Rogues: The Omega Superhero Book Four (Omega Superhero Series 4)

by Darius Brasher

  I wore a plain white short-sleeved shirt and shorts. I ran a hand over my head. I found stubble there despite the hair removal ointment Doctor Alchemy’s subject had used on me. Obviously, my hair was starting to grow back. I pulled off the thin sheet that covered my legs. My right leg was no longer skinless, raw, and bloody. Other than it being discolored, like I had gotten a deep tan from my groin to my ankle, my leg looked normal. Hairless, but normal. An intravenous line ran from my arm to an IV bag dangling from a stand on the side of the bed. A thin electronic monitor was taped near where the IV line entered my arm. All further evidence I was in a hospital room. Maybe I should be a detective instead of a Hero. I could apprentice under Truman. He could teach me to escape a Rogue’s clutches without help.

  I was tired and weak. Even so, while I did not feel up to running a marathon, I felt worlds better than I had when in Doctor Alchemy’s lair.

  I was not alone. I had been so busy taking stock of my body, I had not noticed before. Maybe I didn’t have the talent to be a detective after all. First escape artist, now detective. I was crossing a lot of potential careers off the list.

  “Where am I?” I asked the man. My voice was weak and hoarse. I coughed, trying to clear it.

  “The medical bay in the Guild space station,” the man said. Standing just a few feet away, he examined a machine that beeped and pinged. Since it looked like the big brother of the electronic sensor on my arm, I assumed the sounds it made meant I was still alive. Good. It had seemed touch and go there for a while.

  The medium-sized man examining the machine wore a blue and orange costume that was composed of pants and a loose-fitting tunic rather than the tight costume most Heroes favored. His mask had a white caduceus emblazoned on its forehead. Doctor Hippocrates. I had seen him many times before. Not only had he been the chief physician when I was at the Academy, but he had healed me after Mechano’s bomb exploded in my face in Washington, D.C. Hippocrates had also healed Isaac after Iceburn collapsed a building on him, Neha, and me during our Academy days. Among his other powers, he could boost and accelerate the body’s capacity to heal itself.

  “How did I get here?” I asked him.

  “Myth brought you here. He said it was the safest place for you since there were some Rogues after you. After he brought you here, he went and found me. I was doing some work in South Sudan at the time. I told him I was too busy to tend to you. He said he’d knock me out and drag me here if I didn’t come voluntarily.” Doctor Hippocrates shook his head in bemusement at the recollection. “Though I don’t enjoy being threatened, it’s a good thing he was so insistent. Though the doctors here had done all they could, you were at death’s door when I arrived. After taking care of the nasty infection you had, I performed a skin graft to replace the skin on your leg. That’s why your leg looks the way it does. I’ve also accelerated the healing process for all your other injuries. You’ve been here almost a week.”

  “Where’s Myth now?”

  “Standing guard outside the door. He’s been there every day while you’ve been healing. Said somebody would come in here to attack you again over his dead body. In light of how he threatened me, I believe him. You’ve lucky to have such a loyal friend.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. I remembered how Isaac had rescued me from Doctor Alchemy’s clutches despite my foolish insistence we stay to rescue the Rogue’s drug-addled subjects. Now that I was more clear-headed, I knew I had not been in any condition to rescue anyone. But now that I was on the mend, I would have to go back and liberate Doctor Alchemy’s followers. “How much longer do I need to stay here?” I asked.

  “It’ll be several more days before you’re one hundred percent well again. To be frank, you’ll look like you’re wearing a one-legged stocking the rest of your life thanks to the skin graft, but at least you won’t die.” Doctor Alchemy shook his head at me. “At least not yet. This is the second time in just a few years I’ve treated you for life-threatening injuries. You need to be more careful. The next time, you may not have a friend handy to shanghai me into service.”

  A wave of exhaustion washed over me. I lay back down.

  “I’m not in the be more careful business, Doc,” I said. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wished they hadn’t. Narrowly escaping death apparently made me sound like a swaggering douchebag.

  I closed my eyes and thought while Doctor Hippocrates puttered around in the room. He was right. How many times had I narrowly avoided death since developing powers? So often, I was not certain of the number.

  A cat had nine lives, and it did not have the responsibility of saving the world.

  How many more did I have?

  CHAPTER 28

  A few days later, I had my Omega suit on while in the space station’s Promenade. I had spent most of my time the past few days exploring the station. The time I had spent recovering from my injuries was the first time I had been inside the space station. As a kid, I had read countless science fiction books about space and space stations, and now adult me was on one. If I were here under different circumstance, I’d be squealing like a little girl.

  Hippocrates had cleared me to leave the medical bay. Even so, I wheeled around with me a portable stand from which dangled an IV bag, with the line running from it still embedded in my arm. The clear bag contained my final round of antibiotics. Doctor Hippocrates had already weaned me off the painkiller he had been dosing me with. My right leg throbbed, though the pain was mostly gone thanks to Hippocrates accelerating my body’s healing. My grandma used to swear she knew it was going to rain when her arthritic knee throbbed. I wondered if I’d be able to predict the weather with my throbbing leg. It remaining off-white and pain-free would mean the coast was clear; it throbbing and turning blood-red would mean a severe thunderstorm with a sixty percent chance of a Rogue attack.

  The low hum of other Heroes’ conversations washed over me as I stood alone in the Promenade. It was a glass, chrome, and metal area that gleamed like the set of a science fiction show. Despite that, the couches and comfortable chairs that were scattered around the area and the Heroes who socialized in it made it feel more like a fraternity house than a Babylon 5 episode. Being surrounded by people who carefully ignored me made me feel like I was in high school again. Unlike in high school, I did not much mind being ignored now. I was too busy looking down at Earth.

  That was not quite true. I looked down at a projection of Earth. Though the ceiling to floor glass I stared at appeared to be a window to space, it was in fact a projection screen that showed what would be visible if what I looked at really was a window. The space station was too heavily armored for there to be actual windows. After all, the Guild had built it as a precaution against another alien invasion after the V’Loth had attacked the world in the 1960s. I remembered the attack and me foiling it as if it had happened yesterday even though I had not really been there. As I often did, I thought of Neha, our son James, and our lives together as a family. Though none of it had happened, it still seemed real, like a vivid dream I had been awakened from and never would be able to return to.

  One of the perks of my powers was they allowed me to go into space for short periods. During a previous jaunt into space months ago, I had seen the space station from the outside. It looked somewhat like a bicycle tire with a thick rod shoved through the center where the spokes met. The circular Promenade I now stood in was the rubber of the tire, the spokes housed the Guild’s administrative offices and the medical bay, and the thick rod in the center of the spokes contained the machinery and electronics that kept the space station going, including the facility’s armaments.

  The existence of the space station was a secret known only to licensed Heroes. It was cloaked so it could not be detected from the planet or spotted by conventional satellites. I didn’t like keeping something this big from the public, though I understood the reasoning behind it. If the public knew we Heroes maintained a giant space station bristling with weapons, many would fear we us
ed it for some nefarious purpose. Considering how Heroes like Mechano, Seer, and Millennium had treated me, I could sympathize with such paranoia. Even paranoids had enemies.

  There was a low hum and then a click behind me. I glanced back to see a willowy woman in a form-fitting olive costume step out of one of the station’s matter transportation chambers. They were recessed into the Promenade’s curved inner wall. The female Hero peeled her mask off as the door of the transportation chamber clicked shut behind her. She looked at me, glancing down at my Omega suit. I didn’t know her, but obviously she recognized me. Her eyes widened. She took a tentative step in my direction, thought better of it, and instead turned to join a nearby group of Heroes congregated around a cluster of couches. The Heroes there carefully avoided looking directly at me, yet kept glancing at me out of the corners of their eyes. I didn’t need super hearing to know they were talking about me. Though there was no rule saying they could not come up to me, it was bad form up here to approach a Hero you didn’t know. We Heroes got enough of that from civilians down on Earth. The Guild space station was supposed to be a place we could take our masks off, both literally and figuratively. To ensure privacy, there was no electronic surveillance in the Promenade, and Heroes recording or photographing their fellow Heroes was strictly forbidden. Even so, unlike most of the Heroes now socializing on the Promenade, I had not removed my mask. I had no reason to believe any Heroes were out to get me other than the three corrupt Sentinels. But why take a chance? A cat who sat on a hot stove wouldn’t sit on a hot stove again, but it was also leery of sitting on any kind of stove again. Once burned, twice shy.

  Feeling like the elephant in the room, I turned back to look at Earth again. Despite hours of wandering the Promenade the past few days, I had not gotten used to Heroes treating me like I was a combination of a rock star and the only tiger in a roomful of cats. To have a group of people I once viewed as larger-than-life figures treat me like I was the one who was larger-than-life was a bizarre. Omega was famous in the general population, but even more so among Heroes. With Millennium’s license having been revoked, I was the only Omega-level licensed Hero. Heroes knew better than anyone what that meant. Plus, I was famous for having exposed the corruption in the Sentinels’ midst.

  All the Heroes up here were why Isaac had brought me here to recuperate. He had thought that if there was anywhere in the world—or off the world in this case—where I would be safe from another Rogue attack, it would be in the Guild’s secret space station. But even if the Revengers came after me here—Brown Recluse knew of the space station since he had been a Hero and might have spilled the beans about it—Isaac figured me being surrounded by a bunch of other Heroes would make Doctor Alchemy and the other Revengers think twice. Not only was the space station an alien early-warning system and battle station, but it was also the Guild’s official headquarters and unofficial clubhouse. The Guild’s ornate building in Washington, D.C. was more a public relations front and tourist trap than the headquarters it pretended to the public to be.

  Matter transporters like the one the olive-garbed Hero had stepped out of were how Isaac had brought me here after taking me from Doctor Alchemy’s lair. There were transporters in regional Guild offices scattered across the world. After flying me from Doctor Alchemy’s volcanic island, Isaac had carried me to the closest landmass, in this case South America. He used a matter transporter in Chile to beam us to the space station.

  Isaac had been relieved to get the call from my watch’s panic button. After the Revengers attacked me in Astor City, Isaac had watched footage of the attack a bystander had uploaded to UWant Video. Isaac had been looking for me ever since Doctor Alchemy disappeared with my body. He had recruited Truman and a few other Heroes to look for me too. Until he got the distress call from my watch’s panic button, he thought I was dead.

  He had very nearly been right.

  I looked down at the blue and white orb I was supposed to protect. Literally billions of people relied on me though they did not know it. Ignorance was bliss.

  Death did not frighten me. My encounter with Angel and my suicidal thoughts unearthed by the wine I drank the next day had taught me that. But, the thought of dying before I had fulfilled my supposed purpose of protecting the world below did more than frighten me. It terrified me. Too many people had died because of me already. Dad, Hannah, and Neha. I had no interest in adding more to the list. Three was three too many.

  North America was below. I could reach out and put my finger on the spot where I’d grown up, give or take a few hundred miles. From a small farm to a space station looking down on that farm in a few short years. If I had not lived it, I would not have believed it. Heck, I had lived it, and I still barely believed it.

  I was beginning to understand why the Trials were so bloodthirsty, with several Hero candidates getting seriously hurt or killed like Hammer had been. Until now I had thought the Trials were needlessly violent and perhaps indicative, like Seer, Mechano, and Millennium were, of a cynical disregard for the sanctity of human life in the ranks of the Guild. I still thought that. It was absurd that Hero candidates were taught to not kill, yet the administrators of the Trials had no problem putting those same candidates in situations that could kill them. It was like a parent telling her children, “Do as I say, not as I do.” But now I was also starting to think that the official purpose of the Trials was not just empty words. The Guild said the purpose of the Trials was to make sure potential Heroes were hardened enough to withstand whatever a dangerous world threw at them. Fresh off the farm me would have broken both physically and mentally under Doctor Alchemy’s tender mercies. Yet Heroic me had not broken. I had bent a little maybe, but I had not broken. I was scarred and humbled and questioning the way I had gone about things since I had become Omega, but I was still standing.

  Still staring at the world below, I said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “You’ve been thinking about how creepy it is when you know who’s approaching without looking around?” Isaac said. “You were less creepy when you didn’t have your powers.”

  He came up alongside of me. His freshly shaved brown head glistened under the Promenade’s lights. He had barely let me out of his sight since bringing me to the space station. Normally I would have chafed being under someone’s watchful eye. After what I had been through with Doctor Alchemy though, I did not mind. It was like have a guardian angel.

  “I’m creepy?” I said. “You’re the one who’s been my shadow the past few days.”

  “You’re calling a black man a shadow? Really? Your moonshine-drenched racist roots rear their ugly head yet again. You white-privileged, cis-hetero, patriarchy-enabled, micro-aggressive male monster. Next you’ll be calling me a spook.”

  “I’m not sure how insulted I should be by what you just said because I didn’t understand it.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Nobody does.”

  Unmasked and out of costume, Isaac wore only jeans and a tee shirt. It was an Omega tee shirt, one of the U.S. made official ones I had licensed rather than one of the Chinese knockoffs some enterprising intellectual property pirates were making a bundle from. His shirt was the same color blue as my costume, with a white Omega symbol on the front of it. On the back of it Isaac had written in black marker, I saved Omega, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. The saving me part was true enough, but the rest wasn’t—he had bought the shirt himself months ago. I most definitely had not given it to him. I wasn’t so full of myself that I gave people Omega brand swag. It would be like giving out selfies as Christmas presents.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I repeated. “And not of names to call you, so cancel your and Jesse Jackson’s boycott of my Omega merchandise. I’ve been thinking about what a fool I’ve been.”

  “Well, hallelujah. I’ve been thinking the same thing for ages now.” Isaac hesitated. “Um, what exactly have you been a fool about? There’s so much to choose from.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the crisis
the Sentinels warned me about. I thought that with my powers and the Omega suit, given enough time and training, I would be able to handle anything that was thrown at me. And after Neha died, I wanted to handle it alone. I didn’t want someone else I cared about to get hurt because of me.” As I spoke, I continued to look at the world I was supposed to protect. The longer I looked at it, the more I felt its weight on my shoulders. “Despite all my powers, despite the suit, despite all my training and preparation, I still got my ass handed to me by a group of Rogues. If it hadn’t been for Doctor Alchemy not killing me immediately when the Revengers defeated me so he could torture me and get information out of me about you, I’d be dead right now.”

  Isaac shook his head. “I still don’t buy that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Trey knows my real name and my code name. If you know both, finding me is a snap. There’s no way he didn’t share that information with Doctor Alchemy.”

  “What makes you so sure of that?”

  “Because if the shoe was on the other foot and Doctor Alchemy was targeting Trey, I’d drop a dime on him so fast it would make his blonde head spin,” Isaac said matter-of-factly. His usual jovial demeanor made it easy to forget just how intensely he hated Trey because of what Trey had done to his sister. “If I’d do it to him, do you really think that lowlife would hesitate to do it to me? I think Doctor Alchemy tortured you because he wanted to, not because he really was trying to wring intel out of you.”

  I had to admit that made sense. Me thinking when I was in Doctor Alchemy’s clutches that he didn’t know where Isaac was seemed silly now that I was relatively unhurt and could think clearly. Being tortured clouded one’s thinking. Who would’ve guessed? “You’re saying I went through all that for nothing?”

  “Not nothing. You got a real cool leg-length scar out of the deal. It’s even cooler than mine. Lucky duck. Everyone knows chicks dig scars.” Isaac’s teeth flashed in a grin as he rubbed the jagged scar on his forehead from our run-in with Iceburn years ago. Then he sobered. “But before you start sulking again about the fact you got captured—”