Superhero Nation

by

Mike Tanier

Part Three of Five

Different Languages

We aren't supposed to know that agencies like Valley Green exist.

According to government policy, the Vigilante Prevention Amendments were absolute and total. Only government agents are authorized to use CFC or superconductive weapons. Private citizens are banned from using such weapons. No body-enhancing drugs. No flight packs. Period. Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

In reality, nothing is ever that easy. Captains of industry need security personnel armed with the latest hardware. Corporations need sleuths for internal security and investigations, and souped-up bodies and hardware are advantageous when available. The rich and powerful weren't about to allow Washington to corner the market on high-tech weaponry, and they dispatched their lobbyists the moment VPA was ratified.

Hence the existence of organizations like Valley Green, a fully licensed provider of superpowered investigators and bodyguards for those wealthy enough to afford such amenities. Tucked away in one of Manhattan's thousands of high-rise offices, the unassuming corporation does it's level best to attract as little attention as possible. That's why its name isn't exactly evocative, and you can't find them in the yellow pages. They publish a web site (it would be suspicious if they didn't) full of vague language and double-talk, designed to bore the reader into moving on, unless he knows what he's looking for.

Getting an interview with anyone at Valley Green is nearly impossible. It takes impressive credentials and a promise of absolute anonymity. Smart readers have probably already realized that Valley Green Agency isn't really called Valley Green Agency, and Salome DuPree, the woman I met on behalf of the Goths, isn't really named Salome DuPree.

"A famous soul singer contacted us eight months ago," Salome explained as we talked in her spacious, tastefully decorated office. She was a tall, slender woman with mounds of black curls and café-latte skin. "This individual was being harassed by a stalker for months. Conventional security guards weren't able to catch him."

She poured herself a glass of water. In her blue business suit, she looked more like a stock trader than a clandestine operative. "We dispatched an agent who had undergone optic surgery as a child. Visual acuity in his surgically-implanted eye was 5-times better than in a conventional eye. Essentially, our operative had 20/4 vision. Furthermore, the surgical eye was equipped with a recording device which could be up-linked with image recognition software."

"Did he catch the stalker?"

"In three days. He spotted the same person in two concert crowds at two different cities. He approached the suspect, took a voice sample, matched it to a recorded phone conversation, and gave the evidence to local authorities."

She stood and gazed out the window, the Manhattan skyline framing her silhouette. "It would have been impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive, to canvas each concert crowd with cameras, then hire agents to review hundreds of hours of tape. Unfortunately, that's how the FBI suggested our client handle that case. The government doesn't use surgically enhanced operatives at all."

"You're in a unique position."

"As are you," she said, coming around her desk and sitting in a chair beside me. "I wasn't expecting a celebrity guest."

I explained about the documentary, and how the kids feared a trap and refused to come to New York.

"It's a thin line between wise caution and foolish paranoia," she mused. "The paranoid distrust everyone, yet they are oddly unprepared when enemies really strike."

My eyebrows arched. "That was cryptic."

She smiled coyly. "Sorry. There just seems to be an odd confluence of interest descending upon this ragged little band of thugs in Atlantic City."

"I stumbled into them to do a story. That's my interest. What's yours?"

"I have none, with the team at least. Valley Green, on the other hand, is interested in recruiting one of them. Specifically, Alicea Mann."

I nodded. A security agency like Valley Green could find about a billion uses for someone with Alicea's unique gifts.

"Telepathy is easily the rarest and most valuable meta-human ability we've encountered," she continued. "Even someone who can only a catch a stray emotion under controlled conditions will find the asking price for her talents quite impressive in certain circles. Some governments employ gleaners, who aren't really telepaths but ultra-skilled readers of body language and facial expression, as spies and negotiators. Alicea Mann is far more gifted than any gleaner, yet she's slumming with a garage gang."

"True," I replied. "It's a waste of her abilities. She's toiling in obscurity. Which makes me wonder: how does your organization even know she exists?"

Anxiety flashed across Salome's otherwise inscrutable features. "We've had . . . operatives in the Atlantic City area."

I leaned forward. "Could you elaborate a little?"

She didn't want to tell me any more, but she could tell I wasn't backing down. After all, what would a firm like Valley Green be doing canvassing the hoods of Atlantic City? "We were employed to follow an individual called Dennis Zane. That is all I can tell you."

And that was all she would tell me, even though I begged for more. Zane? No one with the money to afford Valley Green should have had any interest in him, according to my research. The guy was a wage-slave before he went ballistic. Who wanted him tailed? Why? Salome didn't reach her position by being a source of easy answers. "Mr. Zane isn't precisely what he appeared to be," was all the additional information she would provide.

"Our operative was within the tavern when the incident took place," she explained. "He saw Ms. Mann in combat and suspected that she might have telepathic abilities. As she wasn't disguised, he was able to provide us with a facial sketch, we got a computer match, and we found out who she was. Your little garage gang isn't very clever about concealing their identities."

"Well, they wouldn't have agreed to appear on television if they were."

Salome laughed. "Can you take a message back to Ms. Mann?"

I told her I would be happy to, and she wrote a brief note. I watched her write a dollar figure, presumably a salary or contract incentive, and my eyes couldn't help but widen as I saw her form the little loops that represent three zeroes strung onto the end of a figure. More than I make, and maybe twenty times what a garment warehouse manager earns.

"You realize," I said, "that Alicea might not take your offer."

Salome looked surprised, but it was my turn to be elliptical. I could have told her about Alicea's reluctance to pursue the vigilante gig, about Travis and his manipulations, but she wasn't forthcoming about Valley Green or Dennis Zane and I saw no reason to be charitable. I just slipped the note in my breast pocket.

"I sincerely hope she does," Salome said, "and not just because I think she would be a valuable addition to our corporation. We both know how nasty this business is, Mr. Stone, even for our operatives with considerable resources at their disposal." She came around her desk to shake my hand, clasping it firmly while staring at me knowingly. "Out there in the streets, life can be very cheap."

*****

Now reader, if you are the suspicious type, as I am, you may begin to get the impression that more was going on than my little documentary about superheroes. I was thinking the same thing as I drove back to Jersey. It didn't surprise me that Valley Green was interested in Alicea, but the story about tracking Dennis Zane didn't add up. Ms. Salome probably had a thick file of classified information tucked in her desk, and the contents of that file might reveal that more was going on at the Bashful Banana than a midlife crisis gone violent and a gang skirmish erupting from a misunderstanding. But that file would never be cracked open. Was there more to Zane than I uncovered, or was there some sort of setup involved: to catch the Black Street Herd, or the Goths, or maybe just Alicea? Throw in Mr. Wasserman's unusual interest in my story, and I was beginning to get downright paranoid.

Suspicions are like opinions and assholes: we all have one, but only the last thing does us any good. In this business, you deal with the story you have until it changes. Ms. Salome expressed no more to me than an interest in hiring Alicea, and that was all I was going back to Atlantic City to report.

Oh, I did some more research on Zane. Actually, I called the office and had some interns do it. Dennis Zane: brokerage house employee, Philadelphia, PA. Divorced, no children. Nothing of interest in his personal life. That in itself was a bit odd: nobody has nothing of interest, not in this day and age. We all made the local paper when we scored 16 points for the high school basketball team, or made the company newsletter for employee of the month, or something which places a few scraps of identification beside our name when someone performs a web search. But Zane had only his demographics, a job, a marriage and a divorce. His wife and employers weren't talking, but Zane didn't handle the kind of money to attract Valley Green's attention, so his trail was ice cold.

By the time I reached the city, I had little time to pursue side stories. The fire at the Bashful Banana brought a full McCoy Unit to the city, and the Black Street Herd was their primary target. The officers brought their own camera crews with them. I stopped and watched as an officer, dressed in full flight armor minus the mask, instructed a class of school children while a PR officer recorded it. The fed let the kids touch his flight pack and try on his helmet, then explained to them the dangers of joining vigilante gangs and posses. It was a cute scene, and a calculated tactic: the ATF maintains high visibility without sacrificing public relations, all the while increasing the likelihood that some tot rats out his neighbor or dad or older brother as being in The Herd.

Finally, I returned to the Goth headquarters, dropping a bomb on their world as I dropped Salome's offer in Alicea's lap.

"What do they want me to do?" Alicea asked, her eyes bulging at the financial incentive on the note.

"Become a spy," I said flatly.

Travis read the note over her shoulder. "This could be our big chance," he said hopefully.

"Travis," I said. "There is no `we.' This offer was meant for Alicea."

He waved me off. "I know that. But Alicea could probably get established, then bring the rest of us in later. It may not be the arrangement of my dreams, but it will give us a chance to do some good."

Alicea thought for a moment, her hands shaking as she re-read the note. She looked to Julianna, who was slumped on the couch, coughing and sweating from a fever. Alicea clenched the note in both hands, twisted and tore it. "No," she said. "I can't do this."

There was that momentary pause, like the wait between lighting flash and thunder, when all of us waited for Travis to erupt. Julianna's cough silenced; even JD looked up from his drink. Travis squeezed his fists, struggling to control his emotions. He barely choked out the words. "Don't do this to me," he said. "We need to talk."

Travis slammed the door behind him, keeping me and my camera out of the room. The room was miked, of course, but it wasn't necessary, as I could easily hear the seething Travis rip into Alicea.

"What do you mean, 'you aren't interested?'"

"I'm not. I don't want to go to New York. I don't know anything about this 'Valley Green' company, and I don't want to know."

The floorboards creaked; Travis was pacing. "Alicea, I think you're being a little selfish. . ."

This time it was Alicea's turn to lash out. "How dare you call me selfish? Who the hell keeps a roof over your head?"

"Damn it, how can you pass up an opportunity like this for us?"

"How is this an opportunity for us? Valley Green wants me, not you."

"They don't want me right now, but this could be our chance to get a foot in the door. You could go work for them, get established, then try to get them to hire the rest of the team next time they're recruiting. It might not be an independent gig, but it beats government work, and it sure beats waiting around this shit hole apartment for the feds to knock on the door and take us away."

There was a pause before Alicea spoke, this time in calmer, more measured tones. "I had no idea that this apartment was holding you down. I thought this was the only thing that gave our lives any semblance of balance or normalcy. But all it is to you is a reminder that things aren't working out exactly the way you wanted them to."

"It's not like that."

"It is. All my sacrifices for this team don't mean anything to you. You haven't even taken them for granted; it's worse than that. You've resented them, haven't you? I've been trying to build a life for us, but as far as you're concerned, I've just built a prison for you."

"You just don't get it Alicea. You can talk all you want about your damn sacrifices. I don't see any sacrifices. You've done exactly what you wanted to do: get a normal job, live like Miss Average American. What about sacrifices for the team?"

Alicea's tone was incredulous. "Sacrifices for the team?"

"Yes. How about pulling yourself together more often so you can go out on patrol after work? How about picking a nickname and a fucking costume so we don't look like idiots when we do our job? How about at least making the most of a chance like this to join a firm like Valley Green and give the rest of us some hope? You just won't do it. That's why I'm telling you you're being selfish."

Alicea's next words were very quiet; I had to pull them off of the microphone feed later. "That's funny. I thought when I let you max out my credit cards, I was making a sacrifice. I thought that every time I spent the night crying because I had a migraine from trying to extract information from the kids you beat up. . . I thought those were sacrifices. But the only sacrifice you'll accept is my life. You won't be satisfied until I've abdicated every shred of control over my own destiny."

"Now you're being dramatic."

"Travis, get out."

"Are you throwing me out?"

"God damn it, I'm such a fool."

"Are you throwing me out?"

Her scream shook the pipes and echoed through the heating vents; the whole building must have heard it. "What the hell does it sound like? Get out of my apartment! Get the hell out of here. "

Travis came out of the room and slammed the door behind him. He appeared angry, but also afraid. He stopped and pointed at me furiously, as if he was about to tell me something, but he didn't speak. He just shook his head and stormed into the bathroom.

"He'll be back," JD said calmly.

I turned to him. Through the whole argument, he had sat silently on the couch sipping Hennessey, never blinking at the strong words we could clearly hear through the door.

"You sound sure," I said.

He nodded. "She throws somebody out every week or so. Sometimes me. Usually him. He'll disappear tonight so she can cool down."

Travis was in costume when he left the bathroom. He barely acknowledged us as he left the apartment. "I'm going out," was all he said, although he spoke directly to neither of us.

"Where does he go?" I asked JD. I would have to follow Travis in a situation like this. Who knows what he might do in his aroused state? I needed to get the story, of course, but I felt obligated to try to keep the kid from doing something he might regret.

JD just took a long drink. "Who the hell cares?" was his response.

*****

The first time I tracked the team on patrol, I was prepared for nighttime reconnaissance: the minicam was set for wide-angle recording, the floater was programmed for high flight, and most importantly, I was in the driver's seat of the van and ready for action. When Travis stormed out the door of the apartment, nothing was prepared. I had to break down the whole floater and minicam apparatus, then rush out to the van giving Travis a ten-minute head start. There was no time to program the floater to follow him, and there was no guarantee that I would find him in the first place. I just started the van and followed my instincts, hoping that an enraged superhero would leave a distinctive trail. If Travis was taking out his aggressions on every teenager who spat on the sidewalk, he wouldn't be too hard to find.

I followed the route of his regular patrol, but to no avail. It was a windy, frigid night, the kind that even keeps the worst elements indoors. The drug supermarket street corners were mostly deserted, so Travis might have been patrolling his usual route without finding any reason to leave his concealment on the rooftops or in the dark alleyways. Which, I thought, was a good thing, as I would hate to be the first pimp or pusher Travis came across.

I circled around the worst neighborhoods in the city for almost an hour before giving up. There were a bunch of kids, older teenagers for the most part, strutting right down Virginia Avenue in the middle of the street, smoking chronic and drinking 55's out of paper bags and blaring their radios. I could smell their hooch from ten blocks away, they were creating a disturbance to wake the dead, and Virginia Avenue was a regular stop on Travis' route. These kids might as well have been wearing targets on their back, but no Travis. He must not have been patrolling, which meant that I was off the trail.

So, if I were Travis, and I just had a fight with my girlfriend, but for some reason I didn't feel like a head-busting session in the streets of Atlantic City, where would I go? That train of thought didn't lead me very far. Two weeks in close quarters with the kid made me familiar with him, but I didn't have him completely nailed down. What did Travis like, besides being a superhero and playing video games? He was a bit of a drinker, and possibly a gambler, which meant he could be virtually anywhere in the city.

So I gave up, headed for the old casino district, and went in search of a corned beef sandwich on the boardwalk. Stepping onto the actual boards was like wandering into a wind tunnel. A gale was whipping off the ocean and slamming right into the casino hotels, shaking signs and street lamps and rattling windows. Ferry service to the atoll was shut down, and the only brave souls on the boardwalk beside myself were the die-hard gamblers racing from gaming hall to gaming hall. I turned up the collar on my trench coat and tightened my scarf, determined to survive until I could find a casino with a half-decent deli.

And that's when I saw him. Actually, the motionless black figure silhouetted against the faint reflections of casino lights on the ocean could have been a bag of trash, a stray dog, or just about anything else. But something told me that I had lucked into Travis, so I drew closer to the fence to have a better look. It was him, kneeling cross-legged at the edge of the lapping waves, facing directly out to sea.

I stepped out onto the sand. As the beach dipped toward the ocean, the wind grew even more intense, and I was nearly knocked over by one gust. Sand blew across my exposed forehead like icy needles. The beach seemed like the most forbidding place on earth on a December night, but Travis just sat, as though he was surrounded by tranquility.

"Don't disturb me, Randy," he said as I approached. His eyes were closed; I didn't ask how he knew it was me. His hands rested upon his knees, palms stretched upward. His shield lay in front of him, now half covered by blowing sand. He was meditating, something I didn't expect from the likes of him.

We stayed there, silently, for several minutes. Travis sat silently while I hopped around, stomping my feet for warmth, wondering how he could possibly shut out his surroundings. Finally, his eyes opened and he leapt to his feet. He picked up his shield and began walking south along the beach. I jogged into place beside him.

"No camera?" he asked.

I explained that I wasn't expecting to run into him.

"That's a shame. I'm sure your television story will have plenty of scenes with me and the others pounding people. You'll have no problem showing us getting drunk, either. And that fight Alicea and I just had: I'm sure the world will be treated to every last moment of that."

"I didn't think you cared."

He shot me an icy look. "You're wrong. Which is why it all makes sense. Your program will include lots of scenes which make me look like some kind of reckless punk, but a quiet moment on the beach? No way that'll make the cut."

"I didn't know you meditated."

"I don't call it meditation. It's just an opportunity to listen to my own thoughts. I need the ocean beside me to drown out the atoll and the casinos and the noise of just being alive. It keeps me sharp. A good, terrible night like tonight can even get Alicea out of my mind for a few minutes."

"You know that you two were speaking two different languages tonight," I said to him.

He stopped in his tracks. "We never had that problem. She used to go right up here," he said, tapping his head. "She could read me like yesterday's news. She always knew what I wanted."

He began to walk again, and I followed. "Yeah, she knew what you wanted, but did you know what she wanted?"

"It was her job to tell me that. I'm not a mind reader."

"It was your job to listen."

He stopped again, turning angrily to face me. "Look, who the hell are you? I thought reporters weren't supposed to get involved. We're letting you do this story, but it would be a lot easier if you could stay the hell out of it."

"It was okay for me to interfere when I was scoping out Valley Green for you. Look, I'm just trying to figure out where you're coming from."

Travis knew I had a point: I was this involved in their lives at his request. As far as my editors would be concerned, I was already way over the line, so it made sense for me to keep pushing to get the most out of these kids.

But frustrating Travis with logic probably wasn't a wise move. He looked primed to take a swing at me, but instead lifted his buckler and heaved it out across the ocean. The silver saucer caught a thermal updraft over the water and was pushed back to land, arching over a few hundred feet of sand before sticking, nearly upright, into one off the treated logs which mark offshore jetties.

"You know exactly where I'm coming from. I have no secret plans. I have no hidden agendas. I brought them all out here. I made a life for my sister. I saved Alicea from her parents and that rich-bitch life. I did it all for them. You know that I've dedicated my life to making a difference. I have not wavered. If you're looking for someone who can't make up their mind, or who says one thing and does another, then go talk to that sunny day superhero I live with."

As he sprinted away to retrieve his shield, I realized that it wasn't me he was trying to run away from. It was his own self doubt. Travis wasn't just mad about Alicea's decision not to join Valley Green. Deep down, he was afraid that she had made the right decision. Nobody who affirms his conviction as often as Travis does is as devoted to his purpose as he would like to be. When Travis felt his dedication waning, he took it out on Alicea, someone who has never been soft-spoken about her doubts. Travis not only used Alicea for her money, but for her willingness to express things he couldn't accept, and he rewarded her honesty with his abuse.

He was halfway up the beach when the explosion rang off the pylons of the boardwalk and the windows of the casinos. He whirled around to track the location of the blast, as did I, but we were chasing echoes. In a few seconds, a plume of smoke became visible over the island. Travis ran to it, and I followed.

*****

It was hard to make sense of the scene. Everybody was out of their homes: little kids on bikes, teenage mothers clutching their infants, old folks huddled in groups. With ash and debris still falling from the building and a firefight raging in the street, none of these people were safe outside, but they stayed and watched the spectacle as if it were staged for their entertainment.

Firefighters trained their hoses on what was left of the four-story building, now a gutted skeleton collapsed onto itself and suffocated in smoke. The police were wise enough to provide escort into that part of town, but they didn't count on the Black Street Herd. Service revolvers were no match for CFC weapons; all the police could do is protect the firefighters with riot shields as Herd members took potshots and shouted invective at the authorities through their loudspeakers.

Travis leapt into the fray, quickly knocking a few jammers unconscious before they could react, but he was alone, and the Herd had plenty of guns on the scene. He dove behind a mailbox to escape getting fried, then spotted me taking cover in an open doorway.

As he crawled along the street to join me, the McCoys arrived. Three officers in full armor hovered down from the sky like archangels. When they engaged their loudspeakers, it overwhelmed the entire city block, drowning out the Herd and the hoses and everything else. "Citizens, return to your homes," they announced and the voice felt like it was inside your head. "Anyone currently in possession of a CFC weapon is under arrest for violating the Vigilante Prevention Amendments."

About a half dozen herd members trained their weapons on the McCoys, including one guy in full armor who must have had a high yield CFC generator strapped to his back. It looked like ground lightning, and the air stunk of ozone after they fired. One of the McCoys took a hit, but wasn't seriously damaged. The others flew away from the onslaught and strafed the ground with fire. Their shots were deadly accurate, sending some of the Herd sprawling for cover while neutralizing others.

"This is out of control," I said as the McCoy officers floated to the ground and drew fire away from the firefighters.

"They think the Herd blew up that building," Travis said.

"It sure looks that way."

Travis shook his head. "That's the new youth center. It's probably the only positive thing in this neighborhood. They wouldn't torch that."

He was right. The Herd was supposed to be a pro-social organization, their philosophy being to take over the streets so drug dealers couldn't. They were often overzealous, of course, attacking homosexuals as threats to society and engaging in trumped-up racial skirmishes with the police, but they protected poor neighborhoods. They didn't burn them down.

"Another accident?" I suggested. "Like the Banana?"

"Maybe. Maybe they were trying to nail the perp when all hell broke loose."

A Herd assault vehicle careened around the corner. It was a heavy Chevy with some big guns bolted to the hood, and the kid in the makeshift pillbox wasn't shy about pulling the trigger. We retreated deeper into the doorway, and the few stragglers who didn't take cover when the feds arrived scrambled for cover. We couldn't see the shot that took out the firefighters from our new vantage point, but the eerie dance of the untended hose lunging into the air and slithering along the street told us what happened.

"They're lashing out now," I said. "This is just rage."

"Let me use your phone," Travis asked. "I'll get the team down here."

"Why, so you can all get arrested or killed?"

Travis started to get angry, but realized I was right.

The assault vehicle kept shooting up the street. A McCoy took to the air, CFC fire trailing him as he rose, but he ascended out of the range of the big gun. The armored officer turned his body in the air as his shoulder mounted weapon locked into place.

I held my ears just before the missile impacted. The assault vehicle disappeared behind a wall of smoke. Hubcaps sliced through the air, crashing into buildings at the other end of the block. For a few seconds it rained auto parts.

It was safe to go out on the street after that. Some more local cops arrived and helped the McCoys seal off the street. Additional fire units arrived. What was left of the Herd beat a quick retreat.

As things settled, I approached one of the McCoys flashing my press credential. I wanted to know who they suspected in the explosion, who authorized the use of percussion missiles, and about a thousand other things. The officer cut me off before I could ask any questions.

"I'm only authorized to make a brief statement," he said. "The escalation in violence here in Atlantic City in recent days has been disturbing. Peace and order must be maintained. It's the duty of the Anti-Vigilante Unit- or the McCoys, as we're called- to do all that is necessary and proper to protect the innocent and incarcerate those who use vigilante weapons to promote lawlessness."

My portable phone rang. It was Gus. "Randy, we need you to do the network story. You're the only reporter near the scene."

"Near the scene?" I shouted. "I'm at the scene. It's like the Bed-Stuy riots out here!"

"It's just the press corps, Randy. You can handle them"

It took a second for me to realize that we weren't talking about the same thing.

"I don't know anything about a firefight," Gus explained. "All I know is that Atoll security cameras have pictures of Joe Bell in bed with three underage girls. The video hit the web about three hours ago. The hotel administrators have a press conference planned in one hour, and we want a top gun there. Plus, you have a good relationship with Bell."

My mind whirled. I watched small fires peter out in trash cans, listened as mothers consoled children terrified by the heat and noise. Residents began sweeping broken glass from the sidewalks, a few looters turned the corner but were scared off by the feds. It was all crazy, the world turned upside down, and Gus was the craziest one of all.

"Boss, airlift the Philly Bureau people in for the fucking conference. I just watched the McCoy's blow up a city block."

He was quiet. "Are you OK?" he finally asked.

I paused. "Let me get back to you on that," I said, and I flipped the phone shut.

Chapter 9

Superhero Games

The history of the Vigilante Prevention Acts, the superhero subculture, and the McCoy Units can be traced back to the year 2017, and to the think tank of a small chemical engineering contractor in New Mexico called Alight Technologies. It was there that three young turk scientists stumbled across the energy source which came to be known as compressed fusion. The name is inappropriate; the technique for safely preserving and releasing chemical energy with amazing efficiency had nothing to do with atomic fusion, and there was nothing really "compressed" about it. But the marketing gurus at Alight coined the term when they began marketing their batteries, which were hundreds of times more powerful than the batteries available at the time. The company rode its Compressed Fusion Capacitors, or CFCs, to the top of the stock market.

This is not the place for a scientific treatise on compressed fusion, and I'm not the person to give it to you. Depending on the types of chemicals used and the amount of them, it's possible to create CFC's of varying power-yields. Most people nowadays only know about Minimal-Yield CFC's, the only legal type. Originally, all CFCs were commercially available except the largest models, the ancestors of today's high-yield CFCs. Alight made high-yields available only to the government and licensed commercial operations as a company policy, not under government coercion. This is one of those incidents in history in which technology tragically outstripped government policy. Uninformed users sometimes put CFCs into the same appliances that ran on alkaline batteries; portable stereos exploded on people's ears in a few cases. Father's Day barbecues were cooked on grills supercharged with low-yield (and sometimes moderate yield) CFCs; sometimes the neighborhood would get cooked too. The government stepped in and passed a few sane regulations, Alight made a sincere effort to educate consumers, and domestic accidents soon subsided.

The development of CFC power and, to a lesser extent, superconductors, changed society for the better. That fact is often lost when I dive into stories of vigilante mayhem, where it seems that the only use for this great energy is to turn another human being into a pile of ash. These energies, as well as other technologies derived from them, account for over 20% of our nation's power. The CFC has helped developing nations achieve sound economic footing by providing them with a cheap power source without squandering their natural resources. It has greatly reduced our reliance on fossil fuels. It's sometimes fashionable to blame technology for our problems; that's just not appropriate in this case.

The potential of CFC's for use in weapons was seized immediately by the military, but it didn't take long for commercial weapon manufacturers to catch on. A company called Norcross Rifles developed a CFC-powered pellet launcher. The weapon had greater range and firing speed than any semi-automatic weapon on the market, and its ammunition was far cheaper. The gun cost $1800, about twice what a comparable weapon sold for at the time. Six months after it's release, it was the most popular weapon in the country.

About a year after Alight announced the development of the CFC, a pharmaceutical concern out of Pennsylvania began marketing DelNecra, the first of the "safe" muscle growth hormones. DelNecra was approved by the FDA only for very specific purposes: rehabilitating severely injured limbs, treatment of muscular disorders, and the like. Once the public realized how much muscle DelNecra grew, and how quickly, demand became intense. Doctors became prescription-happy, giving patients access to the drug as a treatment for mundane fatigue disorders and other minor ailments.

DelNecra was a fad for about two years at the end of the 2010's. A well-known former senator, a man of around seventy, revealed on a talk show that he was taking the medication, and his testimonial was backed up by video tape of the elderly gentleman chopping wood on his ranch and wrestling with a calf. The drug was said to be an aphrodisiac for older men, which further fanned public interest. Comedians made jokes about the drug; fitness gurus recommended it as an essential part of any fitness regimen. About 5% of all Americans over 18 were prescription DelNecra users by 2019, and another 5% of the population were probably getting their hands on it one way or another.

The problem with DelNecra was fundamentally the same as the problems with Rae-Tae, Phinny-Bar, and any of the dozen or so other super-steroids currently on the illegal market. The drugs build muscle faster and more efficiently than nature can account for, but few of them provide similar benefits to bones, cartilage, ligaments, or the cardio-vascular system. Used responsibly, this is not a problem: these drugs can round out the body nicely, and with regular exercise can enhance the quality of life. Used irresponsibly, as these drugs usually are, they can turn an ordinary person into 300 pounds of muscle crammed onto a frame designed to max out at 160 lbs.

The ugly effects of over-zealous DelNecra use inevitably led to the end of the prescription boom. People were tearing the cartilage in their knees to shreds while trying to drag their over-muscled bodies up a flight of stairs. A 425-lb. college football player had a coronary during pregame warmups: his parents revealed that he had weighed pounds just 18 months earlier. Strict guidelines for the use of the drug were enacted and enforced. Unfortunately, illegal trade in the drug had already begun, and DelNecro was available in every gymnasium in America.

With the simultaneous developments of cheap, portable power sources and a new generation of strength-enhancing chemicals, what had once been the stuff of science fiction rapidly became reality. Blaster weapons developed quickly through the 2020's, hitting the market in all their variety: lasers, microwave weapons, pulse guns, etc. The government usually got around to banning each new variety of weapon about a year after it hit the market, but special-interest groups ensured that no sweeping bans were passed which would eliminate all CFC weapons. What laws were passed were usually technologically naïve, tied to the exact specifications of one particular aspect of the weapon, allowing manufacturers to circumvent the spirit of the law by making minor modifications to the hardware. In the 2020's it was possible to walk into Omnimart with a credit card and walk out with a pulse weapon powerful enough to knock down the walls of your neighbor's house.

When it came to keeping up with new weapon designs, the criminal element moved much more quickly than law enforcement. There were spectacular firefights in the streets of several big cities in the 2020s. In a well-known Brooklyn riot in 2025, the police were so out-gunned that the National Guard was brought in. (I was 14 at the time and lived with my mother and older brother in Tribecca. We took the bus across town to watch Brooklyn burn from across the river). The chief of police for Los Angeles County unveiled a detailed plan for dealing with high-tech violence after a similar riot a few months later. His plan called for "progressive policing," which meant that the force maintained a high community profile and a positive public image, combined with a concerted effort to maintain technological superiority. Many other cities quickly adopted similar plans.

That chief of police was named Charlie McCoy.

The McCoy plan worked in a few big cities, but it just wasn't feasible for the police force in a poor city to keep pace with the changes in technology. The money just wasn't there. While the New York and Los Angeles police forces bought shiny, first-generation armored battle suits from the military, it was all other cities could do to provide the men in blue with a sturdy CFC rifle, some insulated shielding, and enough training to use these devices properly. Meanwhile, these under-gunned, undertrained cops made a valiant effort to institute "progressive policing." This mild-mannered approach was often effective, but when it failed, it failed spectacularly, and the public began to perceive their local police force as soft and ineffectual.

The sad truth was that a private citizen had the means to be better armed than the police. It didn't take long for private citizens to decide that they were more effective at law enforcement, as well.

*****

The First United Methodist Church of Gainesville, Florida, burned to the ground in August of 2022 in what was believed to be an isolated act of racial violence. The perpetrators were quickly rounded up and prosecuted; most considered the matter cleared up until six months later, when a Georgia church was burned under similar circumstances. Again, a few suspects were brought to justice, but it didn't prevent another incident in Florida just a few months later.

The string of church burnings came to be known as the White Lightning fires. The FBI did its best to conceal the fact that the arsonists left a distinctive calling card at each crime- a ceramic lightning bolt- but the press ferreted out the information. There was a new hate group in the south, and they were armed with modern weapons small and powerful enough to demolish a building in minutes. Their reign of terror extended over five states for six years, the authorities always one step behind them. Hundreds of gang members were brought to justice during that period, and some squealed on regional organization leaders and chieftains, but White Lightning had loyal members and considerable resources.

Six years of frustration in southern cities built to the point where citizens began to act in their own defense. Twenty-four hour neighborhood watches were enacted around possible target churches. It was an unspoken assumption that some watch members were armed, and were as likely to take action themselves as to call the police if they saw anything suspicious. A minister in South Carolina allegedly armed parishioners with CFC weapons, although such allegations were vehemently denied by everyone, as were suggestions that some churches had hired "ringers," private investigators with suspiciously powerful bodies, to guard church grounds. These neighborhood watches appeared to work: White Lightning did not strike from October or 2027 through March of 2029, and when they did strike, they paid for it.

In what later turned out to be part of an elaborate sting operation, the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee publicly outlawed all neighborhood watch organizations within the city, claiming that college students and visitors were being harassed by overzealous citizens. Three weeks later, White Lightning descended upon a Baptist church in Knoxville, and the citizen patrol descended on them. The public saw for the first time what kind of arsenal this hate organization brought to bear: CFC generated microwave weapons, foreign-designed battle armor, and a fully-equipped entourage of goons to protect the main firebug if trouble broke out. When trouble did break out, it turned out that White Lightning had the hardware but not the training. An under-gunned citizen army, with civic pride and holy fervor on their side, easily defeated them in a battle that lit up the streets of Knoxville. Having been caught red-handed for the first time, the supremacists were less frosty about selling out their superiors, and the FBI finally had a crack in the case that would lead to the upper echelons of the organization.

The Knoxville Incident caught the imagination of the media. The town's mayor was hailed as a hero throughout the state; the governor gave an impassioned speech about the spirit of "the new Tennessee Volunteers." A movie was quickly produced. Meanwhile, the normally cool headed hosts of morning news shows were seriously suggesting that citizen "posses" represented a legitimate adjunct to traditional law enforcement. In some cities, police chiefs deputized citizen task forces, providing them with training in situations ranging from surveillance to crowd control to, in a few cases, criminal apprehension and combat. Elsewhere, armed neighborhood watches sprung up without government assistance or blessing, organized by pastors, leading citizens, or taxpayers with chips on their shoulders.

Lawmakers were again caught off guard, as they were when CFCs first hit the street. States like California banned what were then called "posses" outright; a few others recognized only posses sanctioned by local sheriffs. New York State only required that such groups register and charter through a government watchdog agency. That might have worked just fine in Albany or Syracuse, but by 2036, when the Vigilante Prevention Acts were passed, there were over 80 chartered organizations in New York City: The Subway Angels, Street Survivors, the Kings of Queens, the Bed-Stuy Herd, Triboro Protection, the Old School Herd, and countless others. And that count didn't count covert associations like Valley Green, or loosely affiliated street gangs with impressive hardware and indeterminate motivations, of which there were thousands.

Under those conditions, it's not surprising that it took just a few years for heroic citizen posses to turn into vigilantes.

*****

Those who blame plug music for the rise in the superhero culture among teenagers have probably forgotten that it was an old-fashioned rap recording, "SH-1" by Base Tone, which started the superhero fad just a few months after Knoxville. The rap glorified the exploits of a neighborhood defender, a "superhero" in a polished gold battle suit. Coming on the heels of Knoxville, the violence of the lyrics didn't seem that disturbing, as the heavies in the parable were White Lightning-types who harassed kids and burned down buildings. A dozen copycat songs followed; a rap group called Slam Down Herd declared themselves to be superheroes, wearing armored breastplates in their videos and concerts and focusing nearly all their songs on defeating one or another menace to the hood. The group itself faded into obscurity, but the appellation "herd" came to be applied to many vigilante teams for years to come.

All of this was innocent fun; it wasn't inciting kids to riot in the schools or kill each other. This was harmless, wholesome music, after all. Parents let their kids dress as SH-1 for Halloween. There was a revival of the old superhero characters from comics and cartoons. Creaky old science fiction writers spoke on television about the exciting era we were living in, in which the stuff of fantasy was becoming possible. Kids told their parents they wanted to be superheroes when they grew up, and in the states where it was encouraged, teenagers signed up for the local posse as if they were joining the town soccer team.

This was not even 20 years ago, although it seems a lifetime away. My brother and I used to watch a show called "Superhero Games" on the network. It was like pro wrestling, but with high-tech weapons and armor and athletes whose abilities were expanded by drugs illegal in legitimate sports. Many people, even policy makers and intellectuals, naively believed that the superhero craze would usher in an expanded era of civic responsibility. Sure: those kids aren't taking Rae-Tae because their unstable thrill-seekers, their doing it because they would rather do volunteer work but can't figure out where to go to apply.

*****

The three-week standoff between the Subway Angels and the Bed-Stuy Herd was the first nationally publicized incidence of vigilante-on-vigilante crime, but it certainly wasn't the first actual event. Problems were cropping up just a few months after Knoxville, but they were brief flare-ups. Inevitably, the winners in some shootout would successfully brand the losers as "pornographers" or "drug dealers" to the local press, thereby making themselves out to be heroes in what was essentially an out-of-control power struggle. By the time research or a district attorney cleared the losers' names, it was a page-six retraction to a page-one, 60-point headline story, which did little to stem the tide of superhero mania.

The Herd-Angels war was different, as both teams were chartered by the state and were high profile. The Angels had been around, with different names, since the twentieth century, and the Bed Stuy Herd was bankrolled by an aging filmmaker turned community activist. The Angels accused several Herd members of selling drugs. The allegations were probably true, but it was certainly true that the Angels were the most dangerous loose cannons on the street. Subway cars would go silent when an Angel entered; there was a palpable fear that the beret-sporting fascist might open fire if a commuter popped his gum. An Angel took a static-charged billy club to a Herd member in broad daylight in the middle of the street, and for three weeks afterward, Brooklyn was a war zone. It was the second time in seven years that violence engulfed the borough, and the second time the NYPD proved outgunned and outclassed. Both vigilante squads, bankrolled by charitable and corporate interest (and possibly illicit activities), boasted budgets in the millions of dollars, and unlike the cops they didn't worry about overtime or traffic duty. The violence only ended when the leaders of the two groups agreed to a cease fire. They stood together on the steps of city hall and spoke of "putting differences behind them" and "renewing their focus to the task at hand" but everyone had an uneasy feeling that there was too much armament in the hands of unstable people, and that the situation was bound to grow out of control.

The Herd-Angels war alerted Washington to the problem, but lawmakers moved at their usual glacier pace. Most of the body-enhancing drugs used by the vigilantes were already illegal, as were many of the weapons. Congress moved to prohibit this and that type of weapon, usually with second-amendment lobbyist giving them a battle at every turn. Four long years passed, and vigilante wars increased. Twelve were killed in a border dispute in Oakland. Over 25 buildings were destroyed in one night during a power struggle in Detroit. It was impossible to keep track of who was destroying what, and why. Everybody called himself a superhero, from the guy in Boston who popped three unarmed teens for giving him lip in a parking lot to the hoodlums in Chicago who called themselves Robbin' Hoods, who looted stores, ostensibly to give the booty to the poor (themselves). Chartered good-guy operations tended to be populated by as many high-strung sadists and racists as well-meaning citizens, and cloudier grass-roots movements often cloaked the illegal operations of their own members. And everybody was armed with something illegal-yet-cheap, light, relatively easy to use, and deadly.

A line had to be drawn, and the Vigilante Prevention Acts were that line. No legislation in American history is quite like it. They had to repeal the second amendment to push it through, but that was possible when "well-organized militias" were wreaking havoc on city streets around the country. The acts outlawed the weapons, and the actions. A citizen's right to fight crime ended at his property line. Beyond that, only self-defense and the protection of immediate family was legal. If you see a crime and want to be a good Samaritan, call the police. If you intervene yourself, you may get caught in a double whammy: you can be accused of vigilantism, and the perpetrator can claim that you violated his civil rights and avoid prosecution.

The federal government couldn't outlaw all vigilante activity and expect local municipalities to clean up the mess; after all, if local authorities could handle the problem, it wouldn't have become a problem. The VPA commissioned the Treasury Department to charter a special division of the Division of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, diverting funds from the Drug Enforcement Agency and other sources affected by the vigilante crisis. This Anti-Vigilante Unit would enforce the new laws, providing local police with the muscle and resources to combat even the best-equipped vigilantes. It would also coordinate efforts with communities, churches and schools to raise awareness of the dangers of the vigilante lifestyle. Only one man in the country could handle such a delicate balance of duties: former LA police chief Charlie McCoy, who believed that half of a good cops job is keeping the community on your side. McCoy became director of the unit, and it has borne his signature- and his name- ever since.

*****

We've lived with the VPA for eleven years, and things are much better than they were. The fires in Atlantic City appalled everyone; fifteen years ago, they might not have made the news. The weapons and drugs are still out there, but the president of your local lodge isn't encouraging members to buy them and help police the community anymore. I don't feel afraid for myself or my family living in Manhattan; when I left Tribecca to go to college in New Hampshire, I swore that if things didn't change I would never go back and would make my mom get a place in the suburbs.

Of course, we've given up some freedom, too. Local club meetings sometimes get raided, not by the McCoys, but by local cops: any club with lots of young men could be a vigilante team. Sometimes, rights get stepped on along the way. What's more, hundreds of criminals are released on technicalities after clumsy do-gooders step in and stop a crime. It doesn't happen as often as opponents of the law claim it does: if the good Samaritan and the victim share a wink and say the assailant took a swing at the Samaritan, it all becomes self-defense, and most DAs are willing to abide by the charade if there were no weapons involved. But it's disturbing when it occurs. It's all a matter of give-and-take. Most intelligent people would prefer that the authorities exercise a little more common sense when sorting dangerous vigilantes from confused kids. But when you see super-gangs duking it out in the middle of the street, there's nothing more reassuring than seeing the shining armor of McCoy agents swooping down on the scene with the hardware and the jurisdiction to handle any emergency.

Chapter 9:

Linking Causes and Effects

We were back at the apartment by nightfall. Alicea had the police scanner and the network on; local affiliates were beside themselves, trying to cram the firefight and Bell's indiscretions into one night of news. We must have looked pretty ragged; Travis was cut up and covered in soot. She went immediately to the first aid kit they kept in the kitchen.

"Were you involved in all this?" she asked as she tended a cut on Travis' elbow. The anger of earlier that afternoon melted into concern as she dressed his wounds.

"We just showed up to watch the fireworks," he said, wincing as the antiseptic stung the open wound. Alicea smiled slightly.

JD propped himself up on the sofa. "They say the Black Street Herd blew up a rec center in a black neighborhood. Does that sound right to you?"

Travis pulled away before Alicea could pour any more chemicals into sensitive places. "It sounds all wrong to me. It sounds like the McCoy Units are too lazy to do a real investigation."

"Neighbors said they saw a suspicious character in the neighborhood: middle aged white guy in a suit, the kind who usually drives through that part of town at 75 miles per hour."

I looked down at my suit, which was blackened with smoke. "That might have been me," I said.

They all laughed nervously. "Nah. You ain't middle aged. Not yet, anyway."

"Thanks, JD."

Alicea tossed me a damp washcloth. "With all that soot, you don't even look like a white guy."

I blushed, wiping my face with the cool cloth.

The news shifted from the youth center to Bell. I hadn't had any time to process what Gus had told me; the image of that truck getting scorched by a small anti-tank missile occupied the center of my thoughts for most of the past hour. When the story started, I perked up, but the kids switched channels.

"Man, these old drunk senators get more action than me," JD complained as he switched to basketball.

"Turn that back on," I said.

JD was about to tell me to go to hell, then he took a good look at me. Something about the way my trench was covered in soot and my hands shook as I wiped my neck told him not to mess with me. He returned to the news, even flicking the settings to Full Enabled so I could read hypertext on the monitor.

Democrat Joe Bell, 62 years old, married to the same woman for almost 40 years, caught on security cameras after one of his escorts du soir, a 16-year old girl, cried out for help in the middle of the night. The legislator propositioned the girl and two of her friends earlier in the evening; it was all fun and games until things got rough. The girls had been posing as legal-aged patrons, even gambling in the casinos, but that detail wasn't going to help Bell much.

Bell and three little party girls, younger than his daughters. Wasserman must be having a field day. I didn't even bother to check the sponsors on the anti-Bell editorials that had already been rushed onto the web: Wasserman and Family Values Programming and every Republican worth his parking spot behind Capital Hill were all striking at once while Bell was on the mat and covering up. His House seat would probably be vacant by the end of the week, I reasoned.

"I'll bet anything that this was arson,:" Travis said. "The Herd moved in to protect the neighborhood; and the McCoys moved in to get them."

"If the Herd knew something, they must have gotten a tip from someone," JD said.

Could I do something to help Bell? I wondered. More importantly, should I? This wasn't some little tryst, after all, and you can overlook only so much bad behavior in a political leader. I could publish my own opinions about his importance in fighting the vigilante problem, but one voice wouldn't do much good. In fact, I wondered if it would be better if I distance Bell from his moderate political views, in the hopes of keeping his policies afloat even as he sunk.

"Which means that someone knows something," Travis said. "And the usual guy to talk to is . . ."

"Shorty Rock," JD finished. "Kind of makes you feel sorry for trying to kill him, huh?"

Travis shrugged his shoulders. "He shouldn't have touched Julianna," he said. He looked around, "Speaking of Julianna?"

"She's asleep," Alicea said, staring at him accusingly. "She hasn't left her room in two days, or haven't you noticed? Actually, no: she came out last night, grabbed a scotch bottle and a bag of pretzels, then went back in."

"Haven't you checked on her?"

"Every hour or so. She hasn't felt much like talking since the Bashful Banana."

Travis lowered his head. "I guess you blame me for that."

Alicea rolled her eyes. "Does it matter who I blame?"

"You know I'm sorry for the way that went down."

Alicea bit her lip. She put a hand on his shoulder. "I know. But it is nice to hear you say it for once."

He put his arms around her, and they hugged tightly. "I'm glad your okay," she said, running her fingers through his hair. "When you're out and I hear sirens, I expect the worst."

JD grunted. "If you two want to be alone, then go someplace. Me and Randy are about to play video golf."

"No you're not," Travis said. "We're gonna pay Shorty a visit."

It was all too convenient. Bell goes down hard just as the McCoys take on the Black Street Herd on a crowded city street. That firefight was just the kind of thing Bell worked to prevent. It was like an ambush: all of a sudden a new order was sweeping through faster than I could make sense of it all.

"Coming Randy?"

I looked up. I had been ignoring the team. They were going to investigate the fire. They smelled a setup, just like I did.

I set the floater to a default program. "You don't need an old timer slowing you down. Just take the camera."

Travis buttoned his jacket. "You OK, Randy? You take care of yourself pretty well for an old guy."

I tried to be frosty, but my mind was elsewhere. "I was covering scenes like that back when you were eating crayons."

"Yeah, but you don't get used to it, do you?"

I looked up at him. He had the capacity to be gentle, even thoughtful, when he tried. I smiled. "No you don't," I said.

They left with the floater, and I helped myself to a drink of their whisky while trying to remember what Giles Wasserman and Gus had said to me about Joe Bell.

*****

The night crowd hadn't shown up yet when Travis, JD, and Alicea arrived at Down Under. Just the zombies were there: the white-skinned ghost children who never see the light of day. They laid on overstuffed sofas with their bodies intertwined, listless and lazy eyed and strung out on what-have-you, barely acknowledging the team as they strolled in. Shorty Rock, reclining in a corner with a Jack-and-coke and a 16-year-old bleached blonde, wasn't nearly as nonchalant as his patrons. He threw the girl off his lap and sat up rigidly when he saw Travis enter. Travis cracked his knuckles as the hustler approached.

"I hope you come in peace," Shorty said, bowing and affecting the pose of some affluent sheik. His sunglasses hid a deep shiner surrounding his eye.

JD spoke up. "Our white flags are up."

Shorty's eyebrows peaked. "Your white flag is always up, my friend, but Travis often sails beneath the Jolly Roger."

Alicea shook her head. "Don't worry. I have him on my leash." Travis frowned at her, but she ignored him. "We came here because we needed to get out, but we need to be discreet. Laying low, you understand."

"Indeed I do."

Alicea looked at Travis and JD accusatorily. "In fact," she said, "I didn't think it was such a wise idea coming out tonight at all."

Shorty shook his head and feigned concern. "It would be a shame to spend all your time cooped up in your crib during the holidays. Travis, my friend, you should not hide such beauty as this from the world. You have to show the lady a good time."

Shorty took Alicea's hand and brought it toward his mouth, but one look from Travis put him in his place.

"Oh," Shorty said. "So the big man is still sore over that . . . misunderstanding with his sister. Well, I am sore over it ,too. Sore in the ribs, sore around the eye . . ."

They laughed, easing the tension. Shorty brought them through the lounge into the makeshift club's VIP area. There was a small bar there, a few tables, some holographic paintings and black light posters. Shorty invited the others to sit at the bar, pouring each of them a cognac.

"This place is almost nice," Alicea said.

"You never been back here?" JD asked. "This is Shorty's inner sanctum, reserved for close friends and major players."

Travis nodded. "So what are we?"

Shorty grinned. "Old friends, Travis. We merely need to have our fences mended. Shorty Rock cannot abide by a long-term grudge, nor can he afford one." He lifted his glass. "Cheers."

They drank.

Shorty leaned across the bar. "So tell me: why have we been locked away in our crib for so long, other than the wonderful Jersey weather whipping off the ocean."

Travis swished his drink around his mouth. "No other reason."

"Mmmm. Of course not. There is never any reason for anything. Things just happen. Begin linking causes and effects and, if you aren't careful, you may know too much."

Travis stared Shorty down. "Exactly."

"What the hell are you fishing for, Shorty?" JD asked.

"Nothing, brother. Curiosity can be lethal." Shorty finished his drink and poured another. "I suppose it is only coincidence that none of you has been seen since the Bashful Banana burned down."

None of them lost their cool. Alicea stared into space for a moment, and Travis just swirled his drink. Alicea may have been reading someone: flashing a message to Travis, perhaps, or scanning Shorty. I had no way of knowing through the camera feed.

JD just cackled. "Shorty Rock, you are shot out! Who the hell we look like, the Black Street Herd?"

"Hell, no. But the word is that some white kids were around the scene, and from the rumors that come through here . . ."

Travis stood up. "Do I seem like the kind that hangs around gay bars?"

Shorty took a step back, self-consciously grabbing his ribs. "Now, nobody said that, brother ."

"You shouldn't listen to rumors, Shorty," Travis said, returning to his stool.

Shorty shook his head and wiped his brow with a cocktail napkin. "I know that, better than anyone. I wasn't saying anything about anybody's personal life. I just get the impression some people come through here who are involved in the superhero racket. Hell, we get guys from the Black Street Herd in here all the time, bragging about the chumps that they sauced."

"I understand," Alicea said. "Lots of kids come through, and everybody's involved with something."

"Exactly," Shorty said, pointing his finger. "It's certainly not my policy to accuse folks of anything. Like I said a moment ago: curiosity is lethal, and sometimes it's best to know nothing. It's just that if we did have folks coming through here who were in the superhero racket, I can find much better work for them to do than saucing gay bars."

Travis did his best to pretend to be disinterested. He finished his drink and held out his glass. "I'm sure you do," he said. "Like busting your pot and fake ID empire to the ground, maybe?"

Shorty poured another Hennessey. "No," he said curtly. "Like taking care of some real problems." He leaned closer to the others and began to whisper. "Take, for example, the tragic fire at the youth center earlier in the night."

"That was a shame" Travis said.

"A cruel shame," Shorty replied, shaking his head. "Saucing some fag joint off the strip where the smack and "10" flows all night is one thing, but the motherfucka- please excuse the queen's English- that torches a rec enter where kids go after school is just begging to be taken down."

"Sounds like a job for the McCoy's" Alicea said.

"Or the herd," Travis added.

"If only matters were so easily resolved. I have some acquaintances, some serious 90-calibre goombas, if you follow, and they told me just a few hours ago that some neo-Nazi Armorlitia types were involved. Now, you know the McCoys: they don't wanna hear from nothing about the Armorlitia. They just wanna round up the Black Street Herd and smile for the cameras. And the Herd can't often tell one white American from another when it comes to retaliation, if you follow."

Travis' eyes lit up. "Do you think there's an Armorlitia cell operating in this area?"

"That is the story I hear, despite my best efforts not to hear anything. Word has it that they operate out in the woods on the mainland, but they come into the city for hardware, plus the occasional muscle-flexing like the youth center fire."

"Any leads as to their whereabouts?" Travis asked.

"Well, information like this has been going around the Herd, or what's left of the Herd, for some time. They've been investigating in their own way, but let's just say that their organization and detective skills aren't up to this task. My data collection abilities are more finely honed; therefore, I have come across some information that I would pass along to anyone who- unlike my eager associates in the Herd- could deal with this problem effectively"

"But we might know some people who could help," Travis said.

"Now, you have to realize that these Armorlitia guys mean business. The rumor has them burning this town to the ground and setting up the Herd in the progress."

"I hear you," Travis said

"It's breaking each of my personal rules to go this far. Of course, when I think of that youth center burning down, I can't look the other way."

"Just tell me what you know, Shorty," Travis said.

Shorty glanced nervously back and forth. "A gentleman came to me looking for some hot security codes, the kind that might unlock the safety controls in stolen military battle armor. I told the guy that the goods were beyond my means, but he gave me this in case I reconsidered."

Shorty reached into his pocket and produced a matchbook. Travis examined it. It was from The Shoals, the resort casino on the Atoll, and a room number was handwritten on it, as were the words "Herman Long, here until 12/24"

Travis peered up at Shorty suspiciously. "You didn't tell the police, or the mob?"

Shorty laughed. "I don't have any strong connections with the goombas, Travis. And as for the police, well, you don't do much business in the phony card racket when word gets out that you dimed someone. That's why I hope to put this information in the hands of somebody who'll do the right thing. I could give it to the Black Street Herd, but those trigger-happy fools would burn down half the town."

Travis shrugged his shoulders, passing the matchbook back to Shorty. "We'll keep our eyes and ears out for you," he said. "That's all we can do."

Shorty looked way for a moment, as though he were collecting his thoughts, but he turned and smiled at his guests warmly. "That's all I can ask you to do, my friends."

*****

The wind nearly blew Alicea into the street as they ascended the steps from Down Under. "Suddenly, Shorty Rock is in a sharing mood when it comes to information," she said. "I don't like it."

"He's helped us out before," JD said as they began walking home. "The guy never shuts up."

"No, but he's never this full of it," Travis said. "But, if what he said was true, he might never have been this spooked before."

"We could ask Randy to check out the story," JD said.

"We could do our own research for a change," Alicea answered.

Travis turned to her. "Didn't you think to . . ." he made the spinning gesture near his head.

Alicea rolled her eyes. "Only for a second, Travis. It's all I could handle. I wanted to see if he knew who we are and if he was sure about the bar burning."

"Well, what does he know?"

"Any idiot can see that he knows who we are. As for the bar incident, he was pretty damn sure it was us, and I don't think we changed his mind."

"But you didn't read anything during his story about the Armorlitia?"

"I was burned out. His mind is like the cup-and-saucer ride at the Steel Pier."

"Like I said before," JD said, "we get Randy to check his news sources."

"You know what he'll tell you?" Travis asked. "He'll tell you that Atlantic City averages a dozen racially motivated crimes every month, and most of them are blamed on an Armorlitia that the feds don't even believe exists. I know, Jeremy: I read the papers."

"Well, hell, let's just go to the Shoals and look in on this guy," JD said. "If he looks suspicious, we sauce him."

"If he looks suspicious," Travis corrected, "we wait until we catch him with something, then sauce him. But this calls for a cloak and dagger operation . . ."

He stopped and turned to Alicea. "What do you want?" she asked.

"Are you feeling cooperative?"

She sneered at him, then turned away. "Not particularly, but the thought of neighborhoods getting leveled as part of some sick skinhead prank doesn't exactly appeal to me. What do you have in mind?"

*****

Two days later, they decided to send JD out to corroborate the story: do a flyover of the warehouse, maybe talk to a few street contacts he had. If Shorty's information was legitimate, they would strike. It wasn't a unanimous decision: JD didn't want to fly in sub-zero temperatures, and Julianna just sat like a stone faced puppet, letting the deliberations wash over her. But Travis made the plans and Alicea didn't give him her usual parcel of grief, which for this bunch was a regular quorum.

They cooled their heels in the apartment, all dressed and ready for action, just waiting for a call from JD. Alicea even dressed the occasion: she popped out of the bedroom in black tights, a scarlet spandex top, and a red mask she had fashioned out of some felt. Travis nearly fell off his seat.

"Damn!" he said, putting his arms around her. "All you need now is a nickname."

She pulled off the mask. "I've gone this far," she said. "Don't get greedy."

The phone rang. Travis, verifying that it was JD, slipped out onto the fire escape to talk.

I sized up the suddenly not-so-reluctant superhero suspiciously. "Well, I'm surprised," I said.

She struck a coy little runway-model pose. "What? This old thing? I whipped it up in five minutes. I could use a little more anonymity when we work,"

I shook my head. "Not just the costume," I said. "The whole attitude. Two days ago, you were ready to throw Travis out on his ear. Now, you're acting like his dream girl."

She pulled over a kitchen chair to sit beside me. "It's my Christmas present to him. My last one: I'm leaving tomorrow."

"Really?" I asked, leaning closer to speak confidentially. "Why now?"

She thought for a moment. "Because I can't take it anymore. I mean, is this any way to spend Christmas Eve?"

"I'll bet you've been this fed up a hundred times before. Does this happen often? Do you work yourself up to leave and then back down at the last second?"

She glared at me. "I may have, once or twice. But this is different."

"How?"

She was about to speak when Julianna entered the kitchen. We were quiet as the girl, in costume and wearing her gauntlet, fumbled with a bottle of cognac. She couldn't open the bottle with that steel glove on; we watched her vain efforts until Alicea gave up and poured the girl a drink.

"That's how," she said after Julianna left. "She's been drinking herself into a coma since the bar fire. She blames herself. Travis doesn't see it; he doesn't realize that she'll do anything for his approval. That's the only reason she keeps fighting."

Alicea looked down at the cognac bottle and decided to pour herself a drink. "No, the only reason I'm going tonight is to watch out for her. One of two things happens tonight: we catch this arsonist, and Travis is satisfied for a while, or everything goes to hell. Either way, this is the curtain call."

She took a long, hard draught of the drink, then stared wistfully out the window. "I don't have the capacity to worry about these people anymore, Randy. Something could happen, and that would be all I could stand. I have to get away."

I stood behind her, resting my arms on her shoulders. "Well, I'm coming along tonight, but we probably won't have a chance to talk. You'll be out before the sun tomorrow?"

She nodded. I could see her tears in the reflected glass.

"It's been great meeting you," I said.

She shook her head, then looked down to hide her tears. "Same," she whispered.

Travis burst through the door; I removed my hands from Alicea's person in short order, but he wasn't coming for me. He slammed the phone down on the table. "The lazy shit did one flyover," he said.

Alicea composed herself quickly. "Did he find anything?"

"He said the story adds up: there was some activity at this warehouse. He just called me from a bar near the Atoll tunnel entrance. He stashed the flight suit; he claims he's watching the tunnel for Long."

"I'll bet he is," Alicea said.

"I'm going to meet him and send him to the warehouse. I'll watch for Long without getting distracted by every skirt in the place. Do you know where you're going?"

She nodded and he turned to leave, then stopped. He looked back at her, noticing the remnants of tears. His expression softened. He took her into his arms, kissing her deeply. He looked at her for a moment, watching he face for emotions as their embrace dissolved. His eyes were questioning, as if he couldn't find what he was looking for. I thought he would say something, but he just turned and left.

"Sometimes I think he can read my mind," she said.

I checked my hidden camera and the remote control for the floater; I had to be ready for fast action. "So this is it?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, slowly tying on her new mask and pulling her hair back into a ponytail. "Once more into the breach."

*****

The team assembled. Three of them did, anyway; Travis trailed Mr. Long and kept in constant contact on the cell. I went with the team. This event was too big to be entrusted to a floating minicam, and I wanted my hand held unit to be there when the action went down. We were back where it all started: the Kaiser Bread warehouse was just a few blocks north of the street where I met the team nearly a month before. The wide streets were nearly deserted; high reeds rustled on the dunes that guarded the entrance to the bay.

Alicea's teeth chattered as she studied the scene. She watched JD execute some minor repairs on his flightpack while Julianna sat cross-legged, her back propped against the wall of a nearby building. The younger girl was fingering her weapon nervously. Alicea knelt beside her.

"I'm worried about you," she said.

Julianna began rocking and rubbing her arms for warmth. "I'm fine," she said. She turned to Alicea. "At least, as fine as you are."

Alicea bit her lip. "I guess that's as good as we can ask for."

JD spoke up. "Check that out."

A black stretch limo rolled into view. For a second, the team was caught in its headlights as it passed, but it didn't slow or acknowledge them. It rolled into the gravel driveway behind the Kaiser warehouse, and three suits got out: the driver looking like muscle, the others in the back like fat cats or major hustlers.

"Hmmm," Alicea said, affecting sarcasm. "That looks suspicious."

"Can you read them?" JD asked?

"Too far away. Can you get some aerial surveillance?"

JD began bolting the harness to his back and armpits. "In a minute, but I'd rather not. Wind shears. The warehouse has a high ceiling, though, so I'll be able to fly when it hits the fan."

I used my zoom lens. The fat cats looked like everyday sleazeballs, cigar-chomping daddies with greased back hair and spit-shined shoes. The driver, who unlocked the warehouse and held the door for the others, was a buttoned-down professional: a tall black man with a shiny pate and eyes that looked everywhere at once. He glanced in the direction of the team for a moment, but we were tucked away in the shadows.

Static erupted from Alicea's portable. She mustered some nervous humor. "Mario's pizza."

Travis' voice was so loud at first that it carried through the streets. Alicea hurriedly adjusted the volume. "Long is in a cab and will be at Kaiser in maybe three minutes. I'll be there in four."

"Don't get too tired. We have at least one paid jammer here, and a couple of players who look like they mean business."

"I mean business, too," Travis replied, and the portable fell silent.

They waited through several long minutes, each of them clearly agitated. Alicea's breath was long and labored; Julianna stifled a series of raspy coughs. JD tightened and re-tightened the bolts that connected the flight harness to his body, stretching his arms to test the snugness of the fit. Finally, a taxi appeared at a distant corner, releasing a short, pudgy figure with a briefcase. The figure walked toward the warehouse.

"That's Long," Alicea said. "He'll probably get a look at us. Keep the hardware out of sight, and he'll think we're just street punks."

JD slumped against the wall, concealing his backpack behind him. Julianna didn't have to do anything to resemble a street punk. Alicea, who looked too mature to fit in, turned her back. Long glanced over, but kept moving. He rounded the warehouse, knocked on the door where the others had entered, and disappeared inside.

"It's show time," JD said, pointing to a nearby rooftop. Travis' head and shoulders were visible. He must have followed the taxi on foot, running rooftop-to-rooftop behind it, dropping to the street only when it was necessary. He gave the others a "cut throat" sign for radio silence, than a thumbs up.

"Be careful and don't kill anybody, people," Alicea said. "Let's catch the firebugs then go home for Christmas mac-and-cheese." JD pulled the cord and his flight engine roared to life. He took a running start away from the warehouse, releasing his wings and sprinting until the superconductive field became strong enough to provide a few precious feet of lift. He rose steadily, disappearing around the block.

Travis dropped from the rooftop and trotted in a crescent-shaped path along the street, gathering speed as he approached the loading bay door. Julianna aimed the sights of her force pack. Now high above, JD reappeared, circling silently above the street. I slipped closer, ready to charge in a few seconds behind the team.

"Now!" Travis shouted. An ionized pulse ripped from Julianna's weapon. The corrugated loading bay door buckled instantly. Travis, having built a good head of steam, rushed for the entrance, and JD dove for it.

"Here goes," Alicea said as she and Julianna followed their teammates, with me and my cameras hot on her heels.

The warehouse was dimly lit and crammed with empty crates and old machinery. The fat cats and Long were at the opposite end of a long breezeway, visible through the window of the old foreman's office in which they were negotiating. They turned to acknowledge the teens racing toward them; the bodyguard stepped into the entrance of the office, brandishing a low-yield CFC pistol.

"D-Bird, clear! Velvet, fire!" Travis yelled as he rolled behind a pile of crates. JD ascended beyond the range of Julianna's gauntlet just as the weapon unleashed a pulse straight down the breezeway. The bodyguard was knocked right off his feet; the window shuddered but did not break.

"We got 'em!" Travis exclaimed. He regained his feet as JD rose and perched atop some high shelving. Alicea, a few steps behind the others, stopped in her tracks suddenly, staring into the foreman's office in terror.

"Oh, shit," she cried. "Oh Travis, oh shit!"

The fat cats helped their enforcer to his feet.

"What is it?" Travis asked.

Her eyes shifted wildly from left to right. "We aren't alone in here . . ."

The fat cats and Long calmly stepped out of the office. Travis turned to them in confusion, then back to Alicea.

"Alicea?" he whispered.

"Trap!" she shouted. "Run!"

Long pulled a badge from his breast pocket. "ATF: McCoy units," he shouted. "Freeze!"

"A setup!" Travis shouted in anger. He grabbed his sister's hand, pulling her away back toward the entrance they had blasted. Alicea followed, and JD dropped from his perch in the same direction. From behind the crates came a dozen McCoy troopers, these guys in full battle armor. One sealed off the exit, stepping into view with his CFC rifle poised at Travis' chest.

Travis leapt for cover, nearly pulling his sister's arm from its socket as he dragged her to safety. JD arched away to freedom at the last second, but his wing clipped the trooper at the door. If not for battle armor, the fed might have been decapitated, but he was just bowled over. That drew JD some fire, though. The high ceilings were bathed in light as blasts followed JD through the warehouse.

Alicea and I picked our way between boxes until we could see the others. She called to Travis. "There are 14 of them," she said, "They're armed to the teeth."

"Let's get out of here," Travis said.

Long and the others drew weapons and approached the team slowly, calling down the breezeway as they walked. "You are under arrest for violations of the VPA," Long announced, his words punctuated by blasts as his lieutenants pursued JD. "Surrender immediately. We are authorized to use any and all necessary force."

"We have no chance against the armor guys, but those four . . ." Travis thought aloud. "Julie, give me one ass kicker to take out Long. Then we go straight out the way they came in."

Julianna fiddled with the controls. Tears were pouring from her eyes. She wiped them away, hurrying to make adjustments as the feds approached.

"Oh, God," Alicea whispered as she watched Julianna work.

Julianna crouched on the floor, steadied her legs against her brother's body, and kicked hard, sliding out into the causeway. She squeezed the trigger on her box, but only a few crates over her targets' left shoulders were disturbed. In her haste, she had miscalibrated the force pulse.

"No!" Travis screamed. He and Alicea both leapt into the causeway as the trooper JD knocked down a moment before drew a bead on the helpless girl. He fired, and the super-heated blast burst against Julianna's leg just as Alicea pounced upon her. Julianna yelped with pain. Long and the others brought their pistols down to fire, but Travis intervened. He raked two of their faces with the buckler in his left hand, side-kicking away Long's weapon. The enforcer descended upon him, and they were engaged in a five-man melee.

Alicea tossed Julianna to cover, then stood to face the trooper a few yards away, his weapon trained on her. She lifted her arms weakly in surrender, only to be lifted off her feet. JD took her in his arms, climbing quickly toward the high ventilation windows.

Travis was thrown to the ground. Long shook some pain from his hand, then produced a communicator. "Two getaways. I want two men in airborne pursuit. The rest mop up. Let's not lose the bird in the hand."

All the while, I was tucked away in a hiding place, safely away from the action. But I had to figure that the armored troopers had heat-seeking technology, so it was only a matter of time before I was discovered. Sure enough, I felt a cold barrel at my back as I crouched forward, trying to get a decent shot of Travis' last stand. I tried to rise when I felt the gun, and it was pushed deeply between my shoulder blades. I dropped my camera, and slowly raised my hands.

Chapter 10:

Acceptable Losses

I had to give JD credit: I didn't expect the kid to think of anybody else in a crisis. He could have had a good head start on the feds if he just flew out the warehouse window, but instead he spent a few precious seconds swooping down to pick up Alicea. He must have known that, as a college graduate, she would have been tried as an adult, like him (he was 23) but unlike the others. Or maybe he just had a thing for her. Either way, he was a sight to behold as he ducked and dodged blaster bursts, thrusters at full throttle, wings bent backwards as he and Alicea ascended to the bank of windows just beneath the warehouse ceiling.

I wouldn't have given them 50 to 1 odds of escaping. Long had ordered two officers to chase them, and the two silver-armored figures flooded the room with blinding reflections as they flew through the beams of the strobe lights. The McCoy soldiers were faster and could maneuver better than JD, even without Alicea in tow. They would be authorized to use stun weapons on JD, even though he could be seriously injured or killed by a fall, as he was unlawfully fleeing a crime scene. My best estimates gave JD about 30 seconds before he was in custody, and there was nothing I could do. Or should do, for that matter, if I intended to maintain journalistic impartiality, except try to capture the whole scene on video. But even that wasn't an option: my little floater would never catch up to JD or his pursuers in time. What's more, if the chase ended with JD and Alicea splattered across the boardwalk, I didn't want a recording of the event. To hell with the story; these were human beings.

There was only one possible means of escape. The McCoy officers track flyers using heat-seeking technology. They also have motion-sensing equipment at their disposal, but its not as reliable when pursuing someone producing a couple thousand kilowatts of output. JD and his flight pack were easily the hottest moving objects in the city flying lower than a jet airplane, but there are plenty of hotter stationary objects: namely, casino lights. If JD could make it to the casino district, the heat generated by signs and displays would force the feds to switch to motion sensors, or at least to modify the bandwidths on their heat seekers.

Reaching the boardwalk, however, would only achieve a temporary solution. The McCoy units would only be confused until they switched tracking technologies, which would only take a few seconds. JD needed to get lost within a crowd of flying, heat-producing, man-sized or greater objects. The only place that could happen was at an Atoll Casino. The offshore casinos rented safe, recreational flightpacks to tourists for $100 a half hour; like many aspects of life on the atoll, this was only legal because they were located in international water. No recreational pack generates the heat produced by JD's pack, but with the McCoy heat-seekers adjusted to compensate for the boardwalk casino lights, JD would blend in, assuming a few crazies were out flying on Christmas Eve.

Let's review: to escape, JD and Alicea had to: a) reach the casino district, preferably in a non-straight path, b) use the casino lights as camouflage to temporary lose the McCoy officers, c) fly three miles over the cold Atlantic before the McCoy soldiers could make their adjustments, and d) blend in with the recreational flyers at an offshore tourist facility. No sweat.

Why am I telling you all this? Because the scenario above is precisely what happened. Alicea recounted the events to me later. JD made up for a lack of speed by flying low over rooftops the feds were unfamiliar with. He banked wide along the 75,000 lightbulb display of the old Ziggurat casino, where they must have enjoyed a few seconds of invisibility from the McCoy sensors. They crossed the ocean about two feet above the waves, risking an icy wipeout in the hope of flying below tracking range and confusing motion sensors. This was an escape maneuver that the team had worked out long ago. Surprisingly, not only did JD remember it under pressure, but he executed it perfectly with a passenger in tow.

Their problems didn't end when they reached the Atoll. It was Christmas Eve, and even on a relatively warm December evening there weren't many thrill-seekers on the flying range. Had they just waited there, JD and Alicea would have been rounded up as soon as the officers picked them out from about a half dozen tourists. But JD was ready for that. After circling with the renters for a few seconds, he ascended high into the airspace, fired thrusters toward shore for a few seconds, then cut power. How he managed to stay airborne carrying an extra ninety pounds is anyone's guess. But the managed to stay afloat, and they glided to the beach while their pursuers flew out to the atoll in search of them.

When they reached the beach, JD and Alicea parted company. He tore off his flight harness and buried it in a sand dune, then set off to get lost in the crowd at some heavy metal nightclub. Alicea ran to the boardwalk, bought a sweatshirt and slipped it on. She spent the whole night wandering from casino to casino, playing quarter slots to calm her nerves and trying to blend in with the crowd. It was a lousy way to spend Christmas Eve.

But it was nothing compared to what Travis and Julianna went through.

*****

After JD and Alicea escaped, Travis realized that there was no reason to continue fighting. He threw down his shield and came out of hiding from behind a stack of crates. He called for Julianna to come out, but at first she didn't respond. Then we saw her drag herself by her arms from behind one of those track-mounted forklifts. She had taken a direct blast to her right hip. Her costume was burnt past her waist on the right side and her skin was blackened, but she wasn't so much crying as gasping for breath as she pathetically inched forward.

"Medical unit: stat," announced a lieutenant as he removed his battle helmet. The kid looked no older than JD; he was clean cut and fresh faced and obviously shaken by the sight of the wounded teen. He buried his face in his hands as an officer in medical attire emerged from the loading dock and began tending to Julianna.

Long and two officers stood astride Travis. They shackled him, hands and legs, with reinforced cuffs as they read him his rights. I felt a tap on the shoulder.

"Take your feet sir," the fed with his piece at my neck said.

I slowly stood. "I'm press, officer. I'm going to reach into my breast pocket and show my credential."

"Hands behind your back, sir," the officer replied.

I did as I was told. In a moment, Travis and I were standing, handcuffed, side by side. Julianna was being lifted onto a stretcher. Travis turned to look at me, and I have never seen such a guilty, defeated young man. I thought the truth had finally dawned on him: that he had endangered his sister, his friends, and himself, for a cause he couldn't define or even adequately justify. His sunken eyes seemed to suggest that he realized how far he had fallen from his own ideals, and what a bitter end he had had brought forth for himself and his sister.

"I'm sorry I got you in to this, Randy," he said.

Then I realized: in Travis' warped mind, Julianna and the others were soldiers. They knew the risks. I was the innocent civilian who he was supposed to protect. It was my arrest that shook him.

"Travis," I said, "I won't last two hours at police headquarters. I'll be eating dinner with my mom out in Tribeca tomorrow. You and your sister will be God knows where. Do you realize that? Do you realize this is it?"

He faced forward and hardened his jaw. "Acceptable losses. We'll bounce back."

I shook my head. "What about Alicea? I hope to God I see her and JD walk up that loading ramp in cuffs in a few minutes. Otherwise, they got zapped in mid air, and judging from the inexperience of these feds, I wouldn't count on a clean catch."

That hit him hard, but he tried not to show it. "What if they escaped?" He asked, his voice catching.

At that moment, I barely considered that a possibility, but I didn't say that to Travis. It wasn't my job to break through the kid's defenses and get him to realize the trouble he was in. As a technical juvenile, he would be assigned a counselor immediately upon arraignment. The professionals had a better chance of reaching Travis than I did.

The van the McCoy unit came in was sent to the hospital with Julianna. Two Atlantic City squad cars came to pick us up. This was my first hint that no one intended to bring the team up on federal charges; for serious cases, Travis would have been taken directly to an ATF facility in Philadelphia or Trenton. If the McCoy units were coordinating with local authorities, then the city district attorney probably planned to pick up easy convictions on state and local charges, rather than risking bad publicity by bringing technical juveniles to federal court.

I won't bore you with my interrogation. That young lieutenant wound up apologizing to me. So did Long and just about every other arresting officer. They returned my hardware with the usual lecture about my responsibility as a member of the media to report crimes to the authorities, not just to the public. The McCoy Unit goes to great lengths to stay friendly with the media, however, and after the slightest reprimand I was given some pizza and allowed to witness Travis' interrogation.

There wasn't much to see. Travis demanded a lawyer at the beginning of the proceedings, and a sleepy-eyed public defender sat beside Travis as he admitted to a variety of wrongdoings. The police wanted Alicea and JD, but Travis refused to budge. He claimed, cleverly I thought, that the others at the scene were a separate pair of vigilantes who had been sucked in by the same sting. The cops brought up the Bashful Banana incident, but their information about that night was sketchy, and when Travis admitted to being at that scene, they gave up on Alicea and JD.

Travis was arraigned at dawn on the 26th on several state charges: vigilante-related mayhem (a state equivalent of the federal laws), prescription forgery, reckless endangerment, etc. He pleaded guilty. This would be a high-speed process: the district attorney, I was certain, would accept a plea bargain that put Travis in a rehab facility for a few years. The case wasn't going to court.

Julianna, meanwhile, was being treated at the hospital out in Pleasantville. At her arraignment on the 29th, the judge declared her a minor under Travis' guardianship. That put her fate in the hand of social workers, who would decide that the best thing for her would be to finish high school.

But I've jumped ahead of myself.

It was nearly midnight on Christmas Eve. Julianna was in the hospital, receiving treatment for third-degree burns. Travis was alone in a holding cell, his interrogation over. I had spent the whole holiday season following kids through ghetto neighborhoods and into cramped, smelly apartments, dark alleys, and seedy bars. My Christmas Eve was spent in a warehouse, a squad car, and a police station. The most joyous holiday of the year was upon me, and I had a responsibility to hunt down Alicea and JD. At the time, my best guess placed them in the morgue, waiting for someone to positively ID them.

I wasn't spending Christmas morning in the morgue. Nor did I plan to edit footage or to relive that firefight in the warehouse. December had passed for me without a carol or a tree, and Christmas arrived with the tragedy of four young lives shattered and wasted. From Amanda Douglass, the girl who fell from the power line in November, to Alicea, who I believed was just as dead, everything I had experienced in the past few weeks had been desperation and pain. It had been too much. All I could think of as I left the precinct building was how hollow my soul felt, how distant I seemed to be from anything comforting or meaningful.

So I went to midnight mass. Surprisingly, the pillars of that old mission church didn't crumble when I entered. I sang hymns and shook hands with strangers and soaked up the ambience: point settia and incense and a nativity beneath a lit Christmas tree beneath a crucifix. I knelt in my pew and prayed: for Travis, for Julianna, for the five hundred thousand or more kids under 21 who risk their lives in the misguided belief that its somehow cool to be a "superhero."

Most of all, I prayed that Alicea was OK.

*****

Everybody disappeared for a few days; the Hood siblings into the judicial system, the others into the woodwork. It was a good time to go into hiding. McCoy was bringing down the Black Street Herd, street kids with pop blasters, and anyone who looked like they might have ever taken a muscle drug. The sting was on in Atlantic City, and there was no sign of kid gloves. Public opinion shifted after the rec center fire, and when public opinion shifts, the McCoy's respond. The nightly news was dominated by superpowered chases: feds using shoulder-mounted launchers to take out Herd assault vehicles on public streets, silver-plated knights of justice kicking in door frames and pointing CFC rifles at small-time Rae-Tae dealers, and other assorted mayhem. The public begged for more. I begged for the chance to get three blocks in the city without something blowing up beside me.

I couldn't find Alicea or JD anywhere. I tried Shorty Rock, but his information was less than forthright. Then, Shorty was gone. He didn't even make the nightly news, unless you requested full enabled and extended crime coverage. There he was, the troopers beside him looking like platinum behemoths, as they led him out of Down Under in cuffs. Almost a half-million dollars worth of stolen access numbers were confiscated, according to the report. Drug sales and teen prostitution suspected, it said: otherwise, the McCoys would be out of their jurisdiction. Coverage provided by: you guessed it, the ATF public relations department.

Nobody came by the apartment: not Alicea, not JD, not the authorities. With all the other action, the McCoy units seemed satisfied to give up on the remainder of the team, but no one told the team. When the garment factory reopened, I asked discreetly about Alicea's whereabouts. She was taking some time off for the holidays, they said. No one knew where she was staying.

With Shorty's enterprises closed down, I only had one lead left: the cognac bar where I first encountered Alicea. The Atoll was about the only part of the city that wasn't engulfed in violence, and a person could easily blend into the crowd there. I passed through some extra-tight security, rode the moving walkway, and staked out a surveillance position with a view of the bar.

Sure enough, she appeared, looking exhausted and scared but trying to hide it as her eyes darted around the bar. "Let me get a St. Vincent's" she said.

I approached her, making sure she could see me from a distance: there was no sense in scaring her. "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" I joked.

"Oh, Randy," she cried, putting her arms around me when I drew close. "I never thought I'd be happy to see you."

I asked her where she had been. She spent Christmas day wandering the floors of casinos; it was her and a few of the most compulsive of gamblers, absently dropping money into machines and fighting off emotional collapse. When she could no longer stand, she returned to the apartment to sleep, but the network kept ringing. So she packed for life on the streets: she crashed in libraries and church soup kitchens by day, then wandered the casinos by night. She used her powers to earn a little extra cash (although telepathy isn't the advantage you would think it is in a casino: the dealer doesn't know what the next card is, so reading his mind doesn't help). She had enough money for a hotel but was afraid to even sign Jane Doe to a register.

"They're not looking for you anymore." I said.

"I know that," she said. "I saw a McCoy command van operating behind one of the old boardwalk casinos. I read everybody that I could. A trooper looked right at me without getting suspicious."

"You can go home," I said.

She gulped her drink. "I know that and you know that."

I nodded. She wasn't ready. "What about JD?"

"No sign of him. When he left, he said something about New York. He doesn't have any of my credit cards, so I don't care."

"You don't care?"

She winced. "No, I don't. OK, I do. But I think we would both agree that I would be better off if he just disappeared. Then, I could put this all behind me and move on."

"It's probably for the best," I said.

"Yeah. I've even thinking about Valley Green. It might be my version of the French Foreign Legion."

I nodded. "I suppose my work with you is done. I've found you. Your alive, you've escaped, and you're going to be okay."

She finished her drink and flashed a crooked smile. "Yep, that's me. Alive and okay. No worries. What about you?"

"I have a story to finish. I have to do features on Travis and Julianna after they're placed. And I have to try to find JD and do a wrap on him."

She ordered drinks for both of us. "Let me go with you to find him," she said.

I accepted the refreshments. "You don't have to do that."

"I know. But you'll never find him without me, and I guess I owe it to him to look after him."

She finished her second drink in one long draught, watching the waves crash behind the atrium window beyond the bar. "It's my fate, Randy. I don't know how to live if I'm not babysitting people like Travis and Jeremy. I won't be able to live with myself if I don't know what became of him, and I don't want to have to watch your show to find out."

"Well," I said, smiling at her, "if you insist."

She smiled back. "I do. Just give me a day or two."

*****

.Julianna's was the last sequence I recorded for the documentary, in the middle of January. But we edited her story into sequence earlier for dramatic effect, so that's how I'm telling the story here.-R.S.

Matt and Chrissy Devlin of South Orange New Jersey have seen it all since they became foster parents for troubled teens. They've seen the ravages of drugs and the sad aftermath of child abuse, kids crippled by wounds both physical and emotional. The patterns are always there- of victimhood, abuse, and lost innocence- but each individual they take in is unique.

Julianna Hood was no exception.

"Many girls come to us very withdrawn," Chrissy Devlin said as she sat beneath the photo gallery on her family room wall. The photos and digital images depicted the members of the Devlin extended family, the dozen or so teenagers- mostly girls- who were sent to live with the Devlins in the past eight years while the federal government made more permanent arrangements.

"Most times, it seems like they're shrinking away from their pasts," Chrissy continued. "Most of these children are not proud of what they did in the past. Also, some lack the self-esteem to speak up for themselves when they aren't part of some gang."

Matt, an insurance adjuster in his mid-40's, laid a supportive hand on his wife's knee. "That isn't always the case. Some kids bring their problems with them: the aggression, the hostility, the tendency to find themselves in with the wrong element. We had a girl three years ago who started selling Phinny Bar two weeks after we took her in. We had to turn her right back over to DYFS."

"But most aren't like that," Chrissy, a school crisis counselor, explained. "Most are like Julianna. They're scared of their surroundings. Many of them have never experienced a normal home life. Over time, they open up, and you realize how much these young people are hurting."

Julianna inherited a room that housed many young vigilantes before her. The room was spacious and decorated in a cozy but impersonal manner. She was permitted to decorate, but the room displayed few personal touches except for a fading image of her brother and his ex-girlfriend taped to the wall beside her bed.

She looked healthier than she did a month earlier, when her brother led her into a trap inside a warehouse. She was eating regularly, and her cheeks were starting to fill out. Her hair was cut short, and she was wearing her makeup sensibly: the superhero who could blast opponents with force fields had become the girl next door.

"I miss everybody," she said as she sat cross-legged on a bad far too large for her. "I miss being able to do my own thing. But I'm glad I don't have to fight anymore."

The rules of the Devlin household, and of the federal program which sent Julianna there, were simple. Give up the vigilante lifestyle. Earn a high school diploma. Rejoin mainstream society. This wasn't a halfway house or lock-down environment, though. Julianna was free to live the life of a normal teenager. She could date and go to parties, assuming she kept a regular curfew. In fact, the Devlins encouraged their foster children to socialize with the "right element."

"I've met some people," Julianna said, blushing and looking very much like a normal teenager as she discusses her social life. "The kids at school are nice. I'm going to a party tonight with some people I met."

Chrissy Devlin first encountered teenage vigilantism in her role as a public school crisis counselor.

"The school I worked at was plagued by gang activity," she explained. "Students came to me, and I began to hear about the types of drugs they used to make themselves stronger. When I researched these drugs, I realized how dangerous they were, yet the school district tried to sweep the problem under a rug."

Chrissy's district focused their anti-drug energies on intoxicants, choosing to ignore body-enhancers as a threat to the student population. Many communities made the same mistake two decades ago, when Rae-Tae and Phinny Bar were considered inner-city street drugs.

"I couldn't stand by and not take action," Chrissy said, explaining her decision to campaign for muscle enhancement awareness programs in her community. It was at the same time that the Devlins volunteered to become foster parents.

Chrissy's experience made the couple ideal candidates for the foster parent program, but Matt admitted that "at first, it was a learning experience for both of us. Chrissy knew what these children were like in a school environment, but bringing them home was another story." Their first child was prone to violent fits and destroyed much of the family's furniture and electronic equipment. The Devlins learned to adapt, and to provide for each child's individual needs.

"By the time they reach you," Chrissy explained, "so many people have failed for these kids. So many have let them down. All you can do is be there for them, and keep loving them no matter what happens."

Even when surrounded by her new friends from school, Julianna spoke little and rarely smiled. Her friends picked her up in a sporty new convertible. They were a guy and a girl, but not a couple, and everything about them appeared to be typical of the All American high school senior. They were outgoing, healthy, cute and fashionable, and they appeared to accept their new friend totally. The trio gossiped and giggled about school and the upcoming party as they whizzed down the interstate, apparently oblivious of the camera that hovered beside them as they drove.

"They're nice to me," Julianna said after they arrived at the party. "They help me with my homework. I guess they're my best friends right now."

"I know Julie has had some problems in the past," explained Dylan, a tall kid with his wavy brown hair bunched into a ponytail. "But what she got caught doing, I'm sure there's 50 kids in the school who've done the same thing. That doesn't make it right, but you shouldn't look down on her, either,"

Danielle, the owner of the convertible and a fresh-faced youngster who seemed to smile constantly, agreed with her friend. "You can't judge people. It's hard enough to have to move in with new people and go to a new school without people talking behind your back. Julie seems like a nice person; I don't care what she did in Atlantic City, or whatever."

The party took place at a grand suburban home in a cul-de-sac. Cars filled the driveway and the circle; a beat and bass line shook the neighborhood. Inside, the crowd was thick, and the smell of stale beer, cigarettes and chronic were prevalent. Kids danced and talked, flaked out on couches and necked in corners. Julianna and her friends were handed cups of beer the moment the entered, and Julianna soon was surrounded by a herd of potential suitors.

"You know how guys are when there's a new girl in school," Danielle explained.

Julianna appeared to enjoy the attention, opening up and smiling as she flirted with the guys. Alcohol, of course, was a violation of her probation. The law said that she wasn't even supposed to be in the presence of alcohol consumption, but that didn't stop Julianna from drinking.

"This ain't Pollyanna," Dylan explained. "There aren't any parties without drinking. Anyway, she can hold her liquor better than most of those guys."

Danielle slipped into the crowd surrounding Julianna and attempted to pry her away, but she shook off the effort. Julianna walked arm-in-arm with one boy, presumably in the direction of the keg, as Danielle shrugged her shoulders.

"I guess the important thing," Danielle said, "is to keep her away from the superhero stuff. Those guys aren't interested in that."

*****

After eight years, Chrissy Devlin can create a fairly specific profile of the female superhero.

"Nearly all of them are heavily influenced by outside factors. Rarely does a girl wake up and decide that she wants to fight crime. Sometimes, there's a gang of girls involved, but most female vigilantes are under pressure from their boyfriends, fathers, or, in Julianna's case, a brother who acts as a surrogate father.

"The emotional abuse these father figures bring to bear is sometimes crippling. Many are delusional individuals, fighting some kind of personal jihad against contemporary society. They raise these girls to be backwards, hateful, and distrustful. Most of the kids don't have a chance."

Many superheroes are trained to be neighborhood soldiers of fortune, thugs who can commit petty crimes or shake down perceived malefactors for their fathers or boyfriends. In some cases, the girls were abused when younger, then turned to vigilantism to have the power to fight back against their abusers. Backwoods fathers outfit their daughters to defend their homes against attackers, usually repo men or sheriff's officers. Devlin is familiar with several cases in which well-meaning parents offered their daughters chemical enhancements for self-defense, only to watch the girls become violent and unstable.

"Rarely do we see a girl who came from a nurturing environment," Chrissy said. "There's always something: alcoholism, sexual assault, something. Vigilantism is a symptom of more serious problems. Once you realize that, you can take the first step toward healing these children."

The Devlin philosophy necessitates that the couple take some chances, including allowing children like Julianna to attend parties. Matt admits that "it would be easier to lock her in her room every night. That would solve some problems, but it wouldn't help Julianna any. It's important that she takes some control over her life, and that means that we have to allow her to make her own mistakes sometimes."

Julianna's midnight curfew came and went, and the house party took a darker turn. Drunkenness overtook most of the kids; some were passed out, the rest were slurring and stumbling, their interactions incoherent. Girls fell into guys arms; calm discussions erupted into shouts and shoving matches. Many of the clean-cut kids who were there when Julianna arrived had left, and a shadier crowd had arrived.

In the master bedroom, three young men shared a bed with Julianna. She was drunk and dazed, sprawled out on the bed as the boys moved around her. One had his pants around his ankles, another was unzipping his jeans. The third, his bare chest a mass of demonic etchings, ran his fingers along her thighs. Julianna's blouse was draped around her neck and her bra was pulled aside. She shifted onto her hands and knees beside the first guy, her bare stomach a sharp relief of ribs, her eyes lifeless as she rubbed her head against his hips.

Dylan burst into the room angrily. "What are you doing with my girl?"

The tattoo guy stood, cracking his knuckles. "What makes her your girl?"

"She came with me. She's mine."

Dylan, rail thin and innocent in appearance, gamely stared down his tattooed adversary as the others looked on in confusion. "Well, I ain't lookin for trouble right now, and she ain't worth fighting over."

Dylan turned to the others still kneeling on the bed. "Get rid of your friends too."

Etching Kid grunted. "Hell, I don't even know these guys."

It took a few moments, but Dylan bluffed all three into leaving. He stared down at Julianna, who had rolled into the fetal position, her clothes still half off.

"Let's get you dressed."

Julianna rolled onto her back. Dylan straightened her bra and pulled her blouse back over her arms. "Did you see that one guy?" she said, her speech very loose. "He looked like JD with all the art."

"Whatever," Dylan said, pulling her upright. "Danielle talked to Mr. Devlin. She bought us some time, although I don't think he was convinced by the story. You'll be okay if you can sober up."

Her head swiveled as if she couldn't support it. "I'm fine. I didn't drink that much."

*****

As Julianna headed for the school bus stop on Monday morning, Chrissy Devlin mused about the fate of children like her.

"There are so many excuses for giving up on a girl like Julianna. Take the incident on Saturday night. She was two hours late. We could have reported that, and she would be one step closer to a juvenile facility. But what would that solve? Would she be any closer to rehabilitation? I doubt it.

"I'm certain that nothing happened on Saturday night that Matt and I should worry about. She's a good kid, and she's made good friends who won't let her get into any trouble. A normal teenage social life is a new experience for Julianna, and she probably got caught up in the excitement of being around people her own age who aren't obsessed with violence. Under the circumstances, I might forget my curfew, too.

"Julianna's come a long way in just a few weeks. She's had a rough time, growing up with nobody responsible to take care of her. Now that we have her, I'm sure she's going to be okay."

*****

- I caught up with Travis not long after he was sent to rehab. This part of the story was edited in to sequence here- R.S.

They sentenced Travis to four years at a live-in state rehabilitation center in Morristown. The facility was beautiful: about 150 acres of gardens and trees and old-time architecture on what used to be the campus of a private school. Facilities like Morristown were high-security, lock-down environments, but they were always designed not to look that way. Only a select few offenders, who meet specific criteria, make it into these facilities: most individuals found guilty under the Vigilante Prevention Acts are remanded to traditional federal prisons. Travis was sent to Morristown because he was a technical juvenile, could plead reasonable adversity from losing both parents fairly young, and passed a battery of psychological exams which demonstrated that rehabilitation was an actual possibility.

Getting an interview with him was tricky. Part of the standard operating procedure at any rehab is to severely limit contact with the outside world. That means restricted viewing of carefully monitored programs, no telecommunications of any sort, and a strict protocol for visitors. Even parents and spouses are limited to monthly one-hour visits at Morristown. From non-relatives, patients are permitted only three visitors per year, and these individuals are carefully screened. Anyone with any criminal record is prohibited, and Morristown reserves the right to drug-test anyone wishing access to a patient who appears to be a regular user of any controlled substances. Anyone who refuses a test is not allowed in. All of these strictures are designed to keep patients away from potential advocates of their previous lifestyle. If your visit has the potential to contradict the worldview with which patients at Morristown are indoctrinated, then you simply don't get in.

As a non-relative, I qualified for one of Travis' three annual visitor passes, but my status as a high-profile journalist made the director squirm. I couldn't lie about my objectives: she knew I wasn't going to be interviewing Travis about the food. The director, Dr. Sherryl Beech, at first refused my request on principal. Even the rumor that Randy Stone was interested in one of the patients, her reasoning went, would be enough to rekindle the urges, the delusions, the compulsions to act out from which most of her patients suffered.

I didn't give up. First, I pointed out that Travis had no family, except for a sister who would not be visiting. Since JD would never pass a drug test, I knew that Alicea and I would be the only people who would even qualify for a visit, and Alicea had no intentions of dropping in. Dr. Beech conceded that it wasn't healthy for a patient to get absolutely no visitors. Secondly, I brought up the public relations angle, telling her that a piece in my show would increase awareness of the positive work being done at facilities like Morristown. I didn't buy that one myself, but I was fishing for Dr. Beech's approval using a chance to be on television as bait.

She swallowed.

"We have 700 patients here at the Morristown Rehabilitation Complex, all of whom were recommended to us by the courts after committing federal felonies outlined in the Vigilante Prevention Acts or state felonies as described in the New Jersey anti-vigilante code."

My minicam hovered as I walked beside her down the manicured lanes in the complex courtyard. Oh, I had to make other concessions: my questions to Travis were screened, my contact with him would be limited and monitored, etc. But basically, I was in for the price of a few hours of grandstanding by the good doctor.

"Further, all of our patients were substance abusers. VPA offenders who use illicit weaponry or surgically mutilate themselves in the act of vigilantism are remanded to other complexes, assuming that the courts suggest rehabilitation."

Hardware hacks in this part of the country are sent to a federally-administrated facility out on Long Island. That's where Julianna would have wound up if she was 18. Implant freaks like JD don't have their own hospital systems; they usually wind up in traditional mental hospitals, and most of them need it.

"The rehabilitation process at Morristown is divided into two separate, but equally important, functions. The first is to rid the patient of all controlled substances, to offer them an opportunity to overcome their addictions, and to repair the damage done to their bodies by years of drug abuse and dependence. Our second function is to re-orient them with mainstream society. Our aggressive program of counseling, education, and reinforcement is a proven technique in eliminating from subjects their inclination toward anti-social or dangerous behavior."

She led me to the gymnasium, where Travis and other patients were taking part in morning exercise. Exercise, she explained at length, was a privilege, and about half of their community was confined to their rooms that morning for one minor transgression or another.

We watched them from behind a mirror on a platform above the gym floor. There was no special equipment around: no weights, no basketball nets, not even lines to mark off a volleyball court. The kids, Travis among them, were following a counselor through brisk aerobic exercises. The atmosphere was silent, almost solemn: three hundred kids doing jumping jacks with only their footfalls, their breathing, and the counselor's counting to be heard.

"There are no weights at this facility," Dr. Beech told me. "Most of these young men have already spent enough of their lives in the weight room. They come to us with biceps like suspension cables, but many of them can only run for about a minute before getting winded. That's a direct result of Ray-Tae, the most common addictive muscle-builder we encounter. The heart and lungs are actually weakened by the drug, rendering the user a muscle-bound user a Colossus with clay feet. Or, to be more exact, a clay cardio-vascular system."

I noticed that many of the most physically-imposing young men were indeed wheezing their way through the calisthenics.

"Mr. Hood is lucky by these standards. As an Anapest user, he avoided many of the most harmful side effects of more powerful drugs. What's more, if there was such a thing as a responsible user of these chemicals, Mr. Hood would be one. The physiological component of his rehabilitation has proceeded smoothly.

The counselor on the floor called the aerobics to an end, and most of the patients slumped gratefully. Travis, however, began to run in place. From my vantage point, I could see that stubborn look on his face. He wasn't finished with his morning workout.

The counselor approached him slowly. "Mr. Hood, this exercise period has ended!"

Travis' legs began pumping harder. Dr. Beech bit her lip.

"Mr. Hood, you are ordered to stop running!"

Travis' whole body was shuddering as he galloped in place.

"Mr. Hood, you will lose exercise privileges for one month if you do not desist immediately!"

He finally came to a halt, but he stared at his counselor defiantly. They sized each other up; the instructor was a tough looking guy, and I speculated that he probably tussled with a kid once in a while, just to let them know who they were messing with. I thought it was coming to that, but Travis backed down after a few tense seconds.

"Fall out people," the counselor ordered.

Dr. Beech turned away from the glass. "That sort of confrontation happens far more often than we would like," she said.

*****

I followed Travis all day, always observing him from a double mirror or some other blind spot. They were training him to be a medical technician, and he had the aptitude for it. He led a team of residents through a mock emergency, handling the situation with the confidence of a young man who knew his way out of a burning building. It was nice to see the kid's ambitions channeled into something useful, and I could imagine Travis leading a paramedic team someday in the future. He had the potential to be a real hero.

Reluctantly, Dr. Beech allowed me to conduct a short interview under controlled conditions. She previewed all of my questions and insisted that the interview be carried out in the facility's visitation room, through reinforced glass and with constant remote supervision. "Randy," he said as they led him into the room. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me. "Trying to finish your story?"

I explained that tracking down he and Julianna were my final assignments. He started to ask about the others, but I shook him off. "I would love to have a conversation, Travis, but I'm sure you realize that Dr. Beech is watching us. She will end this discussion if I stray from the questions she approved."

He nodded and leaned back, appearing comfortable with the circumstances. "Yeah, Randy. That's the story of my life lately. I'm always under supervision. First, it was you who had a camera up my ass every day for a month. Now, they even have cameras on me in the john. Even you didn't do that."

"So, how do you feel about your treatment here at Morristown?"

He looked around. "It's alright, Randy, and I mean that. I'm not afraid of having a jack-boot at my throat tonight if I criticize the place, if you get my drift."

"I do."

"A great, structured environment. Plenty of educational opportunities. Tremendous food, believe it or not. If I were a criminal, I would consider myself lucky to be in a place like this."

I scratched my head. "You still don't consider yourself a criminal?"

He squeezed his temples. "Randy, I spent two hours a day with counselors: please don't start on me. I am well aware of the fact that I broke the law, but I will never, never consider myself a criminal. Is that such a fine point that only I understand the difference?"

"I suppose not."

"Randy, we have guys in here who do nothing but jam. They jam with street herds, they jam with neighbors, and if the guards turn their backs, they jam with each other. You have about a million hours of tape of me. Was I really like that? Do I really belong here?"

I had no way of responding, and he seemed to understand. He smiled and leaned back, apparently happy to speak his mind.

"Who do you blame for the events that lead you here?" I asked.

He chuckled. "Well, Shorty Rock for one. Of course, he was only setting us up because I kicked his ass, but I only did that because he was trying to make my sister. Of course, he was only making my sister because I had to deal with scum like him in the first place, so . . ."

"So you blame yourself," I concluded.

He grinned widely. "What kind of hero would I be if I didn't take responsibility for my own mistakes? Yes, I blame myself, for putting myself in a position to get set up and for not smelling the setup when it happened."

That threw me off; I didn't expect Travis to take responsibility, although the kid did spend a month surprising me. I paused the floated to flip threw my note cards for a moment.

"Randy," Travis whispered to me.

I looked up.

"I hear things in here," he whispered. His hands were over his mouth; the monitors probably couldn't pick up his voice.

"There's a guy in here who was recruited by an agency," he said. "They were training him in urban terrorism: hijacking, hostages . . ." he emphasized the last words, "arson."

I whispered as low as I could. "Valley Green?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Armorlitia. Or something like it. He left when the action got too hot, and McCoy picked him up at a convenience store two days later. Funny, huh?"

I spoke in my normal voice; all that whispering was sure to attract Dr. Beech. I was disobeying her directives just by entertaining that kind of talk. "Travis, you're falling for an old jailhouse dodge. He knows you were going after an arsonist when you got caught, so he pretends to know something."

Travis protested. "It's not like that. Hear me out."

"I don't know what you use for money in this place, but this guy probably wants some. He'll feed you what you want to hear until you cough up cigarettes, or N-10, or whatever."

The doors behind me swung open. Dr Beech entered, looking quite irate. Two guards entered the room behind Travis and took places beside him.

"This interview is terminated Mr. Stone," Beech said curtly.

"Randy, tell Alicea that I love her."

I looked him in the eye. "I can't do that."

The guards took firm grip of each of Travis' arms as he rose to approach the glass. They struggled to hold him back. "Why? Because of these people? To hell with them!"

"It's not that," I said. Dr. Beech stepped between me and the glass, but I could easily see Travis behind her. I told him why I wouldn't pass a message on to Alicea. He stopped wrestling, his shoulders sagged, and the two guards walked him out of the visitation room without incident. Beech nearly shoved me out the door.

"You compromised everything by discussing the outside world in such detail," she said as she escorted me out. "It was the most unprofessional display of journalism I've ever seen. That patient is likely to regress, to possibly become violent . . ."

"Prisoners have a right to know about the outside," I said.

"These are not prisoners, Mr. Stone. They're patients."

She had a point, but I had a story.

Dr. Beech left me outside the main gate. I studied the place's placid exterior. It was a civilized place to hold criminals, I thought. But what about those who merely broke the law? Not a philosophically deep distinction, perhaps, but Travis had a point when he said that no one seemed to recognize it.

I was about to pull away when I heard a ruckus coming from a grove well beyond the fence. A few guards were deployed, communicating on their portables and fanning out to stop some unseen threat. Then they scrambled. One disappeared behind a strand of trees, then another. Suddenly, the threat came into view, running at full tilt toward the fence and waving his arms at me.

"Randy!" Travis shouted, shrugging off the guard attempting to tackle him. "Dennis Zane! The guy I told you about knew Dennis Zane!"

Travis was quickly subdued by about half of the Morristown staff, and I pulled out of the lot, trying not to think about Dennis Zane. Hell, that name made the papers after the Bashful Banana burnt down; any good scam artist would be able to feed Travis a line about him. Granted, news was scarce in the facility, but I had little time to follow shadow conspiracies. Beech was sure to call Gus, so I had an afternoon on the network explaining myself ahead of me, plus I still had to meet with Julianna's foster family and get the whole story wrapped up in three days.

Travis took a big risk, but there was no time to think about Dennis Zane. My story was almost over.

*****

It took us the better part of two days to find JD. I used up a few markers among my underworld contacts, visiting every shooting gallery and head shop that would have me, waving JD's picture in front of pushers and dealers and junkies. Alicea pushed herself to the limit as well, scanning the minds of the people we questioned, searching for any evidence that they might know something. We spent a solemn, sleepless night in my apartment; I stayed up until dawn combing through news reports, hunting down potential hideouts, while Alicea whimpered softly beneath a damp towel, waiting for the blinding pain to subside. My job seemed futile: JD could be in any vacant building, alley, or subway station in the city. The only real lead I had was that he had visited Mahmoud's pawn/chop shop, and I was hoping he didn't stray too far from there.

Mahmoud was the first person we visited when we reached Manhattan. He was more than happy to fill me in. JD visited the shop two days after Christmas. He was looking to trade in his wings. The Kurd offered him a cool grand for the harness, but after he factored in about $200 in old debt, he gave JD $800. The harness was sold the next day for $1500; JD hadn't been seen since.

How far can a kid go in the city with $800? As far as he wants. But Alicea and I both assumed that he didn't make a down payment on a flophouse and go in search of regular work.

So we spent our second day in the city canvassing the bars and liquor stores around Gold Street Electronics, and late in the afternoon we caught a break. The liquor store clerk didn't want to talk to us, but the flicker of recognition crossed his mind when I showed him JD's picture, and Alicea picked up his though loud and clear.

"He tried to rob me last night," the clerk explained after some coercion. "He was stoned, so bad he could barely stand up. All he had was a knife; he waived in my face and told me to empty the register."

I asked how he responded.

"I pulled my piece."

The clerk didn't shoot JD; our boy stumbled into the night when he realized he was outgunned. But he couldn't have gotten far. There was hope. A local beat patrolman filled me in on a few prime locations to find drugs and those who use them, and we narrowed our search to the half-mile around the liquor store.

We found him as night fell. He was huddled face-down on top of a heating vent behind a restaurant, wearing only his jeans and a tee shirt. He was unconscious, and freezing. I knelt to examine him. His face was cut and bloodied, his body filthy. There were signs of infection around the piercings on his arms and back. His body went limp as I lifted him. As I tried to open his eyes, he muttered something, tossed his hand weakly, then slipped back into unconsciousness.

"My God," Alicea said.

I slung the broken young man's arm over my shoulder and began to drag him out of the alley. "Let's get him into the van," I said. "I'm not sure he'll survive the night outside.

*****

A closer examination of JD's body told us more about the previous four days. There were needle marks inside each of his elbows, which explains most about the fate of the $800 JD received in exchange for his wings. There were caps from a couple of fifths of Hennessey in his pants pockets, which explains the rest. The wounds on his face looked relatively fresh, the result of passing out hard on a concrete pillow, possibly in the very spot where we had found him. The kid spent two years telling himself he was a superhero, but when it all fell apart, he traded his wings for a four-day heroin binge that could easily have cost him his life.

Alicea and I cleaned the wound on his face and the area around his harness snaps with some old towels while we weighed our options.

"You want to take him back to Atlantic City, don't you?" she asked. At times, it was hard to tell if she was reading my mind or just speculating. Either way, she was right.

"I don't think his situation is critical," I replied, feeling his forehead. It was burning. "It hasn't been cold enough to induce hypothermia, and he's not in shock or anything. Right now, I want what's best for both him and you."

"I'm fine," she said unconvincingly. There was just enough light in the back of my van with which to work, yet she was blinking as though someone was shining a strobe light in her eyes. Her voice was little more than a plaintive whisper. She had been reading strange minds for the better part of two days; my guess was that the adrenaline was the only thing keeping her standing, and that was starting to wane. If I tried to take her to a New York City emergency room on New Year's Eve, with all the howling and mayhem that goes on in them, I would have two patients on my hand instead of one.

"I think you need to get back home," I said, resting a hand on her shoulder. She put her arms around me, and we held each other for a few seconds. I could feel her trembling, growing weaker by the second as she clung to me.

"Oh, no," she whispered, as she spun away from me, her equilibrium obviously off. I placed a towel beneath her face before she became violently ill, her whole body shuddering from the nausea that accompanied her dizzying headaches.

I moistened a clean towel and placed it over her head, patting her gently and telling her everything was OK as she convulsed. JD lay a few feet away, seemingly inanimate, his arms outstretched like a figure in free fall.

I couldn't help but laugh. I whispered to myself: "Happy New Year."

It took forever to get out of the metro area, but traffic thinned out as we moved south on the Parkway. My passengers slept in the back as I drove. A light rain began to fall as we passed the exit for Jersey City, and I was reminded of Amanda Douglass. Somehow, the three clean cuts that ended her life no longer seemed enough to express the anguish of these young lives.

Alicea stumbled forward into the passenger seat. I had waited for her fit of illness to subside and cleaned her up before we left the island. I figured she would need two days of bed rest, at least, to recover fully, but she had demonstrated over the last two days that she was nothing if not tough.

"I'm feeling better," she said, and I realized that "better" is a relative term. Her voice was barely audible. She leaned her head against the door, as if sitting up straight might be too much of an effort.

"How's JD?" I asked.

"Comatose."

A sign passed announcing an approaching fuel stop, and I convinced Alicea that she should try to choke down some soda to prevent dehydration. I was hungry, myself, and I thought it might be a good idea to try to get some fluids into JD.

Alicea was asleep again when I returned from the fast food joint. I woke her, and together we tried to wake up JD, who couldn't be roused beyond an incoherent stupor.

"I've seen guys knocked out cold for three days," I said after we gave up trying to wake him. "The drugs just fry their systems. Sometimes they don't sleep for two days when they're high, but the crashes just shut everything down."

Alicea was gamely trying to hold down ginger ale. "He seems very peaceful."

"He is. And he's going to be okay, thanks to you. I would never have found him without you. You did the right thing."

She nodded. "It's funny. I despised him. I resented having to share a roof with him. I hated Travis for forcing him upon me. I was afraid to leave Julianna at home with him, and sometimes I was afraid to be alone with him. I thought he had the conscience and morality of a pack animal that just growls and fights and fucks and marks its territory."

I chuckled. "JD seemed like a tough kid to love."

She laughed at my understatement. "But in that warehouse, he saved me. He could have escaped cleanly, but he put himself in harm's way to save me from going to jail.

"We were struggling to get lift," she continued, "and just after we cleared the window, the cold air hit us and we lost about twenty feet of altitude. JD could barely keep us aloft, and we could hear the feds powering up behind us. I kept thinking that he was going to drop me. I kept telling myself: as soon as he realizes that he won't be able to escape with me, he'll drop me and make a break for the atoll."

I interrupted: "But he never did."

"No. I'm ashamed of myself for thinking that. Nobody is that irredeemable. Nobody."

She leaned close to me; I put my arm around her shoulder. "I've laid awake nights wondering what would happen to me if I had been captured," she said. "I can see my father storming in to my cell with a battalion of lawyers, getting them to declare me incompetent to stand trial because of my 'gift'. I can hear him blaming everything on Travis, blaming everything on society . . . blaming everything on anyone but himself. And me. Then, after a few weeks of back room wrangling, I would walk free: a free woman, but a vegetable labeled too sick to live her own life. Given the circumstances, maybe I would make sure my father never found out. I would rot in jail, silently suffering in the name of 'the cause.' At least Travis would be proud of me, if I couldn't be proud of myself."

I looked down to her. She stared vacantly at her prone comrade. "You have something to be proud of," I said, gesturing at JD. "You saved a life. I've covered this vigilante scene for years, and I've seen vicious acts of vengeance, atrocities carried out with the best intentions, and just about every horror you could imagine done in the name of justice. In all those years, Alicea, I have never seen a superhero save a single life. You're the first."

She looked up at me, and she was smiling. What I told her was the truth, not that I thought she cared much: she had never identified with herself as a superhero, the way Travis did. But I felt that she needed to realize that while she had spent years living in fulfillment of another person's dreams, her time hadn't been wasted. She had become something: a woman of fortitude, and courage, and sacrifice. I needed her to realize that I admired her for her strength, but for a few moments we could do nothing but beam at each other.

"I'm thirsty," JD croaked, lifting his hand toward us with great effort.

"They gave him vinegar and water to drink," I said, remembering an old bible passage. We propped JD against my video bank and began ministering to him.

*****

We admitted JD to the hospital on the mainland. He was diagnosed with pneumonia in the emergency room, and they took a blood test to determine how much of what he had taken over the last few days. The doctor on duty wanted Alicea to stay as well; he would only let her leave after she agreed to a week of bed rest.

"You know, this could get hard for you," I said as we entered Atlantic City.

"How?"

"What happens when JD is released?"

She bit her lip. "I'll let him move in, provided he gets a job and sobers up."

"That's fine," I said, "but what about the conversation we had about starting over? You might not want a monkey on your back as you try to get away from this lifestyle."

She shook her head. "It's too late to back out now. I was committed the moment we found him in the alley. Anyway, he won't be a monkey on my back. I'm starting over, and so will he. His flight suit is gone. He has nothing. He'll have to play by my rules."

I nodded. She sounded confident.

"He can't scare me anymore," she continued. "I know he can't hurt me. Know why?"

I didn't.

"If he ever tries anything with me, if I catch him stealing money, or shooting up, I'll nail him. I'll reach into his mind, and I'll find the memory of him reaching out in agony, begging us for a drink. I'll make that memory so real for him that he'll think he's right back in this van, lying in his own sweat. I'll fill up his mind with it, until the only thing he perceives is the image of himself helplessly crying out to me. And I'll keep that memory in the front of his consciousness until he collapses under the weight of his own frailty."

Her conviction was frightening, but at least I was no longer worried that she wouldn't be able to defend herself if JD came sniffing around for a credit card to borrow. Anyway, I guessed that while the treatment she described sounded harsh, it was probably fair: a psychic kick in the cubes for a joker who walked over her one too many times.

"Drive past the apartment," she said. "Go to the boardwalk."

"The doctor said rest."

"It's New Year's Eve. It's nearly midnight."

"Are you sure you feel up to it?"

"Positive."

We parked in one of the old casino lots, then headed for the boardwalk. There was a throng of people there, drinking and carousing and staring across the water at the gleaming lights from the atoll. The noise didn't seem to bother Alicea; she took my hand and led me past the crowds and out to the beach.

"I didn't want to lose you in the mob," she said as she led me down a dune. The rain had let up an hour ago; the beach was moist and pock-marked by raindrops. The sea was choppy, with foamy waves thundering ashore just a few feet from us.

I looked at my watch. "They should have started," I said.

She gathered my hands in hers. "They will in a moment," she replied.

With that, the crowd on the boardwalk began counting from twenty. Their voices seemed distant, overwhelmed by the pummeling waves.

"New Year's resolutions?" I asked her.

"My whole life is a resolution. And you?"

"A few. It's bad luck to tell."

She giggled. "You're thinking of birthday wishes, Randy."

The countdown ended. The crowd cheered, and a hundred lasers shot into the sky from the atoll. The beams danced along the clouds as fireworks burst over the ocean, alighting the sea with reflected colors.

"Happy New Year, Randy. I think I love you."

She put her lips to mine, and for the first time in weeks, everything seemed to make sense.

*****

That's the little secret I shared with Travis at the Morristown facility, the one that took the fight out of him. There was no sense holding out hope for redemption with Alicea; she wasn't his girl anymore, not even in the most remote sense. I'm not sure why I picked that moment to drop a bomb on the kid. Maybe I felt like he needed to get on with his rehabilitation, that a healthy dose of anger against her and me would help him make a clean break. That's my charitable interpretation, the one I use when I want to give myself credit. Deep down, I may have wanted to show him up, to humiliate him for the sake of my feeling towards her.

But that wasn't it either. I had fallen in love with Alicea over the course of the story, but my love for the truth was still stronger than my love for any person. It sickened me to think of Travis maintaining some façade of chivalry, to keep up the pretense of courtly love that fed his illusions that he was anything other than a gang leader in a Halloween costume. There were too many lies in illusions in the whole superhero life. That was the one I had the power to destroy, and I went for it.

Alicea and I loved each other through a few rocky weeks. She couldn't sleep through the night until the middle of January. At first it was the fevers from the cold and exertion of our trip to New York, but later it was the nightmares. Does a telepath have more vivid dreams than the rest of us, and therefore more horrific nightmares? How do you compare? Once or twice a night, she woke up with a start. I rolled over to find her clutching at the sheets and shaking. I'd prop myself up on pillows and hold her against my chest, letting her feel my heart beat until she drifted back to sleep.

That's me, mighty Randy, being strong for the frightened little girl. Except I was terrified myself, the scenes of the past few weeks haunting me, every siren in the distance waking me up like a bolt. Holding her close was the only way I could sleep. Some veteran of the street scene I was, clinging to a girl seventeen years my junior for support.

Gradually, the fear did begin to fade. After a few nights in hotels, we were satisfied that her apartment wasn't under surveillance, and she returned there. I commuted back and forth to Manhattan, editing by day and returning to her by night. We never turned on the lights in the apartment, though: we were cautious not to alert anyone to our presence by a light in the window or a blip on the power grid. After 6:00 every night, we lived in the shadows of candlelight.

Alicea lit three candles on the shelves around her bed. The flames flickered in the draughts from the warped windowpanes and she curled her body around mine, her hand playing against my chest. "I'm spending too much of my life in darkness right now, Randy," she said.

"I know," I said. The candlelight drained the haunting blue from her eyes as she looked up at me. Her eyes were reflected fire. "It isn't right. It's like the old scripture verse. You should never hide your light beneath a shade."

A gust of wind outside sent shadows rippling across her face. "What does that really mean?"

I tangled her hair with my fingers. "Well, in the bible it refers to the light of faith, the belief in God which is a person's most noble trait. It should never be denied or hidden from the world. I tend to think of it as meaning more than that. We shouldn't deny our nature. We shouldn't hide our gifts or our talents. We shouldn't forsake what we really love."

She squirmed at my side, resting her head against my chest. "And when you live your life in fear, hiding in a pitch black apartment all night, listening for strange footsteps in the corridor, you're really doing all those things."

I sighed, holding her tightly. The nightmare never seemed to end for her. She was out of the vigilante life, but she wouldn't be free until she could start over.

"How long will you be with me?" she asked. "How long till the story is done?"

"A few days," I said. At that point, I hadn't tracked down Julianna at the foster home yet. That was the last piece of the puzzle, that and some editing.

She grasped at my shoulders, pulling herself up along my body until we were eye to eye. "I guess then its back to New York with you, huh? Back to whatever life you have there."

Whatever life, I thought. I watched the candles flicker in her eyes. "I could come back," I said. "Or you could come with me."

She stared at me, like she was telling me to be serious, then she laughed out loud. It was the heartiest laugh I had heard in a month. "Do you really think that's a good idea?" she said.

I didn't. Taking her out of Atlantic City and bringing her up to the apple with me would make her totally dependant on me. After two years under Travis' thumb, she would be beholden to me. How could she get healthy under those conditions? People would look at her as my sugar baby or something, and she would spend her days taking care of the mixed-up wreck I am when I don't lose myself in my work. And there was no way I could move down the shore and keep my career on the right track. It was all wishful thinking.

"Then why did you say it?" she asked.

"I don't know. What makes me think I can keep secrets from you?"

She ran a finger along my cheek, slowing to rub the outline of my lips. "It's gotten easy to slip into your mind, Randy. You don't have to tell me how you feel. And you don't have to worry about me. I know we can't stay together. I know I have to live my own life." She brought her face close to mind, her leg sliding down to rest her whole body atop me. "For now, though, please can we just milk whatever happiness we can out of the moment? We can worry about the future some other time."

We kissed, and I let myself get lost in the moment, forgetting that our time together was short.

*****

We spent a few more short nights together in the dark apartment, then said goodbye. I held back tears as I pulled away, watching her wave until I turned the corner out of that dirty alleyway. As soon as she was out of sight, I lost it, and had to pull over at a toll plaza until I could see again. I indulged all the fantasies for a few minutes, imagining myself turning back and gathering her in my arms and taking her with me, common sense and her best interests be damned. Then I reminded myself that she had a plan, that she would soon be free and independent and all the better for it, and that I had to be the mature one. Why did it seem like she was really the older person? Maybe it was two years as a surrogate parent to emotionally stunted friends that made her seem that way.

I returned to Manhattan, tired and a little broken hearted and eager to put the story to bed. My brief romance with Alicea wouldn't be appearing in any documentary, but there were hundreds of hours of footage to sort through in just a few days. And Alicea was in every third frame; it least it seemed that way. I gave up when we came to the footage of Alicea and I searching for JD; I left my intern to do it. Every image of her face put me back on the beach with her, and I just couldn't stand it.

I finished writing the text version of the story as I finished the video. Parts of the original text from the documentary have been dropped into the story already: you can spot them when I disappear into the third person. On a bitter cold Sunday night in the city, with a deadline breathing down my back, I composed a loose conclusion for the story:

*****

When Congress returns from recess, they will consider a bill banning states from passing laws that soften the harsh provisions of the Vigilante Prevention acts. Such laws, for years the useful tools of prosecutors and cops unsure about their ability to earn a federal conviction, or unwilling to resort to the federal courts for minor cases, have come under fire as contributors to the vigilante culture. In states like New Jersey, the war hawks of Congress complain, vigilantes don't fear the consequences. Soft rehabilitation facilities and mental hospitals aren't sufficient deterrents to scare criminals out of the life. It's become fashionable to take a hard line stance against the street superheroes. Teach them a lesson. Through away the key. Then the cities will be safe again, and our children will learn not to play with drugs and weapons.

But there was no deterrent in the world that would keep Travis Hood from pursing the superhero life. The harder the law pushed, the harder he would push back. He was a young man scorned by two lovers: Alicea and America. He would do anything for either of them except give up his fight, and his fight sent him farther away from them as he kept going. What would a tougher law do to stop a misguided kid like that, a would-be paladin in search of a worthy quest on the streets of a crumbling resort town? Nothing. It would make him fight harder, bring him closer to delusion and self destruction.

And what did the law matter to Jeremy David Orczykowski, a.k.a. JD, a.k.a. Dangerbird? There have been JD's since the beginning of time, banditos and highwaymen ill-suited for the life of an honest man. Laws can't change a person's nature. JD was destined to be some kind of criminal; it was only Travis' influence that kept him from a life of conventional gangland violence. Tougher laws mean nothing when you don't value anything, because when you value nothing, you fear nothing.

Julianna Hood now has the chance for a normal life. It's an uphill battle for her. She doesn't know how normal kids interact. She has the education of a 14-year old and the experiences of a 40-year old in a 17-year old package, and every day for her will bring an invitation to temptation and trouble. But would she be better off in juvenile stir, surrounded by hundreds of other girls with horrors in their past? The War Hawks tell me that a 17-year old wouldn't be prosecuted as an adult. Julianna turns 18 in March. If the events in this story unfolded around Easter instead of Christmas, would it make a difference?

Finally, we have Alicea, a girl with a college education, a girl with an intact family somewhere. She lived with the daily fear of the law, yet she kept fighting. She witnessed violence she couldn't bring herself to comprehend, yet she kept fighting. Would tougher laws have changed her? What's the difference between fear and outright horror? In the final analysis, neither was as strong a motivator for her as her sense of obligation, her need to hold onto what little she had in the support of her comrades. Unlike the others, she had no choice about her powers. She was different from the start. Society might gain something by tightening laws and locking Alicea Mann away, even if that something is just the smug satisfaction of our own self-righteous abuse of power. Balance that against the humanity we lose each time we deny care and mercy to the hurting, the troubled, and the misunderstood, and ask yourself if you want to follow the War Hawks as they pass ever more prohibitive laws.

Atlantic City is quiet again. The fires have subsided. Dozens of street superheroes were brought to justice. Yet two remain free. Their paths no longer cross. They no longer take part in bloody sieges of the street by night. Instead, they scuttle like cockroaches beneath the notice of the police and the feds as they take tentative steps toward building a life for themselves. We can't be sure where Alicea and JD will be six months from now; JD might be right back in the life. But for now, this reporter refuses to begrudge them their freedom in the name of strengthening laws which are already too vindictive.

The sight of a street punk, a denizen of society's wide margin where superheroes and criminals scratch out lives for themselves, inspires many emotions: fear and anger, perhaps, or scorn, or perhaps pity. After my time in Atlantic City, the sight of one of these kids will always produce a few ounces of respect and envy. Perhaps it's because of Alicea's quiet strength and suffering nobility, or Travis' uncompromising sense or righteousness, but there's a part of me that will always wish I could capture the freedom these people must fear when they go about their business, society be damned. They commit crimes, the endanger others, but in a way, they characterize some of our greatest virtues as human beings. We may someday be accountable for the quality of mercy we showed these people; I hope that I will find my name on the good side of the ledger.

To Be Continued . . .