Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight (16 page)

But my childish dream of revenge was not to come to fruition, since by the time I could see straight again, Simple Simon was gone. I couldn’t tell if he’d jumped off the tracks, climbed down, or found some other way to escape, but it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that when I dove down to grab him there was no him to grab. All that was left was four pound cakes tied to the rails, and a sack of various snack cakes lying in the center of the track.

Crap.

I zoomed as high as I could as quickly as I could as the sugar-sweetened bombs all detonated below me. The explosion took out the tracks, the rails, and the El bridge over Frankford Avenue, showering the street below with wreckage and chocolatey frosting.

I looked for Pandora again. She was pushing mightily against the engine of the train but was only barely managing to slow it down. She may have been the strongest girl in the world, but that didn’t mean she was anywhere near as strong as her mentor or anyone else who could conceivably stop a train in its tracks. “More powerful than a locomotive” was not part of the job description of too many of us, and sadly, neither she nor I really qualified in that area.

I kicked my boots into higher-than-high gear and zipped right toward the train. I put my arms against it and added my momentum to Pandora’s, and the train slowed a little bit more. “Why isn’t the conductor slamming on the brakes?” I shouted.

“He’s dead, that’s why. Jellyroll grenade in his sack lunch it looks like. Your guy had this well-planned.”

“Dammit.” Without help from inside, there was no way we were going to be able to stop the train before it plunged through the gaping hole in the tracks up ahead. “Can you get inside?” I shouted to her.

“What?”

“Fly inside and pull the emergency brake. It’s the only hope we have of keeping this train from winding up scattered all over downtown.”

“You go inside. I’ll keep pushing. I’m stronger than you are.” Not a judgment, just a statement of fact.

“Yes, but that’s why you need to pull the brakes. I might not be strong enough to engage them in time.” A blatant lie, but I was banking on her not knowing much about the workings of trains. “I have a plan to slow it down, but I need someone on the brakes to make it work. Don’t ask for details, I don’t have time to explain it.”

She looked at me, her eyes a blend of question and concern, but she obviously trusted me enough not to keep second-guessing me. She zipped upward and swung in a loop toward the window into the control car. I amped up the anti-gravs until they were just short of overloading and pushed with all my might, but the train kept moving forward.

The muscles in my arm screamed at the torture I was subjecting them to. If I kept up this pace, my bones were bound to shatter. Of course, that would be the least of my worries, because if that were to happen, the train would pick up speed and smash right into the rest of me. If I lived through that impact, which was unlikely, I’d only have about a minute of agony to go through before the train and I both fell to our mutual destruction on the street below.

I felt the emergency brakes kick in as Pandora pulled at the lever with all her might. The train slowed but still had more than enough momentum to carry it forward through the gap. The readout on my visor flashed me a warning: the anti-grav system was overloading. “Great,” I muttered to myself. “One more way I’m going to die.”

That’s when my brain finally kicked into full gear. The anti-gravs were talking with my helmet. I had forgotten about the helmet control system. I didn’t need to work the boots with my feet; I could do it through the helmet. And that meant the weakest link in this operation, my fragile human body, wasn’t necessary. I spun through the menus quickly and engaged the controls. My visor flooded with data readouts and command options.

I dropped the power on the anti-gravs to give me a little time and room to operate. I spun around so my boots, not my arms, braced the front of the car, then I undid the fasteners on the boots so they only loosely hung onto my legs.

I could see Pandora through the window, and a look of terror came over her as she realized what I was planning to do. I looked right at her and gave her a quick hand gesture. I had no way of knowing whether she knew what it meant, or thought that I was making one of those stupid “devil” signs that hard-rock poseurs would flash while headbanging but with my thumb outward. If she didn’t get the message that I was signing to her that I loved her, at least I knew what I had said.

I re-engaged the anti-gravs, pushing me off the front of the train for half a second, then with the helmet, I slammed them into reverse as fast as I could, pouring every last bit of their battery power into the front of the train. The force from the anti-gravs pushed the train back, slowing its forward momentum more than I ever could have by pushing myself. Meanwhile, inertia carried me away from the train and through a graceful arc into empty air.

Every bit of gymnastic training I’d gotten from Uncle Jack, the other heroes, and the YMCA kicked in. I arched my back and extended my arms to control my momentum. My plan was to land on one of the ties and recover, standing up in the split second before the train reached me and jumping back into my boots. I needed to time it perfectly. I twisted, rolled, and … fell between the ties, zooming straight down toward the street below.

On the Beach

Your whole life doesn’t flash in front of your eyes right before you die. You’d never have time for all of that. Even though your brain really does speed up when you’re in a situation where you think you’re going to die, making it look like time slows to a crawl, it doesn’t slow enough to see your whole life. Even when you’re just a punk seventeen-year-old who pulled a very boneheaded move on the El tracks, there was way too much experience to go through. So what happens is your brain picks certain strong memories and flashes them before your eyes instead. Sort of like a single track off a “Greatest Hits” collection. The memories chosen for my pre-death entertainment, appropriately enough, centered around Sarah, and one of the times she’d visited me here in the City.

That night when I found myself plunging head-first toward asphalt had been the first time I’d shown Sarah the City the way I thought it looked best, from high above where we could see all the action. But it was hardly the first time I’d shown off my town to her or the other sidekicks. They spent so much time at the mansion with Uncle Jack and me over the years that the other heroes had started joking about Jack having four sidekicks.

My favorite time of all of them would have to be my fifteenth anti-birthday.

You see, no kid who lives in a seaside town and has a birthday in
January
gets to enjoy their celebration properly. It’s obviously much too cold to go to the beach, and most of the stuff that catered to kids is shuttered. Tommy had the brilliant idea of celebrating the day as far from my birthday as humanly possible. That put us right in the middle of July, which just happened to be the height of beach season and perfect for us to go out and have a good time.

We’d started the morning on an amusement pier, but when Rick and I proved incapable of winning some stupid stuffed animal (we didn’t let Tommy try because his super-fast perception would have been cheating, not to mention he’d make the two of us look even worse), we headed out onto the beach. We spent some time sitting on the sand, enjoying the heat, and once she was certain the sun had warmed up the ocean enough, Sarah went for a swim. Rick and I set up a volleyball net and started a game. Tommy, naturally, played on both teams (although we made sure he kept his speed to believable levels just in case anyone was watching). I beat Rick twenty-five to twenty, something I made sure he didn’t forget for the better part of a year. Just as we were taking the net back down, Sarah came out of the water.

I stood, transfixed, as she walked toward us, salt water glistening all over her body. She unwrapped her ponytail and shook the water out of her hair. I marveled at how long her hair was and how beautiful it looked when she let it flow freely like that. It would only be in hindsight, years later, that I realized the full extent of the thoughts that bombarded me upon seeing this vision, but I was determined to commit every single detail of that image of Sarah to memory.

I didn’t get the chance to do that, however, since while I was watching her cross the sand, I felt a sudden, out-of-place breeze and heard a very loud laughter from my two compatriots.

Tommy had pantsed me, right there on the beach.

Worst of all, he had pantsed me while I was wearing a bathing suit, and only a bathing suit.

As soon as I realized what had happened, I dove face-first onto my beach blanket, grabbed it, and rolled quickly to wrap myself up. I turned so red I was certain that if a lifeguard looked at me, he’d rush me off to the first aid shack thinking I had sunstroke.

“You bastard!” I shouted as I pulled myself up, tied the beach blanket as securely around my waist as I could, and worked my bathing suit back up while letting as little as possible be seen. Once I had my pants back on, I took off like a madman after Tommy. I didn’t have a chance of catching him (because even when he restricted himself to normal speeds he was pretty damn fast) but secretly hoped that in his haste he’d trip over something and I’d get the chance to beat the shit out of him. He was laughing, Rick was laughing, and in spite of myself, I was laughing. Funny, now that I think about it, I don’t believe Sarah had been laughing, even though I got the distinct impression she’d been enjoying herself.

Just when I was starting to enjoy that memory, I blacked out, and I assumed that meant I’d hit the pavement. It didn’t hurt nearly as badly as I’d expected.

***

“Why, Sergeant Simpson, I didn’t know you cared.”

When I regained consciousness, I was pleased to find every bone in my body wasn’t broken. Yeah, I had bruises and severely strained muscles reasserting their presences, but nothing I hadn’t encountered during the fight itself, or from pushing the train. I was less pleased to find Sergeant Simpson, the guy who had escorted me off school grounds a week before, staring down at me, but I figured it was a small price to pay to not have gone
splat
. Unless, of course, I had gone
splat,
and the face of Simpson staring down at me was proof I’d wound up in Hell.

“Slick move, Knight,” Simpson said with more than a little admiration as he helped me out of the rescue net and down to the street with him. “Good thing we’d managed to get the net set up before you took your dive.” Whew. That meant it was probably the shock of the drop and maybe the possible concussion that had blacked me out, not the impact. Of course, it meant this time it was the cops who’d saved
my
life, not the other way around. Who knew if I was ever going to hear the end of it?

“The train. Did it—?”

“Your trick with your flying boots slowed it down, and your girlfriend got the brakes engaged. It stopped with just inches to spare.”

Girlfriend? He had to be talking about Pandora. “Where is she?”

“She’s been helping evacuate the passengers. Handy to have someone who can fly for that kind of job, isn’t it?” He grinned down at me. “I’ll lay even money she’s pissed at you. You know what it’s like. If you die, they never forgive you. If you live, they never forgive you for not dying when they were so convinced you were going to.”

I smirked, not that he could see it through the visor. “Sounds to me like you’re a married man.”

“Are you kidding? I know better than to put a wife through all this.”

“Man after my own heart.” I managed to find my way to my feet without falling on my ass. Maybe it wasn’t a concussion after all, just my own natural stupidity that had me dizzy. “Any injuries on the train? Other than the conductor, I mean.”

“Nope. Looks like you two sure saved the day this time. Getting to be a habit with you, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Some habits are too hard to break.” I dusted myself off and looked up at the train. A ladder from the fire engine leaned against one set of windows, with passengers slowly being lowered down, one at a time. Another set of windows stood wide open and Pandora slipped through them, carrying two children under her arms. She drifted down toward what looked like a staging center for the rescue operation, but when she saw I was up and about, she changed course and came over to check on me.

“Are you hurt?” Her tone held more than a tinge of annoyance, but I was glad to hear it nonetheless.

“I’ll live.”

She smiled as she put the two kids down. They immediately ran over to me and gave me a hug that nearly knocked me off my feet. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” they both shouted, and then gave Pandora the same treatment. She smiled at them, and so did I, even though they couldn’t see it. One thing I will say about this job is you never get bored of that kind of stuff, kids showering you with gratitude for saving them. Sometimes it’s the only reason some of us heroes keep at it.

Pandora turned to Simpson. “Sergeant, can you spare me for the rest of the evacuation? It looks like your team has everything under control here.”

“I think so. Get this guy home before he really hurts himself.” Simpson called another cop over and gestured to the children. “Murphy, take these two over with the other passengers. I’m sure their folks are worried.” The patrolman nodded, then took the kids by the hand and led them away. Simpson turned his attention back to us. “I really don’t know how to thank you two.”

“It’s all in a day’s work,” I said without a bit of irony in my voice. “Anything we can do to help.” Pandora scooped me up like I was one of the riders she’d just ferried off the train and was ready to take off when Simpson stopped us.

“Hold on a moment, Knight.” He ran over to his cruiser and popped the trunk. He pulled out something long and brought it over to us. “Here, I’ve been holding onto this since … well, you know. Figured it would be safe in case I ran into you again.” He handed me my sword.

This time, only my jaw plunged toward the pavement, not my whole body. “I don’t know how to thank you, Sergeant. This—”