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never do that! It must just be, like, knockout-gas bombs or something—”

Festus muted the comm to face Syndi. “You still believe that fanatic isn’t dangerous? You heard him in therapy, in his note to Miss Brain! That he’d ‘explode’ a conspiracy! Well he’s done it! With bombs!”

He unmuted his comm. “Stand by for scrambled mission strategy. Converge as outlined. Flying Squirrel out.”

Festus turned, facing his troops. “Professor Icegaard. Contact the Spook directly—try him at Langley; I think he’s speaking to the graduating class. He’ll want a piece of this bastard boiled and dipped in butter. Wally. Try using your omni-hearing to locate Edgerton. We have to assume he’s heading to the Blue Pyramid immediately—assuming he hasn’t taken it already.

“Everyone: the only people we can count on now are us. We in this room may be the only surviving active members of the F*O*O*J. We have one mission, perhaps our most important ever: to neutralize the X-Man and his L*A*B fanatics tonight before they neutralize us all.”

Failing to Fight the Supervillain Within

Still unsure of the extant conditions and locked inside a psychemotional grand mal seizure of their own combative, antagonistic paradigm, the F*O*O*Jsters were determined to defeat their former colleague—not with reason, visualization, feelings-work, journaling, or an intervention—but with naked, brute violence.

Even if the F*O*O*Jsters could somehow manage not to destroy one another, their capacity for psychic healing would be all the more diminished by their refusal to engage the most important hyper-battle of all: against the supervillain within.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SuperHeroes Need SuperEgos

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 7:12 P.M.

Processing Unresolved Issues

In the bowels of Langston-Douglas, terror was growing like a radioactive polyp. With news helicopters ratcheting overhead in the choking 110 degree smog and the streets bloodied by sunset, the QRIB HQ of the League of Angry Blackmen stood in dark defiance of the noose tightening every second around it.

Having divided all responding heroes into attack squads for three separate targets, the Flying Squirrel waited at ready with his own strike force from an undisclosed location, monitoring the shrinking cordon around the faux–Egyptian temple of the QRIB.

Including Power Grrrl, Red Squad was composed of eight trained and armed fighters, warriors straining at the ropes to begin combat, valiantly ignoring the shouted curses and tossed garbage of neighborhood residents: fifty-three-year-old Kid Kombat Sr. with his wrecking-ball arms, buzzsaw “wings,” and missile-launcher backpack; forty-three-year-old Saber-Tooth Beaver, scourge of Treemasons and environmentalists, and champion of the nation’s forestry industry; fifty-five-year-old Smithing Wesson, lord of firearms; fifty-one-year-old King’s English, the superbobby; the sixty-four-year-old Rock Breaker, armed with his mystic hammer John Henry; thirty-eight-year-old Super Bastard, half lawyer, half trailer park; and the commander, legend among legends (despite lingering court cases surrounding a few dozen friendly-fire deaths), the sixty-three-year-old military master, the Spook.

Safely ensconced inside the Squirrel Tree’s crime lab, I was able to observe the approaching melee two ways: visually through the honeycomb of monitors, and empathically through the OM Meters the Flying Squirrel had ordered everyone to wear so he could coordinate the battle. Perhaps due to a malfunction, I couldn’t pick up Festus’s own cognistream, but I could experience the unfolding crisis from as many other psi-POVs as I could handle.

“I can’t believe, like, what a bunch of pathetic, fossilized old geezers I’m stuck with,” complained public-persona Syndi, perhaps having forgotten that her comm was active (or perhaps not forgetting).

“Cut the chatter, Red Two,” snapped the Spook.

“Quit calling me that, Sanford! My name is Power Grrrl!”

The Spook: “Red Squad, lock weapons and prime powers in attack readiness.”

Kid Kombat Sr.: “Red Three, standing by.”

Saber-Tooth Beaver: “Red Four, standing by.”

Smithing Wesson: “Red Five, standing by.”

King’s English: “I say, old chap, Red Six, standing by.”

The Rock Breaker: “Yessuh, Red Seven hyah, stannin by-anby.”

Super Bastard: “Red Eight, frickin ready to rawk an ro-o-oll, good buddy!” (Pause) “Stanning by.”

(Pause)

The Spook: “Red Two, confirm readiness!”

Power Grrrl (sighing): “Whatever.”

Still monitoring visuals only, I watched as the Spook, suddenly lit by red and blue lights stroking him and the buildings around him, stood to address those bunkered inside the QRIB.

“ATTENTION, PHILIP K. EDGERTON AND OTHER L*A*B MILITANTS!” boomed the amplified voice of Red Squad Leader. “SURRENDER IMMEDIATELY. WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.”

Seconds gouged into everyone’s nerves. There was no response.

After forty-six seconds, Saber-Tooth Beaver asked, “Are we even sure they’re in there?”

“Yes of course we’re sure!” said the Spook. “Hold your positions, and your tongues!”

On the honeycomb hexagons haloing the combat theater, video unfurled from the helicopters of the local and national news stations. Reporters explained that they were “live at the Stun-Glas standoff” (seconded by onscreen titles proclaiming the location as “KRIB Headquarters” [sic]) where “black L*A*B cult militants are under the command of disgraced F*O*O*Jster the X-Man”; PNN’s story proclaimed Kareem an “antiwhite fanatic turned terrorist and superpredator” against whom the “dusk raid has been launched following a terrorist attack on the Fortress of Freedom where assembled F*O*O*Jsters are presumed dead…”

Once sixty seconds at full alert had expired, the Spook ordered Syndi to deploy her HEAT Ray against the L*A*B to “dance them out.” Syndi reminded the field commander that her beam worked only on line-of-sight, useless against the L*A*Bsters trapped inside.

The Spook: “Then hit the music, Red Two!”

Instantly: BUHM-BUHM-BUHM-BUHM…BUHM-BUHM-BUHMti-BUHM…

Ripping her bustier speakers up to full volume, Syndi opened her mouth to unleash a sonic tsunami upon the neighborhood, a herd of auditory woolly mammoths trampling over tepees:

“I wanna SHOCK you, BABY

ROCK you, BABY

TALK you MAYBE

Into GOING

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN

DOWN on ME-E-E-E…”

Rushing to their windows, ghetto dwellers leaned out, screaming inaudibly against the aural assault; soon they disappeared only to return to their sills throwing bottles, forks, and burning trash—

The Spook: “Take ’em out, Red Two!”

Syndi’s HEAT Ray bathed the tenements in intense swirls of disco light, and instantly the dozen window terrorists were transmuted into twelve individual Power Grrrls, all of them harmonizing with her choral invitation to cunnilingual fury. When other residents emerged to pelt the Syndis in their own building