The Last American Hero

by Nicole Field

  Table of Contents

  The Last American Hero

  Book Details

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  The

  Last

  AMERICAN HERO

  NICOLE FIELD

  In the aftermath of the accident that revealed his identity, famous superhero Captain Hart has gone missing. His best friend Bruce waits anxiously for any sign of him, any clue as to where Leo Hart might have gone—even though he knows full well he's not the only one looking, and that it might be best for Leo to stay gone.

  Then Leo returns, and Bruce starts to wonder whether it will be the good thing he expected it to be.

  The Last American Hero

  By Nicole Field

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Leta Hutchins

  Cover designed by Aisha Akeju

  This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  First Edition February 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Nicole Field

  Printed in the United States of America

  Digital ISBN 9781620049532

  Print ISBN 9781620049457

  To Ben

  For making me realise that the second half of the novel was part of the story I wanted to tell.

  Chapter One

  "… a month since the devastating alien attack on the White House. Residents in and around the capital have been arriving for the commemoration event today outside the White House."

  Bruce Paulson flicked through the channels. The coverage was pretty much the same on all networks. It seemed that the question on everyone's lips was the same one that Bruce had been asking himself for the last month.

  Where was Captain Hart?

  Of course, Bruce knew the American superhero merely as Leo Hart, the guy with whom he'd shared an apartment in Arlington ever since they'd finished college. When Leo had suddenly revealed himself as being a superhero, Bruce had accepted it. When footage had shown up about aliens attempting to attack the White House, Bruce had assumed the two of them were somehow connected. It was like the question posed in Chris Nolan's Batman Begins: 'What about escalation? We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armour casing rounds.'

  Or, in this case, they bring an alien space ship and whatever weapons they had had on board.

  Not that he thought for a minute that any of this had been Leo's fault. At all.

  It was a long way over now, though it hadn't seemed like that for a long time. Bruce and Leo had done very well at keeping up his secret identity before that night. It had just been an unfortunate slip of the leather mask from Captain Hart's face, followed by the facial recognition software that had been able to link it with one Leo Hart. That had blown the secret wide open.

  Leo had super hearing, he could move fast—faster—than anything Bruce had seen. He couldn't fly, but he could jump. They were both pretty sure Leo had more powers he hadn't yet discovered. Bruce wondered how many, if any, had been discovered during his month away.

  Shortly after Leo's disappearance, the whole street they lived on was like a spring festival. People wandered everywhere, just hoping for a glimpse of the famous Captain Hart. The police combed through his house. Bruce wasn't sure what they'd expected to find that he didn't know about already, but he hadn't obstructed justice. He'd just hoped that they'd find him. Alive, preferably.

  A larger part of him had remained very aware that Leo Hart wouldn't be found again until he wanted to be.

  Bruce tried to remember when he'd realized it was more strange finding out that his roommate spent nights patrolling the Washington metropolitan area after being bit by an escaped dog from a medical research facility than that Carr—Leo was doing so as a guy. Bruce knew he betrayed Leo's memory by using his dead name, even in his head.

  Bruce betrayed Leo whenever he mentally stumbled across phrases like 'Leo's memory', like he was allowing him to be dead.

  Bruce had no more idea than the rest of Washington, or America, what had happened to Captain Hart after the Battle of Washington one month ago. Leo had never returned home. Bruce, with the rest of America, had been left glued to his television as the space ship soared through the city like a flying tortoise. The Internet filled up with YouTube clips of the alien space ship from the ground. Like them, Bruce had been desperate for a resolution that would not end in the destruction of the White House.

  In the days afterwards, when Leo still didn't return, Bruce started to send him emails.

  I know you're probably hiding out after everything that went down. Bruce tried to sound understanding about something he had no idea how to understand. But if you need a friend… I'm here.

  He agonized over the wording in his emails, not wanting to send something that came across as scared or needy when Leo had literally gone through hell for the sake of America. He'd done what no one else could have done when he shut off the power core that had connected the ship to the rest of its species. Scientists employed by the American government had apparently been able to confirm that the coordinates of their little planet Earth hadn't been sent to the rest of the alien species before Captain Hart had disabled it. There would be no future attacks.

  Hopefully.

  That was the other hard part of the Battle of Washington. It had shown human kind how behind they were in terms of space travel and technology.

  Bruce could hardly stand to watch the news feeds online and on TV in the aftermath of the Battle. He'd only turned the television on tonight to try to feel some connection to the roommate who had suddenly become one of the most known faces in America today.

  It wasn't working.

  *~*~*

  Bruce woke to an unfamiliar sound inside the house. It was pouring outside. Rain pounded against the windows of his room, and he didn't need to look at the clock on his bedside table to know it was the early hours of the morning.

  For a moment, he lay on his back in his bed, unmoving. Sounds in the house had become unfamiliar since he'd been living alone. Bruce listened for the noise again, wondering as he did whether it had been something from the storm outside that had woken him after all.

  But there was a footstep. Two. Bruce sat up in bed. Had someone figured out where Captain Hart lived? What kind of a person who had found that out would break into a house in the middle of the night during a storm?

  Bruce wondered whether he'd remembered to lock the front door as he moved on silent feet from the bed, picking up the baseball bat he had resting behind the door. It might be someone who thought Captain Hart had lived alone and just wanted some kind of souvenir, but Bruce wasn't taking any chances. He'd read his share of comic books, and it was often the roommates and family members of the superheroes who ended up in trouble, or kidnapped, or dead.

  Whoever it was walking through the liv
ing room didn't turn on any of the lights. That worked for Bruce; he could navigate his home even in the darkness. He waited behind the wall on the other side of the living room, at the bottom of the stairs, with the baseball bat poised against his shoulder and all his weight on the balls of his feet.

  There was a low sigh from the other room. Bruce felt he'd picked up some of Leo's super-hearing. His whole focus was outside himself, and on the intruder in the other room.

  Then there was a wet squelch to the left of his feet. Bruce jolted, gaze immediately darting down to the wet material that was now soaking into the carpet. More importantly, that it had been dropped, and where it had been dropped signified that he had not been quite as silent as he'd thought he'd been.

  "Bruce."

  The voice wasn't as low as a typical movie criminal grunt, but how would someone like that know his name anyway? No. Just one word. One word, and Bruce knew who was standing on the other side of the wall. The baseball bat dropped from his hands.

  "Leo."

  Chapter Two

  Bruce remembered the night Leo first came home after he'd picked up his superhero powers. Bruce had been looking over the press coverage for a rally he'd actually managed to attend around his working hours. He barely looked up when the door opened and closed.

  "Bruce."

  That made Bruce look up, because it was a man's voice speaking to him. He lived with a man, but Leo's voice when he'd left the house that morning had been an alto. This Leo spoke in a baritone.

  Bruce narrowed his eyes. "Leo?" he asked, because it was still him, clearly, but the changes were dramatic.

  His face was recognizable from before the change, but his jaw was squared, forehead more prominent. There seemed no discernible change in hair whatsoever.

  Bruce could remember Leo coming back from the hairdresser, having gotten rid of the brown ponytail that he had worn before he made plans to transition. Leo'd been so proud of himself, of his new haircut and how it represented the way he felt inside. No one had mistaken him as a girl for a while even before that, but this was different. Leo's chest tissue had been transformed into solid muscle. Bruce couldn't ask how far down the changes went. It didn't seem like it was his business.

  Instead he'd just asked, "How?"

  Leo had shaken his head as he stepped further into the room, like he'd been scared of how Bruce was going to react before that. "I got bit."

  Bruce's eyebrows rose and he coughed, despite himself. "Excuse me?"

  Leo glared across at Bruce. He crossed his arms defensively. "A dog bit me. Near a medical research place out…" Leo waved a hand, but that particular piece of information clearly didn't matter to him right now. "I got out of there, but then I passed out, blacked out, or something. And when I woke up…" With another half-hearted movement, Leo indicated his whole body.

  Bruce still stared. He'd considered taking a cautious step forward but, with the look on Leo's face, he thought better of it, had given his best friend space. "What you're telling me is… you had an altercation with your version of a radioactive spider, and now you're—"

  "Do not say Spiderman," Leo had warned him.

  Bruce closed his mouth and swallowed the words.

  Back in the present, it was that awkward silence again between them, with both men staring at each other for several moments. Some light came in through the streetlights from the front facing windows, enough that it was clear that Bruce and Leo stood facing one another with the sodden material and baseball bat between them. Sodden cape, Bruce realized. That was part of the uniform they'd made, what seemed like forever ago now.

  Now Leo's hair was overgrown, thin and lank and unbrushed. Nobody glancing at him would recognize him as Captain Hart now. Leo didn't match the commemoration posters that had filled TV screens long into the night. In the dark, his brown eyes looked black.

  Bruce didn't move. He didn't know what Leo would do if Bruce moved right now. He tried to keep his breathing steady, slow, mindful of the way he'd attempted to convey himself in the emails that had gone unanswered.

  "The government was wrong." Leo's voice, now that it uttered a full sentence, was raspy, as though unused to speaking in the last month. The words broke the silence and the immobilizing spell that had fallen between them.

  Bruce's eyebrows lowered in concern.

  Leo gave a small shake of his head. His lank hair hardly moved. "Maybe they thought they were telling the truth. I don't know. End result is… I couldn't let it go unchecked. They'd already threatened our heads of state."

  "It's okay…" Bruce started, using a carefully modulated tone because that's what Leo would have wanted before his disappearance. Reassurance. But the thing was, Bruce wasn't sure that it was okay. What did Leo mean when he said he couldn't let it go unchecked? The old Leo would have made sure the threat was passed through talking to them. He would have come to understand why they had acted the way that they did, and then tried to come to an understanding, maybe spoken out on their behalf so that the wider world could start to understand their cause.

  From the way Leo was talking now, it didn't sound like he had taken that road.

  It didn't matter to Bruce that the aliens had been a superpower that the Earth had been nowhere near ready to handle. That had been what the news crews had been saying all day, but both Bruce and Leo knew better than most the way that publicity was often skewed to the best interests of an individual or company.

  In their first years of college, Bruce and Leo had been present in equal rights rallies, marriage equality rallies, black shootings, anti-racism and refugee rallies. If there had been a cause that could be taken for the minorities in the country they all shared, they had lifted their voices and their feet to it.

  Towards the end of their degree, Bruce had been guilty of falling away from such activism, not being able to find the time anymore, but Leo had remained staunch. Bruce had stayed up to date with the current contentious debates through Leo's passion, even when his only activism had become enlightening those who made the mistake of shooting their mouths off in front of him.

  That busyness had continued on into his first job in IT, and then to his second. But, to Bruce's knowledge, Leo's activism had continued all the way up to when he received his powers. It had been no surprise at all, in some ways, when Leo had become a superhero. It had merely meant he could be a force that helped other people in new and different ways.

  Bruce tried to remember all of that as he looked over at Leo now. Neither one of them had turned on the lights. Bruce found himself glad about it. He wasn't sure he could stand to face the shadows that were lingering behind Leo's eyes.

  "When I disarmed the ship, I saw other pod points. Rural towns. They were going to overwhelm small towns first and then build up numbers. I killed them all." His sentences came out in abrupt bursts. He wasn't asking for Bruce's approval now, he realized. Leo was simply telling him how it had been, expecting that Bruce would agree.

  "You…" Bruce swallowed. He'd killed them all, without there seeming to be a passing thought, or regret, for any of those lives lost, alien or otherwise.

  It seemed as though the distance of a few feet between them was insurmountable. They were silent. For a long time, Bruce couldn't think of anything to say.

  He tried to remember that Leo had been through hell. He was probably barely holding it all together. Definitely not up to demonstrating emotions like a normal person might right now.

  Bruce breathed out unsteadily. "Have you eaten?"

  The inanity of the question came from not knowing how to agree with what Leo was saying but being unable to voice a dispute. He genuinely did feel bad for the way that Leo had obviously been living the past month. He looked as though he'd been going from bunker to bunker, without often sleeping with a roof over his head in the time since Bruce had last seen him.

  When Leo looked at him again, the look he gave was grateful. "No. Are there leftovers?"

  "Yeah," Bruce said. "In the kitchen. Come on." />
  *~*~*

  Bruce watched Leo, even though he tried not to. They didn't speak while they ate. Bruce didn't know what to say. He was relieved Leo was back, but it seemed unreal somehow. It wasn't just Leo's appearance. It was the way he had returned. Bruce felt like he'd stepped out of his normal world where he went to work every day, sat at his desk answering calls from people who needed help with their computers. Nightly television had turned into something from the sci-fi channel. NASA was more prominently featured on nightly news than he could remember ever having happened before. It seemed like his life—everyone's life—had taken an alarming step into the future in such a short time.

  Leo was too busy eating to speak, though he looked up at Bruce a couple of times. It seemed as though he, too, was struck by the impossibility of a conversation at this time. Bruce glanced up towards the clock on the wall; it was just after 3:30 a.m.

  "Are you staying?" Bruce asked, as Leo finished eating.

  Leo didn't answer immediately. It looked as though he was going to say something else, but when he spoke, all he said was, "I know I left you in the lurch with rent…" His voice was starting to sound more normal now, less raspy, the more he used it.

  "That's not what I was asking," Bruce said, but he didn't know how to articulate how relieved he was just to have Leo sitting in front of him again, back in the house, even with the awkward silences. All of that was better than Leo being dead. "Look, it's late. Your bed's still upstairs. Why don't we work everything else out in the morning," he suggested, as gently as he could.

  Leo drained his second glass of water and then nodded. There seemed nothing else to say.

  Chapter Three

  The next morning, Leo was up and in the kitchen before Bruce. For a moment, it was almost like the last month hadn't happened. Leo was freshly showered and dressed in new clothes. His hair was dry and, although still longer, it was at least brushed. He looked like he was ready for work. It was a Sunday. And, after a month's unexplained absence, it was very likely Leo didn't have a job to go to anymore.