With Friends Like These …

I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone or doing anything, so I turned off all the phones when I got home. Even the red phone. I wouldn’t be able to stay incommunicado for too long—there were legal loose ends that would have to be tied up with the lawyers and managers of each of Jack’s businesses. And my “bereavement leave” from school wasn’t going to last forever—but I’d earned at least a couple hours shut off from the world. After all, I’d helped save the world a few times. The least it could do on the day of Uncle Jack’s funeral was shut up and let me stew in my own juices for a while. Was that too much to ask?

Apparently so, because as soon as I’d collapsed onto the couch, the doorbell rang. I answered it with a baseball bat in hand, ready to bean whoever was disturbing my good, long sulk. Fortunately, one of the people on the other side was one of the few people fast enough to stop the bat in time.

“Dude! I know you’re upset, but that’s no way to greet a guest! At least not me!”

The rush of wind and disappearance of the bat from my hand told me who one of my visitors was even before the distinctive voice came from the living room, behind me. It had to be Tommy Heber.

Of course, as with most of my friends and acquaintances, you might know him by another name: Zipper, the fastest teen in the world and sidekick to Mr. Zip, the fastest man in the world. Tommy was my best friend this side of kindergarten. We’d been thick as thieves ever since we met.

“Aren’t you going to say hi?” Tommy gestured back through the doorway to the only other people who really understood me: Rick (“Shadow”) Major and Sarah (“Pandora”) Marsh, the sidekicks of Mister Mystery and Clytemnestra, respectively. We’d all gotten into the game around the same time, when it was fashionable and almost compulsory for a hero to teach teenagers to fight against crime and for justice.

“Hey. I’m really not in the mood for company tonight.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Rick said as he held up more cans of beer than should be physically possible to carry in your arms, “because when you’re not in the mood for company is the time you need it most. Besides, who else would you want to spend your birthday with?”

Truer words had never been spoken.

***

The four of us blinked, and our eyes adjusted to the bright lights as they swept away the darkness, revealing the secret base Uncle Jack had built years ago.

I hadn’t been down there in ages, having pretty much retired from the whole sidekick game to concentrate on school (my skills as a hero could get me inside Doctor Warhammer’s secret fortress, but not into Harvard).

The array of computers, scanning equipment, tools of the trade like spare armor, anti-grav boots, and Uncle Jack’s workbenches covered with projects that would never be finished, was sort of overwhelming. When you’re out on the job seven nights a week, all your support stuff sort of seems mundane, but after a few months on the sidelines, it was special again. Even after seeing it thousands of times, coming back to it made my jaw drop at least as far as Rick’s and Sarah’s.

“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.