The Invincibles

by Michael McNichols

  She started unclasping the necklace.

  “Mark, I love this necklace, and it might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, but I don’t know if I can accept it.”

  He held up his hand to stop her.

  “Piper,” he said, “I wanted to give you something special.”

  “Give it to someone who deserves it,” she said, “or sell it and give the money to charity.”

  “I have more than enough money to give to charity and buy necklaces just like that for twenty girls, but I only bought the one for you.”

  “Mark, I can’t.”

  “I insist. It’s my money. I’ll do with it what I want. Besides, if you say no, I’ll just buy you a half dozen more.”

  Piper flashed him a wicked smirk. “You’re kind of making me want to say no.”

  “You never do,” Nightshadow said. “Not to me.”

  “I suppose it’s all in how you ask.”

  ***

  Later that night in bed, she tore into him with animalistic vigor like she’d never shown before. She bit and scratched and screamed in all the ways he liked. The entire time, she left the necklace on but nothing else. Despite his fatigue, he dug down deep for the energy to keep up. Eventually, they wore each other out and collapsed down together into a sweaty pile. She sat up and cradled his head in her lap while playing with his hair. He lay still and enjoyed the dark, sullen silence. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t feel any pain or aches. He simply relaxed.

  Someone somewhere was crying out for help. Madmen were plotting to destroy cities. Gangs were going to war. The Spider-Specter, the reaper children, and many, many other criminals had to be found and stopped. However, tonight, he had to rely on his network, the police, his fellow Invincibles, and S.I.L.E.N.T. to keep the world in one piece. Still, he fought down the itch to check the news and see if something was happening that might need his attention. However, if a true crisis occurred, he had alarms that would go off. But they were silent, so he could take it easy for now. His friends and allies would get by fine without him for the one night. He needed the rest too.

  Much as he hated to admit it, he was getting older. He couldn’t keep going at the rate he always had. He’d only kill himself. No, he had to learn to trust in others to help with the work. He couldn’t micro-manage everything for them. Plus, they all had their own skills and resources (many of which he lacked) to put to good use. Besides, if he thought they couldn’t handle things, he wouldn’t be working with them in the first place.

  He curled up comfortably in Piper’s lap and, slowly, closed his eyes. Piper’s voice softly chimed:

  “Trees do bend

  “Though straight and tall,

  “So must we

  “To others’ call,

  “Long have I waited for your coming home to me

  “And living deeply our new life.”

  Nightshadow recognized the song as an old church hymn from going to Catholic mass as a child with his mother. He hadn’t attended church services of any kind since her funeral many, many years ago. Nonetheless, he liked the tune. Piper sang it well.

  “Where did you hear that from?” he asked.

  “You told me about it,” she answered. “It was your mother’s favorite song.”

  His eyes snapped open. “Did I?”

  Immediately, Nightshadow plunged the depths of his memory, trying to recall such a conversation.

  “Well, you did,” she replied, “or I read about it in an old magazine or something.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  Maureen Risen, the matriarch of the Salome City’s first family and the woman Nightshadow claimed was his mother in his Mark Risen identity had been a world famous philanthropist. Even before her mysterious death in a plane crash more than two decades ago, hundreds of newspapers and magazines had run stories about her charitable endeavors.

  It was possible that she’d had the same favorite song as Nightshadow’s actual mother and Piper had read about it somewhere. But was it likely? Or was he just being paranoid? Was he trying to ruin a good thing? Did he not want to be happy? Was he going to investigate Piper yet again? How many times did he need to? He’d found nothing suspicious in her background, but he had been driven to keep checking and re-checking. It was pointless. And what was he overreacting to now? She was only singing a song. He had to accept that, sometimes, things were what they appeared. Coincidences did happen.

  Piper sang again, and he fell asleep in her arms.

  ***

  The next morning, they again made furious love and shared a fruit salad for breakfast, feeding each other by hand. Though Nightshadow was heading off for work, he told Piper she could hang around the penthouse awhile.

  “Sleep in and relax,” he said. “You have that audition later? The TV murder mystery, right? Well, rest up for that and blow them all away.”

  “You got it!” she said, crawling up out of bed to kiss him on the cheek.

  On the drive to the office, Wally noted that the boss was actually smiling and looking almost happy for a change.

  “I had a good night, Wally,” Nightshadow said. “I think I’ll be having more of them from now on.”

  As Mark Risen, he signed off on his company purchasing a whole block of lakeside townhouses and inspected the properties in person. After strength training for a few hours back at his office, he spent some time begging around Triangle Park before bartending at Torchlight while the owner’s thrash rock band, “Human Lighter,” played. Cutthroats and thugs from all over came to hear their old boss, the underworld crime lord “the Glow,” sing. Nightshadow kept a close eye on all of them and memorized the underworld gossip he overheard. However, no matter what else occupied him that day, his mind still battered away at the Spider-Specter case.

  Nightshadow sympathized with vigilantes who took extreme measures. Often, he wondered how much murder and destruction he’d have prevented if he’d simply killed the Death Reaper before that maniac could go on another rampage. Still, he’d seen too many murders ruin too many lives. One murder’s ripple effect (even that of a scumbag) affected whole families, friends, business associates, partners, and more. Also, he hated the idea of martyring some psychopath and seeing that inspire someone else to become a living nightmare in their stead. More importantly, he knew his place. While he acted outside of the system, he never set himself above it. He did what law enforcement and other authorities couldn’t and vice versa. Everyone played their roles in the system and it worked. Well, most of the time it did.

  He wondered what had made the Spider-Specter snap. Nightshadow knew the Spider’s whole life story and had counted him as a friend. He’d never have thought him capable of murder.

  Years ago, a mad scientist think tank had experimented on David Walks On Walls, injecting him with various kinds of radioactive spider DNA until S.I.L.E.N.T busted them. S.I.L.E.N.T. scientists undid most of the genetic damage done to David, and he moved on with his life, finding a job as an auto mechanic and having a son. David and his girlfriend broke up, but he and his boy seemed to get by well enough without her. At age four, David’s son Danny began developing spider-powers. He had no trouble mastering them, but his father insisted he hide them, fearing they’d draw the wrong kind of attention, even out on the isolated little Cherokee reservation where they lived.

  After a mugger shot his father dead because Danny didn’t use his spider-powers to protect him, Danny went to live with his mother in Daylight, Nevada. Having learned that he couldn’t waste his potential as only a teenager, Danny became the Spider-Specter, wanting to help those who couldn’t help themselves. As a young adult, he moved around a lot, never staying in one city overly long, but always chipping in to fight crime and save lives wherever he went. For a while, he’d even lived in Salome City and, with Nightshadow’s blessing, patrolled the streets.

  However, things went bad for Danny.

  Super-criminals kept finding out his secret identity and making his life hell. Danny w
as never sloppy with his secret identity though. He never told the wrong person who he was. He simply had bad luck. He’d lose his mask at the wrong time or someone would recognize his voice or some criminal would manage to somehow track him down.

  Nightshadow helped him change his and his family’s civilian identities multiple times. He’d even helped them move to different cities. Last Nightshadow had heard, Danny was safe and had gotten engaged. Thus, he’d decided to retire from the superhero game, though he came back every now and then to help out with a big crisis. What had changed? What could possibly have happened that Danny would go from enjoying his new life with his fiancée to murdering Doc Lethe?

  While Nightshadow pondered this while slinging drinks, a thought struck him. Like the Spider-Specter, Danny’s fiancée Carly had apparently fallen off the map. Before her though, Danny had always had a girlfriend or two. He did well with the ladies and, even when the relationships failed, he tried to stay friends with them. Maybe, despite his frequent name changes, Danny had kept in touch with a few of them, and one of two of his exes might know how to reach him.

  ***

  Nightshadow remembered Danny talking about Jenny, Lea, Mandy, and Jasmine a lot when he’d lived in Salome City. He’d moaned and groaned about having to break up with each of them due to the pressures of his double life until he met the next girl that fascinated him. They were as good a place to start as any. After bartending, Nightshadow returned to his Triangle Park lair and got onto his supercomputer to delve into the girls’ backgrounds for anything suspicious. While he was at it, he checked for any red flags that might indicate that they were reaper children. He found nothing alarming, but double and triple-checked each girl’s background to be thorough.

  The next few weeks saw him following the girls around, searching through their apartments, and sizing up their friends, families, and associates. He also installed microscopic cameras and hearing devices all over their workplaces and homes to continue surveillance on them even when he was out patrolling and pursuing other cases.

  He loathed going through the camera footage and audio afterwards and grew wretchedly bored whenever he was actually staking them out from a nearby car or apartment. The girls had mundane, unambitious lives. They worked meaningless, middle-management jobs and were trapped in office cubicles all day long. Then they spent their nights watching TV, playing with their gadget phones, and smoking pot. They’d get on the phone with someone they’d just insulted and complain about their other friends, boyfriends, jobs, and how they needed to find the time to get back to the gym. None of them laughed or sang just for the hell of it. They went out to clubs, not to enjoy themselves, but to show up their friends and see who drew more attention by dressing up like a prostitute. Whenever they actually took a guy home, the sex was awkward, dull, and pathetic. Nightshadow couldn’t believe how short and disappointing it was for both the guy and girl each and every time.

  By comparison to them, Piper seemed a bright, beautiful, burning supernova of a girl. Studying these girls’ lives made Nightshadow realize just how lucky he had gotten with Piper. Her acting jobs were at least somewhat interesting, she was always smiling and singing, and she loved everything they did together in bed. Her howls and moans were proof of that.

  Finally, at the end of a grueling month, Nightshadow hit pay dirt. He’d tapped the girls’ phones and pirated into their email accounts. After trolling through hours of worthless conversations about shoes, shitty music, and dogs, Nightshadow discovered a text message Mandy had sent to her friend Lana.

  “Hey gurl,

  Is Danny still just coach-surfing around? I miss his face. :(”

  Lana replied, “Dannys been crashing here for a bit. He hates imposing on every one, but i told him its cool. How bout we all do dinner soon?”

  “Kewl :),” Mandy answered.

  Nightshadow traced Lana’s phone number to an apartment in Downmichael, a northern Salome City suburb on the other side of the lake. Downmichael was a considerable distance off and didn’t have many tall buildings, so gliding there would draw too much attention to himself. The sewer tunnels didn’t go all the way out to that suburb either. He thought it’d be better to travel incognito anyway, so as not to tip off anyone to where he was headed.

  He dressed up as a biker, complete with a helmet painted up like an eight ball. In the garage adjacent to his Triangle Park lair by the docks, he dusted off his customized Harley and fired it up. The motor purred, and he rode through the sewer tunnels up into the city streets. After cruising through uptown, he roared over the bridge out of the city.

  ***

  Downmichael’s houses and apartment complexes bunched up together with a few small play-lots dangling off of the street corners. Every block had wide roads, high street curbs, and weeping willow tree branches brushing down against the sidewalks. Slimy mist curled off of the lake and swept through the area. A damp, blurry, purple sky loitered above. Neon beer signs in tavern windows glowed. Street lamps lit up dimly. At this time of night, almost everyone had gone to bed for work or school in the morning, and the streets were mostly empty.

  Nightshadow hid his bike in an alley and quickly got changed into a wing-suit inside of a dumpster while ignoring the smell. His wing-suit had given off a worse stench when he’d sprayed it down earlier with pheromones specially designed to help deal with the Spider-Specter.

  After scaling a tree, Nightshadow leaped off and glided over the quiet, murky little homes on his wings. He perched upon the roof of the taller apartment building next door to peer down into Lana’s place. His mask’s lens switched to binocular night vision to see in through the window. The apartment looked a mess with clothes piled up everywhere and the floors in dire need of a mopping.

  Seeing no one home, Nightshadow jumped down to Lana’s back porch. He picked the door’s lock and slipped inside. In the kitchen, he discovered a work schedule pinned up on the fridge by a Hyperman H-shaped magnet. The manager’s night shift at a twenty-four-hour grocery store had been circled for tonight, meaning that was where Lana probably was at the moment.

  Nightshadow stalked down the hallway to check the rest of the place out. The apartment featured a long living room and one big walk-in closet. An old but serviceable TV and a dusty, scratched-up stereo crowded together into the corner. Water stains spotted up the coffee table, and a blanket and pillows lay on the sofa. Amongst the clothing heaped up all around on the apartment’s floor, Nightshadow found more than a few pairs of men’s jeans and underwear. He even thought he recognized a few old t-shirts Danny used to like wearing.

  Pulling the blanket off of the sofa, he found a beat up little wallet that had sunk down between the cushions. He flipped through it. The wallet only contained a few dollars and photos. The pictures showed a pensive-looking, reddish-brown-skinned kid and a skinny, pink-haired Asian girl. They hugged while riding a roller coaster, swam together through a green leafy lagoon, and finger-painted onto each other’s faces.

  Danny and Carly in better times, Nightshadow thought.

  If Danny was bunking down here, where was she? Had something happened to her? Did that have anything to do with Danny killing Lethe?

  A sudden loud blasting noise erupted from right outside. Nightshadow jerked his head in that direction. He leaped back as a maniac came crashing in through the windows on a jet pack, bringing down part of the wall and the TV and stereo.

  ***

  The jet pack blared louder and louder, sounding like the world’s most annoying vacuum cleaner. Its sounds grated against Nightshadow’s ears and made it hard for him to concentrate.

  Black, squat, and big-boned, the jet pack’s owner looked young and wild with dreadlocks and a white scarf flipping about in the jet pack’s updraft. He wore a brown leather pilot’s cap and goggles with a matching jacket and boots. His chest bore a strange motif of a clock striking 4:20. On his back, three attached spherical tanks blasted pure force down out of their thrusters, elevating him a few feet above the floor.
While hovering above the apartment’s hardwood floor, he aimed two retro futuristic-looking guns at Nightshadow.

  While they’d never met before, Nightshadow recognized Killjoy from S.I.L.E.N.T.’s files. Mostly, Killjoy operated in Southern California and had constantly harassed Danny when he’d lived out in Breaker’s Bay. The kid was an anarchist troublemaker who claimed to be striking back at corrupt corporations. However, he was obviously really doing it for attention.

  Seeing Nightshadow, Killjoy did a double take. “What are you doing here?” he loudly asked, trying to talk over his jet pack’s roar. Before Killjoy could think to shoot him, Nightshadow whipped an escrima fighting stick at him. It twirled through the air and struck Killjoy right between the eyes, sending him reeling back.

  Nightshadow next threw a smoke pellet that exploded right in Killjoy’s face, fogging up his goggles and further disorienting him. With Killjoy distracted, Nightshadow grabbed his hands to point his guns away, struggled with him, and they both spilled out through the broken windows.

  During the fall, Killjoy slipped free of Nightshadow’s grasp, but Nightshadow landed in a somersault and rolled up to his feet on the patchy front lawn. He heard the jet pack’s thrusters roaring again. A short, hot bolt of electrical fire blackened and burned the grass before him. He danced swiftly away from two more bolts. Killjoy hovered noisily down through the air before him, tossing his goggles away and laughing.

  “I came for the Spider!” He cackled. “But I’m more than willing to do you too! I’ll be a motherfucking legend!”

  Lights shot on in houses up and down the street. Dogs barked. People shouted and began banging open their doors. Young and old voices squeaked.

  “Holy shit! That’s Nightshadow!”