Yesterday's Heroes (Consortium of Chaos Book 1) (22 page)

The women nodded.  Wyatt continued
staring at the game board blankly.  “Wait…what just happened?”

Harlot rolled the dice AGAIN even
though it couldn’t POSSIBLY be her turn, but no one seemed to care.  “Every
fifteen minutes or so, the game goes into teleportation mode, and all the
pieces go to a new arena to battle.  Today, it looks like it’s Clue.”  She
moved her Fabricator figure out of the Ballroom, and towards a plastic dragon
from a medieval castle toy.  “Didn’t you ever play board games with the Freedom
Squad, Wyatt?”

He continued blinking at the board,
trying to follow what was happening.  “Can’t say as we did, no.  And in the HIGHLY
unlikely event that we were somehow
forced
to play, the game would have
had rules.  Order.  A winner and a loser.  In other words, it wouldn’t have
been anything like this.”  He rolled a three and grabbed his game token to move
it.  “Okay…one…”

Harlot shook her head.  “You can’t
move yet, you’re still in the Quagmire of Questions.”

“How can I POSSIBLY be stuck in
that place, since it’s not even
on this board!  It was on the other one!
 
I’m in the Parlor in
Clue
now or something!”

Cynic shook his head.  “Now he’s
trying to make up rules as he goes along.  You see this?  Huh!?!”  His eyes
narrowed in contempt.  “You fucking cheater!”

Harlot grabbed the dice and rolled
AGAIN.  “Now, now…Wyatt just doesn’t understand how the game is played, that’s
all.  I’m sure he’s not
deliberately
cheating.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but
then noticed the faintest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. 
She was teasing him.  …Or maybe she was just insane or something.  He sat in
silence and watched her move her game piece across the board, completely
ignoring the fact that she rolled a four and yet moved her piece nine spaces. 

The woman was a complete mystery. 
He didn’t have a firm grasp on what made her tick.  On one hand, she was
stunningly beautiful and on the other, she spent all her time trying to take
over the world.  She seemed to genuinely love the psychos here, and was willing
to overlook their myriad of crimes, yet was the sweetest, utterly insane person
he had ever met.  She should be like a school teacher, or a hero or something,
not be stuck here.  But this was evidentially where she had chosen to be.  A
pretty flower growing in a junkyard filled with homicidal toxic waste.  It
would have been tragic if it wasn’t so…cute.  Wyatt had no experience with
having the power of choice in what he did.  He had spent his whole life being
molded by his parents into being the perfect hero.  Always ready.  Always aware
of his surroundings and anticipating an attack.  He had never been around
anyone who was so…
alive
before.  Vital. 

He had spent the better part of last
four years of his life on a quest to find honorable people who would help him
in his mission to take down the Freedom Squad.  Reporters, cops, prosecutors…..anyone. 
The main thing his search turned up, though, was that there
were
no
honorable people left.  They were all gone.  They had died like Peter, and now
the world was filled with dark and corrupt individuals, only out for
themselves.  He had found a few people willing to do the right thing, but the
number was terribly small.  Most of his help came from contacts he had simply
been able to bribe.  Buying them off was the quickest way to achieve his goal,
and their price had been quite low.  A few bucks, and they’d stab anyone in the
back.  Sad. 

Once he succeeded in his plan and
allowed the Consortium to take over, it didn’t matter what they did to the
world.  They couldn’t destroy the world; it was already dead.  Meg’s predicted
future had come about, and Wyatt was the only one who realized it.  They were
all living on a burned-out husk; a shell of its former self.  There were still
humans living here, but their humanity was gone.

Harlot though, was
alive
.  Through
her eyes, everything was possible.  She could do what she wanted, BE who she
wanted, LIVE how she wanted.  She could do it all and more.  If she fell down,
she got right back up, never letting the filth which Wyatt saw on a daily basis,
touch her.  She watched these idiots try and fail dozens…
hundreds
…of
times, and she never once seemed to be discouraged by it all.  Never doubted
herself or her family.  Never seemed to struggle with balancing her life and
her job.  In her mind, they were one and the same, which was why she went by
her code name at all times.  She treated all her co-workers like family, and
that’s what they were in her mind. 

In Wyatt’s world, the two parts of
his life were most
definitely
separate.  Every year since childhood, his
work as a caped hero took over more and more of his personal life, until he
honestly couldn’t remember actually
having
one.  He
WAS
Fabricator.  The name was even on his credit cards and driver’s license.  He
didn’t have a civilian identity to speak of, and everything he did, said or
wore, had to be approved by the Squad.  He didn’t go to movies and he
certainly
didn’t have time to waste on something like dating or leisure activities.  That
would never have been allowed.

Wyatt’s world was a dark and
insular place.  He had a very limited area to move around in, and could really
only talk to a few people.  Like his current predicament in the board game he
was playing, he had quite literally been stuck in the “Quagmire of Questions”
for as long as he could remember.  Unable to escape the constant second-guessing,
and the rules he didn’t understand.  Trapped in a small area, away from the
life everyone else got to have.  He was never allowed to be himself.  In the
board game, he was forced to be “Seraphim”, but in real life, he was forced to
be “Fabricator, Champion of Freedom”.  Calling
him
a “Champion of Freedom”
was like calling a whale “Champion of Skydiving”.  He knew nothing about it,
and if he tried it, it probably wouldn’t go well for anyone.  He had never been
free.  He was stuck in the quagmire called his life, and the more he struggled,
the deeper he sank.  After a while, he stopped struggling at all.

The good thing about his predicament
though, was that it allowed him to see things from a new angle.  Because he was
never allowed to do, or say, or think what he wanted, he could really pay
attention to the world around him.  He could see the world as it
actually
was, and it was a dark place.  Harlot however, somehow managed to float above
it all, like a delicate petal caught in a breeze.  She danced through the sky,
above the filth, seemingly not a care in the world, while Wyatt was pulled
further and further into the mire. 

It made Wyatt so
sad
to
think of that petal falling down into the grime though.  The day was coming
that not even Harlot would be able to close her eyes to the horrors of this
world.  This Crater Lair couldn’t shield her from them forever, and sooner or
later, she’d realize that the ground she thought she was standing on was just
air, and then she’d plummet down into the darkness, too.  The world would
consume her the way it did everyone else.  Corrupt her and take away her…spark. 
Her magic.  That thing that made her special and more fascinating than anyone
he had ever known.

It made him unbelievably sad to
think about.

She tucked a strand of her dark
hair behind her ear and it promptly fell down over her eye again, Veronica Lake
style.

What a beautiful woman.

He had spent the last week trying
to come up with things that would confirm his first suspicion that she was
entirely evil and whorish, but he was still coming up empty.  The woman was
delightful and pleasant.  She helped the people here whether they wanted it or
not.  She was always trying to keep the peace in the Lair, even though no one
ever noticed.  She was gentle and kind to everyone as far as he could tell.

He had spent his entire life trying
to stop her “family” and yet she didn’t appear to hold a grudge at all.  In
fact, she seemed to find it delightful.  In her mind, this was apparently all a
game.  There were favorite players, and rules, and big games.  It didn’t matter
who was playing on which team this season, or who won, just so long as they
were all together and having a good time.  A perky cheerleader forced onto the
sidelines most of the time, but still out there rooting for the home team. 
Hell, rooting for the
other
team to make a good showing and have fun as
well.  It was about the love of the game and the glory of playing.

She was a complete lunatic stalker,
but he oddly found that adorable and endearing.  Not even he could explain that
one.  Why anyone in the world would care at all what he did or said was truly
bizarre.  No one he had ever met cared, except for Peter.  The Squad told him
what to say, but that wasn’t because they really
cared
what he said.  They
just wanted to make sure they looked good and that he didn’t embarrass them. 
Harlot apparently cared what he actually
thought
though, and that was
new.  And rationally, he realized that it was kind of scary that she had
pictures of him everywhere and knew more about his life than he did, but…it
really didn’t bother him.  It seemed…sweet.  Innocent.  Like a fan of the game,
collecting baseball cards or something.

And thus, he was currently sitting
in a dank hole in the ground, in rat’s ass New Jersey, playing a strange and
seemingly
random
version of child’s board game, and for the first time
in as long as he could remember…he was having fun.

Not fun because of the game though. 
The game was silly and weird and filled with questions about his life that he
couldn’t answer.  Of course, he was used to that.  There were a LOT of
questions about his life that he couldn’t answer, and making him lose turn
after turn until he
could
answer one wasn’t going to solve anything. 
He’d been doing that his whole life.  Since the day his parents first put him
in that cape, he had been confronted by unanswerable questions.  What was he
doing?  Why?  Did he really
want
to do it?  He was no closer to
answering
those
questions than he was to answering the trivia in the
game, and so it was nothing but “lose a turn” card after “lose a turn” card in
life.  It was
never
Wyatt’s turn.  He was always stuck in the mire, as
he watched “Fabricator” march across the board again and again. 
Fabricator
went round and round in circles on the path that was predetermined for him,
never really getting anywhere.  A hero doing what he was told. 
Wyatt
however
stayed put, unable to do what he wanted, and thus, never moving forward at all. 
He didn’t know which of them had it worse.  

No, the game was stupid.

The company however, was quite
entertaining and enjoyable. 

As they played this completely
idiotic game, more and more other people wandered in and offered advice and
insight on the various strategies which they should utilize, or just sat and
talked with the players.  It was…nice.  Wyatt’s parents didn’t believe in
games.  They said that games promoted sloth, and sloth promoted death.  The
only “games” they ever played were actually training.  He couldn’t remember a
single time in his life that his parents or co-workers ever took the time to
play a game with him.

When he was nine, his aunt Gwen
visited while his parents were away, and she had given him one of those little
motorized games where the plastic fish rotate around a base, opening and
closing their mouths, and you have to use a string to try to “catch” them and
pull them out.  She had handed it to him, and Wyatt had simply stared at it for
several minutes, just trying to understand what the hell it did.  What was its
purpose?  Why would someone take the time to build such a machine, unless it
provided a
use
of some kind?  It was like handing an iPod to a caveman
or something; he simply had no experience with what it could be.  The toy was
strange and mysterious…possibly dangerous…but also strangely fascinating.  Peter
recognized what it was immediately, of course, and happily began to try it
out.  Wyatt hadn’t trusted it though.  It had been about the size of the bombs
they had been learning about in training that day, and for some reason….he
hadn’t touched it.  It made him afraid.  He didn’t like what it represented. 
Peter had told him to play, and Wyatt had wanted to.  Wanted to so
desperately
. 
It looked like so much fun, after all…but he hadn’t.  Instead, he stayed put
and watched from the sidelines as Peter played for hours.  Pete was lost in the
love of the game.  The joy of landing plastic fish after plastic fish.  When
his parents had finally gotten home, Wyatt had asked them about it, trying to
get permission to play too.  …Peter had known that’s what he would do, and what
would happen when he did.  Peter always knew.  Rather than give Wyatt permission
to play the game, his father had smashed it to pieces.  Wyatt stared at those broken
shards of plastic on the rug for what seemed like an eternity, trying to put it
all back together in his mind.  Trying to reassemble that magical lake and its fascinating
moving fish…But it was gone.  Its spark had been extinguished.  The world had
claimed something else that was pure and delicate, and left only debris.  Peter
had put his hand on his shoulder in an attempt to comfort him, and had said
something like;
“
Never pass up on something you want to do, Wyatt.  It
you want to play, play.  Because sooner or later, you won’t have the chance.”

Sometimes Wyatt got the feeling
that his whole life was right there.  Standing on that carpet, while duty and
fear held him back from doing what he really wanted to do.  The stupid Cape got
in his way again, and in the end, all he was left with was a handful of broken
plastic, and the memory of a good time he could have experienced, had he been
able to escape his damn Quagmire of Questions.  Had he been able to do what he
wanted to do for
once
in his life.  But he hadn’t.  His life always
ensured that he
had
no life.