Other People's Heroes (The Heroes of Siegel City) (2 page)

“You okay, mister?” asked another of the now-clean bystanders who’d just been bathed in Gunk’s body. “You want me to call an ambulance?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. And I was. I felt perfect again already. “Besides, I’ve got to get upstairs.” Scrambling to my feet, I rushed into Simon Tower.

When I stepped out of the elevator onto the observation deck I was greeted by a man in a pit-stained white shirt and suspenders. His tie was crooked and his scalp was flaking out a few clumps at a time onto his snow-covered shoulders. I maneuvered myself upwind of him so as not to inhale the smoke drifting from his cheap cigar. As a publicist, the guy was awe-inspiring.

“You Cordwood?”

“
Cor
wood,” I sighed. “Mr. Abadie?”

“Yeah, that’s me. The Doc will be here in a minute. Here’s yer press packet.” He handed me a red, white and blue folder with Dr. Noble’s insignia on the cover. Inside was a press release, a profile and about half a dozen staff photos, mostly headshots. There was only one full-body shot, and it wasn’t even a photograph -- it looked like Abadie had hired a comic book artist to draw it.

“Where
is
Doctor Noble?”

It was actually more like ten minutes before the Doctor showed up. After a few aborted attempts at conversation with the great publicist, I used the time to review the press packet. I’d read the information a thousand times, but I went over his again. Dr. Noble had been an ordinary MD before his alien abduction some years back. He managed to feign unconsciousness as he was taken into some spacecraft, and watched as the visitors began their experiments. Somehow (the press packet was vague on this point) he managed to escape the aliens’ clutches, free his fellow captives and pilot the spacecraft back to Earth. He was the only human left on the ship when he set the engine to self-destruct. Instead of killing him in a dazzling display of self-sacrifice, though, the alien energies gave him superpowers, including flight, telekinesis and limited electromagnetic manipulation. Endowed with these abilities, he embarked on a neverending battle for truth, justice and all the rest of it.

The next release in the packet was concerned more with his accomplishments since donning his tights for the first time: kidnapping victims saved, one-man rescue operations in the wake of natural disasters, terrorist attacks averted and a nearly endless list of Masks he had brought to justice. Photon Man, I noticed, was conspicuously absent from the list.

“Standard stuff,” I said out loud.

“It is in
my
life, son,” said a commanding voice. I turned my attention away from the packet and looked up to see the man who had just landed on the roof. He was broad-shouldered and the red and white cape he wore draped down from his mask. Wrapped in the colors of the flag, he stood erect, his jaw tilted upwards, with a smile that indicated he knew some great secret, some mystery of the universe that had never occurred to anyone else. I looked at Abadie and, in two words managed to convey the awesome respect and grandeur I felt at that moment.

“He’s
fat
,” I whispered.

“Hey, neither of us is gonna get a call from the Mister Universe competition either, pal. Just ask him your questions.”

Okay, I was a 44-inch waist and in no danger of going down. But at least I was
proportionate
. The weight was fairly evenly distributed, so I just looked like a typical, jolly fat guy. I’d even played Santa Claus a few times. Noble, on the other hand, had a slim, svelte frame with a distended belly that seemed to indicate when he wasn’t putting the bad guys behind bars he was throwing back a few brewskis with the Arrow Ace and Silverfish.

This was the first time I’d made contact with one of our superhuman protectors since Lionheart rescued me thirteen years before, so I was going to take advantage of it. I extended my hand and he took it in a firm grip. When we shook, I felt that rush again, that excitement, that burst of energy I’d gotten during my rescue.

“Wow,” I said.

Noble grinned and an errant ray of sunlight sparkled off his teeth. “I get that a lot,” he said.

POWER

About five minutes after I got back to the office there was a tap at the entrance to my cubicle. A head poked around the corner with a warm, welcome smile. “Hey,” she said, “How did the interview go?”

Sheila Reynolds, my copy editor at
Powerlines
, was a cute brunette with deep brown eyes. I’d considered asking her out when I was new at the magazine, but she seemed to be perpetually torn between our star reporter, Scott Elliott, and the solar-powered hero, Spectrum. In fact, she often suspected Elliott and Spectrum and being one and the same, until someone pointed out to her that Elliott had a beard and Spectrum didn’t. She finally gave up on it.

“Right. I admire guys who do the right thing just
because
it’s the right thing. No thought of reward, no ulterior motive... that’s my kind of hero.”

“…shortly after I single-handedly put away the Bloodsucker Gang I returned to the homeworld of the aliens that originally gave me my powers and liberated their slave class from the aristocratic
bourgeois
elite which I learned has been manipulating governments on Earth for some time now. I drove them all away by turning the Washington Monument into a giant negatively-charged magnet but this suddenly left Earth without some vital energy programs, so I rounded up all the villains I could find with electrical powers and used them to power the entire town of Luling, Texas for six months. Well naturally they gave me the key to the city which I later used as bait in the ingenious trap I set for Colonel Coldsnap and his Refrigerator Rangers--”

I shut the recorder off. “The entire fifteen minutes was like that,” I said. “One long, rambling run-on ego-stroking session. I have
no
idea where to insert the punctuation marks in his quotes.”

Sheila left and I turned my attention back to the interview. I was contemplating turning the story into an attack piece, but that wasn’t really my style. Besides, I’d promised Abadie approval. While I sat there trying to figure out how to make him look like less of a self-absorbed cretin, I felt that same rush
(could it be adrenalin?)
I’d gotten when I met the caped bozo on the roof. Even before I turned my head to see him hovering there, I knew I would find Dr. Noble outside my window.

I raised the glass. “Can I help you?” I asked.

“Morrie forgot to give you this. It’s my favorite.” He reached out and handed me an 8 by 10 glossy of himself, a full body shot. He was lean in this photo -- you could count his abs if you wanted to, and my immediate reaction was to assume it had been retouched. Then I saw a billboard in the background featuring a cigarette mascot that had been retired six years ago and I suppressed a chuckle. The guy was using outdated publicity shots because he couldn’t keep himself in shape.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll--”

“
Where’s Elliott?”

There was a sound like a wall being ripped apart and the partitions that made up my cubicle began to tremble. I tried not to worry -- when I got the job I was warned that irate super-villains had a tendency to show up at the office hunting reporters who made them look bad, although this was the first time since I’d been there that one of them was tearing up
my
floor.

Before I even left my chair, Noble blasted in through the window and flew into the hall. I followed just in time to see him catch a rather satisfying blow to the jaw, sending him tumbling.

“Where’s that slimeball Elliott?” shouted his attacker. A shock of blonde hair fell across her eyes and she brushed it back with one blue glove, finally allowing me a good look at her masked face. It was Miss Sinistah, late of the Malevolence Mob. My mental reporter’s file clicked to her entry -- she’d been part of an illegal program to genetically enhance athletes, but it was only a partial success. She had highly increased strength, endurance and durability, but the more the used her powers the weaker she got and had to resort to periods of almost no physical activity to recharge. Still, when fully energized she was invulnerable, super strong... and
shorter
than I’d imagined.

“
You!
” She grabbed me by the front of the shirt and lifted me into the air. “All right, big boy, where is he?”

“Stop trying to cover. He’s hiding, right? He
knew
I’d be coming after him for that piece he wrote about the Mob. We were
never
brought in by that milksop Lionheart! I never even
met
him! I’ll rip his
arms
off when I--”

She was only halfway through the rant when the sudden burst of energy broke us apart. I fell safely to the floor and she went crashing into a cubicle wall, making it collapse on Danny Cardigan from the graphic design department.

“What was
that
?” she spat out as she scrambled to her feet.

“It looked like Noble used his telekinesis to break them apart!” Sheila shouted.

Sinistah grumbled. “How is it somebody
always
has the time for expository dialogue during these fights?”

Her next announcement was cut short when Noble slammed into her. I pulled myself to my feet and half-walked, half-stumbled to the stairwell. I wasn’t concerned about the fight, Noble would catch her. Those guys
always
did. All I wanted was for the rush to fade, which it did as I put some distance between myself and the superhumans.

It was logical to accept Sheila’s explanation, just as it was typical of a winning fella like Noble to take credit. But she was wrong, I knew it. The whole time Noble had been there, I’d felt the rush. When Sinistah showed up, it lanced upwards on me, and I felt stronger than ever before.

Then, when she insulted Lionheart -- a genuinely
good
hero -- I’d felt a veil of anger like I’d never experienced. And when that happened, something inside me exploded.

The teke-burst that bowled over Miss Sinistah didn’t come from Dr. Noble. It came from
me.

ISSUE TWO

ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

How many people ever stare at a quarter? I mean really
stare
at it? Do they wonder why Washington is facing the left instead of the right? Why it looks like he’s not wearing anything but that stupid bow in his hair? I didn’t think about any of those things either, until I spent the better part of an hour staring at a twenty-five cent piece that night, trying to make it move with my mind.

“It’s just sitting there,” Sheila observed.

“I
know
it’s just sitting there,” I hissed. “Maybe it’s a magic quarter or something.”

“Yeah, there are lots of those in circulation.”

“Hey, we’ve seen stranger things. In this office. Today. Sheila, I
know
I fired off that telekinetic burst this afternoon.”

“Doctor Noble did that.”

“That overstuffed moron couldn’t hit anything that didn’t come from a keg.
Move
, dammit!”

“Maybe you should try being polite to it.”

“Oh be quiet.” I slapped the quarter away and it rolled under the desk. “Maybe it needs to be sparked by anger or something.”

“You’re not mad
enough
at it?”

“
You’re
getting on my nerves right now. How do you feel about being a guinea pig?”

Sheila sighed and planted a light, sisterly kiss on my forehead. “Aw, Josh, sweetie, we all know how bad you want to get into the game. Heck, that’s why most of us came to work here in the first place. But sooner or later, you’re just going to have to accept that it’s not going to happen, okay?”

“Hey, Sheila,” Danny said, poking his head into my cubicle. “We’ve got a rumble in the streets between Deep Six and Flambeaux. You might want to pull out those files to prep the story.”

“Okay, Dan. Where’s the rumble, anyway?”

“Right outside. I think Flambeaux read Scott’s last column.”

“I
tell
him to think before he writes that sort of thing. Later, Joshie-bear.” Sheila patted my hand and left me alone.

“Darn quarter,” I mumbled, fishing in my pocket for another one. I cleared everything else off my desk, sweeping it into my already-cluttered top drawer, and placed the quarter dead center. As I concentrated on it, I heard a whistling sound outside -- Flambeaux used his fire powers to make himself lighter than air. The result was, he could fly, and apparently he was doing so right outside the building. I didn’t catch this yet. I was staring at the damned quarter.