Excerpt: Cross-Purposes

PROLOGUE

Over two dozen superheroes responded to the Red Ball alert that day – not a crisis-level of response, but pretty impressive nonetheless. Angela Montessi wasn’t particularly surprised, though. Certain supervillains simply drew that level of response, and Doomsayre was certainly one of them. She’d seen that lunatic put behind bars nearly half a dozen times already, and every time there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would break out again. One time he’d managed to secrete a microscopic teleporter homing beacon inside a false tooth – he beamed himself right out of jail. Another time he used tools from the metal shop and a chunk of a strange meteor he found in the yard to shrink between the atoms of the walls. Once he actually managed to simply hypnotize everyone in the prison. The guards actually smiled and waved at him as he walked straight out without so much as a finger raised to stop him.
This last breakout was different, though. Doomsayre was firmly ensconced as one of the most effective mad scientist types on the eastern seaboard, but he was never a physical threat. You always needed to worry about what new weapon he had invented, what new disease he cultivated from spores discovered in the grout in the bathroom tile, and you never – never – ate or drank anything he offered you. But he was still considered a manageable danger because virtually any superhero could take him down in seconds if they could strip him of his toys and face off with him one-on-one. As Midknight had once observed, “a little leaguer with whiffle bat could take him down if he doesn’t have his weapons.”
Today, Angela observed as a Honda with the hood smashed in flew over her head, he had finally wised up and turned his genius on his own body. While Doomsayre was a skinny little man with wild eyes and long, unruly white hair, the Upsilon Rays he’d managed to focus in on his body with the help of a pair of spectacles he’d managed to convince the prison eye doctor he needed had a drastic and dangerous effect. The tiny man was now nearly nine feet tall, bursting with muscle. The wild hair was replaced by a strange, horned rim that wrapped around his skill like a crown, and his wild eyes were now glowing red, blazing with a malevolent intelligence and a fierce will. His outside was finally as nasty as his inside.
When the word went out that his prison escape this time around took the form of a giant, indestructible beast simply ripping the walls off the facility and marching out, the Red Ball alert went up across Centerville. In a town with as many superheroes as this one, most of the time the heroes simply made an effort to stay out of each others’ way. They respected each others’ territory, didn’t hog one another’s foes, and most importantly, watched each others’ backs when the rumbles they got into did spill over. When a Red Ball went out, though, all those thoughts of territoriality and professional distance went out the window. It was an unspoken bond. Some threats were simply too big for anyone to get petty over who got credit for the collar, and teamwork became the rule of the day. Even the heroes who didn’t like each other still respected each other, at least publically, and that was enough to work with.
The alert about Doomsayre went out at 3:22 p.m. By 3:35, the prison site was overrun with superheroes: Midknight, Helen of Troy, Speedburn, Catalyst, and (of course) Pendragon. Always Pendragon. Montessi remembered being in high school when he first appeared, claiming to be the resurrection of King Arthur and intending to fill the void left by the recent loss of the world’s biggest hero, Lionheart. People were skeptical of him at first, as his high-tech suit of armor didn’t reveal any of his face and his voice was obviously modulated, but over time his actions in the field began to prove his good intentions. Now, nearly ten years later, Montessi was not only lucky enough to have worked with him a few times, but she was relatively certain she worked with him every day.
As she watched from the sidelines, Pendragon and his frequent partner Midknight double-teamed Doomsayre. Midknight didn’t have any known super-powers, but his fighting prowess was usually enough to make him on a level with the heavy hitters like Catalyst. She wasn’t sure what good he would be against the new, monstrous Doomsayre, though. The most impressive archer in the world couldn’t put a dent in the side of an armored tank, and that’s more or less what Doomsayre amounted to now: a walking, destructive tank.
To make matters worse, when he tore apart the prison, Doomsayre didn’t merely free himself. He broke out every other super-criminal being held at Crittenden’s Island in the process. While Pendragon led the fight against Doomsayre himself, a lot of the b-stringers were desperately attempting to round up the b-string villains that were even at the moment flocking away from the island and creating havoc on the streets of Centerville. The part that sucked the worse for Montessi was that she and the rest of the CPD were thrown into crowd control mode when stuff like this went down. Montessi wasn’t one of those cops who resented the fact that the Capes so often “did their job for them,” but she also hated that she was standing there trying to keep the lookie-loos from walking straight into the line of fire (and literally at that – evidently Doomsayre’s new body came with flamethrower eyes as a standard feature) while her partner, Luke Leeds, was nowhere to be found.
She had never been able to prove that Leeds was, in fact, the man beneath Pendragon’s helmet, but she had tons of circumstantial evidence that had accumulated over the years. Sadly, it was all circumstantial, and that wouldn’t even be enough to get him to resign, let alone come clean in the arena of public opinion. But everything about the man screamed “superhero”: his confident demeanor, his calm presence, the way he seemed to inspire everybody in the department, and the way he always, always friggin’ vanished whenever there was a Red Ball situation. Montessi was, at the moment, crouched behind a police cruiser, waiting for the assembled heroes to finish mopping up town square with Doomsayre, along with three or four dozen other cops in a ring around the battle zone. As far as she could tell, though, Leeds wasn’t among them.
When the explosion rocked the street, she ventured a peek over the hood of the car. Speedburn had made a perimeter around the monster, pounding it several thousand times per second. Unfortunately, while her powers made her one of the fastest women on the planet, it didn’t enhance her strength at all. The jackhammer tactic was usually enough to subdue a normal opponent, but Doomsayre was no longer normal.
There was an enormous scream and a “BOOM” from the battlezone, and Montessi was hurled from her feet, sprawling face-down on the concrete. Her jaw hit the pavement hard and jarred her right through to her brain. For a few moments, she was dazzled, until a hand wrapped around her arms.
“Montessi! Montessi, you still with us?”
Terry Raimondi helped pull her to her feet, and her senses slowly started to return. “What’s going on?” she moaned. “What happened.”
“It’s Catalyst!” Raimondi screamed. “He’s down! Catalyst is down!”