We Could Be Heroes

by Harmon Cooper

  “I…” Zoe and Sam exchanged glances.

  “Just think about it,” Helena told the two of them, “no need to give me an answer now. Goodnight.”

  Chapter Fourteen: Explosive Persimmons

  (A chapter about a man named Dr. Hamza Grumio, Centralia’s favorite underground witch doctor with a checkered past and an even shadier practice.)

  It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

  Dr. Hamza Grumio, an immigrant from the Northern Alliance, didn’t mind the woman named Mia’s request. Anything to further the experiment—this was the motto by which Dr. Hamza lived his life, and if someone else was injured along the way, well, that was just part of the scientific process.

  After all, all researchers needed guinea pigs, and all guinea pigs needed researchers.

  Besides, Dr. Hamza was self-made, not a real doctor, not even an official researcher, but he had done enough experiments and had wreaked enough havoc on Centralia’s medical community to give himself the title. Maybe “evil doctor” was more apropos, but Dr. Hamza didn’t see himself as evil.

  The blond man with a bit of white in his beard saw himself as selfless, a champion for non-exemplars, someone taking a dark and winding road to finally do something good, someone willing to do anything for raw data.

  Besides, he had come here at Mia’s request, and he had already warned her what would happen if she took too much of the serum he’d yet to perfect.

  And she wasn’t going to like what he said next.

  When Mia took Dr. Hamza’s serum, she became a beast morpher, a Type II Class C, which was Centralia’s shitty way of saying that she was dangerous to the public and was capable of organic manipulation, a.k.a. morphing.

  While Dr. Hamza might not have been an actual doctor, he knew the same things that any doctor, exemplar or non-exemplar, would know. He understood Centralia’s exemplar classification system and knew its weaknesses, to the point that he could visualize the common chart used by the government offices.

  He also knew that the other Alliances and Provinces utilized different charts, that the strangest exemplars came from the Western Province, and that there was a way to bring out a non-exemplar’s power through the right combo of chemicals (even if the combination was unstable).

  And this was exactly what Mia wanted from Dr. Hamza.

  The beast morpher had started off with payments, but when she’d run out of money, she started using other means to pay Dr. Hamza. He was initially reluctant to take Mia’s body as payment, but she made love like a sexpert, the woman more aggressive than any woman, client or otherwise, he had been with before.

  And Dr. Hamza would have liked to see their little relationship continue, but he was starting to actually like her, and he didn’t want to lie to himself. He also knew that he couldn’t keep supplying her for free, mostly because the chemicals he used weren’t easy to come by, but also for another, more sinister yet scientifically important reason: he wanted to see what an overdose would do.

  “I’m here to cut you off,” he told her, using the line he’d practiced in front of the mirror earlier, instead of his usual hello, kiss on the cheek and squeeze of the ass.

  “Come again?” Mia was two heads taller than Dr. Hamza, muscular, with a sharp chin and a mess of blue hair. Even though she was a non-exemplar, it was clear that she had a predisposition to morph, evident in her size and the slight tint to her skin.

  When Mia took the medicine she grew three feet taller, her skin turning scaly and metallic, wings forming on her back.

  It was terrifying. Fucking beautiful, but terrifying.

  “I can’t keep giving you the stuff for free,” Dr. Hamza told her, not as afraid of the powerful woman as he should have been.

  “This isn’t enough for you?” she said, lifting her skirt, showing him that she was naked beneath, that she’d recently shaved, her other hand naturally falling on the lips of her vagina and rubbing in a circular motion. “I made sure I was wet before you came over…”

  “I just can’t continue to get the chemicals I need to make this stuff without payment,” he finally said.

  “But I want it,” she said, dropping the ends of her dress. “You know that.”

  “There are side effects, Mia, and one of them is a dependency on the serum. I want you to be healthy, and I wanted to deliver this message to you in person because…”

  “Because?” Mia asked, a vein appearing on her forehead, her fists now curled at her sides.

  They were in her first-floor apartment, and Dr. Hamza already had a teleporter scheduled to come to his location, but for his plan to work, he needed to really push her buttons, he needed to really get under her skin.

  It was a gamble, but that was usually how Dr. Hamza Grumio played things.

  “Sweet Mia, relax a little. I just thought it was the right thing to do.”

  “Why did you want to deliver the message to me in person, then? Why not just send me a mental message?” she asked, tapping the side of her skull.

  “You and I had something, and I thought it would be rude to just send you a mental message.”

  It was as close to the truth as he wanted to get, but Mia wasn’t having it.

  “If you show up here, you had better show up with something for me,” she said, baring her teeth.

  “Mia, just…”

  “I’m not playing around with you, Hamza,” she said, grabbing him by the shirt collar.

  Had she been in her beast form, she would have been able to lift him up with a single hand, but rather than attempt anything like that, she just pushed him backward, slamming him into a wall, a picture frame falling.

  “Mia!”

  For some reason, and it was probably his dick talking, Dr. Hamza had believed that he could come over here and cut her off and that she would have a sort of emotional experience, and then he would be there to comfort her, and that comfort would lead to something else, and maybe they could have one last go at it, and afterward he would give her a final taste, a stronger dose than he’d ever prepared up until this point…

  But even he wasn’t stupid enough to think that would work.

  No, the instant he tried to cut her off, Mia would go on the offensive.

  “Where is it?” Mia asked, reading the look in his eyes. “You have some on you, don’t you? Don’t you!?”

  She slammed him into the wall again, and damn if he didn’t want to fuck her in that moment. But the time for that was over; things had officially escalated.

  “In my pocket, front pocket,” Dr. Hamza said, nodding down to the pocket of his lab coat. Mia jammed her hand in and pulled out a bag of white powder.

  “Why isn’t it in pill form?” she asked.

  “I told you, I barely have any left, and I didn’t want to waste any pills. Times are tough,” he said, fixing the front of his lab coat.

  Mia opened up the little packet and inhaled deeply. “It smells just like how it tastes…” she said, licking her lips.

  “Don’t take it like that,” he started to tell her. “You should just take a little at a time, mix it with water, not all at once, and not right now. That’s for later, once I’m gone.”

  “I’m sick of this,” she said, her eyes jumping from Dr. Hamza’s face back to the packet. “The back and forth, the non-exemplar, exemplar, I just want to be an exemplar. Do you know what it’s like to fly around? To finally feel free in my skin? I want to be able to transform and transform back without this shit!”

  “Mia, no!” he shouted as she dumped the contents of the packet in her open mouth.

  She grabbed the glass of water that had been sitting on the coffee table and threw it back, licking her lips, drinking more of the water. She turned the bag inside out and began running her tongue along it, getting every last bit.

  “See? No harm done,” she said, swallowing hard.

  “It’s too much,” Dr. Hamza started to tell her, concern flitting across his face.

  But this was a lie, not what he
was saying, but the look on his face.

  Dr. Hamza wasn’t an idiot, and he knew that somehow, she would get the packet of what he liked to call “serum.” He didn’t like the way she went about getting it; he would have preferred a more sensual way, maybe him spoon-feeding it to her after a final bang, but she had chosen her route, and now he would be able to observe what happened when someone took too much.

  It was a gamble, but his play had worked.

  “How do you feel?” he asked, going into scientist mode.

  Mia’s throat bulged and retracted, the woman’s breath deepening as her arms and legs twitched, as she tried to use the couch for balance. She was licking her lips again, and as she looked up at him her face began to expand, Mia’s eyes turning orange, her transformation beginning.

  “I’m going to kill you.” Still keeping her pretty face, Mia’s lips started to tear at the corners, stretching upward and back to her temples, dozens and dozens of razor-sharp teeth sprouting from her gums.

  “Fascinating,” Dr. Hamza said as he rolled his sleeve back, exposing his wrist guard. He didn’t know exactly how this was going to turn out, but he had the feeling he might have to put her down, a mercy killing if there ever was one.

  The part of Dr. Hamza that had been secretly wishing to keep the friends-with-benefits relationship going now seemed completely trivial. Now he was focused on a different concept.

  Self-preservation.

  ***

  Dr. Hamza used the ends of his lab coat to cover his face as he barreled through Mia’s screen door, tiny shards of glass falling to the pavement of her backyard. He prepared to leap to the top of the wooden fence that separated her yard from a side street.

  A loud screech rang out behind him, and he knew that he needed to get on top of this soon, but he didn’t want to leave without a sample, and to get a sample would mean he would have to fight back somehow…

  He skidded down a small hill to the main thoroughfare, crossed the trolley tracks, and kept running at his top speed as he mentally went through everything he knew about where Mia lived. Centralia’s famed Central Park was a few blocks to the north, which gave him ample space to deal with the flying lizard beast.

  Not hesitating in the least, Dr. Hamza turned north, just as he heard another terrible cry behind him.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the metal-skinned monstrosity lifting into the air, Mia’s wings flapping as she surveyed the area, looking for him. Dr. Hamza was fully aware that she could sense heat.

  Sure enough, the monster woman spotted him and rose just a bit higher in the air.

  He knew the beast would eventually catch up, that he would need to do something soon, and he didn’t want to just teleport away, that would make this trip useless, fruitless even.

  No, Dr. Hamza needed a sample, and he wasn’t sure if his wrist guard could do anything to the creature.

  He’d made a mistake in running through the screen door when he should have blasted Mia with his wrist guard during her transformation, when she was most vulnerable, but even having seen her do it several times, every time she transformed left him awestruck, and Dr. Hamza had acted too late.

  Which meant he needed to get clever, and luckily, he had a small vial of his serum for that very reason.

  Dr. Hamza didn’t like to abuse his own serum; he knew of its addictive qualities, and he knew that the recipe hadn’t been fully perfected yet, but if he was going to win this battle, a battle he didn’t even want to fight, he was going to have to turn the situation in his favor.

  Once he reached the entrance to Central Park, he dipped his hand into the other pocket of his lab coat and pulled out the small vial. This was his backup vial, something he always carried just in case a situation called for it, which this one clearly did.

  Dr. Hamza popped the top off, jammed the vial in his nose, and snorted up, feeling a sudden sense of euphoria, a numbness at the front of his face. That numbness was quickly replaced by something he’d experienced before, a sense of knowing everything.

  If Dr. Hamza had been a true exemplar, he may have been classified as a Type I, Class E, which meant that he was a severely dangerous intelligence-based exemplar. It wasn’t often that people were classified as Type I, and Class E’s were usually classified as Type III or Type IV, moderately dangerous or non-dangerous.

  But Dr. Hamza’s intelligence was based on true cunning, and not only did it make him fast on his feet when adrenaline was high, it also slowed time in a way, allowing him to classify and understand things in his field of vision.

  Its only limitation seemed to be in the actual laboratory, as Dr. Hamza hadn’t been able to fully employ this power to his advantage to get the various serums correct. This was likely because of two reasons: one being that he didn’t like taking the stuff because of the side effects, and two being that it was too overwhelming of a sensation to properly utilize in his lab.

  So he saved the serum for special occasions, spiritual vision quests, and getting away from people trying to kill him.

  Just looking around revealed all sorts of information to Dr. Hamza: the quality of the soil; the brick mixture used to fix the cobblestone path that wound through the park; trace chemicals in the air from a recent teleportation, permagonean blue and loxytoxin 6; a slight increase of moisture in the air signaling that there would be late-night rain, cold winds coming up from the South, and a sunrise at five in the morning.

  All of this and more came to Dr. Hamza in an instant, which was how he noticed a few of the Centralian persimmons hanging from a tree in a public garden in the park’s center.

  He knew instantly that these persimmons, especially ones that were overripe, had chemicals in them that made them highly explosive: Tetromidinal 11; Formudilade Monox; Bonutranate.

  It was their large seed that kept them from exploding, which was why they could fall from the persimmon trees without causing many craters in the ground below.

  On occasion, one would fall without its seed, creating a minor explosion, which was why the trees were protected from children and others who didn’t know about this by a small fence around their bases.

  Of course, to the average Centralian, the small fence was simply to stop wild animals from getting them. Little did they know that your average Centralian was the wild animal.

  Another terrible cry behind him sent Dr. Hamza scrambling over the fence of the first tree he could reach, where he started pulling the wild persimmons down from the hanging branches, jamming his fingers inside, and pulling out the seed.

  By the time Mia landed, Dr. Hamza had an arm full of these explosive persimmons.

  He had also called the teleporter to arrive in exactly one minute, giving himself a time limit.

  Dr. Hamza examined Mia for a moment, both of them stalling.

  She was brutally ugly in this form, and it struck him as odd that that same mouth, the same one filled with so many sharp teeth, had been the same mouth that was on his cock just a few days prior. Mia was really into giving blow jobs and easily able to swallow him all the way up to his nutsack.

  Since his mind was working faster than any mind in the known vicinity, Dr. Hamza was able to remember this sexual experience while measuring trajectories of the best way to throw the persimmons without being caught up in the shrapnel that followed, while also noticing the chemical changes around him given off by sweat as well as the adrenaline he was producing, all whilst observing the strange molecular structures that made up the outer flesh level of Mia’s beast form: Guranlothurlane; Mocktone Polynox; Ditherrupturine 16.

  He knew everything at once, strange as it was, and after one or two seconds, in which both of them hesitated because the beast wasn’t stupid enough to think that he wasn’t up to something, Dr. Hamza purposefully lunged forward, unloading all the persimmons in Mia’s direction, and at the same time ducking for cover behind the tree to the right.

  The explosion that followed tore rocks from the ground, shaking more persimmons from the trees
, a few of which land on Dr. Hamza’s neck and shoulders.

  Now out of breath, but instantly able to see the nontoxic chemicals in the air which were labeled on his pane of vision in white lettering, Dr. Hamza’s eyes fell upon Mia, who was grounded, half her wing blown off, gasping for air.

  The teleporter appeared, a woman named Scarlett, a confused look on her face.

  He raised one finger in her direction as if to say, “not a word,” and she obeyed.

  Scarlett wasn’t a registered teleporter anyway, and the unregistered ones were specifically paid not to report what they’d seen.

  “I’m so sorry, Mia,” Dr. Hamza said as he approached the beast woman’s crippled form.

  She wasn’t dead, but was definitely winded, and unable to pull herself to her feet as she glared up at him with her orange eyes, gnashing her teeth.

  A load of different chemicals came to Dr. Hamza, but most importantly, he knew that she would recover enough to come for him again within two minutes, that if he was smart, he would kill her right then and there.

  But maybe…

  Just maybe…

  Dr. Hamza turned to the teleporter. “I want you to teleport her too,” he said, nodding to Mia’s beast form.

  “Teleport that thing?” the teleporter named Scarlett asked.

  “Don’t worry, I already have a space set up, and I have a mind control serum that I’ve been meaning to test, and now that I think about it, I believe I know what it’s missing. But we need to hurry, otherwise, she will kill us both.”

  “Um, sure,” the woman finally said as she approached the two.

  Dr. Hamza crouched in front of the scaly monster woman, a twisted grin on his face. “It looks like you’re going to live to see another day, sweet Mia.”

  Chapter Fifteen: The Telepath on the Trolley, and Helena’s Knuckle Sandwiches