By Stoney M. Setzer
A job for Icebird, on Dad’s birthday. How ironic is that?
One year ago, Houston Haas had taken up the mantle of Icebird from his late father, complete with costume, jetpack, and freeze ray, but in a wholly different direction. His father, Jerry, had used his inventions to help criminals commit robberies for a cut of the loot. Now, Houston was using his father’s gear to fight crime.
What would Dad think if he saw me now? They hadn’t been on great terms before Jerry died. Houston’s reversal would have him rolling over in his grave.
Houston shook his head. Where is the electronics thief? The police scanner said he wore something black, like an armored version of the Grim Reaper…
Soaring above Iris City, Houston spotted an armored, shadowy figure on top of the Morrow Building tinkering with some gadget. Made from stolen electronics? Houston set his jetpack to hover and drew his freeze ray pistol.
“Freeze on your own, before I freeze you!” Within his helmet, Houston winced. Lame! Gotta improve that…
“Au contraire, Icebird! I, Dirge, will freeze you—in despair!” The thief leaned over the device and pressed a button.
Pulsating energy rippled from the machine. A weird, wailing noise shook Houston to his core.
“You’re no match for the Despair Wave, Icebird!” Dirge shouted.
Houston was still hovering with his jetpack, but the waves disoriented him. Although he wanted to fire his thrusters and fly away, he feared flying headfirst into a building.
“I can’t believe I left my legacy to you!”
Houston had never expected to hear that voice again. “Dad?”
“Who did you expect?” The form of Houston’s late father floated before him. “You’ve failed me!”
Houston was reeling. “What?”
“All that time I spent establishing myself as an ally to criminals, and what do you do? You wreck it all by using my gear to fight crime! And you couldn’t even adopt a different name! You just had to fly against everything I ever did, didn’t you?”
“I…” Houston couldn’t deny the truth. He wanted to fight crime, but he had kept the Icebird moniker specifically to spite his father’s memory.
“On my birthday, no less! Some son you are!”
The rebuke wounded Houston more deeply than he expected. “You… You don’t understand…”
“You’re right, I don’t! Who do you think you are, son? How dare you try to force me to posthumously play Anakin to your Luke!”
Wait… did he really say that? “How would you know that? You never watched those movies with me!”
“Does it matter?”
“My real father wouldn’t have known about Luke and Anakin… This must all be in my head… It isn’t real…” Conviction was slowly building with Houston, galvanizing him. Giving him the strength to fight back…
“Not real?” Jerry thundered. “How dare you…”
Trembling, Houston raised his pistol and fired the freeze ray at the image of his father, hoping Dirge’s device was behind it.
“Forget it, son! That won’t work!”
Just as he was about to give up, the pulsating waves stopped. The apparition of his father vanished, the disparaging words silenced. Houston blinked rapidly as his head cleared and reality returned. The machine was frozen solid.
The perpetrator tried to run, but Houston was faster. Leading his target, he squeezed the trigger on the freeze ray. A moment later, his foe was like a statue, frozen in cryostasis.
“By the time you thaw, you’ll be on ice in the city jail,” Houston said as he called the police. Still, his triumph was dampened by a nagging disquiet that he couldn’t shake. He could have run before I snapped out of it or even shot me. Why didn’t he?
***
Three days later, a dozen college students watched the video. Dr. Dedmon and his teaching assistant, Ms. Ogilvie, stood before them. Dedmon pushed up his thick, tinted spectacles. He hated them, but they masked his cybernetic left eye—an unwanted souvenir of the worldwide superhero clash known as the Cataclysm. Everything they did now had to be masked, even the nature of this class. The dean would shut them down if he learned this wasn’t really an advanced calculus course or that every student on the roster had been affected by the Cataclysm. “Class, your thoughts on what we just witnessed?”
“Dirge failed,” Tucker remarked.
“Yes… and no,” Ogilvie replied, visibly perspiring. Today was a scorcher, and the air conditioner was broken. Prior to the Cataclysm, she favored short skirts on such occasions, but now she was forced to wear pants to hide her new mechanical legs.
Dedmon nodded. “Failure is relative to expectations. Icebird captured Dirge, but we anticipated as much. However, we now know more about Icebird than before, so in that way Dirge succeeded.”
“Then he was a pawn?” Lindsey asked.
“We prefer the term scout.” Ogilvie smiled, her skin glistening. “But yes, his true mission was to gather intel. What have we learned?”
The students pondered the question for a moment.
“Icebird was once identified as a criminal,” Tucker said. “Is this a different man?”
“Excellent observation!” Dedmon replied. “What else?”
“Icebird seems highly dependent on his gadgets,” Felicity pointed out.
“A psionic attack can slow him down, but it won’t stop him,” Chandler noted. “He’s too strong mentally to have his own psyche used against him.”
Dedmon nodded. “Very good, which is why we must continue to learn as much as possible. Then, at the right time, that knowledge will shift the odds in our favor, and he and the other do-gooding remnants like him will finally pay for what they did to us. Class dismissed.”
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Such an interesting story! I can’t wait to see more of Icebird in the future.