Superheroes In Denim

by Lee French

  “No clue.” He shrugged and snorted. “Maybe there really were aliens in Roswell.”

  “Anything is possible, I suppose, though I wonder how it really got here. If there was actually a spacecraft, I would expect our space program to be a little farther along by now.” Cocking his head to one side, Stephen held up a hand to stop the conversation, then put a hand to his ear to activate the mic. “Yes, Klein, I’m here.” He listened, then sighed. “Just a minute, let me confer with Bobby.” He turned off the mic again. “We were so efficient, they want to appeal to our desire to be patriotic Americans and to save the lives of more soldiers by pursuing other dangerous missions that would likely involve a lot of killing.”

  Unsurprised, Bobby scratched the back of his neck and stretched. Riker and his men had probably been written off as killed in action before he and Stephen rescued them. That whole cave now held dead bodies instead of presumed terrorists. Hanamidi was dead. A suspected weapons cache had been emptied. They did their job well, and Uncle Sam liked soldiers who did their job well. Really, he couldn’t blame them. Weapons like them changed the course of history. “They ain’t never gonna let us leave until this thing is done here. We wanna stay and end this damned war, this here’s our chance.”

  Stephen shrugged. “I have to admit there’s some allure to that. A lot of good people have died here.” He paused and turned to fix Bobby with a stare, though his sunglasses made that unclear. “We should decide together, though, not separately. I have a feeling that there will come a point when I don’t remember why it matters anymore. They’ll drag me down into a pit until I become the monster inside and nothing more. Having someone here with me should help prevent that.”

  “But you wanna stay?” Bile rose up in Bobby’s throat. He swallowed hard to push it back down where it belonged.

  “Not exactly. I like knowing that Riker, if he has a brother or a sister, a wife, whatever, they didn’t lose him. Because of me.”

  “Hm.” The question, then, was how much he, Bobby, could stomach. If he looked at it as saving American lives, could he be okay with taking some Afghan kid’s big brother or dad away instead? Both of them stared out at the nothing, as if the rocks and scrub would have answers. “Tell ‘em… Shoot, I dunno. Right and wrong is all screwed up out here. Which is more important—saving soldiers’ lives or finding the missing eleven?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know, either.” Stephen hung his head and shrugged. “If we save twenty lives, is that worth those eleven? I’m not used to tackling truly difficult moral issues. Up to know, I’ve been going based on killing and rape being bad, the Hunger’s wishes notwithstanding. I didn’t really need more nuance than that.”

  One of them had to make a decision. “Tell ‘em—” Bobby rubbed his face again and sighed. “Tell ‘em we’re on board. Privek ain’t gonna trust us with nothing if we bail now. We gotta at least try. If’n it means we gotta kill more, then, well, I guess.” He rubbed his eyes, finally tired enough to sleep.

  Nodding his agreement, Stephen moved his hand to talk to Klein again. “I can live with that. Can you?”

  Bobby grimaced. “I already got forty-some bodies on my tab. What’s forty more?”

  “Maybe we should get some sleep, because that actually sounded funny.”

  “A-damned-men.”

  Aside — Liam

  Liam hated his job. Nothing else could be worse and he had no choice. Three weeks of this crap so far. Three weeks since Elena disappeared. Three weeks since his world fell apart. They’d find her. He only needed to do something in return, so they could justify the man-hours. Oh, sure, he tried to pay them off. His father had more than enough money to cover those salaries. That bastard Privek wanted something else.

  Gritting his teeth, he laid a hand on the unconscious soldier’s bare thigh. At the ankle, this leg ended in a mass of blood-stained gauze. Under that, he knew he’d find a ragged end, treated enough to prevent the victim from bleeding out. No one told him what happened to his patients, and he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know.

  Doing this meant serving his country, he’d been told, as if that would make everything better. He took a deep breath and braced himself. With a twist and a pull someplace inside, he did the impossible and clamped down on a scream as the injury transferred from the soldier’s leg to his own. Blood gushed out of Liam’s ankle and flesh wrapped itself around the soldier’s.

  His thrice-damned power created miracles at the cost of his sanity.

  An eternity of agony later, the soldier still had no foot, but his leg ended in a smooth, healed and rounded stump. They’d be able to fit him with a fake foot now, there would be no oozing and weeping and pus, and the guy could avoid the potential problem of addiction to pain meds. Liam glared at the man for the crime of putting him through a few minutes of hell.

  Reaching down, he swiped the blood off his already regenerated foot with a towel. The second he’d seen the injury, he’d pulled his combat boot and sock off and set them aside. His assistant swooped in with her mop and sloshed the blood off the plastic under him for the thousandth time since he got here. She’d gotten good at it, and took only two swishes before she wordlessly wheeled the soldier’s gurney out. He’d wake up later and be confused, and someone would tell him to thank God, or his lucky stars, or whatever, and to not ask questions. He’d be walking again by nightfall if they had any prosthetics handy.

  Before he had a chance to put his sock back on, two soldiers carried a third in. Another pair peered inside the tent. All five—curiously barefoot and stained, bloodied, and half-dressed by camp standards—had been banged up, but Liam didn’t treat bruises and cut lips. He dealt with serious injuries. His patients either avoided months to years of surgeries and rehab, or they went back out into the field as a result of his ministrations.

  He might have shooed them out, except the man they carried had serious foot injuries. They’d been cut and smashed and generally mistreated to the point of uselessness. Torture did things like that, he supposed. If this guy wound up being able to walk after it healed normally, he’d have pain for the rest of his life. For whatever reason, they hadn’t cut off any of his toes. Maybe he’d escaped or been rescued before they got that far.

  Standing with a sigh, he vacated his stool and gestured for them to set the injured man on it. Since both feet had been hurt, he stooped to remove his other boot. Once he’d set it aside, he looked up at the other soldiers, intending to tell them to get out.

  “Hey, your eyes.” The one with the cut up feet said it, staring at Liam’s icy blue, almond shaped eyes. The other four snapped their attention to him.

  He knew he had unusual eyes. In his social circles, people noticed and considered him exotic for them, and thus more desirable. Before he met Elena, he’d played on it to get what he wanted, often. These men staring at him, however, pushed outside his comfort zone. “Yes, they’re unusual,” he said curtly. “Privacy, please.”

  No one moved. “Are you a faith healer?” Despite the fact none of these men wore any rank insignia, he guessed this one to be higher than the rest.

  Liam snorted. “No.” He pointed to the silver bar on his uniform shirt collar. He’d been given the Lieutenant rank to make his life smoother in the camp, though he hadn’t actually been inducted into the Army. The General who’d handed him the insignia had gotten short with him when he’d insisted upon making that clear. “I believe I gave an order, gentlemen.”

  “Then what can you do? Is it anything like turning into a scad of itty bitty dragons?”

  Two things annoyed Liam right now: these men refused to obey him, and he hated explaining this. A surge of raw, icy panic surged in his gut, eclipsing both things. “What? Where did you see dragons?” His hand shook as he reached up to check the man’s temperature. His skin felt no warmer or cooler than anyone else’s, which meant he had no easy excuse to discount anything he said.

  “His name’s Bobby. He said we shouldn’t talk about him, but if you’re
one of them, it probably doesn’t matter as much. Right?” The other four nodded slowly as the injured man spoke.

  Liam paled. Bobby could only be Mitchell, the one responsible for all that footage he saw of that apocalypse-level chaos in Salt Lake City. Privek called him dangerous, and the footage backed him up. On top of that, Mitchell had most likely been behind Elena’s abduction. He tried not to gulp too hard. “Did he do this to your feet?”

  “No.” The injured man raised an eyebrow and snorted. “He rescued us. Him and the vampire one.”

  “Stephen,” one of the others supplied. “We’d still be POWs getting tortured for information if they didn’t show up.”

  Liam had no idea what to do with that information. Stephen the vampire must be Cant. The report said he might have drank blood from one of the nurses, but she couldn’t really remember. By all accounts, Cant might be worse than Mitchell. Liam had been warned to watch out for them trying to lure him into a life of crime, or something along those lines. “Oh. I’m…glad to hear that. I, ah, do something like faith healing, but without the faith part.”

  He healed the man’s feet and sent the soldiers on their way. “I need a break,” he told his assistant.

  She handed him another towel. “You just started an hour ago.”

  “Yeah,” he snapped, “and now I need a break.” He wiped off his feet and pulled his socks and boots back on. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Just need some air.” Fleeing the tent, he sucked in a lungful of dry, warm air and let the morning sun bake him for a few minutes.

  The monsters in the images he’d seen wouldn’t have rescued soldiers. They would’ve killed everyone and moved on. More importantly, he had no idea why those two would come all the way here to kill people. They could go berserk in the States without the bother of traveling. He wondered if they’d come here to kill or abduct someone specific and rescued those soldiers by accident.

  Maybe he should find them. Men able to empathize with imprisoned soldiers might listen to reason and be persuaded to release Elena. If he played his cards right, he could even talk them into working for Privek. As much as he hated the situation that agent had put him into, Privek clearly wanted the best outcome for all of them. Besides, they probably wouldn’t attack him because of their common parent.

  Hurrying through the camp, he peered around tents and vehicles until he spotted Mitchell with another man, both wearing desert camouflage. They sat on rocks at the perimeter, chatting. Cant had to be the second man. He’d been told the man had a sensitivity to sunlight, and he wore too much clothing for the heat. Cant reached over and shoved Mitchell playfully in the arm, Mitchell laughed and shook his head. They seemed so normal.

  He took one step toward them, then froze. What if there was a reason—a very good reason—why he shouldn’t walk over there and introduce himself? They wore uniforms and appeared to belong, making him wonder why. His hand found the bar on his own collar and he rubbed it between a finger and thumb.

  Privek could be using them, or working his own angle for converting them. If he walked over there and said the wrong thing, he could ruin a lot of work. It would be easy to get huffy with Elena on the line, and his head full of people having their arms ripped off by their werewolf buddy. No, he needed to stay away from them. Elena needed him to do what he promised he’d do.

  He took one last look before turning away and hoping his choice meant Elena would be back in his arms soon.

  Chapter 7

  “And they’re sure these guys got some of our guys?”

  Stephen snorted. “Only as sure as they were of that weapons cache.”

  Frowning, Bobby looked down at the asphalt under his boots. Airstrikes had smashed the buildings on either side of it to rubble, yet left the road intact. Though only about half of it had been demolished, the entire town had been abandoned, and Klein said a Taliban unit had moved in. According to him, they had “reason to believe” at least three American soldiers could be found imprisoned here. Three men maybe held someplace wasn’t enough to justify a conventional rescue operation.

  “I reckon some scouting’s in order, then.”

  “I agree. I’ll wait overhead.” Stephen went up without further discussion, leaving Bobby alone in the dark.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. Stephen’s presence had more to do now with giving Bobby someone to talk to and a second brain to chew on things than anything else. Otherwise, the vampire had, more or less, become excess baggage and they both knew it. Bobby let the dragons peel away, sending them in to check out the town. It spread out, darting around and through the rubble, then into the intact buildings.

  By the time they finished, they’d found three buildings they couldn’t get into without Bobby specifically directing them. The swarm came back together and he set them on the task of breaking into the first one. Its appearance and size suggested a warehouse. Dragons found their way in through one of his favorite access points, an air vent. The place had been set up as an ambush, with tripwires, explosives, even simple stakes and stairs rigged to collapse.

  At first, he couldn’t understand why they thought anyone would fall for this, or why they’d enter it at all. Then he found the odd little devices clipped to the power lines. Aside from the surprise of finding power out here, he had no idea what to make of the devices. Several dragons fell on the boxes to figure out what they were.

  The devices had no buttons or dials, switches or levers. The cord appeared to be a standard three-prong power cable, with no extra wires. It had no antennas, and emitted no sounds or signals he could pick up. They did give off heat, like any other electronic gadget. It seemed to be their sole purpose, which made no sense to him. In a place already hotter’n heckbiscuits this time of year, they had a series of tiny space heaters.

  His dragons poked and prodded at the things until they noticed the devices emitted not heat, but a specific temperature. The surrounding air matched what the dragons knew to be his own natural body temperature. It took him another minute to think of a reason anyone might want that.

  These things had to be intended to fool detection methods that searched for body heat. For a moment, he admired the ingenuity of whoever came up with them. If a normal military unit came in to rescue those men, they’d be lured to a building full of death. Riding on the heels of this realization, seething rage threatened to overpower him. The swarm wanted to find whoever created these death traps and rip them apart from the inside out.

  The second building proved to be empty. When he breached the third building, he figured he’d find people, and meant to scout it and return to Stephen to plan. In the first room they found, the dragons saw men sitting around a table, playing cards and speaking some kind of Arabic-type language. They bore a strong resemblance to the men in that cave system. Before he realized he needed to restrain them, the dragons poured out and attacked, flooding the room and diving into the throats of the surprised men.

  Bobby watched the men thrash and gurgle, watched them claw at their throats and chests. They exploded, dragons bursting out in enough places to rip their chests and backs and bellies apart. In seconds, his swarm reduced four men to shredded meat and sprayed blood and gore everywhere. Dragon fire sparked all around as they cleaned each other off, and he pulled them in to re-form and survey their handiwork with his own eyes.

  Fresh meat, blood, bile: they mixed together in a horrible stench. They had died so fast, with so much awful violence. He would never have to worry about dying like that. What did that mean? Anything at all? He covered his mouth and swallowed bile. Turning on his heel, he slipped and grabbed the bloody doorknob to steady himself.

  He shut the door behind himself and sagged against it, breathing in the dirt and sweat and dust of the hallway. No matter how many times he wiped his hand on his pants, it refused to feel clean, and he swiped his hat off to wipe his sleeve across his brow. He’d come here to scout, not to slaughter.

  Somewhere else in the hallway, a door opened and shut. It goaded him to st
agger away from the door and move. His boots clomped on the thin, industrial carpet and he used the wall for support. As he passed it, a door opened, smacking into his side. The man behind it stared, wide-eyed, then he raised his assault rifle and pointed it at Bobby’s chest. He said something.

  The dragons yearned to be freed. Bobby clamped them down and raised his hands. “I only speak English,” he informed the man, which earned him a rough nudge in the arm with the gun.

  “Go,” the man said with a thick accent.

  Bobby let himself be shoved along, too numb and distracted to resist. As he went, the guy shoved the gun barrel into his back on one side or the other at random intervals, and it got so annoying that Bobby recovered his wits. He could get away at any moment, but this guy seemed to have a destination in mind, and it could turn out to be where the prisoners were kept. That would make everything faster and simpler.

  They went down three flights of metal stairs, two more than necessary to reach the ground. Finally, they passed through a door and down another hallway. Bobby got shoved into an empty room with a bare earth floor and walls. The door clanged shut and his host jangled keys, then he said something that sounded like a sarcastic welcome and walked away. Though the dragons wanted to stream out the window with the bars across it to destroy that man, Bobby wanted to wait and learn more first.

  “Hey,” he called out. Moving over to the door, he grabbed the bars and stood on his toes. He managed to get high enough to peer out, doing it for the sake of appearances.“Hey, is anybody out there?”

  “Yeah,” a male voice croaked. “Save your strength.” He had a Bronx accent, and sounded tired and defeated. “They’ll be down for you soon enough.”

  “What’d they do to you?” He hated to ask and would have preferred never to know. Someone in his position would ask. Besides, better to hear about it before seeing it.

  “Doesn’t matter. Not getting out of here no matter what.”

  Bobby took a deep breath and forced the dragons to stay put. “Anybody else down here?”