Masked Read online

  Now that I’m the Rock, I realize that I weigh about a million pounds, and I’m not sure if my car will even support my weight. So I steal my neighbor’s Hummer, holding my breath as I settle down into the seat. The thing protests, the frame groaning miserably, but goddamn if that machine isn’t worth the price tag and the lousy mileage.

  By the grace of God, when I pull up next to Verlaine’s grave, it’s just as I left it. I jump down into the hole without thinking and fall right onto Verlaine’s chest with a heavy thud. To his credit, and to the point of this whole enterprise, his ribs don’t even bend.

  I kneel down in the grave, leaning awkwardly over the open coffin. I tear the Spandall from his right arm and hold the arm up in front of me. The musculature is perfect, the skin unblemished. I feel like I’m defacing an idol.

  I bite down. Nothing. It’s like biting steel. I bite again, harder this time, and I can feel the skin give way, just a little, but my Rock teeth sing with a queer pain, like I’m biting down on electrified tinfoil.

  I bite down as hard as I can, clamping my jaw on Verlaine’s forearm like an attack dog. I can feel the teeth beginning to crack in my mouth. The pain, my God the pain is unbelievable. Just when I think I can’t take another second of this, Verlaine’s skin parts and his flesh pours into my mouth, soft and clean, filet mignon.

  The transformation is mind-blowing. Verlaine blasts through my system, ejecting the Rock without a moment’s notice, totally taking me over. I feel him surge into my bones and muscles, bubble up into my brain. My teeth begin to heal. My body balances and relaxes, poised and graceful. My mind reels; I’m dizzy with the potency of it. Then Verlaine seeps into my consciousness and I feel a sense of clarity like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I’m gasping, trying to control my thoughts. Everything is so obvious. Verlaine, who he was. Me, who I am. I see the way Verlaine saw, not just with my eyes, though this too is astonishing and I find myself drinking in even the tiniest aspect of the visual world. But I feel his goodness and wisdom as well. I reflect on myself. I see and understand David Caulfield: Wildcard in a way that I’ve never, ever known myself, and I realize that this is how Verlaine always knew me.

  I know that Verlaine, though he would never have told anyone, apparently not even Jeanie, actually held one small, petty jealousy.

  It was of me.

  Flying with Verlaine’s power is nothing like flying on Nightingale Air. The wind doesn’t fight against me—it becomes my ally. The Universe lifts me and carries me where I want to go. I can sense the globe underneath me; I can feel the vibrations of the cities. I can smell the Ghoul King and his children ahead of me while I’m still over Pennsylvania.

  I see him the instant he clears the horizon, my vision cutting through clouds and air pollution. I can see him like he’s right in front of my face. I feel invincible.

  Oh my sweet fucking Christ. This is exactly how Verlaine must have felt flying toward the thing on the day he died.

  Verlaine wasn’t invincible. He wasn’t immortal. My skin crawls and even that sensation is multiplied a hundredfold by my enhanced awareness. What chance do I have?

  It’s too late, though. The Ghoul King has put down everyone who’s stood against him. It’s been almost three hours since I left the fight and the King and what remain of his minions are having the city of Milwaukee for brunch. I see him right in front of me. I’m flying at around six hundred miles an hour. Somehow he senses me coming and turns to meet me. Unable to pull back in time, I accelerate directly into his lashed-out fist at the speed of sound.

  To Verlaine, pain is a sensation that, like all sensations, can be savored by his heightened consciousness. My own way of thinking about pain—i.e., that it hurts—vies with Verlaine’s and it’s like I’m seeing double, but with my mind instead of my eyes. The pain separates what is quintessentially me from what is quintessentially Verlaine, and the comparison in no way flatters me.

  It takes a second for me to realize that I’m on the ground and that the Ghoul King is standing above me, shrieking. His right hand is hanging at an odd angle and I realize, peering through his rocky exterior with X-ray vision, that my impact on him broke two bones in his wrist. All I broke was my nose. Take that, asshole.

  My mind gets caught up in the many nonvisible spectra for a second, and when I switch back to plain old light, I note that in the Ghoul King’s left hand he is holding a minivan. I don’t need Verlaine’s insight to realize that the King’s plan is to brain me with the minivan, so I pivot and stand, gracefully pirouetting my body in the air. My God, how this body moves. That sense of total invulnerability rises up in me again, and I remind myself that this very feeling is probably what got Verlaine killed in the first place. If I have any advantage over my old friend, it’s that I understand the concept of limitations.

  I’ve got two good fists, so I go in swinging, pounding at the Ghoul King with everything I’ve got. He’s covered with stinking fur, but the skin beneath the fur is unlike other Ghoul skin. It’s like shale, sharp and grating. I can feel my knuckles scraping against it.

  The King’s still got one good hand, and when he gut-punches me with it, I am forcefully hurtled backward like a cartoon character. I arc over the bloody beach, remembering just before I slam against the sand that I can fly. Instead of slamming into the beach, I sort of skim across it, creating a rill of glass from the heat of the friction of the sand. I’m down again.

  Clarity again, like pure water, overcomes me. I can hear the waves and the Ghouls rampaging down State Street. I can hear the whipping of the news helicopters’ rotors and I can see and hear their newsfeeds, translating the satellite transmissions into sight and sound in my mind. Everyone is watching me. All eyes are on David Caulfield. The Wildcard.

  I sing to gravity and I’m buoyed up and again I rush the Ghoul King, looking for a vulnerability that neither Verlaine nor Captain Salem was able to find. Somewhere to the left of me I can hear the Captain’s ragged breathing; he’s still alive.

  I strike over and over, pounding the monster with fists made of pure momentum, and if he slows at all I can’t sense it. He’s swiping at me with those black claws but I’m able to stay just ahead of him. I’m learning his rhythms. I can see him as a collection of atoms, as a coherent energy system, as an expression of artificial DNA. All kinds of stuff. These perceptions keep me alive, but don’t give me any more advantage than that.

  We slug it out for long minutes; I can count the exact ticks of a watch on the wrist of a dead soldier. I hit the beach thirty-seven minutes and nine, ten, eleven seconds ago. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate—the everythingness of Verlaine is draining me.

  No, wait. It’s something else. I’m scanning my own body chemistry and I don’t like what I see. The RNA in my cells is beginning to revert to David Caulfield standard. Any minute now, Verlaine’s power will start to drain from me, and I’ll be dead. I’ll be a sidebar in a magazine article about the Milwaukee Massacre, which is what CNN is apparently already calling it.

  Move, dodge, punch, retreat. We’ve fallen into a rhythm. We’re up in the air now, I realize, a hundred feet above the beach. The Ghoul King flies with dire purpose, pushing off hard against air. I can’t keep this up. Gravity is tickling at my body now. I pull back and lurch downward, losing my grip on the sky for a moment. He kicks me in the face and I feel my occipital bone crack. Verlaine’s now-sluggish healing factor grudgingly repairs it.

  I am going to fall.

  The Ghoul King grabs me by the neck and squeezes. I manage to wrench my fingers beneath his, just enough strength remaining in me to keep my head from popping off, but I can no longer breathe and the world is going black. The Universe in all its manifold glory recedes and regular reality returns in muddled sounds, the smell of blood, and pain, pain, pain.

  The Ghoul King smells victory. He lifts me up to stare directly into my eyes, to show me the bleak, relentless intelligence behind his own. He opens his mouth and shrieks in victory.

  I stretc
h out my neck and bite off his tongue.

  In wild rage, he flings me away. I’m sailing through the air, swallowing living meat that tastes like rubber and acid. I’m a slave to physics now; with the last shreds of Verlaine’s clarity of thought, I plot the parabolic trajectory of my fall to earth. I tumble over and I can see the sand rushing up toward me. The last Verlainesque sensation is the fading voice of a reporter shouting, “Jesus Christ, he just bit off that thing’s tongue !”

  I hit the earth hard and roll, wet sand clinging to my fur. My rough skin and claws kick up gouts of sand. Hunger swells up in me. Raw hunger, desperate hunger, and hatred. Nothing has ever felt as good or as satisfying as this. I stand, turn, and regard myself above me, floating downward, sensing my own confusion.

  The Ghoul King snaps into place inside me and I know that I’m me and that he’s him, but I don’t think that he understands that. He’s reaching out toward me, recognizing me, wanting me. I think maybe the Ghoul King is actually a Ghoul Queen. There’s something motherly in its gaze. No, yes, I am female. I am reaching out.

  I jump off the ground toward her. We connect and I slash with my claws with every ounce of strength I possess. There’s an infinite well of potential energy behind my motions, powered by hunger and hate. I catch my self/enemy by surprise. She is reaching out to embrace me and her blood spills out and turns to spray in the wind.

  She is cunning and bold. She is brilliant. She somehow intuits what has happened, that she has been copied. She swipes at me with a look of purest rage, but her strength has already begun to fade. I’m digging, digging inside her exposed abdomen, slicing up everything I can touch. She becomes deadweight in my arms and we fall together in a tangle. The fall is so slow—her sense of time is not human; we seem to be falling forever together. The two seconds of our descent are smeared out over what feels like minutes.

  I turn my head to look down and the soldiers and reporters and bystanders and the few remaining Leaguers are all looking back at me with varying degrees of mixed hope and horror. They know. The smarter ones are putting it together already. The Wildcard, his powers, dead heroes, a bitten-off tongue. Maybe somebody’s already dispatched a camera crew to Verlaine’s grave, where Jeanie may still be waiting. I have no idea what she’ll tell them. It doesn’t really seem to matter.

  Lights pop. The whole world flares up. Flashbulbs and impact. Time returns.

  The ground rises to meet me for what feels like the hundredth time. A dragon is dead in my arms and I have become it and I have slain it.

  James Maxey is the author of the Dragon Age fantasy series: Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. A graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writers Workshop and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Boot Camp, in 2002 he won a Phobos Award for his short story “Empire of Dreams and Miracles,” and has since published numerous short stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction and elsewhere. His first novel was the cult-classic superhero tale Nobody Gets the Girl, which was ahead of the current curve when it comes to superheroes rendered in prose tales, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that he knocked this story out of the park.

  Where Their Worm Dieth Not

  JAMES MAXEY

  Atomahawk took a pack of unfiltered Camels from his utility belt and popped a fresh cigarette between his lips. His fingertip glowed like a miniature sun as he lit it. Acrid smoke curled toward Retaliator.

  Retaliator, squatting on the edge of the roof of the long-vacated factory, said nothing as he continued to stare down at the docks of the darkened warehouse. It was two in the morning; it had been at least twenty minutes since the last goon had furtively slipped inside. Despite Retaliator’s focused silence, something in his posture must have changed imperceptibly.

  “What?” said Atomahawk, sounding defensive.

  “What what?” Retaliator answered, keeping his voice gravelly and neutral, still not looking at his longtime ally.

  “You flinched when I lit up,” said Atomahawk. “You’ve got a problem with my smoking.”

  “I’m not here to pass judgment,” said Retaliator, who recognized the irony of the statement. The whole reason he was a crime fighter was that he was willing to judge people. This was why he spent nights skulking dark alleys in dangerous parts of town rather than drinking brandy by the fireplace in his fifty-room mansion. He was well-known for his ability to see things clearly, in black and white, cutting through the haze of gray fog that afflicted so many of his fellow men. He sighed.

  “A: Lighting your cigarette with your powers is about as stealthy as waving around a road flare. B: Kids look up to the Law Legion and you’re its most powerful member. If they see you smoking, they’ll think it’s okay. C: You’re my friend, John. You deserve a better death than lung cancer.”

  Atomahawk nodded as he hovered closer to the roof’s edge. John Naiche was a full-blooded Apache who looked quite striking in his bright-red plastisteel armor. His long black hair flowed like a cape down his back. He’d been a founding member of the Law Legion along with Retaliator, Arc, She-Devil, and Tempo. The big Apache took a long draw on the cigarette, then flicked it away.

  He crossed his arms and said, “You know I took it up again right after your last funeral.”

  “Again?” asked Retaliator.

  Atomahawk furrowed his brow, puzzled by the query. Unlike Retaliator, he wore no mask to hide his features, only war paint that looked like swept-back hawk’s wings.

  “You said ‘again,’” said Retaliator. “It implies you used to smoke before.”

  “Oh,” said Atomahawk. “Yeah. When I was in high school. I quit when I joined the Marines. But for the last ten years, any time I get stressed out, I can’t help but think about putting a cigarette in my mouth. The last time Prime Mover killed you, I bummed one from a teenager outside the funeral home. I haven’t been able to stop. Honestly, why should I worry? My blood is more radioactive than uranium. I have to bury my feces in lead jars because they’d kill any ordinary man that got near them. Cancer’s coming, probably, but it’s the radiation that will do me in, not cigarettes.”

  Retaliator struggled not to roll his eyes. He’d heard Atomahawk’s my-power-is-my-curse shtick often enough that he could recite it by rote.

  A long moment of silence passed as they both stared at the warehouse.

  Atomahawk said, “Anyway, I’m not the most powerful Legionnaire anymore. She-Devil’s scary now that she’s eaten Satan’s heart. And Golden Victory could probably take me in a fight, if it came to it.”

  “I could take you in a fight,” said Retaliator. “It doesn’t change the fact that kids look up to you.”

  “You dress like a refugee from a bondage flick,” said Atomahawk. “Don’t lecture me about corrupting children. How’s Nubile doing, by the way?”

  Retaliator pressed his lips together tightly. “She’s off the respirator,” he said softly, losing the deep raspy baritone he normally affected. “The doctor’s say… they say she might recover more brain function in time. It’s still too early to know.”

  “That’s good,” said Atomahawk, in a tone that really said, “That sucks.”

  Retaliator stood up, stretching his back. He tugged up his pants, which had slipped down a bit. Perhaps he did look a bit like a bondage fanatic in his black leather pants, knee-high boots with about a hundred silver buckles, leather gloves that laced up his forearms, and a black mask that concealed all his features save for zippered slits at the eyes, mouth, and nostrils. His shaved chest was completely bare, showing off the hundreds of scars he’d acquired over twenty years of crime-fighting. His skin wasn’t bulletproof, but his entire cardiovascular system was composed of high-tech bioplastics from the twenty-eighth century that few twenty-first-century weapons could damage.

  His outfit, he knew, made some people uncomfortable. But they’d been the clothes his father, Reinhart Gray, former chief justice of the Supreme Court, had been found dead in. Police had ruled his death accidental, saying he was the victim of autoerotic asphyxiation. Eric Gray
had become the Retaliator in order to solve the mystery of his father’s murder, a quest for justice that still drove him twenty years later. Wearing his father’s clothes wasn’t a sexual statement. It was, instead, a warning to the unknown murderer, a reminder that there was one man, at least, who still remembered his crime.

  “Here comes Casper,” said Atomahawk.

  “Don’t call him that,” growled Retaliator.

  The ethereal form of Witness floated toward the roof. Witness was really Chang Williams, the ghost of a twelve-year-old conjoined twin whose now-separated brother was currently in a coma. Chang’s spirit was trapped on earth, unseen by all save for the few souls who’d been to the other side and returned. Since nearly all the members of the Law Legion had died at one point or another, they had recently adopted the ghost-child and given him a new life as Witness, an invisible, intangible spy who could gather information in the most dangerous environments without risk to himself.

  Witness floated before them, completely naked, since souls have no need for clothes. It was politically incorrect to call conjoined twins Siamese, yet Chang was, in fact, from Thailand, formerly known as Siam, though he’d been raised in America. He was thin, almost girlish, having died before puberty, with skin the color of a walnut shell; his dark eyes had no irises as he stared at Retaliator and said, “There are a dozen men inside. They frighten me. I can’t touch them.”

  “You can’t touch anybody,” said Atomahawk.

  Witness reached out and placed his skinny fingers onto the Apache’s boot. The big man gave a small yelp and jerked his foot away. “What the hell was that?”

  “You should read the dossiers. Witness has a graveyard touch,” growled Retaliator. “He can brush against anyone’s soul and make them feel the mortal chill of their own guilt.”

  “So, what, the men in that warehouse have no souls?” asked Atomahawk.

  “They’ve signed Prime Mover’s contract,” said Retaliator, with a sigh. “Another dozen lost to the God Clock.”