| |
Ardis made to crawl out, but I stopped her by putting my hand on her shoulder. “Wait. Not yet.”
The laughter emanated from the PA system. A female voice spoke. “Scared you, didn’t I? No need to freak out, my little fanboys and fangirls. I’ll put the lights on now. Beware my power, the power of Mistress Miraculous. You have been warned.”
With another flicker of the lights, long enough to make the crowd groan again, the lights went on and stayed on.
Crowd noise accelerated again. Cries and groans from individuals, calls for medical assistance, and shouts for Security pierced the air. Ardis and I carefully raised the tablecloth to peek out. Inert legs dangled over our table hideaway. Perhaps the person lying on the table was unconscious. Beyond, people lay on the floor, injured. Some were attended by concerned friends or family. Others lay alone and the crowd surged past them. People trampled dropped packages. They dropped their own possessions, too, but didn’t bend down to pick them up. Instead, they moved faster.
“Where are they going?” Ardis asked.
“They’re trying to leave.”
“There aren’t enough exit doors for everybody to leave at once.”
“Which makes the situation even more dangerous now,” I replied. “Let’s stay here. Wait them out.”
I texted Roland.
Need calm PA talk ASAP
“Who are you texting?” Ardis asked. She was tweeting.
“Roland. His company is providing some of the security for the con.”
“What can he do?”
“Get someone on the PA system to calm the crowd, I hope.” I said.
“That’s if the weird lady from before hasn’t trashed the system.”
“I hate your logical mind,” I said. Ardis had the brain of a scientist. She could have gone to MIT but chose art school instead.
She said, “The system isn't working right. Typically, safety backup lights are wired in a separate circuit from the main lights, plus there’s an emergency power source with battery backup. They should have come on.”
“Maybe the inspector got paid off.”
“You’re very cynical.”
“I’m hiding under a table at a comicon, hoping that the crowd noises around us don’t signify people being trampled to death. Of course I’m cynical,” I replied. The sounds of people behaving erratically were as loud as before.
“Unless they come and drag us out from under here and deliberately kill us, we’re fine,” Ardis said.
“Hearing all the panic is scary.”
“We can send more texts and tweets. That’s about it.” She drew a breath. “Anyway, back to how it happened. Even though the wires are on parallel, unconnected systems, she could install a manual interrupter. Or possibly, a radio-controlled interrupter.”
“Why not computer-controlled?”
“It’s actually more complex to have a computer talk to the wiring than to have a radio do it.”
“Aren’t walkie-talkies short range?”
“They use CB radio channels, and the range can encompass this entire convention center easily. That's how a security guard at the south side of the building talks to one on the north side,” she said.
Talking about technicalities wasn't distracting me. The noise of the crowds of people pushing and shoving, shouting and crying, was getting worse. The smell of the rancid fast food detritus was nauseating in such close quarters.
“I can’t stand this anymore,” I said. “I’ve got to try something.” I crawled to the back of the table, where the dealers running their sword exhibit must be.
“Don’t be a hero,” Ardis said.
“I already am.” I thought I’d given it up. Apparently not. I flattened a corrugated cardboard box by ripping it apart, and finally was able to clear the back of the tablecloth.
Standing up from my crouched position was made difficult by the people packed behind the table. I saw no sign of the tattooed salesman. At least ten people stood shoulder to shoulder like sardines, all staring at the aisles behind me. Their faces held horrified expressions. I turned and shimmied between them and the table, getting a very rough front massage from the wooden edge. The back massage was a little softer, but not by much.
The legs we’d seen dangling were attached to an unconscious man splayed across the table. Or he was dead. I couldn’t see the rest of his legs anymore. The crowd in the aisle pressed too hard against the table. I reached beside his legs to grip the far end of the table and hoist myself up on it. His projecting knees shielded my hands from the densely packed crowds in the aisle. People tried to move, but they couldn’t. Still, they shoved against each other, digging angrily into strangers’ flesh, yelling and screaming at the people ahead and behind.
Even two minutes ago, Ardis and I had seen people lying in the aisles. Now all I saw were the heads of people crushing together, trying to leave the hall and unable to get anywhere. Were they standing on top of people who had fallen?
I’d been ignoring the buzz of the Dimensional Diamond for several minutes. No more. In the year since I’d been given it, I’d researched its comic book origin maybe once and since forgotten the details. The jewel held the possibility of many powers, all of them controlled by my thoughts if I held the diamond. Right now, as I finally stood on the table, I wanted the jewel to do the only thing that might alleviate the crowd’s panic.
Since talking to anyone was impossible in the din, voluntary hypnosis was not an option. I pulled the diamond from beneath my costume and rubbed it. It glowed. I asked the jewel to stop time for the people around me, in ever widening circles until it reached the edges of the dealers’ room.
To be completely honest, I didn’t expect anything to happen. Any superpowers I’d had in the past had been in another dimension. But this was the Dimensional Diamond, and the fourth dimension is time.
Time stopped. People who had been frenziedly shoving at each other froze. Screams and shouts were cut off. The hall was suddenly silent.
I had no way of knowing how long I could keep the crowd in stasis. One minute in, the diamond grew warm. Three minutes in, it was hot. Ten minutes in, the diamond was so scorching that even through my superhero gauntlet gloves, I couldn’t hold it anymore. I dropped it back to my chest, where, oddly, it didn’t burn. Immediately, time unfroze. People were disoriented. They didn’t shout or scream, not yet.
Into the silence came blessed relief. “This is security for the convention center speaking. Please remain exactly where you are, while our security staff leads everyone to safety in an orderly fashion.”
The message from the PA system repeated itself. As it did, people around me sighed. Their taut poses relaxed. Still packed against each other tightly, they no longer struggled to move. It might have helped that the speaker was male this time. Not that same taunting female voice we’d heard previously. Mistress Miraculous. What did she have against comicons, anyway?
The silence that accompanied the crowd’s relaxation of tension made it possible to hear the bullhorns of the security employees at the hall’s many exits. Their noise was proof the speaker had not lied to the crowd. People began to nod in approval, and a few even smiled slightly.
The PA system announced that ambulances were available. The speaker gave a hashtag for anyone who saw an injured person to tweet to.
“Buzz Roland again,” Ardis said. Somehow, she’d climbed out of our table cave, and hoisted herself onto the table, too. “I’m glad they’re trying to keep people chilled out,” she said, “This could have been bad.”
“I assume some people have been trampled. What about this guy?” I said, pointing to the still unmoving figure on the table below us. “I’m tweeting he should be a priority.”
We checked his pulse. He had one, and he was breathing. We couldn’t locate any obvious wound.
“He might have had a heart attack or stroke.” Ardis said. She looked at the other people crowded behind the table. “Do any of you have a baby aspirin? Water?”
An older man reached into a backpack and gave us one, which Ardis put into a half empty water bottle someone else handed her. She shook the bottle until the aspirin dissolved. Then she carefully fed the man a tiny sip.
“If he’s unconscious, how can he swallow it?” I asked.
“Automatic reflex. Watch.”
The man swallowed.
“That’s all we dare do.”
At least he was breathing all right.
We’d resorted to shouting again to hear each other. The noise in the exhibition hall had grown louder despite all the PA announcements.
A loud siren rent the hall’s din. People stopped talking briefly, then resumed. Ordinary behavior was creeping back.
Ardis said, “The crowd suddenly shut up for a while, before the PA system came on. Did you make that happen?”
I looked down at the Dimensional Diamond. It no longer glowed. “I think I did,” I said, “but I can’t be sure.”
It took an hour to empty the hall. As the crowd thinned, we again saw downed bodies. Directly opposite us, a woman was lying inert, with three people surrounding her. The body of a man lay farther up the aisle. People who might have walked right over him a half an hour ago now carefully stepped around him. We tweeted the aisle location of the wounded, but apparently the wounded people we reported were only a drop in the bucket. No EMTs arrived for twenty-five minutes. Our position evidently had been safer than other areas of the vast room.
The man we stood over never moved, but we did when we saw EMTs approaching. We jumped up and down and screamed and pointed to him, trying to make sure he wasn’t overlooked. The EMTs cleared him off the table and onto a gurney. The aisles continued to thin of people.
Finally, Roland beeped me back. “What happened?” he asked.
“Crowd panic.”
“No, I mean before that.”
“I’m standing on a table,” I said. “This is not the time or place to talk.”
“The fire marshal is shutting the hall for tonight. Come down to the office I’m using.”
Roland described how to find his office, promising to meet us at the elevator and turn it on for his floor. He was in a locked area inaccessible to the public.
The tattooed swordsman by now had gotten rid of all his uninvited guests except us. He gallantly lifted Ardis down, then motioned to me to take his hand and step down onto a chair and then the floor. We apologized for stomping all over his merchandise.
“The others did worse. I’m missing some weapons, for sure,” he said. “What a disaster,” he said. “Did you hear that nutty lady over the PA?”
“Yes. Mistress Miraculous. Any idea who she is?” I asked.
He shrugged. “She sure had an attitude.”
“Maybe she doesn’t like geeks,” Ardis said.
“Then she should have stayed home and left us to have our fun,” I said.
Our sword master nodded. “Sucks. I’m paying a fortune for my hotel room and this table, and now I’ve lost merchandise and the opportunity to make any more sales today.”
Ardis made soothing noises. The sword guy smiled at her. Most men smile at Ardis. She’s cute and she looks sweet. She tells me the problem is they all think she’s their little sister.
True to form, our tattooed host was concerned for her. “You’re sure you can leave safely, now? Why not stay a little longer? It’ll be another hour before they boot us out of here.”
Ardis gave me one of her patented “I’m interested in this one” looks. We agreed that I would go see Roland alone and we’d meet outside the hall later to see the special movie preview we had tickets for.
As I walked slowly toward the exit, I was still among a throng of people. I passed booths that had been heavily damaged. Overhead decorations hung askew, and even sections of booth walls were broken. I thought I saw bloodstains, too, but didn’t want to look more closely.
The crowd had thinned out dramatically, but was still a crowd. The level of noise in the hall was too loud for me to overhear conversations, but I could discern the unhappy tones in the voices surrounding me.
Who could be vicious enough to set such a huge crowd into a panic? It had to be deliberate. This was Chicago, where the most deadly crowd panic in American history had occurred. I’d learned about the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903 when I’d moved to Chicago a few years ago. Chicagoans were perversely proud of having had the worst fire panic ever. The Second City, as it styled itself, was very competitive about its status. In New York, we simply assumed we were the biggest and best.
Based on the length of time it took the EMTs to reach as far into the hall as I had been, it was likely that hundreds of people had been hurt. Somebody could be dead.
The guards at the doors wouldn’t reveal that information. They shook their heads when asked, and urged us to keep moving. Although a few people acted indignant, most appeared relieved to be out of the exhibition hall.
The concourse running the width of the building was another crowd scene, but convention management had somehow mustered enough staff to control it. They had stanchions up to create exit lanes. People were encouraged to move along, and to exit the building unless they had a ticket for an event. No one was allowed to stand and gawk at the shambles of the dealer’s room.
I found the elevator bank that led to the administrative offices semi-hidden behind a wall that made it look like a random space. I punched in the code Roland had given me, and the elevator came.
The elevator doors opened two floors down, and there was Roland, looking as cute as ever. I always thought he looked like Adrian Grenier in the TV show Entourage, handsome in a dark, curly-haired, boy-next-door manner. When we hugged, his compact body felt comfortable and familiar. We’d been lovers over a year ago. He was only a few inches taller than me, so it was easy for him to aim a kiss at my lips. I turned so it fell on my cheek.
We hadn’t seen each other in a year, not since my big adventure as a temporary superheroine.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
I did. When I said, “And then some idiot turned out the lights,” Roland started laughing and couldn’t stop.
“What? What did I say?”
He finally stopped guffawing. “It’s an old EC Comics joke. About a guy in a maze.”
“EC Comics. Mainly horror comics from the early 1950s, right? Which means your man in the maze didn’t come to a good end,” I said.
Roland started laughing all over again, almost choking in his mirth. I waited him out, a little bit impatient to get on with it. He could be too fanboy for me. Too much the geek. Every reference to a comic book called up a complex history he knew by heart.
When he was my boyfriend, back when I lived in Chi-town, Roland had told me a ton of details about old comics, but I paid attention to very little of it. Mostly what impressed me was how routinely the artists and writers got screwed out of any share in the profits on what they created.
My mother had discouraged me from trying to be an artist, but all mothers did that. Art of any kind was not a practical career choice. Roland was the one who explained in detail how particularly bad the comics business was, how artists lost out and lost heart, having given their all to create amazing characters and stories.
That was why I was a webcomics artist. I owned it. It was all mine. The fact that I hadn’t quite figured out how to make a living from my art was a problem, but it was my problem. I didn’t have to stew with resentment because a company was making a fortune off my creations. I could go ahead and resent myself for being too scared or too lazy to make success happen. Possibly not talented enough, too, but that was a thought I only had on a bad day.
Roland finally stopped laughing. “Tell me everything that happened next.”
This time around my punchline was, “Ardis decided to stay with the tattooed sword master instead of coming along with me.”
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I think. Someone patched into the PA system, taking advantage of sabotage previously arranged on the electrical system.”
“Did the evil laugh lady leave a note? What’s her motivation?”
“We don’t know. That makes Mistress Miraculous extremely dangerous.”
“Is this the reason you called me and asked me to bring the Dimensional Diamond?”
“I had a hunch. There was something in the air.”
I wanted to pooh-pooh Roland’s sensitivity, but I knew how accurate it could be. “Do you think bad people give off bad vibes even in advance of their bad deeds?”
“Dunno. Anyway, I thought if trouble was ahead, I needed the only real superheroine on the planet: you.”
“Thank you,” I said, bowing from the waist, “but my superhero-ness was only temporary.”
“You brought the Dimensional Diamond, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did, and I used it today, too.” I stood and took a turn around the tight confines of his little security command station. “What do you know about its powers? Can’t we shorten the name? It’s way too long to keep stumbling over.”
“You could call it the Jazzy Jewel.”
I looked at him.
He shrugged. “Okay, how about the DD?”
“DD it is. Spill.”
“The Dimensional Diamond—ah, the DD—does not come from the Fantastic Comics universe. Its origin is in the City Periodicals Comics universe, the world created by FC’s biggest rival.”
Roland leaned back in his chair, in his element as he summarized seventy-five years of comic book history, including intricate details of artists going back and forth across midtown Manhattan to work for one company and then the other in an attempt to get paid better. “Thus the Dimensional Diamond, or DD, if you will, was part of a burst of creativity that happened when two vastly talented artists left FC Comics to work for CP Comics. Their sheer output in only a few years was amazing.”
I narrowed my eyes. “My father was involved in this, wasn’t he.” It wasn’t a question.
Roland nodded. “I don’t know how the leap from an idea for a comic book to an object that works in the real world happened, but it’s cool.”
“We’re back to comic book pseudo-science,” I said, curling my lip. “I hate this. It’s as if people make up the rules as they go. It is logically impossible.”
Roland held up a finger, urging me to stop my diatribe. “Yet you say you used the DD this afternoon. You stopped time for ten minutes.”
I pulled my hair band off so I could drag my fingers through my erstwhile ponytail, a bad habit my mother had never been able to break me of. “Maybe I only imagined it.”
“Show me your glove,” he said.
“Huh?”
“You said the diamond got so hot it bothered you through the glove. Let’s look at the glove.”
I opened my right hand and there was a scorch mark on the glove’s third finger and the thumb. I looked up at Roland, who was grinning. “I guess it’s real,” I said.
“Whoo-ee, Chloe Cole, you are the most amazing woman,” he said. “Only you could be special enough to turn a trinket from a comic book into a real weapon.” He punched the air. “Yesss. We can win this.”
I rolled my eyes. An immature gesture, but Roland and I had been down this road once before. “I suppose this means it is my sacred duty to find the lady who turned the lights out and bring her to justice? What if I don’t want to be a superheroine again? What if I want to spend my time drawing ‘Average Chloe’ sketches in Artist’s Alley? How about I give you the diamond and you do the super stuff?”
Roland shook his head. “You’re the only one who has these powers. Look, I’ll prove it to you. Hand me the gem.”
I pulled the chain over my head and gave the Dimensional Diamond to him.
Roland carefully held the crystal between his third finger and his thumb, as I had. “What else did you do?” he asked.
“All I did was ask the gem to stop time. And I rubbed it a little.”
Roland rubbed the gem and stared at it. More like glared. I didn’t notice anything happening, but if he’d succeeded in stopping time, I wouldn’t, would I? I watched the wall clock behind him, but the second hand kept moving.
Roland put the gem on the table next to him. “Nothing,” he said, his drooping mouth showing his disappointment.
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry,” I said. “If anyone deserves superpowers, it’s you.”
“I don’t think powers are handed out on the basis of merit,” he said, frowning at the jewel. “There’s some other, more cosmic explanation for these gifts.”
“Let’s forget about my so-called cosmic connection.” I donned the crystal. “How can you stop Mistress Miraculous from striking again?”
Roland’s pensive expression let on that he’d seized on some clue. When I pressed him to explain, he shook his head, “It’s a vague thought. I have to check something out.”
Roland refused to be drawn, which ticked me off. He used to tell me every thought in his head back when we were together. Roland was quite verbal by comparison to Eric, who never volunteered much.
Eric. He’d be arriving at the hotel soon, in time to attend the opening night party his company was hosting. A large batch of Fantastic Comics employees had already come to town to make sure the huge booth, which was more like a small village than a booth, had been set up correctly and nothing was missing. Marketing staff ran the booth activities, and Eric and his editors and some artists visited the booth and did the panels and autographing meet-and-greets. PR people from the company’s California arm also came to shepherd the stars of the various television shows and movies. Their huge media presence gave them a very long list of events and people to coordinate.
I was to be on several panels, thanks to my leap in visibility by drawing Swoonie. The rest of my time at this comicon was my own, although I had agreed to take a turn in Artists’ Alley, drawing for charity. Artists Alley was the section of the exhibition hall where individual comic book artists hung out and did sketches for fans, who paid moderate to fantastic sums for the privilege.
The payoff we indie artists who self-published wanted from Artists Alley was for fans to like our publishing efforts more and want to buy our comics. We promoted our indie comics and characters, and hopefully sold a few more mugs and t-shirts as well as print copies of our collected strips. At a huge convention like this, thousands upon thousands of people might wander through the backwater at the edge of the dealers’ room. Even though we weren’t the reason they came, it was a major opportunity for publicity and sales.
This time around, though, I would only be helping out with a literacy campaign, doing drawings for the charity. Since last year, I’d worked harder to promote myself and “Average Chloe,” but I wasn’t quite ready to sell myself directly. I hadn’t sprung for my own table.
I broke into speech, interrupting whatever Roland contemplated. “I have to go now and meet up with Ardis. We’re going to see a superhero movie called “Carp!”
“That premiered as a play right here in Chicago in 1971. It’s a superhero science fiction adventure. It ran in New York City, on Broadway, for a couple of weeks in 1973, too, and later in a couple other places. DC, I think. Then there was a 1980s comic book based on it. Not by the big dogs, though.”
“I wonder why anybody made a movie?”
“There’s a lot of media presence here. They might hope to find a theater distributor. Probably they’ve been hitting the indie film festival circuit.”
After Roland had given me the details, he fell silent. He still mulled over that clue he wouldn’t share with me. Something had sparked a train of thought.
I said, “Good luck with catching Mistress Miraculous,” as I walked to the door.
“Make sure you keep wearing the Dimensional Diamond,” his words followed me.
I slewed around. “I won’t be in the dealers’ room all day every day during this comicon. What kind of additional trouble do you expect?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the DD? What else can it do? You do realize I made up stopping time on the spot?”
“How did you choose that?”
“It’s the Dimensional Diamond, duh. The fourth dimension is time.”
“Time,” he said. Then he was off in his own thoughts again.