The Sidekicks Initiative Read online

  The gunman’s face twisted into a snarl. “You hit the alarm? Aw, you dumb… You got five seconds to empty the money into the bag, or I kill this kid, then I kill his dad, then I kill everyone else in this shithole store. Five.”

  “Please! No, please!” Sam whimpered.

  “Daddy?”

  “Four.”

  Behind the counter, Clarice rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

  “Three. Better hurry the fuck up, Lady Godzilla.”

  There were a series of bleeps as Clarice keyed in a code. The register remained resolutely shut.

  “Oh shit,” she groaned.

  “Two!”

  “Open the register! Give him the money!” Sam yelped.

  “Once the alarm’s been tripped, the registers go on lockdown,” Clarice explained. “I can’t!”

  “Bullshit. One!”

  Sam heard Corey cry. It cut through all other sound, silencing the world. He felt it, then, something he hadn’t felt in years. Something he’d kept locked up deep down. A slithering, like snakes moving through his brain. His dirty secret.

  “Leave my son alone!”

  “Zero!”

  The robber’s finger tightened on the trigger. The weapon squished wetly, then slipped from his grip. It landed on the floor with a splurt, the gray metal now a yellow semi-solid on the dirty floor.

  For a while, everyone stared at it, nobody saying anything. The sunshine-colored sludge was still vaguely gun-shaped, although around half of it had spattered across the scuffed lino when it had hit.

  It was Clarice who eventually broke the silence. “Dude, was your gun made of butter?”

  The robber raised his eyes from the firearm-turned-dairy product, his expression alternating between amazement and terror. Stepping back, he raised a finger to his ear.

  “He’s active,” he whispered, and then the doors flew open, the front window smashed, and a SWAT team was suddenly swarming up the aisles.

  Sam sobbed with relief, pulling Corey in close. “It’s OK, Core. It’s OK. It’s over. Nobody’s going to hurt us. We’re safe. We’re OK.”

  He stared defiantly at the robber, wanting to see the moment the bastard was brought to justice. To Sam’s surprise, the man stepped aside, making room for a couple of the SWAT guys to sweep past him, their guns trained on Sam.

  “Down on the floor! Hands where we can see them!”

  Sam frowned. “Huh? No, it wasn’t… I’m not…”

  “Down, down, down!” roared one of the SWAT guys, so aggressively that Sam instinctively dropped to one knee.

  “Daddy? What’s happening?” Corey squeaked.

  “It’s OK, Core. It’s just a misunderstanding. That’s all. These are the good guys. They’re here to help us, OK? They just made a mistake. There’s nothing to worry…”

  And then something sharp stabbed into the side of Sam’s neck. He felt a rush of cold fire fill his throat and flood his brain, and then the floor came up to meet him, and the fluorescent glow of the store became an inky well of darkness.

  And the only sound was the frantic screaming of his five-year-old son growing steadily fainter and more distant.

  Chapter Three

  EIGHTY-ONE HOURS EARLIER…

  Absorbo had never been one of the team’s big hitters. Not really. Sure, he could take one hell of a beating, and then return it with interest in the form of kinetic energy blasts, but he’d never been up there with the greats.

  That didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered now. Not his reputation, not his pride, not even his life.

  Especially not that last one.

  The station’s integrity was holding, but the screeching alarms and the groans from the Durium hull told him this wouldn’t be the case for long. It was supposed to be the strongest metal in the multiverse—essentially unbreakable—and the bulkheads had been constructed from it in the Hellfire forges of Lady Demonstrous herself.

  And yet, the station was on the brink of collapsing. The unbreachable walls were about to give way, and no amount of absorption ability would save him from the cold yawning chasm of space.

  Absorbo ran. There was nothing else for it. He barreled through the station’s labyrinth of corridors, past smoke-spewing engine rooms and armories containing some of the most powerful weapons in existence.

  He didn’t bother to collect any. There were no guns or blades or energy whips that could save him now. There was nothing that could stop what was about to happen. All he could hope for was to get out a warning. To send a message to the unsuspecting world below. Apologize for failing them. Urge them to hold their loved ones close while they waited for their horrible, inevitable end.

  His breath came in heavy, heaving gasps. Prior to a full rebranding by a very persuasive PR company, he’d been known as ‘The Chunk,’ and considered one of North America’s lesser heroes.

  He’d shaved off some weight since the makeover—a couple of hundred pounds or so—but he was still so far away from athletic he wasn’t even in the same hemisphere. He’d never been able to run very fast or very far, but the devil was chomping at his heels now, and no force on Earth or off it was going to stop him reaching the communications station.

  With the sirens screaming and the indestructible walls collapsing behind him, Absorbo, last survivor of a once-great alien race, ran for his life, and for the lives of the seven billion people far, far below.

  Chapter Four

  Sam jerked awake. The sudden movement made him roll sideways off the narrow bed he found himself lying on. He tried to throw his hands out to break his fall, but they were cuffed behind him. For the second time in recent memory, his face hit the floor.

  With some difficulty, he twisted himself into a vaguely upright position, his legs spread out in front of him, his back propped up against the sturdy steel bed frame. A single metal door stood across from where he sat, surrounded on both sides by whitewashed walls made of heavy cinder blocks.

  “Hello?” he called. The effort of it made his head spin, although the falling onto his face thing probably had some part to play in that, too. “Is anyone there?”

  A sudden thought cut through the fuzziness. “Where’s my son? Where’s Corey?”

  “Your son is fine,” a voice told him, hissing faintly with speaker static. It was a man’s voice. New York accent. Brooklyn-ish, Sam thought, although this was a complete guess based on nothing whatsoever, as he’d never been to New York in his life.

  “He’s with his mother and step-father,” the man assured him.

  “They’re not married,” Sam caught himself saying. He admonished himself with a tut and a scowl. “I mean… How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “She told me to say, ‘We’re not happy about the hot dogs,’” the voice continued. It was followed by a series of light crunches, like the person speaking was eating something. Sure enough, when he continued, his voice was a little muffled by whatever he had crammed in there. “Asked me to really stress the ‘we.’ That mean anything?”

  Sam nodded slowly. “Eyeballs and anuses,” he muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes. No. I mean… I believe you,” Sam said. He looked around the cell and spotted a small black device, not much larger than a pen, fixed into a corner near the ceiling. A camera, he assumed. He shot it a pleading look. “You’ve got the wrong guy. There’s been a mistake.”

  More crunching. More chewing.

  “There’s no mistake, Sam.”

  Sam stiffened. “How do you know my name?” he whispered.

  “Well, it was on your driver’s license for one thing.”

  Sam relaxed. “Oh. Yeah. That makes sense.”

  “Also, we’ve been tracking you for the past twenty years.”

  It took a moment for what the man had said to fully register.

  “Wait, what?”

  “We know all there is to know about you, Sam. Everything. Hell, we know things even you don’t know.”

  “What are you talking
about?” Sam asked. A hazy memory of every TV cop show he’d ever seen wafted into his head. “I want a lawyer. And a phone call. I want to phone my lawyer.”

  The voice laughed. “Sorry, pal. This isn’t that kind of place,” it said.

  Sam tried to stand, using the bed to support himself, but his legs and arms were heavy. So heavy. And the door was so far away, and getting further by the second.

  “Night night, Sam,” the walls whispered. “See you on the other side.”

  Sam blinked.

  Technically, he winked, as both eyes moved independently, closing and opening again in sequence rather than both at the same time, but he was in no condition to split hairs.

  “Huh?”

  His voice caught him off guard. He jumped a little in his plastic chair and craned his neck to see who had spoken. When he saw no one, he blinked sequentially again, frowned for several seconds at a spot on the wall that appeared to be identical to all the others, then nodded a little drunkenly.

  He could, if he tried hard enough, remember entering the room through the single door on the otherwise featureless wall. He had been carried by those things. You know the ones.

  He clicked his fingers a few times, searching for the right word.

  “Legs,” he said aloud.

  This took him by surprise, and he began the process of searching for whoever had spoken again, once more to no avail.

  The blinking thing was bothering him. It should probably, given the circumstances, have been near the bottom of his list of priorities, but the way his eyes were refusing to fall into step annoyed him greatly. He muttered uncomplimentary things about them and then spent a good three or four minutes forcing them to behave themselves.

  By the time he’d broken them in, the lightheaded drunkenness had become a heavy-handed throbbing pain at the base of his skull. In hindsight, he preferred the first one.

  Now that he was starting to think more clearly, he was able to take in his surroundings in a bit more detail. Or, he would have been, were his surroundings not utterly lacking in any sort of detail whatsoever.

  The room he was in was stark and clinical, with walls that were mostly featureless, a ceiling devoid of anything interesting, and a floor that was utterly nondescript in every possible way. He was sitting at a round table just large enough for the four chairs positioned around it, three of which were empty. The chairs and table were all made of the same firm but flexible plastic, like whoever was supposed to be sitting in them was a suicide risk who couldn’t be trusted with anything hard or sharp.

  In fact, the whole room had that sort of ‘institutional’ feel about it. It was a room designed to be as unstimulating and unthreatening as possible which, of course, only served to make it all the more so.

  Sam’s seat was positioned so his back was to the room’s only door. He dimly recalled shuffling toward one of the other chairs, but someone had quite forcibly directed him to this one. A man, he thought. Maybe a woman. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, but only saw arms and legs and a general surliness, which didn’t help narrow those choices down any.

  He didn’t like having his back to the door, but didn’t feel comfortable with just changing seats at this stage. Evidently, he was supposed to be sitting here for a reason, and until he knew more, it probably wasn’t wise to go messing around with the seating plan.

  Turning his chair to give him a better view of the door proved to be impossible, as the plastic legs were affixed to the floor by hard plastic rivets. He probably could’ve broken them off if he’d put his back into it, but that felt like even more of a liberty than swapping seats would have been, so he settled for twisting his body around and shooting anxious glances in the door’s direction every few seconds.

  “Hello?” he said, after a few silent and breathless false starts. His voice sounded reedy and thin. He cleared his throat, mentally gave himself a good talking to, and tried again. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  Silence.

  Apparently, there wasn’t.

  “Great.”

  Sam looked around the room a few more times, searching for a camera, but finding none. In a way, the idea that nobody was watching made him more nervous than the thought that somebody was.

  It was then that he realized his hands were no longer cuffed. There were red welts around his wrists from where they had been, but he was no longer shackled and was now free to do whatever he liked.

  He chose to sit quietly and wait.

  Sam was still wearing his work clothes—cheap white shirt, nylon blue tie, and pants that charged up with static electricity whenever his thighs rubbed together. Which was whenever he walked any distance greater than six feet or climbed more than two steps in a row.

  The clothes were crumpled and creased now, suggesting he’d slept in them. He wasn’t normally the type to loosen his tie or undo his top button, but given the circumstances, he decided to do both. It made him feel less relaxed, rather than more, and so he tightened them both back up again.

  He watched the door. No one was coming. As far as he could tell, no one was watching. Even if they were, what right did they have to hold him like this, anyway? He’d done nothing wrong.

  Sam winced a little at that. No, not ‘wrong’ exactly, but he had done something, hadn’t he? Something he hadn’t done in more than two decades.

  But still, that didn’t give anyone the right to lock him up. He hadn’t had his phone call. He was supposed to get a phone call. Everyone knew that.

  He had a good mind to complain. There had to be someone in charge he could talk to, probably right outside that door. Well, he’d go out and talk to them. He’d go out there and let them know that Sam Summers wasn’t the type of guy who would just let himself be pushed around. No siree.

  Sam stood up.

  “Sit down,” commanded a voice from nowhere.

  Sam sat down.

  “Hello?” he said.

  The voice that had spoken had been the same one he’d heard back in the cell, he thought, although it was hard to be sure, what with the shortness of the sentence, the different acoustics, and the impending panic attack Sam was currently hovering on the brink of.

  The voice didn’t answer. Instead, the door opened, and Sam yelped in fright as he spun toward it, almost bending the legs of his plastic chair.

  A red-haired woman in a green dress trudged in, clutching her head with one hand while carrying a single high-heeled red shoe in the other. She had a general air of dishevelment about her, from the creases and, if Sam was not mistaken, vomit stain on her dress, to the way her hair appeared to have been styled with some sort of whisk implement.

  “Shit,” she spat, blinking in the room’s fluorescent glare. She battered the shoe a few times roughly in the area where someone might reasonably expect a light switch to be positioned.

  She gave up after six good thwacks, groaned in annoyance, then spotted Sam for the first time. For a while, she just scowled at him, although she’d been scowling already, so he didn’t think it was anything personal. He gave her a smile and a little wave, but didn’t stand up in case the nameless voice shouted at him to sit down again.

  “Who are you?” she asked. Quite accusingly, he thought, as if she had already decided that she wouldn’t like the answer.

  “Uh, I’m—”

  “Where are we? Are we in jail?” she asked, squinting around at the room. She glared at him again, her anger growing. “Did you do this? Was this you? Where the fuck are we? Who are you, exactly?”

  Sam shook his head. “What? No. No, it wasn’t… I don’t know where this is. I’m—”

  She flopped down into the chair across from him and groaned with something that was either satisfaction or the exact opposite. “You sure?” she demanded.

  Sam hesitated. “Am I sure of what?”

  “That you didn’t do this. That you didn’t spike my drink and take me back here to your creepy evil lair so you could have your way with me?”

  There
was something about the way she said ‘have your way with me’ that suggested she wasn’t being completely serious. To avoid any confusion or risk of future legal proceedings, though, Sam answered with complete sincerity.

  “No! No, definitely not. I mean, I wouldn’t.”

  “You wouldn’t what?” the woman asked, narrowing her eyes and leaning closer. She reeked of alcohol, perfume, and just the faintest whiff of vomit.

  “Drug you and have sex with you,” Sam blurted.

  Her eyes narrowed further. “Why not?”

  This caught Sam off guard. “Well, because it’s wrong. It’s… you know. It’s…”

  “It’s what?”

  Sam lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Rape.”

  The woman’s scowl deepened. She stared at him for several long seconds.

  “Jesus,” she muttered. “That’s one heavy first conversation to have with someone you’ve just met. I mean… rape? Wow. Where do you go from there? The Rwandan genocide?”

  “What? No!” Sam replied. “Anyway, you were the one who started talking about… You know? And I don’t think there was a Rwandan genocide.”

  “You sure about that?” the woman asked, fixing him with a look so utterly and unshakably confident that Sam had to admit that no, he wasn’t.

  There was something about the woman that set his nerves on high alert. She seemed wild and unpredictable—two things he wasn’t—but there was something else, too. A familiarity, almost. A sense that he knew this woman, and that it wasn’t wise to be this close.

  “You smoke?” she asked.

  Sam shook his head. “No. Sorry.”

  “You’re sorry you don’t smoke?”

  “No, I mean I’m sorry I don’t have any cigarettes to give you.”

  “Who says I wanted a cigarette?” she asked.

  “I just thought…”

  “Did you just touch my leg?”

  Sam looked down at the table as if he’d find the answer written there. “No.”

  “Who are you, anyway?” the woman demanded. She held her shoe up like a weapon, heel pointing vaguely in Sam’s direction. “Did you do this? Did you bring me here?”