Other People's Heroes (The Heroes of Siegel City) (12 page)

ISSUE SIX

WIRING

I’ve always believed that a lot of the way people behave is instinctual, especially in split-second cases. Some people are simply programmed to react a certain way in a given situation, no matter what they would normally do if they had time to think about it. Some people are constructed to flee from danger, some leap in face-first. Some will risk their lives without thinking and others just freeze to the spot.

This doesn’t make them good or bad people, you understand, any more than the quality of a car’s wiring makes the rest of it any more or less functional.

I’ve got a point to this. It wasn’t
me
that saved that kid’s life. It was my wiring.

The truck was inches from his face, zooming in my direction, and he was too terrified to move -- not that it would have mattered, human beings aren’t built to move as fast as he would have needed to get out of the way.

Without taking an instant to think it over, I charged the kid with momentum -- but not to the right or the left. Even using LifeSpeed’s powers I
couldn’t possibly have moved him fast enough to even clear the truck’s massive grill that way, it was just too close. Cutting the gravity and hurling him up wouldn’t have done any good, either, that would have only resulted in the paramedics scraping him off the windshield instead of the grill. The momentum I threw into that terrified boy with the familiar face was going in the
same direction as the truck.

The kid jolted off his feet and hurled through the air, keeping pace with the truck well. I gave him bit more momentum, increasing the gap between him and the cab to a few feet rather than a few inches. Whenever I saw an opportunity to hurl him away I’d need to have the clearance at the ready. In the meantime, I rocketed myself down the street, next to the truck, and managed to match the kid’s position and speed. To my perceptions, it looked like he was simply hovering in front of a still cab as the world zipped past us.

“Don’t worry!” I shouted to the screaming boy. “You’re gonna be fine!” I looked up into the cab, boring my gaze into the driver. “Stop the truck!” I shouted. “Stop the damned truck!
Stop!”

The driver stared at me with a confused look. He couldn’t see the kid from his angle and had apparently decided the absence of a “thud” meant I’d pulled the boy free somehow. Over the wind and the groaning engine, he couldn’t hear a word I was saying. I began hurriedly looking for any potential landing spot for the kid, there would be no time to do this delicately.

Across the street we were coming up to a vegetable market. If I could send the kid into the lettuce bin or something it might just cushion the impact. The avocados and apples scared the hell out of me, though. Now if only I could only find a break in the traffic...

As the kid and I lined up with the lettuce bin a green Subaru in the other lane cleared it. There was about four empty feet of space before the next car, a red Jeep whose driver was looking somewhat perturbed.

Four feet at about forty-five miles per hour. It would have to be enough.

I cut off all forward momentum for both the kid and myself, simultaneously shoving him across the street as hard and as fast as I could. My vision was cut off as the truck that should have pulverized him raced past. There was a screeching sound and the cars in the other lane roared to a stop in a domino effect, with more than one fender-bender down the line.

The truck cleared my vision just in time to see the lettuce bin across the street collapsing in on itself, leaves being sprayed into the air, The tomatoes and cabbage on either side tumbled down on the boy and for a quick, horrible second I imagined the headlines: “SHIFT A MURDERER, BOY TOSSED INTO SALAD.”

And then he sat up. He was scratched and scraped. He was probably bruised a little from the impact. But he was in
one piece.

As soon as I knew he wasn’t dead I felt a twang deep in my core. I’d actually done some honest-to-God superhero stuff. Now
there
was a Rush I hadn’t prepared for.

It wasn’t until I knew the kid was safe that I realized two things. First of all, Particle had been shouting at me through my earpiece during the entire ordeal. Whatever he’d been shouting before, though, had been replaced by shouts of “Woo-hoo!” and “That was
spectacular!
”

The second thing I noticed was that I was too far from the bank to feel Rushes from either Flux or any of the Six-ers, but I was still using LifeSpeed’s powers, which meant he had to be nearby, following. As it turned out, he was directly behind me, apparently having changed into his costume, with the kid’s horrified mother and brother in tow. All three were wearing looks of total amazement on their faces.

“I surrender?” I offered.

“You... I was...” LifeSpeed was babbling. As he struggled to figure out how to delicately arrest a man who had just pulled a ten-year-old back from Street Pizza Heaven, in full view of a city’s worth of witnesses no less, a crowd began to form. He finally managed to compose himself. “I happened to be in the area and... and... what the hell did you
do
?”

“I think he saved my son’s life,” the mother said, understandably stunned. After all, I
was
the guy she’d just watch rob a bank (and I suddenly hoped that one of the Spectacle Six had retrieved the money bag I’d dropped rather than some upwardly-mobile passerby). But I had just rescued her son, who wouldn’t have even been
in
danger if not for the direct actions of one of our
protectors.

With traffic ground to a halt the four of us -- LifeSpeed, Mom and bro and myself -- made our way across to the stunned kid with no problem.

“Kid wouldn’t have been in danger if it weren’t for
him
!”

“It wasn’t his fault!”

As we approached the child, one of the more vigorous critics of my performance started to find small objects he didn’t require. A soda bottle glanced off my back, and when I looked up again I saw a rock zooming for me. His aim was off, though, and it angled in towards the mother. She didn’t see it coming. I could have just cut its inertia, but I was getting pissed. Remembering my trick with Fourtifier, I sent it back at the thrower, sped up the molecules and allowed the rock to fall, puddling on the ground, splattering onto a couple of people who ventured too close.

“That’s enough!” LifeSpeed shouted. “The situation is under control!” He got us to the boy’s side, ignoring the bizarre mixture of rants and accolades. Mom, of course, got there first. “Tom? Tommy, are you all right?” She pulled him from the rubble, brushed a lettuce leaf from his hair and clutched him to her chest like a helium balloon trying to escape. The fear in her voice was slowly being replaced by relief.

“I’m okay,” Tom said, still a little unsure of what happened. “I can’t see very well, though.”

“Your eyes will clear up,” I said. “I’ve been zapped by First Light before.”

“Is that
Shift
?” Tom asked, squinting at me. “Did
he
save me?”

“Yes,” his mom said, “he did.” Then she looked up at me, still unsure how to take all of this. He looked a bit like his mother, I realized, and she looked even more familiar than
he
did.
“Why?”
she asked.

My mind scrambled for a moment, finally settling on something I vaguely remembered hearing in a movie once. “Hey, lady,” I said. “I’m just a crook. I’m no killer.”

“Come on, Shift,” LifeSpeed said. “You’re going in. Maybe I can get you some leniency... um... you know, considering.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” I held out my hands and prepared to be led away.

“Mr. Shift?” It was Tom. “Wait a second, please, sir.” He pulled his trading cards from his pocket and started to shuffle through them. “Darn it,” he said, squinting, “I can’t--”

“Wait, let me, squirt,” his brother said. He looked through Tom’s cards, finally pulling one out and holding it up to me. “I think he wants you to sign it for him.”

The three of us tall enough to ride a roller coaster were momentarily stunned. After a few seconds, though, Mom regained her senses. She dug into her purse and produced a pen.

I glanced at LifeSpeed, who raised his eyebrows in a “hell if
I
know” expression. Still feeling a little strange about it, I took the card and pen, scribbled the word “Shift” on it, and gave them back.

“Thanks, mister,” Tom said.

“Uh... yeah, Tom. Anytime.”

We started to push our way through the developing crowd, me playing the part of LifeSpeed’s prisoner. “Clear the way!” LifeSpeed shouted. “This guy’s got a one-way ticket to jail! Clear out!”

The sight of me being led by a Cape seemed to galvanize the audience against me. “Yeah! Get him out of here!”

“Damned menace...”

“Better off with ‘em
all
in jail.”

But I still noticed, for every three or four adversaries I had in the crowd, there was at least one person who didn’t seem quite convinced that LifeSpeed was leading away the right combatant.

As we moved along and the people began to keep their distance, LifeSpeed leaned forward and whispered, “The others have calmed First Light down and returned her to the tower. The money is already back in the bank.”

“Good,” I whispered back. It was like he’d read my mind.

“That was some stunt, rookie,” LifeSpeed said. “Morrie isn’t going to like it at
all
.”

“Morrie isn’t the one who would’ve had to live with a child’s death on his conscience when he could have done something to save him.”

“Whoa, relax! I didn’t say I
agreed
with him. You did
great
out there today.”

“Yeah,” LifeSpeed said. “That’s how it
should
feel.”

We walked in silence for a few more moments.

“Do you think you could teach me that melting trick sometime?” he asked.

REPRIMAND

I don’t know exactly what I expected when LifeSpeed returned me to Simon Tower, but it certainly wasn’t the reception I got. We walked into the lounge amidst a barrage of applause, cheers and catcalls. It was like I’d just won the Miss America pageant, while in actuality I felt like I’d bombed out in the swimsuit competition.

Particle was the first to actually approach me. “Well done, Josh.
Well
done! Any veteran here couldn’t have done any better.”

“Are you kidding? That kid could have been killed.”

“But he
wasn’t,
” Hotshot said. “Not only did you save the kid, but you gave Siegel City a show it’s not going to forget anytime soon. That’s how the game is played, pal.”

“Yeah,” I grumbled. “Where’s First Light? Is she okay?”

“In her quarters getting ‘purified’,” Flux said. “Morrie’s already talked to her.”

“And he’s going to want to talk to
you,
” LifeSpeed said. “Relax here for a while, I’ll try to gauge his mood for you.”

LifeSpeed left and the mob of Capes and Masks dissipated amongst a flurry of pats on the back and trumpeting praise. Bit by bit, people returned to what they were doing before my celebrated entrance, but they were still coming up to me one-on-one, some of them with a simple “Good job,” some whispering how they’d always wanted to do that sort of thing but Morrie wouldn’t have liked it. Even the ever-cheerful Icebergg grumbled out, “I guess ya did okay.” Then my muscles began to water on me and I felt my flesh sag. Even my head hurt a little, like someone had shoved a bag of water up there. I knew who it was.

“Hey Gunk,” I said.

“Hello, my boy.”

“You... you heard about my little... adventure?” Maybe it was because I felt my body turning to mush, but I was started to get some major heebie-jeebies every time I encountered the Gunk.

“Quite the attention-grabber, laddie-buck. I knew you’d be one to look out for, I have an instinct about these things. I
knew
you would be one of those rare supra-normals that electrifies the mundane populace from the moment of your debut.” He laughed. “Why, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if a series of Shift action figures were rushed into production post haste.”

“Yeah... thanks.” It was like holding a conversation with a thesaurus, armed with a copy of
See Spot Run
. I needed out of this situation. “Um... Gunk?”

“Yes, son?”

“Would you mind... going somewhere else? I get... I mean... no offense, but... I get kind of...
slimy
when you’re... you’re around.”

“Oh! My deepest apologizes, lad.” He gave my disintegrating shoulder a fraternal squeeze and a mushy pat. “I should have realized the detrimental effect my particular energy-signature would have upon you. I’ll leave you alone. Again, well done, Joshua.”

As my body returned to its previous semi-solid state, I tried to force a little clarity back into my skull “God, I
hate
when he does that.” I grabbed my own shoulders and squeezed them a couple of times, just to reassure myself that they were again as firm as they’d ever been.

Flambeaux and Deep Six were next. With his flame turned off, Flambeaux was a very pleasant-seeming fellow with a wide grin and a shock of white hair. Deep Six was still in his costume -- a diving suit complete with a bronze dome helmet that covered his entire face, but I assumed the twin brothers would be identical.

“Pretty good, fella,” Flambeaux said.

“Yeah, that was sweet.” Deep Six’s voice was hollow and resonant in the helmet. “I’d never have tried anything like that myself.”

As they wandered off, the next member of the sudden Pro-Shift Society came up to me. “Hey there, Goop,” I said. As I’d noticed back at the Arena, he wasn’t affecting me. As soon as his boss was around I took on the consistency of runny Jell-O, but I wasn’t getting an erg of power from the second-string Gunk.

“Um...” I said. As unnerving as the effects of the Gunk’s powers were on me, the Goop’s
lack
of energy was starting to make me even
more
ill at ease. I tried to sound pleasant. “So... you heard about the kid, huh?”