Wonder Guy (26 page)

The sylph steadied in its semblance of a feminine waif made entirely of sheer veils, flickering in and out of visibility in the scant sunshine penetrating the leafy boughs above.

Elysha considered. She bent to retrieve a broken chunk of masonry wedged between the roots of an oak. “Take this.”

“It’s too heavy, Mistress.” The sylph trembled anew.

Elysha scowled. Indeed, the wispy being could no more have lifted one of the monstrosities of steel crowding the city’s roads. Ah, a stirring in the brambles alerted her. A gnarled, manlike minion approached.

“The human-who-would-be-queen seeks audience, Mistress.”

“Very good.” She almost smiled. “Return to her with this.” She extended the broken chunk of cement and brick. “Tell her to keep it with her and meet me at moonrise at the usual place.”

A set of fingers as gnarled as twigs took the stone, and tucked it in to disappear among the creature’s rags.

* * * *

Greg maintained his surveillance from such a height he’d seem like a dot in the sky if anyone looked up. A few clouds floated higher still or trailed in such thin wisps, like the veils of an exotic dancer, they obscured nothing of the land below. At least they obscured nothing to Wonder Guy’s enhanced vision.

Detective shows and novels–his primary source of instruction on crime-fighting–portrayed surveillance as a boring chore. Maybe they were right when it came to ground-based operations, sitting in a car, waiting for something to happen as minutes turned into hours, but from up here, Greg found it fascinating.

Not only did he have the thrill of flying, of surfing the air currents as if he’d been transformed to some mythic creature like a dragon or Pegasus, but this perspective afforded him views open to no ordinary pilot. Keeping half an eye on the woman who loitered behind the storage facility, he experimented with combining his telescopic and x-ray visions. He zoomed in on his subject to read the license plate on her car and focused the x-ray vision on the contents of its trunk: a rather ordinary spare tire and set of tools. It proved tricky. Overshooting brought him past an object to things on the other side. With practice, he peeked into her briefcase on the back seat of the vehicle. Unfortunately, reading the documents became something different without the spectrum of visible light. He distinguished metal–an iPhone and a manicure set–from the ghost-shapes made by pads and folders, but anything printed on the paper remained unreadable.

Maybe if he had enough time to practice he could learn to use this vision to make such fine spectroscopic distinctions. In the meanwhile, he switched his attention to the object he’d originally planned to investigate, the storage unit beside the car.

Penetrating the roof proved easier than it would have been to see through the metal of the accordion-style garage door. Even with the steel I-beams of the ceiling in the way, he recognized the boxy shapes of a pair of servers and the snaking lines of cables hooked to a ceiling fixture probably meant only to provide light to the unit. The other odd, metallic construct might have been a portable backup generator.

His attention had strayed from the woman, but when she moved, he turned back to her, surveying the scene afresh as she entered her car and maneuvered back toward the main road.

He must have missed something. He scanned the area where she’d loitered, but nothing had changed, only the same scrubby undergrowth and ragged sapling, certainly no living soul.

From this height, he easily tracked her vehicle as it headed north and merged with traffic headed downtown.

As they neared the West Bank area and St. Mary’s hospital, Greg flew with renewed caution, attentive to any sign of waning powers. He flew much higher now than he’d been before, when he’d come in too close to his birthplace hospital. Now he figured he flew high enough to be outside the radius of whatever mysterious and illogical influence the edifice had on him. He estimated the distance equaled roughly fifteen hundred feet. If he maintained an altitude of at least three thousand feet relative to St. Mary’s he should be okay, right?

His logic seemed good. At least, he passed what he estimated as five thousand feet above the hospital without incident, following his subject’s car past the area toward the outskirts of the downtown district, until she pulled into a parking area. What could the suspect woman be doing at ABM’s offices? A chill went through him. Gloria worked there.

Though he meant to stay too high to be noticed by casual observers, Greg dropped altitude, drawn to place himself between this questionable woman and anything having to do with Gloria.

Only a sudden queasy feeling of lost control, like brakes going squishy, warned him to pull up again before he plummeted thousands of feet to the unforgiving streets below.

* * * *

Gloria made good time heading home via side streets to avoid the rush hour traffic. It took her longer to get from the front door to her bedroom.

“Where’d you stay last night?” growled her father from his usual seat on the couch, in front of the usual array of empty and half-empty cans on the coffee table as the TV competed with the sound of his voice.

She’d stopped off at the house that morning, showered and dressed while he’d still been asleep in his room. No such luck now.

“I called you, remember?” She kept her tone even. “My friend died. I was too upset to come home and slept over at Aggie’s.”

“Too upset to walk from one house to the next?”

“Don’t start this, Dad.”
Don’t get sucked in.
Gloria fought the impulse to hunch her shoulders and kept moving, hanging her jacket in the closet. She continued through the living room as she spoke. “What would you have done if I’d started crying? I needed someone to be nice and just listen to me.”

“I always listen to you.” He wore his aggrieved expression. “You didn’t give me the chance. Think I can’t be nice to my own daughter?”

She paused at the head of the short hallway leading to the bedrooms. “Maybe you can.” Talking to him always came out wrong somehow. Gloria softened her voice. “I was too wrung out to take a chance on it.” She bit her tongue. It took so little to set him off.

“Fine thing,” he muttered. “It’s a good thing your mother isn’t here to see how her daughter acts toward her father.” He bent to pick up a can still dewy with condensation.

“Now that’s too much,” Gloria snapped, in more ways than one. “This isn’t about you. One of my best friends just died. I was in shock, devastated.” She’d had too much of this, too many years of walking on eggshells around this man. “I’m sorry if my grief prevented me from being here for you to poke at, or tell me how I’m not good enough for Pete or his family.”

She clenched her jaw. She hated this, hated feeling this angry and hated spewing it at the man she’d come to pity as much as she resented him. It gave her a sick feeling, not in her gut so much as in her heart.

“If it makes you happy,” she said as she turned away from him, “I think you’re right. I’m not going to fit in with Pete or his family. I’m not going to marry him.” She moved to her own room.

Her father muttered, “No, it doesn’t make me happy.”

She closed the door behind her.

* * * *

It took his whole effort to ascend again, fighting with his weakened powers as if struggling up the face of a cliff hand over hand, Finally, Greg gained enough altitude for the sense of weakness to ease, and he no longer felt in danger of winding up flattened against the pavement of the ABM parking lot.

What the hell?
St. Mary’s was at least a couple miles from here. ABM might have some meaning for him, but represented nothing like his ‘planet of origin.’

Greg came in to a careful landing three long blocks away from the ABM building. Best to reconnoiter on foot from here. It would be safer, not risking a fall. It would be even safer to go as plain Greg Roberts, but he couldn’t be sure whether he’d be able to detect the influence that had weakened him just now if he switched out of his Wonder Guy guise.

The effect hadn’t seemed as strong as around St. Mary’s, where he’d been thrown so roughly from the sky before, but this incident had weakened him enough that he felt lucky to have made it safely back to
terra firma
.

At least in this neighborhood, where warehouses and parking lots occupied much of the real estate, he met few pedestrians while striding along the sidewalk in his superhero costume. A few people stopped to stare, but he met nothing worse.

Until he got within a thousand feet of ABM’s parking lot.

Chapter 16

She’d have to tell Pete, of course. Gloria sat on the edge of her bed, door closed firmly behind her. She wished she could do it over the phone, but that seemed cowardly, taking the easy way out. Pete deserved better. This evening would be best, on their usual Friday dinner date. As early as possible. Maybe she’d tell him in the car. She had no appetite for supper.

She hated the thought of hurting Pete. He’d been nothing but kind and considerate of her ever since they’d met. Yet, at the same time, she doubted he’d be terribly devastated. No one would describe Pete as a demonstrative man. He’d never displayed what she’d call passionate feelings about anything. Even her.

He always used gifts to show his affection for her. Fairly generic gifts too. She liked roses and chocolates–a pretty safe bet with most women–and he’d been generous with those. Still, he’d never given her anything as thoughtful as the small multi-tool Greg had given her for her birthday a few years ago. Among its many useful charms, it included an awl to punch holes in leather, and she used it regularly on the Cell Shells.

* * * *

At first Greg hardly noticed it. If he hadn’t been alert to the possibility of danger, he might have approached a good bit closer to the expanse of parking lot occupied by only a handful of cars this late on a Friday. Only now, on high alert, he noted a slight heaviness in his steps, a sickly tang in the pit of his stomach. A few more steps and the tang grew to queasiness. His steps seemed freighted with lead weights.

Strange. At this rate he’d have to fight every step of the way to make it to the red Audi he’d followed from on high, now parked not far from the main entrance to the ABM building. Time for a strategic withdrawal.

Greg retraced his steps away from the source of his growing weakness, whatever that might be. He scanned his surroundings. Where was a convenient telephone booth when a superhero needed one? Setting his sights on a service station another block up the road, Wonder Guy took to the air.

Moving at a speed no human eye could follow, he landed behind the station next to a dumpster loaded with empty cardboard boxes. Taking refuge behind another large stack of boxes, Wonder Guy changed back to his more comfortable identity as Greg Roberts.

Taking his obvious next step, he set out at a walk back toward the ABM parking lot. This time he drew no stares. Clad in tan slacks, his
You Are Here
galaxy t-shirt and a U of M hooded sweatshirt, he might have been any one of thousands of college-aged men. Comfortable in his anonymity, he relaxed as he walked. He wouldn’t want to be ‘just another guy’ to Gloria, but being just another guy to the rest of the world had its charms.

Greg passed the point where, as Wonder Guy, his steps had grown heavier and slower. This time he encountered nothing out of the ordinary. Okay. Serafina had told him how Wonder Guy, having powers like Superman, shared Superman’s vulnerability. She hadn’t said anything about keeping his vulnerability as his regular self, an advantage he had over Clark Kent.

Continuing to the very edge of the parking lot, where vibrant flowerbeds made a border between the city sidewalk and the asphalt marked with parking spaces, he still suffered no ill effects.

Debating the need to pull up his hood to block the bright wash of late afternoon sun, Greg strode up to the red Audi.

What would happen if he switched back to Wonder Guy right here? Probably nothing good. Not worth the risk to find out. If whatever-it-might-be had weakened him from a city block away, he didn’t want to face what it would do at ground zero. The car looked like a car. Had he learned anything useful? Other than the interesting fact that Wonder Guy’s vulnerability didn’t extend to Greg Roberts? Not much.

He walked past the suspect car, moving toward the sheltered entrance to the ABM building. Who was this woman and how did she know Professor Stevens? Her connection to ABM only raised more questions. The odds were astronomical against pure coincidence placing her at the storage unit where the professor directed stolen data. Coincidence didn’t connect her to whatever unknown factor had weakened Wonder Guy when he’d followed her too closely. He had a lot of questions for this woman.