Superheroes Anonymous Read online

  Dr. Mobius led me into a different room. Unlike the dirty storage closet and the dim laboratory, this one was relatively normal. A scarred wooden table with mismatched chairs sat in a room with two doorways, one of which we’d just come through. The doorway opposite led to a small, relatively tidy kitchen area.

  We weren’t just in Dr. Mobius’s evil lair, I realized. He lived here.

  “Eat.” Dr. Mobius pushed a plate in front of me. Steam curled off a grilled piece of chicken and the vegetables around it. “I’ve decided you’re no longer a hostage.”

  “I’m not?” I perked up. “I’m free to go?”

  “That would be rude. You’re a guest here now.”

  “So . . . a fancy hostage,” I said.

  He ignored me. “I’m moving you to the guest bedroom for the duration of your stay. Which, hopefully, won’t be long. You’ll put in a good word for me with Blaze.”

  “I don’t know if that’s in my best interests,” I said, and took a bite of chicken. A little dry, but not bad. And I’d had much, much worse in previous kidnappings.

  He chuckled and took a sip of wine, none of which he offered to me. I had a glass of water that I had to trust wasn’t doped with something. “But of course it is.”

  “What’s your beef with Blaze, anyway?” I cut a large piece of chicken free and managed to chew a ­couple of times before swallowing. The gnawing, pervasive hunger was back, possibly because I’d just pushed myself beyond regular human limits. “Did he run over your dog?”

  “Ha!” Mobius sipped his wine again. “Ha, ha.”

  “You’re not going to answer me, are you?” I asked.

  “I like a bit of mystery. It gives me a certain je ne sais quoi, don’t you think?” He rubbed his rubbery mask of a face. “Makes me debonair.”

  I gagged on a bite of vegetables.

  Once I cleaned my plate—­and I mean that almost literally, for I nearly began to lick the dish when my belly realized the dry chicken and vegetables had reached its end, and I was still hungry—­Dr. Mobius led me from the dining room to a new room just down the hall. I cringed, expecting another storage closet, but when he pushed the door open, it was obvious that the room belonged to a seven-­year-­old.

  A seven-­year-­old in love with the color pink. Light pink wallpaper, dark pink carpet, lacy white curtains, unicorns and rainbows on the bed pillows. “You’ll be staying here,” Mobius said, shoving me inside.

  I blinked at the light pink wallpaper, dotted with tiny cartoon stars, and the purple carpet. Lacy white curtains hung over a window that had been blacked out. There were rainbows on the pillows on the bed. “What the . . . is this your daughter’s bedroom? Where are we?”

  Mobius glared. “You ask too many questions,” he said, and shut the door on me.

  I prowled around the room after I heard Mobius’s footsteps fade down the hall, but there wasn’t a single clue that could tell me who it belonged to. The bookshelves told me the owner was probably a voracious reader, for there were fantasy novels stacked atop science-­fiction novels, mingled with romances and other genres that made me reevaluate my idea that the room’s owner was seven. At random, I picked up a book with a unicorn on the cover, and a sudden, shrill beeping made me shout. It grew louder and louder until I took a step back from the bookshelf.

  The same thing happened when I approached any of the walls.

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked the empty air. With an annoyed huff of breath, I tested the bed, half expecting the beeping to start again. Nothing happened.

  I was curious to see if I could do more push-­ups again since I’d eaten and refueled, but I didn’t think there was a chance food would come a third time, and I didn’t want to face the hunger again. So I looked at the book in my hand, sighed, and curled up on the bed. I turned to page one and began to read.

  This was, I reflected when I put the book down and let my eyes drift closed a few hours later, the strangest hostage situation I’d ever experienced.

  Chapter Six

  THIS TIME, I had no idea how long I slept. Unicorns invaded my dreams, frolicking over the shores of sleep, until something grabbed my shoulder and yanked me back into awareness. I tried to scream, but Dr. Mobius had a hand over my mouth. “They’re here,” he said.

  The darkness made it hard to see, but I could definitely smell him. I tried to struggle away, but my legs were tangled in the blankets, and I was still mostly asleep. “Who’s here?” I said as soon as my mouth was free. “What’s going on?”

  He shook his head, and his eyes looked huge in what little light there was. “They’re here,” he said again. “It’s sooner than I expected.”

  “You were just telling me Blaze was taking too long,” I said, but Dr. Mobius shushed me again. He let go of my shoulder and raced to the bedroom door, peering out. I sat up fully. Excitement began to churn through my middle. “Wait, does that mean—­is Blaze here?”

  Dr. Mobius shook his head. “Not Blaze.”

  Something in the way he said it sent a chill through me. “Who is it, then? War Hammer?”

  As he was wont to do, he ignored me. “I need to give you something,” he said under his breath. “I need to give you something, I should have done this already, where is it.” He patted the pockets of his lab coat. “Where is it, where is it?”

  “Doc?” I asked. I kicked free of the bedcovers. “What are you—­whoa.” I backed up a step, mostly because he’d produced a syringe from somewhere on his person. The needle seemed to gleam like Sleeping Beauty’s demented spinning wheel spindle. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  “Hold still.”

  When I tried to get away, I stumbled at precisely the wrong moment. Dr. Mobius grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and shoved the needle in my arm. He covered my face with his hand to keep me from crying out. A wave of nausea and dizziness slammed into me. I staggered sideways, my knee knocking against the corner of the footboard. Dr. Mobius changed his grip on my neck to grab a handful of the back of my shirt. The floor and walls unhelpfully switched places as he yanked me out of the room and down the hall.

  “What did—­what did you do to me?”

  “Have you considered, my dear Girl, a little gratitude? All of this suspicion can’t be healthy.”

  “Excuse me for being suspicious when the guy who turned me into a super-­substance addict pokes me with things,” I said, swallowing my gorge. “It’s a bad habit.”

  “Sarcasm never won anybody friends.”

  “I don’t feel like that’s true.” When I tripped over my own feet, Dr. Mobius hissed out an annoyed breath and yanked me back upright. “Where are we going?”

  “Away. There are too many of them.”

  “But—­” I had a hard time focusing my eyes. “But not Blaze?”

  “Evidently not. It appears to me he doesn’t love you as much as everybody thinks—­no, no, don’t lose consciousness now. There’s too much to be done.”

  Right, I thought. Like I had a choice. We moved through the dining room and a series of rooms I didn’t recognize. I was too busy trying to keep my latest meal in my stomach to really gather much detail. Another door led us to a garage with a blue sedan inside. Mobius shoved me into the passenger seat. Though I groped for the door handle, my hand missed and hit empty air.

  “Gonna be sick,” I said, when he climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “There will be ample time for that later.”

  “It’s so charming that you think I can schedule something like this.” I tried for the door handle again. It made the world wobble.

  He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine gunned to life. It sounded way too loud, but I didn’t have time to wonder why because he slammed his foot down. The car went backward, and the crash as it hit the garage door sounded like an explosion. My shoulder hit the dashboard, and I cried out.

 
Dr. Mobius stomped harder on the gas. A great, wrenching sound filled the air, and the car seemed to explode backward. I cried out again at the sound of something scraping against the car—­the garage door, I realized, what was going on—­and Dr. Mobius began muttering under his breath. I thought I heard something about “Too soon, too soon,” but everything was starting to fracture and break in my head.

  I caught a glimpse of trimmed green lawns, of streetlamps hanging over the sidewalks, of night. Black figures. No, men. There were men in the front yard, dressed in black. I couldn’t see their faces behind their balaclavas.

  They lifted guns when Dr. Mobius peeled out of the driveway. I heard popping noises, like toy pop caps being stomped on.

  The window behind me shattered. Something rained down on my back.

  “Girl.” Dr. Mobius gripped my shoulder. He was driving, and his mouth moved for a minute, but my ears had stopped working. I wondered what he was saying and why everything felt padded in cotton floss. “—­un.”

  “We’re already running.” My voice sounded slurred, the words tumbling out together. I could feel every inch the car traveled though we must have been going way faster than the speed limit. “Where’s Blaze?”

  “Your dependency on that green cretin is worrisome.”

  “He’s not a cretin, he’s—­”

  But the car slammed to a stop again, sending me into the dashboard once again. Dr. Mobius leaned over me and opened my car door. “Run!” he said. And he shoved me out.

  I hit the asphalt, and it bit into both of my palms. When I turned back to say, “Hey!” in protest, Dr. Mobius slammed the door closed behind me.

  Then he stomped on the gas and drove away, leaving me lying in the middle of the street.

  I rose to my feet and promptly took a knee when that made the world tilt sideways, like I was on the deck of a ship in the middle of a storm. I managed two tottering steps and looked around in confusion. I was in the suburbs. I was in a nice neighborhood in the suburbs even.

  I turned around as a minivan turned around the corner, and it occurred to me:

  I was about to get hit by a car.

  Huh.

  MY ARMS WERE strapped down, but that wasn’t my biggest concern when my eyes opened. Where was I? Why were my arms strapped? Was I on the metal table? No, it wasn’t cold. Something like wax paper crinkled beneath me. I was lying on a cushion with tissue paper on it, and my arms were strapped.

  Above me was a white expanse: a ceiling. I could hear voices from somewhere behind me.

  “I told you to take Seventh, not Bailey. You know they’ve got protests going on all day.”

  “You wanna drive? Be my guest.”

  Somebody had strapped my arms in. Somebody—­Dr. Mobius had strapped me in once. He could have done it again.

  I yanked on my right arm, one sharp, hard tug. It came free with a quiet snap. After a second, I realized it was the leather breaking, not my wrist. Just the left arm to go—­good. I sat up and looked around in a daze.

  The drivers in the front seat of the ambulance didn’t look at me. I didn’t know why they were arguing or why they weren’t paying attention to me, but all I knew was that I had to get away. I had to run.

  Something had told me to run.

  They hadn’t strapped my feet down.

  I climbed free of the stretcher and scrambled for the back door. One jerk of the handle and I was free, tumbling out onto the street. The stopped ambulance was trapped in a swarm of ­people shouting and holding signs as they walked. Its red and blue lights flashed across the brick buildings around all of us in the night, like a troop of dancers, dancing, dancing away into the night.

  I stumbled away.

  IT WAS NIGHT. I remembered that much. Night was when the sky went dark, and the pinpricks of stars came out to greet the darkness. Sometimes the moon came out, but I couldn’t see it. I wasn’t worried, though. The moon always returned.

  It was night, and I was standing in front of a Kidd’s Mart. My neck ached. I’d been staring at a sign, a giant green K over the door. Which was probably why my neck hurt, come to think of it. It wasn’t the Kidd’s right by my apartment, I discerned, looking around. So where was I? I looked around, but there weren’t any street signs nearby.

  With a shrug, I pushed open the door to the Kidd’s and stepped onto the dirty linoleum. Usually, Kidd’s was always pretty busy. The fact that it was empty except for the store clerk told me it was probably pretty late.

  “Excuse me,” I said in a rusty voice.

  The store clerk didn’t look up from his game of Cape Crush. “Finally decided to come inside, huh?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You were out there for like twenty minutes. You were starting to freak me out. I thought about maybe calling the cops or something.”

  I knew why he hadn’t; I was maybe five-­two in heels. Barefoot, I didn’t qualify for anything but tiny. Even with my hair at its frizziest, curliest mess, and my clothing disheveled, I was a threat to precisely nobody.

  “Can—­can you tell me where I am?” I asked.

  The clerk looked up. He took in my bare feet and my dirtied clothing with a frown. And the fact that I had—­I’d just noticed this myself, so I wasn’t surprised it had taken him so long—­thick leather straps hanging from both wrists. “Whoa, are you okay? You look like—­”

  “Where am I?” I said again.

  Startled, he stammered out an address, his eyebrows drawing close together. “Are you okay? Do you need any help?”

  “I’m okay.” And without knowing precisely why, I turned around and left the store.

  I made it about ten feet out the door. “Hey!” The clerk, puffing a little because he’d jumped the counter. “Hey, are you seriously okay?”

  I looked down at the straps. “I’ve had worse.”

  “That—­um, look, here.” He pulled out his wallet and held out a Ventra Card. “There’s only, like, a ­couple of fares left on it, but you look like you could use it more than me.”

  I stared at it like it was a foreign object. “Why?”

  “There’s an ‘L’ stop—­two blocks that way.” He pointed. “Maybe you should go to the police?”

  I took the card. “Thank you,” was all I said, and I left.

  I used up what was left on the fare to get back to my normal stop. The trains were mostly empty, so I didn’t have anybody staring at me. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did; I felt strange, like I was in some kind of drugged haze. My feet hurt by the time I climbed the stairs down from my normal stop. I was limping by the time I reached my corner, and nearly whimpering every time I set my right foot down by the time I walked up the steps outside my building.

  Grateful that I kept a key underneath the fire extinguisher down the walkway, I unlocked my door and stumbled inside. The entire world felt muffled, as though I weren’t a part of it anymore. And I was more than happy to escape—­and did so, flopping facedown on my own bed for the first time in what felt like years and years.

  I DON’T KNOW what woke me. A noise, perhaps, the creak of my upstairs neighbor’s floorboards. Maybe I’d just slept myself out. But one moment I was asleep, and the next I sat straight up in bed, eyes wide.

  Something was wrong. And I was hungry.

  Frantic, I searched my bedroom. There was my laptop on the desk with the shopping list I’d been meaning to use. My closet door was open, my rejected work outfits tossed in front of it. My cell phone wasn’t on its charger on my desk, but other than that, not a single thing was out of place.

  So why did it feel weird?

  I frowned at my sheets, which had streaks of red and black, like odd, demented modern art. Where had that come from? I glanced at my feet and saw dried blood, but there wasn’t so much as a scab. Very weird.

  The main room was as untouched as my bedroom th
ough the milk had spoiled so badly that I gagged and slammed the fridge closed, vowing to toss the entire thing out the window once there weren’t any innocent passersby who could possibly be maimed or killed. I settled for eating anything edible in my pantry, without bothering to warm any of it up. The crackers were stale and probably past their date, but I’d worry about food poisoning later. I scooped up salsa and ate it straight with a spoon, and finally got rid of that jar of olives that had been around so long, it should probably start paying rent.

  Finally, the edge of hunger dwindled, giving me a clearer head.

  When I was headed back into the bathroom to shower away the layers and layers of grime that, amazingly, a single chemical shower did little to combat, I figured out what was out of place.

  There was a strange smell in the apartment. Other than the milk, I mean.

  Though it was familiar, it wasn’t a smell that belonged in my place. Carefully, I walked around, sniffing the air. With a jolt, it hit me: somebody had been in my apartment. The scent seemed familiar, but I couldn’t quite match the scent to an identity. It was like the name hovered just beyond my grasp, and if I could just figure it out . . .

  I braced a chair underneath my front door before I showered.

  The hot water seemed to wake my skin, sending pinpricks up and down my entire body. I stood under the stream of it for more than an hour, letting it beat over me while my brain tried to put everything together. I’d been kidnapped, turned into an addict, and . . . hit with a car. I remembered that much, but there wasn’t so much as a bruise on any part of my skin. And I didn’t remember anything after that. My mind was blank though I had a vague memory of red and blue lights on what had to be the roof of an ambulance.

  So if I’d been in an ambulance, why am I in my apartment now? And why did nothing hurt? Had it been a hallucination?

  I needed to get in touch with Blaze. Could I afford a ticket down to Miami? I winced at the thought and turned off the spray. Maybe I could just send Jeremy an e-­mail on the off chance that my every instinct was wrong and he really was Blaze . . .