FSF, May-June 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  * * * *

  The League of Almost-Superheroes

  Young members of my adopted League family are often obsessed with comic books (although video games seem to have taken over, recently). When I was a kid, at least, our rooms at the Farm were usually plastered with lurid covers of improbable figures in capes and hoods, and panels of quick death and triumph against overwhelming odds. But as much as we dreamed of being like those we met in these bright pages, we looked in vain for anything that resembled our lives. Sure, Spiderman and Batman (their Batman, not ours) and the Thing suffered angst and the terrible limitations that came with being a superbeing. But, in the end, they really were superheroes, and we, we knew, were not, not really.

  I remember the day Ant Boy came up with our name for the League. When we were both about twelve, he was trying to dodge Plastic Girl after one of his regular pranks. And he came across an old series of comics in some dusty boxes back under the eaves in the attic. Called the League of Superheroes, they were much like many of the other comics we had read over the years. But a few of the issues mentioned another group of people with special powers, people who were different but whose capacities did not entitle them to membership in the League. These misfits had a whole collection of mediocre powers like the ability to spit long distances, or to warm the temperature in the room a few degrees, or to leap twenty feet into the air. They banded together and formed what they called the League of Almost-Superheroes. Sometimes they even came to the rescue of the real superheroes, even if they were never given much credit for anything.

  Ant Boy ran down to find me, shaking a comic book in his fist. “This is us!” he shouted, “This is us!” And even though he was still only a kid, this name resonated somehow across the Chateau and into the fellowship spread beyond the farm. We became, and remain, the League of Almost-Superheroes, although there is some question about whether I, in particular, remain a member in good standing.

  Of course, our pompous leaders wouldn't suffer such an indelicate name. They like to refer to us cryptically as The Fellowship.

  They can kiss my ass.

  * * * *

  The Science of Death

  There are many ways to kill, but it must be said that the human body is surprisingly resilient. In my valise I carry perhaps thirty or forty of the most efficient or, in some cases, the most practical options. With respect to those who are already weakened by long bouts of disease, the easiest path (although not always the most comfortable for the patient) is the introduction (by shunt, IV, scratch, etc.) of one of any number of antibiotic-resistant infective organisms. If they are weak enough, these can knock someone out quicker than you'd think, with little chance of recovery.

  The fact is, hospitals are death-traps. Don't let that disinfectant smell fool you. They've all got little bacterial Godzillas creeping around their walls, the evolutionary result of surviving every nasty medicine modern man has dreamed up. Ever seen someone's flesh literally melt off their bones? Not pretty. (I've killed a couple of those poor bastards in my time). And the “health professionals"—an oxymoron if I ever heard one—stand around picking their noses and gossiping about who's humped whom and touching a hundred patients a day, rarely washing their hands.

  Take this down: if you get sick, stay home. If you have to go in, point the half-wits to the alcohol hand-cleaner before they get anywhere near you.

  At least I kill people on purpose.

  Healthy folk who need to die are a more difficult challenge. Even old people are often astonishingly tough. I remember one old guy who suffered from constant, untreatable panic attacks who survived three different attempts to kill him. I finally took a chance that no one would notice (he was ninety-three and in a nursing home) and just popped an air bubble into his vein.

  I have to admit it. In Portland I got cocky. I stuck around too long. Somehow they caught on to me through my job at the medical college. I was lucky, though. I got a strong emotional hit when one of the guards glanced at me as I was entering the building, and took off running. With a little dodging around, I managed to shake them. I called home to my crappy studio and coded in the self-destruct in my trunk (thermite inside an insulated box) even though I was pretty sure they wouldn't be able to track me back to it. I doubled back to where I'd stashed my emergency kit, and lit out for the bus station, where I took the next bus out. I figured I was probably safe, but, like I said, I don't take chances.

  I've got more fake identities than lonely old ladies have cats. And I always wear gloves (if asked, I vaguely refer to allergies). No fingerprints. Of course, you can't do anything about DNA. But I'm very careful about not leaving pop bottles or coffee around. A little squirt of bleach water also does wonders. It doesn't take much to disguise your appearance: a little extra weight here, some gel pads in your cheeks, fake facial hair, a wig, etc. Every place I work I am a different person. And at my apartment building I was someone else again.

  I'm immodestly proud of my emergency bag. It's just an ordinary soft leather valise, but inside it has pretty much everything someone would need to survive almost anywhere (plus enough chemicals to poison a small village). I've got a wire saw, compass, water treatment pellets and a filter straw, signaling mirror, space blanket, survival knife, you name it. You remember the guy who wrote that book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, argued that the most useful item for a traveler was a towel. I don't know if he was serious, but he didn't know what he was talking about. The most useful things to have with you are actually garbage bags. You laugh. But I'm not talking about a flimsy little five gallon kitchen bag. No, I mean a couple of those oversized three mil contractor bags. Endless uses: a sleeping bag, a raincoat, a tarp, a waterproof stuff sack, and on and on. And you can cut them up in all kinds of different ways for different purposes. Take a tip from someone with long experience.

  * * * *

  Vampires

  So anyway, now I had to kill someone.

  I checked the old lady out a little more just to be absolutely certain, but there was no mistaking her condition. For thoroughness's sake, I scanned the rest of the coach all the way to the back, but my heart wasn't in it. The last thing I wanted to find was another termination challenge. Happily, I didn't.

  Bored, then, I just sat and watched the desert crawl by, the only entertainment the occasional mobile home or crumpled barn, some dead and rusting cars, the momentary glimpse of the flat basin of a long dry lake, and, off in the distance, the dim shapes of weathered lava cones. I was trying to hold it till the next stop, but out here that could be almost forever. Finally I slipped on another set of gloves and elbowed fat boy, who amiably shuffled out of the way. Bent a little on aching legs, and immediately assaulted by the din of emotional trauma around me, but happy to be released from his embrace, I stumbled my way up the aisle, glancing over to check out the old lady I was going to have to kill.

  What I saw hit me like a paving stone. It felt for a second like my heart had stopped, but with only a little stumble, I moved on.

  It wasn't her—she was pretty much what I expected, a drab woman in drab clothes rocking slowly back and forth in her seat in time to the pulsing of her emotional hell. No, the problem was that the aisle seat next to her was supposed to be empty. Or, at least, when I scanned it, it was empty. But there was someone there—a dapper little bald man in a bright yellow golf shirt. I could see him with my eyes, but I couldn't see him with my senses. It felt almost like I was seeing a hologram of a person, or an empty blow-up shell. But this guy was real. And I also saw what someone else would have missed, that he had a finger laid lightly against the old lady's wrist. That, and the almost ecstatic look on his face, the little smile, gave him away. At least his eyes were closed. He didn't seem to have noticed anything. I had the upper hand, for the moment.

  I cursed my luck as I lurched up the rest of the aisle to the toilet. Shouldering my way in, I unzipped and stood there thinking, trying to take a piss. I always have trouble peeing in places like that, with the no
xious fluids sloshing around below my penis and the hot air spilling into that upright sewage closet and the constant jostling of the bus and now the anxiety pulsing in my chest from the close encounter with the little man. Even with the incredible pressure in my bladder, it took me about five minutes before I let go in blissful release.

  A vampire. We run into them fairly frequently, although not usually alone like he seemed to be. They usually congregate in groups, nests we call them. Not the kind of creature that you're probably thinking of—though I've met a couple of creepy blood drinkers in the past. No, these are worse. They're psychic vampires, emotional parasites. They don't seem to have their own emotions. The usual vampire is cold, often with an almost mathematical sense of beauty. They do have a hunger, however, a craving for intensity, the intensity of life that they lack.

  They survive by feeding on the strong emotions of others. Sometimes love—but love is hard to maintain and control, so they mostly focus on pain. Any kind of pain: physical, mental, whatever. Usually they don't bother to torture anyone, although they don't really mind a little torture. Instead they often troll the streets for suffering homeless people. I've heard of them kidnapping alcoholics and denying them liquor so they can feed on the DTs. They've been known to steal people with chronic pain, or the terminally ill with agonizing cancer, and keep them at the height of agony for days or even weeks. Eventually, though, even the most intense feeling gets boring. If it isn't too dangerous, they often just sling people back out on the street. If there's any risk, they kill them and bury them in mass graves in their basements, or feed them to wood chippers or arc furnaces or whatnot. And then they go out on the prowl again for something new.

  The League hunts them. Sickos like that, not just vampires, but all of the oddities with strange powers that emerge in the dark corners of civilization, hidden from the “normal” people. If there are (almost) super-heroes there must be anti-heroes as well. That used to be my day job, before the League decided my proclivities were, well, too unusual for them to tolerate.

  In some ways, vampires are like me, in that they can feel the pain and pleasure of others. But your generic vampire is much more limited. Mostly they can draw sensations only through touch. So while I couldn't sense him, it seemed likely that he couldn't sense me, either—at least as long as I didn't make physical contact.

  I could have just killed him, of course. That would have been no great challenge. But he was taking her somewhere. And that probably meant back to the nest. (Just because I was on the outs with the League and their pompous pronouncements didn't mean I felt no larger responsibility.) If I killed him, I'd never know where that was. Vampires are almost fanatically careful creatures—the kind of people who keep all their pencils lined up in order of length on their desks. And they fear the League. There was little chance that there would be any clues on his person about his destination. But I wasn't willing to let the old lady suffer any more than necessary. From a purely moral standpoint, she was my first priority.

  She had to die first. Then I'd figure out how to deal with him. Losing his mule might even disconcert him enough to make him careless. I just needed some time alone with him when he wasn't expecting it, while he still didn't know about me. And maybe then I could do something about finding that nest.

  I shuffled back down the aisle, trying not to stumble against the little man.

  * * * *

  Plastic Girl

  Superpowers suck. You don't get something for nothing in this world. The line between an invalid or a nut or a cripple and an almost-superhero is pretty thin. A little training and attitude and perspective are sometimes all it takes to move from one side to the other.

  Up in the hollows of Kentucky's Appalachia, the Farm encompasses the entire breadth of a weathered mountaintop, with a forest of trees and fields, fallen-down homesteads, and innumerable pools filled in the spring with tiny frogs. I remember the scent of honeysuckle in the summer, and the acrid smells of cut grass, gasoline, and oil after the fields around the Chateau were mown by the grumpy Gardener on his ancient, sputtering Sears rider. I remember the sharp crunch of baby apples we weren't supposed to eat, and the taste of blackberry jam fingered up warm from boiling pots, and the horrid, lingering torment of a black walnut skin accidentally allowed to touch the tongue. I remember playing late into the evening at the water hole in Chattering Brook, and languid summer days lolling in the heat with homework forgotten and books tumbled from lazy hands. And the somber dawn burials of heroes returned for the final time to the earth, a snaking line of strange sorrowed figures trailing up into the cemetery at the weathered peak.

  Scattered throughout the Chateau at the Farm, with its twisting passages, odd-shaped add-on rooms, hidden staircases, and a few narrow pointed towers (filled, too often, with bats) was the most bizarre collection of kooks and misfits you're likely to find anywhere outside a state hospital. There was Braniac, who never left his room filled with strange mechanical artifices and computers, and who answered questions through a funnel connected to a garden hose that ran through a hole in his door. There was Dolphin, the result of some ill-conceived breeding program between a sea mammal of some kind and a human being, a trickster who lived in Chattering Brook in the warm days and who took over the pool in the winter. And there was Ogre, and Batman, and Hunter, and Clear Eyes, and Gardener, and others who are not particularly important to this story.

  It might be helpful to tell you about Plastic Girl. She wasn't really a girl anymore when I came to know her. After I was stolen from my parents as a little kid, she kind of became a surrogate mom for me and the adopted brothers and sisters in my age group. She wasn't very touchy-feely (actually, she was pretty moody), but she did her best to keep us clean and healthy. When we were younger and cruel, as kids can be, prodded by my friend Ant Boy's somewhat twisted sense of humor, we started calling her “Lumpy,” behind her back and sometimes even to her face, because she was always somewhat misshapen, although the specifics changed over time.

  Plastic Girl's special talent was her malleability. If you touched her, she felt a little like Silly Putty. And if you poked her in the side the indent would stay visible for a while. Her whole body was like this. And she could fit herself through incredibly small spaces.

  One event has stayed vividly with me over the years. Shade had accidentally locked herself in one of the dungeon rooms in the basement. She started screaming and crying, terrified, and I started screaming too as I stood outside, feeling her terror as if it were mine. But no one could find the key. So, with a great sigh of distaste, Plastic Girl knelt down and began to feed herself through the inch-high space at the bottom of the heavy door, flattening her head into a manhole shape, and then the rest of her body, one part at a time, slithering through like a monstrous, misshapen eel. Inside, she held Shade close, soothing both of us until they were finally able to open the door.

  It was only then that I realized how terrible a price Plastic Girl paid for her powers. She told all of us to leave the basement before she would come out, but I snuck into a side hallway and spied on her as she tottered unsteadily to her room. She looked like a cartoon Picasso of a person. Her face was the most horrible—eyes and nose in the wrong place, her mouth a ragged split with teeth splayed out in all directions. At the same time, I could feel the despair that she, unlike most people, somehow managed to keep from me. Afterwards she was even more asymmetrical than before. And sometimes, when I caught a stab of despair, I would spy on her through a crack in the bathroom door, watching as she stood before the mirror, tears falling down her misshapen cheeks, trying, somehow, to mold herself into the beautiful girl she was sure she would have been. Yet, despite her pain, she was a loyal member of the League, responding to whatever call came from our scouts out in the world that required her special services for dangerous missions only she could complete, always coming back just a little more out of kilter than before.

  * * * *

  Bad Coffee

  The bus finally stoppe
d for lunch in Bend, a pitiful excuse for a city. A dusty, aesthetically challenged collection of cheap blocky buildings and tired clapboard houses, it huddled forlorn in the beautiful armpit of the towering white Cascade Mountains. The driver gave us forty-five minutes, which I was sure would stretch to an hour. Bleary-eyed and unsteady, we emerged into the truck- and bus-clogged parking lot of a McDonald's, shading our eyes from the incandescent inferno of summer in the high desert. For just a moment, I paused to gaze at the crescent of rocky crags rising in the east in a sudden slanting wall of stone, the rising land obscured by a verdant carpet of pine trees. I craved, then, the coolness of the peaks, little rivulets of water falling into spray from sheer cliffs, and the quiet crunch of pine needles strewn across shaded paths. I had spent much happy time since I left home in the mountains. But it was the wrong direction for me. The vampire and I and Teflon Boy and the old lady were headed across the desert together on the barren track of Highway 20.

  I hung back, waiting till the vampire and his shuffling, frail charge passed by, and then followed them inside the McDonald's. From the back of the restaurant, I watched him park her at a table on the side before joining the line to order food. Then I seated myself at a carefully chosen spot across from them—close enough that I could reach their table quickly, but not so close that they would notice me amidst the press of scruffy customers. I checked to make sure the cone of powder and the tablets I had extricated from my valise were still in my pocket before settling back to wait for the right moment to act.

  For the first time, I really looked at the huddled forms of my fellow travelers who I had explored inside but had not, until then, really seen. A buzz-cut army kid in carefully creased olive drab was talking up a homely girl with stringy hair but extraordinarily large breasts, sexual tension almost literally shimmering between them. A tall bearded Amish man in immaculate black clothes watched his daughter licking carefully at an ice-cream cone. A couple of teenage white kids in ghetto gear silently mouthed the explicit lyrics of the hip-hop coming through their earbuds while their parents argued about something. A kid of about twelve with a smudged card hanging from a string around his neck, his name, a phone number, and “I'm going to see Grandma in Omaha J” written on it, sat with the driver eating a happy meal, furtively glancing around, more excited than scared. A chubby guy with a black-leather-fringed and silver-studded vest was talking too loudly about politics with a nice-looking woman who had a large red birthmark like a splash of ink across one side of her face. The guy was trying too hard, I thought, and she's not interested. In one corner a sullen teenager in a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off and an “I'm with Jesus” baseball cap was buzzing like crazy on crystal meth.