Still dusting herself, Pretty Amazonia frowned. “This riffraff?”
“Now,” Jack urged. “Come on, guys. Move it — let’s get them headed down that street over there.” He pointed to a narrow avenue that was partially sheltered by the tall buildings to either side. “Probably the safest place in all this madness.”
“Right you are, boss-sir,” responded the Brick, as he gave a brief look to PA. “You heard the man, lady — if ya got a few minutes to spare, it’s time fer us to save humanity again.” Strolling out in time to the waltz, holding aloft his big arms, the chunky Equalizer took up yelling at men and women while debris fell about. “Beat it, ya bums! Thataway!”
Jack was set to go lend a hand when he sensed PA hovering behind him. Glancing round, he noticed how her expression simmered.
“Since when did you start giving orders, Jack?”
“Any better notions?”
“Number one, we’re way out of our league — and, secondly, you’re hardly the type to be in charge.”
“Not saying I am — so you take the lead.”
“Why bother?”
Impatient to help the poor sods under attack, and equally steamed up, Jack turned a speedy circle to face the woman. “Because it’s our job, our responsibility — to save innocent people.”
“Not mine. I don’t remember signing up for such rubbish.”
There was a sonic boom, like someone nearby had broken the sound barrier, and the entire façade of a skyscraper crashed down with a roar onto a nearby street, concrete dust filling the air. Once it cleared, Jack saw people hanging from naked girders several storeys up; others stood, shocked, in offices now open to the elements.
“Shite, we haven’t got time for this.” He glared up at the woman. “For God’s sake, make yourself useful, right now, or go home.”
“Touché,” Gypsie-Ann chimed in from over Jack’s shoulder.
In answer, since she was wordless, the other woman quicksilvered it off the street. Jack caught a blur of lavender, and then there was neither sight nor sign in either direction.
The reporter leaned in close, speaking above the sound of squealing violins and peppered shouting. “Don’t judge her just yet. In the meantime, let’s try and do what we can.”
Someone in a Technicolor cape fell out of the sky to slam headfirst into the asphalt in the middle of the road near the Brick, just as a hardware store went kablooey and showered glass and garden tools on people luckless enough to be nearby.
“Lightning bolt at eleven o’clock!” the Brick shouted from the other side of the street.
Jack and Gypsy-Ann looked about. “Bollocks!” Southern Cross yelped, “which bloody way is eleven o’ cl—?”
A fork of electricity that danced across the boulevard cut him short, missing the Equalizer and his umbrella-wielding companion by only a metre, while several bystanders were sautéed.
Now pushed against him, the reporter had lost most of her calm. “Least we now know what time it is. This is getting really bloody hairy,” she whined.
“At least you stayed.”
“I always was the stupid sister.”
Flames sizzled across rooftops as Capes laid into one another in mid-air. One man caught on fire and another dived beneath a plasma blast, straight into a wall. There were screams, insane cheers and jeers, all of this above and beyond the switch in music to ‘Hungarian Dance No. 5’.
While they tried to round up stragglers, Jack and Gypsie-Ann were almost bowled over by a police officer on an Indian Chief motorcycle — Jack saw the hysteria etched into the cop’s face as he raced past — but the reporter successfully fended him off with her brolly.
Of course these people were panicking. They needed a restorative.
With this fancy in mind, the Equalizer again pointed his arm straight, directed at the sky. Having performed a quick look-see to ensure no one was flying overhead, he then fired off his biggest explosive bolt yet. This might’ve almost removed his fingers, but it lit up the street, giving the terrified pause.
“Head that way!” Jack yelled, shaking his right arm in pain at the same time that he pointed with the left. “Stay calm! We’re here to help, okay? Help us help you!”
“Fer the luvva Pete — move it, bozos!” boomed the Brick.
Once the three established some vague sense of order, even while the battle raged on in the wild blue yonder, Jack heard a crack and a scream above the rollicking chorus of stringed instruments in FA minor.
At first he didn’t know which way to look, but seconds later saw that a boy had stumbled, or been pushed over, in the mad scrum — fifty-odd metres away. This kid sat there on his bum, tears in the eyes, nursing a bleeding knee. Above him, formerly secured to the third storey of an emporium, a huge neon-lit billboard sagged. Sparks flying, it broke away from the wall, dipping down at an accelerated pace toward the kid.
The Brick was closer, but he hadn’t noticed — and there was no way his bulk would cover the distance in time. Jack and Gypsie-Ann were too far and could do nothing to stop this horror-in-motion.
“Oh, no,” the reporter mumbled.
In a strange kind of slow-mo, the boy looked up, paled, covered his head with his hands — and then vanished inside a purple flash a split-second before the huge sign smashed into the ground and a veil of debris billowed.
Jack blinked several times.
“Knew you’d need me,” Pretty Amazonia announced right beside him, to his left.
When Jack spun, he found she cradled the bewildered kid. “Jesus…you cut it close,” her partner muttered, a grin etching itself into his face.
“Needed to get the tantrum out of my system.”
“An old habit,” Gypsie-Ann said. “I knew she’d be back.”
“You could’ve told me,” Jack responded.
“Think I inferred.”
Meanwhile, the boy seated in PA’s arms was staring up at his saviour. “You — you’re Pretty Amazonia, ain’t you?” he finally said, eyes huge.
“Yeah, yeah,” the woman muttered, remembering to put him down.
“Wow — it’s really you! Wait’ll I tell the others! I’m Willie Marston, ma’am. Me an’ my pals, Harry and Liz, we’re putting together our own comicbook, honest to gosh, an’ we’ve almost finished issue 1 — with you in spots as the main star.”
“Get over it, kiddo. Not impressed.”
“For you, ma’am, I’ll roll over an’ stay dead.” The boy laughed out loud.
Sure, PA sounded more indifferent than ever, pushing supremely bored, but when Jack looked again he would’ve sworn she’d teared-up.
Then again, maybe it was the smoke.
The war between the Capes took a total of eight minutes to end. The pretty music trailed on thirty seconds longer, before it too subsided and there was an eerie silence.
Soon, sirens wailed and people screamed or moaned or cried, while further buildings collapsed. Entire city blocks had been ravaged, cars burned out on the streets, and there were dozens of bodies amidst the rubble.
In this context, the number of people the Equalizers had saved hardly mattered.
A crowd gathered at both ends of the street, helping survivors and clearing detritus, but when Jack approached to help they responded by pitching rocks at him. This forced the Brick to run interference, stones rebounding off his hide, as he shuffled his partner away from the scene and back to the others.
“Jack, you’re such a bleeding-heart sentimentalist,” PA complained, back to her best. “You remind me of the Big O. These people don’t want your respect — they want you off their damned property.”
#162
On the near horizon, fires still raged.
After a quick call from an undamaged payphone to see if Louise was home (she wasn’t), Jack let Gypsie-Ann get on the blower to the Patriot with her eyewitness scoop, and he joined the other two Equalizers at an adjacent bar, since they’d shot down the Brick’s recommendation of the chicken shawarma place next door
.
A black sign above its front window spelled out the Neon Bullpen in baby blue luminous tube lights, and the owners had topped it off with a picture of an HB pencil. On their in-house sound system they were spinning Tom Jones’s ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’, an upbeat full stop to a long-winded evening.
“Think I need t’order one thousand, five hundred an’ seventy-four gin an’ tonics t’get over this inord’nate stink,” bellyached the Brick, squeezed as he was into a tiny chair.
“Large ones?” Pretty Amazonia helpfully suggested.
“Let’s go with jugs. Only way I’ll feel jolly again, Christmas be damned.”
Jack hopped onto a bench seat closer to the window and ventured a glance into the twilight. The skeleton of a zeppelin smouldered atop a ruined skyscraper three blocks down, and there were four red fire engines tackling the blaze. Hundreds more were down by the waterfront.
“All quiet on the Western Front,” said Jack, “aside from all the people fighting fires.”
“That’s ‘cos most o’ the Capes’re dead-meat.”
“And a whole bunch of other people.” Jack wasn’t wearing his mask. There didn’t seem any point.
“Gotta admit — I never seen anythin’ like it.”
“Soak it up. Doubt we will again,” said PA.
Jack nodded. “Agreed. God, I hope not. The costumed moppets broke way too many toys.”
“And service here sucks.”
The Brick searched about for a waiter, head swivelling this way and that at a rapid pace, which remarkably made Jack laugh.
“I wouldn’t serve us, either.”
As ‘What’s New, Pussycat’ segued into ‘It’s Not Unusual’, the woman on the other side of the table focused in on him.
“You did good, Jack.”
“You too.”
“Eventually.”
“Fat lot of help any of it was, though.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. You were right to coerce us into making the stand.” PA looked down to the red and white chequered tablecloth, carefully sliding a fork next to a butter knife. “I think Mister B and I learned something from you — yeah, I’ll admit it, you showed us our prejudices, and now we’re trying to play catch-up.”
“Glad we’re together on this.”
“Even so, learn something from us. About the girl — Louise. You have to let her go.”
This subject again. The last thing he needed to hear right now. “Why the blazes would I do that?”
“Why? Because one day soon, the hopeless techs back in Melbourne will fix the Reset — and because when she forgets, it’ll break your heart.”
Next to him, the Brick fussed over a serviette but said zero. Agreement hung in the air.
“PA,” Jack muttered, “just drop it.”
“All right.”
The unmasked Equalizer looked around this bar, thinking hard about nothing in particular and trying to shake the gloominess. “I doubt any of it matters, anyway — I’m pretty sure we’re washed up.”
“Still,” PA insisted.
“I get you.”
“But you don’t like our lectures.” She sighed.
“Shoo, Jack — go on, then, scoot over!”
Before the three knew what was afoot, Gypsie-Ann had muscled into a seat beside Southern Cross, and she turned to examine his face.
“Why the moping? You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“Debatable.”
“Well, you look reasonably functional, more so than my poor umbrella.”
“So your investment in yubiwaza didn’t include accessories?”
The reporter tilted her head to one side. “Appreciate the moment. You could easily be one of those corpses out there — speaking of which, we missed the fun and hastily organized games of the funeral for all those dead Capes.”
“They did that already?” Pretty Amazonia frowned. “The fight ended only, what, two hours ago?”
“I’m guessing the locals think good riddance to bad rubbish. I got this from a reliable source — they tossed the bodies into a mass grave in an abandoned lot that’s stuck away on a no-nonsense back street at the edge of town. Witnessed by a miniscule crowd who gave no shit. Or so I hear.”
“Classy,” decided the Brick, as he began to tear a paper napkin into neat strips. “Least they would’a skipped them annoying musical interludes.”
“Not all they skipped. No tears, no flowers, no car horns, and definitely no love lost. Another eight Capes are in intensive care — yep, at a hospital. The rules were bent. Have their own wing to themselves, but I do wonder about any ‘priority’ they’ll be granted.”
PA shifted closer. “Anyone we know?”
“Nana Mouskouri’s Spectacles, Dick Drone, Atomic Autocrac, Callous Claude. A couple of others I hadn’t heard a peep from before.”
“Word on Prima Ballerina?” delicately prodded the Brick.
“She wasn’t on the list.”
“Saint Y?”
“Nope.”
Jack sighed. “Civilian casualties?”
“Last count, six hundred odd — two thirds of that number dead.”
Gypsie-Ann spotted a waitress, hailed her over, and ordered a bottle of Les Gouttes de Dieu merlot with four glasses.
“Hard to say how many for sure. The police’re still counting and playing jigsaw with the remaining pieces. Bob Kahn’s in a rage and Chief of Police O’Hara is on the telly, demanding new legislation to control Cape activities — basically pitching to lock us all up. By the way, I do love this relaxing of the stupid rules. Haven’t drunk this much in years.”
She grabbed the bottle from the waitress, before the woman could pour, in order to do a faster job herself. “Here we go. To the end of a stupid era.”
They clinked glasses filled to the rim, but before she drank PA stared into the red wine. “You reckon there’ll be others?”
“Stupid eras?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Other fly-by-nighters from Melbourne?” Jack asked after a big sip.
“Yeah.”
“Always more suckers back there,” said the Brick.
After finishing off her drink in a few quick gulps, Gypsie-Ann shook her head. “Oh, I doubt it. The system’s down, Blandos waking up. Heropa is not exactly attractive now. I’m loving it, but fact is we’re the stragglers, along with a handful of other bozos out on the streets.”
Pretty Amazonia downed half her own glass, and then pulled a face. “You make me feel like that survivor of the three hundred Spartans.”
“Aristodemus? He actually skipped out on the final battle — eye infection. That’s how he lived.”
“Figures. Maybe that’ll be my excuse. When the system is Reset and we can get out of here,” Jack looked at the reporter over his glass, “are you staying?”
“Bet your life I am. Someone has to tell the stories, and thereby keep the perverse spirit of heroism alive.”
“This wasn’t heroism. It was madness.”
“Precisely — aside from the actions of three people I know right here, Jack. Cheers. Which brings me to my real reason for popping in to hound you all.”
“What, I thought hounding us was your hobby,” her sister responded.
“True, but I also spoke to Kahn.”
Jack flinched. “Has he seen Louise?”
“I mentioned her — but, no, he hasn’t. The man is understandably spitting chips and his officers have their hands full, but he still found time to mention something he found out before the riot. They have a lead on this man we’re after.”
Now Jack shot his head back up. “What? Where?”
“Entering a building downtown, in South Erebus — I have the address here.” Gypsie-Ann placed a piece of paper on the table, expression thoughtful. “I double-checked. There are no Capes we know of — alive, dead or M.I.A. — residing in the area, though I can’t account for secret IDs. This may, and I stress may, be the guy’s base of operations.”
 
; Sweeping up the paper, Jack read an address he didn’t know, and then showed it to his two teammates. “Kahn is sure?”
“The Stetson. Red rag to a bull.”
“PA?”
“On it, sahib.”
A second later, the other woman’s chair was empty, gently rocking back and forth a few times until Gypsie-Ann reached over to stabilize it.
“Haste, less speed,” she muttered.
“Dollface can handle ‘erself,” said the Brick.
“Oh, I know that — I’m more concerned about our suspect.”
“Yeah, come to think o’ it, I don’t want her t’get first dibs. Garçon!” The man snapped his fingers in the air, very nearly deafening the two others at the table. “Where’s our blamed bill?”
#163
While Stellar bee-lined back to the Patriot building —“Vital stuff to catch up on,” she claimed — Jack hopped into the Brick’s Delahaye, and they drove at speed.
“Yer with us, kid?” asked the roughly sculpted chauffeur.
Tightening his seatbelt, Jack produced a slight shrug. “Yeah, just thinking. I should’ve tried calling Louise again.”
“I’m not stoppin’ yer.”
“But you don’t have a telephone in this crate — do you?”
“Only what’cha see. PA says I’m a skinflint, but why on this earth would I need a natty phone?”
Jack glanced at his driver. “How soon till we get to South Erebus?”
“Few minutes. We’re on Iger Street now. Hang tight.”
“The bastard is mine.”
“Join our extended queue, junior. I’ll leave yer the crumbs.”
Ten minutes later, they pulled up at a kerb — the Brick turned the corner far too quickly, took out a road sign, and lodged a back wheel up on the gutter. Outside stood an unremarkable redbrick block of flats with the words Randall Arms in fading print above the entrance.
“344 Yancy?” the Brick wondered, as he looked about.
“Maybe you need spectacles — says so right there, on the sign you knocked over.”
“Let it ride, huh?”
“Nice choice in comebacks, B.”