Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (30 page)

“She’s irrelevant.”

“No,” John said. He shot a glance at Obsidian, standing motionless a few feet away, then turned his eyes back to Morgan. “I think she’s the catalyst. She helped make you who you are. You didn’t mention her in the file, but her presence is everywhere. It drives you.”

Morgan tried to smile, but it felt like a grimace. “You think you understand me now, John?”

The reporter nodded quickly.

Morgan brought the blade to the man’s chin. “Explain it to me.”

John licked his lips, and his eyes drifted towards the ceiling. “After the massacre at Cambridge, you fled the country. Made your way through Europe for a few years.” He screwed up his eyes, thinking. “Maybe you met Lisa somewhere there.”

“Rome,” Morgan said. “We met in Rome.”

“You fell in love. She was a normal. She…she didn’t know what you were, probably. Not at first. You began to forget, as well.” Morgan could almost hear the man piecing the fragments together. “But eventually she found out.”

He could still remember the look on her face, the way her lips twisted in disgust. They were in Madrid. It was warm that evening, so she wore a golden summer dress as they made their way back to their hotel. He was so busy drinking in the sight and smell of her that he didn’t notice the thugs until they were on them.

They were metas, but too weak and stupid to be real supercriminals. Morgan offered them his wallet, but that wasn’t what they came for. One of them clubbed him down with a blackjack, and then they started in on Lisa, eyes leering and filthy hands going for the straps on her dress.

Morgan left them alive for Lisa’s sake. Well, he assumed they lived. The ringleader, a black-haired Spaniard with a basic electricity manipulation power, was losing a lot of blood from the stumps at the end of his arms.

John interrupted the memory. “Uh…there was a transcript in the files. The letterhead said it was from the Metahuman Control branch of Interpol. The witness’s name was blacked out, but it was someone who knew you intimately.”

Morgan closed his eyes and nodded. “She was just scared.” He’d spent nearly a decade trying to convince himself of that. “The propaganda machine had done its work, and I became a monster in her eyes.”

“Interpol turned her. They worked out who you were. She led them to you. And you—”

“That’s enough,” Morgan said. The blade’s glow turned orange, like fire.

Her blood was hot when it left her. For a moment, her cheeks had been the same brilliant pink as when they made love. Then they turned grey, like the rest of her.

Morgan felt Obsidian’s footsteps as she approached. “My lord?”

Electricity ran through his forehead. His head felt so tight he expected the arteries in his temples to burst. No. He wouldn’t have another seizure. Not in front of the reporter.

He breathed deeply, trying to calm his mind. Slowly, ever so slowly, the pain and flashes of light subsided, retreating back to the part of his brain that kept his demons caged. His blade of light had disappeared. He couldn’t remember letting it dissipate.

“My lord?”

He blinked away the fog, until the permanent black splotch was the only thing that clouded his vision. John was staring at him, his forehead damp and his round face pale.

Morgan forced himself to stand up straight and return his hands to his side.
Perception. It’s all that matters.
God, this had been going on for so long.

His muscles seemed to creak when he put a smile on his face. “You’re on the right track, John. You have one more chance at this story. Don’t disappoint me.”

He turned and left without waiting for a response. He thought he heard the reporter choke out a gasp of hysterical laughter, but by then Morgan was too far away to hear if it turned into sobbing. With his handkerchief, he wiped the sweat from his brow.

Obsidian caught up to him in the hallway. “My lord.” She paused, as if struggling for words. “That…emotion. It is unlike you.”

The incident at the TV studio flashed back to him, where he had allowed himself to be goaded by Iron Justice in his cage. He waved away the statement and the memory. “That isn’t your concern.” He checked his watch. Nearly midday. “Have you heard anything from Tinderbox?”

“Yes, my lord. A transmission came through just before you called me to deal with the reporter. It is done.”

He breathed deep and forced himself to smile. It was all going to work out. John would figure out what needed to be done. And now Morgan had reinforcements, of a sort.

“You have command of the base, Obsidian. I’m going to meet our new friends.”

As the dusty road rolled past, Morgan listened to the car radio. As he expected, the Prime Minister and the AAU had both been quick to refuse to comply with his demands. Frank Oppenheimer had yet to show his face, but that was no surprise. The time would come for that. In the meantime, there was one more thing he had to do before he moved into the final phases of his plan. His heart felt tight at the thought of being so close. The strain of all this was taking its toll on him. The interference of Spook and the Carpenter had convinced him to accelerate his plan by a few days. He’d given the authorities thirty-six hours to liberate their metahuman prisoners. That time wasn’t yet up, but there was no point waiting for something that was never going to happen. So he took the prisoners himself.

Finally, after more than an hour of gravel roads and the rumble of the car engine, Morgan’s driver slowed and took a turn into a long, narrow driveway. They were eighty or so miles outside of Neo-Auckland, on an old farm that had been abandoned and half-swallowed up by thick forest. As the Honda sedan topped a rise, several figures came into view at the end of the driveway. The freed prisoners slouched against the corrugated iron of the shed or prowled through the tall grass amongst the sheep droppings. He studied them, trying to judge their powers.
Yes. They’ll do.

His driver slowed to a stop in front of the prisoners, a cloud of dust riding in on their coattails. Morgan forced a smile onto his face as he stepped out. Gravel crunched beneath his shoes. He should have eaten before he came; he’d forgotten to have breakfast with all the excitement. It wouldn’t do to have his stomach rumbling when he was trying to make a good impression.

Most of the metas were trying to look tough, which almost amused him enough to take his mind off his headache and his earlier outburst with John. These metas were small-timers, punks and thugs who had played at being supercriminals. A few were strong, even stronger than his people, but they were untrained, and more importantly, undisciplined. An albino with fists the size of Morgan’s head and arms to match spat through the gap in his teeth, his thick eyebrows pulled down in a look of barely-disguised disgust.

Compared to the prison break in Siberia, this had been a cakewalk. The police had stepped up security on the small facility since his attack on the TV studio. It hadn’t been enough. His man on the inside of Met Div, Daniel O’Connor, was suspended, but that didn’t stop the police officer gaining access to the prison.

O’Connor stood off to the side of the metas, dressed in his blue Met Div uniform. A gas mask hung around his neck. He was an ugly fellow. His dark sideburns fell along the sides of his wide face.
A foul man
. Still, he knew how to move, and he knew how to fight. He nodded as Morgan approached him.

“Any issues?” Morgan asked.

O’Connor shook his head. “They let me right in the front door. I slipped your little gas canister into the air conditioning, and everyone but me got pretty drunk.” He tapped the gas mask hanging around his neck. “Then I just let Tinderbox and the rest of the lads in, and got these bastards out. Easy. No deaths, and not a shot fired.”

Tinderbox and the four metas in his team stood around the prisoners at equally-spaced intervals, watching. They were outnumbered three-to-one by the prisoners, but none looked uneasy. In any case, the threat of force wouldn’t be needed to keep the prisoners in line much longer.

“Good work,” Morgan said, and he shook O’Connor’s hand. “Oh, I nearly forgot.” He reached into his pocket and slipped the Met Div officer a thick envelope. “For your troubles.”

O’Connor grunted and took the envelope, and Morgan moved away to examine the prisoners.

Most of the thugs tried to look uninterested, but their eyes drifted towards him. There were televisions in the prison facility, he knew. They’d seen him.

He smiled broadly and raised his arms to greet them. “My brothers. And sisters,” he added to a pair of lithe twins reclining against the shed, both sets of eyes crackling with green lightning. “Thank you for meeting me. My name is Quanta.”

“What kind of name is that, huh?” one of the prisoners called. “Look at those shoes. Prince of Faggots, more like.” The rest roared with laughter.

Vulgar creatures,
he thought.
But at least they have fire in them.
The smile never left his face. Slowly, the hoots and hollers subsided.

“I’ve come to see if you can be of use to me and my organisation,” Morgan said. “I’m sure such fine people as yourselves would be delighted to change the world forever.”

“Go fuck yourself, cocksucker,” one of the twin girls said. “We ain’t joining no one.” The other prisoners added in their jeers. Again, he waited for the noise to die down. They were having trouble keeping up their defiance under his gaze. Pathetic.

He strolled amongst them until he was standing in front of the twins. He smiled at the one who had spoken. “Such a filthy mouth on such a pretty face. But I’m afraid you misunderstand me. We’re full up at the moment with better metahumans than yourselves. So our organisation does not have any vacancies, as such.”

They stared at him with blank looks on their faces.

“There is one opportunity available,” he said. “But the chances of career advancement are, sadly, nil.”

Their faces were still twisted up in confusion when he drew up his blade of light and cut the first woman’s skullcap off.

One minute later, it was done. A few prisoners had scrambled to their feet in time to try to put up a fight, but they were slow. Now their blood soaked into the soil, and their bodies lay amongst the sheep shit.

He’d lost his appetite. His shield of light had kept the blood and flesh off him, but he could still feel it all over him. He wanted a bath. He could have had Tinderbox or the others do the butchering, but that wouldn’t be right. Their deaths served his plan, so the blood should be on his hands.

Even O’Connor and the others were quiet, their eyes carefully sliding over the bodies. While Morgan caught his breath and went back to the car to retrieve his bag, O’Connor and Tinderbox approached him.

“Why?” O’Connor demanded.

Morgan took his bag and made his way back to the bodies, O’Connor and Tinderbox keeping pace beside him. “Why did I send you in to get them out if I was just going to butcher them?”

They nodded.

“Sometimes, the dead have more use than the living.” He crouched and rolled one of the bodies over. Leaning close, he examined the spot where his light blade had sliced the top of the prisoner’s skull off. The slice was so clean he could make out the tiny network of fibres that ran through the bone. The blade had partially cauterised the brain matter as it passed through. The smell of cooked brain tissue was not unpleasant, which only made it all the worse.

He brought up a thin layer of light around his hands to keep the gore off his gloves while he took a small specimen jar from his bag. With a tiny, scalpel-like blade of light extending from the tip of his index finger, he sliced out a marble-sized chunk of brain and dropped it into the jar.

When he turned back, Tinderbox’s flames had dropped to candle-strength and had a sick, green tinge to them. O’Connor turned and spat. Morgan smiled.

“If this makes you ill,” Morgan said, “gather your team together and congratulate them on a job well done. Then have them dig us some graves. O’Connor, you’ll be staying here with C team. Prepare the airship. I’ll be in touch in a few days.”

O’Connor nodded. Tinderbox swallowed and retreated to the rest of the metas, who stood huddled and whispering. After a moment, Morgan let the strained smile drop and moved onto the next body.

If the dead cared, they didn’t complain.

19: The Last Domino

I was on the eighteenth floor, getting dangled out the window by Suicide Prime, and I figured I was a goner. The coppers couldn’t do a damn thing. I was looking down on all the sirens and flashing lights below, and the crowds looked back, trying to get a good view for when I got splattered on the footpath. And then I saw her. Madame Z. Christ, she was a beautiful lass. She came floating up outta nowhere, just floating in thin air. Without breaking a sweat, she blew Suicide Prime away with some kinda psychic blast and magicked me safely back inside. It wasn’t right what everyone said about her when they found out she was a dyke. She can screw the Circuit’s robots for all it matters. She was the best damn hero I ever saw.

—Witness report from the Doom Corps hostage crisis, 1955