Other People's Heroes (The Heroes of Siegel City) (3 page)

I didn’t notice it at first, but as the whistling sound rose and fell, I started to feel minor peaks in energy -- like the rush was starting to creep up on me. With each minor scale in the energy I redoubled my concentration. Finally my eyes were beginning to hurt and I was ready to
throw
the blasted thing just to get it to move. I didn’t listen to the whistling outside, paid no attention to the crescendo of a human body hurtling through the air at supersonic speeds. I paid no heed at all to the fact that it was getting louder and louder and I was feeling stronger and stronger.

Two things then happened at once. The first is that the whistling got so loud, so intense that Flambeaux
must
have flown directly past my window. I could hear this, even though I was paying no attention to it.

The second thing that happened was, as the whistle reached its loudest point, a massive burst of flame erupted from my eyes and charred off the top of my desk. My concentration broke immediately -- in part because the flames were threatening to burn my face off -- and I fell back in my chair.

The fire alarm went off just as I flopped out of my cubicle shouting incoherent syllables with the intent of alerting people to the situation. “Fire! Gha! Cubie! Fire!” were my exact words. Fortunately, between this and the four-foot wall of flames that was roaring behind me, Sheila was able to translate the message.

She grabbed the fire extinguisher and rushed into my cubicle. There was a spitting sound and the light was replaced by smoke. Sheila came back out and shoved the extinguisher in my hands.

“Some hero,” she chuckled. Crisis averted, the rest of the staff was returning to work. This sort of thing happened
far
too often around here.

“No, come on, I s
wear
. I was trying to move that damn quarter again and... the quarter!” I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into my slightly-used work area. The top of my desk was black and burnt, except in the center. There, puddled on the desk, were the molten remains of twenty-five American cents.

“You see
that
?”

“I’m proving my point! I
know
I’ve got something going on!”

When we made it to the roof we could see Flambeaux smoldering at the top of Barks Plaza across the street. Deep Six’s partners in the Spectacle Six had arrived, and he was getting a lift from the robot called V3OL.

“Look! I’ll bet I can send up a flare.” I thrust my hand towards the air and started thinking
hot, heat, fire, flame
... even
mad
and
angry
when nothing else worked.

“Josh, you look like an idiot.”

“Did Edison look like an idiot when he invented the light bulb? The Wright Brothers? Eins
teeeaaaaaiiiigh!”

The scream wasn’t of pain, but of shock -- my hand was rocketing away into the air. I didn’t go
with
it, mind you, I stayed right there on the roof. Nor did the hand separate itself from my body. Instead, my arm stretched out to a length of at least twenty feet. The flesh hung in the gap like overstretched taffy.

When I realized what was happening, I shouted even louder, falling back into Sheila’s arms. She didn’t catch me, though. Instead I puddled through her fingers into a gooey mess on the roof.

“Josh! Josh, what’s going on?
JOSH!
”

Taking a deep breath (and feeling my lungs inflate like balloons) I tried to imagine myself whole again, 44-inch waist and all. I thought of myself as
solid
as
human
as
complete.

And when I managed to stop panicking, I felt my body pull itself back together, and I was
me
again.

“Oh God, Josh, what the hell
was
that?”

“I don’t know what’s going on, Sheila. I don’t. I--”

As I rambled, a purple-gloved hand stretched up onto the roof, pulling behind it an overly-long individual, wadding all over the place like mint and purple Silly Putty. As he stretched up onto the roof and solidified, we managed to place him as another of the Spectacle Six, DoubleGum Man.

“You people shouldn’t be up here,” he said. “It’s not safe. Get back inside the building and let us handle it.”

“Right,” I gasped, feeling that same old rush and, at the same time, feeling my knees turn to jelly -- literally. “We’ll... we’ll get downstairs.” I grabbed Sheila and headed for the door, just as DoubleGum bounced away towards the rumble. Once we were back inside, the door slammed behind us. I dared to test my limbs, flexing all my muscles and waving my arms around. They were solid. I was normal.

“Josh, what’s going on?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” I shouted. “Sheila... it’s
happening.
I’ve got
super powers
.”

“But so
many
? Teke-bursts and fire and stretching and... Josh
nobody
has powers that diverse, they say it’s
impossible.
”

“That’s not it, Sheila, don’t you see? I don’t have
any
of those powers.”

“I just
saw
you stretch.”

“But I can’t do it
now
. And I could only do the teke-burst while Dr. Numbskull was in the room, and that fire thing only worked while Flambeaux was
right outside the window
. Don’t you
get
it?”

“Get
what?
”

“
That’s
my power. I can duplicate
other people’s
powers, so long as they’re nearby. It’s like I’m... I don’t know, picking up on ambient energy or something. Man... if I could get around a big, mess of heroes at once I’ll bet I could do
anything.
”

“Well... what
are
you going to do?”

I felt another rush this time... not the one that meant I had powers welling up on me... one of pure adrenalin. And I gave her a smile to indicate I knew
exactly
what I was going to do.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she said.

CALLING HOME

I spent the rest of the day shopping, getting materials together for my uniform and facing more than a little ridicule from Sheila in the process. I was ready to put the whole thing together, but there were a few things I was more than a little curious about -- and for all my reporting skills there was always one method of information gathering I turned to when all else failed.

“If you’re calling to remind me of your birthday next month, I’ll have you know I already got your present, so you can just stop hinting around, mister. And no, it’s not as good as the Defender footie pajamas you got when you were seven, so you’ll just have to lump it.”

“Nothing like that, Mom.” I had her on speaker phone so I could work with the laces and accessories I’d bought while I talked. “I was just sort of wondering about... things.”

“What sort of things, honey?”

“Well... I had a normal childhood, didn’t I?”

“Let’s see, your father was creep, you nearly died in a fire, you were saved by a Cape... I guess you’d call it normal in a ‘Daytime Talk Show’ sort of way.”

“No, I mean... did anything really
bizarre
ever happen to me? Or did I ever
do
anything really bizarre?”

“You used to pour 7-Up in your chicken soup before you ate it. Does that count?”

My cat, a plump tabby, tried to hop up into my lap as I spread out my tunic. He looked up at me with big, wondering eyes (wondering, no doubt, if what I was working on was food and, if so, how was he going to get some). I called the cat Achilles. To this day I don’t know what he called himself, but he certainly never responded to his given name.

“Down boy,” I said.

“What?”

“Not you, mom. I can’t really say that’s what I’m looking for. I never... I dunno, started to float around the room or got bathed in some kind of highly-experimental radioactive fluid, did I?”

“Josh--”

“Mom, I’ll cut to the chase, am I the product of a top-secret government conspiracy?”

She gave me the sigh that let me know I had gone too far. “Josh, I
know
you’ve always wanted to be a superhero. I blame your father.”

“Dad never said anything to me about superheroes.”

“Your dad never said much of
anything
to you, that’s why you adopted guys like Lionheart as surrogates. I promise you, Josh, you have led a perfectly normal life, utterly devoid of radiation baths, magic spells and alien abductions. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“Maybe you could
be
one, right?”

“If this is the last time I hear from you before your birthday, you don’t
get
a present.”

“It’s a deal, Mom.”

After the line was disconnected, I wiggled into the half-finished uniform I’d been stitching. It was exactly as I’d envisioned it. “Well, Achilles?” I asked. “What’s the verdict?”

“Meow,” he observed.

“My thoughts exactly.”

PATROL

You write about superheroes long enough and you learn that the first thing, the most
important
thing any new hero needs is a good costume. Something proud and strong. Something that makes a bold statement. Something that strikes fear in the hearts of evildoers and inspires awe and respect amongst the peace-loving general populace.

I turned back to the full-length mirror Sheila had in her apartment and ran my eyes along the improvised get-up. Wisely choosing to eschew the tights, I’d elected for black trousers and boots and a pair of black leather gloves. My domino mask was the same royal blue as my tunic and a line of gold trim formed the initials “GP” on my chest. I’d topped off the whole ensemble with a black trenchcoat -- partially to give myself a more imposing look and partially in the hopes that any evildoers I ran across would find it distracting enough not to notice they were being jumped by a 250-pound reporter.

“I think it looks pretty good,” I said.

“You look like a dork,” she reiterated.

“You know, my mother always says that clothes do
not
make the man.”

“Your mother is far more forgiving than our editor will be if you turn in a story about some geek in a trenchcoat with gold laces.”

“I’m not going to
write
about this! A reporter who’s really a superhero and turns in stories about
himself
? How unethical would
that
be?”

To be perfectly honest, I kind of
felt
like a dork, too, but there was no way I’d admit that to Sheila. Instead I just flexed my leather-clad fists and said, “Open the window.”

“The
window
? For
what
?”

“So I can go on my first patrol.”

“Josh, you’ve read way too many comic books. What happens if you come across a mugger? Or a bank robber? Someone with no powers for you to duplicate? You could get killed.”

“So I only go after Masks. No non-powered opponents.”

“Oh,
that’
s better. Now it’s between you -- a novice with
no
clue as to what he’s doing -- and people who have dealt with these abilities every day of their lives.”

“Come on, Sheila. It’ll be a massacre.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

Frowning at her skepticism, I went and opened the window myself. I had already scrambled halfway out onto the fire escape when I felt her warm hand wrap around my arm.

“Josh, just... be careful.” She placed a chaste kiss on my cheek and gave my arm a squeeze. I smiled back at her.

“I’ll be fine,” I promised.

To my chagrin, I soon found that “fine” was a relative term. Usually the urban superheroes without some method of flight or propulsion carried cables and grappling hooks that allowed rapid transportation from rooftop to rooftop. In
my
case, what you had was a fat guy scrabbling up and down fire escapes with a pair of binoculars banging against his chest. I wasn’t going to be instilling fear in any crooks anytime soon, but I was hoping I’d at least have them paralyzed with laughter long enough to leap down and take them out with their own powers.

Remembering what Sheila said about a bank robber, I decided the primary place to survey on my patrol would be the First National Bank. Two fire escapes and a pulled shoulder muscle later, I decided that was way the hell too far away and I’d go to the Fourth National Bank instead. After nearly slipping on a ladder and falling to a grisly death, I cut my losses and held patrol over a nearby ATM.

I sat on the fire escape glaring at that ATM for about three hours -- most of which I spent trying to concoct a story to feed to Sheila to avoid ridicule: “Well there I was, surrounded by Herr Nemesis and the Tantric Trio, when I remembered Aura’s weakness to magnifying glasses...”