Superheroes in Prose: The 1-4 Collection

by Paris, Sevan

  I point as his phone. “How did … how could …”

  “Really cool app I made. Lot’s of fun, but illegal as hell.”

  There is an explosion outside, quickly followed by the sound of broken glass slicing against the bathroom door. People scream and the lights go out.

  M powers us up.

  I turn my glowing eyes on Casa: “You are a total shit.”

  Chapter Four

  People scream. Glass breaks. Furniture crashes.

  “Stay in here until it’s safe.” I open the door and glimpse a dude in a suit being hurled through the air before Casa slams it shut.

  “Yeah, that’s a really swell idea. Considering you have no idea what you’re facing or how to stop it. You need a game plan.”

  Oh please, one hardly needs a game plan to take down a Zyborg Reformer.

  “A what-y what?”

  “A game plan. Some form of action—you really need to see into this attention problem of yours. Get counseling or—”

  I hold up a hand, cutting off Casa. I can only handle one ass at a time.

  A Zyborg Reformer. The Empire built them for reconditioning prisoners. They transfer the prisoner’s mind into the robot. Then send it to a far away planet, where it spends the rest of its days toiling away in some forsaken mining facility, contemplating a meaningless existence.

  I jerk Casa away from the door by his lapel and kick it open. Screaming followed by the ZARK of an energy weapon greets me. A chandelier explodes over my head, sending tinkling glass to the ground. “You knew what this thing was?! Why didn’t you say something, like, forever ago?!”

  You mean when we weren’t talking to each other or when you were trying to kill the both of us?

  I slide to a stop and peak around a waist-high partition planter with pathos vines streaming down the sides. The screaming lulls, but the Rat Pack keeps playing. “Fine—Fine! What’s the situation?”

  I’m sensing ten people still in the restaurant. Two have serious injuries and may be incapable of moving under their own power. The others are suffering minor to moderate injuries. All of them are trapped between the robot and the eastern wall. Sucks to be them.

  I stand and round the partition. “Hey! Autobitch!”

  I stand corrected—sucks to be us.

  “Remember that doosey of a mistake you made yesterday with the whole museum thing? Think you might be—”

  The robot rounds on me. A series of click-clacks transforms its forearm and fist into some sort of laser bazooka. (Seriously? Another bad guy with a bazooka?)

  It fires.

  The impact sends me to one knee, but M manages to raise our force field in time. I slide back five feet, splitting the planter in half. The force field absorbs the remaining blast with a light bending, blue hue.

  The robot clangs towards me with two giant steps. The forearm laser doesn’t let up. “Galaxy must be terminated. Carbons interfering with this unit’s directive must also be terminated.”

  The beam slides me back another two feet, through dishes, bus carts, and pathos vines. “Like I was saying—This. Is. A. Building! Not a person!”

  “Statement, irrelevant. This unit cannot discount the possibility of deception.”

  It appears the Robby, the Retarded Robot has adapted to the Rocket Girl stratagem.

  The beam sends me down to one arm and I slide into the bar, busting a Galaxy-sized chunk out of it. Liquor and beer bottles roll off my force field and crash onto the floor.

  Need I tell you that we can’t take much more of this?

  “Have those people gotten out yet?”

  Of course they haven’t. Three are trying to help the two that are seriously injured. The other five are trying to capture the event on those iTelephone devices.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Probably hoping to gain fleeting clicking popularity through that infernal youtube.

  I fly as close to the ceiling as I can without going through it. The Reformer’s bazooka beam passes under me and plows through the back of the restaurant, into the parking lot. “PEOPLE!” I grab all of the phones in a Grav Beam, lift my hand and shatter them against the ceiling. “Now would be a great time to vacate the premises, don’tcha think?”

  They stare at me.

  “LEAVE!”

  A few scurry for the exit (and by exit, I mean large gaping hole in the front of the restaurant) right before another laser blast slams me halfway into the ceiling. I fire two Grav Blasts in rapid succession—the first makes the Reformer lose balance, the second knocks him on his metal ass.

  Emergency lighting strobes in the darkness, barely giving people enough light to exit. Eight make it out. That leaves two.

  I land behind the robot. It struggles to right itself and I send another Grav Blast into it for good measure. “You said these things were prisoners! What kind of prisoner is allowed to have laser bazookas?”

  The kind that need to work efficiently on mining colonies. The Zyborg are smart enough to keep safety protocols active after the prisoner’s personality comes online. The protocols force an immediate shutdown should the Reformer attempt to harm someone.

  “Yeah, well they seem to be working really well. Where’d they get the protocols, Microsoft?”

  The Reformer rises. I’m about to give it another Grav Blast when some creaking and groaning forces me to look—and I mean really look—at the restaurant since coming out of the bathroom. A column in the middle of the dining area—not the decorative kind, but the kind that actually supports stuff—bows in the middle. Thick, dark lines crack through every wall. The few windows that are left at the front of the restaurant web with cracks. Several table sized pieces of plaster fall from above and shatter onto the ground. The entire ceiling lets out one bellowing, stomach twisting moan …

  Before giving way to an all out cave in.

  “M!” Blue Grav Beams shoot from my open palms, covering the ceiling and stopping the collapsing roof halfway from the floor. A few smaller pieces escape the Grav Beam and plop onto the breaking tile. “M, where are the other two …”

  Look right.

  A fifty-one year old woman desperately tries to help a waiter pull his leg free from a heap of plaster and busted furniture that has to weigh more than the both of them put together.

  Mom.

  Goddamn you, M. You didn’t lie to me, but you should have told me it was her in the first place.

  “Lady!” I yell above the groaning roof. “You’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Don’t you think I’m trying to do that?!” she says through the strain of pulling under the waiter’s armpits with everything she has. The waiter has a nasty head wound and doesn’t seem to be much help.

  The ceiling of rubble creaks down another foot. I go to one knee, raising my hands above my head as high as they can possibly go, as if it will somehow aid my power in holding everything up. Chandeliers sweep the floor and The Rat Pack has finally stopped playing.

  Do I really need to tell you how much we shouldn’t be doing this? Our power is already—

  “Stow it! Lady—you’re not trying to get out. You’re trying to help someone that you can’t—”

  “I’ll leave here when he does! I’ve got just as—look out!” I follow her pointing finger to the right: The Reformer runs at me and transforms its left hand and forearm into some sort of huge spinning drill. He rears back and stabs the shiny metal cone into my side.

  Hard.

  The drill bends my force field with an angry roar and crazy shower of yellow sparks. I have no idea how much more the roof caves in, but it’s enough to make Mom and the waiter scream.

  I’ll do good to hold this up another fifteen seconds. M simply can’t disperse the beam wide enough. I’ll live because I’m powered up, but I’ll watch Mom die. I’ll watch this person she gave her life trying to save die. I’ll watch Casa die.

  Casa?

  Like something out of Superhero prose, he jumps out of the smoke and tangle of patho
s vines, landing next to Mom. He shoves at the massive piece of debris pinning the waiter—it barely moves.

  The rubble that was once the ceiling is four feet away from our crouched bodies. It reduces the ten-foot tall robot to a belly crawl, but he still keeps that stupid drill in my side.

  Through the sparks, I see a softball-sized piece of ceiling graze mom’s head; she doesn’t pay any attention to it. I can’t help her I can barely hold this up and I can’t help her she’s going to die and I can’t help her … Casa shoves at the debris again. Nothing. The ceiling caves a little more and oh God I can’t hold this up she goes to one knee she isn’t going to give up she isn’t going to give up on saving a guy that she doesn’t even know and it’s going to get her killed and I do the only thing I can do I yell: “Lady—PLEASE!”

  And then, with one last, furious grunt, Casa shoves the debris off the waiter’s leg.

  Mom pulls the waiter up as much as she can, and then Casa helps her. They crawl and drag him out from under what is left of the ceiling. I think I hear Mom yell my name over the raining pieces of ceiling that escape my Grav Beam.

  The robot crawls forward with the drill a little more, bending my force field a little more, and lowering the rubble a little more. “M—let me know the second they’re—”

  They’re out.

  I ball my hands into fists and point them at the Reformer. M sends a massive Grav Blast into the robot’s angular red torso, knocking it somewhere on the other side of the restaurant. The ceiling, with no Grav Beam left to keep it in place, finishes its screeching avalanche of concrete and steal.

  When I’m powered up, I’m way tougher than the average person, even without the force field. Something that would kill somebody—like an Italian restaurant caving in on itself—won’t kill me, but it’s still buckets of pain. I shove a piece of Marko’s off the top of my ringing head. “M, power reading?”

  Back at twenty percent.

  And the Reformer?

  The Reformer shoves and kicks at least five tons of debris off its body and transforms the drill back into a hand.

  I would say a tad better than twenty.

  Energy blasts from its boot jets, sending it into the evening’s autumn colored sky.

  “Do these things have some sort of power battery? Like a coppertop or something?”

  Or something. But it’s a power supply that won’t deplete for a couple of hundred years.

  “Of course it is.” I stand and wobble through the smoking debris, into the street. “Scan the area,” I say through a heavy breath. “What do we have?”

  Sixty-seven people are in our immediate vicinity, two of which have serious injuries. The first one is being helped twenty feet to your right by someone who may or may not know what he is doing; the second one is being helped by your mother in what’s left of the back parking lot.

  Most of the people around me are on their cell phones, talking to significants or 911. If the ambulances can’t get here in time, I can fly the two injured to the hospital. Otherwise, there is not much left to—

  The front of the tattoo shop, Classic Ink, explodes behind us.

  The crowd dives, ducks, and scatters around yellow flames and glass engulfing the sidewalk and a good chunk of Razier Avenue. The force of the explosion flips a nearby scooter into the air. At least twenty people lie prone on the street, most of which don’t get back up because they can’t or won’t.

  I look to the sky … and see the Reformer hovering fifty feet up. One of those laser bazooka things sticks out of both forearms, each with a smoking barrel.

  “Why is this thing still attacking? Didn’t it think I was the building?”

  Yes, but it thought you were the building because its program is a tangled mess. There’s no predicting its behavior. Maybe the Reformer’s directives—as loosely defined as they were—were the only thing keeping it from going berserk in the first place. Now that it’s accomplished at least one of them …

  “Crap.” I fly up to meet the Reformer. “You said I didn’t need a game plan to take this thing down. That implies”—I jerk right, and the Reformer’s oncoming laser beam misses me by a foot—“that implies it’s easy to take down. So far, it looks on the far-ville side of easy.”

  This Reformer’s auxiliary programming—what makes it function in place of a prisoner’s consciousness—is controlled by a relatively unprotected area in the small of its back. Remove or damage it, and it will swoon quicker than that female that pines after Edward Cullen.

  “Show it to me!” I fly above it, narrowly missing another blast from a cannon. M “senses” things in much the same way that the Starship Enterprise seems to (my analogy—not his). When I want him to show me something he’s sensing or referring to, he lets me see said something in a shade of blue. When I fly behind the robot, M lights up a six by six inch panel in the small of the robot’s back. The Reformer raises its altitude in an attempt to catch up with me, which I easily match right before shooting the absolute crap out of the panel with six Grav Blasts. It sparks into flames and smoke.

  The Reformer reaches for the flaming panel in the small of his back, like he’s trying to pull out a knife that he can’t quite reach. He jerks and twists different directions, seemingly oblivious to his hundred-foot plummet back to Razier Avenue. He slams into the pavement right after a few people scamper out of the way, leaving a crater five feet deep.

  I land beside him. The crowd has mostly dispersed. The 911 calls went out a while ago. I can’t believe another Super hasn’t shown up … even with the main team out of town, other reserve members of HEROES should have been here by now.

  Is Casa right? Are they really too afraid? What does that mean for Prose? I turn towards the crowd … what does that mean for me?

  With the sound of two giant fistfuls of crunching asphalt, the Reformer pulls itself out of the crater; loose pieces of road fall from its red chassis.

  “Um, M?”

  The Reformer takes a few baby steps to the right and staggers, as if it’s learning how to walk for the first time.

  “Swooning he is not. What is with the total lack of swoon?”

  …. I don’t know. I honestly didn’t see that coming. Taking out the auxiliary commands should have worked.

  “Should have? Should have? You’re like the most fallible omnipotent being I know.”

  “Where,” the robot starts, “where the bloody hell …” He looks at his hands. “What—what’s happened?”

  Even through the robot’s synthesized voice, I recognize the inflections, the British accent immediately: “Villainous?”

  His glowing red eyes look at me. “Galaxy.”

  That twit.

  “What in the world—”

  He activated the Reformer’s upload beam while standing it front of it, trapping his own mind into this thing … AND didn’t take the auxiliary programming offline first. It wouldn’t let his mind take control of the body. All the Reformer could do was what it was told to do through the prime directives in that panel. The ones that, I assume, Villainous screwed up prior to that. That’s why it was attacking the buildings and—

  “GALAXY!” Villainous—now wearing the body of a ten-foot tall pissed off robot with massive weaponry at his totally irresponsible hands—runs at me. Each step makes the remaining windows in the buildings around us shake.

  I fly up and over Villainous before he connects, causing him to collide with a parked Jeep Cherokee. The screeching impact nearly rips the Jeep in half.

  “Villainous, wait? What’s going on? Why did you—”

  “Oh, it wasn’t my fault, Space Boy! I assure you I don’t fancy being a robot!”

  “Then what—”

  He gets one arm free from the tangled wreck and fires another blast. I jerk right and the blast misses by inches.

  “Will you just wait?! I might be able to help you!”

  Gabe, I’m sensing an incoming Super. It’s flying in from the north and it’s flying in fast.

&nb
sp; I look right.

  Other north.

  I look left.

  There ya go.

  “How fast? Like, Liberty fast?”

  “Liberty?” Villainous says. “Am I going to have a go at him too? Wait, you’re stalling then, aren’t you?”

  No, whomever it is isn’t that powerful, but still rates pretty high on the bad day meter. The Super will be here in five, four, three …

  “Yeah, that’s what you’re doing.’ The ponce, you, Pink, you’re all in this—”

  A white and blue blur vaguely shaped like a person screams by me and tackles Villainous. With two full, quick spins, it hurls him and the Cherokee into the river. The Jeep separates from Villainous halfway and slams into the shore, rolling onto the same bench Reagan and I sat on a month ago.

  The Super hovers next to me, at eye level. He wears a mostly white costume with blue gloves, cape, and boots. A blue domino mask covers his eyes and an outline of a fist carrying a dumbbell covers the front of his chest. Red and grey hair sets him around fifty or so, and his grotesquely muscular body makes me wonder how the dude can touch his shoulders or wipe his butt. I recognize him in an instant, but he should be in The Bend: “Captain Strong?”

  “Uh, no,” Captain Strong says in a manly voice with a valley girl inflection.

  My sigh is just a little louder than M’s: “Pink.” She’s using her possession power to control Captain Strong’s body. The only reason I didn’t recognize her right away is because the whites of the domino mask cover Captain Strong's eyes. With her inside him, they should be glowing pink.

  “In the flesh,” She/he—whatever—turns to the river and shields her eyes from the setting sun. “Man, this is a mess. And you know what? This is an epic, Galaxy-style mess. If you’d just dealt with these robot dumb-dumbs a month ago—”

  “Hey, whoa, don’t you pin this on me!”

  Oh, you’re going to engage with the phantom female now? I’m sure that will prove fruitful.

  “Why shouldn’t I? Help me, and I’ll help you. That’s what I totally said—remember? I was all make with the help, but you? You didn’t make with the anything.”