Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

by Chris Strange

  Hayne tightened his grip on the girl’s nipple, and she tried to slap his hand away. Laughing, he gave her one last squeeze before releasing her. She rolled away from him, dropping her glass to the wooden floor.

  Hayne let out a noise that was half-grunt, half-sigh, and drained his glass. Holding his hand up in front of him, he frowned. “That’s a hell of a wine,” he slurred.

  “Think about it. No animal has ever been discovered with superpowers. Only humans are affected.” He swilled his wine. “Hero or criminal, I believe all metas became metas because they have something in common. No meta’s subconscious—his id, as it were—is content to just let life happen, to ‘go with the flow’, as they say. They shape themselves, and then they shape the world around them. They all share one deeply-held belief, a belief so buried they might not even know they possess it.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Carpe omnia.”

  Hayne doubled over, clutching his head in both hands. “Carpey what? Morgan, I ain’t feeling so good.”

  “I know.” Morgan lifted up the couch cushion and pulled out the object he’d concealed there before he went to the bar. It was white and shaped somewhat like a small handgun, with a needle encased within a cage in the barrel. “Although sometimes I wonder whether you were ever truly ‘good’, William.”

  “What you talking about?” Hayne tried to stand up, but he collapsed to the floor on his hands and knees. The two Thai girls were motionless now, aside from the slow rise and fall of their chests. They would have bad hangovers for a day or two, but the drug he’d slipped into the rice wine wouldn’t do them any serious damage.

  “Never mind,” Morgan said. He flipped the safety switch on the gun, and the needle protruded out of the protective cage. As he brought the injector gun down towards Hayne’s bulging neck veins, he exhaled. “Just remember what you used to be.”

  But before he could make the injection, his muscles froze. What? What’s happening? Dimly, the realisation came to him. His disease. No! Not now. Morgan’s limbs tensed of their own accord, sending little bolts of electricity through his body.

  Then white hot pain shot through Morgan’s head. A scream tore through him as his vision went red and spotted. For the love of God, not yet. His head swirled like a merry-go-round, and the injector dropped from his hand. His hands and arms curled, muscles seizing. No!

  He wrenched his eyes open, and a metal-plated fist collided with his jaw. A new wave of pain crashed through him. He flew back and smashed into a table, breaking it in two. His brain scrambled to deal with the twin assaults, both internal and external.

  “You son of a bitch,” Hayne’s voice growled through the fog. “What the hell did you do to me?”

  Morgan forced his eyes into focus. The pain in his brain was receding, the nausea passing. Cold sweat poured from his face. He’d thought that was the end of him. The final gasp of his illness.

  Time. He had none left, and so much more to do. So much more to set in motion before the end.

  He locked his gaze on the man stumbling through the room towards him. Hayne was still going, still moving, despite the incredible dose of the drug racing through his system. Only it wasn’t Hayne anymore, not really. The man who stood before Morgan bore scales of steel across his entire body, like they’d grown from his skin. His eyes glowed red, and his knuckles were slick with Morgan’s blood. He was a human tank, built for destruction.

  He was Iron Justice.

  Every muscle screaming, Morgan forced himself to his feet. He’d miscalculated how much sedative he needed to slip into the wine to immobilize Hayne. The man had got fatter and, if possible, more muscled since his retirement. There was a tranquilizer in the injector gun to finish the job. But first he had to get the needle into three hundred and eighty pounds of steel-plated metahuman.

  So be it.

  Iron Justice charged, swinging his armoured fist again. Morgan was ready for it this time. He swung to the side and brought up a shield of solid light. The punch glanced off, and Iron Justice overbalanced, falling forwards. If the ex-hero had been sober, Morgan knew, that blow would’ve killed him.

  Morgan kicked off a couch to change direction and slammed back into Iron Justice, using a wall of light to shove the man further off balance. Justice stumbled, groaning, and went back onto his knees.

  No time to stop. He wouldn’t stay down long. Morgan leapt back and snatched up the injector from where he’d dropped it. The needle and vial were still intact. As Iron Justice lurched back to his feet, Morgan snatched up a lamp that had escaped the carnage.

  “Who are you?” Iron Justice growled.

  Morgan ripped the wires from the lamp and spread his legs. “I’m the man who’s going to damn the world.”

  Justice swung. He was too slow. Morgan ducked, dodged, and pressed the live wires against Iron Justice’s metal neck. Sparks flew and blue lightning arced across the steel scales. Hayne screamed.

  The metal plates of Iron Justice’s neck seemed to liquefy and retract as they fled from the electricity. A patch of skin a few inches wide emerged. It was enough.

  Morgan plunged the injector needle into Hayne’s neck and squeezed the trigger. The gun silently released its contents into the man’s bloodstream. His red eyes bulged. Morgan tossed the wires aside as Justice fell. The ex-hero didn’t even groan as he slipped into unconsciousness.

  Morgan panted, sweat pouring from him. That had been too close. His disease had nearly cost him everything. He shouldn’t have delayed all those years. So long he’d been healthy, content to plan and plot. But now, when it came down to it, he had no time.

  Haze and Tinderbox pounded into the room a moment later. They stared at the carnage for a moment, and Haze leered at the unconscious girls.

  “My lord Quanta,” Tinderbox said. “Are you all right?”

  Morgan stepped over the unconscious Hayne and adjusted the Thai girl’s singlet to cover her exposed breast. “I’m fine. Contact Obsidian. I think we’ll need her help to carry this one out.” He gave Hayne a light kick.

  Head pounding, Morgan picked up the bottle of rice wine. By some miracle it had survived the battle. Before he’d started drinking, he’d lined his stomach and oesophagus with solidified light. Later, he’d have to deal with the unpleasantness of vomiting the rice wine up so he could remove the light lining. But for now, neither the sedative nor the alcohol would affect him.

  Morgan stared at Iron Justice and raised the nearly empty bottle in a toast to the defeated hero. “Carpe omnia.”

  Tinderbox frowned. “My lord?”

  “Carpe omnia,” Morgan said again, almost to himself.

  Seize everything.

  6: A Word Between Friends

  Mr October

  Real name:

  Joseph Yager

  Powers:

  Psy-blasts, telepathy.

  Notes:

  Acted as the Manhattan Eight’s main spokesman and media representative. Yager was the only non-scientist member of the Manhattan Eight. Before the explosion, Yager was a soldier stationed at Los Alamos. Reportedly died of bowel cancer in 1951 and was buried in an undisclosed location. To this day, some claim his true cause of death was covered up.

  —Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #0004]

  Niobe hung up the payphone and stepped out of the booth. They’d had to drive for twenty minutes to reach the last working payphone in the Old City, but she wasn’t willing to use her home phone. It was this or drive back to the Starlight Hotel in the middle of the afternoon to talk to Frank Julius in person. That was out of the question. The coppers were still on high alert after the raid that morning. She supposed they feared a retaliatory attack for the death of McClellan, and a few years ago, that might’ve been the case. But the Old City metas had just gone back to their homes to gossip over what happened. All except Niobe and Solomon.

  “How’s our old friend?” Solomon leaned against the phone booth, munching on an apple he’d brought from his tree at home. “He get any more talkative
?”

  “No,” she said. To be honest, she hadn’t even tried to pry more information out of him. Anything she got would be half-truths and misinformation. She learned long ago, before she became a superhero, that if you wanted the truth, you had to hunt it down yourself. “But the job’s ours. I charged him our standard retainer. We get the balance when we get the kid.”

  “I can already taste that caviar and lobster. What are you going to spend your share on, Spook?”

  Niobe shrugged and lit up a cigarette. She hadn’t told Solomon what happened to Gabby, or her plan to leave Earth. It was easier that way. Solomon was a good friend, but he still believed in the world. He thought there was still a place for metas here. But Gabby was right. The longer they stayed, the worse it would get. A one-way trip to the Moon was just what they needed. It was the only place they could be free.

  After Gabby had run out of tears, she’d plunged herself back into some radio scrambler she was working on. The cut on her head was superficial, nothing serious. But that didn’t mean she was okay. She’d been mumbling in her sleep again, one of the few times she spoke. Whenever it happened, Niobe pulled her close and stroked her hair until the nightmare left her. It was the same nightmare Gabby always had. The day she lost her hearing.

  It happened before the Seoul Accord, when Gabby had moved to Sydney for a couple of years to do some part-time crime-fighting work as the Silver Scarab. Occasionally, she went into the field wearing a suit of armour she’d crafted herself, but mainly she provided logistical support. There was no machine in the world that she couldn’t coax into doing her bidding, no matter how badly damaged. Every machine had a soul, she insisted, a soul she could talk to.

  She’d been working late one night when the anarchist supercriminal Kiloton attacked her group’s base. The group was just a local initiative, poorly funded. They had no bomb-proof doors or advanced security systems, except for what Gabby had cobbled together. Kiloton and his flying bombs tore through the place. Gabby barely had time to suit up before he hit the main hall. A few civilians were inside, doing routine cleaning and maintenance work. Gabby tried to cover their escape. But she didn’t know Kiloton had maneuvered motorized bombs into position at the rear exit.

  She was in combat with Kiloton when she heard the bombs go off, followed by the screams. For a moment, Gabby had frozen.

  Kiloton saw his chance and tossed a grenade at her face. The armour prevented damage to her face, but the detonation blew out her inner ears. Kiloton left her for dead and continued his rampant destruction.

  It was months before Gabby could stand without falling over. The balance centres in her inner ears were damaged, but with rehabilitation, she improved. Her hearing never returned, though, and neither did her desire to be a hero. And then the world changed, and she wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to be a hero anymore.

  Niobe stubbed out her cigarette on the wall of the phone booth. She hadn’t told Gabby where she was going, just that she had to get onto the job. She couldn’t let her worry. The job was just something that had to be done. Otherwise, sooner or later, they’d end up like McClellan, dead at the hands of cape coppers. Niobe had avoided getting a kill switch, but Gabby had one. All it would take was one overzealous copper with the right radio frequency and Gabby would be lying in the street, the back of her head blown out, her blood leaking into the storm water drain.

  Niobe couldn’t let that happen.

  Solomon seemed to have picked up on her mood. With the help of some old friends, he’d got McClellan’s widow out of the Old City with a couple of hundred dollars. Hopefully the coppers wouldn’t have the resources for a full man-hunt. Anyway, they had what they wanted. Chances were the baby was already dead or kill-switched. Niobe swallowed. She had to save who she could. That was just the way things were now.

  Niobe got behind the wheel in silence, Solomon in the passenger seat, and they started on their way. Frank Julius hadn’t been willing to give them the answers they needed to track down his nephew. Usually they dealt with stupider people, ones who’d give information away while they thought they were being secretive. Photographs on the mantelpiece showing lakeside cabins where they kept their important documents, or an extra pair of shoes at the door that could only belong to a jilted lover. The clues were there.

  But Frank Julius was careful. Niobe tried to weasel some information out of the clerk at the Starlight Hotel when she called. After a sob story where she claimed she was Frank’s niece and his sister was sick, the clerk gave up the information he had. But it turned out to be little more than she already knew. The same name he’d given her—probably fake—and an American passport—another fake—was all the identification he’d left with the hotel. He’d paid in cash, and he was the only one staying in the room. That meant the kid had already been snatched before he took a room there. But other than that, they were in the dark.

  So now they had no choice but to go to more extreme measures to get information. The plastic bag in her pocket creaked every time she shifted gears. It contained a single hair, taken from the gold watch she’d examined in Julius’s room. The hair was short and brown, probably an arm hair. Frank’s body hair had gone prematurely white, and besides, the watch was too fancy to be something he’d wear. Despite his high-class accommodation, the man seemed to travel light and unornamented. Everything he’d brought with him had been simple, functional. The watch belonged to Sam. And so did the hair. Or so she hoped.

  The roads grew more damaged as they drove. They weren’t going south this time. They made their way east, deeper into the Old City. Through Greenlane and Remuera, and on towards Meadowbank. There was someone they needed to see, someone who could point them in the right direction. For a price.

  The surviving buildings became fewer and farther between, and uncleared debris lay scattered across the road. After the nuke hit Auckland back in ’51, not much remained standing. That was nearly a decade before the Seoul Accord, when the Americans were still in Korea eyeing up the Commies. The supercriminal Red Bear was flying around causing trouble when someone got the bright idea to fire a nuke at him. But they miscalculated. Red Bear deflected the bomb. Right into Auckland.

  The rest of the world seemed to think it was no big deal. Everyone was getting nuked in those days. Warsaw got it worse. That didn’t make it easier.

  As Niobe and Solomon drove closer to the sea, she spotted gulls perching on the surviving lamp posts. Solomon was as quiet as her. She knew him well enough to recognise his moods even behind a mask. He’d never say it, but the McClellan thing had rocked him. It had rocked both of them. They hadn’t been able to get the baby back. Hell, they couldn’t even convince Brightlance to help them out. We couldn’t even save one damn baby.

  She drove on in silence.

  They had to abandon the car after a few miles. The roads became impassable except on foot, so Niobe activated the car’s security measures and they continued on.

  She kept her eyes on the ruined houses around her as they walked. She didn’t like moving during the day. Too exposed. The Carpenter kept his wide-brimmed hat low as well, casting glances out from under his half-mask. He’d brought along a wooden quarterstaff that he kept half-concealed by his shoulder cape. It didn’t look like much, but she’d seen the broken bones sticking out of supercriminals after Solomon’s fights.

  “The wife’d kill me if she knew I was out here,” he said after a while.

  “Where’d you tell her you were going?”

  “Didn’t.” A small smile grew on his face. “We’ve got an understanding. She doesn’t ask what dumb place I’m going, and that way she doesn’t have to beat me over the head with a rolling pin. It’d be a bad example for the kids.”

  Niobe shook her head. “You’ve got a screwy family, Carpenter.”

  “Not their fault. I’m just a bad influence.”

  They walked in silence. Packs of stray dogs watched from the shadows, sniffing the air. Her neck prickled. What she wouldn’t give for s
ome darkness. But they couldn’t wait for night. The man they were meeting was powerful, but he couldn’t work miracles. The longer they waited, the colder the kid’s trail would become. They’d already failed one child today. She wasn’t going to fail this one too.

  “I’m not enamoured by this idea of yours, Spook,” Solomon said after a while. “You know how I feel about psychics. You can never be sure the thoughts you’re thinking are your own.”

  Niobe cast a look around. The wind was picking up, and there were fewer surviving buildings here to shelter them. “Technically, you’re a psychic.”

  “That’s different,” he said. “Trees don’t tend to have much in the way of private thoughts. But there’s all sorts of things in my head that shouldn’t see the light of day.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re talking dirty?”

  “Moi? I’m just an innocent old man.”

  “A family man,” Niobe said.

  “Pillar of the community.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. To be honest, she wasn’t keen on the psychic idea either. She didn’t trust information she didn’t obtain herself. But the job demanded what the job demanded.

  A shadow flickered in the window of a ruined townhouse. She gave no outward sign that she’d seen it, but she lowered her voice and spoke to Solomon. “We’re being watched.”

  “Yep. I can sense wood moving behind us.” He adjusted his mask and pointed with the barest movement of his pinky finger. “Probably from rifles. Three of them.”

  Niobe adjusted her shoulder slightly to feel the weight of her revolver in its holster. It was set to stun rounds at the moment. She could draw and fire in 0.7 seconds. She’d timed it. But she still wished it was dark.

  Something crunched on concrete. A gull took flight.

  “Spook…” Solomon said.

  “They won’t attack without a challenge. Probably.”