We Could Be Heroes

by Harmon Cooper

  “I don’t know how to feel about that,” Sam said, looking to Ozella for support, who wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone in Helena’s gym.

  “Yeah, yeah, I had my ass handed to me,” Zoe said, still panting. “But I know what you’re up to, and I know your style. And I’ll get you next time.” She wiped her mouth, and stood, chugging the bottle of water, spritzing some of it on her head. “Are we going to this witch doctor’s home or what?” she asked Sam, water still dripping from her face.

  “It’s still kind of early,” Helena said, turning to Ozella and Sam. “Did you have something else in mind before we went?”

  “A thrift store,” said Ozella.

  “And we also need to check the crime scene from last night. I want to see what this thing can do,” Sam said, pointing to his nose.

  Helena nodded, satisfied with the answer. “So, shopping, crime scene, and then we pay a visit to the good doctor. I think it’s going to be exciting day. Let’s get changed.”

  She turned to the exit, not waiting for the others to catch up to her.

  It was only when she stepped out of her gym that Helena was finally able to place her hand on her hip, cringing at the pain.

  Zoe’s punch was going to leave a serious bruise.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Thrift Stores and Free Falling

  (A chapter about why it is never good to talk to strangers, at least superpowered ones.)

  A fit female teleporter deposited the four would-be heroes in front of a thrift store on 49th street called Thrifty Chic. It was one that Ozella recommended, a place where she claimed good cosplaying supplies were easy to come by.

  “I really think we should be going to this whacko doctor’s house rather than shopping,” Zoe said.

  “I believe you already told us that,” Helena snapped back. “But if you prefer to go to the doctor’s home alone, by all means.”

  “I…” Zoe looked to Sam. “You didn’t tell me where it is yet.”

  “We should all go as a group, and we don’t know if he’s a whacko yet…” Sam said. “Besides, this won’t take long, right, Ozella?”

  “Not too long.”

  The group’s stat keeper already had her notebook open, jotting something down while her eyes darted between Zoe and Helena.

  “What are you writing?” Zoe asked Ozella.

  “I’ll show you later, I promise.”

  “Let’s just wrap this up, get to the crime scene, and then move on,” said the slightly annoyed tiger girl wannabe.

  They entered Thrifty Chic, and Sam did all he could not to take a breath through his nostrils.

  He knew what thrift stores smelled like, and didn’t know how his mind, or maybe his olfactory epithelium, would process so many scents at once.

  “Just select a few items,” he told Ozella, “things that don’t look too creepy.”

  “Like this?” Helena asked, reaching for a black dress on the nearest rack. If she was in any way opposed to being in a used clothing store, she wasn’t showing it.

  “What’s creepy about that?” Zoe asked.

  “For one, it has spikes built into the sleeve.” Helena showed her what she was talking about. “This is fashion from like ten years ago.”

  “But that means it’s close to making a comeback, right?”

  “Actually…” Helena nodded at Zoe. “You may be right.”

  As the two disregarded their grudges and moved deeper into the store, Ozella stayed with Sam, searching through a rack of coats until she found a pink leather jacket.

  “How about this one?” she asked.

  “So you just want me to smell it, and then tell you what I know about it?”

  “Almost,” said Ozella. “I want you to smell it, tell me what you know about it, and then we’re going to go find the person and confirm if you’re right or not.”

  “How are we going to pull that off without looking like some creepy ass stalkers?”

  Ozella snorted and covered her mouth. “Hopefully we’ll find a person who isn’t too annoyed. I mean, you can sense everything, right?”

  “I really don’t know. But I’m afraid if I sniff this in here, I’ll take in the rest of the store as well, and that may throw off what I’m sensing.”

  “Then let’s buy it,” Ozella said as she walked to the cash register with the pink leather jacket. She smiled at the older woman behind the register without making eye contact, and pointed at Helena Knight.

  “Oh, I’m familiar with her,” the woman said. “I’ve seen her in some of the tabloids.”

  “And she’ll be picking up the tab for everything we purchase today,” Ozella said, her voice quieter than normal, her shyness in meeting a stranger on display.

  “Just let me confirm. Helena!” Sam called out.

  The combat dancer looked over at him, saw that he was standing at the register with Ozella, and gave him the thumbs up. She then returned to a rack of dresses that Zoe and her were going through, Zoe occasionally taking a dress off the rack and holding it up to her body, showing Helena.

  “Yep, it’s all on her,” Sam told the lady at the register.

  Ozella and Sam stepped outside, Ozella immediately thanking him for taking over at the register. “I get shy around new people,” she said meekly.

  “I’ve noticed. It’s not a bad thing. It’s cute, really.”

  Ozella looked at Sam with true appreciation in her eyes. “You think it’s cute?”

  “Yeah, I mean it, it’s you,” Sam said with his trademark smile. “And I think the closer people are to their true selves, the cuter and more charming they become. Actually, maybe what I just said doesn’t work for everyone, especially if someone’s true self is an asshole…”

  Ozella laughed. “So are you going to smell it?”

  “I guess there’s no better time than now,” Sam said as he brought the pink leather jacket to his nose.

  He gave it a big sniff, and immediately knew more about the owner than he ever wanted to know. There had been two owners, actually, but the most recent owner had had it for at least three years.

  “She’s an exemplar,” Sam told Ozella. “An immigrant from the Northern Alliance.”

  “Good start, let’s go confirm it.”

  “You’re the shy one here,” he reminded her, “are you really up for something like that?”

  Ozella shrugged, the ribbon she tied around her neck slowly lifting as a breeze rushed by. “Now we have to deal with Zoe and Helena shopping, and this could take a while. I should have noted this.” She reached into her cute little backpack and pulled out her Book of Known Variables.

  “So that’s a ‘yes?’ We should go?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll tell them then,” Sam said as he let her jot down whatever it was she was going to jot down. “Helena, Zoe!” he called out once he stepped inside the store, not wanting to move too deep into the jungle of stank-ass abandoned clothing.

  When no response came, he decided to move in deeper. The thrift store, like most thrift stores, was packed to the brim, and even though there were signs labeling the various sections, it was very hard to know where one section began and another ended.

  And Sam almost did it, he almost took a breath in through his nostrils, but he stopped himself just in time, glad he hadn’t triggered a thousand memories at once.

  He found Helena by the dressing room area, the woman bouncing on the balls of her feet as she waited for Zoe to try something on.

  “Hey you,” she said, her hand naturally coming into his.

  They hadn’t been fully intimate yet, but there had been some intimate moments between them. As she moved closer to him, coming in to kiss him, Sam expected another one was about to happen.

  And as if on cue, the dressing room curtain opened and Zoe stepped out, the look on her face cutting a wide swath of space between Sam and Helena.

  “Am I interrupting something?” she asked.

  “That dress looks great on you,” Helena said,
lightly stepping over to Zoe.

  A look of surprise came across Zoe’s face as Helena brought her hands to Zoe’s waist, judging the tightness of the fabric and pulling it down just a little, so her breasts flattened some. “We can have a tailor adjust it. The style of dress is supposed to be worn in this way, not showing as much of this area,” she said, moving her hand over Zoe’s chest. “And it needs to be just a little bit tighter for the effect to be pulled off correctly.”

  “Thanks?” Zoe asked.

  “It looks great,” Sam said awkwardly.

  He couldn’t tell the difference in the dress being tugged down a bit or the original incarnation, but he smiled anyway, pretending he could.

  “And that’s all you have to say?” Zoe asked, turning her back to him, letting him see the garment’s unique cut, a V-shape in the back of the dress that stopped just above her tailbone, Zoe’s shoulder blades and spine exposed.

  “That’s pretty low,” Sam said.

  “It’s supposed to be a formal dress,” Helena told him, again adjusting the dress on Zoe’s body, tugging portions of the fabric, her hands moving quickly as Zoe got used to being touched in this way.

  “Well, this is great, and I think you should buy it then. We found the jacket that we want to do a little further research on, so whenever you two are ready…”

  Helena looked over at him with her gray eyes, an amused grin spreading across her face. “Maybe you and Ozella should go alone, this is going to be a while.”

  “I figured as much,” Sam said as he turned to the exit.

  ***

  Sam and Ozella screamed out, Ozella’s skirt beating up in the wind revealing her ass, Sam’s loose-fitting shirt now with a big bubble of air in the back, his black hair off his forehead, his arms spread wide as he fell.

  “Please!” he cried out, seeing the rooftop of the building come into view.

  As they neared its top, the two were lifted again high into the air, much higher than he’d ever been before, where it was cold, their lift slow and painstaking versus their fall, which was quick and rapid.

  Sam had already vomited, and there really wasn’t much to vomit up aside from the little bit of jam and toast he’d had for breakfast. Glancing left he saw Ozella’s eyes were bloodshot, her blonde hair whipping around her face, her tiny red backpack beating against her back, both her hands over her mouth as she tried not to throw up.

  Trying to find the woman with the pink jacket had been a terrible idea.

  A no good, very bad, terrible fucking idea.

  Sam could see the woman now, a blip on the edge of the rooftop, her pink jacket in one hand as Sam and Ozella were repeatedly lifted into the air and dropped, narrowly hitting the rooftop, only to be lifted again.

  “Please stop!” Sam cried again as they got near the rooftop, feeling a jerk in his body as they were slowly lifted back into the air.

  He knew the woman’s name was Catherine; he had picked that up by sniffing the jacket right before they’d teleported over here. For such a mousy, petite woman, there was a streak of evilness in her, evident in the way she treated complete strangers.

  “My family is from the North too!” he lied on their next go around, kicking his legs and punching his arms out, trying to get a grip on something.

  Catherine’s eyebrow rose, and for a moment, Sam and Ozella hovered in the air, about five feet up. Her hair was white, and there was a strand of braided red hair behind her right ear, which Sam had recognized as a fashion from the Northern Alliance.

  “Thank you,” Ozella whimpered. “Please don’t hurt us.”

  Just as Sam had sensed, Catherine was an exemplar who specialized in air manipulation. Upon approaching her as she stepped out of what was presumably her apartment building, the woman immediately lifted the two of them over the building, and proceeded to torture them.

  Cruel and unusual? Yes.

  But then again, one could never be too careful, and Catherine didn’t know how these two had gotten her old pink leather jacket and brought it back to her, nor how they had found her in the first place.

  So she’d acted on instinct.

  “What’s your family’s last name?” Catherine asked.

  “Meeko,” Sam said, in too much of a delirium to lie and make his last name sound more like a Northern Alliance last name.

  “Wrong answer.”

  Catherine lifted a single finger and Sam and Ozella were hurled up in the air, even higher than they’d been before, only this time they weren’t dropped.

  They simply hovered again, the wind rotating their bodies onto their backs. This turned out to be even worse for both of them. They knew what was on the other side, yet all they could do was look up at the sky now, taking away any small sense of control they had in the first place.

  “Why did you come here?” Catherine asked. She suddenly floated in the sky next to them, graceful, in a way that reminded Sam of how Helena held herself.

  “Please, just let us down, I’ll explain. I won’t lie. I promise, please!” Sam said out of the corner of his mouth, his body on full alert, trying to gauge if she was lowering them to the ground or lifting them even higher.

  “And you are both non-exemplars?” she asked.

  “I’m not, she is,” Sam said.

  “And your power?”

  Sam lifted his hand to his nose and touched it.

  “You have the power of smell?” Catherine asked, her voice tinged with skepticism.

  “I swear, that’s how I figured out this was your jacket. We were just trying to improve my power. I was a non-exemplar for the last twenty years, well, basically, and my power was dormant. But it’s active now! So we’re just trying to test out the limits. Please, let us down, please…”

  Sam and Ozella’s bodies were righted, and Catherine began to lower them.

  But just as they got close to the rooftop, she threw them up again, both Sam and Ozella screaming once more as their bodies blasted off, a gust of wind slapping into them, twisting the two around and depositing them on the rooftop.

  “What the hell was that for?” Sam asked, everything around him spinning.

  At least he was on solid ground now, a feeling of elation running through him. He looked over to see Ozella experiencing the same sensation, although she was doing it with her eyes closed, her hands on her stomach.

  It was amazing neither of them had buckled once they hit the rooftop, but after testing his buoyancy, Sam realized that there was a bit of wind keeping him erect.

  Sam wasn’t a telepath, but if he could have read Ozella’s mind in that moment (or smelled her), he would have seen that she was battling two thoughts: one to jump at the exemplar and try to strangle her—a feeling of aggression Ozella had never experienced before—the other to call a teleporter right then and there, to get the hell out of here before they got swept away again.

  “You’ve got one minute to explain everything to me,” Catherine said. “One minute.”

  “Do you mind if I use this?” Sam asked, pointing to his nose.

  “You want to smell me?”

  “Well, I don’t have to get close to you; I’m sure you can make a situation in which I am downwind.”

  Catherine smirked. “Are you sure you want me to do something like that?”

  “Not in a hard way, just a slight wind,” he told her.

  “And then what? You’re going to read my fortune, tell me about my past?”

  “To be honest with you, the only reason we came here was to see just how powerful my… What did you call it?” Sam asked, turning to Ozella.

  “Your olfactory epithelium,” she said, swallowing hard, “and as part of that, your olfactory receptor cells and olfactory track too.”

  “What she said. Look, I’m still getting used to my power, and we thought if we went to a thrift store and smelled an object, it would be an interesting test to try to return it to its owner… Yeah, that’s it. Is that your jacket?”

  “It is,” Catherine said
.

  “And you are Catherine Edmonton, an exemplar from the Northern Alliance who specializes in air manipulation, correct?”

  “Correct, a Type III, Class C, in Centralia’s ranking system, or so I was recently told.”

  Sam accidentally took a whiff through his nostrils and tilted his head to the side for a moment, not sure of the validity of what he’d just sensed. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Please do; your minute is almost up.”

  Sam nodded quickly. “Did you recently have an immigration related issue?”

  “I did.”

  “And were you taken care of by a guy with white hair and orange eyes?”

  “I was...” Catherine said, her body language indicating she was growing a bit uncomfortable with this line of questioning.

  “And have you seen him since?” Sam asked.

  “Once, briefly, although we may see each other again. Are you telling me you got all that just by sniffing in my direction?” she asked.

  “Yes. And I swear that’s all we came here to do, well not to smell you, but to see if the jacket actually belonged to you. That’s all, I swear. We can take it back to the thrift store if you want, our friends are there.”

  “You know, I think I’ll keep the jacket,” Catherine said, admiring it for moment. “It was given to me by an ex, but I always liked the way it fit.”

  Catherine, who wore a modest, light brown dress, slipped into the jacket. Casually turning a little, showing them how well it fit.

  “It looks good,” Ozella said, her eyes still closed, hands still on her stomach as she tried to get her wits.

  “It looks great,” Sam added.

  “What else can you tell me about me with your nosy power?” Catherine asked, taking a step closer to him.

  “I mean, I can just sense your past, maybe some parts of your future, I’m not quite sure of how the future sensing works. My nose really just picks up bits and pieces.”

  “So you are like a telepath, in a way?” Catherine asked, raising her hand to him. “Take it.”

  Rather than be whipped up into the air again, Sam readily took Catherine’s hand and brought it to his nose.