Enter the Nemesis
Part Four: Wake-Up Call
To this point, if I recalled correctly (and something told me that I did) this was my fourth wake-up since I started remembering again. All three of the previous ones had been experiences that I would have been better off forgetting, if I was at all capable of doing so. So yeah, near-perfect memory, great stuff. A truckload of utterly fucking horrible memories to populate it … yeah, currently a great fan of amnesia. Just saying.
The first time, I'd horked up the contents of my stomach, to the tune of 'fuck my arm hurts', then promptly passed out again. The second time, I'd been getting close and personal attention from a rat, which ran off when I woke up. Of course, my life had then taken a turn for the worse (
not for the last time, just in case I'm not being clear here) when I promptly managed to murder a cop. In front of another cop and a superhero. And possibly in front of a reporter, too (though I didn't notice
him in the alley) given that my face was all over the papers the next morning. Fuck my life.
The third time I woke up, it was because some little teenage delinquent had decided to take advantage of my currently shitty life, and make it
more shitty, by going through my pockets. Which meant that, when I got up, hungry as fuck, I was inclined to
take the food that I would otherwise have paid for. Which, for my pains, I got shot for. But hey, I blew up the asshole's cash register, so I guess we were even.
In any case, what I'm saying is that when I finally managed to claw myself out of the nightmare-filled depths of sleep
this time, I had every reason to expect more of the same.
To my absolute astonishment, this time around, I was lying on something soft. There was even something warm covering me. Experimentally, I sniffed; the all-pervading odour of garbage, urine, puke, human crap,
burnt garbage and crap, and above all,
me, was no longer a close and personal neighbour. In fact, it seemed to have wandered off somewhere, without leaving a forwarding address.
I was obviously hallucinating. Off my tree. This sort of shit didn't happen to me. According to the totality of my conscious life experience to date, I was the designated butt-monkey for what was probably most of the eastern seaboard of the United States. More specifically, for that pretentious bag of rancid buffalo turd squeezings that called itself Flux.
And so, this couldn't be real. I was probably in some sort of concussive daze, and any minute now, all my problems would all come back on me like a ton-weight of frozen dogshit to the back of the neck.
Any minute now.
I sniffed again. My sense of smell, which had returned from its holiday feeling much refreshed, thank you very much, reported chirpily that there was food cooking nearby. Actual food. Actually cooking.
I didn't believe it for a second.
I had to wonder what was under me; it didn't feel hard enough to be concrete, or lumpy enough to be a garbage bag. It almost felt like an inflatable mattress. I didn't wonder how I knew what an inflatable mattress was, or how one felt, while at the same time having fuck-all knowledge of such important data as; my own name, where I was from,
anything of my life before waking up in that alley, or how the fuck I ended up with powers. Some things, I was just learning to accept. Small mercies (or irritations) and all that.
Some more of my memories, apparently having waited until right now to finish compiling (or whatever memories do) decided to jump up and down to get my attention. I scrolled through them, eliding past the oh-so-wonderful dip in the sewer, the bang on the head from the truck, and … wait. The really big guy and the girl. She'd screamed for help; he'd tried to hit me.
And I'd killed him. Roasted his chestnuts.
I was a murderer all over again.
Fuck my
life.
<><>
I could move. I
knew I could move. I just didn't want to. If I didn't move, the concussive headache, or whatever it was that was currently causing the hallucination of delicious cooking smells, wouldn't come back with a vengeance – because, let's look at this seriously, when has Murphy
ever taken a day off when it came to me – and leave me asking myself
why didn't I just fucking lie still?
So I just lay still. It wasn't unpleasant, it wasn't uncomfortable, and whoever was in charge of the imaginary-cooking-smells department certainly knew their beans (geddit?); I wouldn't have been able to pick it from
real cooking smells in a million years. The trouble was, it also impacted other parts of my body; my stomach, for one. Which, when faced with cooking smells like that, sent me a sternly worded note by registered mail that threatened strike action if I didn't eat something soon. As a consequence of this very real threat, it was my job to find whatever was smelling so good and inhale it as fast as humanly possible. In summary;
feed me!
This wouldn't have been so bad, but then it decided to ensure a response by throwing in a vocal complaint. It wasn't a quiet one; I was pretty sure that I heard windows rattling as a result. Which was all well and good, so long as I was alone -
"Hey," someone said, quite nearby. "I think he's waking up."
I froze.
Fuck.
Footsteps started in my direction.
Double fuck.
I jerked my eyelids open and sat up abruptly, scanning my surroundings.
And, in the process, I scared the absolute living bejeezus out of a chubby teenage boy who was crouching next to me; he flailed backward, landed on his butt and scrambled backward across the wooden floor. A little bit farther away was a kid in a hoodie; she had jumped a little bit and let out a tiny yelp when I sat up, but was now pretending that she'd done neither. She looked just a little bit familiar, and I filed her face away for later checking.
The last person in the room – wooden floor, brick walls, sagging plaster ceiling – was the one walking toward me; she barely even flinched as I sat up. In her hand was a metal bowl or cup or something, from which white steam curled. It framed her face; she was delicately pretty, currently composed, with an overlay of concern. I seemed to recall that she'd been the big guy's prospective victim.
Which begged the question: where was the big guy and, more to the point, where was
I? And where were my clothes? Because as far as I could tell, the only things covering me were the blanket and a pair of briefs.
Wait, back up. Blanket?
I looked again. Yes, I was mostly covered by a blanket; old, worn, but still warm.
This concept intrigued me. A part of my hallucination had come true; as the girl with the bowl came closer, the steam reached me, and it certainly smelled like someone had cooked actual food in it. And when I looked at what I was lying on, it certainly looked and felt like an inflatable mattress.
I was confused. For a hallucination, this one seemed to be remarkably insistent.
"Uh … hi?"
I looked at the girl holding the bowl. She had stopped a couple of yards away from the half-naked crazy-looking man with the blue lines on his face and the wild look in his eyes. That is, me; I had to commend her grasp of common sense.
Okay, she could see me, she wasn't hostile, she had addressed me, and she was holding food. I couldn't actually complain about any of that. I cleared my throat. Time to humour my subconscious and talk back to the voices in my head.
"Um, yeah, hi," I responded, feeling remarkably witty. "Where am I?"
"It's a condemned building," she replied. "We moved you here after … "
"After I killed that guy and passed out," I finished for her. "Uh, he wasn't, uh, just playing around or something, was he? Because I'd feel really bad if -"
She shook her head convulsively. "No. No, Troll was bad. He – he would have -" She shuddered. "That is, if you hadn't stopped him." She gave me a somewhat watery smile. "Thank you for that."
I shrugged, a little awkwardly. If my hallucinations weren't going to hold this against me, then I wasn't going to worry overmuch about it. "Eh. Didn't strike me as someone I'd want to introduce to my daughter. If I had one."
"Yeah, no," she agreed. She took a step forward. "Would you like some stew?"
"Hungry, yes," I agreed. This was kind of an understatement; my stomach, up to that point a passive plaintiff in the matter of
I'm Hungry vs Why Aren't You Feeding Me Now, took direct control of my hands, and I reached out to take the bowl off of her. Which brought my attention to the fact that while my right hand was fine, my
left hand was lightly wrapped in bandages, preventing it from opening.
I frowned at the bandages. "Did I hurt my hand?"
The girl shook her head. "No. But I didn't want you accidentally opening your hand while Justin was carrying you here."
"Justin?" I blinked, looking around. "Someone else here?"
"No," the street kid replied, from where she'd moved with the pudgy teen, back to what looked like a little gas barbecue. "This is Justin." She indicated the overweight teenager, who smiled and waved at me. The look on his face did not give me great hopes as to his mental acuity. I had a vague memory of that kid growing a rocky exterior and being smacked out by the big guy.
"Huh," I grunted.
"You carried me? Good going, kid." Awkwardly, I tucked the bowl in between my left forearm and my chest, and took a spoonful of stew. It was good. No, scratch that. It was fuckin'
heavenly. I could just
feel it doing me good. The hot metal was a little uncomfortable against the bare skin of my chest; I couldn't have cared less.
The pudgy teen smiled again and ducked his head; the street kid put her arm around his shoulders. "Justin's one of us. Don't you tease him."
"Wasn't teasing," I assured her. "I – " I paused. Her face suddenly clicked into my memories, and I was back in the alley, as a skinny street kid in a hoodie ran away from me. "You!
You're the one who robbed me.
And tied my goddamn shoelaces together!"
The kid looked suddenly scared. "Uh … "
"Cleo." The girl, who had sat down on the end of the mattress, turned to glare at the street kid. "Seriously? You
robbed him?"
"I was looking for money!" the kid replied defensively. "He had money! I didn't know who he was, or what he could do! I just knew if I didn't bring back money, Troll would get mad, so … "
The girl sighed and turned back to me. "Look, I'm sorry about that. We'll give it back."
I wasn't actually listening too closely, being too interested in shovelling that amazingly tasty stew into my mouth. But I followed far enough to understand what was going on.
"Don't sweat it," I told her, waving the spoon briefly. "Troll was a shit who made you go out and steal, I got it." I went back to spooning stew; this was a really great hallucination. I hoped it lasted a while longer.
She nodded, looking relieved. "So, uh, introductions. I'm Rhia. That's Cleo and Justin."
I nodded, and kept eating. Eating was good. The only problem with eating was that the bottom of the bowl was coming up fast, and I'd have to stop eating then. I wasn't looking forward to that.
After a few more spoonfuls, I realised that the other three were looking at me expectantly. I blinked, rewound the conversation, and played it through again.
Oh, duh. Introductions.
"Sorry," I told her, after swallowing the last of the stew. "I have no idea who I am, where I'm from, or even what I was doing forty-eight hours ago."
She looked somewhat taken aback. "Oh. That's … not great for you."
I snorted. "Nah, that's just a minor fucking inconvenience. What's not
great for me is everything that's happened since. Including, mind you, waking up with
this." I put the bowl down, and indicated my left hand with my right. "Oh, and apparently having incurred the close and personal enmity of number one in the airborne asshole stakes."
She nodded, apparently unsurprised. "Flux, yeah."
"Wait." I stared at her. "You've had problems with Flux?"
She rolled her eyes. "Are you actually surprised? We've
all had problems with Flux. Which is why we're living
here, instead of, say, in a real house with electricity and running water."
Hoodie kid – Cleo – raised her hand slightly. "Don't forget Troll."
Rhia grimaced. "Yeah, Troll. He was big enough and strong enough that he could actually go toe to toe with Flux. Trouble was, he was also an asshole. Didn't tolerate anyone with powers not being part of his little group. He was obsessed with us being his money makers."
"Sounds like a real stand-up guy," I observed sarcastically.
"Well, he kept us safe from Flux," she allowed. "Trouble was, there was no-one keeping us safe from
Troll."
"So what's with that, anyway?" I asked. "You look normal enough. What's wrong with you just, you know, living in society normally? Even the Pickpocket Kid over there?"
Rhia shook her head. "Flux. That's what's wrong with that."
I frowned. "What, he's got it in for you guys too? What the hell's with that? And could I have more stew? If there's any?"
Rhia passed the bowl back to Cleo, who started refilling it. "Three things you need to know about Flux. First thing is, he used to be in the Wards. But he left, due to undisclosed circumstances. No-one talks about it, no-one knows, but it was bad enough for him to quit or get fired. Second thing is, he's got money behind him. Big money. They pay for his costume and his PR, and the local PD and newspapers basically cater to his every need. Any news story about him treats him like the second coming of Scion."
I accepted the bowl back, and began eating again. It was still just as good. "So what's the third thing?"
She shrugged. "He's a dick."
"No," Cleo retorted. "He's a one hundred per cent douchenozzle. With cherries on top."
I nodded to the kid. "Yeah, I think I got that already."
"But there's more to it than that," Rhia put in. "He doesn't accept
any other capes in town. Established heroes come in, they get made unwelcome. Anyone who's not an established hero, they either get shoved out of town or made into a villain. Any actual villains show up, he goes at them hard. No holds barred. He's powerful enough to pull it off, and any property damage is their fault. When you can tell the papers what to say, that's not hard to achieve."
I paused, and stared at her. "So basically, he says who's a hero and who's a villain, and people go along with it?"
She shrugged. "The locals love him. As far as they're concerned, he's keeping the town safe from all the villains. And what they don't know doesn't hurt them; he's killed more than one villain, unwritten rules or no."
"Christ." I stared at her again. "So why are you even still here? And what's he got on you?"
"I'm still here because of Cleo and Justin." She gestured at the other two. "Justin has special needs. We can't get out of town because he's got our faces out there; or rather, Justin's face. Cleo or I could slide by, but we can't abandon Justin."
"Slide by."
She nodded. "I'm kind of a Master. I can make people see me as their ultimate perfect lover. Or as someone that they know and trust. Cleo's a Stranger; she can make people ignore her if they're not really thinking about her."
"And the kid's a Brute," I finished, waving at him with my spoon. "I saw him growing that rocky hide, earlier."
"Justin's a Brute, yeah," she agreed. "And he
did kind of cause a bit of property damage when he first got his powers, so Flux immediately had him tagged as a villain. Cleo's a runaway from an abusive home, and Flux caught her stealing so she could buy food."
She stopped talking; I looked at her. "And you; what happened with you?"
She grimaced. "I was his secretary. Right up until he discovered that I had powers."
"Ah." I could see where that was going. "Crap."
She nodded. "Yeah. The thing is, what Flux wants is recognition, validation, as a hero. But he doesn't care what he has to do to get it. Troll tended to keep on the down-low, only engaging him when he couldn't avoid it. The rest of us, we've got no chance of facing him, and we don't want to. So when you came along, you must have been a godsend. Flashy powers, public battle, someone who could almost stand up to him."
"Yeah," I muttered. "I'm starting to wonder if it isn't a little
too much of a godsend."
"How do you mean?" she asked.
"Well, I woke up, and he was right there, along with some cops," I told her. "And he called me 'villain' straight away. In fact, every time we've met, he's called me 'villain'. Like he's reinforcing the idea. And to be honest, I find it remarkably easy to think of myself as a villain. Doing villainous things. Almost like it's something I've been programmed to do. Brainwashed, maybe."
Rhia grimaced and shook her head. "I find that hard to believe. Flux has money and resources, sure, but on
that level? Having a supervillain to order just delivered to the city? I can't see that."
I could see her point. "Yeah, maybe. Just saying, it's kind of a tall order to believe that it's all a coincidence."
"Well, in any case," she told me briskly, "you're here now, and so are we. And, as you can see, it's not the best of situations."
I frowned. "Not great for you, or for me," I admitted. "And probably worse for you; I killed Troll, which lets Fluckface focus on you guys. And I'll probably draw attention to you, just by being here."
"No," Rhia told me firmly. "No, you don't get to walk away from us. What Troll was about to do to me …. " She shuddered. "I owe you for that. For stopping him." She reached out a hand, put it on my arm. "Please, stay."
I paused, spoon halfway to my mouth. She was looking more and more attractive to me by the second. "Wait. Are you using your power on me?"
She blinked, and suddenly, she was just normally pretty again. "Oh. Shit. Sorry. I didn't mean to. I -"
I waved the spoon. "Never mind. Just don't make any assumptions about me, all right? You don't know what sort of a guy I am.
I don't know what sort of a guy I am."
"You killed Troll to save me -"
I raised my voice to cut her off. "Yeah, I killed Troll. That's actually not a good thing. I chose to kill a man.
Why I did it is another matter. Yeah, maybe it was to help you out. Or maybe that's just the excuse I gave myself. Maybe I just wanted to kill someone?"
She eyed me. "Don't you know?"
"No," I told her. "I
don't. I've got less than a day of conscious memory. I don't know
why I do shit. I might end up being a bigger danger than Flux. Or Troll. Just saying." Taking hold of the bowl with my right hand, I waved my bandaged left hand. "And that's not even counting this. I open my hand by accident at the wrong time, people die. It's happened before."
"No."
Rhia and I looked around. It was the kid, Cleo, who had spoken. I frowned. "What?"
"No." Her voice shook a little, but she stood her ground. "No, Rhia's right. You're just making up excuses so you don't have to do this. So you don't have to
care."
I made my voice harder. "I've
killed people, kid. I'm fuckin'
dangerous. You really sure you want to be around me?"
"Yeah. I am." She took a deep breath. "I saw the look on your face when you killed Troll."
"
What look?" I didn't have to pretend to be confused.
She rolled her eyes. "The sort of look that said 'Oh, for fuck's sake. I've got to do
this now?' You didn't have to step in. He wasn't any danger to you. We didn't mean anything to you. You coulda just kept walking. But he was gonna hurt Rhia, so you stopped him. Not because you wanted to look cool and heroic. Not because you wanted to impress us. But because Troll
needed stopping."
I didn't want to admit that she was right. But she was, kinda. I'd been put through so much shit that seeing someone
else in trouble just put my back up.
Did that make me a hero? Hardly; I'd killed the guy. I didn't
feel heroic. No costume for me, no adoring public. Not unless you counted two kids and a young woman. But a man was still dead.
Somewhere along the way, I had lost my appetite. But that was okay, because the bowl was empty. I put it down on the floor next to the mattress. "Yeah, maybe. But I've killed someone else, too. Maybe you need to think about that."
Rhia spread her hands. "So tell us about it." Cleo stirred, but didn't say anything.
Where had I gone from 'wanting to leave' to 'wanting to stay'? I looked away, trying to regain control of the situation. "It's not a good thing."
Again, Rhia put her hand on my arm. This time, she seemed to keep control of her power, as it was just a hand on my arm. "Killing people is never good. Even when it's justified."
"Trust me, this time it wasn't." I took a deep breath. "Couple cops found me. I didn't know about my powers then. When they shone a light on me, I held up my hand. Fried them. Killed one, not sure about the other. That's when Flux showed up for the first time, told me to run or he'd kill me."
"Shit." That was Cleo. "I saw the story in the paper. According to them, you're a flat-out stone killer. But you're not. That sounded more like an accident than anything."
I shrugged. "A cop's still dead. Wrong place, wrong time."
"No. No, it wasn't an accident." Rhia's voice was sharp. "You happen to use your powers for the first time and kill a cop, and Flux is
right there? And someone gets a photo to use in the paper the
very next morning? Doesn't that strike you as being just a
tiny bit coincidental?"
"Wait. The fuck?" I could see where she was going, but I didn't want to believe it. If only because it would prove that I'd been jerked around like a muppet for the last twelve hours and change. "You're saying I was
set up?"
Her gaze didn't waver from mine for an instant. "To look like a villain, yes. Flux kept
calling you a villain. You're someone who's obviously dangerous, but you can't beat him because magnetism apparently trumps electricity."
Her logic was inescapable. "Yeah, I got it, I got it. I'm his perfect opponent. But are we really doing this? Are we really going back to the idea that he was able to arrange for this? For me?"
"My dad was a lawyer." She shrugged. "He'd say that we discarded the idea because of a lack of corroborating evidence. But now we have that evidence. If only circumstantial."
"Whoa, hey," Cleo broke in. "Does it really matter? Either way, Flux is a massive asshat, and he needs to go down in the worst way. We can figure it out after the fact. Or, you know, beat it out of Flux once we've made him our bitch."
Justin stirred. "Flux is bad," he agreed. "He made me look bad. I don't want to be bad." He looked at me. "Can you help?"
I sighed.
I'm going to do this, aren't I? "Fuck my life."
<><>
Three Days Later
"So, how are you feeling?"
I looked up as Rhia settled herself on to the dilapidated sofa beside me. "Better," I admitted. To be perfectly honest, I felt a good deal more than 'better'. It was absolutely amazing what a bit of rest and food could do for my outlook. I'd been doing basically nothing but sleep and eat for the last couple of days.
My regret over killing Troll was even starting to fade, a little. The guy
had been an absolute paragon of assholery, after all. Plus, I sincerely doubted that a kind word over a cup of coffee would have swayed him from his path of stealing shit and hurting people.
On the other hand, he
had protected Rhia and the kids from Flux. Just goes to show how bad the superhero is when the sadistic would-be rapist might be seen as a nicer guy by comparison. Mind you, at this point, the apples and oranges we're comparing
are the rotten and mouldy ones that you don't even want to touch with gloves on.
"I have a theory on those ribbons you told me about," she ventured.
"Yeah, so do I," I replied. "Electricity, right? I can pull it to me, so I guess it kind of makes sense that I can see it."
She looked a little put out that I'd spoiled her big reveal. "Okay, smart guy," she retorted. "How about the other half of it? From what you told me, you should've been a hospital case when I first saw you."
"Yeah, well. There you've got me," I admitted. "I'm still a bit sore, but nothing like what I should be."
Her grin was triumphant. "Electricity heals you and makes you tougher."
I looked at her as though she'd just sprouted a second head. "Say that again without the crazy?"
"You said you were shot," she pointed out. "No bullet hole. Only a faint scar. Very few bruises from falling down into a sewer. No broken bones from
any of what happened to you. I'm guessing you've got a Brute rating that gets better when you're all charged up."
"Okay, not something I was ready for," I admitted. "Not saying you're wrong, but do you have anything to support that?"
Her grin widened. "Sure. You said you felt better when you absorbed all that charge? There's your proof. It healed your gunshot wound and all the stuff that Flux had done to you. And the leftover charge made you tough enough that you didn't get hurt in the sewer."
Once I decided to ignore things like logic and common sense, it actually began to sound like she had a point. And after all, I could shoot lightning out of my hand; logic and common sense didn't have much to say about that either.
"Kind of sounds reasonable," I decided. "Let's go with that idea till we find a better one."
"Good," she agreed. "Now on to the real mystery. Why did whoever dumped you in that alley leave two grand in your pocket in the process? I mean, if it was Flux, why give you money? If it wasn't, why dump you there?"
"Ah." I realised that I hadn't told her everything. "I think I was supposed to get a costume made up. There was an address and a list of names in my pocket. I guess it kind of got destroyed when I went for a swim in the sewer. Fortunately, Cleo stole this from me first." I pulled the wad out of my pocket and flicked through it. The kid had even apologised when she gave it back.
"Oh." Rhia paused. "That makes a certain kind of sense. What sort of names were they?"
My grin was wry. "Supervillain names, of course. Dark Sinister. Electromaster. Stuff like that."
"Hm." She looked thoughtful. "You realise that we're going to have to do something about your lack of a name. We can't call you 'hey you' all the time."
I raised an eyebrow. "You didn't know? The kids have been calling me 'Joe'. Well, Justin's been calling me '
Uncle Joe', but yeah. It's kind of cute. He's a sweet kid. What I don't know is where they got 'Joe' from."
"Ah, that might've been me." Rhia looked a little embarrassed. "I sort of referred to you as 'John Doe' a couple of times, while you were asleep. It looks like they ran it together to make 'Joe'."
"Well, it's as good a name as any," I noted.
"Are you going to pick a cape name, too?" She gave me a quizzical look. "Something that sounds better than 'Electro-Killer'. Because trust me, that name's gonna be real hard to spin with PR. As it is, we're changing our names."
"What, really?" Boy, was I on fire with the witty repartee. "Why?"
She shuddered slightly. "Troll picked our names. He was going with a fantasy creature theme: Troll, Changeling, Gargoyle, Sprite. I don't want to keep anything from that man. Cleo's going with Hide and Seek, I'm going to call myself Charmer, and I think Justin likes Stoneface."
I snorted. "That sounds about right." It was a good name, to be honest. The kid might not have much going on in the top storey, but he had a good heart, and I'd kinda taken to him. "So what's next? Costumes?"
"No, just clothes. And shoes." She looked serious now. "Life on the run is hard on clothing, and both Cleo and Justin are still growing. So we need to get hold of something in their size. Also, food. We need to replenish."
"So we go buy stuff," I suggested. "Or you go buy it, anyway. Pretty sure my face'll bring down the forces of law and disorder pretty quickly."
"Actually, that's something else we could get," she noted. "Foundation to hide those marks on your face. Maybe a wig to cover the hair."
"Priorities," I pointed out. "Food and clothing takes precedence." I held up the wad of cash. "Need a loan?"
"I'd prefer to save the cash for when we don't have time to do it the sneaky way," Rhia suggested. "But you were right in that your face would attract too much negative attention. Unfortunately, Flux has been combing the city for you, and if he sees any of us, he'll recognise us."
I frowned. "Seriously? He's got your faces memorised?"
"Seriously, I suspect that he's got the faces of everyone he's turned into a villain memorised," she sighed. "And there's posters up of our faces in most public places anyway."
"Okay, then." I tucked the money away again. "Something tells me that you've got a plan to get around this."
"Yeah, well, I've got a sort-of plan." She eyed me warily. "Not sure if you'll like it or not."
I stretched my legs out and tucked my hands behind my head. "Only one way to find out."
<><>
One Day Later
"
Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Never more sure in my life." My grin was kind of cocky, to match my tone.
Rhia's voice held a certain amount of sarcasm.
"That's easy to say when your total life experience consists of four days and an odd number of hours."
I blew a raspberry. Beside me, Justin giggled. Rhia was less impressed.
"Just don't think you need to hold out any longer than you have to."
"Trust me, Mom, this little piggy's gonna go wee-wee-wee all the way home just as soon as I can disengage from the big bad wolf."
"
Now you're mixing your nursery rhymes."
"And? You and the Pickpocket Kid ready to roll?"
"
You're never gonna let her live that down, are you?"
"Nope. Let's do this."
<><>
To Rhia's surprise, I had jumped at the plan she was proposing; specifically, that I run interference for her and Cleo while they had their little 'shopping' trip. In short, I would go out and make a public spectacle, with the full intent of bringing Flux down on my head. I'd kind of pissed him off in our last encounter, so he was likely to come after me hard and fast, to the exclusion of all else.
In fact, I was rather counting on it.
The one thing I hadn't allowed for was the idea of Justin coming along with me. The kid was nice enough but he didn't have a lot going on in his upper storey. Mind you, he wasn't a fan of pro wrestling, so he had to have
some IQ points. However, this in no way prepared him for a potential face-off against Flux.
I had argued against his inclusion in my part of the mission. My experience of this sort of thing wavered on the scale at about a tenth of a point above 'zero', but to take a kid with mental problems into the field against a sadistic asshole like Flux was tantamount to getting on your knees and begging for trouble.
Are you going to be looking for trouble? Rhia had asked.
No, but I'm pretty damn sure that it'll find us, I had replied.
Justin can take care of himself. And he'll be good as a lookout. She had given me a hard stare.
And I'm counting on you to not let him get hurt.
It had then occurred to me that letting Justin come along made me unhappy with the situation. I was actually okay with being unhappy. It was a state of affairs that I'd learned to get used to, over the last few days.
I turned to look at him now. He was holding his phone in his hand, the one thing I couldn't do. Mine was tucked into my pocket, with a bluetooth gizmo in my ear. We had found out the hard way that if I held a cell phone in my right hand, I automatically sucked all electrical charge out of it. I could no more turn that power off than I could turn off the ability to spray my area with arcs of high-powered electricity. We lost three cell-phones that way before Rhia figured out what was going on.
"So, you good to go, kid?" I asked.
He nodded earnestly. "Yes, Uncle Joe."
I still wasn't sure exactly how to respond to the 'uncle' title, but it seemed to please him, so I let it go. "Okay, let's do this. Put the phone away."
Obediently he tucked it into his pocket, then concentrated. As he seemed to flex, grey stony plates appeared from nowhere, overlaying his clothes and building him up into a hulking golem of a monster.
As he completed his alteration, I was already walking out of the alley. I took the baseball cap from my head and tucked it into my pocket, then moved over to stand next to a street-light pole. Now that I had a good idea of what the ribbon was, I had no hesitation in grabbing hold of it with my right hand.
Once more, power surged into me. I was already rested and well-fed, but this made me feel a thousand percent better, in ways that food just could not match. I was ten feet tall and bulletproof, able to take on the world. Even Flux would fall before me …
whoa.
"Okay," I muttered to myself. "Keep an eye on the megalomania there." Still, even knowing that the feeling was artificial, I had a hard time focusing past it to the job at hand. I felt a grin splitting my face, and I knew what my cape name was going to be.
With Justin – now Stoneface – flanking me, I strode down the pavement toward my first destination. Specifically, the convenience store that had suffered so badly from my previous visit. There were a few people around; not as many as I'd seen on my last time here, but enough for our purposes. I saw heads turn, the expressions of worry and fear blossoming across one face after another. More than one phone came out, as they started backing away from us. Which suited me just fine.
The bell on the door
dinged as we entered; I looked around with interest at the interior of the store. There were still signs of the damage that I had caused. These mainly consisted of scorch-marks that hadn't yet been painted over, along with the odd damaged shelf. The cash register that I'd nuked had been replaced with something that I was pretty sure had been tossed off the Ark when Noah invested in a newer model.
The guy standing behind the counter wasn't Shotgun Billy. I spent a moment wondering where Billy was, and hoping that I hadn't actually hurt him too badly, before striding up to face the new guy. He also looked vaguely Asian in his features – look, I'm
not good at picking that sort of thing – but he was also about twenty years younger than the previous guy. Maybe he was the Number One Son, or nephew, or something like that.
"Hey," I greeted him warmly before he could pull out the old man's shotgun and start blasting away. As charged up as I was, I wasn't even sure that it would hurt me, and it probably wouldn't do much to Stoneface, either. But I didn't want this to devolve into violence, because I was actually interested in maintaining a meaningful dialogue, or whatever it is that real people do when they don't want to fight. While a fight would be
fun and all, I was saving it for Fluckface. This was part of the
other plan.
Caught on the back foot, Number One Son stared at me like a rabbit in the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler. "Uh …"
"Yeah, it's me," I went on cheerfully. "I came in to say sorry about the other day. I wasn't in a good place, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Now, I know this won't even begin to help, but I want to make the gesture, so here's something to put toward getting yourself a new cash register. Or at least a second-hand one that doesn't run on coal or something." With my right hand, I slapped a hundred dollar note down on the counter.
I'm not a telepath – I'll fry the shit out of someone's mind, but I can't
read it – and I'm normally no great shakes at analysing expressions. But it didn't matter in this case, as Number One Son might as well have been drawing signs on a huge whiteboard to explain what he was thinking:
Oh shit oh shit oh shit it's that supervillain, he's gonna electromogrify me into a crispy paste.
He's not zapping me, not dead yet. He's talking to me. Why is he talking to me?
Wait. Waaiitt. Back up. I missed something. Why is the supervillain apologising to me?
Holy fuckballs, he did not just put money down on the counter.
He did put money down on the counter.
What the fuck?
No, seriously, what the living fuck?
I waited till he had almost finished goggling, then slapped another ten down on top of the hundred. "And I'd like to buy something, too." Turning toward Justin, I gestured toward the fridge. "Can you get me a chocolate milk, please? And something for yourself, too."
Stoneface grunted; he was very good at that. In fact, he could articulate quite well even in his stone-covered form, but pretending to be the big dumb Brute was something he did really well. Turning, he tromped toward the fridge; Number One Son watched him go, probably expecting him to rip the door clean off of its hinges. Which was something that he could quite easily do, but on this occasion I had impressed on him the need to not break things. Until the time came to start breaking stuff, in which case I would pass on the word and then get ready to award points for style.
The fridge door opened as Justin delicately pulled on the handle; he didn't even bend it, which impressed me considerably. Pretending nonchalance, I leaned on the counter, keeping one eye on Number One Son. "He's a nice kid," I confided. "Means well. But if he gets pissed … well, watch out, is all I can say. Not even
I want to see him upset."
Mainly because Justin didn't get angry. The closest I'd seen him to that state was when he jumped Troll to try to help Rhia. But if he did lose control of his emotions, he basically started bawling, which
nobody wanted to see.
Justin returned, holding a super-sized chocolate milk in one hand – I actually started salivating upon seeing the bottle – and a banana milk in the other. Well, to each his own, I guess.
He put the cold drinks on the counter; Number One Son stared at them and then at me, as if unsure as to what to do next. I coughed meaningfully, indicating the ancient and dilapidated cash register. "We, uh, want to, you know,
buy them?"
"Oh!" Jolting into action, he snatched up the money; I watched with interest as he began hitting buttons on the cash register. Clockwork twanged and gears ground as he entered the required amounts, then pulled a small lever on the side. Metal tabs inside the display section popped up, with the amount of our change on them. The cash drawer shot open with a musical
ding, and he dug out some coins. I was so fascinated by the display of pre-electronic technology that I almost forgot to take the change from him. Almost, but not quite.
"Thank you," I told him cheerfully. "I hope you've had a pleasant and fulfilling supervillain experience today. My name is Surge, and my colleague here is Stoneface. Have a nice day."
Number One Son went back to goggling at us, which was fine; we didn't need to interact with him any more. Turning, I led the way from the convenience store, twisting the cap from the chocolate milk and tossing it on to the floor – after all, I
was a supervillain. If littering was the worst crime I was going to commit that day, I would commit it in style.
When I stepped out of the convenience store with Justin behind me, Flux had not yet made an appearance. Neither had the local constabulary, possibly because they were still getting their cars repaired. The crowd had gathered a little, but they were keeping their distance. Every single person had a phone out and recording, probably so as to present as much damaging evidence toward my activities as possible. Flux had no doubt sworn them all in as junior assistant superheroes or something.
I stopped, and took a drink from my chocolate milk. The long-awaited rich chocolatey goodness gurgled down my throat, causing a minor explosion of joy in my stomach. I'd been
waiting for this.
Beside me, Stoneface did the same with the banana milk, after more or less ripping the cap off. It appeared that he didn't have any feeling in his stony 'skin', which made him clumsy unless he was watching what he was doing. But where finesse failed, brute strength dealt with minor matters such as the plastic cap on a plastic bottle just fine.
Were I a betting man, I would have wagered that the consumption of artificially-flavoured reconstituted milk drinks had rarely, if ever, been the subject of so much intent interest. I enjoyed the attention, drawing out the moment. This was an indulgence, and I damn well intended to indulge.
I finished my drink just a few moments ahead of Justin. With a well-deserved belch, I tossed the bottle toward a nearby bin. The angle was bad, and I'm not that great a shot; the bottle caromed off of the rim and clattered on to the pavement. I looked at the surrounding audience and shrugged, as if to say,
Well, what did you expect? I'm a supervillain, not a basketball player.
Justin did the same as me, tossing his now-empty bottle toward the trash can. Whether by fluke or skill, he nailed it perfectly. Then he added insult to injury by picking up my discarded bottle, which had rolled back toward him, and tossing that in as well.
Smartass.
"Well, that was nice," I declared. "Shall we take a stroll?"
Justin, in his role as Stoneface, didn't answer verbally; instead, he just grunted. When I headed off down the pavement, the people before us pulling back out of the way, he followed. In what was possibly the most boring supervillain attack that this town had ever experienced, we strolled along the side of the street, ignoring the phone-cameras pointed at us from all angles.
Just for a moment, one man in the crowd caught my eye. He was a bit older than me, and considerably wider in the shoulders. The look on his face wasn't fear or defiance, but … speculation. As if I factored into his calculations, but I wasn't the main aspect of them. I wondered if he was a cape, but he made no move to interfere.
At last, sirens began sounding in the distance. For a moment, I entertained the thought that the police would actually beat my least favourite superhero ever to the punch. But alas, this was not to be. Justin pointed; I turned, just in time to see the brightly-clad heroic figure drop out of the sky and land a little way in front of us.
"Morning, Fluckface," I called out cheerfully before he could speak. "Come to make an idiot out of yourself again?" As I spoke, I trailed my right hand against the post of a street-light; the charge I had picked up earlier hadn't dwindled much, but I felt the rush as it replenished anyway.
"I'd be careful if I were you, villain," he retorted. "You're keeping unsavoury company there. That's Gargoyle, Troll's cohort." Behind me, almost too faint to be audible, I heard the scrape of metal on metal. From the tilt of Justin's head, he'd heard it too.
"No, it actually isn't," I corrected him. "This is Stoneface. He's my cohort. Troll's out of the picture as far as he's concerned."
He frowned, as if trying to work out what I meant by that. Justin turned his head, then stepped behind me; I heard the
clang of metal on stone. Glancing around, I saw that Justin had hold of a manhole cover. It was jerking erratically from side to side; he had to hang on tightly to prevent it from escaping his grip.
"Naughty, naughty," I chided, stepping forward and shaking my finger at Flux. "Attacking me from behind? That's something a villain might do, not a hero."
"Against murderers and inhuman freaks, I have somewhat more leeway," Flux countered. "You need to be taken down, villain. Your record makes that clear."
"You need to be told to shut the fluck up more often," I said. "Your mouth makes that clear." It was pretty weak as a comeback, but a few people in the crowd seemed to think it was funny.
Flux did not. He reached into a pouch at his belt and brought out a handful of shiny ball-bearings, each about half an inch across. When he tossed them into the air, they stayed there, hovering in a loose group just above his hand.
Okay, I thought.
This could get nasty. "Get ready for plan B, kid," I muttered, just loud enough for Justin to hear me.
"What was that?" Flux asked. "Are you
planning something? Do you think you can
beat me?" He tensed; the ball-bearings began to quiver in midair. I knew that sign; in another second or so, he would launch them at me. I was tougher than I was used to being, but I didn't want to see if he could push them at bullet speed or not.
Flux actually laughed out loud when I opened my left hand, directing a stream of lightning toward him; specifically, toward his face. It splashed against his magnetic field, of course; I had expected it to do nothing less. But the lightning was more than just electricity. It was also very bright, dazzling him briefly.
Briefly was long enough; it gave me the time to close the distance and to pull my secret weapon out from under the long-coat. I'd thought of going with aluminum, but there
was the outside chance that his magnetism was of the bullshit kind that affected all metal. So the baseball bat that I swung at his ribs was made out of good old American hickory.
Someone shouted a warning and he began to lift off, but I still managed to get one good swing in; he went
oof and doubled over, even as he gained altitude. I hadn't felt any ribs go, but I figured that he'd have a nice bruise there in the morning. Even better, the loss of concentration meant that the ball-bearings were scattered to hell and gone on the pavement.
By the time he recovered enough to glare at me, he was twenty feet in the air and effectively untouchable. Rhia and I had debated the idea of Justin throwing something at him, but there existed the problem of 'what goes up must come down'. I didn't want to hurt an innocent out of my line of sight. In fact, I didn't want to hurt any innocents at all.
It was time for Plan B.
<><>
Flux scowled as his vision cleared. He didn't have the ball-bearings any more, and picking them up one at a time would be as tedious as hell. The idea of being dazzled by the electrical discharge hadn't occurred to him before now. It hadn't harmed him in the slightest, of course, but his ribs were still hurting from whatever the electrical villain had done as a follow-up.
When he saw what it was, his eyes widened slightly. The guy had used a
baseball bat on him? Who the hell even
did that any more?
And then he realised that the electric villain was retreating, along with the stone-clad Gargoyle, or Stoneface, or whatever he was called these days.
What did he mean when he said that Troll was out of the picture? "You can't get away!" he called out, swooping down to parallel their course. Having learned his lesson, he didn't come within arm's reach of either one as he used his metal-sense to search for anything he could use as ammunition.
I'll have to watch out for that dazzling move. This guy's trickier than I thought he'd be. At the back of his mind, a tiny kernel of worry unfolded.
Maybe this was a bad idea.
No. Mentally, he squared his shoulders.
His powers were set up so that I could always beat him. He's going down.
<><>
The store lights flickered; Rhia didn't look around as she pushed the shopping cart, well-laden with tinned food, toward the store exit. One of the store employees stepped out to meet her.
"Can I help you -?" he began, then stopped as she exerted her power slightly. "Oh, sorry, honey. Didn't recognise you for a minute."
"That's okay," she replied with a wide smile that she didn't feel. "I just need to run this out to the car. I'll be right back, mmkay?"
"Sure thing," he agreed. "Let me get the door for you."
She held the smile as she went out through the doors, almost gritting her teeth until she was out of sight. It was only then that she let herself indulge in a full-body shudder.
"I
hate doing that," she muttered.
"Don't blame you," Cleo said cheerfully from right beside her. The teenager wore a backpack which bulged heavily with stolen goods. "So, you think they'll be okay?"
"We can only hope so," Rhia told her. "I don't know if this particular trick'll work again. If we'd hung around there much longer, someone would have pinged me."
"Eh, we made out like bandits," Cleo declared. "Because, you know, that's basically what we are. Geddit?"
Rhia sighed. "Yes. I get it."
But she couldn't help worrying about Justin and Surge. Which reminded her. Pulling out her phone, she made a call. When it went through, she spoke one word.
<><>
"Mailbox!" I shouted; Justin ducked and the flying post office box caromed off of his raised forearm with a crash. A metal bumper tore from a car parked at the curb and swung at me, its silvery chromed length reflecting my face oddly. I evaded it, but then it struck Justin, wrapping its length around his body. Pinning his arms to his sides.
We retreated down the pavement, doing our best to evade all of Flux's attacks. He was good but he wasn't great; I suspected that he hadn't faced off against more than one opponent for quite some time. For the sake of appearances, I let off the occasional burst of electricity, aiming to miss everything except Flux.
Justin flexed, tearing the car bumper like cardboard. He was still holding the manhole cover, and he brought it up just in time to deflect another one away from me. Flux had sent it flying toward me at a speed that would have almost certainly injured me badly, if not fatally. My ears were still ringing from the clash of steel on steel as I followed the track of the projectile.
I watched as the manhole cover, still moving at a very high speed, began to curve back toward us. Almost directly overhead was a set of power lines. If the cover had kept on its path, it would have missed them. However, Flux wanted it back, so it altered course … and sheared straight through two of the cables.
Everything seemed to slow down as the cables began to fall, the ends already sparking. The impact of the manhole cover had imparted a great deal of kinetic energy to the cables; they whipped and twanged erratically even as they dropped free of the pole. Below the severed ends of the cables, where they were most likely to fall, there was a large bunch of people, all either filming the action or just plain rubbernecking. And the cables were live.
I lunged sideways toward the roadway – thankfully, the police were blocking off the road at each end, which meant no traffic – reaching out toward the falling cables. When I had first learned this trick, I'd had to touch the light-pole physically in order to drain off power. I knew that I'd never reach the cables in time. My only chance was to gamble that my power in that regard
wasn't touch-only.
A split-second before the cables fell into the group, it happened. The ribbons which had been paralleling the power lines, cut off when the physical cables were severed, re-established themselves. However,
this time, they stretched from the power lines to my right hand; a visible electrical arc followed their path. All the way into yours truly.
Were I one to use bad puns, I might say that it was a shocking experience. However, I am not, and it was not. A more apt word would be 'enlightening'; my previous experiences with drawing on outside sources of electricity had involved my power skimming off of the top, whereas this time I was mainlining the stuff straight up.
I felt energised beyond belief; the blue lines on my face, Justin told me later, lit up like a neon sign. However, I couldn't
hold that much electricity. I had the idea of blasting the excess into the sky, but electricity wants to ground out. It wants to arc to something conductive. Looking around wildly, I spotted a lightning-rod on a nearby building. My left hand shot out, the fingers opened, and a crackling bolt of lightning arced over to the rod and grounded out.
But this wasn't the end of it. There was more current – thousands of volts – pouring through the cables; if I lost concentration even for an instant, it would surge down to ground level and electrocute anyone who happened to be touching the downed powerlines. I had to hold on, drawing the electricity away, until they were clear. And that meant ignoring Flux for the moment. Hopefully, he would see what I was doing and hold off further attacks until the danger was over.
Justin's bulk moved between me and the hovering cape; dimly, over the roaring crackle in my ears, I heard clangs as metal deflected from metal, along with duller crunches as his stone body took other hits.
Having firmly earned his place in the ranks of flying douchebags, Flux kept up his attacks on me; it was only due to Justin's strength and reflexes that none of them got through. I was pretty sure that the lightning-rod was starting to glow red at the tip by the time the last civilians were out of harm's way. Then I turned my attention in Flux's direction.
Not only was he a jerk and an asshole, but he'd deliberately attempted to make use of my distraction to attack me, knowing that this would endanger civilians. My feelings toward him escalated from irritated dislike all the way to serious hatred. However, before I could see if unleashing the town's entire power grid on him would overcome his magnetic shielding, my bluetooth earpiece beeped.
Pulling back my right hand, I released the hold on the 'ribbon', allowing current to flow through the power-lines once more. With a tap on the earpiece, I accepted the call.
It was Rhia on the other end.
"Done."
That was the signal that she and Cleo had made full use of the distraction, and had gotten the food and clothing that we needed. The agreement was that we should now disengage.
I was tempted to ignore it. Flux was right there, and I was charged up like never before. But Justin was depending on me not to screw things up, and if he got hurt because I wanted to press the fight, I'd never forgive myself. Besides, I had ideas for how to kick Flux's ass later on.
Sending a burst of electricity to splash against Flux's shields, I turned to Stoneface. "Go go go," I told him.
He didn't need telling twice; his rocky exterior was chipped and cracked, mute testimony to the ferocity of the attacks he had weathered while protecting me. I made a mental note to get the kid as much banana-flavoured milk as he could drink, once we were in a position to do so. He'd come through, in spades.
<><>
The broad-shouldered man frowned. This was not how cape battles normally went. Usually, the
villain endangered civilians while the
hero saved them. As it was, this battle seemed to have been ultimately pointless; there were no banks or other such places nearby where a quick profit might be made. In fact, the pair hadn't even tried to rob the convenience store.
And now, they were sidling over to one of the several open manholes on the street. Before Flux could react, the stone golem disappeared down the hole. The man in the long-coat, the lines on his face still glowing a vivid blue, went next; as he vanished from sight, his hands were the last things in view, each offering Flux a raised middle finger.
About half a second later, a cover slammed into place over the hole, but it was too late. They had escaped.
Flux drifted down to ground level and began to accept the adulation of the crowd for driving off the villains, but the broad-shouldered man didn't join them. Rubbing his chin, he looked first at the downed power-lines and then at the convenience store. Something definitely didn't make sense, and he intended to get to the bottom of the matter.
It was, after all, why he had come to Bedford in the first place.
End of Part Four
Part Five
