Normalized (The Complete Quartet)

by David Bussell

  I was about to suplex the bitch all to hell but he got me while I was still picking myself up off the floor. He really put the boot in too. I’m only able to write this because a bachelorette party (the bridge and tunnel kind that can skeletonize a male stripper in ten seconds flat) happened to be in the store shopping for novelty condoms. Lucky for me they chased Acro-Bat off before he could finish stomping my head flat. If I don’t sound too grateful it’s only because they shot the beat-down on their cell phones before intervening, then posted the footage on YouTube with the title ‘CAPTAIN MIGHT GTS PWNED LOL!!!1!’[65]

  March 11th

  I was sat on the John letting a can of sausage gumbo fulfil its destiny when it happened. From out of nowhere came a huge crash, then before I could buckle my pants, a foot kicked down the bathroom door and giant hands were hauling me off of the toilet.

  “Har har, puny man make potty.”

  It was Strong-Man, and I got the feeling he hadn't stopped by to slip me a copy of the Watchtower.

  He turned me around in his grip and I saw the rest of the intruders: Acro-Bat, Miss Fortune and Fräulein Frigid. Seemed the whole of the Murder Circus had decided they wanted a piece of the action after Acro-Batfed me that sh*t sundae yesterday.

  “Good morning, Captain,” said the man himself.

  They used to say Might Heights was impregnable but that all came down to one thing: me. Truth is the place didn’t have any real security measures – my enemies just knew better than to come knocking since the most kick-ass superhero in the world lived there. With the guard dog out of action though, things had changed. My impregnable home had given it up like a jilted prom queen.

  Strong-Man set me in a chair and held me down. This was not going to end well. The Murder Circus might have been the Limp Bizkit of bad guys, but that wouldn’t stop me catching a beating time. Not since I found my new place at the bottom of the superhuman food chain.

  “Any last requests?” asked Acro-Bat.

  “Delete my browser history?”

  Fräulein Frigid gave me a stinging back-hander that left frostbite on my cheek. I struggled to break free of Strong-Man’s hold but he had me locked down like Fritzl.

  There was only one way out of this predicament and that was to call for help. Acro-Bat caught my eyes flick over to the intercom console by the flattened apartment door; the one with the C.H.A.M.P signal button (standard with every domicile, though mine had been touched less than the turn signal on an Asian lady’s car).

  “You want to call your friends, is that it?” Acro-Bat asked.

  He nodded to Miss Fortune, who let fly with a crackling bolt of magic lighting that fried the console and left it puffing smoke from its guts. If things were lousy before, now they stank twice as bad (like a fart in a bathtub).

  It was time for the Murder Circus to have their fun. Strong-Man lifted me into the air and macked me right in the mouth. I flew across the apartment and hit the wall so hard I’m surprised he didn't embed me in the brickwork. After that the lynch mob really went to work, the four of them knocking me about like a hockey puck. I was getting creamed, then—

  “Let him go.”

  It was my turncoat brother, Birdy, his underwhelming silhouette framed by the apartment entrance. He proceeded inside and positioned himself between me and Acro-Bat. I could only cower as the two flightless wonders faced off, scrabbling backwards on my hands and knees like a royal subject in supplication. It was humiliating, but what else was I supposed to do with my whole body feeling like it had walked groin-first into a dick-kicking contest?

  “Backup is on the way,” Birdy announced. “I suggest you folks take off while you still can.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Acro-Bat, “how about we see if we can have some fun before your friends arrive?”

  I saw a gulp travel up and down Birdy’s throat. Nice one, bro, thanks for the assist. Maybe next time muster the troops before you ride into battle, eh?

  The Murder Circus closed in ready to play trampoline on our faces—

  —but Birdy scooped me up in a fireman’s lift, shouldered Acro-Bat aside and began running in the direction of the nearest window. The window that led straight to a twenty-story drop.

  SMASH!

  We careened through the shattered glass and seemed to hang in the air for a moment like a couple of Wile E. Coyotes. It gave me pause for thought. Did Birdy somehow forget that Might Heights was a penthouse suite I wondered, or did this exit strategy of his explicitly involve a pair of body bags?

  As we began our descent I thought, well, at least I’ll die sort of flying. I started to flip. Over and over. Sidewalk and sky sidewalk and sky sidewalk and sky. I closed my eyes.

  Then I stopped.

  Not ‘splattered on the sidewalk’ stopped but regular stopped.

  I parted my eyelids to see that I was sat in a cabin – the cabin of Birdy’s Hero-Wing – which he’d parked outside in hover mode to catch our fall. He gunned the afterburner and a bulletproof glass canopy slid shut above us, then—

  BAROOM!

  I looked in the Hero-Wing’s rear view to see my home, my possessions and what little was left of my dignity erupt like a roman candle and go raining onto the streets – a hail of flaming trash.[66]

  As we sped to safety, Birdy explained how he’d come to arrive at my door. Apparently the Murder Circus had been overheard making plans to settle my hash and a C.H.A.M.P informant had called it in to the station. Birdy had been on patrol when dispatch passed along the message.

  “When I got the news I made for your place so fast I almost burned out my engine,” he said.

  What he didn’t say (because it was so obvious, why bother?) was how much he was enjoying himself. After all this time riding sidecar, finally Birdy was the one in the drivers’ seat. Hot on the scene to pluck his has-been brother out of the fire. He’d be big man on campus for this little stunt, no doubt about it. Lord of the freaking manor.

  March 12th

  It’s easy to get depressed about things, so let’s do that.

  I spent today holed up at a secure location while C.H.A.M.P’s powers that be held a summit to determine my future. I was kept clean out of the conversation, as though my opinion didn’t figure into things. I’m telling you, they treated me like a little boy sat at the kid’s table so the grown-ups could talk. Goddamned bunch of stuffed suits. The way they’re acting you’d think I was an inconvenience instead of an international icon. A liability. A brittle vase teetering on a take-out chopstick.

  Worst part is they’re right. If Birdy hadn’t shown up when he did I’d be a smear right now, and the Murder Circus were only a sign of things to come. I’ve been in law enforcement a long while, and in that time I’ve put a whole lot of beaks out of joint. Now every punching bag I ever clobbered is going to come swinging back at me, and hard. There are glory-seekers all over town who’d do anything to punch my ticket – glory-seekers who can phase through solid concrete, or liquefy flesh with a touch, or monkey with a man’s molecules and edit him into a cantaloupe. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life running around in a zig-zag every time I stepped outside something drastic had to happen, and dollars to donuts I knew just what that something was.

  They were sending me to The Bunker...

  *****

  Have Captain Might’s superpowers really left him for good?

  What is “The Bunker”?

  And where do I buy my copy of Legs Akimbo Asian Bimbo?

  Find out next week… same Cap-time, same Cap-channel!

  *****

  *****

  Part Three: Grounded

  The Journal of Captain Might

  Written by Captain Might

  Footnotes after the fact by Captain Might

  March 19th — May 17th

  *****

  March 13th

  Is it a bird? Is it a plane...?

  ...it is a plane, and I’m sat riding it like some vacationing grandma.[67]

  My life was
out of my hands. If I wanted to carry on doing the breathing thing I’d have to head off-reservation, and pronto like tonto. I wouldn’t survive another day in the City – I was a bucket of chum in a shark pool there – blood in the water. The way the bigwigs at C.H.A.M.P saw it I only had two options left:

  1) Enrolment into a government sponsored protection program and immediate transfer to a secret location known as The Bunker.

  2) An agonizing death.

  As choices go, it didn’t take much handwringing.

  Of course Birdy acted all sad about seeing me go, like he wasn’t dying to whip out the broom and sweep me under the rug. He told me my relocation was just standard operating procedure – that C.H.A.M.P were only trying to do what was best for my welfare.

  “Don’t be mad,” he told me.

  I told him I wasn’t mad, just disappointed. Disappointed at how much I wanted him to drown in a lagoon of sh*t.

  I was driven to JFK, put on a charter jet and dispatched by cover of night. The Bunker’s location was classified, so I had no idea where I was headed or what to expect of the place. All I knew were rumors. One of the more persistent ones concerned a previous tenant and former C.H.A.M.P Officer named Brown Note. BN specialized in crowd control, a job he excelled at due to his ability to generate sonic frequencies low enough to void a man’s bowels. That’s until he generated a blast of phonic colonic that went wide of a crowd of Occupy protestors and did a boomerang back at him, browning his pants and earning him a feature role in TMZ’s most popular video of the year. The story went that Brown Note had hit the skids in a big way after that. Drinking lead to depression and depression lead him to The Bunker. That’s where they’d sent Brown Note to keep him clear of all the bad guys looking to earn themselves a murder selfie with a former C.H.A.M.P man. What happened to him after that I have no idea, but he never showed up to work again.

  Who knows, maybe it’s all bullsh*t. Maybe Brown Note retired from crime-fighting and he’s swinging a four iron on some ninth hole. Maybe he wasn’t swallowed up by The Bunker. Hell, maybe The Bunker wasn’t even a bunker. Maybe it’s a codename to disguise the fact that it’s beach hut in sunny Costa Rica. Maybe I was heading some place with white sands and sapphire blue water and women who look like they’ve been traced out of a swimwear catalog.

  Still, as the landing gear tucked away and the lights of New York faded into the distance I felt a crushing gloom set in. I went looking for a distraction and found a TV in my armrest. I turned on the in-flight entertainment but there was only one station, and the programming was someone’s idea of a sick joke. Tonight’s feature presentation? Super-Model: The Movie.

  Believe me when I tell you itwas every bit as sh*tty as the reviews all said it was, but that wasn’t the real torture. What made it so unbearable was seeing how good Super-Model looked in it. I’m telling you, she was so hot you could have boiled a kettle on her face. And her body... man, the attention the camera paid to that thing was staggering. Forensic even. Christ, I’d never see the likes of that ass again.

  I was about to switch the TV off when the plane started going all bucking bronco. This wasn’t just some rough patch either, this was the real deal – overhead compartments burping up luggage and food carts crashing down the aisle – death with all the trimmings. My oxygen mask deployed and I caught of flash of tomorrow’s headline: ‘Hero of the Skies Dies in Plane Wreck.’ I began to hyperventilate as I imagined Rex Kettner’s joy – the friction from his hand-rubbing putting the NY Fire Department on high alert.

  Then a voice snapped me out of my panic. “Relax,” it said, the calm in the literal storm. “Put your oxygen mask over your mouth and breathe regularly, we’ll be back to normal in just a moment.”

  I knew that voice. Could it be? It couldn’t, but it was. It was Dad! My old man, back from the dead to guide me in my time of need. I whirled about to find him but I was all alone. What the hell? Then I came to my senses. It was Dad alright, but only an echo of him. His words programmed into the plane’s warning system – a relic from his voice artist days.

  Finally the buffeting stopped and we passed into calm. I breathed a sigh of relief as the plane levelled out and the pilot reported that everything was back under control. We were going to be fine he said. Except I wasn’t. I kept hearing Dad’s voice over and over again – his words, seared into my brain like a cattle brand.

  We’ll be back to normal in just a moment.

  Back to normal.

  Normal.

  March 14th

  My new life began this morning. At o’ five hundred hours I touched down in an undisclosed location to be driven, burlap sack over my head, to my new place of residence.

  I was relieved to discover that The Bunker wasn’t what it sounded like. It wasn’t a military installation or an abandoned silo or a concrete hole in the ground. As I’d suspected, ‘The Bunker’ was just a codename. So had I arrived in sunny Costa Rica after all? Was I going to spend the next few months topping up my tan and sucking back frozen margaritas? I’ll give you three guesses but you’ll only need one.

  The Bunker was a two bedroom bungalow in a suburb outside of Pittsburgh. Apparently C.H.A.M.P’s solution for getting victims out of harm’s way was to assign them a new identity and shelve them in a flyover state. Funny. Back when I had my superpowers they were all flyover states.

  I was given a packet containing my new ID and told to memorize the details. From now on I’ll be Cody Mathesson, a thirty-six year-old cubicle jockey on workman’s comp. I won’t be making any neighborhood friends though. Too risky. I only had to collect the newspaper from the driveway for someone to recognize me and post my picture to Instagram. Soon as some villain got wind of that I’d wind up looking like the center spread of a Fangoria magazine.

  But just in case, I’d been assigned a minder; a live-in bodyguard whose job it is to cock-block anyone who looks as though they might be in the ex-superhero killing business. As if some buzz-cut heavy is going to stand a chance in hell against one of my old sparring partners. If Professor D’eath figures out my zip code do you really think a Glock 22’s going to put him down? I’d have better luck hanging up a dream catcher.

  As well as being forbidden to set foot out of the house, my bodyguard’s made it clear that all contact with the outside world is severed. That means no internet, no mail and no phone calls.What the sh*t? This isn’t a protection program, this is house arrest! I’m telling you, there are honest to goodness pederasts who get cut more slack than this.

  So this is how it ends, is it? Iced out by my peers and banished to the burbs to live among the normals.[68] I’ve been out of sorts for a while now but this makes it official – I’m just not myself anymore. After a lifetime of refusing to wear a mask, my secret identity... is me. That it should come to this. Captain Might, grounded in every sense of the word.

  March 19th

  I hate this sh*tty house. I hate its sh*tty walls, I hate its sh*tty floor and I hate its sh*tty roof. Most of all I hate its sh*tty kitchen. No luxury marble worktops or walk-in butler’s pantry there – instead I get laminate flooring, an electric stove and a bunch of plywood cabinets with their doors hanging off their hinges. I’m telling you, whoever built this place spared every expense.

  But the worst part of living here is the boredom. The days that go on and on. Beige and endless. Bread on toast. I’m telling you, the world moves real slow when you’re used to being able to fly to the Grand Canyon and back in the time it takes a man to finish a yawn. Nowadays I feel like I’m stuck in a traffic jam of glaciers. Like I’m watching someone else watch paint dry.

  Nothing I do matters now. No one cares. I only bother wiping my ass anymore out of habit – Lord knows why I bother to put on my superhero getup. A wolf in a dog kennel, that’s what I must look like. I ditched the costume and went for a more appropriate packaging. Pulled on a flannel robe instead. I couldn’t get comfortable in civvies though so I snipped a couple of eyeholes in the hood and tugged it over my hea
d like a cowl. My minder walked in on me and laughed so hard he gave his face a stitch.

  My bodyguard is the only company I have left now, so it goes without saying that the guy’s a world-classassh*le – a petty, Red Bull chugging knucklehead with a face like a demolition zone. Errant teeth, cauliflower ears and a bust-up snout where a nose used to be. His body is a Mack Truck packed into a doorman’s suit. Just looking at him you know there’s a Celtic tattoo under that getup too. Like I say, a world-classassh*le.

  “Get with the program and quit acting like you’re something special,” he told me. “If you can’t be a superman at least be a man.

  He jabbed me in the ribs with one of his sausage link fingers.