Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

by Chris Strange

  “He’s going out, I suppose?” a woman’s voice came from the doorway.

  Niobe turned away from the old superhero memorabilia to find Kate watching her from just inside the doorway. Solomon’s wife clung to beauty even in her forties. Despite the late hour, her blonde bombshell hairstyle was perfect. She had her arms crossed over her nightgown, with a small silver cross around her neck. The look she gave Niobe was the one she’d come to expect, a kind of cold disapproval.

  Christ. Niobe had just wriggled out of one argument. She sure as hell didn’t want to wind up in another.

  “Yes,” Niobe said. With her goggles in place, Kate wouldn’t be able to see her eyes, and she was glad for that. Most people would be creeped out if they saw that Niobe’s eyes were charcoal black all the way across, but Kate wasn’t most people. The woman had a gaze that could crack rocks, even if she wasn’t a meta.

  The silence stretched between them. Niobe could never work out if Kate disliked her because she put Solomon in dangerous situations, or because she thought Niobe was shagging him. She didn’t suppose it would help to tell her she found him about as attractive as she found any man. Kate probably wouldn’t be any happier to know her husband was running around with a lesbian. It had taken Solomon long enough to come to grips with that himself. He was old-fashioned that way.

  Kate opened her mouth to speak, and it didn’t look like it was going to be pleasant. But by some miracle, Solomon chose that moment to come back into the room. “Oh, there you are, dear,” he said to Kate. He must have sensed something, because his back stiffened. He glanced at Niobe, then back to his wife.

  Kate turned her icy stare on her husband. Niobe recognised that look. It was the same one Gabby gave her during their argument an hour ago. Kate’s lips twisted as she studied his new attire. He’d exchanged the pyjamas for full costume, and Niobe wondered if he was as grateful for his mask as she was for hers.

  The Carpenter’s outfit was all forest greens and autumn reds. A new hat—sleeker and more modern than the tattered one on the wall—sat low across his eyes. A brown half-mask left his mouth uncovered, and a cloak hung over his left shoulder, stretching down to his elbow. Poking out the bottom was the handle of his hatchet, hanging from a loop in his belt.

  The costume still fit well. For some reason, it was the only thing she saw him in that ever seemed to suit him. Anyone else would look ridiculous in something so damn rustic.

  Too bad his appearance did nothing to improve the mood in the room. It was lucky Kate’s looks couldn’t kill. More than one person had lost limbs from their superpowered spouse’s misdirected eye beams.

  “I’ll get the car warmed up,” Niobe said. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and squeezed past the couple, while Solomon did his best to look anywhere but his wife.

  Superpowered combat and interdimensional alien attacks she could handle. But there was no way in hell she was putting herself into the middle of a marital spat. She’d had enough of that already.

  3: The Night Belongs To Me

  The Pilgrim

  Real name:

  Gordon Whitman

  Powers:

  Teleportation.

  Notes:

  The youngest member of the Manhattan Eight. When the radiation of the Los Alamos explosion struck him, he became metahuman and instantly teleported to Santiago, Chile. He was consequently assumed dead until several weeks after the incident when he returned to the US. Although he occasionally engaged in direct combat, his main role in the Manhattan Eight was to insert other members into danger zones.

  —Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #0008]

  Solomon finally emerged from the house a few minutes later, looking calm but walking a bit too briskly away from the front door. He got in the passenger side and glanced at Niobe behind the wheel.

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to let a woman drive,” he said.

  She pushed back the lapel of her trench coat to reveal the butt of her gun. “Try feeding me that line again. Try.”

  He grinned and pulled his hat low over his eyes. Niobe took a swig of water from her canteen, then pulled the choke out and gave it some pedal.

  The car was a black 1949 Ford two-door sedan. Or it had started out that way. Gabby had made so many modifications to the thing Niobe doubted there was an original piece left. The dashboard was outfitted with a dozen knobs and levers for gadgets that might come in handy. A police radio scanner was tucked under the dash on the passenger side, tuned to the local Met Div frequency. It was silent now. A little strange, but not entirely unexpected. Few metas got themselves into trouble with the law these days. They must’ve been smarter than her.

  The streets were deserted. They made their way out of the Old City the usual way, taking the barely-policed route through the bomb-damaged streets to the east and then travelling south past the Mangere Inlet. The roads looked worse than they were. The cracks and collapsed buildings that remained in place nearly two decades since the bomb hit turned the route into a maze if you didn’t know where you were going. But it was navigable, if bumpy, and kept them free of checkpoints.

  Officially, metas weren’t forced to stay in the Old City. They were still human after all, and could go where they pleased. But probable cause wasn’t hard for the coppers to manufacture, and if Niobe and Solomon got caught driving around after nightfall where they weren’t welcome, a quick search would turn up a dozen things that weren’t strictly legal. Her gun, for one, not to mention the road tack deployment system in the boot of the car. But the checkpoints and police dirigibles were well to the west, so the law didn’t bother them.

  The Neo-Auckland skyline cut a jagged line through the night. The guys who’d designed it had been fond of tapering towers and spires that glimmered even in the darkness. Above the streets, the upper highways and monorail tracks swooped between apartment buildings and offices, suspended on the impossibly thin support struts originally conceived by the metahuman Green Tornado. Billboards dotted the skies as well, advertising Coke or the new electric Toyotas or rocket-plane trips to the sunny Gold Coast. And in the middle of it all, the Peace Tower stood tall, its spire piercing the sky; a monument to the destruction of the Old City, and a promise of something greater.

  Thinking of the Old City brought her mind back to Gabby, and the argument. Gabby always worried when she went out on a job, and lately it had been getting worse. Niobe tried not to bring her work home with her, but it was never enough to keep the pain out of Gabby’s eyes.

  “Are you all right, Spook?” Solomon’s voice snapped her back to reality. “You’re quiet, even for you.”

  Niobe blinked and cleared her throat. “Yeah. Fine.” She nodded outside, to where the lawns and trimmed hedges of the Neo-Auckland suburbs gave way to a pair of three-storey department stores and a long shopping mall. Past the dress and shoe shops, a sleek white tower stood between elevated monorail tracks. “That’s our man’s hotel.”

  “Hotel? He doesn’t live here?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t want us to know where he lives.”

  A row of manicured trees divided the road in two. They drove beneath coloured banners that stretched across the street, proclaiming a Christmas sale at a toy store. It wasn’t even December yet.

  The shops were all shut, of course, and the moving footpaths had been switched off for the night. Niobe pulled the car off the main street and parked it down an alley a block from the hotel. Even the alley was spotlessly clean. It looked like some poor bugger had scrubbed each green rubbish bin until it shone.

  Niobe activated the car’s security measures—you could never be too careful—and they strode down the footpath together, Solomon’s shoulder cape billowing in the breeze.

  A tall silver birch stood guard beside the Starlight Hotel, the base of its trunk ringed by a low brick fence. The hotel’s revolving door faced the street. It’d be locked at this hour. Through the glass came dull orange light, probably from a lamp. She touched the le
ver at the side of her goggles, switching the magnification. She could just make out the silhouette of the night-shift clerk at the front desk, her head nodding.

  “Our man’s in four-oh-eight,” she said in a low voice. She stepped back and counted off the fourth floor balconies. “That one there.”

  “I take it asking politely isn’t an option?”

  She buttoned up her trench coat and smiled beneath her mask. “Race you there.”

  She sucked in a lungful of warm night air, held it, and relaxed her body.

  Then she spread out in all directions like an ice cream melting in double time. Everything became thin, two-dimensional. Sight disappeared, replaced by a sense of position and an awareness of the minutest traces of light reflecting off surfaces.

  She never really liked becoming a shadow. It made her feel so flat. Incorporeal. She was a slave to every bump and crack on the surface.

  Still, it had its uses.

  She shot along the ground and turned ninety degrees as she hit the wall. There was no sense of up or down as a shadow. There was only the surface. She flitted up along the outer wall of the Starlight hotel, passing balconies and feeling the roughness of sealed paint beneath her.

  Dimly, she registered the noise of the silver birch creaking and groaning as the sound waves generated tiny vibrations on the tower surface. She paused for a moment to turn her attention back to Solomon. She could just make him out, a fleshy surface against a concrete one, gripping the end of a long low-hanging branch of the tree with one hand, his feet spread wide on the ground. Then, with another crack of groaning wood, the branch swung upwards, sending Solomon flying into the air. Another branch further up rotated and bent down like a friend offering Solomon a hand. He grabbed it and let it pull him back up, flinging him to the next branch.

  If Niobe still had a mouth, she would have smiled to herself. He was getting on in years, but he still knew how to move. She raced up the side of the Hotel, matching him inch for inch.

  The Carpenter could bend wood to his will, use it as a weapon if he wanted. But his real control came over trees and bushes that still had life in them. While a pure telekinetic meta was limited to bending things and hurling them around, Solomon had a kind of kinship with wood-based plants. He said he could sense things from them, talk to them in a limited capacity. Occasionally it came in useful, but trees didn’t tend to be very coherent or observant. They could tell you what the weather was like a few days ago, or when something blocked their light, or if a possum was stripping their leaves. But if you wanted to know if a bad guy had been past, they were as silent as a mobster in a film noir.

  She slipped under a balcony to avoid the light from a street lamp and crossed to the opposite side. She could feel Solomon’s heavy breathing as he heaved himself up in one last leap.

  She got to the balcony of 408 and drew herself back together. Her body and clothes reformed and her normal senses returned. It took less than a second. Quietly, she let out the breath she’d been holding.

  Solomon landed next to her a moment later. “Call it a draw?”

  “You wish, Carpenter.” She peered through the double French doors, but the inside was dark. No movement that she could see. She tried the handle with a gloved hand. Locked.

  Her set of lock picks were nestled in her inner coat pocket, but she didn’t need them. The doors didn’t sit well in their frames. She ran her fingers down the crack between them. It was enough.

  She held her breath and shifted back into shadow form. In an instant, she’d slipped through the crack and reformed herself on the other side. A minor thrill ran through her heart as she crouched and peered around the hotel room. The teenager in her had never got over the excitement of being where she shouldn’t be.

  She could make out a couch and a dining table with four chairs, but only a single one was out of place. Next to the table, a room service trolley sat. She sniffed. Roast chicken. Better than the beans and stew she’d cooked for dinner. A television rested in the corner. Supposedly the Americans all had colour TVs by now, but New Zealand was still broadcasting everything in black and white.

  Satisfied they were alone, she unlocked the balcony door and let Solomon in. He hesitated before entering. She knew the part of his brain trained in Sunday School got anxious whenever he trespassed with her. He preferred the straight-up-and-down fights. Too bad there weren’t many of them going round anymore.

  Still, Niobe was no criminal. You had to have a code. Breaking in to a place was all right, as long as you didn’t take anything or do any actual breaking. You couldn’t own the space inside a building, not really. The night belonged to the shadows, and the shadows belonged to Niobe.

  Niobe signalled with her fingers and crept forwards. Solomon’s footsteps came behind her, only slightly louder than hers. Battle Jack would’ve been useless in this line of work. He tended to get confused when confronted with a situation he couldn’t either punch or shag his way out of.

  Bed springs creaked. Niobe threw out a hand, gesturing for Solomon to stop, but he already had. Something scraped against carpet in the next room.

  Niobe padded silently to the corner of the hotel lounge. We were so quiet. She’d once had an entire fist fight with Black Collar five feet from two of his security guards, and they’d never heard a whisper. So how the hell had this guy heard them?

  A walking stick appeared from the open bedroom door and rested on the carpet, followed a moment later by a foot.

  “I know you’re there,” the man said, “so your options are to leave or try to fight me.”

  The accent was American, educated. Interesting. Not many Americans came out to this part of the world. Not since the AAU was formed, anyway. She breathed, calming her heart.

  The man took another step out. He saw the Carpenter first, silhouetted as he was against the balcony doors.

  “Well?” the man said. He spread his legs and raised his cane.

  Niobe flicked on the lamp in the corner of the living room. The man squinted and blinked against the sudden glare, but he didn’t let his guard down. His hands didn’t even shake. Doubly interesting.

  She put him in his sixties. His cheeks sagged and the top of his head held nothing but liver spots. The little hair he did have clung to the sides of his head, a ring of black and grey. He hunched a little as he stood, but not, apparently, from fear.

  “You’ve got keen ears, Frank,” Niobe said from the corner, recalling the name Gabby had given her. “Or is it Mr Frank?”

  The man kept his walking stick aimed at the Carpenter. Solomon could rip that stick from the man’s hand and beat him round the head with it, but he wouldn’t. Not unless the man attacked first.

  Frank’s startlingly blue eyes caught a flash of light. “What is this? Have you come for me too, now?” He was soft-spoken, but his voice didn’t tremble.

  “We haven’t come for anybody,” Solomon said. “We hear you’ve got a missing person.”

  Niobe nodded. “We’re in the business of finding missing people. Amongst other things.”

  Frank narrowed his eyes a little, his gaze darting between them. “You’re metas?”

  “Nah,” Solomon said. “We’re a pair of wandering freelance circus clowns. You don’t like the outfits?”

  “I’m Spook,” Niobe said, “and the smart-arse is the Carpenter.”

  “The Carpenter,” the man said. He lowered the stick a fraction. “I remember your name.”

  Solomon grinned at that, but she cut him off before he could get too excited. “Time’s an issue here, Mr Frank.”

  “Frank,” he said. “Just Frank. Frank Julius.” He dropped the cane to his side, but he didn’t seem to put much weight on it.

  “Frank, then,” she said. “We like to stay under the radar. That means we want to be gone before dawn. Now, do you have a case for us? Or were we mistaken?”

  He studied them for a moment, then turned his gaze to the purple veins running across the backs of his hands.

  �
��The people I talked to said they would get the word out,” Frank said. “I just expected a little more notice.”

  “And miss all this fun?” she said.

  The man frowned. “Couldn’t you have called first?”

  “That’s what I keep telling her,” the Carpenter said. “But does she listen?”

  “What my partner means to say,” she said, shooting him a look, “is that we like to know who we’re dealing with. Keeps us safe.”

  The man nodded slowly. He seemed to be weighing his options. It didn’t surprise Niobe. He looked out of his element, conducting shady business like this. This hotel was nice, and sure as hell not cheap. Offering them a job might be the most illegal thing he’d ever done. It might be the only illegal thing he’d ever done. But there was desperation in his face. She knew there would be even before she got here. If he was coming to them, it meant the police wouldn’t or couldn’t help him. He could have even gone to a normal private eye, since he seemed to have cash to burn. But there were some things only a meta could do.

  They didn’t get job offers from normals very often. The crackdowns in the early ’60s still lingered in people’s minds, when offering jobs to metas could get you a prison sentence if you were unlucky. But maybe he was old enough to remember the days when superheroes kept the world safe. Maybe that was what she could see stirring behind those blue eyes.

  “My nephew,” he finally said. “My nephew is missing.”

  His voice was steady, but his eyes were focussed on something else.

  “You got a picture?” she asked.

  “What?” he said.

  “A photo. Of your nephew.”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes. It’s in my suitcase.” He turned went back into his room.

  Niobe shot Solomon a glance. She pulled him aside and lowered her voice. “Does he seem familiar to you?”

  “Can’t say he rings a bell.” He grinned. “Maybe you saw him at the pictures or something. All Yanks are film stars nowadays, right?”