An ambulance was at the entrance of the nursing home, a couple beefy paramedics hoisting up a withered woman who seemed to weigh nothing at all, sliding her cot into the back of the boxy vehicle.
A light from the top of the ambulance flashed Tom right in the face.
Oh, thank fucking god, he thought as he shuffled the rest of the way down the aluminum ladder and picked it up. Tom ran down the path toward the miniature park, trying his damndest to be invisible. He was wearing dark clothing and the paramedics were busy, but all it took was one stray glance and he’d be toast.
Once he got outside the grounds of the nursing home, it would be a short jog over to his car, parked a couple streets down so as to not make it obvious which roof he was prowling.
When he crossed the picturesque hedge lined with flowers that served as the threshold of the nursing home, he took off his ski mask and slowed down, his heart hammering in his chest. A kid walking through an urban street in the middle of the night with a ladder was an eyebrow-raiser, but not something that people would go out of their way to investigate.
If he was wearing a ski mask, that changed things entirely.
He threw the mask into an alley on the way over to the Subaru, hoping no eyes were on him.
The trip back to his car was uneventful, and Tom got the ladder into the back of his beat-up Subaru without incident. He was about to close the back hatch when a beam of light settled on him, blinding his hard-won night vision.
Ohshitohshitoshit!
A door opened and closed, but Tom couldn’t do anything but cover his eyes against the spotlight.
“Whatcha doing with a ladder at two in the morning?” a voice asked.
“Taking it to my grampa. I just bought it. I work the night shift,” Tom said, his mind whirring at top speed.
Listen son, the key to lying to the cops is keeping all your points of failure in line. Keep everything as close to the truth as possible, and make everything that you say as impossible to disprove as you can. They’ll peck at your story, but if you do it right, they’ll leave you be. And end every sentence with ‘sir’. Gets their rocks off.
Thanks, Grampa.
In this case, his point of failure was his grampa, but hopefully Grampa was quick enough on his feet to corroborate Tom’s story.
“You got a receipt?” the cop asked, stepping closer, out of the glaring light. The cop was your typical ruddy-cheeked two-hundred-pound white guy with a crew cut.
Tom could swear they had some kind of mold for beat-cops.
“Yeah, it’s in the car—sir,” Tom said, heart jumping into his chest. He actually did have the receipt, but Tom didn’t like the intensity of the questioning. He didn’t like anything about the current situation.
His body wanted him to start running immediately, but his mind knew that was the fastest way to fuck himself over. They had his license plates; he was already caught. Right now, he just needed to play it cool so they dropped it.
The cop leaned over and scanned the back of the Subaru for a moment before he put the beam of light in Tom’s face. His gaze lingered on Tom for a gut-wrenching moment.
“We’ve got reports of somebody trespassing through people’s backyards. You take a shortcut through somebody’s lawn earlier tonight? Maybe on your way to the store?”
They were a couple blocks away from a suburb, so it was within reason.
Stupid trespasser making life difficult for me.
“No sir, I have a car.”
“This is your car?”
“Yessir.”
“ID.”
Tom fished out his wallet and passed the whole thing over. The cop deftly took out his driver’s license and went back to the car, the cruiser’s floodlight pinning him in place like a bug on a display.
Oh, great, they’ve got your ID now.
Tom could only sweat his ass off for what felt like an hour while they ran his plates.
“You go by Tom or Thomas?” the officer asked as he ducked back out of the cruiser.
“Tom, sir.”
“You carrying any drugs?”
“No, sir.”
The officer checked his pockets, took one last look at his car’s shredded interior, then nodded. “Have a good night, Tom. Get those seatbelts replaced.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
The cop handed Tom a ticket for the seatbelts, then headed back to the cruiser. And just like that, they left him alone. Tom let out the biggest sigh of relief since Ellie had been born.
“I gotta get the hell outta here,” Tom muttered, ducking into his seat.
When he got home, Tom got right to work on the summoning circle. It was…well, it was impossible to know for sure if he got it right after only one day. Tom’s memory was good, but it wasn’t perfect.
He made a rough sketch of the diagram for contacting Outsiders from memory, gathered all the ingredients he could remember, then went to bed.
Over the next couple days, he would consult the drawing in his dreams, comparing it to the one in the book, and make changes to the sketch as soon as he woke up, making a line slightly thicker here, adding a missing detail there.
Eventually, his sketch in the real world was a perfect copy of the one in the book. Good enough to risk getting started on the spell itself.
Tom was not looking forward to going back up on the roof of the nursing home and seeing if his net had caught any old-people souls, but he would have to eventually.
Over the course of two weeks, he painstakingly inscribed the complex arrangement of runes on the floor using a caulk gun filled with a thick black sludge of goose fat and ash, checking and double-checking the book for every possible thing that could go wrong.
All the squiggly lines of the spell travelled inward, toward the as-yet missing power source, which should theoretically light the whole thing up.
It kinda looks like a creepy eye, Tom thought as he carefully checked over the symbol on the floor, comparing it to his sketch.
It was done. The black design on the ground was as perfect as he could make it. Now he just needed the power source.
I wonder if two weeks is long enough for someone to have kicked the bucket, Tom thought idly as he clomped up the stairs out of the basement. It was eight in the morning, he’d been working on the spell all night between feeding and diapers, and he was glad to find Gramma making dinner/breakfast for him and Grampa.
“It emerges,” Grampa said without dropping his newspaper. The old man was a stubborn holdout for paper, when he could’ve just as easily been reading on his cell phone. Then again, being stubborn was kind of Grampa’s shtick.
Tom blinked against the light of dawn and suppressed a yawn, glancing at the paper.
“Hero Cop Makes Another Daring Drug Bust”
Tom idly scanned the back of the newspaper as he sat, picking out the major details, like the fact that the guy had been outgunned six to one and disarmed the bad guys without suffering a single wound. It was highly unusual, but it wasn’t unheard-of.
Good for him, I guess. Tom wasn’t that uncharitable. Even though a cop had almost caught him in a misdemeanor a while ago, he’d rather not see news about them getting plastered across the sidewalk.
Tom was quickly distracted by bacon and eggs dropping onto his plate.
“Did I mention how much I love you, Gramma?” Tom mentioned between forkfuls of greasy calories.
“Yeah… It always seems to peak around breakfast,” she said with a hint of sarcasm, rinsing off the pan.
“Mm” Tom grunted.
***Kenneth Peterson***
“That was some stunt you pulled, there,” Paul said, reviewing the body-cam footage while Ken waited patiently for his boss to finish his tirade.
“That. Right there,” he said, pausing the film right before one of the dealers pulled the trigger.
“I don’t know how the fuck you didn’t get blown away right there. You’re obviously staring down the goddamn barrel in the video.”
“He flinched,” Ken said, his voice even.
“If he did, it’s sure as hell hard to see.”
The captain turned back to Ken. “Normally, I’d give you a thorough cussing for taking so many stupid risks, but somehow you make it look like it’s spring cleaning and you’re the damn maid, and now the mayor himself is asking about you specifically, and asking me some stupid goddamn questions, like ‘If one guy can do it, why did it take this long?’”
Paul leaned forward. “You and I both know human beings can’t possibly match that standard, so you’re gonna shake the mayor’s hand, smile for the cameras, claim your exploits were the result of your training and the support of your fellow officers, take the promotion, and fade into obscurity. Is that understood?”
“Yessir.”
Paul shook his head, watching Ken closely. “Well, if you were looking to advance your career by being stupid, it looks like you hit the jackpot. Now half a dozen other kids are gonna try the same thing and get killed. I should shove my foot up your ass, but it needs to be sparkling for the press conference. I’ll see you in an hour.”
“Sir,” Ken said, recognizing a dismissal when he heard one.
Ken left the office and relaxed. Paul didn’t know about the gold…thing. He hadn’t brought it up once. That meant no one else had realized what they could do.
I’m a fucking superhero. Like Green Lantern, or something. He’d been able to turn cold and let those bullets pass right through him. It was fucking beautiful.
In a few days, the wad of gold from the girl’s car was going to disappear, but it wasn’t going to be wasted lining the pockets of his superiors; it was going to go to someone who deserved it. Someone who could use it:
Kenneth.
All he had to do was slip into the evidence room from an exterior wall, grab the loot and slip right back out.
He hadn’t really planned exactly what he was going to do with it once he had it. Hand them out to other cops so they could kick major ass too?
Then again… A faint, nearly unconscious voice told Ken that if he just handed the magic doodads out, he would no longer be special.
...Actually, you know what? They would probably fall into the wrong hands in a matter of weeks, he rationalized. Secrets shared between more than one person never stay secret, and sooner or later, some criminal would get their hands on one of them, and then there would be supervillains.
The responsible thing to do was to keep it to himself.
And did the city really need a team of superpowered crime fighters? Not really. They hadn’t needed them before, and they wouldn’t need them now—especially if he did the city a favor and kept the secret of the gold from getting into the hands of the bad guys.
Which it would, if the brass sold it wholesale.
You’re welcome, Chicago, Ken thought as he straightened his jacket, heading out towards the locker room.
In the meantime, he had to touch up his shave, comb his hair pretty, shine his shoes, get any creases ironed out of his uniform, and pin on his medals. He wanted to look his best for the cameras when the mayor shook his hand.