Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

by Chris Strange

The incident at the TV studio flashed back to him, where he had allowed himself to be goaded by Iron Justice in his cage. He waved away the statement and the memory. “That isn’t your concern.” He checked his watch. Nearly midday. “Have you heard anything from Tinderbox?”

  “Yes, my lord. A transmission came through just before you called me to deal with the reporter. It is done.”

  He breathed deep and forced himself to smile. It was all going to work out. John would figure out what needed to be done. And now Morgan had reinforcements, of a sort.

  “You have command of the base, Obsidian. I’m going to meet our new friends.”

  As the dusty road rolled past, Morgan listened to the car radio. As he expected, the Prime Minister and the AAU had both been quick to refuse to comply with his demands. Frank Oppenheimer had yet to show his face, but that was no surprise. The time would come for that. In the meantime, there was one more thing he had to do before he moved into the final phases of his plan. His heart felt tight at the thought of being so close. The strain of all this was taking its toll on him. The interference of Spook and the Carpenter had convinced him to accelerate his plan by a few days. He’d given the authorities thirty-six hours to liberate their metahuman prisoners. That time wasn’t yet up, but there was no point waiting for something that was never going to happen. So he took the prisoners himself.

  Finally, after more than an hour of gravel roads and the rumble of the car engine, Morgan’s driver slowed and took a turn into a long, narrow driveway. They were eighty or so miles outside of Neo-Auckland, on an old farm that had been abandoned and half-swallowed up by thick forest. As the Honda sedan topped a rise, several figures came into view at the end of the driveway. The freed prisoners slouched against the corrugated iron of the shed or prowled through the tall grass amongst the sheep droppings. He studied them, trying to judge their powers. Yes. They’ll do.

  His driver slowed to a stop in front of the prisoners, a cloud of dust riding in on their coattails. Morgan forced a smile onto his face as he stepped out. Gravel crunched beneath his shoes. He should have eaten before he came; he’d forgotten to have breakfast with all the excitement. It wouldn’t do to have his stomach rumbling when he was trying to make a good impression.

  Most of the metas were trying to look tough, which almost amused him enough to take his mind off his headache and his earlier outburst with John. These metas were small-timers, punks and thugs who had played at being supercriminals. A few were strong, even stronger than his people, but they were untrained, and more importantly, undisciplined. An albino with fists the size of Morgan’s head and arms to match spat through the gap in his teeth, his thick eyebrows pulled down in a look of barely-disguised disgust.

  Compared to the prison break in Siberia, this had been a cakewalk. The police had stepped up security on the small facility since his attack on the TV studio. It hadn’t been enough. His man on the inside of Met Div, Daniel O’Connor, was suspended, but that didn’t stop the police officer gaining access to the prison.

  O’Connor stood off to the side of the metas, dressed in his blue Met Div uniform. A gas mask hung around his neck. He was an ugly fellow. His dark sideburns fell along the sides of his wide face. A foul man. Still, he knew how to move, and he knew how to fight. He nodded as Morgan approached him.

  “Any issues?” Morgan asked.

  O’Connor shook his head. “They let me right in the front door. I slipped your little gas canister into the air conditioning, and everyone but me got pretty drunk.” He tapped the gas mask hanging around his neck. “Then I just let Tinderbox and the rest of the lads in, and got these bastards out. Easy. No deaths, and not a shot fired.”

  Tinderbox and the four metas in his team stood around the prisoners at equally-spaced intervals, watching. They were outnumbered three-to-one by the prisoners, but none looked uneasy. In any case, the threat of force wouldn’t be needed to keep the prisoners in line much longer.

  “Good work,” Morgan said, and he shook O’Connor’s hand. “Oh, I nearly forgot.” He reached into his pocket and slipped the Met Div officer a thick envelope. “For your troubles.”

  O’Connor grunted and took the envelope, and Morgan moved away to examine the prisoners.

  Most of the thugs tried to look uninterested, but their eyes drifted towards him. There were televisions in the prison facility, he knew. They’d seen him.

  He smiled broadly and raised his arms to greet them. “My brothers. And sisters,” he added to a pair of lithe twins reclining against the shed, both sets of eyes crackling with green lightning. “Thank you for meeting me. My name is Quanta.”

  “What kind of name is that, huh?” one of the prisoners called. “Look at those shoes. Prince of Faggots, more like.” The rest roared with laughter.

  Vulgar creatures, he thought. But at least they have fire in them. The smile never left his face. Slowly, the hoots and hollers subsided.

  “I’ve come to see if you can be of use to me and my organisation,” Morgan said. “I’m sure such fine people as yourselves would be delighted to change the world forever.”

  “Go fuck yourself, cocksucker,” one of the twin girls said. “We ain’t joining no one.” The other prisoners added in their jeers. Again, he waited for the noise to die down. They were having trouble keeping up their defiance under his gaze. Pathetic.

  He strolled amongst them until he was standing in front of the twins. He smiled at the one who had spoken. “Such a filthy mouth on such a pretty face. But I’m afraid you misunderstand me. We’re full up at the moment with better metahumans than yourselves. So our organisation does not have any vacancies, as such.”

  They stared at him with blank looks on their faces.

  “There is one opportunity available,” he said. “But the chances of career advancement are, sadly, nil.”

  Their faces were still twisted up in confusion when he drew up his blade of light and cut the first woman’s skullcap off.

  One minute later, it was done. A few prisoners had scrambled to their feet in time to try to put up a fight, but they were slow. Now their blood soaked into the soil, and their bodies lay amongst the sheep shit.

  He’d lost his appetite. His shield of light had kept the blood and flesh off him, but he could still feel it all over him. He wanted a bath. He could have had Tinderbox or the others do the butchering, but that wouldn’t be right. Their deaths served his plan, so the blood should be on his hands.

  Even O’Connor and the others were quiet, their eyes carefully sliding over the bodies. While Morgan caught his breath and went back to the car to retrieve his bag, O’Connor and Tinderbox approached him.

  “Why?” O’Connor demanded.

  Morgan took his bag and made his way back to the bodies, O’Connor and Tinderbox keeping pace beside him. “Why did I send you in to get them out if I was just going to butcher them?”

  They nodded.

  “Sometimes, the dead have more use than the living.” He crouched and rolled one of the bodies over. Leaning close, he examined the spot where his light blade had sliced the top of the prisoner’s skull off. The slice was so clean he could make out the tiny network of fibres that ran through the bone. The blade had partially cauterised the brain matter as it passed through. The smell of cooked brain tissue was not unpleasant, which only made it all the worse.

  He brought up a thin layer of light around his hands to keep the gore off his gloves while he took a small specimen jar from his bag. With a tiny, scalpel-like blade of light extending from the tip of his index finger, he sliced out a marble-sized chunk of brain and dropped it into the jar.

  When he turned back, Tinderbox’s flames had dropped to candle-strength and had a sick, green tinge to them. O’Connor turned and spat. Morgan smiled.

  “If this makes you ill,” Morgan said, “gather your team together and congratulate them on a job well done. Then have them dig us some graves. O’Connor, you’ll be staying here with C team. Prepare the airship. I’ll be in touch in a few
days.”

  O’Connor nodded. Tinderbox swallowed and retreated to the rest of the metas, who stood huddled and whispering. After a moment, Morgan let the strained smile drop and moved onto the next body.

  If the dead cared, they didn’t complain.

  19: The Last Domino

  I was on the eighteenth floor, getting dangled out the window by Suicide Prime, and I figured I was a goner. The coppers couldn’t do a damn thing. I was looking down on all the sirens and flashing lights below, and the crowds looked back, trying to get a good view for when I got splattered on the footpath. And then I saw her. Madame Z. Christ, she was a beautiful lass. She came floating up outta nowhere, just floating in thin air. Without breaking a sweat, she blew Suicide Prime away with some kinda psychic blast and magicked me safely back inside. It wasn’t right what everyone said about her when they found out she was a dyke. She can screw the Circuit’s robots for all it matters. She was the best damn hero I ever saw.

  —Witness report from the Doom Corps hostage crisis, 1955

  Niobe woke to the sound of sizzling and a spicy scent filling her nostrils. Her stomach growled and knotted. Bleary-eyed and groggy, she pulled the bowler hat off her face and sat up on the couch, putting a hand against her spine. That had been a bad place for a nap. Her back felt like a sumo wrestler had done a tap dance on it.

  She plodded to the kitchen. Gabby?

  Her heart sank when she saw Solomon stirring the sizzling vegetables around the pan. Solomon gave her a too-cheerful grin as she sank into a seat at the table and propped her chin up on her hands.

  “Why so glum?” he asked.

  “Bite me,” she said. “Where’s Gabby?”

  Solomon shovelled the vegetables into piles on two plates. “Still in the bedroom.”

  Niobe put her face in her hands. Gabby hadn’t so much as looked at them when she came back up from the basement, her clothes streaked with engine grease. She went into the bedroom, shut the door, and then Niobe heard the shower running. That was the last she’d seen of her.

  Solomon shoved a plate and a big glass of water in front of her, and forced a fork into her hand. “Eat, kiddo.”

  She wasn’t so hungry anymore. She glanced at the bedroom door, but no matter how much she willed it, it didn’t open. She could just go in, but that might cause more problems than it would solve. Or maybe Gabby was in there waiting for her to come apologise. This bloody thing was too complicated.

  Solomon sat opposite her, putting his plate down on top of an old police report about Daniel O’Connor’s team taking down some metahuman kidnappers. He chowed into his food immediately, but Niobe poked a piece of broccoli with her fork. “What’s this supposed to be?”

  “Stir-fry,” Solomon said with his mouth full. “I thought you were supposed to be Asian.”

  “My folks cooked Japanese food, not Chinese. And I spent most of my time at boarding school.” She could barely remember her mum cooking. But the food did smell good. “Aren’t you supposed to have rice or noodles or something with this?”

  He shrugged. “Quit your complaining and eat. You can’t go hunting supervillains on an empty stomach.”

  Her hunger returned as soon as she started eating. Her stomach rumbled with satisfaction. “What’s the time?”

  He checked his watch. “Five in the afternoon.”

  Crap. Her nap had gone a few hours longer than she intended. No wonder she was hungry. She drained her glass of water and went back to the food. They’d spent until midday poring over the documents she’d taken from Met Div, trying to piece everything together, find connections. They’d got nowhere. They were working with too few pieces of the puzzle. They needed to work out how everyone fitted together, but more importantly, they needed a location on Quanta. She’d lost count of how many times she’d listened to his smarmy voice on the recording, but the background noises were too distorted to be of any help.

  The midday radio news said there had been reports of a breakout at the Metahuman Correctional Facility, but the cape coppers had lips as tight as their arses. It must’ve been a hell of a breakout. All the meta prisoners would have kill-switches, so any guard who caught them escaping would be able to blow the back of their head out in seconds.

  Everyone who had a hint of authority had been quick to assure the public that the AAU wouldn’t bow to Quanta’s threats. The media called him a terrorist, not a supercriminal, like they were trying to play down the fact that he just executed one of the world’s greatest superheroes on live television. Still, that didn’t stop the reporters from snooping around the Old City, trying to get comments from ex-heroes. So far, they’d failed miserably.

  Other than that, Met Div were floundering. Some were suggesting the radiation bomb Quanta left at the TV studio was a trick—real radiation poisoning didn’t completely wear off after a couple of days. The cops had evacuated a mile radius from the studio, and had hazard teams cycling in and out to monitor the contamination. If it had all been for nothing, some people at Met Div would have red faces.

  That said, she and Solomon weren’t doing any better. Her eyes hurt trying to make out the handwritten reports. Solomon looked as shattered as she felt. Thankfully, he avoided asking any questions about her fight with Gabby. The situation was awkward enough as it was.

  While she chewed, her eyes drifted over the paper scattered across the table. Avin and Screecher were definitely connected. They’d communicated and even worked in the same teams a few times back in the old days, and they were both active in Heroes for Freedom. Avin was a prominent member, while Screecher was a behind-the-scenes guy, but the organisation hadn’t been large. It wasn’t hard to picture them becoming friends and following the same causes.

  What could entice them to fall in with Quanta, though? And what about Daniel O’Connor, the Met Div officer who’d snatched Sam from the boat? Judging from some of the reports in his file, O’Connor seemed to have links in the meta community. Was that how he’d encountered Avin and Screecher? He’d started out as a beat cop in New Zealand, but he got friendly with some AAU bureaucrats and was promoted to some unspecified international government work in Europe in the ’50s. Interpol, maybe, or some sort of special unit, the documents weren’t clear. When he came back to New Zealand, he got tasked on some of the higher-profile stuff. Supercriminals and hostage situations and the like. He volunteered for Met Div when the unit was set up after the Seoul Accord was signed. He’d had a couple of brutality complaints, although nothing stuck. But then there was something interesting. The report of his dismissal was vague, but “indiscretions” were mentioned, along with veiled accusations of corruption. It wasn’t conclusive, but she had a pretty good idea what’d happened. He’d been leaking departmental information. He’d been spying for Quanta. And by the sound of it, it had been going on a long time.

  But how did he get to know Quanta in the first place? And where was the link she needed? It was here somewhere. There was something in these files that could help her find Quanta and Sam. There had to be. Sam. He’s alone with that bastard.

  She gobbled down the last bit of carrot and sat back in her chair. She’d never felt so satisfied. The Carpenter was giving her a funny look.

  “What?” she said.

  “Got any answers for us yet? I can hear your brain working from here.”

  She opened her mouth to tell him she was fresh out of ideas. A knock on the door cut her off.

  He raised his eyebrows at her and frowned. She met his look, heart racing, and gave a tiny shrug. She didn’t entertain visitors. Ever.

  They stood silently. She reached for her gun before she remembered she’d left it in the holster in her bedroom, along with her mask. The Carpenter pulled on his mask and hat while she quietly padded to the bedroom and opened the door. Gabby was lying on the bed in a bathrobe, eyes puffy from tears. She sat up when Niobe entered.

  Niobe pressed a finger to her lips, grabbed her gun from its holster, pulled the mask over her face, and slipped back in
to the living room. The gun was loaded. She deliberated for half a second, then switched to stun rounds. The knock came again, louder. She went to the window and pulled the curtains closed. The Carpenter stood by the door, hatchet in one hand and a small, crazed smile on his face. She came alongside him and held up a fist. On three, she mouthed. He nodded.

  She held up one finger. One.

  Who the hell could it be? Two.

  She sucked in a lungful of air and slipped into shadow. The comforting dark embraced her, and she became part of the faded carpet. She sped through the crack under the door and got an image of the sleek surface of someone in a full bodysuit. She darted between his legs and emerged from the shadow behind him.

  Three.

  The Carpenter jerked the door open, and at the same time she shoved the barrel of her gun against the stranger’s back. The man jumped, but before he could react, the Carpenter’s hand darted out, latched onto his shoulder, and hauled him inside. Niobe followed, gun pressed against the white bodysuit that covered every inch of skin.

  She kicked the door shut behind her as the Carpenter pressed the man against the wall. The suited man was so tall she had to stretch to press the gun barrel against the side of his head. The masked man raised his arms, palms out, and said, “Jesus Christ, don’t shoot!”

  It took her a moment to recognise him. “Quick-fire?”

  “Bit far from the Blind Man’s territory, aren’t you, speedster?” the Carpenter said, the man’s suit fabric scrunched in his fist. “Get lost on your way to buy a pack of smokes?”

  There was a patch on his suit covering the spot where Niobe’s stun round had hit him. That felt like years ago.

  “Talk quick,” she said. “How do you know where I live?”

  “The Blind Man.” His voice was clipped. “He knows all that sort of stuff.”

  That son of a bitch. What else did he get when he was rooting around in her brain? Were her bloody memories not enough?

  “What do you want, Quick-fire?” the Carpenter said.