Crawling From the Wreckage Read online

  “Noon-ish. If you want to hang out in the office with me until your appointment, you’re more than welcome to.”

  She doesn’t have to go in for a couple of hours, though; she got up early to spend time with me, so we take our coffee and a light breakfast of strawberry Pop-Tarts out to the dining room.

  “Did you sleep at all?” Sara asks.

  “No, but I didn’t expect to. I figure I have another two or three good hours in me before I’ll be ready to attempt sleep. Got a lot of reading in, though. I’m now up to speed on the Great Unmasking and the Kingsport Landing...”

  “Great. That’s two fewer insanely complicated things I have to try to explain. That leaves, oh, only a hundred or so topics to cover.”

  “Easy-peasy.”

  “Morning, girls,” Mom says. She grabs a cup of coffee for herself and joins us. “What’s on the agenda today?”

  “Go to work. Work. Come home. Enjoy a relaxing night with the family. It’s nearly impossible to get a decent audience for a mid-week show so they give us Wednesdays off,” Sara explains.

  “Hang out with Sara for a while, go see if I still have a job, debrief Edison,” I say. “That last one should take me to dinnertime. You?”

  “Oh, let’s see,” Mom says. “I’ll probably spend the day agonizing over my presentation to Edison and his merry band of executives. Ah, and I do have to call the school and let them know you’re back.”

  “Yay?”

  “I think it’ll be good for you,” Sara says. “You need to get back into a normal routine and school is as normal as it gets.”

  Mom clears her throat. “You should tell her.”

  Sara doesn’t follow at first. “Oh. Yeah. That.”

  “That?” I say. “What that?”

  “I’ll leave you to explain it to her,” Mom says. “Have a good day you two. See you tonight.”

  Mom kisses Sara on the head, and then me.

  Sara, and then me. I’m the runner-up for parental affection.

  “I don’t know how to break this to you gently, so I won’t,” Sara says. I lay my hands on the table to show her I’m braced for whatever she’s about to lay on me — except I’m totally not. “Mr. Dent is the Foreman.”

  I stare at her, waiting for her completely deadpan expression to crack. It doesn’t. Come on, Sara, not funny. Don’t mess with my head like this.

  “Oh my God, you’re not kidding,” I say.

  “I wish I was,” she says. “I really wish I was.”

  To get to that mind-blowing plot twist, Sara has to backtrack more than a year — to last June, specifically, when the Squad took down Damage Inc., a quartet of loser super-villain wannabes who cobbled together some construction worker-themed weapons and costumes and then tried to rob the Kingsport Credit Union. We stopped them cold in less than two minutes, they went to jail, end of story.

  Except it was far from the end of the story. Damage Inc. resurfaced about a week after I left, sporting shiny new weapons and outfits courtesy of our old enemy the Foreman. They banged up Sara pretty badly (she promises to show me the scar later), and they would have made a clean getaway if it hadn’t been for that meddling Psyche. She caught one of them, the Riveter, and he sat in jail for several days before his buddies attempted a rescue. They broke him out of the district courthouse and, again, almost got away clean, except it was Matt who interfered the second time around.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite as successful as Sara. Damage Inc. kicked the crap out of him and took him hostage. Before he could affect an escape, the Foreman showed up looking to repossess his equipment. He murdered Damage Inc. and was about to pull the trigger on Matt when he broke free. During the ensuing fight, Matt unmasked our mysterious foe, and it turned out we knew who the Foreman was all along; he was, and always had been, our assistant principal, Carson Dent. As best as anyone can figure out, he was planted in Kingsport High School to spy on the team, but the hows, whys, and wherefores remain unanswered. Matt wailed the living hell out of the Foreman/Mr. Dent, but he paid Matt back in kind. Matt was in the hospital for a month or so afterward, laid up at home for a month after that, and in physical therapy for weeks after that.

  (Side note: this is when Zina dumped Matt. She was totally down with having a super-hero boyfriend, right up until the moment she realized Matt wasn’t playing some game. The risk factor was real and very high — too high for her tastes, so she dropped Matt like a bad habit the day after his epic beating. Stay classy, Zina.)

  The Foreman has yet to resurface, but there are signs he may be back in action. Over the past few months, there’s been a surge in criminal activity involving genetically and technologically enhanced superhumans. People like the Landsharks have been popping up not just all over New England but across the country, which is concerning. It suggests the Foreman’s operation is a lot bigger than we thought it was. Why he’s outfitting aspiring super-villains is a matter of speculation, but the consensus is he’s recruiting potential operatives as part of some endgame from which nothing good could possibly come.

  Yes, by all means, let’s add that to the big pile of scary that is my life.

  “Why did I come back to Earth again?” I say.

  “Because you love your friends and family,” Sara says.

  “Damn you and your unassailable logic.”

  Sara gulps down the last of her coffee. “We should get going. I have an established reputation as a punctual employee to maintain.”

  ***

  I hang out at the office for a while and watch Sara attend to her duties. She starts her day by sorting out the cranks and crackpots from the voicemails and e-mails received overnight. Ninety percent of the messages come from trolls and whackos. Most of the legit calls are about mundane issues, and those get relayed to the police. Only a precious few are forwarded to Edison. After that, it’s a lot of sitting, monitoring the Protectorate’s social media accounts, occasionally answering the phone or dealing with visitors, and light filing. The bulk of Sara’s day is occupied with a project to index several years’ worth of team reports by tagging them with keywords for easier cross-referencing. Sara, the madwoman, took this on voluntarily.

  “It keeps me employed,” she says.

  “Yeah, I can appreciate that,” I say. “On that note...”

  “Call me if you need anything.”

  “I will.”

  The Protectorate’s public office is a stone’s throw away from Town Hall Square and the area we call the Bizarre Coincidence Complex, a cluster of small offices occupied by child psychologist and family therapist Bart Connors, CPA Wil Steiger, and attorney Sullivan Crenshaw — respectively Mindforce of the Protectorate, Matt’s dad, and the Protectorate’s lawyer. Our personal and professional lives were overlapping long before any of us realized it.

  I enter the offices of Crenshaw and Associates, and Roger the receptionist starts to deliver his usual chipper welcoming spiel (Hello! Welcome to Crenshaw and Associates, I’m Roger, how may I help you today?). He gets as far as “Hello!” before veering off-script.

  “Carrie!” he says. “You’re back!”

  It’s nice that people are happy to see me. It is, and I appreciate it, but I am getting sooo sick of hearing people proclaiming, “You’re back!” Yes, I know I am. Thank you for pointing that out, Captain Obvious.

  “Hi, Roger,” I say. “Is Mr. Crenshaw available? I just wanted to say hello, touch base...”

  “For you, he’ll make himself available. Hold on a sec.”

  Roger buzzes Mr. Crenshaw and tells me to sit tight. The phone rings, preventing Roger from engaging me in small talk, but someone else steps up to attend to that duty.

  “Carrie?”

  “Gordon?” Once again, context throws me off. I’ve met Stuart’s brother Gordon before, quite a few times, but I knew him as a scruffy, unemployed slacker fresh out of law school. The man standing before me now is a well-groomed, well-dressed lawyer.

  “Hey, it is you! Stuart said you wer
e back.”

  He did? Since when do Stuart and Gordon have normal human conversations? Usually they can barely stand to be in the same room as each other.

  “Yeah, yesterday. What are you doing here?” I say. It sounds more like an accusation than I mean it to.

  “I work here now,” Gordon says with a little gesture of presentation, as if he’s inviting me to check him out in his expensive new suit (which he probably is. I am uncomfortably aware of his crush on me). “Stuart heard through Edison Bose there was an opening, gave me the heads up, so I put in for it and here I am.”

  “Oh. Cool. Good for you.”

  “Thanks. I admit, this isn’t the field I expected to go into, but super-hero law is really quite fascinating.”

  “Yeah, I know. I used to work here.”

  “Hey, that’s right. Maybe we could get together sometime, talk shop a little.”

  Mr. Crenshaw unwittingly saves Gordon from the humiliation of getting shot down in flames. “Carrie!” he says, and God love him, he does not tell me that I’m back. “Oh, wow, it’s so good to see you! How are you?”

  “I’m good, thank you.” I glance over at Gordon. “Shouldn’t you be off impressing your boss here with your initiative, work ethic, and go-getter attitude?”

  “I should,” Gordon says, and off he goes to get.

  “What brings you by, Carrie?” Mr. Crenshaw says. “Making the rounds and saying hello to people, or...?”

  “Yeah, mostly,” I say. “I’m meeting with Edison in a little while to go over some stuff but I had some time to kill, so I thought I’d drop by, say hi...”

  Hope that you’ll tell me I still have a job here and I can come back anytime I’m ready? No? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

  “Well, if you find you have any legal issues to resolve stemming from your, ah, absence, give me a call and we’ll get things squared away for you.”

  I thank him and say goodbye, then linger a couple of seconds in the vain hope Mr. Crenshaw will tell me to be back in the office bright and early tomorrow morning.

  No such luck. Carrie Hauser is officially unemployed.

  SIX

  “He should be here any minute,” Candace says, glancing at her phone.

  “Will you relax?” Drake says. “He’s probably running late. Everyone’s late nowadays. That’s assuming he shows up at all.”

  “Who’d go through all the trouble of finding us and then not show up for the meeting he arranged? Except maybe the police,” Candace says, answering her own question.

  “If — and I stress if — this is some kind of sting, cops wouldn’t ask us to meet them in a diner during lunchtime.”

  He’s right. Candace knows this on a logical, intellectual level, but Drake’s voice of reason is competing with a much louder inner voice that’s convinced their waitress is an undercover cop. Every time she disappears into the kitchen, she’s relaying information to a SWAT team, and any minute now, every other diner in the place will pull out a gun and a badge and order them down onto the floor, and thus will their relatively short but eventful career come to an ignominious end.

  “Candy. Relax. The cops don’t even know who we are,” Drake whispers.

  “Someone does,” she says, and some primal instinct draws her attention toward a man entering the diner. He’s too indistinct to be that way naturally, she decides; he’s put a little too much effort into blending in. She tenses as the man, with his beige T-shirt and Gap jeans and extremely average build, walks straight toward their corner booth.

  “Candace. Drake. I’m Jason X. May I?” the man says, sitting. Even his voice is generic. “Thank you for meeting with me. I believe we have a great deal to discuss.”

  “We could’ve discussed it online,” Candace says.

  “The Internet isn’t as private as you might think. Simply making contact with you was risky.”

  “And talking about —” Candace catches herself. “Talking business in a crowded diner isn’t?”

  “People tend to be too absorbed in themselves to pay attention to others. The women in the booth behind me have been on their phones ever since they sat down twenty-one minutes ago. Nevertheless, discretion would be wise. Your waitress will be coming by in —” He glances at his watch. “— approximately two minutes, so we should be quiet until she’s out of sight again.”

  “Two minutes? How do you know that?” Drake asks.

  “I scouted this diner ahead of time. During the lunchtime rush — which begins around 11:20 AM and peters out around 1:34 PM — your waitress, Mary, checks in with every table in her area in seven-minute intervals on average. She starts with this corner booth, works her way down, then heads into the kitchen until her next circuit.”

  Drake laughs. “Man. You’re detail-oriented, aren’t you?”

  “That’s my particular gift. Part of it, I should say.”

  “You don’t sound like a superhuman,” Candace says. “You sound autistic.”

  “My nephew’s autistic.” Jason smiles. “But he’s a bright, energetic, loving boy, so I’ll take that as a compliment. No, I am what’s called an enhanced neurocognitive. I process information at a greatly accelerated rate, I possess hyperthymesia, which means I remember every single detail of my life, and I have an eidetic memory — what people often refer to, somewhat incorrectly, as a photographic memory.”

  Curious, perhaps a bit skeptical, Candace opens her menu, displays it to Jason (if that is his real name) for a three count, and snaps it shut. “What was the fourth item down on the left-hand page?”

  “Candy, jeez,” Drake says.

  “All righty, folks, you ready to order?” Mary says, notepad at the ready.

  “I would like the open-faced Thanksgiving Sandwich,” Jason says, “which comes with fresh, thin-sliced lean turkey breast, garlic-rosemary mashed potatoes, and rich turkey gravy, all piled high on a bed of chestnut stuffing and served with a side of cranberry sauce and a flaky buttermilk biscuit. Oh, and please add a second biscuit for the fifty-cent up-charge. Coke for my drink.”

  “Man knows what he wants,” Mary muses. “And you two?”

  “Cheeseburger, medium, all the fixings,” Drake says. “Root beer.”

  “Same,” Candace says.

  “I’ll put that right in,” Mary says.

  “Carlos is working the grill today so our food should arrive in nine minutes,” Jason says. “Thank you for choosing the turkey, by the way. If you’d picked the Reuben I would have been very unhappy. I hate sauerkraut.”

  “Handy talent,” Drake says.

  “You have no idea. All right, we have time before our food arrives so let’s get down to business. I represent an organization that’s taken an interest in you two.”

  “An organization?”

  “I’m afraid that’s all I can really say about that. While the level of secrecy with which they operate has recently been compromised somewhat, my employer prefers it if I play things close to the vest. But, in the interest of earning your trust, I’ll gladly fill in some rather large blanks for you — such as how you obtained those fine suits you keep locked up in the back of your SUV.”

  Candy stiffens. “You know about the suits?”

  “I know more about them than you,” Jason says. “Tell me, do either of you remember meeting a man named John Nemo?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell, no,” Drake says. “Candy?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You wouldn’t. My predecessor had a truly unique ability to erase his presence from people’s memories, which made him a valuable asset. He was, for lack of a better term, a talent scout. He sought out potential operatives for the organization — people with natural abilities, like me, or people like you, who had the right disposition but no powers, who they outfitted with weaponry. He’d send them off on little missions to test their capabilities under real-world conditions. If they succeeded, they’d be brought into the fold. If they failed because the law or some super-hero took them down? They’d have
no one to sell out. Complete deniability on our end.”

  Drake leans forward, his brow creased in troubled thought. Jason’s story rings true, for the most part. He and Candace had never been A-list criminals, despite their somewhat fanciful dreams of becoming the next Bonnie and Clyde, but they had a sound track record — several successful scores and no arrests. They’d never aspired to becoming something as lofty and, in Drake’s opinion, as silly as so-called super-villains — not until the day Candace found in her pocket a business card bearing a Newark street address but no name of any kind. She had no idea where it came from, but she felt compelled to seek out the address. Drake’s efforts to talk her out of it were half-hearted at best; though he never admitted as much to her, he too felt the same compulsion.

  Their destination was, by all outward appearances, a perfectly normal pawn shop, but in the back, they discovered an armory straight out of a science fiction movie. To this day, Drake swears he saw an honest-to-God Terminator tucked up against a wall amidst racks of exotic firearms. The man who ran the armory kitted them out with suits of armor that must have cost small fortunes, and yet he demanded no payment. That part, he said, had already been taken care of.

  Drake received Typhon, a bulky suit that promised to effortlessly repel gunfire, enhance his strength to superhuman levels, and project something called supercharged plasma. Candace received Echidna, a more streamlined suit that jacked straight into her nervous system, granting her mental control over a set of a dozen “offspring” — spheres the size of billiard balls, each one a weapon unto itself. The offspring could project beams of intense heat or release a stream of powerful acid or deliver a neurotoxin that could paralyze or, in sufficient concentrations, kill, and so much more.

  They took the suits and practiced with them in secret. Once they’d grown comfortable with their new tech, they ventured out and returned to their thieving ways, with even greater success than before. The heists went off more quickly and smoothly than ever, and their getaways were spectacularly destructive. They sacrificed some of their already acquired notoriety — police didn’t know wanted bank robbers Drake Anzo and Candace Tanith were in the suits — but the new legend of Typhon and Echidna proved just as satisfying.