Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight (2 page)

“Whoa!” Rick gasped as he took in the enormity of the base. “The Knight had a pretty sweet setup here! It sure puts Mystery’s digs to shame.”

“You’re just being modest.”

“No,” Tommy said. “I’ve seen Mystery’s lair. He’s right.”

“This is really where you operated out of?” Sarah drifted down into the well of the operation, as if she were drawn to become one with it in some kind of technological ecstasy. “This is beautiful. I wish we had this kind of base.”

“Are you kidding?” I chuckled. “Your boss operates out of a Greek Temple.”

“Yeah,” Sarah shot back. “A Greek Temple in
Buffalo
. Do you know how
cold
that kind of place gets? Of course, the cold doesn’t bother Clytemnestra, being supernatural and shit, but I freeze my ass off most of the year. Especially in that outfit she makes me wear.”

Rick laughed. “Do what I did. Change it. You remember the costume Mystery gave me at the beginning?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah. Including the Speedo and booties. I think you took down more bad guys with laughter than with your fists.”

Rick playfully mimed punching me, and I playfully ducked. He likewise dissolved into laughter. “I swear, there’s got to be something wrong with a man who makes a teenage boy dress like that. I kept complaining about it, but he never listened. So one night I showed up for patrol wearing jet-black sweatpants. Said it fit the whole ‘Shadow’ image better than making me look like a reject from the high school swim team. He wasn’t too pleased, but the next day he arranged for a more … ‘appropriate’ costume for me.”

“I might try that. Clytemnestra is usually pretty easy to reason with. Just because
she
looks like a bodybuilding hooker in her costume doesn’t mean
I
have to. And
none
of you are going to tell her I said that.”

“Don’t look at me,” I said, making a “zipping my lips” motion. “I would never say anything to make her angry. I’m not one for grievous bodily harm when I’m on the receiving end.”

“So this is really where all the magic happened, huh?” I could tell Rick was still impressed. I’d never seen Mister Mystery’s hideout (as paranoid as he is, I’m sure if he could’ve found a way to keep
himself
from seeing it, he probably would have), but I’d heard it was a sweet operation. Of course, it helped that Uncle Jack was pretty much the Justice Federation’s resident engineer and “gadgeteer,” as he used to refer to himself, so he tended to have the best stuff. He had invented the teleporter for those of us who couldn’t move faster than the speed of sound, those special glasses that let Mister Mystery see in the dark, and a lot of cool gizmos the heroes couldn’t figure out how they’d ever fought crime without. It stood to reason that his workshop and base of operations would seem cool to the other sidekicks. Hell, it
was
cool, even if I needed to be away from it to appreciate it.

“Yep, this was the Scarlet Knight’s hidden base. Seems kind of strange coming back now. It’s so quiet.”

Rick popped open a beer. “Well, it won’t be quiet for long.” He tossed me a can. “We still need to celebrate your birthday, dude. Drink up.”

“How the hell did you get beer?” Rick’s grief-warming gift confused me. Those of us in the sidekick business tended to be pretty straight-laced, even guys like Rick and me who’d started out on the wrong side of things. This was unlike him. “You’re only a year and a half older than me.”

“I’m old enough to buy it in Canada.”

“Yeah, but we’re nowhere
near
Canada. And the only way you could’ve gone up to Canada after the funeral, bought the beer, and gotten back here is … ” I spun to look at Tommy, who was blushing and had that “aw-shucks” look, like a kid caught with his hand in an entire bakery, not just a cookie jar. “Of course.” I spun back to Rick. “You made Tommy an accessory to your crime. I don’t even want to know how he managed to carry you, since you weigh enough for two of him.”

“Not when I’m wearing your anti-grav boots. I asked Tommy to sneak in and borrow your pair for the trip. Hope you don’t mind.”

“You could’ve asked.”

“And ruined the surprise? Come on. Besides, I’m sure there’s some loophole in the law that lets you get wasted on your birthday if you buried your foster father that morning.”

I was sure there wasn’t but didn’t feel like arguing with Rick. After all, it seemed like he had my best interests, or at least my sanity, at heart.

***

They say you never forget your first beer. That’s probably because you’re never, no matter how long you live, ever going to forget your first hangover.

I woke up, sprawled on the floor, with a very loud fire alarm echoing in the empty space between my ears while a souped-up paint-stirring machine did its best to separate my left wrist from my body.

“Dude.”

Whoever was calling for my help was going to have to wait until I managed to free myself from the Sherwin-Williams demon, and then put out the fire. That’s what heroes do, right?

“Dude!” The plaintive cry came again, a little closer this time. Was the person attached to that voice running toward me? Was some horrible beast pursuing them? Was it connected with whoever set the fire? If only I could get my wrist away from …

“DUDE!” someone with super-voice powers yelled at three hundred decibels, trying to deafen me (the fiend!). “IT’S THE WATCH!”

Watch? What about a watch? I had a watch. I painfully pulled myself toward consciousness.

“BOB! YOUR SIGNAL WATCH IS GOING OFF!”

It was Rick. That’s right; he was in the base with me. So were Tommy and Sarah. Memories of the beer came flooding back, and it all made sense. Now I knew why people coming off a bender say they’ll never drink again.

Wait. My watch was going off? That was bad. It contains a special hypersonic signaling device, just like the other sidekicks and all of the members of the Justice Federation carry. An emergency signal sent from Federation HQ, or from a hero in trouble, would make everyone’s device beep and vibrate like a cell phone but much louder and more persistent. The signal devices all tie in with the network of teleporters each member keeps in their base (and a few other safe locations), so when they were activated, we could all be zapped to a specific place. In short, a signal watch (or other accessory, like Sarah’s necklace) going off meant, “trouble.” In long, it meant, “get your ass here immediately.”

“Shit.” I scrambled to turn it off. “Did I manage to activate it somehow in my sleep? Is everyone going to swarm here, thinking someone’s attacking? How can I … ?”

“You didn’t set it off,” Tommy said. “Because if you had, ours would be going nuts, telling us to get here.”

“Well, maybe because you’re already here, the things didn’t bother … ” Slowly but relentlessly, like a snail trying to eat a rhino, the key phrase in Tommy’s remark came into focus. “Wait. Yours isn’t going off?”

“Nope. Rick?”

“Not mine, either. Sarah?”

“Not a peep.”

“That’s weird. Anything important enough to summon one of us would have to be so big that everyone would be needed, especially if they felt the need to summon a sidekick. And if they were calling in an
inactive
sidekick, it must be something just north of the end of the world as we know it.” I shook my watch. “You think it’s malfunctioning?”

“Can we take that chance? Maybe ours are malfunctioning, and yours isn’t,” Rick said. “Can your teleporter take all of us, just in case? If our signals can’t tell it where to send us … ”

“This place is one of the Federation’s emergency evacuation points, in case everyone needs to bug out of somewhere in a hurry. The whole room is a teleporter pad.” I ran to the closet where my Squire costume was; Uncle Jack had kept one here in good condition, even after I’d stopped adventuring. I pulled on the bulletproof, chainmail shirt (another of Uncle Jack’s wonderful creations) and grabbed my spare boots, since Rick had apparently never returned the ones he’d had Tommy borrow.

I spun around. “You guys have your costumes—” Tommy and Sarah had already changed, and Rick was lacing his boots. Changing clothes lightning fast is essential in this business.

“Grab hold, everyone.” Shadow grabbed one of my arms, Zipper, the other. Pandora—in a move I would’ve been able to appreciate if it weren’t for the chance we’d all be teleporting into a battle scene—threw her arms around my waist. “Here we go.”

I pushed the “emergency teleport” button on my watch, and the teleporter activated. The four of us were pulled apart, atom-by-atom, and flung across the space-time continuum to whatever location had been encoded into the activation signal.

Yes, it hurts as much as it sounds, but it’s over quick, and you get used to it after a while. Besides, it did have one nice side effect—it didn’t transmit the toxins and other hangover crud flowing through my bloodstream, which meant my head wouldn’t be in total agony when we landed. Well, unless some bad guy hit me over the head with a telephone pole or something.

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

It took a moment or two to get oriented after I was slammed back together. I spun around, taking in the scene, listening for explosions or screaming—anything that might give me a clue about where the vicious battle between a bunch of heroes and one of our many nemeses was. But the only thing I heard was a soft, whooshing hum. As my brain caught up with my senses (not always an easy thing to do) our location, and situation, became clearer.

We were in a huge, empty hall constructed of some kind of industrial metal but with no obvious bolts or welding joints. It looked as if the metal had grown into this huge, cavernous room. Along the walls stood a row of statues and mannequins with bright, garish costumes and a series of trophies mounted between them. It was a display that left a very lasting impression, and I recognized it with barely a glance.

“What’s going on?” Tommy asked. “Where’s the battle?” He might be the fastest teen in the world, but he wasn’t always the swiftest, if you get what I mean.

“There is no battle, Zipper,” Rick said, relaxing from his battle-ready stance. “There’s no emergency. We’re in HQ.”

“HQ? As in the headquarters of the Justice Federation?”

“Got it in one.”

“I don’t understand,” I mused. “Why have we been summoned to HQ?”

“
We
haven’t been summoned to HQ, Squire,” Rick said with a hint of a sneer in his voice. “You have.”

“Me? Only me?”

Of course,” Sarah said. “That’s why only
your
watch went off. They summoned you, and we wound up coming along for the ride.”

“But why would they summon me? And why only me?”

“Maybe,” Rick said as he pointed to the large double doors at the end of the hall, “you ought to go and ask them.”

“Don’t you mean ‘we’?”

Rick shook his head. “It’s you they want. They didn’t know we were with you last night, so they couldn’t have wanted all of us.”

“No way. We’re all going. I’m not walking in there alone. Hell, I’ve never gone into that room alone.” The three of them glanced at each other, then nodded. We walked the rest of the way to the doors together, and I lifted my palm to the big sensor beside the doors. It scanned me, confirmed my identity, and beeped softly. The doors slid apart, slowly and silently, like they were about to reveal the super prize on some cosmic game show. As soon as the opening was wide enough, I lifted my head high (whatever I was walking toward, I was going toward it with dignity, thank you) and walked through.

***

You ever see one of those old “nuclear war between America and Russia” movies from the 1980s? The ones that have those gigantic NORAD rooms deep underneath a mountain with zillions of high-definition screens showing maps of every inch of the earth and giant computer terminals? Imagine a huge, round space with three of those rooms crammed together, all assembled by an architect with a fetish for polished chrome and an IT guy whose cousin owned a discount warehouse stuffed with flat-panel touch screens. HQ was even buried deep underneath a mountain, although only Paragon (who hollowed out the space and put in its teleporter system working from Uncle Jack’s blueprints) knew exactly which mountain. That should give you an idea of what HQ was like, but it still isn’t the whole picture.

Down in the very center of the sunken room was a huge, round table with seven large chairs. All but one was occupied by members of the Justice Federation; the empty chair belonged to the Scarlet Knight.

“Squire,” Paragon said in that “Zeus up on the mountain” voice he liked to use. “Welcome. Please, come down.”

As I walked down the winding ramp, the heroes in the pit realized I wasn’t alone.

“Pandora. Shadow. Zipper,” a regal, female voice hissed. “We don’t remember summoning you.”

“They were with me when my signal watch went off, Auntie Clytemnestra. We had no way of knowing it wasn’t an emergency, so they came along in case there was trouble. They meant no disrespect.”

“And I assume
you
mean no disrespect by calling me ‘Auntie’ when we’re conducting official business?”

I blushed, but Morgaine came to my defense. “Oh, relax, Clytemnestra. The boy may not have a father or mother, but he’s got more uncles and aunts than he knows what to do with. All the kids do. I don’t think any of us should be offended if they want to show affection when there are no civilians around. Please, Bobby,” Morgaine gestured to the empty space, “come on down here. We want to talk with you. You others come on down, too. You should all be here for this. If that’s all right with everyone, that is?”

Morgaine has a voice like chocolate-coated gummy bears and could prove very persuasive when she wanted, even without using her magic, so what little resistance there was to the other sidekicks joining in melted quickly.

I made my way toward the table, and the others followed close behind. As I stepped off the ramp, Morgaine ran up and gave me a gripping hug. She wasn’t the biggest woman in the world, but she compensated for it in her power and ferocious emotions. Annoy her enough, and nothing would save you. And if she wanted to show affection, she would. Her arms barely wrapped around my back, and her head didn’t quite rest on my shoulder, but she squeezed so tight I nearly wound up an inch taller. “Bobby, I’m so sorry. How are you holding up?”