The Infinite League Read online

  “So, what’s going on, Frank?”

  “Bridge,” he corrected me crossly, tapping the eagle on his collar with his large finger. “Colonel Bridge. I’m the director of the Department of Superhuman Activities. Do you know what our operating parameters are?”

  “The DSA monitors the actions, behaviors and incidents involving enhanced people and other costumed vigilantes currently living within the borders of the United States,” I replied, reciting the textbook definition I had learned in my criminal justice courses.

  Costumed vigilantes had come to be a derogatory term for the people who wished they had super powers, but still put on costumes and went out and fought crooks on the streets. Most of them were harmless crackpots who were just overzealous neighborhood watch volunteers with a horrible taste in clothes, like the Blue Mole or the Scarlet Skunk. True, there were a few well-funded and well-trained vigilantes out there without any catalogued super powers, but I could count them on the fingers of one hand.

  The four soldiers took a step closer to me. I suddenly wished I had a few powers of my own.

  “The Sparks who have registered with the DSA have pledged not to use their powers for illegal means,” the colonel continued, as if hosting a seminar and not supervising a gang beating. “Some of them, the ones that you know as super heroes, have pledged to use their powers to defend and protect innocent lives. These men and women are sanctioned by the government, with the same powers and responsibilities as police officers.”

  I didn’t personally care to have a costume wearing glory hound be given equal stature as a police officer, but I’m sadly in the minority on that injustice.

  “You were involved in the death of the super hero known as Andromeda, one of the founding members of the Infinite League,” he said accusingly. “This is considered equal to an attack on a federal agent, Miss Watts.”

  “It was an accident,” I reminded them all. The soldiers were all a few steps away from me now. “You haven’t even heard my side of the story yet, or why we stole that man’s computer.”

  “We’ve investigated his computer,” Cassiopeia commented. “We saw the sort of shit he was downloading. I know what you were trying to do, and I get it. I do. But my friend is dead.”

  “Involuntary manslaughter at the very least,” Colonel Bridge informed me, as if I didn’t already know that. “If it actually got to court, the prosecuting attorney would probably be pushing for second degree murder charges.”

  I didn’t like the way he put emphasis on the word if. The soldiers all took another step forward. I clenched my fists, and began to balance myself on the balls of my feet.

  “I don’t think you understand how deep in the waters you are,” the colonel droned on. “When the American public finds out that their hero was just shot in the head by an Irish phreaker, a Muslim hacker and a disgraced cop, they’ll be screaming for the sort of blood that’s going to drain the time of the courts, exhaust the media and incite the public.”

  Yeah. This was getting real. The colonel and the lady remained casually leaning against the wall, but the soldiers were now within striking distance of me. Two of them had taken offensive stances; the other two had pulled batons from holsters strapped to their thighs.

  “Gentlemen,” the Colonel said gently. “You have your orders. The time for talking is over. Beat her to death.”

  No. I was not going down like this. That’s what I was saying to myself when the first gorilla shoved his fist into the small of my back. Even when I went down to my knees, I was still mentally protesting the situation.

  The shortest of the soldiers placed his black boot on my shoulder, and shoved me so forcefully that I tumbled completely over, nearly twisting my neck as I rolled.

  My body was still in motion when another soldier swung his baton, striking me directly in the chest. Down the other way I went, feeling the suffocating impact of the strike as I crumbled.

  The other one with the baton was laughing at his buddies, and he clutched his baton a little tighter as he stepped over me. The others just stood there, watching to see what I was going to do next.

  They were hammering me with brutal strikes, but nothing lethal. They could have held me down, while cracking my head open with the batons. They seemed to be just toying with me. They were holding back. Somehow, I got the impression they weren’t really trying to kill me.

  They were testing me.

  The soldier standing over me raised his baton, gripping it as if he was going to club me in the skull. He swung downward, but he had unknowingly telegraphed his strike. He might have been holding the baton over my head, but his eyes were focused on the ground three inches away from my skull.

  He swung, but he wasn’t trying to hit my head at all. It was a scare tactic, and I punched him in the elbow as hard as I could. It wouldn’t hurt him, but it did make him drop the baton. The kick in the balls….that hurt him.

  Two-on-one was much preferable than four-on-one, so I kicked the next closest soldier in the peroneal nerve just above the knee. I would have done more damage if I hadn’t been barefoot, but it still got the job done. He was clutching his knee so tightly when he fell that nothing prevented him from banging his head when he hit the ground. That was two down.

  “Shit,” remarked one of the remaining soldiers. He pulled out his baton, and I took a step backwards….into the waiting arms of the fourth grunt. He wrapped his arms around me, preventing me from moving. They may not really have been trying to kill me, but they were pissed now and they planned to hurt me. I saw it in the man’s eyes. He intended to swing his baton right across my jaw.

  I swung my head back as forcefully as I could. Twice. On the second swing, I heard the soldier’s nose break against my head. He collapsed to the ground, and I convinced him to stay down by kicking backwards like a pissed off mule. I meant to nail him in the chest, but I kicked him across the face and he went silent.

  The last soldier swung his baton at me, and I deflected it with the weapon I had stolen from the first guard.

  He must have anticipated the move, though. Just when I was patting myself on the back for blocking his baton, he shoved his knee into the back of my leg. I dropped, and he backhanded me across the face.

  That’s when everything really went red for me. I was still holding my baton, and I swung it upwards, catching him under the chin with the blunt end of the stick. He was unconscious before he even hit the floor.

  The only one still moving was the first guy, the one who I stole the baton from. The one with the severe testicular trauma. He made a move towards me, but I caught him in the neck with a solid strike with the weapon. It wasn’t forceful enough to kill the man, but it did make him curl up and puke.

  I pointed the baton at the colonel. There was blood in my eyes, possibly from where the last soldier backhanded me, but it wasn’t going to stop me. “I’m gonna rip that bitch’s arms off, and beat you to death with them, soldier boy!”

  It sounded incredibly bad ass in my head, but the truth was I don’t think they understood me through my swollen mouth and angry, squeaky voice. But the colonel did know a threat when he saw one, and he pulled something out of one of the pockets of his belt. I thought it was a weapon, but it seemed too small for that. It looked like a miniature remote control, and he started to point it at me. I intended to knock his brains out long before he had a chance to do whatever he planned to do.

  But I didn’t get a chance to find out what it did. Before he could tap one of the many buttons on the device, Cassiopeia placed her hand on his, and gently lowered his arm. “I’ve got this,” she told him. She took her trench coat off, revealing a black leather outfit. Slung around her neck was something that looked like a tight red leather bandage. She tugged on it, pulling it over her nose and mouth, and I realized it was a mask that concealed everything except her forehead and eyes.

  I suddenly realized who Cassiopeia really was. I should have realized it when I spotted her the first time. This tiny thing, someone who d
idn’t look much older than twenty, was the youngest member of the Infinite League. This was the one known as Submission.

  It didn’t make sense to me. These heroes have been protecting the world for the last fifteen years. This chick would have been ten years old, at the oldest, when the League started.

  “Your powers aren’t going to work on her,” the colonel warned her.

  As pissed off as I was, I didn’t care if she was the real deal or not. She was walking right towards me, clopping along on those ridiculous boots that added a few inches to her height, staring me down with a hateful glare.

  She saw me just annihilate four soldiers, and I was absolutely sure this fresh-faced child was just trying to scare me. I raised my baton up and locked eyes with her. I didn’t necessarily want to hurt her, but if she made a move on me, I was going to brain the bitch. Then I was going to have a few words with Colonel Bridge before trying to get out of this place.

  The young lady with the long hair stopped about five feet from me, unexpectedly, and leaned back in her heels. She lifted her hands up, as if in surrender, and took a deep breath. I had no idea what she was about to do, so I froze and prepared myself for anything.

  The rumor was, Submission is an expert at mind-control. She can make people do whatever they want, just by thinking about it. I’ve heard reports of her stopping a bank robbery just by walking into the lobby, waving her hands, and forcing the perps to drop their weapons and lay down on the floor with their hands behind their backs.

  Was she making me stay in place? Was she using her powers on me? It didn’t seem like it, I decided. I tested the theory by flexing my foot and twisting my hips a bit, and didn’t find myself frozen at all. Either she wasn’t trying to mind control me, or she couldn’t.

  While I was trying to decide what she was doing, she revealed why her hands were in the air. She cartwheeled. She began to cartwheel, but it quickly turned into flips. She was doing perfect layout flips, three in a row, towards me.

  She might not have mind control powers, but the girl was definitely acrobatic. I swung low, trying to hit her in the knees as she got next to me. At the speed she was moving, I would never scramble away fast enough.

  I swung at the ground, but she had projected herself straight up into the air. While my hand was still in mid-swing, I looked up and saw her directly above me. In that half a second, it looked like she was hovering in the air like a firework.

  She came down spinning, landing on one toe with a precision that I would have admired had the other foot not spun out and caught me right across the cheek.

  I landed two feet away, without my baton, bladder control and one of my teeth. If I hadn’t gotten a concussion, it was just one step shy of it. All the fight had been knocked out of me, I just lay there like a beached whale while she secured a restraint around my wrists and left me on my stomach.

  “You don’t need powers to kick her in the face,” I heard her say as she returned to Colonel Bridge’s side.

  I tried to get in the last word; I tried to tell her that she’d better start watching her back. Grab your bottom lip, pull it out and strum it like a harp while sustaining the letter “B” for ten seconds in a loud voice. That’s what my threat actually sounded like.

  “You men who aren’t currently incapacitated or bleeding all over my floor, return this woman to her cell,” the colonel ordered. “She’ll need to get some rest before tomorrow’s ceremony.”

  “I still don’t like this,” Submission protested.

  “I don’t like it either,” the colonel replied. “But Dr. Progeriat is in charge, and he’s made the call. We don’t have anyone else in the pipeline for the Legacy Initiative, so it’s this or face a media meltdown.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe we should just bite the bullet this time and let the chips fall where they may this time?”

  “I’m sure that’s not what your mother would have wanted,” he told her.

  “Don’t go there,” she warned.

  I wish I could have heard more, but that’s when they dragged me out of the room. I was unconscious by the time they dropped me back on my bed and locked the door.

  6

  The Lonely Grave

  Sunday, May 4 – 10:00 a.m.

  So two more nights passed, with me stuck in my lonely padded cell with nothing to keep me company except my thoughts. Did my family know what had happened to me? What was Caleb going through? His father had walked out on him when he was four, and now he probably thinks his mother had vanished without a trace. I just wanted to let him know that he hadn’t lost me, too.

  Without access to a calendar or my phone, I had no idea how many days it had been since I’d been detained. None of the guards would tell me, and I’ve been unconscious so many times since the incident, I couldn’t even guess what day it was.

  Today was the first day I’d seen sunlight since being arrested. For the last hour, I’d been sitting in the back seat of a black Lincoln town car. Two armed soldiers flanked the vehicle, preventing me from leaving. I’d been given a new dark blue skirt and blouse to replace the grey jogging pants that I’d been sweating in for the last several days, as well as iron manacles on my wrists and irons on my ankles to keep me from trying to wander away.

  It was morning, and we were parked in a cemetery that I’d never been to before. I couldn’t see the city from here, but somehow I knew we were far from Philadelphia.

  There was a funeral being held, but I wasn’t invited to the service. Colonel Bridge had brought me here, but he’d left me here in the car. All I could do was wait.

  I’m sure I wouldn’t have been welcomed anyway. They were pretty far away, but I could see a crowd of thirty people gathered at the ceremony. Uniformed soldiers mostly, plus a few civilians. I could see DeathTek in the back of the crowd, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the group. I thought I saw the Necromancer at one point, but he was obscured by the wave of bodies clustered together. Submission was addressing the crowd, but she kept her head down while she spoke. Even from this distance, I could tell it was an emotional gathering.

  Why did he even bring me here? Some sort of emotional punishment, or fucked up interrogation tactic? I had expected to be arrested and booked for murder charges, but I’d been dragged into the heroes’ private headquarters and held captive for days. After the sadistic incident yesterday, what with the soldiers and Submission using me as a punching bag, I was still scratching my head. If they weren’t going to kill me and they weren’t putting me through the legal system, then why kick the shit out of me and not even ask me any questions?

  It’s almost as if Colonel Bridge hadn’t quite decided what to do with me yet, and he was keeping himself entertained by having me smacked around physically and emotionally.

  I leaned back in my seat and decided to take a nap. For once, it’d be nice to get some sleep because it suited me, not because I’d been drugged or kicked in the face.

  Of course, even that humble request got shot down a few minutes later when the door was opened and the pair of soldiers pulled me suddenly out of my nap. When they pulled me out of the car, I had to bounce in my shackles a bit to keep from falling over. I’m sure Colonel Bridge found my awkward jumping endlessly hilarious, but I tried to stay as dignified as I possibly could. I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of seeing me beg for mercy.

  “Unlock her,” Colonel Bridge ordered, gesturing towards my leg irons and handcuffs. “Unlock everything.”

  Okay. That, I didn’t quite expect. As the soldiers unlocked me, my first instinct was to run as fast as I could. But it seemed too easy, which meant that there was no way I would have escaped. For all I knew, they wanted to claim that I was shot trying to escape.

  I looked in the direction of where the funeral procession was, but it had already broken up. People were getting into cars and driving away, and there was no sign of the super-heroes anymore. The funeral was over, and the colonel and his two cronies were the only ones left
in sight.

  “Walk with me, Miss Watts,” he told me.

  Colonel Bridge began walking down the dusty road in the cemetery, heading purposefully back towards the site of the funeral service. Behind me, both soldiers stayed a few feet behind, but they kept pace with me. They were ready to move if I decided to deviate from the path. I’m sure by now they’d heard what I did to the four grunts in the gymnasium, so they weren’t going to take any chances with me.

  These two had weapons on their hips, and their fingers were resting on the holsters. This wasn’t the time to test them. I walked.

  “How’s your head?” I asked him in as genuine tone as I could manage.

  “I bit my lip when you kicked me,” he admitted. “I think I’ll pull through though, thanks for your concern.”

  “Why haven’t I seen a lawyer yet? Have you even filed formal charges yet?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m a little fuzzy on how long I’ve been in custody, but I’m sure it’s nearly ninety-six hours. That’s the maximum amount of hours you can hold someone suspected of murder in—“

  “Yes, I know you know your rights,” the colonel said, cutting me off with an impatient wave of his hands. “But you can be held for three weeks if you’ve been arrested for violating the Terrorist Act.”

  “Two weeks,” I corrected him.

  “When it involves Enhanced Humans, its three weeks,” he shot back. “People with powers have to be handled with more caution than the rest of us, you understand.”

  “Okay, I guess I get that,” I answered. I was trying to sound cooperative, but it sounded like some bullshit rhetoric designed to keep me in custody indefinitely. Then again, I did a little bit more than just key someone’s car.

  “It’s my job to see that those with special powers don’t use their abilities for criminal purposes. If you have powers, and you wish to operate as a super hero, you register with my office. You can’t be a cop without a badge, and you can’t be a super hero without a piece of paper with my name on it. You understand that, right?”