The City That Heroes Built

by Daniel Pierce

  “Then they're going to check the cell tower information and triangulate you to here,” I said.

  “How the fuck do people even get away with keeping a secret identity?” Jen asked.

  “Their friends don't get caught first.”

  “I'm less optimistic about doing anything.”

  “We need burners,” I suggested.

  “Yeah. Burner computers?”

  “Buy used, use for a week, sell them back.”

  “Maybe. We couldn't use them here without masking our IP address.”

  “We need to give this more thought,” I said.

  “Sleep on it?”

  I tried, but I couldn't. I stared at the ceiling, and ran again early. The coffee shop was late opening. I bumped into Calliope coming back empty-handed.

  “You look like hell,” she said.

  “Couldn't sleep,” I said.

  “Nightmares?” She must have read something on my face because she nodded. “My ex- had nightmares. Had a hard time sleeping.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He drank.”

  “Ah. That reminds me, I ran into a client of yours here a couple of days ago.” Her eyes narrowed. “Dude named Fiver.” She did not look happy. “He just needed a ride,” I said. “I hooked him up.”

  “He offered to do a favor in return?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, that's what he does because he doesn't have friends. Be careful, he'll end up taking more than he gets. Do you a favor, you do him one, he gets you to do something else. So on.”

  “I'll keep that in mind.”

  She went out, I went back into my apartment. Jen was still sleeping. I went through the news. It was a busy night in Santa Maria.

  The Big Blue Meanie wrecked another bank in Union City. He followed his usual MO of doing so much damage to the bank while carrying bags of money that the majority of his haul was left scattered on the street. Onlookers scrambled for the loose bills.

  The assassin Bikini Kill killed 6 people in a jazz club in East Palm.

  And Skyborne was being sued.

  I avoided coffee that morning, and managed to sleep. Jen left me unmolested until the afternoon, and then I slept some more. I woke up around four.

  “No nightmares?” she asked when I showed myself.

  “No, I'm okay,” I said. “I feel like we should talk to Fiver today. I'm not sure what to say, though.”

  “I was going to say the same thing,” Jen said. “I mean, what the hell? Why not?”

  “I mean, as long as I'm right and he's not actually a supra-villain, we should be fine.”

  “Should we tell someone else in case we die?”

  “Your optimism is terrifying,” I said.

  “I'm just saying.”

  “I don't know what we'd say. It's not like we have crucial information that no one else can sort out.”

  “Yeah, okay. You have his number?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Call him from a payphone?”

  “Yeah.”

  We used the one at Pizza Planet.

  “Fiver,” said Fiver. “Give me your number.”

  I read out the number on the phone. He hung up. I hung up. The phone rang. I answered.

  “Fiver,” he said.

  “You said you owed me a favor.”

  “Yeah? I'm at Murphy's.”

  “Across from the gym on Speyside?”

  “That's the one.”

  “Be there in twenty minutes.”

  He hung up. Twenty minutes later we were sitting at a table with Fiver in a derelict Irish pub in East Santa Maria.

  “Where do I know you from?” he asked.

  “I drove you to Todd's house.”

  “I meant her.”

  “You don't,” Jen said. Fiver didn't look convinced.

  “I don't know your names.”

  I looked at Jen. “Uh,…?”

  “We're Jen and Tom,” Jen said.

  “Right on,” Fiver said. “What can I do for you?”

  “It's more about what we can do for you,” Jen said. “We're research professionals. Databases, information, analysis.”

  “I'm not a small business owner,” Fiver said.

  “You're looking for someone,” Jen said. “We can help you.”

  Fiver squinted. “What do you think you know?”

  Jen looked at me. I cleared my throat.

  “I think I know who Todd is, and why you told his parents you'd take care of it. I think we know who has him, and what they're doing, and we think we can help figure out where they're going to go next.”

  “Then you probably think you know about my background.”

  “I'd feel comfortable putting a wager on it.”

  “Let me go put a quarter in the juke box. I'm sure you've got an email on a timer or a letter in your lawyers hands, don't worry, I'm not going to threaten you. I'm not really that important. You out me, and the only thing I'm worried about is some jackass in here making fun of what I wore to fights five years ago.” He got up and walked near the jukebox, stopping instead at the bar. The bartender nodded. Fiver came back.

  “Had to do a number on the electronics,” he said. “So, tell me what you know. Details this time.”

  I told him what I found out about Todd, how I figured he must be Rebel, about the Lady in Black. I told him we thought we could help him pull a team together to stop LEGION the next time they wanted to steal a body. Jen mentioned we might be able to put him in touch with Free Force.

  “Nah, I already reached out to those assholes,” Fiver said. “They wouldn't have me. I mean, okay, I don't have any flashy power, I get that they've found a happy spot with their team. Fuck them, though. They don't do a damn thing. Okay, sorry, I don't deal with rejection very well.”

  “Well, anyway, maybe we could help out with finding someone else.”

  “What's your deal, then?” he asked. “Why are you trying to help with this?”

  “Just seems like something that we can do. We don't have powers, but we're into supras. Might as well put our interest to a productive end.”

  “You looking to get paid?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Yeah, okay, I've got a good vibe from you, dude. Let's make plans.”

  “Like what?”

  “Get your data together. Let me know where and when to meet up with you.” He gave me another number. “That's good until Sunday. You can always leave a message for me here. Talk to the bartender with the one leg. The other one never remembers to give me messages.”

  “That guy there?” I couldn't see his legs for the bar.

  “Yeah, but his brother looks just like him, only with both legs.”

  “What's his name?”

  “Cal is the guy with one leg, Simon is his brother.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We'll get back to you.”

  Jen and I left. We went by her place to get some things, then back to mine to stay the night.

  Wiki Entry: The Seven Minute War

  The Seven Minute War was a devastating battle between The Guardian Angels and LEGION that was caught on tape March 15th, 2012. The fight destroyed three city blocks and ended with the deaths of many of the supras involved. The most tragic of which was the death of Liberty Rose, a relatively new member of The Guardian Angels (she joined in 2009) and idolized by millions. Rose was killed by Harbinger and then apparently reanimated by The Lady in Black to fight on against her former teammates. Liberty Rose died that day, but Bloody Rose was born. She has surfaced since, never at the Lady in Black's side but as a random mass murderer, her expression never once changing from one of glassy eyed curiosity as she slices her victims apart. Arcade and Crescent were killed by Bloody Rose during the Seven Minute War. Sentinel killed Harbinger and Loathings. Sally Blues retired in the aftermath.

  June 2, 2021

  The news in the morning led with a report of missing children in Santa Maria. A runaway shelter reported the disappeara
nces a couple of weeks ago, but no one could prove anyone was actually missing until a local kid living at home was grabbed in the same area.

  Jen and I started the morning thinking about the LEGION issue. The first thing we needed to do, was chart the final resting place of all of the supras we could.

  “There could be thousands,” Jen warned.

  “We only need the public information,” I pointed out. “LEGION is probably doing a simple internet search. Most supras aren't going to get a nice burial; they're going to be cremated. Basically all the villains end up as dust after the government tests them. That leaves civilians basically. People who left family around.”

  It didn't take too long to put the information together. By the afternoon, we were working on other things.

  “We ought to talk to the homeless shelter where the kids are missing,” Jen suggested. “Maybe we could get a lead there.”

  “You want to really investigate something?”

  “I mean, why not? The more data we have the better off we are.”

  “I'm thinking more like we stick to researching online and building analytics,” I said.

  “Not a whole lot on this one. Maybe we can turn something up that the cops didn't.”

  “I feel like we're significantly disadvantaged, not being cops.”

  “Runaways aren't going to be happy talking to cops,” Jen said. “And cops aren't going to care about missing kids that are already missing, or weren't even reported missing in the first place.”

  “What do we tell people when they ask why we're asking questions?”

  “We tell them we're reporters.”

  “They can confirm that.”

  “We tell them we're independent investigators.”

  “That's not even a thing,” I said.

  “So what? If they want to talk to us great, if not, we lose nothing. But let's go while it's still light out, I don't want to be there after dark if someone is running around kidnapping people.”

  “Right.”

  We went out to the shelter, a local charity called Kids Remembered. They had beds for a hundred and thirty kids a night, and filled about half of them with a regular group of kids. The other half of the beds went to transients, either kids passing through or those that didn't stay long before returning home, or going to a different shelter. We got in by claiming we wanted to be volunteers.

  “You couldn't have come by at a better time,” said Tina, the woman who ran the volunteer coordination. “I just had a couple of people quit. How'd you find out about us?”

  “Saw the story about the missing kids,” Jen said. “Read about Kids Remembered, decided that it's something we wanted to get involved in.”

  “What do you do?” Tina asked.

  “IT contractors,” Jen said.

  “Odd hours, I'm guessing.”

  “Some. We just finished a big project, so it'll be a while before we get our next gig.”

  “Well we could use people to sort donations, and run the laundry. We make the kids do as much work as we can, teach them to be self-sufficient, pro-active about taking care of themselves, but they need oversight or some things won't get done. Before I can use you, we need a background check.”

  “Really?”

  “There are people who would take advantage of the kids. Come in here, earn their trust, get them involved in drugs or prostitution.”

  She sent us away with a small stack of paperwork. We walked through the neighborhood on our way out. The shelter was in an old warehouse in the rail district, in East Santa Maria. Outside of the shuffle of trains, there weren't too many businesses in the area. Murphy's was on the northern border, and Skins was near the center. There weren't any restaurants, but food trucks came in during the week at breakfast and lunch. None stayed after dark.

  Barbed wire topped roofs and steel gates that were chained shut at night. The buses ran to the edges of the district, mostly left over from when Santa Maria was smaller and the passenger rail when through the district, before the new high speed lines went direct from LA to the Bay Area, or were re-directed to stops along the coast. An abandoned theatre, the Old Fashioned, and a handful of failed restaurants were boarded up and left to rot. The other blocks were almost exclusively warehouses. Graffiti covered every wall, and some of the ground as well. We turned away at Bath Street when the dealers started watching us.

  “We're close to Murphy's. Let's see if Fiver is there,” Jen suggested.

  He wasn't. I called him.

  “Yeah, I'm nearby, give me five minutes.”

  Twenty minutes, Fiver showed up.

  “Yeah, sorry, what do you have?”

  Jen walked through our program.

  “This is a list of every supra who has been in the news over the last five years who has died and was buried in Santa Maria.”

  “I feel like that would be a lot,” Fiver said.

  “Not really,” Jen said. “Most villains were disposed of by the government. A couple of heroes that died had their bodies removed by fleeing teammates. Some people were from out of town and their bodies sent home, a lot didn't have any family and were cremated, or had family that wanted them cremated.”

  “So what are we dealing with?”

  “Eight that we could locate graves for.”

  “That's not good odds.”

  “Besides Todd, two others were taken in the last two months,” I said. “One was Vanessa Robbins, stay at home mom, was a bit suicidal, jumped off a building, lived. Had a couple of overdoses, too. Finally stepped in front of the high speed train from LA. She died in the hospital the next day. Her body was taken from the family plot Lompoc.

  “The other is Zhang Meili, daughter of Chinese-American immigrants, she was part of the gang “Minor Threat”. She and her partner Lara Quigaman were released from the Citadel in 2019. They wanted to re-establish their territory and business in a hurry, but within a couple of days they were found beaten to death. Stone City was tagged on the wall next to where their bodies were found. That's the gang that still runs the rail district, and basically all of East Santa Maria. Anyway, her folks converted when they came over, and she was buried in Santa Maria. He grave was opened in April, body snatched.”

  “That leaves us with five,” Jen said. “Three of those are in Arroyo Grande.”

  “Free Force patrols there.”

  “Right, so that leaves us Flammable Lolita and the Granite Kid. She is buried in Vandenberg Commons, the kid is in Antiguo Los Alamos Cemetery.”

  “That's not too far apart.”

  “Too far to watch both at once. Still, a 50/50 chance. Not too bad.”

  “Yeah, I've got a way around that,” Fiver said. “Just a matter of who we're going to be interrupting. LEGION is serious business.”

  “Maybe you can follow them,” I suggested.

  “Probably not,” Fiver said. “They fly.”

  “It's too bad you can't get the New Powers back together to team up with the rest of the Guard,” Jen said.

  Fiver's face darkened. “Never going to happen,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah, forgot you guys had some differences after Lady Thirteen left.”

  Despite his success at the card table, Fiver didn't have a poker face. He looked like he was going to say something. He left it inside.

  “So LEGION,” I said. “We figure if we're half right, we've got a fair shot at stopping their next body snatch.”

  “Knowing where it's happening and stopping it are two different things. I'm fairly foolhardy, and even I don't want to run into that fight.”

  “We could steal the bodies first,” Jen suggested.

  “And then what?”

  “Then they can't steal them.”

  “And we're going to store them in the fridge? Pay to have them re-interned and not tell the families?”

  “Cremate them? Stop LEGION from adding to their numbers.”

  “Maybe,” Fiver didn't look convinced. “I'm more interested in old fashioned revenge.�
�

  “You want to kill Lady in Black,” Jen said.

  “I'd probably be happy with ruining her schemes and seeing her thrown into the Citadel, but killing her would be nice.”

  “Not much of a chance if the Guardian Angels couldn't do it,” I said.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Fiver said.

  “I'm just saying, you run into a fight and punch people. That's not really a supra-power.”

  “Sometimes I kick, too,” Fiver said.

  An awkward pause threatened when Jen said, “We should probably go.”

  “I'll see about those cemeteries,” Fiver said.

  Jen and I left.

  “Hey, didn't Nigel say that Mike had a good file on the New Powers?” Jen asked. “I'm going to give him a call.”

  She spoke quickly while I drove and reported, “He says he doesn't have it.”

  “You think he's lying,” I guessed.

  “I'm almost certain of it. I've asked him for things before, he's always jumped at the chance to help.”

  “We should ask him face to face, get a read on him. Maybe video it and do microexpression analysis.”

  “That's not going to let us read his mind,” she said. “We've all got huge gaps in our knowledge, let's not read too much into this.”

  “So what's next?”

  “Pizza and beer?”

  We went back to my place.

  June 3, 2021

  Fiver called in the morning, from a new number.

  “I sent you a picture, let me know if you can figure out who this is. Also, put this number in your phone. It's not mine, but it might be handy.” He hung up.

  “Who was that?” Jen asked.

  “Fiver.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wanted to know who this guy is.” I held up my phone so she could see the picture. I forwarded it to my laptop. Free facial recognition software is fairly accurate, but I used a program from Standout Software that is way better. I ran the picture and started an Internet search.

  Jen got up and made coffee. I called Fiver back with the results.

  “He's a supra with the 5th Street Gatos. Tomas Maria Tomas. Called Terror. Was supposed to do twenty in the Citadel, released a couple of years ago after five. May I ask why?”