by Logan Jacobs
It was about twenty minutes away to where the kidnapped child had been seen last, so I had a little time to think. The problem was, I felt like I was at a crossroads, and I couldn’t foresee the consequences of taking either path. What I really would have preferred to do was continue to follow both until I could learn more. I wanted to know Miles better and find out what it was like working with him, while continuing to perform my duties as a Warden and retain that title.
But I knew that wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t have my cake and eat it too.
First of all, The Wardens would be furious if they knew what kind of activities Miles was getting me involved in. It was definitely a violation of my contract with them, not to mention the law. Second of all, practically speaking, I really didn’t have time or energy for both. They were both full-time jobs for a superhero, and I needed to sleep sometimes. But the most profound reason was that it would just be hypocritical to stay in both roles.
Miles had decided to start going after supervillains himself because he didn’t believe The Wardens were effective at it anymore. He wanted to try a radically different approach. Namely, default to lethal force immediately. According to The Wardens, if I did it Miles’ way, then I would lose the moral high ground, I would be just as bad as a supervillain.
And according to Miles, if I kept fighting crime The Wardens’ way, I would just be perpetuating one big, lucrative entertainment cycle that cost thousands of innocent lives.
I thought he was greatly exaggerating the extent of the corruption and greed within the Warden organization. I knew a lot of the superheroes personally and perceived them as earnest, hard-working individuals. But, I could also see that there were elements of truth in what he said. Some Wardens, especially the most high profile ones, really weren’t focused first and foremost on fighting crime anymore. The fame had gone to their heads.
I didn’t know yet whether Miles was right, or whether The Wardens were right. Probably, they were both getting some things right and some things wrong. But I didn’t know, in the end, which one was more right. I just knew that if I kept playing for both sides, I’d be part of the problem no matter what. I’d be canceling out whatever progress I was making against crime in Pinnacle City.
So I had to choose.
Probably sooner rather than later, because my supervisors were already starting to get suspicious.
I still couldn’t believe that they had had the nerve to track my whereabouts yesterday when I was not at work and then question me about them, as if I had been the one doing something wrong. I didn’t even feel guilty about lying to them about my activities since it wasn’t any of their business. They didn’t own me. I wasn’t their property.
The suit that I had been testing last night had felt amazing on, it was the best garment I’d ever worn. It actually enhanced my powers more significantly than anything The Wardens had ever equipped me with, and while I hated to admit it, the suit had looked really sexy on me.
Accepting a piece of tech like that from a stranger was a sketchy proposition, and Miles could easily have implanted the suit with a tracking device of his own or other spyware, or could have wired it to electrocute me if I disobeyed him or any other kind of villainy like that, but I just didn’t think he would do that.
It didn’t seem like his style.
Did he like power and influence? Yes, obviously. Over beautiful women in particular? Again, based on what I knew of his personal history, yes. But I didn’t think he’d want to try to control a woman in a fascist style like that. I think for him the fun was in seducing them and manipulating them into doing what he wanted of their own free wills.
If he knew anything about me, then he’d have to know that I would die before I would let anyone make a slave of me.
Whatever its qualities, both discovered and as yet undiscovered, I had a feeling that the suit was only a small taste of what Miles could do. I didn’t know all that much about technology, but based on that suit and his work that I’d seen in The Cellar, it seemed like maybe all the media coverage wasn’t exaggerating his genius invention prowess. If anything, maybe the public didn’t fully appreciate what he was capable of.
But, when it came to engineering, my impressions hardly amounted to an expert opinion. The only thing I really knew how to do, or at least thought I knew how to do, was to fight supervillains. And now along came this arrogant, impressive stranger who challenged even my basic conceptions of how to do that.
Some of the points he said during our debates were flat out wrong. Reprehensible even. But some of the points, especially his criticisms of the current crime fighting system, made sense and were hard to deny.
There was also one other issue that made it hard for me to evaluate objectively whether Miles had a solid case for killing supervillains in direct contravention of Warden policy.
If I was being honest with myself, I was definitely attracted to him.
I wasn’t head-over-heels in love with him like his poor little assistant. Not even close. But there was a spark of sexual chemistry there that I felt even when we were arguing. Maybe especially when we were arguing. In many ways, the tabloids were correct about Miles. He was devilishly charming, roguishly handsome, and possessed fierce intelligence. The combination of all three traits seemed to permeate the air around him like an aura, and the more time I spent around him the more I found the experience pleasurable. I didn’t think I was weak-minded enough to get ideologically corrupted by someone and suckered into participating in a murderous rampage just because I wanted to fuck him, but the possibility did concern me.
Was he right with his manifesto, or was I just falling for him?
My own car honked lightly at me, and I realized that it had pulled into a parking lot and stopped while I had been lost in my thoughts.
Miles tended to distract me.
“Time to go save this poor kidnapped kid,” I sighed as I slid out of my car.
My partner for this mission was Clifford, and he walked over as soon as I stood from my car. He’d chosen his superhero name after the big red dog. He wasn’t red skinned or even red haired, just a fair-skinned, freckled, brown haired college aged kid, and he wasn’t big either, just moderately athletic and naturally lean. But, he could morph into a nondescript stray looking brown mutt, every nonhuman animal he ever met unfailingly adored him, and he had that sixth sense that some dogs do for danger whether in the form of earthquakes or people’s bad intentions.
I liked Clifford, actually. He was young, naïve, almost painfully earnest, so sometimes he could be a bit exasperating to have along on missions, but I’d take him any day over the Killer Kitten, whom The Wardens loved to pair me up with since we “looked so good together.” She was actually an impressive fighter but probably the vainest, most self-centered, and catty-bitch I’d ever met. And she resented me because tabloids liked to call me “the next Killer Kitten,” which wasn’t exactly a title that I appreciated either.
“Hi Lizzie!” Clifford cheered as he waved at me.
“Hey Clifford.” I was fine with my real name, Elizabeth, and I’d be lying if I didn’t like the way it sounded as it rolled off Miles’ silver tongue, but I hated the nickname Lizzie. I let Clifford and Clifford only use it since he was so adorable in a clumsy puppy kind of way.
“Look!” he said as he thrust a red ball into my hand.
For a second I thought he was trying to play fetch. Then I realized that the ball was made of foam and that it had a cutout where a human nose was supposed to go. “Oh, this is the clown’s nose?”
“Yup, it must have fallen off, maybe the little girl put up a struggle,” he replied. “But it has his scent on it, so now it’ll be easy to track him!”
I had to smile at Clifford’s infectious enthusiasm. “Okay, well you’re the one with the tracking abilities, so I’ll just follow your lead.”
Clifford morphed into a friendly mutt and scampered along through the neighborhood of the missing child. I walked behind him, and about
a mile away we reached an abandoned ramshackle shed at the edge of a forest with sinister graffiti painted on the outside.
Then he morphed back, pointed at the shed, and announced in a stage whisper, “He must have taken her in there!”
“Okay, let’s go get him,” I said.
Clifford glanced me up and down and frowned. “Hey, where’s the nose?” he asked. “You still have it, right?”
“N-no, I chucked it in a trash can that we passed,” I admitted. “I thought you never forget a scent once you sniff it once? So I didn’t think we needed it. And it was kind of… greasy.”
“Yeah, but we’re supposed to retain stuff like that for evidence!” Clifford exclaimed.
I wanted to make a sarcastic retort, since I was pretty sure we’d find all the evidence we needed to convict and then some inside the shed, but Clifford was technically correct, so I just said, “Sorry, my bad,” and started heading for the shed.
As we approached, we could hear the sound of a little girl sobbing. I kicked in the door and found the pigtailed child in a dress propped up in what looked like a prototype for the first electric chair with a metal bowl clamped over her head and everything, and a clown in full costume bent over it, fiddling with some wires while cackling maniacally.
Fucking crazy psycho was about to murder a little girl.
“Hands over your head!” Clifford shouted, but I had already grabbed the clown by the throat, slammed him into the wall, and started choking him while his feet kicked feebly, and his layers of makeup started cracking and sweating off so that it looked like his huge eyes were melting and his oversized pout was drooping even farther.
“Here are the handcuffs,” Clifford said eagerly from behind me.
“Why don’t you free the little girl?” I growled at my partner while I continued to hold the clown in place. The villain had tried to choke out something when I grabbed him, but now he was struggling to breathe under my fingers, and I could feel the pulse slowing through his carotid artery.
All I would have to do is just keep holding him like this. I wouldn’t even have to squeeze any harder. He’s just lose the blood flow to his brain.
“Good idea, I’ll do that right away,” Clifford agreed, and I heard the clacking of metal clamps being rapidly undone. “Dynamo!”
“What’s wrong, is she okay?” I asked without turning around. I was kind of fascinated by the evolution that the clown’s face was going through. It was getting all red, veiny, and twitchy in spots. And I was starting to be able to see the bloated flabby middle-aged man’s face through the androgynous cartoon character veneer. I looked deeply into his eyes but I didn’t see human emotion looking back, just a psychotic emptiness. What would happen if I actually used all my strength to squeeze? Would his head pop like a zit, or would he just suffocate out and die with a whimper?
Physics said the later, but I kind of wanted to try it.
“She’s fine, but he’s starting to look really unwell-- Dynamo!” Clifford yelled as he tugged on my arm. “Let go, you’ll kill him!”
“Oh,” I sighed. Then I let go of the villain, and Clifford lunged forward and quickly handcuffed him.
“What was that?” Clifford asked me under his breath after he had the clown under control. His eyes were wide with concern. “Dynamo, you almost killed him!”
“It would have been a tragic loss to the community, I’m sure,” I sighed.
“What’s wrong with you?” Clifford glared at me.
The little girl, who might have been cute if her face hadn’t been so puffy and tear-stained, pointed at the handcuffed clown and shrilled, “That’s a bad man! A very very bad man!”
“Well, you don’t need to worry, you’re safe from him now,” Clifford told her warmly. He didn’t just have a way with animals, he also tended to have a way with small children, and this girl was no exception. He picked her up and put her on his hip as we headed back to our vehicles. He soon had her giggling, and her brush with death by clown electrocution was seemingly forgotten.
We shut the clown in the caged section of Clifford’s Warden truck and decided that I would stay there to guard him while Clifford went to deliver the little girl back to her parents. The process only took a few minutes, but I paced behind the cage in Clifford’s truck and tried to keep my mind from wandering to last night.
“Dynamo, are you okay?” Clifford asked me when he got back.
“Yeah,” I said as I shook thoughts of Miles out of my head. “He didn’t even put up a fight. I don’t think he was even necessarily a supervillain, just a sadistic circus freak.”
“No, I mean… you’re not acting like yourself,” Clifford said.
“Look, I’m sorry, I might have been a little overly rough with the clown,” I said. “I just… um… saw that little girl in the chair like that about to get her brains fried and I guess my maternal instincts just kicked in.”
“Oh, okay,” he said as he smiled at me.
I had just told a lie.
Sure, I instinctively wanted to protect the girl just like I always instinctively wanted to protect every helpless person, but the difference in this case had been that I hadn’t really perceived the clown as human.
As redeemable. As deserving of due process. All the things I’d been trained to keep in mind when dealing with supervillains and lower level criminals. I had just seen him the way Miles would have seen him: as a problem to be eliminated.
A problem that, once eliminated, would mean that the world would be a safer place for little girls.
Clifford was right. I wasn’t quite myself that day. Or, maybe part of me had always been ruthless like that, and Warden training had never fully succeeded in conditioning the killer instinct out of me? Either way, I really needed to watch my behavior more carefully.
Our next mission for the day involved a trio of supervillains with various agility related abilities that they tried to use to escape us by leading us on a rooftop chase. Clifford and I had managed to capture two of them, and this time, conscious that my partner was watching me closely, I took extra care to be gentle and humane with them as I handcuffed them. He seemed to notice and approve. So everything was going excellently, until I was pursuing the last of the trio to remain at large, and he flew from one building to the next, and I tried to jump the gap, and instead tumbled down four stories.
Pain exploded through my kneecap, and I realized that it had been completely shattered.
Clifford screamed in shock. Then he yelled down at me, “Dynamo, are you okay?”
“Will be soon!” I managed to yell. “Fucking get him!”
Clifford hesitated, but then his training kicked in. He nodded, swung across the gap on a clothesline that I really should have used myself, and disappeared after the fleeing supervillain.
I sat there in the empty concrete alley wheezing in agony. Once my leg started healing and the pain subsided just enough that I could think again, I realized what my mistake had been in missing that jump. The reason wasn’t that I had miscalculated the distance.
It was that, if I had been wearing the new suit that Miles designed for me, I would have been able to clear it with room to spare.
In my shiny red latex Warden-designed one, however, I had come up just barely short. The suit that I’d been wearing for my entire, admittedly brief, career as a Warden. The suit that I’d worn into combat countless times. So how could I possibly already be more used to the one that I’d only worn once ever, for a few hours, for testing purposes only? How could my body already be expecting the dark gray suit with all its unfamiliar gadgets?
I sighed. The broken leg was a wakeup call. I couldn’t work this distracted. I really needed to sort my thoughts out and come to a decision before I’d be good for any kind of crime fighting again.
A few minutes later Clifford radioed me to tell me that he’d successfully captured the supervillain and was taking him back to our cars.
Miles would tell me that it was another full delivery for The W
ardens public relations team to crow about and the prison industrial complex to profit from.
How long would this trio remain behind bars? I would probably get the chance to chase them down again in a few months. How many people would they kill in the meantime? How many more times would we chase them?
When would it end?
“Damn,” I sighed as my leg began to itch. I really had to dismiss thoughts like these. I was a Warden right now, and I needed to focus on my job, not Miles’ observations.
Once the trio of supervillains were all safely caged, Clifford came back to help me limp back to my car. It was embarrassing to lean on him like that, but it would have taken another twenty minutes or so before it was healed enough for me to walk on my own.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened. I’ve been such a lame partner today, you deserve better.”
“Don’t apologize, that looked like a really gruesome injury!” Clifford said anxiously. “You must be in a lot of pain. You’d better take the rest of the day off, once we drop the prisoners off.”
“Yeah, I guess I’ll do that,” I said a bit too eagerly, and then I silently berated myself.
After the prisoners were safely in Warden custody and Clifford had been dispatched on another mission with a different partner, I sat motionless in my car in the parking lot staring into space. My leg still hurt, mostly because it was a reminder of all my failures that day. Both the visible, physical mistakes and the mental weakness and indecision.
“Where would you like to go, Miss Dynamo?” my car prompted me in a male British accent.
I hesitated.
Where I really should probably have gone was home to make myself some coffee and have some quiet time to think, but spending any more time tangled in my thoughts seemed like an utterly miserable prospect at the moment. It would just drive me crazy. If I weren’t already crazy, that is.