Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  The moonlight chisels her body into a work of marble. She’s wearing a coat that’s too large, a skirt that’s too short, and a pair of boots that are too high. He stops three feet away, dripping.

  Her head is cocked to one side, her eyes wary. Perhaps she didn’t …

  “How did you do that?”

  So much for that idea. He tries bluffing. “Do what?”

  “Get out of the water.”

  So much for bluffing. He deliberately looks around and then over his shoulder. “Oh, the puddle, by the street? It’s okay, it wasn’t that deep. I, uhh … tripped.”

  Her eyes twitch. “No, you didn’t. You didn’t trip. And that puddle was ten feet deep.”

  Now, how did she know that? “Look, honey—”

  “Don’t ‘Look, honey’ me,” she says, her voice beginning to rise. “How did you do that?”

  “Honestly, honey, I think—”

  “I said—”

  “Good evening, Kirby.”

  Father and daughter turn.

  A man stands fifteen feet away. In the shadows, he looks tiny and frail. He’s holding something in his hands.

  Kirby recognizes him instantly. Oh god, not him. Not now. This day has been horrendous. He refuses to let it become absurd.

  “Not now, Frances. Go bother somebody else.”

  The man steps close enough for the moonlight to define his features. He has the kind of haircut fathers give their children when they don’t realize they’re being cruel. The glasses on the end of his nose could be used for coffee-tables. He’s holding a laptop computer.

  The man smiles. “Really, Kirby, is that any way to greet an old friend?”

  “I’m serious, Frances. This is not the time. If you want to play, go find Max. I think he’s at Studio Two. If you hurry, you might even get some help.”

  “Dad, who is this?” Melissa says suddenly. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

  Behind the blocks of glass, the man’s eyes go wide. “Dad?” A smile spreads across his face that makes him look like a demented pumpkin. His voice, however, is oddly strained. “Oh, how very precious.”

  “Frances, I swear to God … ”

  Suddenly, the man stabs a finger at the laptop and several things happen at once. First, the computer springs from the man’s hands and begins to float, several feet away.

  That’s new, Kirby thinks.

  Second, a soft glow surrounds the man and the computer. Finally, an arm—bigger than the laptop itself—emerges from the computer, snakes across the moonlight, and snatches Melissa to the man’s side.

  “Dad!” Melissa squeals.

  “All right, Frances, that’s enough,” Kirby barks with more command than he feels. “She isn’t one of us.” Quietly, he gathers the energy around him. How can he do this without Melissa knowing? He is fairly certain Frances won’t hurt her.

  “Relax, Kirby,” the man says. “I won’t hurt her.” He grabs her left arm. “So … is this Melissa or Rebecca?”

  “It’s Melissa, dickweed,” she snaps, twisting in his grip. “Let me go.”

  “Frances, let her go.” It would have to be quiet. It would have to be something he hadn’t done before.

  “Relax, Kirby. I’m just—”

  “No,” Melissa says. Her body shimmers …

  And Kirby Walker watches his eldest daughter turn into water.

  Her skin ripples in the moonlight like molten glass. “I said … ” She pulls her liquid arm free from her captor. Sprints away, leaving tiny puddles in her wake. Stops after twenty strides. Turns.

  “ … let me go,” she finishes. “Dickweed.”

  “Holy shit,” Frances says.

  “Holy shit,” Kirby says.

  The man with the computer recovers first. He turns on Kirby.

  “You lied to me,” he whines. “She isn’t a civilian at all. She’s—”

  Once he recovers, Kirby doesn’t hesitate. A dozen questions rip through his mind, but one thing is for certain.

  No more need for secret identities.

  He feels his costume change even as he releases an energy spike at the computer that would fry several city blocks.

  And is shocked for the second time in less than a minute when nothing happens.

  The pumpkin smile is back. “That won’t work this time, Kirby. As a matter of fact, nothing you do will work.”

  “I doubt that.” His second surge is no more effective than his first.

  “Doubt away. This time, I shielded everything.”

  Kirby blinks. “You what?”

  “That’s right,” the man crows. “It’s magnet-proof. You can’t beat me.” He actually does a little dance. “You can’t—”

  He’s still dancing when a huge pool of water appears over his head.

  And falls.

  It drenches the man and the computer at his side. Something sizzles, and the nimbus of light disappears. A single pocking sound, like a knot exploding in firewood. Then …

  “Guess you forgot to make it waterproof. Dickweed.”

  Kirby turns to find his daughter, her head cocked to one side, gazing at Frances with a contempt that only teenagers can master.

  “You wrecked my laptop!”

  Kirby turns back to Frances.

  “I’ll kill you!” Frances squeaks at Melissa.

  Kirby opens his mouth to deal with that threat … and then bursts into laughter.

  It has been a horrible day. And now Frances is standing there, threatening his daughter, looking like a disillusioned mop. His laptop keeps making sizzling sounds.

  “With what?” Melissa drawls, taunting Frances. “Your eyeglasses? That’s a nice paperweight you’ve got there.”

  Frances stamps his feet like a seven-year old in the rain. Mud splatters. His computer pops again.

  Kirby can’t stop laughing.

  A splatter of mud strikes Melissa’s dress. For the first time, she looks angry. “What are you—like—four?” She flicks the mud away and rubs at the spot.

  Frances makes a sound like a steam kettle. Kirby suddenly imagines the mop of hair on the man’s head bursting into the sky like a champagne cork.

  “This is Dolce & Gabbana, asshole.”

  “All right,” Kirby croaks. It’s about time he got himself under control. “You don’t need to use that kind of language, young lady. He’s beaten.”

  “He’s an—”

  “Melissa Francine Walker.” He says it firmly, without anger. Straightens up. She takes the hint.

  Or, at least, she would have, if Frances doesn’t screech: “Beaten? Beaten? I’m not beaten! I’ll—”

  “Shut up, Frances.” Father and daughter say it as one.

  Melissa glances at her father. She giggles nervously.

  Kirby smiles back. Then he reaches into the earth with his power. He locates a vein of metal—feels like lead—about fourteen feet down and pulls some to the surface. Forms it into a thick cord and binds Frances’ arms, hands and feet. On a whim, he flattens out a section and wraps it around the man’s mouth.

  He does all of this in less than five seconds.

  “There.” He drives part of the cord back into the earth, pinning Frances to the spot. “Now I can think.”

  Melissa is staring at him, eyes wide. “Holy shit. You’re Magnet Man.”

  Kirby sighs. So much for watching her language. “Yes, I am. Honey, I think we need to talk.” It isn’t too great of an understatement.

  Melissa looks at Frances, bound and gagged by metal. “You’re Magnet Man,” she says again. “Holy shit.”

  Suddenly, she goes still. “Wait a minute.” She turns. “You can’t be Magnet Man. You don’t look anything like him.”

  He suppresses a smile. She’s already caught Frances’s name and used it against him. And now this. She’s very quick.

  He looks around, pursing his lips in thought. “There’s a baseball diamond nearby where I sometimes sit when I need to figure things out.” He nods in t
he general direction. “Why don’t we sit and have a conversation?” Without waiting for her reply, he gently grabs her elbow and steers her away from Frances.

  They get about fifty feet before she stops. “Wait a minute.” She looks back at Frances. “What about him?”

  “He isn’t going anywhere. Besides, even if he could move, the cops are more than capable of handling someone like Laptop.”

  “Laptop?”

  “That’s what he calls himself. Frances is his given name.”

  Her gaze tightens. “And how do you know that? How come he knew your name?”

  He jerks his head in the direction of the bleachers. “All in good time.”

  They walk the remainder of the distance in silence. The moonlight casts the baseball diamond in a brilliant chalky white. Kirby steps up onto wooden slats bleached an oddly vivid gray, crisscrossed by chain-link shadows. He stops about halfway down. Turns to face his daughter. Sits. She does the same.

  A long pause.

  Then, at nearly the same instant, they both take a deep breath and say: “So, you’re a superhero.”

  Kirby’s smile is immediate. He chuckles. He’d meant the words as a joke, hoping to deflate some of the tension. Apparently, his daughter thought along similar lines.

  She smiles back at him. “You first. Are you really Magnet Man?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  Her father has just confirmed that he’s one of the most powerful people on the planet. A minute ago, her mouth had dropped in teenaged awe. This time, Melissa just nods, her eyes shrewd. She’s thinking of questions. She starts with the obvious one.

  “Why don’t you look like him?”

  “Actually, it’s Magnet Man that doesn’t look like me.”

  She frowns, and he holds up his arm. “See this? This is my wrist watch. The same one I always wear. But it doesn’t look the same anymore, does it?”

  She shakes her head.

  “All right, here’s a history lesson. A long time ago there was a superhero named Device. The first superhero. He didn’t really have any super powers, except for the fact that he was probably the smartest man who ever lived. He built devices. With them, he fought crime. He was a good superhero, fought in World War Two with the Fighting Americans, but that’s not why he’s so important. He’s important because of what he did after he retired. What he did for us.”

  He takes a deep breath. “After the war, he decided there were enough superheroes that he wasn’t needed publicly. He retired, and began doing work for all the other heroes. He designed our costumes. He designed an elaborate communications network. And he designed a way for us to have secret identities that actually work. He designed these.” He held up his wrist again.

  His first memory. He’s two years old. There’s a man snapping the device around Kirby’s wrist. The device and the man’s hair are an identical shade of silver.

  He blinks suddenly. This was hard. It shouldn’t be this hard, it’s been almost two years …

  “What Device told me,” he says firmly, fighting the constriction in his throat, “is that, in essence, this is an imaging device. For everything. TV’s, cameras, audio recorders … people. When we’re working, it sends an image of our public superhero identity to the world in all manner possible. All our real characteristics—body, face, voice, name—are hidden. Hell, we probably don’t even smell the same.”

  “Then how come you don’t look like that now?”

  A broken smile. “That’s part of the genius. The device ignores anyone who knows the truth. Once you figured it out, it began treating you the same way it treated Device. Or your mother. And—before you ask—I don’t know how they work. Or how my costume appears when I want it to, or how a dozen and one other things Device did for us work. I doubt there are more than a handful of people on the planet even smart enough to guess. They just work. They let us have a life outside of what we do. They give us that sanity. Device gave us that. All of us. He was like a godfather to us all.” He whispers the last.

  His daughter is studying him intently in the moonlight. “Dad … are you all right?”

  He is not going to cry in front of his daughter. It’s ridiculous. They have a million other things to worry about. It shouldn’t be this hard. It’s been two years—it shouldn’t still …

  “We were very close,” he says abruptly. “Device and I. He … he was a good friend.”

  “Was?”

  She is so quick. The quiet light of his heart.

  “He died. About two years ago. I’m sorry … it’s still hard sometimes.” He very much wants to say: Sometimes I don’t know what to do without him. But this is his daughter. She doesn’t need to hear such things. Not now. So, instead, he says: “I miss him.”

  His daughter studies him for a moment. “Did I ever meet him? I mean, like in his”—she searches for the right word—“normal identity?”

  Another broken smile. “I don’t think Device had a normal identity. He didn’t like to use his real name. Ever.” He glances back across the park to the spot where they had left Laptop pinned to the grass. “And no, he never came by the house. You and Rebecca never showed any signs of power, so he didn’t consider you a part of his world. He was odd that way. I think he might have been trying to protect you.

  “Which brings us back to you.” He takes a deep breath. Glances in the direction of Laptop. Then looks at his daughter, sitting on the bench in an oversized coat and undersized clothes. Like a normal teenager. Which, from now on, is no longer true.

  “It looks like you were part of his world after all.”

  He isn’t certain, but she might be blushing in the moonlight.

  “How long have you known?”

  She toes the bench, taking her time. Kirby gives it to her.

  “About eight months,” she says finally. “I was working on a book report and the ‘D’ on my keyboard kept sticking. I kept getting more and more frustrated, until finally I slammed my fist down and screamed. And then it turned into water. Flooded my whole desk. I didn’t know what had happened, but I was so worried you and Mom would freak out, so I ran out and bought a new keyboard.

  “It didn’t happen again for a while, so I figured it was just one of those weird things, like the kind they show on Did That Really Happen? Then, three weeks later, my cellphone died when I was telling Sally about … ” She stops and flickers a glance in his direction. “When we were talking about something really important.” Another glance. “So I screamed again and my cell phone dissolved. That’s when I realized I was doing it. And I’d better do something about it, cause it was starting to get kinda expensive.”

  A sudden image of random items around the house dissolving into puddles every time Melissa gets frustrated. He shakes his head. It was a wonder her sister was still in one piece.

  Then his daughter goes still.

  “I wanted to tell you and Mom,” she says. “That’s why I wanted you to come to the concert tonight, I … I was going to tell you anyway. I would have told you sooner but I didn’t know you were … ” Her toe begins to grind into the bench. “I mean, I was afraid you’d think I was a … ”

  There’s so much need in her voice Kirby can’t keep silent.

  “Oh, honey … ”

  “No, don’t.” She takes a few steps along the bench, waving her arms as if she were swatting something away. “I know, it’s stupid. I know, you’d never … I mean, you and Mom … ” She squeezes the guardrail, as if holding it from flight.

  Then, suddenly, her head comes up. “Wait a minute.” The toe stops grinding into the bench.

  “Is Mom a superhero too?”

  He blinks. “Honey … we’re talking about you right now.”

  “She is, isn’t she?” Her eyes go wide, her own story forgotten. “Which one? Is she Beauty Queen?”

  She’s so far off the mark, Kirby coughs. “No,” he says firmly. “She isn’t Beauty Queen.”

  “Than which one? Iridium? Willow? Windshear?”


  Kirby sighs. He can’t keep up. Teenagers.

  “She’s Amazon.”

  His daughter’s face snaps back as if she’s been slapped. “Fuck … off.”

  It takes him a second to see she’s not angry.

  Perhaps she realizes this, because immediately she says, “Sorry. I didn’t mean … it’s just … Mom’s Amazon? The Amazon?”

  Once he realizes it’s awe and not rage he relaxes again. “Little more impressive than Magnet Man, huh?”

  “No,” she says quickly. “I mean—”

  “It’s all right, honey.” He chuckles. He’s pretty sure she has posters of her mother on her bedroom walls. “You don’t need to keep explaining yourself to me. I find her pretty stunning myself.

  “However,” he says, as his daughter turns back to the baseball field and begins to mutter things like Amazon? and Wow! into the night, “we were talking about you. We can talk about your mother and me a little—”

  “Where’d she go?”

  He blinks. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Mom. Amazon. No one’s seen her in, like, more than a year.”

  Now Kirby goes still. This is not a safe topic of conversation.

  “Uhhh … ”

  “Some of the kids at school think she retired. But that’s bullshit, she’s too young. Sally says Poleaxe killed her but that’s bull—” She stops.

  “Oh God.”

  She turns. Looks him in the eye.

  “It’s Michael, isn’t it?”

  Her voice sounds as if a black hole has just opened inside her heart.

  It isn’t fair. For a few moments, on a set of bleachers by the light of the moon, all the failures of the past two years had been forgotten. For a few moments, only Kirby and Melissa, father and daughter. The quiet light of his heart. Now …

  He is not ready to have this conversation. She’s too quick, he doesn’t know how much she knows; but there’s a horror in her voice, a horror he has heard before, a horror he has to address, but he isn’t—how the hell did this just happen?

  Then, just as he is struggling to catch up, a shadow descends from the sky and a voice that seems to come from everywhere speaks into the night.

  “GOOD EVENING, KIRBY WALKER AND DAUGHTER OF KIRBY WALKER.”

  It’s huge and moonlight seems to slip off its glittering black skin. Deep amber flashes, like embers, flicker under its surface. There are no other features.