still on-site.

If the front lobby is a monument to heroism, the trophy hall is its opposite. I pause a moment, humbled. The hall is crowded with display cases, trophy plaques, and force fields that hold souvenirs of the most twisted imaginations of the century run riot. The Oboist’s oboe, the Gentleman’s gloves and monocle hang together across from a life-size mannequin wearing the Abomination’s armor. An ornate golden key hangs by itself, one section lifted away to reveal miniaturized circuitry of the thirtieth century.

The workmanship here is priceless, and even I can’t name it all. A fountain pen, a fedora, a painting whose lurid colors shift as I watch. A dress worn by Anne de Siècle, one of Sinistra’s left-handed gloves. I spot one of Baron Ether’s old pocket watches and contemplate stealing it back for him. Amulets, shields, ray guns. Malevolent statuary. A tiny castle under glass. A music box. A shelf holds books and blueprints. I could leave with an armload, but that would attract attention.

A decade ago the Champions fought a woman who called herself Dollface. She built tiny malevolent toys—a cowboy, a tiger, a carriage—but the toys worked, and they each did something different. A novelty villain, arguably, but she had a kind of concentrated ingenuity. Why only toys? It must have meant something to her.

They’re in back, a dusty miniature carnival behind glass, their creator mislabeled as “Doll Woman.”
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Tiny merry-go-round, tiny Ferris wheel, tiny elephants, and tiny calliope, each with its own sinister function. A genius work of miniaturization; they don’t make craftsmen like her anymore. They have the full set, but I snap the lock and take only the one I need.

Gravity is many things to many people: a wave, a particle, a force. To Dollface, it was the luminous gaze of a tiny laughing fat man, a tiny ray that could make a person heavier or lighter. Some trick inside it no one ever figured out, not even me.

But in my hands, Dollface will finally get her due. She and Laserator never met, but they’re going to make a great team.

A louder chime from the Power Staff tells me I’ve made a mistake. I cut it too close. I just have time to change back into my cleaning uniform before someone’s caped shadow falls into the front hallway from the lobby, long and thin in the afternoon light. There are three of them standing there. Floating, actually. Damsel, Blackwolf, Lily. This is going to be awkward, to say the least.

It’s been a long time. Not since that night in the bar. It feels like all the blood is rushing to my chest, and I’m frozen. She’s right there. Crap. In two steps, I could reach out and touch her back, just under the shoulder blade.

I don’t know what to do. It’s unprofessional. I should be attacking while they think they’re alone. In another second they’re going to see me anyway. Is she going to fight me? In front of her friends?

You can’t let these things get to you, not if you’re going to get anywhere. It’s sooner than the plan calls for, but never mind. I can do this. The Power Staff is charged. I fought their fathers to a standstill in the days of the Super Squadron, and I’ll fight them, too. I step out into the light, ready for anything.

But then they aren’t looking at me. The television is on in the lobby, so I hear it at the same time they do. CoreFire has been found.

That morning, for an instant, I thought I was in jail again, waking up under a dozen cameras, waiting for the guards to unstrap me. But there was no one there, just the alarm clock and the anonymous charm of the Starlight Motel. It’s four days later.

Slowly, deliberately, I dress for the occasion. I’m still not used to street clothes, and the overlapping folds and clasps and pockets of a single-breasted suit seemed absurdly overcomplicated after the economy of my imperial garments. I comb my hair straight back, and trim my beard, a pale, slightly weary Lucifer. I am aging, slowly, in spite of my powers. Finished, I step back to inspect the results. I look like a person I had forgotten about, the shabby postdoc I said good-bye to twenty-five years ago. I look like a civilian. I look like a loser.

Outside in the street, my face feels naked. No sunglasses. I’m taking a serious risk here. It has been eleven years since I walked outdoors in public without a mask on. That long since I’ve been this close to a civilian who isn’t cowering or calling the police. I take the subway across the river, where once I flew. Doctor Impossible comes to Manhattan.

Emerging, I make slow progress up Amsterdam Avenue toward 112th Street. No one bats an eyelash as I walk past the corner where I first landed Antitron. A panhandler stares insolently into my face, and inside the pocket of my trousers, I clench a fist. No one knows me.

When I get there at last, the memorial service is half over, and the crowd is so large, it spills out onto the cathedral steps. Some of them are crying, and many carry signed photographs. Plenty of them are just here to see the most distinguished mourners, to get a glimpse of Damsel or Blackwolf or Elphin, the television-friendly heroes. I wonder if Erica’s in there somewhere. She’s been in seclusion for a long time, filing the occasional story remotely, still mostly CoreFire material. She keeps her whereabouts a secret these days, which is probably my fault.

I’ve come a long way for this, but as I edge inside through the sitting and standing mourners, into the dim, echoing interior of St. John the Divine, I’m not sure what I’m here to do. Working my way forward, I can see the reserved section up front, behind the velvet rope. Of course they aren’t going to let me up there, but I want to see who came.

I try not to look for her. She would be up on that platform with the capes and masks, up in the riot of forms and mythologies of the VIP area. But in a way, it’s too easy—in this light, she registers only as a group of highlights, where the candles reflect. I only have to spot the apparently empty seat.

And there she is, sitting between Feral and another hero, who I don’t recognize, a girl with a seahorse on her chest. She’s listening quietly, head bowed a little. I stare, despite myself. Who is she trying to kid? I’ve seen her tear the door off a Wells Fargo truck bare-handed, laughing, dragging a guardsman out by his shirt. I was there when she took the depleted-uranium rounds that chipped and scored the right side of her collarbone. We rode the roof of a D train together out of Manhattan that time, while the Metaman was still scouring Broadway for us, and we leaped off the Manhattan Bridge together when they finally found us. We crawled ashore at Williamsburg, to the cheers of drunken party-goers on a rooftop. In the cathedral half-light, she looks like a shadow among the reds and blues of the do-gooders.

I didn’t kill him. But it’s bad taste at any funeral to have tried to kill the deceased as often as I have, and taste is very much on my mind. Sooner or later, one of the crew on the podium is bound to recognize the incognito Doctor Impossible, and although I assume it is considered to be in equally bad taste to try to kill me as I pay my respects, taste feels like an increasingly tenuous shield against the planet-wrecking ordnance the VIPs are capable of launching in my direction.

I never understood CoreFire or liked him particularly. I should know how he worked if anyone can, but I don’t. I’ve pieced together as much as I can about his exploits from news broadcasts, hacked computer files, and eyewitnesses. He could fly, which was reason enough to resent him. He didn’t even have the decency to work for it, to flap a pair of wings or at least glow a little. He seemed to do it purely out of a sense of entitlement—something about it suggested that the rest of us had simply knuckled under to gravity. I didn’t kill him. But I wish I knew who the murderer was, because it was supposed to be me.

The image dominated TV news for days, a column of steam the size of a city block reaching out of the Indian Ocean into the sky. Helicopters and the smaller specks of superpowered fliers hung in misty silhouette, waiting to discover what had struck the water with such heat and force. Hard to tell where he came from. It didn’t make sense, scientists complained, that an object large enough to do that had not broken up in the atmosphere. When they brought him up, he looked unhurt, perfect like always. He had disrupted weather patterns for a thousand miles when he hit.

The mayor of New York spoke. CoreFire had a lot of friends in the community. He was faster, stronger, and tougher than almost anyone else. He never failed to answer a call for help, he never did celebrity endorsements, and, as far as I know, he never lost. Even old Baron Ether came, wheeled gently up the handicapped ramp by two of the Mechanist’s gunmetal-finish golems.

I stand unobtrusively among the masses, clutching my burden, half-listening while a representative from the State Department recites a litany of good deeds and public services. A middle-aged woman to my left begins weeping uncontrollably. I have plenty of time to sit and tick off the familiar names and faces. I know a couple of them from the Peterson School, which was a real breeding ground for powered types.

Before they shut it down, Peterson alone graduated eleven powered individuals. It wasn’t an accident; there was something in the culture there that drove it. Six of them are up there now, at least. It’s not as if I feel like talking, but I stare for a while, looking at what we’ve become, the ones who found power.

I remember Blackwolf, a thin, bright freshman who worked a little too hard to make people laugh. Wrestling team, gymnastics team, electronics club. He published clever sonnets about members of the student government, and became the smallest member of the rugby team. He’s here with Damsel and the rest of the popular kids. He looks grave, but he hasn’t lost that habit of watching everyone around him. I take care to stay well out of his line of view. They came in when I was a senior. Damsel, too, who attended in her secret identity, but I remember her anyway, a quiet, mathy girl who wore her brown hair long and straight. Debating team, and she ran the yearbook staff.