Seven Days in the Hole

Note to self: the next time you want to go off somewhere and be alone while you work on special projects and have yourself a good old-fashioned sulk, make sure you change the locks on your house and the security codes for all your alarms. Friends have an annoying tendency to butt into your affairs unwelcomed.

“Bobby?” The voice came about thirty seconds after I heard the door to the base slide open unexpectedly. I figured any villain who was smart enough to worm his or her way past Uncle Jack’s security measures would have earned the right to stab me in the back and put the world out of my misery, so I kept on with what I was doing and didn’t bother turning around. Hearing Tommy’s voice made me a little sad. I’d not only gotten used to the idea of a Big Bad smiting me at the workbench, I’d started to look forward to it a little. Not that I wouldn’t normally be glad to hear Tommy, but he had an annoying tendency to be happy all the times I wanted to be miserable. And call me old-fashioned, but I thought that him being as cheerful as he sounded less than a week after they’d buried his Uncle Seth was a little too creepy to put up with. It wasn’t right that I should be more depressed than him.

The thing people who have never gone through depression don’t realize is sometimes, the depressed person needs to sit and stew for a while. When something trips you up and sends you spiraling downward, the fastest way to get back up is to just go along for the ride. Strap yourself to your emotional surfboard and wait for the wave to eventually carry you back to shore. It’s not that I enjoy those moments. It’s kind of like when you go for a week or so without a shower, you don’t like the way you smell, you just notice it a lot less. Plodding your way through depression is like letting a campfire burn itself out instead of pouring the kerosene of human interaction onto it. That was why I’d sequestered myself down in the base and poured myself into work, and why I was not happy to have Tommy show up not only on my doorstep but past it and downstairs.

Maybe if I ignored him, he’d take the hint.

“Bob? Dude, it’s us.” Great. Rick was with him. Probably Sarah, too.

“Bobby? I brought wings. From that place you like in Tonawanda.” Yep. Her too. All three of them had descended upon my Fortress of Suckitude. That could mean one of three things. Either (a) the world was ending and I’d let the battery on my watch run down so they had to come and get me in person; (b) they felt like reliving the old days of the four of us going out and dealing with one of the lesser bad guys, which I absolutely did not want to do in the mood I was in; or (c) an intervention, which was worse than the other two possibilities rolled into one. Boy, was this going to be painful.

“You’ve reached the Baines residence,” I piped up in my best fake-cheerful voice. “We’re sorry, but no one is home right now. After the beep, please piss off. Beep.”

“Come on, Dude. It’s been a week. No one’s seen you. We were starting to worry.”

“Gee, it took you a full week to start worrying? What friends I’ve got. Remind me to think of you when I’m on fire sometime.”

“There’s no reason to be nasty, Bobby.” The hurt in Tommy’s voice was clear. That wasn’t what I’d intended. I just wanted to be left alone to enjoy my own misery, and instead, I’d increased the suffering of the only person in the room who had a right to be more miserable than me. Of course, that should have made me feel even worse, but misery doesn’t work that way. Adding a new misery onto a misery you’re already in doesn’t make the old misery worse, it just adds to the things you’re miserable about. Someday, I might try to write a paper on the Commutative Property of Misery, but I doubt I’d ever be able to get the higher math degree I’d need to make anyone take it seriously.

“I’m sorry, Tommy.” I finally spun my chair around to look at them. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’m just not in shape for company.”

“That’s what you said last time.” Rick looked me square in the eye. “It didn’t hold water then, and it doesn’t now. You’ve been out of circulation for a week, ever since the Professor’s funeral. Mystery told me you swapped out your turn on monitor duty this week, and there haven’t been many reports of you even going out on patrol.”

“How do you know that? News reports?”

“Nah, the web. There are whole websites dedicated to tracking hero sightings. It’s a hobby for some people.” He went to the PC over on the other desk and typed in a web address. To my astonishment, the site was exactly what he’d said it was: a list of sightings of all the heroes in the Justice Federation, along with a few blurry photographs taken of us zooming by. There were only two reports of me flying over the City during the past week, which was understandable since I’d only really gone outside to clear my head. Oddly enough, there were a couple of sightings of Mr. Zip in the days immediately following the Professor’s death. “I made those,” Rick bragged. “To help cover it up.”

“Clever. If I’d known about that, or the other heroes had known about that, then there wouldn’t have been a need for me to step in as the Knight.”

One of those awkward silences that were starting to follow me around, like a puppy following a guy holding a steak, descended upon the four of us. Apparently, I’d hit a nerve. “Did Prism speak with any of you?”

“We talked for a little while.” Tommy’s face looked like it was going to slip right off his skull. “She said she was going to suggest I not get promoted until this killer was tracked down, and even though I understand, it still hurts. It’s like I’m being told I’m not good enough.”

“That’s not the case. She thinks you’re all good enough to be alongside the rest of us. And once this is settled, she and I will both push to get you all promoted in your own right, not just as replacements, like what happened with me. You all deserve to be at the big table, but it’s not right to put the three of you in harm’s way unnecessarily.”

“Bullshit!” Sarah shouted, which was uncharacteristic for her. “We’re in harm’s way every single day. We were all practically born in harm’s way. What right do the heroes have to worry about us being in danger now, when they’re the ones who brought us up to be their human shields and cannon fodder?”

“You don’t really feel that way, do you, Sarah?”

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Okay, partially true. I believed what she was saying since I’d felt the same way on more than one occasion, but I couldn’t believe she was the one saying it. Rick had always been the rebellious one of our bunch and the kind to express those feelings. I rebelled in my heart sometimes but toed the line. Sarah was the good girl who did whatever she was told. And Tommy? Tommy just enjoyed himself way too much to care.

“You don’t have to tell me that.” I restrained myself from shouting. “I feel the same way. Frankly, I think this whole ‘sidekick’ thing was a mistake from the get-go, only redeemed by the fact that it made the three of you the great heroes you’ve become. It’s not right to put a kid into a costume and throw him at a super-villain. It’s not right to take a kid and turn him into a weapon.” I kicked the workbench. “It’s just not right.”

Another awkward silence snuck up on us, and we stared at each other for a while. When Tommy started fidgeting, which happens a lot when you’re as fast as he is, I knew it was time to change the subject and try to rescue the mood. I grabbed a couple of boxes I’d stacked in the corner of the bench and tossed them to the boys. “I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to get one of these made for you, Sarah, but I’ll work on something similar.”

Rick tore open the box and removed the contents: a white tank-top undershirt. “A wife-beater. How thoughtful.”

“You know I hate that term. Anyway, it’s not just any ‘wife-beater.’ It’s made out of the same metallic fabric as my costume, so it’s bulletproof.”

“Whoa!” Tommy opened his package, or at least I assumed that was what happened since he moved so quickly it looked like the package was tied up one moment and miraculously open the next. “That’s so cool. Where did you get them?”

“I have a blacksmith friend who found the material fairly easy to work with. Well, once he figured out he needed welding tools instead of a needle to put them together, he found it easy. He seems to like challenges, so I gave him one.”

“Why would you guys need those?” Sarah asked. “Aren’t all your costumes already bulletproof?”

“Yeah, our costumes are, but we’re not always in costume. When I got caught flat-footed that day at the blacksmith’s, I realized we’re not always going to have time to change into costume. We need some protection when we’re in civvies, too.”

“Maybe, but are any of us targets when we’re not in costume?”

“My Uncle Seth was.” Tommy’s voice croaked as he forced the words out.

“And … ” I considered my words carefully. I hadn’t shared Mr. Zip’s observations about the tape with them, and I couldn’t be certain whether any of the other heroes had. The fact the killer recognized me was pretty highly classified information, from what I gathered. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the other sidekicks needed to be ready to protect themselves as much as the other heroes. “We have reason to believe the killer knows at least a couple of our identities.”

“What?” Tommy sounded shocked.

“Are you sure?” Sarah sounded more confused.

“How do you know this?” Rick sounded cynical, as usual. That was one of the things I liked about him.

“It’s only a theory. The point is we all need to watch our backs. And every little bit of protection helps.”

“You got that right.” Rick examined the undershirt again admiringly. Then the look on his face shifted, and he started to ask me a question. “Uh, dude, could you … ”

“I’m shocked you’re so worried about getting shot there, and even more worried that I expected you to mention this, but yes, the boxer shorts are on order.”

I spent the next hour playing the good host and catching up on their lives. When the topic of me came up, I pointed at the disassembled pieces of Professor Smith’s computer, which I’d thrown into a corner of the room days ago out of sheer frustration, and explained my attempts to find and/or recover the surveillance footage. “I searched through every directory on the hard drive, and when I couldn’t find it anywhere, I pulled every hacker trick I knew. I even ran it through Miracle Max, but—”

“Wait,” Sarah interrupted. “You ran it through what?”

I stifled a laugh. “Sorry, private joke. Uncle Jack had developed this really cool program that could recover just about any lost or deleted file you could throw at it. He called it ‘Miracle Max’ because no matter how well you think you’ve deleted a file, it is still only mostly dead, and Max can bring it back.”

Tommy and Sarah laughed at the reference. Rick stared at us as if we were insane, and I resolved to make him watch more movies.

“So no luck recovering the footage then?” Tommy asked, trying to veer the discussion back on topic.

“None. I have to wonder if it was ever on this computer to begin with. As you can see by the state of its component parts, and the component parts of those component parts, it proved to be a frustrating exercise. Piled on top of all the rest of the crap in my life, and our collective lives, it just got to be too much.”

“Understandable,” Sarah said. “But that still doesn’t tell us what else you’ve been up to. I doubt it took you a full week to smash that computer.”

“Well, after I realized there was no hope of getting that footage back, and after being forced out of school, I desperately needed to do something constructive. Anything, really. It started with getting those bulletproof undershirts made for the boys, and it sort of took off from there. I found myself digging through all of Uncle Jack’s old files, his notes on his old inventions, and his works-in-progress, and I decided to get my hands dirty. For example, get a load of this.”

I lifted myself a few feet off the floor. Not enough to be flying, but enough to attract their attention. Their eyes shot toward my feet, and the way their jaws dropped when they saw I wasn’t wearing the anti-grav boots was almost priceless.

“Dude!” Rick was too stunned to say much, so he broke out into laughter. “Where are the boots?”

“I decided to do without them. They’re such bulky things that they’re only really good for costume duty and too unwieldy to wear for everyday use. Like I said, I wanted to get more protection while in civvies, so I retrofitted some anti-gravs into this old pair of high-top sneakers. I’m putting some in my dress shoes next.”

“Wow. What a great idea.” Tommy was suitably impressed, which showed me I was on the right track.

“Yep. This way, I can have the speed and agility boosts I get from the anti-gravs while wearing shoes no one would suspect had anything special about them. They’re not quite perfect. Uncle Jack built a control system into the helmet that lets the wearer control the anti-gravs, instead of only using the toe buttons. Haven’t linked the sneakers into the controls yet, but that shouldn’t take me too long. I’m going to try and string a series of anti-gravs into a belt and link them up, so I don’t even have to worry about what I’ve got on my feet when the time comes that I need the boost the anti-gravs give me. I’ll just have to be careful not to go into full-bore flight when the wrong people are looking.”

“Dude! I so need a pair of those. You have to make one for me.”

“Me, too, Bobby! Me too!”

Sarah scoffed. “I don’t see what’s so important about them.”

“That’s because you can fly already,” Rick retorted. “For us earthbound types, it’s right up our alley.”

“Why would you need them? You’ve never been able to fly. Your fighting styles were designed to be done on the ground, and you wouldn’t know the first thing about fighting in mid-air.”

“She’s right, guys,” I butted in. “It took me a while to really adapt my fighting style to be done off the ground. You two wouldn’t know how to take on an opponent without winding up with your ass in the air and your face on the pavement.” They looked half-offended and half-upset, so I drifted back down. “So, I guess I’m just going to have to train you two in aerial combat.”

The look on their faces made Sarah laugh hysterically and even made me crack a smile. It was one for the books. It was so nice watching someone go from a look of envy and dejection to disbelief, then elation. “But I thought the Scarlet Knight, I mean the old Scarlet Knight,” Tommy corrected himself, “never shared his anti-grav units with anyone but you.”

“He’s not the Knight anymore. I’m the Scarlet Knight now. And I don’t plan to run things the way he used to.” The words that had been spoken so earnestly a little more than a week before in the Professor’s office still resonated with me: we needed to trust one another. And as far as I was concerned, that meant trusting the other sidekicks. I might not technically be one any longer, but I still felt more like one of them than I did one of the big guns, and their lives were as much on the line as the other heroes’ were.

“Oh, before I forget, we also come bearing gifts.”

“Really, guys.” I indicated the Styrofoam boxes Sarah had brought in with her. “I don’t know that fifty medium from Pesci’s is that much of a gift. Especially because you three are bound to eat more than I am.”

“Not what I’m talking about. The wings are just a snack. These,” Rick reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a couple of manila envelopes, “are gifts.” He handed them to me. I ripped the first one open with all the gusto of a kid launching a frontal assault on the big box under the Christmas tree. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I hadn’t damaged the contents of the envelope in my dismembering of it. At least, until I realized what those contents were.

Then I wanted to damage Rick instead.