Masked Read online

  “Thank you,” Eric whispered as he turned away.

  If he wanted to find comfort for his aching soul, this was not the place to look for it. He walked to the library, activated the hidden elevator, and rode down to the quiet room. He tossed the robe aside and pulled on his mask. The door slid open on the stone-lined chamber.

  Lawrence David Rambo was slumped on the stone floor, snoring. His ankle was red and raw where the iron manacle held it. He was naked save for the leather bands around his neck and wrists. His body was covered with welts and purple bruises haloed in yellow.

  Lawrence David Rambo wasn’t a supervillain. He was a petty scoundrel, seventeen years old, from a suburb near Baltimore. He’d discovered it was easy money to wave a gun around in small mom-and-pop stores out in the boonies, where he’d get away with a hundred bucks if he was lucky, a case of beer, maybe a roll of scratch-off lottery tickets. He’d never shot anyone, but he’d pistol-whipped a sixty-year-old woman who hadn’t been moving fast enough, and had once pointed his gun at an eight-year-old boy who’d been coming out of the restroom, forcing him to lie down and count to a hundred, shouting that if he stopped counting he’d die.

  Lawrence David Rambo was white. His parents were middle-class. He’d been arrested twice for trivial crimes, but never even spent a full night in jail. He was the sort of kid the broken justice system would allow to slip through the cracks until he killed someone.

  Retaliator doused him with a bucket of cold water.

  The young man gasped awake, trembling.

  “Ohgoddon’t,” he whimpered as he curled into a fetal position. “Ohpleaseohpleasedon’t.”

  Retaliator looked down through his zippered eye-slits at the very worst of humanity. When other men thought of evil, they thought of villains like Hitler, or Osama bin Laden, or Prime Mover. But Retaliator saw the truth. The true evil of the world was insidious in its smallness, the petty, pointless meanness that would pistol-whip a grandmother or badger a crying child. The big evils of the world were easy to manage. Armies were sent after men like bin Laden. But the same governments that raised the armies would provide lawyers to men like Rambo, subhuman scum who had hurt people not for any grand plan of world conquest, but simply because it was easy to bully those weaker than him.

  Save for his rebuilt heart, Retaliator possessed no superpowers. What he did possess that allowed him to stand beside demigods like Atomahawk was clarity of vision. He could see through the veil of excuses and justifications that society wove to hide the reality of the evil in their midst.

  Eric Gray’s great power was his ability to see the world in black and white.

  He selected a bullwhip from the wall, its tip studded with shards of broken glass.

  His prisoner released a series of incoherent whimpers that Retaliator recognized as pleas for mercy.

  Retaliator dropped his voice to a cold bass rumble. “Begging will only make me beat you harder.”

  The young man slowly stilled his voice in a series of choked sobs.

  “Or perhaps it’s silence that will infuriate me,” said Retaliator, raising the whip, knowing, in truth, nothing the boy did mattered anymore. He would never leave this room alive.

  As Eric Gray, it was simple enough to obtain a seat in the gallery of the Supreme Court, even at the last second. She-Devil was in her human identity of Eula Leahy and accompanied him as his guest. Ordinarily if he was seen around town in the company of a woman, it would be fodder for the tabloids, but Eula was a small-town librarian from Kansas who looked to be in her mid-sixties. In her gray pantsuit, she was nearly invisible in her normalness.

  “Where’s Atomahawk?” she whispered as they took their seats.

  “Fifty miles straight up,” Eric whispered back. “He can be here inside of five seconds once Prime Mover’s thugs show.”

  “If they come,” said Eula. “Prime Mover stands a good chance of prevailing. Why would he pull something big like this?”

  Retaliator didn’t answer her question before the bailiff called the room to silence and ordered everyone to rise. The nine judges filed into the room. Eric felt a stirring of sadness as he watched their black robes sway. He remembered his father’s robes from long ago.

  Eight of the judges sat.

  The chief justice, Lucas Shoen, remained standing. With a swift motion, a silver revolver dropped into his hand from his black sleeve. He placed the gun against his temple.

  “Bring me the Law Legion,” he said, in a crisp British accent that Eric recognized immediately. There was a flurry of confusion as the guards stationed around the rooms drew their guns. Eric grabbed Eula and pushed her to the floor, hiding behind the benches.

  “How could he soul-swap with Schoen?” Eula whispered. “When would they ever make eye contact? Prime Mover’s still in jail! I checked the magic mirror before I came here.”

  Eric instantly saw the only possible answer. “The power must work no matter what body he’s in. He could jump from person to person for months, swapping every hour, until he arrived in the body he wanted… to…” His voice trailed off. “You have to leave,” he said.

  Eula nodded, understanding. There was circumstantial evidence he’d possessed her once. She was among the most difficult of the Law Legion to track down; this whole event could have been staged just for the chance to possess her again.

  In the time it took Eric to blink, Eula had vanished, slipping back into the Devil Cave.

  Eric reached under the bench and grabbed his utility belt. There had been no way to get through security while wearing it, which is why he’d had Tempo time-walk into the building at five in the morning to plant it. He crushed a sleeping-gas pellet between his fingers. The people immediately around him fell like flies. Seconds later, people cried out in panic as the gas spread, incapacitating everyone. Retaliator pulled on his mask and sprinkled his five-thousand-dollar suit with the nanites he’d taken from Mothmaster. Instantly the wool fell to dust, revealing his costume. He fastened his utility belt as he stood, palming a concussion grenade.

  Nearly everyone in the room had fallen now, save for the chief justice, who was held conscious by the full power of Prime Mover’s nearly matchless will.

  “Hello, Eric,” said Prime Mover.

  Retaliator didn’t blink.

  “Surprised that I know your secret?” Prime Mover taunted.

  “You were inside She-Devil for at least an hour,” said Retaliator. “I could uncover every secret of the Law Legion if I had ten unguarded minutes with the central computer. I imagine it might have taken you twenty.”

  “Where are your friends, Eric?” said Prime Mover, pressing the pistol more tightly to his temple.

  “It’s just you and me this time,” said Retaliator.

  The chief justice’s left eye twitched. While his expression of satisfied smugness didn’t change, Retaliator knew that Prime Mover had to be disappointed by this news. No doubt he hoped to possess a more powerful hero, someone like—

  A concentrated burst of energy flashed above them, leaving a perfect circle in the ceiling. The bright red form of Atomahawk streaked down from the sky, landing in the middle of the room, his fists wreathed with balls of white plasma. He stood with his back to Retaliator, facing the chief justice.

  Retaliator started to scream a warning.

  He got out the word “close” when the gun at the chief justice’s temple disintegrated as Atomahawk’s atomavision ripped it apart at a subatomic level.

  The word “your” ripped from his throat as the chief justice smiled.

  The word, “eyes” crossed his lips as Atomahawk whirled around, now wearing the very same smile.

  “Shit,” said Retaliator.

  “Language,” said Prime Mover as he floated into the air, flexing Atomahawk’s fingers as if testing to see how well they fit.

  Retaliator reached for the antispace grenade, a small box the size of a deck of cards that could destroy all matter within a three-foot sphere by creating a pocket of alte
rnate physics where the Higgs boson had no mass.

  His fingers never reached his belt before Atomahawk’s impossibly hot fingers closed around his throat and jerked him from his feet.

  “This is more like it,” Prime Mover giggled. “The power of a living sun at my command! I’m going to kill a lot of people in the next sixty minutes, Eric. You, however, will not be one of them. You’ve humiliated me so often, Eric, that I don’t want your misery to ever end, Eric, Eric, Eric! When you learn what I’ve done to—”

  Suddenly Atomahawk jerked backward, gasping as if he’d been stabbed. Retaliator fell from his slack grasp, landing, appropriately enough, on the prone form of Vance Davis, the attorney who’d been prepared to argue Prime Mover’s case.

  Witness floated behind Atomahawk, his ghostly forearm reaching into the radioactive Indian’s back. Retaliator could tell from the position of the boy’s arm that his fingers were closed around Atomahawk’s heart. Prime Mover was getting a full dose of the graveyard touch.

  If Witness could distract Atomahawk for another thirty seconds…

  It took only three seconds for Atomahawk’s reddish skin to flash through every color of the spectrum, then beyond. His skin turned clear as glass. Sparks leapt from the silver buckles on Retaliator’s boots. Witness wailed, then disappeared.

  Atomahawk fell to his knees as his skin returned to its normal hue. He chuckled breathlessly for a few seconds. “I always… suspected… there was an electromagnetic frequency… that could reach the bloody ghoststream,” Prime Mover said, wiping his lips.

  “You sound winded,” said Retaliator.

  “Perhaps I’ll massage your heart and see how you sound,” Prime Mover grumbled.

  “I was going to blame the smoking,” said Retaliator, holding up the pack of unfiltered Camels he’d swapped on Atomahawk’s utility belt. In his mind, he counted down six, five, four,…

  “I’m so sorry, John,” he said, despite the lump in his throat.

  “What are you—”

  Prime Mover never finished his sentence. There was a silent flash. In the aftermath, there was a perfectly concave indention in the marble floor where Atomahawk had knelt.

  He’d just killed his worst enemy and best friend with a single act, but he had no time to contemplate what had happened. The goons in the warehouse, with the helicopters and the high explosives—this had never been their target. In the pit of his stomach, he knew where Prime Mover had sent them.

  Eric Gray, the man who saw things in black and white, sat amid the mound of black cinders that had once been his mansion as pure white clouds the shape of comic book thought balloons drifted in the November sky. He had his mask wadded into a ball in his left hand; the island was completely silent. While the place was technically a crime scene, he had enough pull to allow him these few precious, private moments alone in the remains of the house he’d grown up in.

  Only, as an even darker shadow fell across the charcoal that had once been the hardwood of his living room floor, he realized that this was no longer a private moment.

  “I’m sorry about Nubile,” said She-Devil. “Also… well… you know.”

  “She’ll be back,” he whispered, through a voice wet with tears. “John, too.”

  “I understand it’s hard to let go,” said She-Devil. The outline of her wings and horns were sharply defined as they stretched out before him.

  “She’s not dead,” he said, shaking his head. “We thought she was dead when she was shot. But she was alive, even if her mind was gone. Now her body’s gone. You’ve played this game long enough. No body, no death. That’s how I know Atomahawk will be back, with a story of how he got shunted into another dimension, or backward in time, or whatever. We never stay dead.”

  She-Devil’s shadow horns shook slowly.

  “Eric, there’s a time when hope is healthy, and a point where it’s just a form of self-torture.”

  Retaliator nodded. “I know a thing or two about torture. There’s a pain you can create with despair. And there’s a deeper, darker, more desperate pain you can fuel with hope.”

  Black ash swirled in the chill breeze.

  “Things look bleak now,” said She-Devil. “You paid a high price. But you won. You finally stopped Prime Mover. He’s in hell now. Find comfort in that, if you can.”

  “You know a lot about hell,” said Retaliator.

  She-Devil’s shadow shrugged. He didn’t have the strength to turn his head to face her.

  “So you know the myth of Sisyphus.”

  She-Devil said nothing.

  “Condemned to eternally push a rock up a hill. Every time he reaches the top, the stone rolls right back to the bottom.”

  “I’ve heard the myth,” she said.

  “We go out every week and fight bad guys and save the world,” said Retaliator. “We die. They die. We all come back. We thwart their plans and lock them in prison cells and two months later they’re standing on the Eiffel Tower waving around the latest and greatest doomsday ray and shouting demands. It never ends. It never ends. We get the rock to the top of the hill, and have to watch it roll back to the bottom.”

  “You’re understandably depressed, Eric. You’ve lost your wife and home. You’ve lost your best friend. And now the police are hunting Retaliator for the murder of Atomahawk. But you’ll bounce back. You’ll make it to the top of the hill again. You always do. Maybe this time, the rock will stay put.”

  Eric rolled his mask into a cylinder and kneaded it back and forth in his fists. He swallowed his tears, then said, “You told us that you’d been tasked by Satan to find the most wicked men who ever lived and punish them.”

  She-Devil’s shadow froze.

  His voice dropped to a near whisper as he asked the question that terrified him most. “Is this… is this hell? Am I Sisyphus? Is this how you’ve chosen to punish me?”

  He turned to see her face.

  She was no longer there.

  He dropped his mask, as tears streamed down his cheeks. His hands shook as he unsnapped the pouch on the front of his belt. The pouch held an antique, ivory-handled derringer that had belonged to his great-grandfather. Atomahawk had teased him about keeping it in his belt along with all his high-tech toys and gizmos. If he had to carry a gun, certainly Retaliator could have afforded something with a bit more heft.

  But it doesn’t require that much force to drive a lead slug through the roof of one’s mouth. The steel barrel was cold as ice against his lips, and brought forth the most exquisite and terrifying sense of déjà vu.

  He wondered, when this all began again, if he would remember pulling the trigger.

  The writer of such Marvel comics titles as Wisdom, Captain Britain and MI-13, Dark Reign: Young Avengers, and Black Widow: Deadly Origin, Paul Cornell is perhaps best known for his work on the BBC’s new Doctor Who series, for which he has twice been nominated for the prestigious Hugo Award. He is also the author of the novels Something More and British Summertime, and the creator of Bernice Summerfield, a Doctor Who companion who has gone on to spawn her own series of books, short story anthologies, and audio dramas. A fantastic writer in any form, Cornell gives us a tale that pushes the limits of double identities.

  Secret Identity

  PAUL CORNELL

  Jim Ashton heard the magic explosion. So could all of Mantos. He tried to look surprised. He put down his pint, spun around, looking out across the canal. Pretending he didn’t know what that was.

  “Look at Lois Lane,” said Hugh, sitting beside him. He, typically, hadn’t flinched at the noise.

  “What?” Jim turned back from the window, annoyed at the other man’s grin.

  “Is Chris really going to come out of the loo and sit back down here? Come on. It’s all right. If anyone can keep a secret, this lot can.”

  “You reckon? And,” he quickly added, “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  Hugh lowered his voice. “Chris is the Manchester Guardian. Everyone knows they’re the same bl
oke.”

  Jim found himself wearing a sad smile as the sound of another explosion echoed over the water. “Do they?”

  The Guardian caught the second of the Top Hat’s magic spikes a nanosecond after he’d thrown it, clenched his fist on it, and dumped the energy into the atomic void in his palm. This magic villain really could do anything: change time and space. The first throw had caught him off guard, spun him round in a whiplash of colors. But now he was closing on his opponent, flashing through the air toward him as their enhanced senses calculated the impact—

  He had a second to see the shocked expression on the Top Hat’s face—

  He was there faster.

  His senses were better.

  He deflected the bolt intended for his head up into the sky. He wouldn’t let it hit Canal Street.

  Enough of this! He broke through the Top Hat’s magical shields with one punch.

  He grabbed the magician by the collar and slapped the hat off his head.

  It went spiraling down into the lights of the bars and restaurants along the canal.

  The Top Hat tried to say something, his hands flailing, his expression demanding mercy now that he was powerless. He knew where the Guardian would send him. His eyes reflected the moon.

  The Guardian grabbed him with both hands and spun three times, until he was at maximum magical velocity—

  He released the magician. Straight at the moon.

  The Top Hat blazed a sudden bright line into the stratosphere. A reverse meteor. Faster than escape velocity.

  He’d hit the lunar surface in about three days.

  Without his hat to grant the wishes that gave him his powers, this time it might actually take him a while to escape.

  The Guardian glanced down and used his magical vision to find the hat. A group of students had grabbed it, were laughing about it, trying it on. Gay lads from the Uni, a couple of fag hags with them. They’d been queuing outside one of the bars while watching the battle. The people of Manchester had always watched the magic “hero fights” in their skies, treating them like the weather.