It had been vain to hope that he would slip and fall. I just counted myself lucky that however metallic his face looked, there were still parts of it vulnerable to the spray.
Lung hauled himself over the edge of the roof. I had him hurting… I just couldn’t do anything about it. My bugs were officially useless, there was nothing left in my utility sheath, and I would hurt myself more than I hurt Lung if I attacked him. Making a mental note to pick myself up a concealable knife or baton if I managed to live through this, I bolted for the fire escape.
“Muh… Motherfucker!” Lung screamed. With my back turned, there was no way to see it, but the roof was briefly illuminated before the wave of flame hit me from behind. Knocked off balance, I skidded on the gravel and hit the raised lip of the roof, just by the fire escape. Frantically, I patted myself down. My costume wasn’t on fire, but my hair – I hurriedly ran my hands over it to make sure it hadn’t been ignited.
Small mercies, I thought, that there was no tar used on the roof. I could just imagine the flames igniting the rooftop, and just how little I’d be able to do if it happened.
Lung stood, slowly, still covering part of his face with his hand. He walked with a slight limp as he approached me. Blindly, he lashed out with a broad wave of flame that rolled over half the roof. I covered my head with my hands and brought my knees to my chest as the hot air and flame rushed over me. My costume seemed to take the brunt of it, but it was still hot enough I had to bite my lip to stop from making a sound.
Lung stopped advancing, slowly turning his head from one side to another.
“Cock. Sucker,” he growled in his heavily accented voice, his cussing interrupted by his panting for breath, “Move. Give me something to aim for.”
I held my breath and stayed as still as possible. What could I do? I still had the pepper spray in my hand, but even if I got him again, I was running the risk that he would lash out and bake me alive before I could move. If I moved first, he would hear me and I would get knocked around by another blast of flame, probably before I could get to my feet.
Lung moved his hand from his face. He blinked a few times, then looked around, then blinked a few more times. It was a matter of seconds before he could see well enough to make me out from the shadows. Wasn’t pepper spray supposed to put someone down for thirty minutes? How was this monster not an A-Lister?
He suddenly moved, flames wreathing his hands, and I screwed my eyes shut.
When I heard the crackling whoosh of the flame and wasn’t burned alive, I opened my eyes again. Lung was firing streams of flame, aiming for the edge of the roof of the adjacent building, a three story apartment. I looked to see what he was aiming at, but couldn’t make anything out in the gloom or in the brief second of light Lung’s flames afforded.
With no warning, a massive shape landed atop Lung with an impact I could swear people heard at the other end of the street. The size of a van, the ‘massive object’ was animal rather than vehicle, resembling a cross between a lizard and a tiger, with tangles of muscle and bone where it ought to have skin, scales or fur. Lung was now on his knees, holding one of the beast’s sizable claws away from his face with his own clawed hand.
Lung used his free hand to strike the creature across the snout. Even though he was smaller than the beast, the impact made it rear back. It took a few short steps back in reaction, and then rhino-charged him off the edge of the roof. They hit the street with an audible crash.
I stood, aware I was shaking like a leaf. I was so unsteady on my feet, from the mixed relief and fear, that I almost fell over again as two more impacts shook the roof. Two more creatures, similar to the first in texture, but slightly different in size and shape, had arrived on the rooftop. These two each had a pair of riders. I watched as the people slid off the backs of the animals. There were two girls, a guy, and a fourth I identified as male only because of the height. The tall one approached me, while the others hurried to the edge of the roof to watch Lung and the creature duke it out.
“You really saved us a lot of trouble,” he told me. His voice was deep, masculine, but muffled by the helmet he wore. He was dressed entirely in black, a costume I realized was basically motorcycle leathers and a motorcycle helmet. The only thing that made me think it was a costume was the visor of his helmet. The full-face visor was sculpted to look like a stylized skull, and was as black as the rest of his costume, with only the faint highlights of reflected light on the surface to give a sense of what it was. It was one of those costumes that people put together out of what they can scrounge up, and it wasn’t half bad if you didn’t look too close. He reached out a hand towards me, and I leaned away, wary.
I didn’t know what to say, so I stuck to my policy of not saying anything that could get me into a worse situation.
Withdrawing his hand, the man in black jerked his thumb over one shoulder, “When we got word Lung was aiming to come after us tonight, we were pretty freaked. We were arguing strategy for the better part of the day. We eventually decided, fuck it, we’d meet him halfway. Wing it. Not my usual way of doing things, but yeah.”
Behind him, one of the girls whistled sharply and pointed down at the street. The two monsters the group had been riding on bounded across the roof and leaped down to the street to join the fight.
The guy in black kept talking, “Wouldn’t you know, his flunky Lee is there with a half dozen guys, but Lung and the rest of his gang are nowhere to be found,” he laughed, a surprisingly normal sound for someone wearing a mask with a skull on it.
“Lee’s no slouch in a fight, but there’s a reason he’s not leader of the ABB. He got spooked without his boss there and ran. I guess you’re responsible for that?” Skull-mask waited for a response from me. When I didn’t offer one, he ventured towards the edge of the roof and looked down, then spoke without turning to look at me, “Lung is getting creamed. The fuck you do to him?”
“Pepper spray, wasp and bee stings, fire ants and spider bites,” the second of the girls said, answering the question for me. She was dressed in a skintight outfit that combined black with a pale shade of blue or purple – I couldn’t tell in the dark – and her dark blond hair was long and windblown. The girl grinned as she added, “He’s not holding up too well. Gonna feel a helluvalot worse tomorrow.”
The man in black suddenly turned to look at me, “Introductions. That’s Tattletale. I’m Grue. The girl with the dogs-” he pointed to the other girl, the one who had whistled and directed the monsters. She wasn’t in costume unless I counted a plaid skirt, army boots, a torn-up sleeveless T-shirt and a hard plastic, dollar-store rottweiler mask as a costume. “-We call her Bitch, her preference, but in the interests of being P.G., the good guys and media decided to call her Hellhound instead. Last and certainly least, we have Regent.”
I finally caught up with what he was saying. Those monsters were dogs?
“Fuck you, Grue,” Regent retorted, with a chuckle and a tone of voice that made it clear he wasn’t really that offended. He was wearing a white mask, not quite as decorative or made up as the ones I associated with the carnivals in Venice, but similar. He’d placed a silver coronet around his short black curls, and wore a ruffled white shirt with skintight leggings tucked into knee-high boots. The outfit was very renaissance faire. He had a build that made me think more of a dancer than a bodybuilder.
Introductions done, Grue looked at me for several long moments. After a few seconds, he asked me, “Hey, you okay? You hurt?”
“The reason she’s not introducing herself isn’t because she’s hurt,” Tattletale told him, as she continued to lean over the edge of the roof and watch whatever was going on at the street level, “It’s because she’s shy.”
Tattletale turned around and it looked like she was going to say something else, but she stopped, turning her head. The smile she’d been wearing faded, “Heads up. We’ve gotta scram.”
Bitch nodded in response and whistled, one short whistle followed by two long ones. After a
brief pause, the building was suddenly rattled by impacts. In just moments, the three creatures of hers leaped from the alleys to either side of the building and onto the roof.
Grue turned towards me. I was still standing on the opposite end of the roof, by the fire escape. “Hey, want a ride?”
I looked at the creatures – dogs? They were bloodied, snarling creatures out of a nightmare. I shook my head. He shrugged.
“Hey,” Tattletale said to me, seating herself just behind Bitch, “What’s your name?”
I stared at her. My voice caught in my throat before I was able to get the words out, “I don’t… I haven’t picked one yet.”
“Well, Bug, a cape is gonna show up in less than a minute. You did us a solid by dealing with Lung, so take my advice. Someone from the Protectorate shows up, finds two bad guys duking it out, they’re not going to let one walk away. You should get out of here,” She said. She flashed me a smile. She had one of those vulpine grins that turned up at the corners. Behind her simple black domino style mask, her eyes were glittering with mischief. If she had red hair, she would have made me think of a fox. She kind of did, anyways.
With that, they leaped over my head, one of the three beasts hitting or stepping on the fire escape on the way down, eliciting a screech of metal on metal.
When I realized what had just happened, I could have cried. It was easy enough to pin down Regent, Tattletale and Bitch as teenagers. It wasn’t much of an intuitive leap to guess that Grue had been one too. The ‘children’ Lung had mentioned, the ones I had gone to so much effort to save tonight, were bad guys. Not only that, but they had mistaken me for one, too.
1.06
I heard the cape arrive on his souped up motorcycle. I didn’t want to be seen fleeing the scene of a fight, and risk being labeled one of the bad guys by yet another person, but I wasn’t about to get closer to the street either, in case Lung was feeling better. Since there was nowhere to go, I just stayed put. Just resting felt good.
If you’d asked me just a few hours ago about how I thought I would feel meeting a big name superhero, I would have used words like excited and giddy. The reality was that I was almost too exhausted to care.
It looked as though he flew up onto the roof, but the six-foot long weapon the man held kind of jerked as he landed. I was pretty sure I saw the tines of a grappling hook retreating back into the end of the weapon. So this was what Armsmaster looked like in person, I thought.
The largest superhero organization in the world was the Protectorate, spanning Canada and the States, with ongoing talks about including Mexico in the deal. It was a government sponsored league of superheroes with a base in each ‘cape city’. That is, they had a team set up in each city with a sizable population of heroes and villains. Brockton Bay’s team was officially ‘The Protectorate East-North-East’, and were headquartered in the floating, forcefield-shrouded island that you could see from the Boardwalk. This guy, Armsmaster, was the guy in charge of the local team. When the core group of the top Protectorate members from around Canada and the States assembled in that classic ‘v’ formation for the photo shoots, Armsmaster was one of the guys in the wings. This was a guy who had his own action figures. Poseable Armsmaster with interchangeable Halberd parts.
He really did look like a superhero, not like some guy in a costume. It was an important distinction. He wore body armor, dark blue with silver highlights, had a sharply angled v-shaped visor covering his eyes and nose. With only the lower half of his face exposed, I could see a beard trimmed to trace the edges of his jaw. If I had to judge, with only the lower half of his face to go by, I’d guess he was in his late twenties or early thirties.
His trademark and weapon was his Halberd, which was basically a spear with an axe head on the end, souped up with gadgets and the kind of technology you generally only saw in science fiction. He was the kind of guy who appeared on magazine covers and did interviews on TV, so you could find almost anything about Armsmaster through various media, short of his secret identity. I knew his weapon could cut through steel as though it was butter, that it had plasma injectors for stuff that the blade alone couldn’t cut and that he could fire off directed electromagnetic pulses to shut down forcefields and mechanical devices.
“You gonna fight me?” He called out.
“I’m a good guy,” I said.
Stepping closer to me, he tilted his head, “You don’t look like one.”
That stung, especially coming from him. It was like Michael Jordan saying you sucked at basketball. “That’s… not intentional,” I responded, not a little defensively, “I was more than halfway done putting the costume together when I realized it was already looking more edgy than I’d intended, and I couldn’t do anything about it by then.”
There was a long pause. Nervously, I turned my eyes from that opaque visor. I glanced at his chest emblem, a silhouette of his visor in blue against a silver background, and was struck with the ridiculous thought that I had once owned a pair of underpants with his emblem on the front.
“You’re telling the truth,” he said. It was a definitive statement, which startled me. I wanted to ask how he knew, but I wasn’t about to do or say anything that might change his mind.
He approached closer, looking me over as I sat there with my arms around my knees, he asked, “You need a hospital?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t think so. I’m as surprised as you are.”
“You’re a new face,” he said.
“I haven’t even come up with a name yet. You know how hard it is to come up with a bug-themed name that doesn’t make me sound like a supervillain or a complete dork?”
He chuckled, and it sounded warm, very normal, “I wouldn’t know. I got into the game early enough that I didn’t have to worry about missing out on all of the good names.”
There was a pause in the conversation. I suddenly felt awkward. I don’t know why, but I admitted to him, “I almost died.”
“That’s why we have the Ward program,” he said. There was no judgement in his tone, no pressure. Just a statement.
I nodded, more to give a response than out of any agreement with the answer. The Wards were the under-eighteen subdivision of the Protectorate, and Brockton Bay did have its own team of Wards, with the same naming convention as the Protectorate; The Wards East-North-East. I had considered applying to join, but the notion of escaping the stresses of high school by flinging myself into a mess of teenage drama, adult oversight and schedules seemed self-defeating.
“You get Lung?” I asked, to change the subject from the Wards. I was pretty sure that he was obligated to try and induct new heroes into either the Protectorate or the Wards, depending on their age, to promote the whole agenda of organized heroes who are accountable for their actions, and I really didn’t want him to get on my case about joining.
“Lung was unconscious, beaten and battered when I arrived. I pumped him full of tranquilizers to be safe and temporarily restrained him under a steel cage I welded to the sidewalk. I’ll pick him up on my way back.”
“Good,” I said, “With him in jail, I’ll feel like I accomplished something today. Only reason I started the fight was because I overheard him telling his men to shoot some kids. Only realized later that he was talking about some other villains.”
Armsmaster turned to look at me. So I told him, walking him through the fight in general, the arrival of the teenage bad guys, and their general descriptions. Before I finished, he was pacing back and forth on the roof.
“These guys. They knew I was coming?”
I nodded, once. As much respect as I had for Armsmaster, I wasn’t in much of a mood to repeat myself.
“That explains a lot,” he said, staring off into the distance. After a few moments, he went on to explain, “They’re slippery. On those few occasions we do manage to get in a toe to toe fight with them, they either win, or they get away more or less unscathed, or both. We know so little about them. Grue and Hellhound were working on thei
r own before they joined the group, so there’s some information there, but the other two? They’re nonentities. If the girl Tattletale has some way of detecting or tracking us, it would go a long way towards explaining why they’re doing as well as they are.”
It kind of surprised me to hear one of the top level heroes admitting to being anything less than perfectly on top of things.
“It’s funny,” I said, after a few moment’s thought, “They didn’t seem that hardcore. Grue said they were kind of panicking when they heard Lung was coming after them, and they were casually joking around while the fight was going on. Grue was making fun of Regent.”
“They said all this in front of you?” he asked.
I shrugged, “I think they thought I was helping them out. The way Tattletale talked, I think she thought I was a bad guy too or something.” With a touch of bitterness, I said, “Dunno, I guess it was the costume that led them to that assumption.”
“Could you have taken them in a fight?” Armsmaster asked me.
I started to shrug, and winced a little. I was feeling a little sore in the shoulder, where I’d tumbled on the roof after being blasted by Lung’s flames. I said, “Like you said, we don’t know a lot about them, but I think that girl with the dogs-”
“Hellhound,” Armsmaster said.
“I think she could have kicked my ass on her own, so no. I probably couldn’t have fought them.”
“Then count it as a good thing that they got the wrong impression,” Armsmaster said.
“I’ll try to look at it that way,” I said, struck by how he easily he was able to employ the whole ‘take a negative and turn it into a positive’ mindset I’d been trying to maintain. I envied that.
“That a girl,” he said, “And while we’re looking forward, we need to decide where we go from here.”
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