Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (40 page)

His lunch had arrived an hour ago, but it lay beside him uneaten. It was decent fare; most meals came with potatoes or bread, and a good range of fruits and vegetables: tomatoes, peas, apples, bananas. He was having trouble summoning an appetite, but he knew he should eat. The winds of fate could change quickly, and you had to be ready to put up sails. He prodded a tender spot in his top gum with his tongue, and reached for the tray.

It wasn’t a noise that alerted him, so much as a feeling of presence. He smiled. “My dear Dr Oppenheimer, I was beginning to think you had forgotten me. You never write, you never visit.”

Something struck his cheek, and his head snapped around. Purple spots swam through the darkness, accompanied by lightning bolts of pain shooting through his bones. He tried to reach out, and realised he’d fallen onto his side. Blood filled his mouth. He pushed himself up on shaky arms. A hand closed around his throat and pulled him the rest of the way.

“Where is my nephew?” Frank Oppenheimer’s voice hissed in his ear.

Morgan couldn’t speak if he wanted to. His windpipe screamed in agony as Frank’s palm crushed it, and his lungs started to burn. The purple spots returned, the only colour in a room of black. For a moment, his confidence slipped, and doubt entered his mind.
He’ll kill me if I’m not careful
.

The hand relaxed, and air rushed in to fill the void in his lungs, along with the scent of Oppenheimer’s sweat. Spasms wracked Morgan’s chest, and he coughed again and again.

“Where is he?” Frank demanded again.

Something slammed into Morgan’s stomach, and the coughs doubled in intensity. “Frank,” he managed to gasp before another coughing fit struck him.

“Tell me where Sam is!”

“I will,” he choked out. “Don’t…don’t hit me again.”

He waited for another blow, but it didn’t come. He forced himself to take deep breaths, suppressing the spasms in his throat. Frank’s hand had left him. He wanted to curl over and vomit, but he suppressed that too.

“Sam’s safe,” he said when he could speak again. “He’s fine.”

“Where?” The voice was coming from his other side now. Omegaman could still move silently, no matter his age.

“I figured you’d come, Frank. I’m glad we finally have a chance to talk. I always admired you.”

The noise that came from Morgan’s right was more of a growl than words. “Why? Why did you do this?”

“Because someone had to.”

He could feel Frank moving around the cell. He wondered if the man was in costume.
If it still fits
. Omegaman used to have goggles that let him see in the dark, but even those wouldn’t be much use down here. You couldn’t amplify a photon if it didn’t exist.

“Did you know how powerful Sam could be?” Morgan said. The movement stopped. “You must have had some idea, or you wouldn’t have come to see your friend, the one who worked at Unity Corp.”

Frank grunted.

“I was surprised you fell for it so easily,” Morgan said. “But you were eager, weren’t you? A medicine to suppress metahuman powers. You couldn’t get here fast enough.”

He said nothing.

“Were you afraid Sam was going to go mad and try to kill you like your brother did? Or did you just want to spare him this life?” Morgan heaped scorn on the sentence. “Tell me, Frank, are you ashamed? Do you regret being Omegaman?”

“I’m ashamed that I share an origin with you, monster. With people like you to represent us, no wonder the normals hate us.”

Morgan laughed. “Oh, come now. You and I both know that supercriminals had nothing to do with what they did to people like us. Like many metas, I thought for a long time that it was economics. We were taking their jobs and doing them better. But it was more than that. We lost some part of ourselves. We didn’t fight this, because we didn’t believe in ourselves anymore.”

“Stalling won’t save you.”

Morgan prodded his sore gum again. It was becoming a compulsion. “I just want to make you understand, Frank. Do you remember that old saying? A hero’s greatest power is his mind. It turns out that’s true. Well, not the mind, but the brain. We did some research. There’s a protein that builds up in the neocortex of the brain, especially in more powerful metas, and especially in psychics. A collection of proteins, really. Your brother would have been swimming in it. Perhaps that’s what drove him mad.”

He made out the sound of steel leaving a sheath.

“The protein complex is incredibly elaborate, and unique to the individual. And recently, we discovered something very special. It retains an imprint of the meta’s powers, even when removed from the brain in question. Of course, this is useless for the most part, a curiosity. But there are ways of conducting a transfer. Ways of giving someone another’s powers. All you need is a powerful psychic stimulus, and a metahuman malleable enough to take the transfer. That part is the tricky one. Such a metahuman is exceedingly rare. It needs to be a tier zero meta. Someone like Sam.”

A palm slammed into Morgan’s sternum and shoved him back against the wall.

“Enough,” Frank said. A blade whistled as it cut the air. “Enough of your talking. You will tell me now. Where is Sam?”

“You were a scientist,” Morgan said. “I thought that bit of information might interest you. Maybe you’re out of practice. Should we should start with something simpler? Perhaps the sort of experiments children do in school. Do you remember the chemical reaction that you get from putting zinc and copper electrodes into certain fruits and vegetables?”

The point of a blade pricked his neck, but he didn’t stop.

“Potatoes and tomatoes, for example.” Morgan’s hand groped to the side, until it touched the metal tray. “The zinc is oxidised, and hydrogen gas is produced. And along the way you get a nice little flow of electrons.” He prodded the spot on his gum again, where the false tooth used to sit, waiting for this day. “The whole reaction only gives less than one milliamp of current, of course. But you know, it’s just enough to generate…” He pressed the tiny bulb into the tomato’s flesh, and it began to glow. “…a little bit of light.”

Morgan could see. And in the dim red light, he made out the realisation in Frank Oppenheimer’s eyes. Each time Morgan had done this over the last two days, he’d savoured every morsel of light he could drink up. Hoarding it. For just this occasion.

He smiled.

Oppenheimer was fast, but Morgan had surprise on his side. The blade of light he formed in his hand was a pitiful thing, dull, not much longer than a bread knife. But when he passed it across Frank Oppenheimer’s throat, it sliced through just the same.

The old man toppled. His silver dagger clattered to the ground. Morgan had to dart forwards to catch Oppenheimer before he hit the ground. Gently, Morgan lowered the ex-hero the rest of the way, while the man’s wide eyes stared at him. The spluttering was awful. Again and again Frank tried to take a breath, only to draw more blood into his lungs.

God forgive him.

“I’m sorry, Frank,” Morgan whispered. He cradled the man’s head in his arm and used his sleeve to wipe the blood from around Frank’s mouth. “I wish you could understand. I’m going to make a better world.”

The old man was looking at something Morgan couldn’t see. Oppenheimer’s eyes glistened in the dim light of the blade. His mouth made gulping motions, and his hands gripped helplessly at the grey and black fabric of his bodysuit. He was wearing his old Omegaman costume after all. At least he’d die as a hero. A small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.

Morgan waited with Frank until the man’s eyes glazed over and blood stopped squirting. The blood was all over Morgan’s face, he knew, but for once he didn’t concern himself with his appearance. There’d be time enough for that in a few minutes, when he’d gather his captured metas and escape this prison. But first, he had something to do.

Finally, when everything stopped moving, he laid Frank’s head on the cold concrete and shifted his weight. The headache was back, and it was trying to make up for the last two days. Morgan wouldn’t complain, though. The price was far cheaper than the one Frank Oppenheimer had paid.

“You deserved better than this,” he said to Frank. “We all did.”

He brought his blade down on Frank’s skullcap and began to cut.

Part Three

He aha te mea nui o te ao?

He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

What is the most important thing in the world?

It is people, it is people, it is people.

—Maori proverb

26: The Long Way Home

Battle Jack

Real name:

Jack Kingi

Powers:

Super strength, rapid healing.

Notes:

Noted close-quarters combatant and ranged weapons expert. Often operated as the Wardens’ shock trooper, distracting villains and keeping them occupied while the rest of the group manoeuvered into flanking positions, rescued hostages, disabled bombs, or achieved other secondary objectives. In 1957, supercriminal group the Syndicate uncovered Kingi’s secret identity and kidnapped his wife. Kingi was lured into a trap and executed.

—Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #0310]

The Carpenter was too heavy to carry, so in the end Niobe had to fashion a sled out of the bits of broken wood and drag him out of the meat works. She left Doll Face for the flies.

Once she got him to the car, she used the first aid kit to clean and dress the wound in his chest. She stripped off his shirt and did her best to clean off the blood. When she was done, she covered him with one of his spare cloaks he kept in the car boot and laid him down in the back seat. The car was a two-door, so it took her ten minutes of awkward pushing and pulling to get him in. The sun beat down on her, but she didn’t stop to remove her stained trench coat.

The wound in her thigh wasn’t bad. It’d stopped bleeding by the time she peeled off her bodysuit enough to expose it. She didn’t mind the stinging when she applied the rubbing alcohol. It’d leave a scar if she didn’t get stitches, but she couldn’t summon the urge to care. She covered it in gauze, wrapped a bandage around, and zipped up her bodysuit.

She didn’t know what time it was when she finally climbed into the driver’s seat. Her watch had broken sometime during the battle, but she guessed it was mid-afternoon by the look of the sun. Solomon had been driving last. When she had to pull the seat forwards so she could reach the pedals, she nearly broke down then and there.

She barely noticed the overgrown landscape as she drove south along the gravel roads. Every now and then she looked up at the sky, but she never spotted Sam. Logically, she knew she needed to find a phone, contact someone. People needed to know. But every time she passed through a village that looked like it might have a phone line, she kept driving.

When the Neo-Auckland skyline came into view an hour and a half later, it was no comfort. She thought about going straight to Met Div headquarters and trashing the place. No, that wouldn’t solve anything. Something dark was building inside her, and it needed a target, that was all. She had to stay calm. Cold. A shadow.

She turned off the northern highway and took the back streets to the Old City. Everything was quiet. A few people moved on the streets, utterly unconcerned about the world around them. They didn’t understand, none of them. Christ, she wished she was one of them.

After ten minutes, she pulled up outside their usual phone booth. How many times had she or the Carpenter used this phone?
Stop it.
She closed her eyes and forced the thoughts out of her head. She fished her cigarettes out of the glove box and lit one. Not even that helped. She turned to the Carpenter. She wished she could say that he looked like he was just taking a nap in the back seat, but that would be a lie. His cheeks had gone grey, his limbs were fixed in a way that no living human could replicate.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said around her cigarette.

By now, she knew Senior Sergeant Wallace’s extension by heart. She stepped into the phone booth and punched in the number, expelling a lungful of smoke as she waited.

“Yes?” a strange voice answered.

She frowned. “Where’s Wallace?”

“He has important business elsewhere at the moment. This is Constable Hinerau. Can I help you?”

“Yeah. Tell him if he visits a Schuster Meat Solutions up north he’ll find the supercriminal known as Doll Face. He’s dead. But that can wait. A meta called Sam Oppen…Sam Julius may be a risk to the public. He’s just a boy, and he’s not himself, but he is extremely powerful. I don’t think he’ll be hard to find. Tell Wallace that the boy needs to be taken into custody. But if Wallace harms the kid, he’ll have me to answer to. Tell him I’ll be contacting him again. Tell him I want to help him in this.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Uh…who can I say is calling?”