The Infinite League Page 3

  “Gee, thanks,” I replied sarcastically. I hit the high beams, flooding the guard with so much light that he had to shield his eyes. He knew what I was about to do, and he was already mouthing a few panicked words into the radio on his shoulder.

  “Hold on, kids,” I warned them. I slammed on the accelerator, and I felt my weight press against the seat as we lurched forward. The guard dropped his radio, his eyes bulged open, and he bounced a bit on his heels as my car raced towards him.

  “Emily,” said Sadaf nervously.

  I was aiming the hood of the car right at the guard. I clutched the wheel, preparing to swerve the wheels to the left at the last moment. I had no intention of killing this man, but a sickening knot formed in my stomach at the possibility of him deciding to jump in the same direction as where I planned to go. If he did, I wouldn’t be able to avoid hitting the man.

  In the second before I hit him, I saw the terrified look on his face. With the high-beams on, there was no way he could see me gesturing for him to jump to the right. I yanked the wheel to the left, and the guard thankfully jumped in the opposite direction. He probably hurt himself as he slammed into the brick wall of the guard house, but it would hurt less than being hit by my Saturn. The gate splintered apart in thousands of red and white wooden fragments, and we were gone.

  “He’s still on the ground,” Sadaf reported as we left the guard house in the distance. “He never got a look at the car.”

  Ten minutes later, we were travelling sixty miles per hour with the rest of the highway traffic as we headed back to Eamon’s apartment. Not a single police light in sight.

  “I’d love to be at his next tenants meeting,” laughed Sadaf. “We’ve accomplished a fine thing this evening. We have served justice well, Emily.”

  “And you’re getting a better paycheck out of it, too,” Eamon chimed in, laughing at our good fortune.

  I remained silent, watching the rear view mirror and trying to ignore the dread in my chest. If they had called the police, it was clear by now that they didn’t know what direction we went in, nor what we were driving.

  But somehow, for some reason, I knew this wasn’t over.

  3

  The Stray Bullet

  Tuesday, April 29 – 8:30 p.m.

  I don’t consider myself a hero. In a world where men and women are seen flying over the skies, lifting cars with their bare hands, and attacking each with beams of energy, the word hero sounds so pedestrian to me.

  Sadaf suggested that the only difference between a super-hero and myself are my lack of actual enhanced abilities. After all, there are quite a few heroes and villains without real powers. True, most of them are just clueless kooks that walk around the streets of major cities, looking for fights to get into. But there are a few people the government technically classifies as Sparks simply because of the specialized gadgets or training they possessed.

  This was the fifth time that I had lead Sadaf and Eamon into a potentially dangerous situation. Sadaf had been my friend for years, and she believed in my crusades. Eamon did it purely for mercenary reasons, of course, but at least I was putting his particular skill set towards helping people for once in his life. If I deserved to be called a hero for anything, it was for that.

  The moment that we had gotten back to Eamon’s apartment, the others had already began to breathe easier. His apartment was on the sixth floor, and the balcony provided a spectacular view of Philadelphia. I could see past the Convention Center, over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, and almost into New Jersey.

  For the first half-hour, I kept a vigilant eye on the city below us. Sadaf had plugged in the stolen computer immediately, immersing herself in the task of backtracking the source of all the vile videos and images in Fleckmore’s private files. Eamon was relaxing on his couch, a cold beer in hand, mentally spending the money that I’d be paying him.

  Every time the flash of red and blue police lights blinked on the streets, I felt a nervous apprehension of a job gone horribly bad, and the cruel sting of a career stolen by greedy and immoral men. But they never turned toward the apartment. We seemed to be safe.

  From the kitchen table, Sadaf grunted painfully before popping a few painkillers into her mouth. She gently massaged one of the uncountable aching spots on her back, and then returned to her task.

  “How you doing, honey?”

  “Could use another beer and maybe a handjob,” Eamon replied from the other room. “But since Sadaf’s hands are a little busy, maybe you’d like to come over here and give my flute a nice little how-do-you-do?”

  He was a repulsive Irish lout with all the charm and manners of a horny camel, but he did serve his purpose. Just the same, there was only so much I was willing to tolerate from him.

  “Ignore him, Sadaf,” I advised her. “He’s so skeevy, his flesh light sued him for date rape.”

  “Even if I weren’t gay, I would never afford him the pleasure,” Sadaf said with a smirk, never looking up from her computer. She reached behind her to touch a spot on her shoulder blades, and winced.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she lied to me. “It just stings some nights more than others.”

  I nodded sympathetically without replying. To tell her that I understand how she feels would be incorrect and insulting. I respect her too much to do that. In her home country of Habindaque, she was dragged out into the streets and publically whipped twenty times. All for the grievous crime of loving another human being that just happened to be the same gender. I know my share of wonderful Muslim families; men and women who would never dream of harming another person just because they live their life differently from them. It’s no different than this ridiculous church of so-called Christians in Kansas that spend their days protesting any little thing that pisses them off. They’re screwed up individuals, but it doesn’t color my opinion of the entire religion. Truth be told, it’s extremist attitudes like those that helped forge me into the happy atheist that I am today.

  “The money transfer went through?”

  “Perfectly, as always,” she reported. “Twenty thousand dollars have been deposited into the account. Shall I make the arrangements that we’ve agreed upon?”

  “Thirty-five hundred in my private account, three thousand for you, another three for our idiot friend back there. The rest goes to the charity.”

  “It’s done,” she confirmed, closing the laptop after a few more keyboard strokes. “I’ve got some other good news, too. I think I’ve backtracked the smut to the source.”

  “You have to be kidding me.”

  “It was a pretty secure encryption algorithm, I’ll be honest,” she admitted with just a hint of a smug smile. “But I got lucky. I used a side channel attack by looking at the greasy smudges on the man’s screen, and that allowed me to narrow down his password. Then just now, I used a little dash of acoustic cryptanalysis with my smart phone, and I could hear the telltale signs that the computer was decrypting some data containing a ten-year-old girl.”

  “Yeah, so I’m going to pretend like I understood more than two words of that sentence so you won’t think I’m a complete moron.”

  “It didn’t take much longer to backtrack the e-mail, and discover the ISP address of the sender,” she continued. “I’ve cracked open the ISP, and I’ve identified the computer belonging to Christopher Whitfield of New York City.”

  “Hold on, how’d this betty do this?” Eamon had joined the conversation now, staring at Sadaf with a suspicious look. “I didn’t think that was possible. You actually found his name and address?”

  “Under normal circumstances, it’s not possible,” I told him. “The only way you can do is to have a law enforcement agency submit a request to the person’s ISP and request an identity.”

  “Or you can hire a genius like me, and I’ll bypass all that bureaucratic nonsense,” she put in. “The point is, you have your big fish, boss. What’s the plan?”

  “Oi, you’ve got him
by the clackers! You can probably get a million from this eejit,” Eamon suggested helpfully. “He’ll give a literal ton of cash to keep us from turning him in.”

  “I can live with letting someone like Fleckmore off with a slap on the wrist,” I told him. “But if Whitfield is the one responsible for all this garbage, he couldn’t pay me enough money to let him run free. Sorry to let you down, but today was the last paycheck on this particular trail. You’ve made nearly ten grand for a few weeks of easy work, so let’s not be greedy. I’m gonna turn this asshole over to the feds, and then we’ll throw ourselves into a new crusade.”

  “What a waste,” Eamon decided. He shook his head resentfully, but didn’t argue the point any further. He knew that once I’d made up my mind, the discussion was done.

  “Good work, honey,” I told Sadaf. “If I weren’t a straight woman, I’d kiss you.”

  Sadaf rested her head on her chin, and gave me a piercing glare. “You never let me have any fun.”

  It’s hard for me to describe how she sounded when she spoke those words to me. There was a hint of seductive naughtiness in her words, and a gleam of intense longing. I knew she’d had a bit of a crush on me since we first starting working together, but she was generally reserved and restrained. She locked eyes with me, and she held the gaze. Frankly, it was making me feel a bit uncomfortable. “You feeling alright, honey?”

  “I’m feeling fine,” she assured me, standing up and curling her fingers around the tip of her purple hijab. She gently pulled at it, unraveling the fabric and allowing her brunette hair to flow over her shoulders. “Would you like to feel me and find out for yourself?”

  Okay, this was definitely getting weird. Despite the abuse she’s suffered in her home country, Sadaf still adhered to the basic principles of her faith. I’d seen her remove her hijab once before, but she’d normally never take it off in the presence of a man who wasn’t part of her family…and certainly not near a walking hard-on like Eamon.

  “Do you need some water?” I walked over to the fridge, but Sadaf’s eyes were following me like a hawk.

  I shot a glance at Eamon, wondering what he thought of this odd side to her behavior, but he was staring at the ceiling with a terrified look in his eyes. There was nothing but white plaster above him. Whatever he was looking at was something he alone was seeing. Something was happening to us.

  “I don’t need water,” Sadaf repeated, this time tugging her black blouse up over her body. Her unrestrained breasts bounced free, revealing a side to Sadaf that I’d never wanted to see. “I need you.”

  There was a dry taste in my mouth. Eamon was batting his hands at unseen objects around his face. My best friend was trying to molest me. Something was going very wrong!

  “I need you so bloody bad,” Sadaf continued. She placed her fingers against her cheek, and scratched her cheek.

  In front of my eyes, a huge chunk of bloody meat came off of her cheek, splattering on the floor in front of my feet. She stuck her tongue out and laughed, and reached for me.

  “What the fuck, Sadaf?” I jumped backwards, knocking over a wine bottle in the process. It shattered on the floor, and the sound echoed through my head with painful reverberations. “What’s going on with you?”

  There were two more figures in the living room now, approaching all of us in the kitchen. One was a large figure that appeared as a black silhouette, shimmering like a hazy shadow in a desert. The other was a pale white glowing image of a woman, laughing despite her hands covered with fire.

  There was a small flower vase on the edge of the sink, and it was right within my reach. Sadaf was getting closer to me now, and black ooze was now pouring from her nose and mouth. Her eyes had turned red, but still she was smiling. She kept get closer.

  “Put your hands on me, Emily,” she was saying. “Possess me body and soul, my flower.”

  My first instinct was to hit her with the vase. More flesh was dripping off of her face now, revealing the porcelain white bone beneath. Her fingertips stretched out and touched my face.

  The dark figure in the background just stood there, waving his hands. He seemed to be the least threatening presence in the room.

  That’s exactly what he would want me to think, I assumed, if he didn’t want me to attack him. I went with my instincts and threw the vase directly at his head. There was a satisfying sound of the vase shattering into dozens of shards. As the dark figure fell on his back, everything went back to normal.

  Eamon was shaking his head, disoriented and angry. Sadaf was still sitting at her chair, with all of her clothes and her skin still intact.

  “I saw the most terrible things,” Sadaf whispered, gripping the table tightly to keep from falling off of her chair. “Oh Emily, what just happened?”

  I looked in the direction of the two figures that had intruded upon us. I knew the answer immediately. It damn near pissed myself.

  I know you’re probably confused right now, so let’s just put a pin in this moment of chaos. I want to go slightly off topic for a bit, just to bring you up to speed to what I was dealing with in this moment.

  I’m sure you know all about the Infinite League. As a police officer, I was hearing about their incidents on a weekly basis. As a mother, I was hearing about their incidents from my kid on a nightly basis. It’s the world we live in; you can’t get away from them.

  They weren’t the first Sparks to make their presence known in the world, but they were definitely the first to reach literal superstar status. Reportedly, they’ve never taken any serious injuries. Considering some of the psychopaths and megalomaniacs with ambitions of world domination and human subjugation that they’ve confronted over the last fifteen years, I have to admit they’ve had a remarkable track record. But the side effect is that it’s made the job of being a police officer a rather thankless and inglorious profession.

  The Ambassador is their leader, and he’s probably the strongest man on the entire planet. He’s gone on record many times claiming that he’s an alien from a doomed civilization somewhere out in the Andromeda galaxy, but who knows if that’s true? What I do know is that he stands over six feet tall, he has blonde hair and a tight goatee, and bright blue eyes. He’s got the body of a linebacker, he can pick up a car with one hand, take a bullet to the chest and just laugh it off, and leap over a house without breaking a sweat. He talks like a gentleman born and raised in the fifties, and he’d probably be embarrassed if he knew how many women touch themselves at night thinking about him. They actually sold a line of vibrators called “Little Ambassadors” for a while there, but his lawyers made the manufacturers discontinue it. Makes me glad I kept one of mine in the original package. It might be worth some money someday.

  DeathTek looks like a giant robotic action figure, and no one’s really sure if he’s the world’s first functioning artificial intelligence, or some regular dude riding around in the machine like a tank. I don’t know how quickly he goes through batteries, but he’s armed with hydraulic hands, guided stinger missiles and who knows what else under the hood. His true face is forever hidden behind a helmet that looks like a curved silver bell with a skull painted on it, and his voice is filtered and electronic and cold.

  Submission was, in my opinion, purely chosen to add some perverted sex appeal to the group. A red fabric mask hides most of her face, and she wears chains that connected to her wrists like a set of manacles. It’s like something out of an eighth grade boy’s fantasy. And don’t even get me started on how she walks around in those stripper boots of hers. She’s said to be a talented acrobatic virtuoso, she can fight a room full of men with her fancy ninja skills, and she can control people’s minds with some sort of mental powers. My sister is convinced that deep down, she’s probably a very nice young lady. But in my opinion, if she walks and talks like a ho….

  Andromeda is the complete opposite. A tall woman with short, punky blonde hair parading around in golden goggles and bright yellow skirts, she’s the most visible member of the
team outside of the Ambassador himself. She flies through the air, and she starts fires with her mind. She carries herself like a princess, which is exactly how the majority of the world thinks of her. Seriously. This goes beyond just idolizing her like a pretty pop star; this girl is probably the most popular woman on the planet. She appears at charities, she models for fashion magazines, and she makes inspirational lectures at colleges on her days off.

  Then there’s the Necromancer. He’s the guy people seem to know the least about. He’s a massive black guy wearing ebony cloaks and robes, and they call him an expert on death. I know more than anybody how these urban legends seem to get exaggerated, especially by a lot of the uneducated criminals that pour through the system like mud. But it’s said that he can kill men with just a touch of his fingers, and cause his victims to see illusions so vivid that they’ll go mad.

  If you’ve been following along with the story, you’ll probably guess where I’m getting at with this. It’s one thing to share the world with people that can fly or pick up city buses or fire electricity from their fingertips. It’s another to see one of them standing right in front of you.

  It downright terrifying to see one of them standing right in front of you immediately following the shenanigans we just pulled. The creepy, funky taste that had been coating my mouth was starting to drift away, as well as the strange visions. On the ground was a man wearing flowing black clothes and bracelets decorated with deep-blue jewels. Standing over him, curling her fingers and tightening her jaw into an angry snarl, was a woman wearing a frosted gold goggles, and a white and gold tunic with a burning flame insignia on the chest. There was only one person she could be. I had to say something.

  “I bought your perfume last month,” were the stupid words coming out of my stupid mouth.

  “You were spotted stealing property from a private citizen,” she said in a more authoritative voice than I could ever come up with when I was a cop. “Don’t you know stealing is illegal?”