Big Superhero Action (18 page)

“You’ve had a hard life, Duff.”

“You too, probably.”

“I guess.”

“Where are you from?”

“Egypt.”

“Really?”

“No. I’m from Texas.”

“How’d you get here?”

“I don’t know. I was moved from Texas when I was fifteen when I died.”

“You died?”

“What I know I know the same way I know what I dream was my dream. You just know.”

Duff said, “I should call home.”

“Okay. You should call them. But you can’t go home.”

“Why not?”

“If you do you’ll have Down’s again.”

“How come?”

“The healing only works when you’re here.”

“Oh.”

She had to gaze at him. He was so clean and innocent.

He said, “Is that your superpower?”

“I get stuff from the future.”

“You get music from the future?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s weird.”

“I have another superpower. It’s…it sounds dumb.”

“What is it?”

“My…my looks…can addict people.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“You’re a kid, you don’t get the effect. But it effects people like a drug.”

“Wow. How does that work?”

“I don’t know but it’s growing stronger. One day it will control people. Now imagine what Her Blue Majesty would do with that. She’d exploit the fuck out of it. She’d grind me into powder and bottle me as a new drink.”

“Is that bad?”

“You child. It’s the worst. Worse than being pimped and porned-out. She uses people up then kills them off. Then she would use you until you were too old to use. Then the OSD would kill you to save costs.”

“Ugh.”

“Now you’re getting it, Duff. But that won’t happen to us.”

“What now?”

“You go to an orphanage. Get in touch with your parents. See what happens.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I don’t know. Maybe I could be a superhero.”

“Like one who’s beautiful?”

“That is kinda lame, isn’t it? But if I leave town I go back to being dead. But here I can be a superhero.”

“One who’s beautiful and hears music from the future?”

“And can heal people to one song. Don’t forget that. That’s a legit superpower.”

“Yeah.”

“I have a name for my superhero.”

“What?”

“Teenage Cleopatra.”

M
mmmgghhh!

Staring up at the plates JKM pictured
Mmmmgghhh!
in a speech balloon above his head. He was in Gold’s Gym bench pressing six hundred pounds. He held it for exactly four breaths then used his arms to resist gravity enough for the steel bar to not crush his face coming back down. The
clank
shook the bench. His guns fell to his sides blazing, the blowtorch shooting across his delts, searing every muscle above the waist. His lungs clawed at the oxygen. Six hundred was his personal max. For someone born with the name January Kosinski that was pretty fucking awesome. What he’d do post-op would be massive.

He looked around at the hulks cranking iron. His connection worked out after three p.m., the guy who did his shooting-up in the right hip. There was no drug testing for superheroes.

The Halo’s face popped over his sweaty one. There was the chance that she would find him at the gym.

She said, “What did you do?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“I saw you on TV, you asshole. They said you did it.”

“Whatever.”

Now she was almost in tears.

“What did you fucking do?” she said.

“You told me to fuck off.”

“What did you do?”

He flexed his eight-pack, sat up on the bench, stood. The wetness of his back was even wetter than the bench, shorts drenched, even his bare feet leaving wet footprints.

“I went into the club to find who hit you. I looked in the men’s room, found a dead guy. I called the police. Told them I did it.”

“Why the fuck did you do that?”

“Between the two of us, which one would survive better in prison? Three guesses. Not you. How do I know which prison they’d send us to? Would they send you to men’s prison because you have a wiener? Or me to women’s because I don’t? I’d do better in men’s than you would. I’d do better in women’s than you would in men’s. Fuck, I’d do better in women’s than you would in women’s.”

Before him the Halo turned atop her high heels in a circle like a spastic Wonder Woman, flapped her arms, shook her head. Then she grabbed him by the skull. Hopelessly avoiding the sweaty spots, she wrapped her arms around him, choked him in her perfume. She kissed his cheeks, his lips, his forehead. It felt good. He didn’t know what to do so he kept talking.

“I confessed to the killing. Then I pled guilty. Sort of. I pled not guilty so I could cop a plea. I got second degree murder. The judge gave me two years. I start serving in three months.”

“You assumed I did it,” she said.

“Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You beat him to death.”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“With a beer bottle.”

“Maybe you
would
do well in prison.”

“You had my back all along. After the way I treated you. I’m so sorry I told you to fuck off.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t go in with you. It would’a never went down that way.”

“At least it made me a hero for the first time.”

He put a hand under her fading black eye, gave her cheek a gentle caress. He almost admired her; he couldn’t remember his first time crushing an enemy.

She pouted. “Now we’ll never get The Corpus.”

He was thinking now. “Maybe The Corpus doesn’t watch the news.”

She looked up. “You think?”

“If you were The Corpus would you watch the news?”

“Yeah. To see who needs his help.”

“Fuck.”

“But maybe he missed the story.”

Two days later they found The Corpus on Lower Brutalia Avenue. He was sitting on a curb in a crunched
Thinker
pose. Across the street: fire trucks outside an apartment building spewing black smoke. The air was thick with the reek of burning building. The sight of flames was obscene, blackening three window frames. JKM was a man without fear but he in would no way have stepped one step closer to that building. Heights he could deal with, he sprung from rooftop to rooftop. He had zero claustrophobia, hid between the bricks in a brick wall and crawled up manholes. In NYC he had spent sewer surveillance up to his cape in sewer rats. He had been attacked by dogs and hit by cars. He had stopped knives and bullets. He had broken more bones than he could keep track. He had spent months on his back under needles and tubes. But fire was out. Even a barbecue grill freaked him out. Firemen were beyond his comprehension. With a twitch of his thick neck, that annoyed him.

They squatted to either side of The Corpus and watched with him.

Above his perched fist The Corpus’ chin started going up and down. “The building is empty. No one lives there. The building was torched by an OSD street gang for fun.”

“Sociopathic baby creeps,” JKM said.

“I only heal the body. The mind…that’s another superhero. The work is without end.”

The Halo said, “How are you? You seem…disturbed somehow…”

“There are things I pick up,” The Corpus began. “I have the luxury of collecting data without inventing the technology to collect it. Yet the mountain has to be climbed before one can reach the top. Science exists only to act out the truth. Ancient conversations are happening between here and the sun. We are still learning with each planet. Each one is different. Yet technology seeks to make us all the same. Everything is passworded and encrypted. People are over-teched. They mistake the toy for the function of play. They’ve lost the way. They need to be taken back to the elements. To retribution. To atonement. To abasement. To commitment. To obedience. And they want it. They seek it. They’ll always need somebody like me to give it to them.”

JKM looked over at the Halo then each other. They didn’t know what to say so they kept their mouths shut.

“You,” The Corpus said, “I see on the news.”

JKM said, “Me?”

“You killed someone, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You beat a man to death.”

“Yes.”

“No,” the Halo said.

“No?”

“No. I did it.”

“You?”

“He said
he
did it to protect me. He did that for me. I’m sorry.”

The Corpus folded his arms, sat statue-still. He stayed that way as minutes passed, the two not knowing whether to wait or leave.

After ten minutes The Corpus said, “I do for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Not today. Tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“When?”

“Noon. At the falls in Brutalia Park.”

“There?”

“We need enough water for this.”

“In public?”

“If you want privacy no one will watch. It will be too gross for people to watch.”

“…Okay.”

“Okay…”

“Now you can leave me alone.”

The two stood. JKM took the Halo’s hand, got them moving away. She stopped looking back, fell in beside him.

“Know what?” he said.

“Yeah I know what. We’re scared.”

“He is scary as fuck.”

S
iren Syndicate seldom sold street shit, superior shit solely: Siren Six. It was aspirational. Not for proles. Only the upscale could afford it. Not for kids unless you were a kid with a black card. Not worldwide like Playground 14, but stronger yet healthier. Plus the brand was cooler. The Siren Syndicate was style and sex while the OSD was military-issue and fascism. Siren Six also put AXIS in the style war.

To break a new social drug you started in the clubs and got it trending. The hottest clubs were the red carpet for the drug trade. On that red carpet Ryan Seacrest didn’t ask “who” you were wearing, he asked “who” you were doing. The cool kids said
AXIS
. The club floors stayed packed, the beat sweaty, a sea of tweeked-up bodies hopping and bouncing. After the Siren Syndicate opened their stores inside the hot clubs, the following nights went supernova. Tourists circled the building looking for superheroes, paparazzi snapped them.

People wanted a piece of them. Wherever they turned flashbulbs popped them. Cameras stole their essence and put it on the Internet. The store was ground zero for celebrity dirt. The tabloids sent their young vultures to pin them down for questions, maybe get past their bouncers and score something off the record. Sirens bought them drinks to get them drunk, maybe drop a Ruthie to knock them out and move them to the recycling bin. The next day they’d wake up inside a dumpster.

If there was a Playground 14 presence, you out trended 14 until it looked like MySpace. You trended VIP. You were a gangster now. Club people knew who to buy and who not to buy. When the OSD didn’t like that, they started sending enforcers to the clubs. Knowing they couldn’t take on the Siren Syndicate in full force, they tried to get to them isolated, hijack one. All it took was one Siren to break the Syndicate and their problem was over. Still six Sirens swung solo. No AXIS protection for them, The Carousel drawing the line at participation, AXIS taking zero cut, AXIS offering zero support. The Sirens only had each other.

New people started showing up. Trending were Asian males in track suits. Outside a club three of them were waiting for Sailor Star.

“We are OSD.”

The other two track suits closed in around her cutting off any exit. There was a silence where nobody moved. Their Chinese faces hardened.

“Our people need to talk to you. You come with us please.”

Sailor Star said, “Thanks, but you guys don’t look promising.”

“You come with us for thirty minutes please.”

“Back off.”

“You come by choice or not by choice, you come.”

“Back off, OSD…”

“You’re coming with us.”

“Meanwhile all this is on TV,” she said. “Look.”

They looked across the street at the paparazzi shooting them. Sidewalk space cleared around her as the Chinese guys suddenly walked.

Now the Sirens were looking for Chinese guys in track suits. Next time it happened inside the club. Six Chinese guys collected around Kafka Kardashian. They were the first three guys with a new three guys. They zeroed in on her, collected.

The man got in her face. “You need to come with us. This time no way around it.”

The man raised a hand, took hold of her arm just above the elbow joint.

She shot a signal to her guys. When the Sirens ran a store in a club, they dominated until club staff took their orders, obeyed every twitch of their whims. From three directions, a tide of steroids hit the floor, moved on the six Chinese for a group bounce. She refilled her champagne glass, graded the Chinese guys. Her guys had better jiu-jitsu than their guys. It took two minutes to clear them from the floor, bounce them down the rear stairwell. By the time they reached the gravel two of them were unconscious.

The next night over the beat a cluster of male voices went up. Two Brazilian guys in the face of one of the bouncers, the three yelling. The two Brazillians were dressed like Ali G, the bouncer a super heavyweight with a shaved head. He looked like a pro. He looked like he could take the other two as they buzzed in his face like flies on a water buffalo. The verbal brawl spilled off a basketball court, went NYC versus Brutalia, U.S. versus Brazil, went louder, seconds from the first level of violence. Mermaid Gangster watched from a nearby booth. She was tuning up a Siren Six pixie with her first pixie pop and the distraction was giving her a headache.

She said to the pixie, “I’ll be right back.”

Mermaid Gangster went over to them.

“Do me a favor,” she said. “Cool it.”

One of the Brazilians said, “Stay out of it.”

The Pro turned to her. He had a booming, sandpapery voice: “I got this.”

“Then handle this.”

He looked her up and down. “What are you–the Siren Syndicate?”

She nodded.

He said, “Nobody told you, girl, but you’re nobodies.”

“We’re big in Japan.”

The other of the two Ali G’s said, “Yo, bitch, go somewhere else, bitch.”