I couldn’t fight D’eath on my own though. If I was going to figure out a way forward I’d need help. From someone with smarts. Someone I could trust. That’s why I went to the one person left that I knew I could count on in a time of crisis; Doctor Love (well, since I’d gotten over that whole unforgivable double-cross anyway).
I found Love blockaded in her apartment living off of tinned tuna and faucet water. When she realized who’d come calling she unlatched the door, threw her arms around me and squeezed for dear life.
“I’m so glad to see you!” she said.
I was glad too, but as a courtesy I angled my boner to one side. That’s just good manners.
“I can’t believe D’eath’s getting away with this,” Love said. She was in a real mess. All this carnage was way too much for her lady brain.
“It’s okay,” I promised, smoothing down her hair. “Powers or no powers, I’m going to put an end to D’eath’s plan. This is between me and him, always has been, and I won’t rest until the balance of good and evil is restor—”
—I must have gotten carried away because that’s about the point Love asked me to please stop shaking my fist at her and remove my feet from the furniture.
Now it was Love’s turn to talk. I listened as she sat me down and politely recommended a course of action that might yield better results than showing up to the Battle of Little Bighorn waving your dick as a club (so to speak).
“Strength in numbers,” she said, “that’s how we win this thing.” It turned out the Doc had heard of the resistance too. “We have to find a way to join the cause.”
“We?” I said.
“Of course we. Did you think I was going to let you take on D’eath by yourself?”
“Look, I hate to be the designated driver of the fact-mobile here, but it’s not like the resistance are listed in the yellow pages. How exactly are we meant to make contact?”
“We get help.”
“From who?”
“From Rex Kettner.”
“You’re asking me to buddy up with Rex Kettner?!”
“You want to get a message to the resistance, right? Well, Kettner’s plugged into one of the biggest communication networks in the world.”
“But Rex Kettner?”
“Name one person who’s given you more air time than him.”
“That was then. Even if I did get chummy with that beef rod now, how’s he meant to bypass D’eath’s communications blackout?”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” she said, which is true I suppose, even if that way mostly leads headfirst into a sh*t pit.
“And if Kettner won’t help us,” she added cheerily, “I’ll just put a force bubble around his head until he chokes to death.”
Now there was a plan I could hang my coat off.
May 24th
We went looking for Kettner at his place of business, C.H.O.M.P Towers. We had no trouble getting to the guy – his staff parted like two fat kids chasing two different candy bars when Mister Normal strutted into the lobby.
I kicked open the door to Kettner’s office to find him holding court with a gang of neck-tied lackeys.
“Kettner!” I growled.
“Mister Normal? What are you doing here?”
“Quit talking while I’m interrupting you.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just so good to finally meet you,” Kettner said as he patted me on the back like a long-lost friend. He called on a crony to fetch some beverages and gestured to a seat. Sure, let’s you and me have a nice chat over a frappe, Kettner; I wonder how you’ll like your new best buddy when you find out he’s your former whipping boy!
I took off my glasses to show Kettner who he was dealing with.
He squinted. “Tom Bosley’s kid?”
“No!” I said.
I struck the tackle-to-the-wind pose of my now ruined statue.
“Oh my God!” Kettner gasped. “You’re Captain Might!”
Here we go. Any second now he’d be begging for forgiveness, scraping the ground like Danny DeVito’s cummerbund.
Instead Kettner came back with “Brilliant!” and gave his knee a hearty slap. “Absolutely brilliant!”
“What are you talking about?! I fooled you! You made me into your poster boy but I was your worst enemy the whole time!”
“Enemy? What made you think we were enemies?”
The gall of this guy. Boy, I really wanted to crack his dick in a door.
Doctor Love jumped in on my behalf. “Are you for real? You broadsided him on national TV with that alien pod story and you’ve blamed him for everything that’s gone wrong since! All you’ve done since you showed up is rail on this man!”
“Well,” he said, “it never hurts to court a little controversy.”
“You didn’t court controversy,” Love yelled, “you trapped it in a shed and took it apart with a bone saw!”
She made a lunge for the guy but I held her back.
“Easy, Joan of Arc.”
Kettner looked genuinely hurt. “I hope you realize what you see on television isn’t a reflection of my true feelings,” he said. “It’s nothing personal, just a pundit doing his job.”
“Is that right?” I scoffed, picturing myself going at him like a seething red tornado of whirling fists and roundhouse kicks.
“Absolutely,” he replied. “It was never about you or me, or right or wrong, or heroes or normals. It was about giving the public what they wanted.”
I felt my sneer gear activate. “And what’s that?”
“A bullseye” he said.
“A bullseye?” Love spluttered.
“People are frustrated and they need a place to target their frustration. That’s what folks like me do, we paint a bullseye to stop the whole target getting shredded.”
“So why do I have to be the bullseye?”
“Well, the consumer drives the market, but really it’s not that important who wears it – it could be you, it could be your brother, it could be the man in the Whitehouse – it only matters that it’s on someone. Biscotti?”
I swallowed the imported biscuit along with my contempt. “If that’s true then what do you say about painting a bullseye on Professor D’eath?”
“Now we’re talking,” Kettner said, all smiles. I swear I saw the table he was sat under lift a couple of inches.
“I don’t get it, why are you so keen to help me?”
“Because you’re the revolution, that’s why. If a regular schmo like you can do the business out there maybe folks in this city will remember they don’t have to rely on capes to solve all their problems. Maybe they’ll remember that ordinary men can make a difference. So long as you don’t get bitch-slapped into a new time zone anyway.”
The man had a point.
“Okay then, let’s do this,” I said. “First things first though, do you know a way to unscramble D’eath’s communications block?”
“No.”
For the love off*ck.
“But if there’s one thing I do know,” Kettner went on, “it’s how to find an audience. This resistance you want to get to, what do you know about them?”
“Not much. Just that they’re circus folk.”
“Excellent.”
He called on another crony. “Go to the archives and check the index for anything you can find on vagabond culture, specifically written argot.”
Kettner turned to me. “The first trick with any audience,” he said, “is learning to speak their language.”
I had to admit I was impressed, even if I wasn’t quite ready to line up our balls and turn them into a Newton’s cradle.
May 25th
With Rex Kettner’s help we scratched out a communiqué to the resistance. I still had reservations about mucking in with the Murder Circus, but I figured I’d done business with one sworn enemy this week so what was the harm in adding a few more to the roll call?
I daubed an invitation to the resistance alongside their ‘FIGHT TO THE D
’EATH’ graffiti. It was written in carny jargon – a cypher only they’d understand – and it was made up of two simple things; a time and a place. The time was midnight. The place... well, I figured our meeting would need to happen as far from prying eyes as possible, so I set the scene outside of the Mandroids’ dragnet. My surveillance over the last few days told me D’eath’s rampaging Roombas stuck mostly to the city’s main streets, so I staged the confab off the beaten track – a garden-variety back alley, at least as far as the Mandroids were concerned. To the Murder Circus though, the site held significance. For me too. It was the same back alley we’d met in back when I was Captain Might – back when I was a lantern-jawed superhero and they were a pack of common hoods.
The alleyway was barricaded but the boards nailed over its entrance were only superficial. After all, with the lights out and the vermin running amok, even the junkies knew better than to break the seal. I can’t say I blamed them – heading into the pitch black to tiptoe over steroidal rats wasn’t exactly top of my bucket list either. Still, I had a tryst to attend, so with Doctor Love’s help I pried off a couple of planks and the pair of us slipped through the gap.
We hopscotched piles of reeking garbage and puddles of God-knows-what until we reached the rendezvous point. I checked my wristwatch. The time was right, but it looked as though our contacts were a no show. I was about to suggest to Love that we head home when I felt a twitch in my earballs.
Footsteps.
Then came the cold. Cold like moonlight on a tombstone. A bitter frost crept along the brickwork of the alleyway, spreading like the opposite of wildfire. I heard the chatter of Doctor Love’s teeth. My breath became a car exhaust. Then, from out of the gloom, came my welcoming party – Fraulein Frigid and Strong-Man.
“You!” spat Frigid. “You melted me with fire – that was not cool.”
Another cold pun, what a surprise. Still, when in Rome...
“So, here we all are,” I replied, “who wants to break the ice?”
My joke went down like a nun with broken kneecaps. So it’s just her that’s allowed to crack cold puns, is it? Someone needs to write all these rules down.
Strong-Man’s lip curled, showing a set of front teeth that looked like bulldozed tombstones.
“You break Strong-Man’s face.”
He tore a drainpipe from a wall and patted in his palm like a baseball bat. Frigid popped her knuckles, making a sound like a cracked ice tray. Doctor Love looked at me, searching for a next move I didn’t have. A fat Sharpie seemed to hover overhead, ready to strike a line through our names.
“Hold it,” came a voice from the gloom.
A man stepped from the darkness and into our circle. There he was, large as life...
“Talk,” said Acro-Bat.
I could tell right away that he was a changed man. Not some sissy backstreet stickup artist but the fearless leader of the freedom fighters. Acro-Bat had seriously levelled up since our last encounter, no doubt about it. If the Murder Circus was a Voltron-style combining mega-monster, Acro-Bat was its big swinging dick. Pretty funny when you think how I used to treat the guy like some Fudruckers was missing its assistant manager.
“We’re here to join the cause,” I told him.
Strong-Man and Frigid laughed like the end of a Thundercats episode.
“You think that’s funny,” I said, taking off my glasses and using my hands to make a shield-shape on my chest, “check this out.”
That certainly dicked with the festivities. A vein came up on Strong-Man’s temple big as a garden hose and Frigid made a face like she wanted to turn me inside out and shake my guts all over the floor.
“Easy,” said Doctor Love. “Whatever your differences in the past, you can’t afford to be butting heads right now.”
“We’re doing fine on our own,” said Acro-Bat, placing an arm in front of his henchmen. “Now if that’s everything, we’ve got work to do.”
He started to leave, crew and all. I needed to get his attention, and fast.
“You’re a man down,” I said.
The Murder Circus had gone from being fantastic four to a f*cked-up three since Miss Fortune’s spot opened up, and I knew for a fact that she hadn’t left town to frolic on some farm.
“Well, I’m a man down too,” I went on. “I lost my friend Gerry, the old man who got gunned down saving your hides.”
“Okay,” said Acro-Bat, “we’ve both got dead people, what’s your point?”
“My point is that we’ll both be dead people – all of us will – if we don’t settle the score with Professor D’eath.”
Acro-Bat carried on sizing me up.
“Look, I get it,” I said. “None of us saw this crossover coming. Captain Might teaming up with the Murder Circus? Next to me you guys were worthless; a bunch of three-ring gooftards; the dry hump of supervillains—”
Doctor Love gave me an elbow and whispered in my ear. “I don’t want to note you to death but you might have taken a wrong turn with your recruitment speech...”
“—but forget all that,” I said to the assembled. “What matters is that we’re living on borrowed time and D’eath’s holding the stopwatch, and it won’t be long until he scratches ‘ALL THE HUMANS’ on the side of a giant funeral urn.”
“What are we even talking about here?” asked Acro-Bat, pointing at the Moon hanging in the night sky like the lid of a pockmarked skull. “The Prof’s up there! You know some way of getting to the Moon we don’t?”
Lucky for us I had a reply to that one hip-pocketed just for the occasion. “As a matter of fact I do. Ladies and Gentlemen,” I said with a flourish (because even the dark times deserve a bit of theatre) “...say hello to Miss Transit.”
All heads turned as I cued her in. Miss Transit took an awkward step from the shadows and offered a meek wave.
Doctor Love took it from there. “Miss Transit is our invitation to the dance. Using her superpower we can teleport to the Moon and catch D’eath unawares.”
Transit darted up a hand. “Um, maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I don’t remember anyone saying anything about the Moon.”
That much was true. I’d suspected her commitment might waver if she knew just how kamikaze this gig was, so I’d held a couple of details back. Still, I was confident that if I blindsided her in front of a crowd I could talk her into it. I don’t like to brag about that, or admit it, or even mumble it in my sleep, but that’s about the size of it.
“It’ll be fine,” I said.
Transit didn’t seem convinced.
“I don’t even know if I could pull off a stunt like that,” she said. “We’re not talking about popping to the corner store for a quart of milk here. I mean, the Moon?”
“I’ve seen your résumé – you can travel to any point within eyesight, right?”
“Technically, yeah, but this is pretty extreme.”
“Extreme’s good!” I said. “Like bungee jumping, or rollercoasters, or certain flavors of Dorito...”
There was suddenly a lot of shoe-staring. Miss Transit looked like she was damned near about to snap her cringe bone. Lucky for me, Doctor Love picked up the slack.
“Guys, this is do or die. I know it’s a big ask, but the City’s on its ass right now and it needs our help. We have to take this gambit, because if we don’t, we’re all goners.”
I don’t know how she could have stated her case any clearer than that, short of popping off her socks and making a couple of ‘explanation puppets.’
Acro-Bat took a moment. The room held its breath. Finally, after a pregnant pause that ran to its third trimester, he spoke.
“Let’s bring our A-game to this A-hole.”
No way that wasn’t getting high-fived.
May 26th (part one)[116]
If there’s such a thing as seller’s remorse I am suffering a serious dose of it right now.
What was I thinking, getting everyone all geed up like that? Gerry already showed us what happens when the
little guy sticks his neck out, yet here I am, about to make a final play for my archenemy, and who do I choose as backup? Some big top bozos, a failed job applicant and a therapist I have the hots for. I used to work for the greatest crime fighting organization in the world, now this is my posse? This shower of misfits? It’s like I climbed down from Mount Olympus and signed up to the boy scouts.
Then there’s my daredevil plan to consider – Operation: Terrible Mistake. It’s the double-ended dildo of strategies – either way we’re f*cked. I mean, let’s say, by the skin of our teeth, our ragtag team manages to make this incredible longshot and pitch up on the Moon? We might as well be Gnat-Man attacking a bug zapper for all the chance we’ll have against Professor D’eath. The mightiest heroes this planet had to offer didn’t pick up the baton after the Prof put me on the no-fly list, and who could blame them? If Captain Might took him on and got his wings clipped trying, what chance did they have?
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