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  Still he waited, weighing his options. He was confident he could sneak up on the bike batter unseen and unheard. Slap a rear naked choke on him and leave him tied up for the cops like the Batman. Tagger knew that realistically, he would just as likely leave enough clues for the cops to find him. He didn’t need to advertise himself. The criminal scum on whom he preyed would do that for him.

  A faint light appeared intermittently a hundred yards down the path. A bicyclist headed their way, leg lamp describing an oncoming spiral. The rider would reach the bike batter before he came to Tagger, unless Tagger acted fast. Seeing and feeling the batter tense up and concentrate his attention on the approaching cyclist, Tagger took off in full sprint, landing on the balls of his feet, making no sound on the arid, sandy earth. The bicyclist was ten feet from the bushes as the batter tensed, bat behind his head in the classic stance, ready to spring.

  Tagger sprung first. Four feet from the bike batter, he threw himself into the air, turned sideways and lashed out with a flying sidekick that struck the aluminum bat, slamming it into the side of the batter’s head with a slight bong. The batter said, “Oof.”

  The cyclist, wearing a streamlined helmet and a little dentist mirror, glanced once in their direction and took off with renewed vigor, ass pumping up and down as he put his full weight into it.

  Tagger landed and rolled, rising instantly to his feet. The bike batter retained his grip on the bat, put a hand to his head, and gaped in astonishment at the lump. His beady, bloodshot eyes focused on Tagger.

  “You fuckin’ with the wrong dude, man.” He came forward, swinging the bat before him in furious arcs.

  Tagger timed it, sprang forward inside the swing and smashed his forehead into the batter’s nose. Tagger grabbed the batter by the shoulders and jammed his knee into the batter’s gonads.

  The batter dropped, groaning and cursing, to the ground, knees drawn up. “Ahmina fuck you up, man… You know ’bout MS 13? We gonna bleed you for days, man…”

  Tagger seized the bat, holding it casually for a minute while the batter looked up through pain-glazed eyes and saw, for the first time, his antagonist.

  “What the fuck are you, man?”

  Wham! Tagger brought the bat down with the full force of his body onto the batter’s knee. He felt bone and cartilage tear through the bat. The batter would never again play baseball. The batter screamed high and piercing like a girl or an alley cat. Tagger removed the spray paint from his fanny pack, took off the magnet, shook it and painted a red T on the batter’s face.

  He leaned in, inches from the groaning batter’s ear. “Tell them Tagger was here.”

  He was outta there.

  Tagger was so stoked by his mission he’d forgotten to search the batter for money. Oh well. It was his first night and thus far it had been spectacular. Two for two.

  He was an avatar operating in a three-dimensional game with simultaneous players. First Person Shooter. Only he did no shooting.

  Like the Badger, Tagger eschewed guns. He’d been lucky so far. He hadn’t thought about ballistic armor, but why not? Batman had it. You could buy the stuff online from cheaperthandirt.com. Or anywhere.

  He’d considered calling himself Avatar, but he didn’t want the DC Legal Department on his ass. He would have enough trouble as it was.

  Two for two and it seemed unreal. Tagger had never felt more alive, his senses magnified a thousandfold, like a dog’s, or a bat’s, or an eagle’s. He could smell juniper and pine and garbage. He could hear the burble of the river, an owl’s call, the traffic on nearby Allen Street, a police siren halfway across the city. He could see the stars through the trees, the distant twinkle of condos and the downtown skyscrapers, fast-food wrappers thrown to the ground.

  And most of all, he could do.

  Do the things that others only dreamed about. Do them because he was fifteen and crazier than a shithouse rat. Fifteen with a nascent conscience and character not yet touched by mortality. Capable of astonishing feats.

  A woman’s shout briefly pierced the velvet night, abruptly cut off. Sounds of a struggle coming through the buffalo grass. Tagger had his work cut out for him. Even as he flowed through the thorns and saguaro, Tagger wondered why no one had done it before, gone on patrol, opened a can of vigilante whup-ass.

  Everybody knew the cops only came round after the blood had soaked into the ground. Every kid Hoyt knew carried some kind of weapon. There were tough men, capable men in the city, men who could go into a mob and single-handedly stop it dead. Why hadn’t they taken up the mantle?

  Tagger hoped he would be the tipping point, opening the flood gates to dozens of other heroes. As Chairman Mao said, “Let a thousand blossoms bloom.”

  Tagger reached the scene in seconds. Two men held a woman down in a copse of trees. Tagger could see the flash of her leg as she struggled. The men grunted and snickered.

  “Hold her, you asshole!” one said.

  “Shut up, bitch!” said the other, smashing the woman across the mouth.

  Tagger took the iron punch from his fanny pack and gripped it in his left hand. He walked up to the closest assailant, not bothering to conceal himself but not announcing himself either. The men were bloodlust oblivious, their attention riveted on the woman they intended to violate.

  “Hey, fuckwad,” Tagger said in a conversational voice.

  The dude jerked around so fast it was funny. That’s when Tagger slammed him in the jaw with all his strength.

  The man shrieked and fell back with his hands to his face. When he pulled them back, Tagger could see the jawbone exposed in bloody grooves of flesh. The other rapist sprang to his feet and whipped out a straight razor, which he held with the blade bent back over his knuckles.

  “What the fuck are you,” he raged. “Some kind of half-assed superhero?”

  The woman scrabbled backward into the brush. Razor man advanced, holding the blade in front of him like a lantern. “You wanna fuck with us? Zat it? Okay, motherfucker. Let’s do it.”

  Tagger watched the man carefully, planning his move.

  That’s when the first man grabbed him around his ankles and brought him down. Grunting and cursing, the man reached for Tagger’s genitals. Only the fact he was wearing a cup saved him. Even so, the rapist punched his cup hard enough to make him see stars and his eyes water. The man was big—much bigger than Tagger, as he pulled himself up and began to rain blows down on Tagger’s head.

  Tagger turned away, trying to ward off the blows with his arms, when he felt an explosive impact in his side, driving out all the air, letting in all the pain. A rib cracked. The razor man kicked him with size-14 Doc Martens. The razor flicked down. Tagger barely had time to jam his shoe at it, saving himself from being ripped open like a slaughtered pig.

  Still gripping the iron jabs, Tagger hammered away at the first guy’s head, each blow sending a thunderbolt of pain through Tagger’s ribs. Blood and drool flowed freely from his assailant’s shattered jaw. One of Tagger’s wild blows struck the man on the chin, and with a squeal of pain he fell sideways.

  Razor man swung his razor hand, cutting through Tagger’s black sweatshirt and opening a long shallow cut on his upper arm. Tagger struck out with one leg, catching razor man in the knee, stopping him cold. Razor man’s square face went white. He had a little pencil mustache and blue-gray flames flickering up through his collar.

  Tagger staggered to his feet, shuffling toward razor man with his left hand leading.

  Control the knife hand.

  Tagger wished he’d brought the nunchuks. Or a club. Sensing Shatterjaw about to come at him again, Tagger struck out with a spinning backkick that caught the man square on the solar plexus, causing him to collapse like a tent in a tornado and fall to the ground with a dull thump.

  Tagger looked around. The girl had fled. So far so good.

  Razor man was breathing hard now, nothing left for threats or curses, stalking Tagger in a workmanlike manner, razor held low before him. They c
ircled, Tagger acutely aware of the life of the city rising all around them: the honk of horns, the shouts, the airplanes, the dogs. His opponent had a massive occipital brow and was built like a linebacker.

  Razor man rushed. Tagger spun, lashing out with a reverse backkick that struck razor man square in the gut. Razor man grunted and grabbed Tagger’s ankle, quicker than he thought possible. They went to the ground. Tagger focused on the knife hand, working that wrist while his bigger, heavier assailant tried to use his weight to pin Tagger to the dirt.

  Tagger smashed the man’s hand with his iron points, receiving a nasty cut across three fingers. Razor man dropped the razor. Tagger went to work with a vengeance, flailing upward with the device as blood flew.

  “Fuck this shit!” the razorless man declared, abruptly getting to his feet and lumbering off into the woods. Tagger lay on the ground, breath rasping in and out like an anchor chain. The pain in his throat and lungs was intense. Slowly, ever so slowly, he got to his hands and knees. Nausea washed over him like a riptide, and he barely had time to rip off his mask before he vomited, the sour smell filling the copse. Blood from his forearm and his nose flowed freely into the dirt. He couldn’t remember being hit in the face.

  He stayed that way for long minutes while he struggled to regain his breath and listened to the city. There were no screams. Tagger looked around. The dude whose jaw he’d broken lay on his back at an awkward angle, his thick, tattooed arms splayed. Tagger crept over and pulled out the man’s wallet.

  Fourteen dollars and a photo of the man smiling with a plump wife and two little girls.

  Tagger slapped the man’s grooved cheek. “Hey. Hey, wake up.”

  He felt for a pulse along the carotid artery. Zippo. The dude was dead. Croaked. Worm food.

  Suddenly it all seemed very real.

  Daryl Gregory’s debut novel, Pandemonium, won the 2009 Crawford Award, and was short-listed for the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award for best dark fantasy or horror novel, the Locus Award for best first novel, and the Mythopoeic Award, for best adult fantasy novel. Pandemonium was followed by The Devil’s Alphabet, a tale of quantum physics and murder in a mountain town. Gregory has been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been reprinted in numerous Year’s Best anthologies. Pandemonium mixes demonic possession with golden age comic books, so it’s no wonder that Gregory’s short fiction often ventures into superhero territory as well. I can’t imagine it will be long before we see him writing comics as well; the following tale attests to his ability.

  Message from the Bubblegum Factory

  DARYL GREGORY

  The guards, Dear Reader, are kicking the shit out of me.

  The first few steps of my plan for breaking into the Ant Hill were simple: Drive through the outer gate in my rented Land Rover, brake to a halt well short of the second gate, and then step out of the car. I thought that once I’d assumed the posture of absolute surrender—prone, hands on the back of my head, stillness personified—they wouldn’t feel the need to stomp me like a bug.

  Unfortunately, no.

  The subsequent intake process, however, is everything you’d expect of the world’s only Ultra-Super-Max prison. They carry me under a half-lowered blast shield that looks nuke-proof, then through a vault door, and finally into a series of cold, concrete rooms where I am fingerprinted and photographed, palpated and probed, swabbed, scanned, and scrubbed, deloused and depilated. They keep me naked. My head throbs from the pounding I took at the gate, and my stomach feels like it’s been turned inside out.

  The paperwork is stunning. They even make me sign for the lime green jumper they throw at me.

  The warden comes in as I step into it. Judging by the demeanor of the guards and the way one of them cracks me in the ribs when I don’t zip up fast enough, this is an honor of some kind. One millionth customer, maybe.

  The warden looks like a… Does it matter? He is the warden. Supply your own visual.

  He frowns at me. “You’re the mascot.”

  “That’s kind of offensive.”

  “The sidekick, then. The nut job who went crazy on TV last year.”

  “Now you’re just being mean.”

  He looks me up and down, taking in my skinny arms, my puffy eye, my pot belly. He shakes his head in bewilderment. “How the hell did you think you would get in here, much less out again? Look at you. You’re out of shape, you have no weapons, no powers—” He gives me a hard look. “Do you?”

  “Not really,” I say. “Well, one.”

  The four guards in the room suddenly tense. I hear a subtle but bracing sound: the double creak of leather gloves pulling back metal triggers.

  “I can’t be killed,” I say.

  I smile. “I mean, not because of anything I can do. It’s just— Look. When I was hanging out with Soliton and the Protectors, I must have been kidnapped once a month. Held hostage, used as bait, snared in death traps. They especially liked to dangle me.”

  “What?”

  “Over tubs of acid, piranhas, lava pits, you name it—villains are very big on dangling. Twenty years of this, ever since I was a kid. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been shot at, blown up, tossed into rivers, knifed, pummeled, thrown off buildings and bridges—”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Oh yeah, half a dozen times at least. My right ear drum’s still perforated from being chucked out of a plane.” I lean forward, and the guard puts a hand on my chest. I ignore him. “See, here’s the thing. I should be dead a hundred times over. But the rules of the universe don’t allow it. I’m not bragging—that just seems to be the way it works.”

  The warden smiles coldly. “Cold” is the only form available to him, the sole version taught in Sadistic Warden School. “That’s not a superpower, Mr. King. That’s a delusion. One shared by every teenager who doesn’t wear a seat belt.”

  The guards’ guns are still aimed at me, but I no longer seem to be in imminent danger. The warden opens a manila folder. “You went missing from St. Adolphus Psychiatric Hospital in Modesto, California, six months ago. No one’s seen you since.”

  I shrug.

  He flips through more papers. “Where have you been, Mr. King?”

  “Does it matter?” I say. I wait for him to look up. “Really. Are you at all interested? Will it make a difference?”

  He considers this. “No, as a matter of fact.” He closes the folder. “I’ve already called for a helicopter to take you out of here and back to your doctors in California. This is not a hospital.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “People like you, even famous people, are not in my remit. You are not what this institution is for.”

  “But what about my crime? Don’t you want to punish me?”

  “What crime is that?”

  “Assaulting a federal officer.” And then I kick him in the nuts.

  I’ll give the warden this: He doesn’t go down. He staggers back, red-faced and wincing. He gets his breath back while the guards whack me like a piñata until the candy comes out. And by candy, I mean, not candy.

  After a while the warden kneels and lifts my head off the floor. “You win, Mr. King. You get an overnight stay.” He taps my forehead. “You’re going to talk to my men, and you’re going to tell them everything—your deepest fear, your favorite color, your grandmother’s social security number. You’re going to tell us where you’ve been for six months, why you’re here now, and what you thought you would accomplish. Everything.”

  I make a sound that ends in a question mark.

  “Yes,” he says. “Everything.”

  Picture it from above, Dear Reader, say from a huge, invisible eyeball floating above the plains. From ten thousand feet, the Ant Hill is just a gray dot in the middle of a huge blank square on the North Dakota map, a cement speck surrounded by half a million acres of treeless prairie. Drop a
few thousand feet. You make out a single road heading toward the heart of the Ant Hill. And then you make out concentric rings that the road pierces: the outermost ring is just a chain-link fence, easy enough to drive through, but the next two inner rings are taller, reinforced, with sturdy gates. The road ends at the innermost ring, a cement wall twenty feet tall. Inside the ring is an oval of cobalt blue, a manmade lake. Beside the lake is a gray cooling tower like a funeral urn, then the cement dome of the reactor building, and half a dozen shorter buildings huddling close. The familiar shapes of the tower and dome, repeated in nuclear power plants across the globe, have always put me in mind of mosques.

  The Antioch Federal Nuclear Facility was built in the ’80s, designed to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium for the hungry guts of America’s ICBMs. A few months after Soliton’s arrival, however, a freak accident shut the plant down. (Freak accidents became a lot more common after the Big S touched down, and we would have had to stop referring to them by that name if they hadn’t created so many freaks.) Before the plant could reopen, Soliton’s adventures had (a) ended the Cold War, and (b) provided a need for a new kind of jail.

  So they renovated. You couldn’t see much of the work on the surface. But that’s the thing about ant hills.

  The guards drag me through approximately three thousand miles of tunnels. I could be wrong—they smacked me around quite a bit. I’m just happy that I haven’t blacked out or thrown up.

  They toss me into the cell. I’m expecting a sarcastic line from the guards—“Welcome to the Ant Hill,” perhaps—but they disappoint me by merely slamming the door.

  I pull myself up onto the bunk and lay there for a while. There’s a toilet, a sink, and a cardboard box holding a roll of toilet paper. There don’t seem to be any cameras in the cement ceiling—I’m too low a threat for the expensive rooms.

  My stomach rumbles.

  “Jesus, hold on a minute,” I say.

  I pull myself into a sitting position, put my hands on my knees, and take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say. “One, two—”