Footsoldiers: A Super Human Clash Special From Philomel Books Read Free Page B

Chaingang one by one, before they can assemble.”
    The Chaingang mostly kept out of the press, so you might not have heard of them. Actually, I should put it the other way around: the press mostly avoided reporting on the Chaingang. Much later, a couple of years after we lost our powers, I saw one of them on television: he had inherited his parents’ media empire. It’s pretty clear now that his parents knew about his bad side and used their influence to hush up his activities.
    There were six of them: three guys, two girls and one we were never sure about. His—or her—codename was Spite. I’m pretty sure he was a guy; Octavian was certain Spite was a girl. It was hard to tell because he had a very lean body, no real muscle structure, dressed from head to toe in solid black, and almost never spoke. He was rarely seen too. He had this power that allowed him to teleport, but only when no one could see him. Hence the black costume—it enabled him to hide in the shadows.
    The others were Muscle, Torture, and Incendiary—the guys—and the two girls, Vortex and Paranoia. They didn’t dress alike, or have any team motif. I believe they called themselves the Chaingang simply because they thought it was an intimidating name.
    I’m not going to tell you which member of the Chaingang is now running that media empire, nor am I going to say which media empire I’m talking about. I’ve no physical proof to back up my story and they’d sue me for everything I have.
    We were going after Torture first. Octavian carried Thalamus on his back, Hesperus and I flew, while Apex bounded along behind us, leaping from rooftop to rooftop.
    Now, the Footsoldiers weren’t like the High Command. We didn’t have unlimited funds for equipment or a team of private security guards backing us up like Dalton and his crew. None of us were billionaires, or mechanical geniuses like Paragon. We had no government support. We had to make do with what we could scrounge from others, or stuff we “acquired” in battle.
    We were the poor relatives of the bigger teams. I wasn’t happy about that, but, hey, it was better than
not
being in a team.
    So when we fought, we didn’t have dinky little communicator headsets. The only way we could communicate was through me. I could hear the others and pass on messages. Once when we were fighting with Impervia she started calling me Switchboard. I guess she thought that was funny.
    Thalamus told us that Torture had been spotted by “one of his sources” in a café in Watertown, which is about halfway between Madison and Milwaukee. Thalamus had a lot of these “sources” but he never revealed who they were or how they got in touch with him. Sometimes the information just seemed to come from nowhere.
    I’d fought Torture a couple of times, before the Chaingang had been formed. On the supervillain scale—where you’ve got Ragnarök and Slaughter at the top end and that dipstick who called himself Cake-Man at the other end—Torture would be closer to the Cake-Man end.
    Torture was strong, cruel, and he had a bad temper. That was about it. On his own, any one of us—apart from Thalamus—could have defeated him. That was also pretty much true for Incendiary, the pyrokinetic. Definitely second-string villains. But with the rest of the gang they could be extremely dangerous.
    I took the lead, because it had been over a day since Torture was spotted and I was the only one who could track him down. You see, what most people don’t realize is that the human body is not silent. Not even counting the voice, every human makes noise all the time. There’s breathing, the heartbeat, the digestive system, the creak of ligaments and muscles, drops of perspiration being pushed out through the pores. The scrape and rustle of body hair as it moves and grows. The twin thumps of eyelids blinking.
    The firing of neurons in the