Junior Hero
Part 5
I got on to the rooftops and followed the sirens. Pretty soon I didn't need them; it was fairly obvious where they were going.
It had once been a fairly affluent neighborhood; there was a bunch of brownstones facing a park. But the area was now rife with gang activity, and money had been moving out. It was run down, with both the buildings and the park showing signs of wear and tear. No doubt the park was a meeting place at night between members of one gang or another, and let the uninitiated beware.
One of the brownstones was well alight by the time I blinked into existence not far away from the fire trucks. It was a good five storeys tall, with flames belching from windows on every floor.
The firefighters had a problem of their own; someone had thoughtfully abandoned a whole series of cars in front of the brownstone, arranged in such a manner that the fire trucks could not get close to the building. Worse, it appeared that some of the fire hydrants had been welded shut. I took a good look at the onlookers, and understood almost immediately.
Virtually all of the bystanders were dark-skinned, to one degree or another. It followed that the inhabitants of the brownstone were likewise black, or otherwise not Caucasian. Which, combined with the abandoned cars, made this deliberate arson. And, if I was right about the voices I could hear from the windows, murder.
My guess was that the Empire Eighty-Eight had a hand in this, somewhere. It was just their style.
I looked around; I was going to need a clear space. Just as I found it, a heavy hand fell on my shoulder.
It was one of the firefighters. "You need to get back, kid, before -" he began, then his gaze fell on my mask. "Hey, you're a cape?"
"Yeah," I replied. Cool, I was getting some recognition at last. "Kid, ah, Quantum. How many people are up there?"
"Ah, we're not sure. Maybe half a dozen, maybe a lot more."
Shit. Unless I acted fast, they were going to be dead. "Listen," I told him. "What's your name?"
"Ed," he replied automatically. "Ed Falks. But you need to talk to the fire chief."
"Don't have time," I told him, saving that spot into D-1's memory. "Stay where you are for just a moment. I'll be back."
"Back -" he began, but I wasn't listening. I hit the recall button and went home.
In my bedroom, I quickly located the can of yellow spray paint I had used to stencil my jacket, and returned to the same spot. Ed Folks was staring at where I'd vanished from; he stepped back a pace when I reappeared.
"Christ," he exclaimed. "You scared the shit out of me."
I hid a grin and began marking out a square, two yards across, on the asphalt, with the yellow paint.
"Hey, what are you doing?" he asked. "You can't do that."
I tucked the can into my pocket, and turned to him. "I'll be teleporting people to this spot, you got it?" I told him. "Right here. In this square. They appear, you pull them out of the square. Don't let anyone intothe square."
He blinked, but didn't argue. It was the best I was going to get, I guessed.
I peered up at the burning building, picked a window that didn't have fire coming out of it, and tapped in the coordinates for the window ledge.
Even though the bit I was at wasn't on fire, it was still plenty hot. Being next to a burning building was no kind of fun. I was already starting to cough when I scrambled in through the window.
"Hey!" I yelled. "Anyone! This way out! Hey!"
Pulling out a handkerchief and covering my mouth and nose with it, I stumbled farther into the building. It didn't do much.
Nor could I see much, even when I pulled out my torch.
I found a body, slumped on the floor; crouching beside him, I felt for a pulse. I wasn't the best at my first-aid class, but I figured he was alive. Now to get him down to safety.
He wasn't conscious, or near to it. He would never stand up to step on the plate. That was fine; I could work around that.
Pulling D-3 off of my belt, I dropped it on the floor beside him. D-4 had the keypad; squinting to see it in the light of the torch, I tapped in the coordinates that equated to the square I had jumped from. Without a line of sight, I just had to trust that Ed Falks wasn't standing in the middle of it, waving his arms.
The coordinates were locked in. I lifted the old man's hand – he didn't deserve to die, just because the Empire Eighty-Eight disapproved of his skin colour - then let it fall on to the plate of D-3.
He vanished.
One bystander safe.
I coughed heavily.
Picking up D-3, I found the door and went to open it, then changed my mind when I saw the smoke roiling in under the jamb. The handle was hot to the touch. Not a good idea.
I tried to recall if either of the windows on one side or the other had been free of fire.
Staggering back to the window, I leaned out and took deep breaths of air that was hot and had marginally less smoke in it. It tasted like heaven. Looking to the left, I saw flames. To the right, nothing. And then I heard the yelling.
Craning out and looking up, I saw towels being waved out the window, heard yelling.
That was where I needed to be.
Climbing out on to the window ledge, I yelled as loud as I could.
"Hey! Hey up there! Can you hear me?"
There was a pause in the yelling. I tried again. "Can you hear me?"
"Yeah," a hoarse voice replied. "We hear you! Where are you?"
"One floor down!" I yelled back. "Get away from the window. Do you hear me? Away from the window!"
"Why?" he yelled back, over the crackling of flames. Too close. I looked over my shoulder, and saw that the door was no longer blocking the flames from the corridor. The heat was suddenly a magnitude more intense. I was seriously regretting making a jacket part of my ensemble.
"Just stand back from the window!" I screamed. I couldn't wait. Tapping in the coordinates one-handed, I hit the go button.
D-1 did its job, translating me straight up, on to the window ledge above. However, I coughed heavily just as I jumped, and lost my grip. I slipped, started to fall outward.
A strong hand gripped my wrist, and I was hauled into the room. Getting to my feet was difficult, because I couldn't stop coughing. I looked through streaming eyes at a semi-circle of anxious faces.
Dropping D-3 on to the floor, I input the destination coordinates into D-4, stopping twice to cough.
As I did so, I could hear them talking.
"Shee-it, it's just a kid!"
"How'd he get up here?"
"Screw that, how's he gonna git us down?"
"What's he doing?"
Only my erstwhile rescuer stayed silent, watching my every move with a calculated calm.
I slumped to one side, coughing, and gestured at D-3. My words were lost in the noise of the inferno elsewhere in the building. Far too close, now.
"What?" He leaned closer.
"Step ... on ... it ..." I managed. I gestured at the window.
The voices rose again. "What did he say?"
"He said to step on it."
"Why?"
"Only one way to find out."
An elderly man, who could have been a twin for the one downstairs, hobbled forward and placed one foot gingerly on D-3. He vanished, of course.
The big man, the one who had pulled me in, leaned out the window, staring outward. Suddenly, he tensed.
"He's down there!" he yelled. "He's out! That thing teleports you!"
The rest had done me good; I struggled to my knees with my handkerchief over my mouth. As they surged forward, I put out my hand, one finger upward. They stopped. I pointed at a woman carrying a baby. She stepped forward; they both vanished.
Two young children, clinging together. They went as well.
One at a time, giving the unit time to charge its quantum coils, they went.
Half of the crowd of twenty - somewhat more than half a dozen, indeed - were gone, when there was a roar and a rush of heat. The door to the apartment had crumbled, and flame was rapidly encroaching on the apartment.
At the same time, a rather portly man stepped on D-3 and utterly failed to vanish. D-3 let out a mournful beep.
"Hey, what's up?" he yelled. "Not workin'!"
I waved him back, knelt down to examine the unit. As I feared, the repeated use had drained its power cell. Looking over my shoulder, I eyed the oncoming fire. I had a solution, but it was risky as hell.
Turning D-3 over, I ripped open the access panel. Beside it, I dropped D-1 and likewise opened the panel. Pulling the QD unit from D-1, I hastily wired it into D-3; hopefully, the connection would hold long enough. And in the meantime, it was being recharged by D-5.
Which reminded me. Slapping D-1 back into its chest holder, I activated D-5 and headed for the fire. Using a control I'd added as an afterthought, I expanded the bubble around me as far as it would go - in the final estimate, about four feet in all directions.
This let a lot of surface area absorb energy. It was also risky as hell; I had to make sure that it didn't absorb too much. Overload might just equal boom.
Just a few seconds later, D-3 let out a triumphant chime. The portly man stepped on it, and vanished. A muffled cheer went up, and the next man stepped forward. I stayed where I was; the field emitted by D-5 was sucking up the flames and retarding the forward progress, but the footing was unsteady as the floor burned away.
And field or no field, it was hot.
The last to step out was the big man who had saved me from falling; he turned and nodded to me before vanishing.
I hurried forward, or tried to; stumbling, I went to my knees, coughing and wheezing.
I could feel the air inside my field heating up. What was happening?
Oh, yeah, it might be overloading.
If I turned it off, that could release all the stored energy like a bomb.
I did the only thing I could; I unclipped the unit, dropped it, and used D-1 to jump across to the window where D-3 waited for me. Scooping up the faithful unit, I was reaching for the button to jump away just as D-5 exploded.
It really was like a bomb.
I breathed cool, dry air. It was sweet and life-giving.
Slowly, I blinked open swollen, reddened eyes.
A female paramedic looked down at me. "Hey, you're awake." She raised her voice. "He's awake!"
Oh shit oh shit. I tried to reach up to my face; was my mask still on?
"Hey, relax, hero," she reassured me. "We worked around your mask. No-one saw your face."
I relaxed again, then. Breathed oxygen from the mask. Thought about how excellent it was to be alive.
Two faces leaned in to the ambulance. One was bare, but bore marks of smoke and grime around where an air mask had been covering it. The other was covered almost entirely by a helmet. I recognised Armsmaster at once, of course.
"Well, kid, you gave us all a fright at the end," said the bare-faced man. "I'm Chief Ridley. Falks says your name's Kid Quantum?"
I nodded, a little weakly. "That's me," I mumbled inside the mask.
"You saved twenty-two people today," Armsmaster took up the thread. "I examined your gear; while I didn't understand all the principles, it's pretty easy to see that you're a tinker. And that you did some sort of modifications to it in the middle of a burning building."
I nodded and shrugged; I couldn't make any sort of long speech right then.
Fortunately, he didn't need one. "That shows heroic intention, and a certain level of capability that we really need," he went on. "I'd like to extend an invitation to you.
"How would you like to be in the Wards?"
End of Part 5