Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight (21 page)

“Yeah. Pity you didn’t take me out when you could. Would have really cut down on the body count.”

Tommy didn’t catch my remark or at least chose to ignore it. “Zip actually thought he’d be safe confronting me. He didn’t realize I’d learned more tricks in the years I’d had my speed than he had in all the years he had his. Too bad he had to learn the hard way. Oh, by the way, thanks for showing me the pile you’d thrown his hard drive into yesterday. I can’t believe you didn’t check his e-mail.”

“What are you talking about?” Zip’s e-mail? Damn. I
hadn’t
bothered to go through it. I was so busy looking for a video file that I didn’t think about the obvious places to look for clues. What had I missed?

“Zip’s e-mail. Turns out he’d had a long, very disgusting, correspondence with your friend and mine, Doctor Lawrence McBride. A lot of photographs shared between them, including some fascinating ones of the three of us. I might never have discovered that if you hadn’t given me the idea of going through his hard drive myself. Oh, and if he hadn’t been stupid enough to not clean out his mailbox. So I guess that brings us around to another one of your ‘whys.’ Any more questions?”

“Yes. Just one.” One more answer, that’s all I wanted. The big one. “You still haven’t told me why you killed my Uncle Jack.”

Tommy laughed. This laughter seemed a lot nastier and hurtful, not the kind of joyful laugh I’d grown to expect from him. “Oh, Bobby. You never figured that out?”

“No,” I admitted. “I can’t figure out your motives for doing it.”

“That’s because I didn’t
have
any motives for doing it. In fact, if you want to be technical, I
didn’t
do it.”

It All Ends Here

“One of the nastier side effects of super speed,” Tommy said, “is that you get bored. Very bored, very quickly. The human brain needs constant stimulation, and when you can process information as fast as I can, stimuli don’t last very long. That’s one reason I hung out with you three so often. You amused me. You provided the stimulation I needed.

“The day the Scarlet Knight died, I was the only sidekick with nothing to do. You were away looking at one of those stupid parade of colleges, Rick told me he had other plans, and Sarah was off on some diplomatic trip or other with Clytemnestra for some weird reason, so the fastest boy in the world had time on his hands.” He rubbed those hands gleefully, as if punctuating the thought. “Like I said, when time moves as slowly as it does for me, having that much time becomes more than a little annoying. So what is the poor, little fast boy to do? The same thing he does every other time he’s gotten bored in the past few months. He goes off for a few visits to different cities, pulling stunts and crappy little jobs as the Man in Black.”

I almost sympathized with Tommy. Being a hero, even a sidekick, was a real adrenaline rush—lots of speed, lots of action, lots of thrills. Even growing up in a seaside town with tons of thrill rides on its boardwalk, I never really went in for roller coasters. That sort of thing just seems so empty when you’re putting your life on the line every night fighting for truth, justice, and yadda yadda yadda. The months I’d hung up the costume to play diligent schoolboy had been quite a letdown. I was an action junkie who’d gone cold turkey, but the rewards I thought I’d get out of my sacrifice kept me plodding onward.

I tried picturing what that must have been like for Tommy. Imagine if he went through the withdrawal I’d felt over a period of months after just one
minute
without action. No wonder he went batshit. It’s hard to admit this, but if I were in his position I probably would have, too.

“I was starting to realize how much fun I could have as a villain,” he went on, “and decided to have myself a ball. As I went along, pulling job after job, I started pushing my luck little by little. Eventually, I decided to risk pulling a job in Harbor City. You see, I’d avoided cities protected by the members of the Justice Federation up to that point, but something told me that if I tried pulling a job where I stood the risk of getting caught, shit, I’d probably get the biggest thrill I’d ever had! It’s no fun without danger.”

“Uh huh.” Tommy was as sick and screwed up as any of the villains I’d gone up against, and I knew then there was no reason he could give me for what he did that I would understand. That I could forgive him for. But while he’d been talking, I’d been forming a plan. I gently brushed a toe up against one of the control buttons in my sneaker and urged him on. “So why Harbor City?”

“Oh, come on, Bobby.
Think
. The Knight was the least threat to me. Do you think I would be stupid enough to go up against
Paragon
? Other than Zip, he was about the only person who could move fast enough to catch me. Prism, Morgaine, and Clytemnestra might not have been able to catch up with me, but they could out-strategize me. Or at least, they could have back then. And with you out of action, you two wouldn’t be able to outflank me. So I started pulling jobs. I got through a couple of minor holdups and a breaking-and-entering before my luck ran out.”

“You decided to rob one of my Uncle Jack’s warehouses.”

“Can you believe it? I didn’t even pick one with anything worth
stealing
! So there I am with a choice to make. I could fight, which I didn’t really want to do. I could give myself up, ditto on the whole
do not want
thing. Or I could run. I mean, let’s face it, I’m good at running. Hell, as far as most people are concerned, running is the only thing I
am
good at.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘only,’ but go on.”

“So in the time it took me to consider my options—and believe me, I didn’t need that much time—I start hearing this stupid voice in my head. And I start to feel like my stomach is going round and round, like a Tasmanian Devil. I couldn’t believe it. My conscience was actually trying to get to me. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, we’d all been force fed the whole ‘Greater Good’ load of crap by the heroes we’d trained under. Besides, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a hero’s sidekick any more, not after I’d seen how thrilling the other side could be, so why would I care if I lost my costume over it? I figured I’d had my fun, and maybe the time had come to face the consequences.”

I didn’t know how much of this to believe. Thinking back on our time together, I couldn’t think of any time Tommy out and out lied to me, even though there had to be a few. Why would he lie about something this big and this important to me? Anyway, it didn’t matter whether he was telling the truth or talking out his ass; I wanted to hear the end of the story. “So what did you do?”

“Simple. I put my hands up in the universal sign for surrender, then reached up to pull off my mask. Boy, Bobby, you should have seen the look on your Uncle Jack’s face.”

“Yeah, I can picture it.” I could, too.

“So after I unmasked myself, I figured I’d get a lecture, or at least some kind of statement of disbelief. You know, something like the whole
‘you?!’
cliché. But the only thing I heard from the Knight was a grunt, then a scream.”

“What?”

“The Knight clutched at his chest and doubled over, then collapsed to the floor. I panicked, having absolutely no idea what to do. I guess I hesitated just a little too long, because by the time I decided to intervene, he’d stopped breathing.

“No way. A
heart attack
?
Uncle Jack died of a freaking
heart attack
?” Heart attack had been the cover story Mystery had worked up for Uncle Jack’s sudden demise. Who would have known he’d really guessed the truth?

“Yep. Massive coronary. I swear to God, Bobby, he didn’t even know what hit him. He was dead before he hit the ground. Even if I’d run for help, it wouldn’t have done any good. Believe me, I didn’t mean for him to die.”

Did I believe him? I had no reason to. Then again, I had no reason not to. It would be nice to think I’d been wrong in assuming my ex-best friend had murdered Uncle Jack, making me an orphan all over again. I sighed. “I believe you, Tommy. But why stab him with the sword? Why not just say he’d had a heart attack?”

“I thought it over. There would have been too many questions to answer if I had. What was I doing there? Why was he confronting me? That sort of thing. Especially if I used the Knight’s panic button to bring in the big guns, they’d all want to know what I was up to, and I was starting to change my mind about turning myself in. Besides, who ever heard of a superhero dying of a
heart attack
?
That’s not how heroes are supposed to die. We’re supposed to go down in battle, strong and brave to the end and shit. I liked your Uncle Jack. I really did. And I thought he deserved better than that. So I gave him the heroic end he deserved. I made it look like I’d disarmed him, snatched his breastplate, and stabbed him with his own sword. Then I triggered his panic button and high-tailed it out faster than I’d ever run before. I’d been home for a whole minute before I got a call from Zip to let me know something had happened.”

Throughout Tommy’s confession, I’d been drifting upward very slowly, about an inch every second. Tommy had kept up with me, matching my rise almost unthinkingly. Then I gradually started accelerating, and once again he matched me. By the time he’d finished his story we were somewhere around sixty stories off the ground. I didn’t have an actual plan in mind; all I knew was I wanted to get him as far away from the innocent people on the ground as I could. Also, if we ended up fighting I wanted as much reaction time I could get and as few obstacles around as possible. And considering what the likely outcome of the two of us tussling in mid-air was going to be, I didn’t want any chance of surviving the fall. Falling from sixty stories meant there was an extremely tiny chance I might live through it, but probably wouldn’t be very thankful I’d done so. If the odds were that I wasn’t going to walk away from the confrontation, I didn’t want to risk ending up a big bag of ground beef being kept alive by machines. Besides, if I
couldn’t
stop Tommy, Sarah would probably be the next one to jump into the fray and get slaughtered in our quixotic efforts. If I was successful, she would live. If I failed, she would die. If she wasn’t going to make it out of this alive, there was no way in Hell I wanted to, either. So I kept inching higher and higher, and Tommy did the same.

“Where do we go from here, Tommy?” It was time to take the initiative. “You can’t honestly think you’re going to get away with all this.”

“Why not?” Tommy’s smugness made me want to deck him all over again. “Everyone who could have stood in our way is gone or out of commission. The whole old guard. The four of us can start over as the next generation of heroes. We’ll carry the torch, pick up the burden, all that crap. But this time, we’ll be able to run things our way. No more sacrificing everything; this time, we’re going to get the reward we deserve. I’m not just talking about praise and empty gratitude, either.”

“What?” I asked while trying to hold back a chuckle. Tommy’s idea was so screwed up it was laughable. “Charge people for saving them?”

“Why not? People pay taxes to fund the police, the fire department, and the military to keep them safe, don’t they? Well, let them pay a superhero tax, to make sure we’re there when they need us.”

I couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. He wanted to run the Justice Federation as a protection racket. I didn’t need all those years of hero training to tell me that was not the way things were supposed to work and that I wanted no part of this brave new world he was planning. “Clytemnestra will never go for that. Rick and Sarah won’t, either.”

“Sure they will. Rick’s as sick of the whole hero game as I am. He’s wanted out for ages but could never bring himself to step aside. Well, now he won’t have to. He’ll be able to keep doing what we’ve been trained to do, and this time, make a comfortable living at it. Sarah may not like it at first, but she’ll come around. And as for Clytemnestra?” He opened his fist to reveal Prism’s necklace. “If she doesn’t like it, then she can follow her friend Paragon where he went.”

My stomach fell. This wasn’t Tommy talking anymore. I still didn’t know what had made him snap, and maybe I never would. Had what he’d found out about Mystery and Zip made him that cold? No, it went back further than that. Maybe it had been watching Uncle Jack die. Maybe it was something from running around playing bad guy. Or maybe it was something even deeper-seeded, something fundamental that the rest of us had been too blind to see. Whatever had happened to him, it had made him unrecognizable. This wasn’t my best friend brandishing Prism’s necklace, holding my Uncle Jack’s sword, and wearing my boots. This was …

Another one of those bags of cement thudded in my brain.
My boots.
I had to keep him talking while I tried to remember the sequence. “And you know I won’t go for that either, Tommy.”

He looked genuinely hurt. “Bobby, you’ve always been the best of the four of us. We need you.”

I cycled through the menus. Where was it? And would it even work? Keep talking. “I’m sorry, Tommy. I can’t let you do this.”

“I won’t let you stop me, Bobby.”

There. There was the menu. Now what was the command? “You don’t want to kill me, Tommy.”

“I didn’t want to kill Prism. Or Mr. Zip. Or Mystery. Okay, I
did
want to kill Mystery, but it doesn’t change my point. The point is … ”

Before he made his point, I found what I had been looking for. In the menu for anti-grav control on my visor, I’d pulled up the status screen. The visor was communicating with his boots but not with my sneakers, since I hadn’t reprogrammed the system to deal with them yet. I went back to the menu, highlighted “reverse polarity,” and as I whispered a plea for forgiveness, I triggered it.

Quicker than even Tommy could react, the anti-gravs in his boots switched modes and instead of pushing away from the ground, pulled hard toward it. Tommy fell faster than a rock as twice the normal pull of gravity yanked him out of the air and straight down.

***

Tommy survived the fall. More than survived, it was like he’d hopped off a stoop instead of plunging somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy stories straight to the pavement. He’d managed to vibrate his arms enough to create a warm air pocket underneath him that pushed up, somewhat cushioning his fall. But while it had softened his landing, it had not prevented it, and the anti-grav boots kept him firmly fastened to the ground.