The Invincibles

by Michael McNichols

  Some of the faithful wore regular everyday clothes, while many others threw on gaudy hoods marked up with glowing infinity symbols. Others dressed themselves in full pathetic-looking Hyperman outfits. Photos, paintings, and statues of Hyperman surrounded the rows of chairs, benches, or pews. Hyperman mosaics or a massive infinity symbol dominated the altars. Up on podiums, the clerics’ voices boomed out of microphones as they read scriptures and news stories about Hyperman. Smoothly, they segued into sermons about following his example, doing right by others, making a difference, and never allowing evil to rule the day to glorify his holy, hyper name.

  It was too much for even Hyperman to take. They all truly believed that he was their savior. It wasn’t a lie or scam. It was what they believed in their heart of hearts. He flew higher and higher up, trying to get to where he hopefully couldn’t hear any of their prayers or sermons anymore.

  ***

  He floated above the world where the atmosphere thinned, and the blue sky darkened into the thick black of space. Now that he knew there were people doing it, he’d probably never stop hearing someone praying, singing, or chanting to him. Someone somewhere would always be carrying on with “Hyperman this, Hyperman that. Amen.”

  Even at this distance, he heard them down below. He couldn’t help it. He knew they were there and had to listen to all their pleas and prayers. It wasn’t enough that he saved all their lives, this world and others, and sometimes the entire cosmos on a regular basis. They wanted him to bless them with good luck, give them smart, healthy children, and help them have long, dignified lives. They were asking for things they needed to work at themselves. Nobody needed super-powers to achieve them. Luck and hard work went a long way into helping make those wishes a reality though. However, they weren’t beyond anyone’s grasp. Hyperman couldn’t fix their lives for them. He couldn’t help them find jobs, meet the right person to marry, and move on after a loved one’s death. He’d save their lives, but they had to do with them what they could.

  Still, those people’s struggles and grief touched a chord in him. He had so much power and wished he could do more for them. Maybe he could though. He’d always managed to achieve the impossible. Even before he knew people were praying to him, he hated to let anyone down. Now people were crying out to him for help, and he had to do whatever he could for them. He was a hero after all, and that was what heroes did.

  He concentrated, trying to pick out one or more voices among the many that he could somehow help right away. His ears pricked up and listened in on a gang of men loading their guns and talking about attacking one of his temples. He immediately darted down back toward the Earth and streaked across the pallid blue sky.

  A short, stout office building squatted down in the middle of a corporate park in Southern Illinois. Still, crystal-blue water filled a man-made lake that bright, freshly mowed grass surrounded. Sunshine glinted off the cars in the parking lot. The temple took up the building’s top two floors. Inside, the plain-clothed Hyper-Faithful ended a service with a rock band jamming out.

  “Hyperman! Oh, Hyperman!” the singer wailed while the guitarists and drummers hammered away behind him up on the stage. “Power on high! Power from the sky! Come save me, Hyperman! Ye-aaaah!”

  Three vans pulled jerkily up outside, screeching and skidding tire tracks across the pavement. Their side doors flew open and hooded men leaped out with machine guns, shooting in the windows, not caring if they hit the dentists on the first floor instead of the worshippers.

  Hyperman flashed through the building, moving far too fast for anyone to actually see him, catching and deflecting all the bullets before they hit anyone. Sweeping outside, he aimed his eye-beams at the guns and van tires. The melted metal and rubber gave off a horrible smell. He blitzed through the attackers and left them tangled up in one big, unconscious pile. However, he snatched one of them up into the sky with him.

  While he was soaring away, his hyper-senses alerted him to the office workers from the other buildings spilling out to see what had happened. Already in the distance, police cruisers hurried toward the scene. Someone in the building must have triggered an alarm or made a call, which was good. The police could arrest the gunmen and try to keep everyone from panicking.

  In the temple itself, the faithful held each other and tried to calm their more shaken brothers and sisters down. Some wandered about, shell-shocked, trying to understand what had happened. Some of their eyes eventually drifted out the windows and up toward the sky. Gasps followed and several of the worshippers crashed down to their knees, whimpering.

  “Was he…was he here?”

  “He saved us! He had to! Only he could have saved us! Saved us forever!”

  “Heaven, the sky and the universe, we have seen!”

  Hyperman grimaced. Couldn’t they just be thankful he’d saved them and not want to sing hymns about his glory?

  He held the gunman up by the collar as they hovered high over a grassy field filled with churning windmills. Glaring at him, Hyperman’s eyes flared a toxic, angry blue. The gunman fidgeted and convulsed in his grip.

  “Please!” he cried, glancing nervously down at the ground. “Don’t drop me! I’ll do anything!”

  Hyperman tore off the gunman’s burglar mask and threw it down where it caught on a windmill’s whirling blade. Tear-reddened, light marble-green eyes poked out of the gunman’s fleshy, Indian-brown face.

  “What were you doing there?” Hyperman asked. “Why were you shooting at those people? What were you trying to do? Tell me! I’ll know if you lie!”

  The gunman swallowed hard. “They…they worship a false god!” he said.

  “They worship me!” Hyperman replied.

  “And you’re you! A superhero, not a god.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “True gods, not mythological ones, are greater!”

  Hyperman sneered. “You have a god then? Did he tell you to do this?”

  “Our seer…our seer had a vision,” the gunman said. “A vision of speed! Super-speed and purity!”

  “Sure he did. So why didn’t you come after me instead of them?”

  “You haven’t done anything wrong! You didn’t force them to worship you! We know that!”

  “I don’t care! Those people weren’t hurting anyone!”

  “They were hurting themselves and their ideas could have spread! Like a virus! Our seer foresaw it!”

  “Did he?”

  “The Lightning-Struck spoke to him, but only after he crashed his race car! He had to build up as much speed as possible to commune with the divine! With the super-fast!”

  Hyperman irked up an eyebrow. “Exactly who is this god of yours?”

  “You…you don’t know?” the gunman asked.

  Hyperman gazed down at the gunman’s tight, buttoned-up jean jacket. His hyper-vision cut through it like an X-ray. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A swipe of his hand opened up the jacket and exposed the shirt beneath. It bore the Whorl’s blue-glowing spiral.

  Glancing back toward the corporate park, Hyperman scanned the other gunmen, who lay together unconscious before the arriving policemen. The spiral showed up on all their clothes and some had even gotten it tattooed somewhere on their bodies.

  Speechless, Hyperman floated in the air, needing a moment to take this all in. He glanced back up at the gunman he held, who twitched wildly in his grasp.

  “Never tell anyone I was here,” Hyperman said. “I’ll know if you do.”

  He let go of him. Frantically clawing at the air, the gunman fell screaming. Before he hit the ground, Hyperman caught him and light-sped over to add him to the other unconscious thugs piled up for the police.

  ***

  Needing to clear his head, Hyperman swooped around the world. He kept his ears perked up in case somebody needed him, but all the cries for help sounded too much like prayers. He stopped being able to tell the difference between the two and hated it. He couldn’t make people’s ex-husbands
and wives come back to them or have their children call more often. He couldn’t force their bosses to give them a raise or ensure that their baseball team won the pennant. His job meant keeping the world spinning along, not twisting and turning it around for the benefit of a chosen few or according to his own whims. He wished he’d never heard of his worshippers and wondered how the other Invincibles would handle themselves in the same situation. In fact, he thought he’d ask another Invincible about it right now.

  After scanning the world, he found the Whorl sprinting across the Pacific, furiously splashing and skimming along the ocean’s surface. Hyperman whooshed down and flew alongside him.

  “Don!” he said. “We need to talk!”

  “This way,” the Whorl replied, leading the way over to the nearest deserted island for privacy.

  ***

  Golden sand sparkled along the small isle’s coastline. Wild grass grew, and palm trees swayed. A dry, hot wind picked along the beachfront. Ocean waves lapped and glittered for miles and miles out.

  While the Whorl hunkered down on a big, cracked rock, Hyperman told him everything about the three kids and their stunt, his worshippers, and the Whorl’s. When the sun dipped below the horizon, Hyperman found some firewood and lit it up with an eye-beam blast. The Whorl rubbed his hands together over the flames and snickered.

  “They wouldn’t think I was much of a god if they could see me laid up in bed for days after I stop running,” he said. “They don’t know that I eventually get tired and can’t be the Whorl all the time. They have no idea that I have to build up my speed. They don’t see me putting on makeup to pass as a normal person and busting my ass to make a sales quota to pay my mortgage.”

  Hyperman stood across the fire from the Whorl, and the flames threw dark flickering lights over him. “They just jumped to all these weird conclusions about us,” he said.

  The Whorl shrugged. “People believe what they want, and sometimes, these beliefs mutate over time into things nobody can really explain, but they believe in them nonetheless.”

  “They expect so much more from us than we ever thought,” Hyperman said. “What will they do when they inevitably feel disappointed? We don’t know how they’ll react, and I don’t know what to do about any of them.”

  “Well, if we let these people down somehow, they might find a way to excuse us and justify it, or they might just go get a new god. As for what we can do about them, I don’t think there’s much. As creepy as this whole thing is, worshipping us isn’t illegal. They have to actually step out of line and start committing crimes before we can do anything about them, like these gunmen you just encountered, for example. Most of the rest of these folks seem pretty harmless for now.”

  “So we should just leave them be?”

  “I think that’s the best option.”

  “Yeah, but all this? It just…irks me.”

  “Same here, but we deal with wackos and freaks all the time. The world’s full of them. We just have to get used to these people too. We aren’t responsible for what they do, even if we’re their excuse for whatever mistakes they make.”

  Hyperman shook his head. “You don’t have hyper-hearing like I do. You don’t hear all their prayers all the time! It makes me feel like I can never do enough. Never be enough!”

  “Cal,” the Whorl said, looking up over the fire, “just because you can hear what people are saying doesn’t mean you have to listen. People say all sorts of things about you and me that aren’t true. Why do you care now all of a sudden?”

  Hyperman shrugged. “I don’t know. This is just different. These people are depending on me in a way nobody else does. I don’t want to let anyone down.”

  “Then don’t. Do your best. Be you. That’s all you can do. If you end up saving these people somehow, whether it’s their lives or souls, that’s great. But you can’t worry about what fanatics think. They make their own choices and live their own lives. You can’t help that or change the way they think. And, while it might be an old saying, it is true. You can’t please everyone, not even with hyper-powers. Now I think I’ve got an idea that might make us both feel better.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.”

  Stiffly, the Whorl stood up and stretched his legs.

  “I’ve got a few more hours of speed left in me to run,” he said. “So if you’re worried about not doing enough for the world, let’s take care of that. We fight crime and alien invasions all the time, but there are people who need food, clean water, shelter, or some help getting to church or work. Let’s see what we can do for them.”

  Hyperman smiled. “Yeah, okay. Sure.”

  The two of them sped off across the world. They delivered toys and built homes for the needy, and helped farmers with their crops. They transported truckloads of much-needed medical equipment to hospitals. They cleaned graffiti off walls, found lost pets, and fixed flat tires. Soon, they lost track of time and discovered that the Whorl had kept running long past his typical point of exhaustion. Still, on they went, performing good deeds, and Hyperman found the looks of gratitude he received in return better than any prayer.

  Chapter 6: THOUGH STRAIGHT AND TALL

  “Ooooooohhhhhhh!” Piper gushed while snapping open the little black box. Inside, a golden-red necklace glistened. With her nimble fingers, she clasped the necklace around her thin, swan-like neck. Picking up a spoon, she admired her reflection in it.

  “It’s perfect!” she said with a boisterous smile. “Just perfect!”

  She practically melted in her seat across the table from Nightshadow. They sat near a window, looking down on boats chugging through the choppy, gray lake waters on a drizzly, moonless night. The restaurant featured two floors of fine, candle-lit dining, ultra-chic paintings, exposed brick, and a cozy, warm ambiance. Women sitting at other tables cooed at Piper’s necklace and whispered amongst themselves. Several tried to sneak pictures of it onto their cell phones.

  The next morning, all the rags would be talking about Mark Risen’s dinner date tonight. Nightshadow hardly minded. The notoriety boosted Mark Risen’s public image and Piper thought that, in turn, would help her acting career. Before dating Nightshadow, she’d only gotten bit parts in foot cream commercials. Now she was scoring small parts on TV shows and making more money, and it showed in her wardrobe.

  Tonight, she wore a form-fitting, sun-red dress that complimented her dyed fiery red hair and reddish-black makeup. He’d donned a loose, airy grayish-black suit with a collarless white shirt. His messy hair tousled about on his head, looking more gray than black.

  His bones felt stiff, and an aching fatigue slowed down even his most casual movements. The last few months had been hitting him hard. His meditative techniques helped some, but he couldn’t keep years of pain bottled up inside. The wear and tear was showing more and more every day. The fatigue and aches often exploded out all across his body when he least suspected it, sometimes on patrol or in a business meeting. His years of training and discipline got him through whatever fight or business deal he was in the middle of, but he’d pass out back at his lair as soon as he got the chance. Yet, he refused to even think about retiring, not when there was still work to do.

  On top of his regular patrols, he’d been coordinating a cross-country search with his network and S.I.L.E.N.T.’s best trackers for the Spider-Specter and reaper children. If the Spider-Specter was found, they were to alert him immediately so he could take care of the matter personally. Nightshadow didn’t want the other Invincibles to know what was going on with the Spider. He might have an explanation for what was going on and Nightshadow was willing to hear him out, though the other Invincibles might not.

  Neither S.I.L.E.N.T. nor his agents had found anything yet, though they’d keep looking. Nightshadow, however, had needed at least one night off to relax and recoup. His body had practically demanded it, so he’d given in—but only for the one night. He couldn’t think of a better way to spend his free time than with Piper. He’d foun
d himself thinking more and more about her recently and smiling.

  Whenever she looked at him, her green eyes glowed with adoration. She never complained about his age, scars, or frequent disappearances. She simply accepted him and savored his company whenever he was around. Despite the longer days and nights taking a toll on him, seeing her gave him something to look forward to after patrols. He’d repeatedly checked out her background and had cleared her of being a reaper child. She appeared to be what she seemed: a lovely, spry young girl who cared about him.

  She hadn’t tried searching through his belongings and never bothered him about any of his exes or money or anything. She never demanded all his time. Whenever they did get together, they had a great time, dining together, eating, and the sex was amazing. So he saw no reason not to bask in her affections and see where their feelings for each other took them.

  The waitress returned to pour Piper another glass of red wine and refill Nightshadow’s water. As a rule, he never touched alcohol. “Goodness!” the waitress said, seeing Piper’s necklace. The flame-shaped gold flashed and flared in the room’s dim light.

  “I know!” Piper replied. “It’s incredible!”

  “You’re very, very lucky,” the waitress said. She looked both Nightshadow and Piper over and knowingly grinned. “You both are.”

  “I agree,” Nightshadow said, sipping his water and enjoying the way everyone in the restaurant gawked at his date’s beauty.

  The waitress said their seitan scaloppinis with lemon-olive sauce would be ready soon and dashed off to another table. Piper’s smile suddenly faded. A shadow fell across her face. Fingering her necklace, she said, “You know this thing probably costs more than that waitress makes in an entire year. None of the waitresses here could possibly afford this. Neither can I. Not without your help.”