Junior Hero Blues

by J. K. Pendragon

  The nurse led me into a fairly big room with white walls and uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs. It was empty except for one person, sitting slumped at a table by one of the windows. There was a puzzle on the table, but she was ignoring it to stare out the window. She was wearing a white hospital gown over gray sweatpants and slippers, and her hair was in the same short cut it had been in the picture of her, but kind of flat and lifeless.

  “Let us know if you need anything,” said the nurse, and she left.

  I swallowed and took a deep breath, inhaling the sickly sweet hospital smell that permeated the place, and took a few steps toward Vanessa. She didn’t move at all. I wondered if she even realized I was there. I sat at the table next to her. “Vanessa?”

  For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to respond. Then she turned her head slowly and looked at me, unblinking, her eyes strangely glazed.

  “H-hi,” I said. “You don’t know me. My name’s Javier Medina. I’m a . . . I was a friend of Rick’s. Rick Rykov, do you remember him?”

  She blinked finally, without any expression on her face, and looked back out the window. Her head inclined ever so slightly.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s just that . . . he’s gotten into some . . . some trouble lately. And I thought you might be able to help me figure out how to help him.”

  “You can’t help him.” Her voice was surprisingly sharp, although so quiet I almost didn’t hear what she’d said.

  “Why not?” I asked, and she made eye contact with me for a minute, her eyes widening. Then she shook her head and swallowed hard.

  “I don’t know.” She brought a hand up to her face. “I’m confused. I need my meds.”

  “Wait, but—” The chair scraped as I moved closer to her. “Did something happen to you and Rick in that car crash?”

  She shook her head again. “No. I remember things that didn’t happen.”

  “What do you remember?”

  She looked more alert suddenly, and wary. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m . . .” I bit my lip. “Um . . . can I tell you a secret?” A little jolt went through me, and I wondered if I should be doing this.

  Vanessa shrugged. “Okay.”

  I glanced around nervously and leaned forward. “I’m a superhero.”

  Her eyebrows shot up, and an almost nonexistent smile touched her lips.

  “It’s true,” I continued. “I’ll show you.” I reached for my wrist, and turned my contacts off for a second, letting my eyes glow blue for her.

  Her eyes seemed to light up a little in response. “Are you on a superhero mission?” she asked, with a little trace of humor in her voice. “You need my help?”

  I nodded encouragingly. “Whatever happened to you in that car crash, I don’t think you imagined it. Rick . . . I think the Organization did something to him. But I don’t know how.”

  Her face was different now, her jaw held tight and her eyes sharp. She glanced around, her lips white and trembling before moving so that our faces were almost touching. “Javier, right? Listen. No one died in the car crash.”

  I stared at her, trying to figure out what that could mean. “But the newspapers. Your boyfriend, Josh.”

  “He was already dead.” Her voice broke, and she moved away from me, covering her mouth with her hands. “They killed him. They took us, experimented on us. Then they . . . then they crashed the car. They put Rick and Josh back in, but Josh was already . . .” She stopped and stared at me, her eyes wide. “I don’t know, I wasn’t there, I didn’t see it. I just know.”

  “What did they do to you? To Rick and Josh?” I took her hand, hoping that she could tell I wanted to help her. She was upset, and I didn’t want to pressure her into telling me anything, but I needed to know.

  She swallowed and calmed again. I think the medication she was on was keeping her from being too emotional. Also I’d heard that people who’d gone through traumatizing things were usually really calm about it, so there was that. “Whatever they did to them, it killed him,” she said. “Josh. Not Rick though . . . something else happened to him.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t remember. But—” she swallowed and looked at me “—when they tried to do it to me, it didn’t work. I . . . I stopped them. I—” her eyes went wide “—I killed them. I ran away.” Her hand was shaking in mine, and she grabbed me and pulled me close. “Am I crazy?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Actually everything she said made perfect sense. In a terrifying way.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I don’t know what I did.” She shook her head. “Do you . . . believe me?”

  “Yeah. It all makes sense. Rick can’t remember what happened before the crash. You were supposed to be camping, but he doesn’t remember it. And the League says he’s been brainwashed by the Organization. They must have experimented on him, and then brainwashed him into working for them.”

  “God.” She screwed her eyes shut. “I’m probably imagining all of this. The medication they give me . . .”

  “I should get you out of here. You’re not insane.”

  “But I’m still sick.” She shrugged. “I have PTSD. Nightmares. I killed people, remember?”

  “In self-defense!” I argued. “Listen, let me take you to the League. There are people there who can help you. Besides, you don’t know that you’re safe here. What if the Organization comes back for you?”

  “I . . .” Vanessa looked frightened again. Her lips trembled, and she glanced at the door. “I thought it was just my psychosis, but . . . if everything else is true . . .”

  “What?”

  She was still staring at the doorway, her eyes glazed again, and her lips white.

  “Vanessa.” I wanted to shake her. “What?”

  “I don’t think they ever left,” she said.

  I glanced at the doorway to see that the nurse was back and walking toward us. Except something was wrong with my vision all of a sudden: everything going dark and inky. I stood just as the woman reached me, and before my vision went completely, I saw that her eyes were pitch-black.

  She grabbed the collar of my shirt before I could react, and jerked me forward, sinking her fist into my stomach and sending me backward into the wall. I choked, trying desperately to get my breath back. Vanessa screamed to my right. I still couldn’t see anything, so I used my echolocation instead, and the static image of some blurry, winged thing bending over Vanessa forced itself into my brain. Welcome to Nightmare City.

  I sucked a deep breath in and threw myself forward, slamming into the creature with all my might and sending us both flying. A horrible screech temporarily blocked my echolocation, and I scrambled along the wall to reach Vanessa, grabbed her around the waist, and jumped up onto the window ledge.

  I smacked a hand onto the paned glass, sending a ripple of noise through the entire thing so that it shattered outward, and launched myself out with Vanessa under my arm. Her weight was more than I was used to handling, but I managed to keep us up. As we went, my vision returned, and the blackness went away like it had never been there. Glancing back, I could see the nurse hanging out the broken window, her eyes like big gaping pits of nothingness staring after us.

  I landed us on a nearby rooftop, and Vanessa dropped to the cement next to me. “They’ll come after me.” She stood and wrapped her arms around herself as the wind whipped at her hospital gown.

  “You’ll be safe with the League.” I desperately mashed the button on my watch to call for backup. “We just have to get you—”

  The gravel crunched behind us, and I turned to see the nurse, still in her flowery scrubs but with big shadowy wings framing her body. Her eyes were black, and way too big for her face. And then, of course, my vision went dark again.

  I tried to use my echolocation, but that horrendous ear-piercing screech was back, completely blocking it out. I screamed at Vanessa to run, and then turned to where the sound was coming from, in time to feel a sharp,
overwhelming pain in my stomach. Something an awful lot like claws dragged across my face, and I felt my glasses shatter, and closed my eyes just in time.

  Angry now, I brought my hands up, shooting waves of sound at the creature. All I could think was that I needed to get it away from me, to get it off . . . I needed to see. But if my attack had any effect, I didn’t notice it. From the way she was slashing at me, it seemed like it had only made her angrier. Like a giant pissed-off bird.

  Another claw punctured my stomach, this one going deep, and I gasped, pain flooding through me and making me light-headed. My knees buckled, my vision went red, and for a moment I was certain I was going to die with that horrible screaming in my ears.

  Then the screaming was cut off, and the darkness seemed to get a bit lighter. The claw in my stomach came free with an awful scraping feeling, and the nurse, now looking more like a big, black bird than a human, fell away from me. Vanessa was there, her hands retreating as the bird fell, and she took a step back and stared at me with her eyes wide and terrified.

  My ears rang, sounds coming slowly and echoing, and everything seemed a little blurry and weird. There was noise like a jet plane, and wind was blowing on my face. Then I felt someone behind me, and instinctively turned to defend myself, but I could barely move. I recognized his voice anyway, it was Captain Justice.

  “Javier, what happened?” He pressed a gloved hand to the wound on my stomach, and I looked down and realized that it was, like, pumping blood out. Ouch.

  “I need a med kit!” he yelled, and I guess I passed out for a second, because when I came to, he had lifted my shirt up and was putting gauze and stuff on it. I’d forgotten he was a doctor.

  I squinted and tilted my head a bit, trying to find Vanessa. I finally caught sight of her slippers and gray sweatpants next to me. She was just standing there, staring at the dead bird-thing.

  “It’s dead,” she said finally, her voice hollow.

  “It was trying to kill me,” I gasped, and Captain Justice shushed me.

  “Who are you?” he asked Vanessa.

  She looked up at him. “Vanessa Larsen. I don’t know what I am.”

  “She’s a Hound,” said Chelsea.

  Captain Justice turned from where he’d been sitting by my bedside. “Excuse me?”

  Chelsea looked slightly out of breath, as if she’d run all the way to the health wing from her office. “A Hound. I’m sure of it.”

  “B-but . . . she can’t be, she’s only eighteen,” I slurred. “I saw her school records.”

  “How is this possible?” said Captain Justice.

  “It was recent,” said Chelsea. “The change. Probably when the Organization attempted to brainwash her. She resisted the initial break. That’s how Hounds are created, remember?”

  “You said it was really rare.” I was trying not to cough or let it show that I was in pain, or else they’d put me under again. I’d had some pretty serious damage done, but I was going to be okay. Probably in a couple of weeks thanks to my Kanaan DNA. It still hurt a lot though.

  “It is,” said Chelsea. “Very rare.”

  “Can we trust her?” asked Captain Justice, and Chelsea gave him a look.

  “She’s still human. She’s a young, mentally scarred girl. What we can do is help her.”

  Captain Justice nodded, and stood. “I’ll speak to her, then, if you think that would be appropriate. Will you be all right here, Blue?”

  “I have to call my parents,” I said.

  Captain Justice turned back to me. “Have you thought of what you’re going to tell them?”

  I shrugged painfully. “The truth?”

  “I can give them a call, if you’d like,” he said. “Tell them to come visit you here.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “Okay.”

  So that was terrifying. My stomach managed to keep doing flip-flops despite the fact that I couldn’t actually feel anything below my chest. I didn’t know why I suddenly wanted to tell my parents. By all accounts, this was, like, the worst way to break the news to them. I guess I was just so tired of lying, and feeling my own mortality, and also they couldn’t be too mad at me when I was like this, right?

  Wrong.

  My mom yelled at me for, like, half an hour. She seemed furious about everything: the fact that I’d gotten hurt, the fact that I was a superhero in the first place, and of course the fact that I hadn’t told them the truth from the start. They wanted me to stop, and when I told them that wasn’t an option, they got all dismissive with me, and told me they were going to talk to Captain Justice and make him fire me or whatever.

  “It’s my decision,” I said over and over again. “It’s what I want to do.”

  “But you’re hurt!” said my mom, distraught. “Look at you!”

  “I’m fine.” Well, that was a lie. I was actually in, like, a lot of pain, but I didn’t want them to know that, obviously. “It’s just a job hazard. I was saving someone.”

  “Well who is going to save you, Javier?” She said it in English, which was particularly upsetting, and I don’t really know why. I guess it was her way of saying that she didn’t understand. Of all the ways I’d imagined of how them finding out about this would go, I’d always figured they’d be sort of proud of me in some way. Not just disappointed and worried. And that hurt a lot.

  Captain Justice came by that night after my parents went home. I’d never spent the night at the League before. I knew they had some pretty nice apartments where some of the heroes lived, but the health wing was just like any other hospital, and I didn’t like it. The nurse was going to give me something to help me sleep, but the captain wanted to talk to me first.

  “I spoke to Vanessa,” he said. “I thought you should know: she’s very grateful to you.”

  “I’m grateful to her too. She saved me. How is she?”

  “She’s having a hard time.” Captain Justice sighed. “She has severe PTSD, which was probably exacerbated by her treatment at Liberty Fields. She doesn’t know how to use her abilities as a Hound very well yet, and she’s suffering from guilt over the things she’s done to survive this far. But I think she’ll be okay.”

  There was a commotion at the doorway, and the Raven stormed in, looking angry. “I just got back from Alaska. I leave and you get hurt? Tsk. Always getting into trouble.”

  “It’s not my fault,” I said weakly. “I didn’t think I’d be attacked by some harpy thing.”

  “No one does,” said Captain Justice gently. “I spoke to your parents as well.”

  “You told your parents?” said the Raven. “How did they take it?”

  “They’re mad,” I said dismissively. “I knew they would be.”

  “They’re worried,” said Captain Justice. “You can’t blame them.”

  “Just thought they’d be proud.” I sank down. “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” said Captain Justice, putting a hand on the bedspread next to me, “for what it’s worth, I’m proud.”

  I swallowed, and looked away. All I could think was that I’d just provided him, and the League, with the best possible weapon against the Organization. So yeah, of course he was proud.

  I wasn’t in school for a week after that, and when I did come back, Rick at least seemed relieved to see me. He actually talked to me, walking across the parking lot from his SUV to where I was sitting at a picnic table with Kendall. “Thought maybe you were dead.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I see that isn’t the case.”

  “I’m pretty resilient.” I took a bite of my sandwich.

  “What happened?”

  I scoffed. “It was the Organization, what do you think?”

  “I’ll be right back.” Kendall scooted off.

  Rick sat down heavily across from me. “What did you do to provoke them?”

  “I stole one of their Hounds.” I was being deliberately snarky, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was mad at Rick, despite knowing that nothing was really his fault, and I wasn’t s
ure what the best way to break the news about Vanessa was. I hoped I could somehow cause his brainwashing to fail again, but I really had no idea how to do that. “Not the old lady.” I swallowed my food and looked at him. “Vanessa.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “She’s a Hound. The Organization took you and her and Josh and experimented on you and brainwashed you. She resisted the brainwashing; that’s how she became a Hound. Sound familiar at all?”

  “No.” Rick shook his head. “What kind of bull is the League feeding you?”

  “Vanessa told me.”

  “Well then she’s been freaking brainwashed! Listen, Javier, you better not have upset her.”

  “Upset her?”

  “She’s mentally ill. She needs to be kept at Liberty Fields.”

  “She’s traumatized, and she needs to be with people who can help her, not drug her and monitor her so that they can use her one day.” I took another bite of my sandwich. “Anyway, it’s her decision. She wanted to come to the League.”

  “Sure she did.” Rick’s eyes were ice-cold. “If I find out you’ve hurt her . . .”

  “I haven’t done anything to her. I was too busy being almost stabbed to death.” I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “She’s fine. If you want to see her, you should come to the League.”

  “Ha. Like I’m falling for that again.”

  I threw my sandwich down. “Rick, please. You know what I’m saying makes sense. You know the Organization experimented on you, don’t you? How do you think you got your abilities?”

  “So what if they did?”

  “So what? So everything!”

  “Well, I don’t care.”

  “You just think you don’t care.”

  “That’s it.” Rick stood. “I’m not going to talk to you if all you’re going to do is go on and on about brainwashing. I thought we could be civil, but obviously not.”