Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  “Mr. SMOG?” Jane says. “Oh, yeah. He is. He’s sabotaging development of the LAX leg of the subway.”

  Camille looks at the page on Mr. SMOG doubtfully.

  “But … is he really a supervillain, though? It says here that his name is Jerry Rutherford.”

  “So he says,” Jane says. “But we know better.”

  “Does he have a lair?”

  Camille, having been the kind of girl who didn’t know about comic books, has a vague idea that the defining characteristic of a supervillain is the possession of a decent lair. And possibly some henchmen. When she hesitantly expresses this to Jane, her friend is dismissive.

  “Get with it, Camille! This isn’t Batman! In the real world, superheroes have lame powers like niceness and villains are trying to sabotage public transit and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

  There’s a long pause. Camille closes the binder, carefully.

  “Jane,” she says, “are you embarrassed about your superpower?”

  Jane avoids her gaze. “It’s just not very good,” she finally says. “Not like yours or Sharla’s. I’m not sure it even counts.”

  Camille isn’t sure, either, but she wants to be supportive of her tough friend. “I’m sure it comes in useful when you’re battling criminals who are, er, rude,” she says. It doesn’t sound as good out loud as it did in her head. Jane glares at her.

  “Let’s go see Sharla,” Camille suggests, a little desperately. “She’ll know who to fight.”

  Sharla opens the door and immediately hands them a clipping from a recent issue of the Times.

  “Professor Albert Brown,” she says. “He’s our guy.”

  The picture is of a man who’s clearly a mad scientist, standing in the desert, next to some sort of device.

  “It says that he’s an earthquake researcher,” Camille says, scanning the article. Secretly, she’s starting to wonder if her friends are insane. When she discovered that she could make herself invisible at will, this was not one of the things she worried about.

  “Whatever! His secret identity is Admiral Razor,” Sharla says, and hands her a printout from a website Camille has never heard of, superheronews.com. The article claims that a supervillain named Admiral Razor is working on the means to induce devastating earthquakes at any major fault line around the globe.

  “This is Los Angeles,” Sharla says, with a businesslike edge in her voice. “Three things we’ve got plenty of. Smog, waiter-actors, and fault lines. I figure he’s planning to strike in a week, when the UN Environmental Conference comes to town.”

  “But why—”

  “Camille,” Jane says, “he doesn’t need a reason! He’s a supervillain. The UN probably refused to fund his research or something, so he’s plotting to take them all down.”

  “Don’t you—don’t you think we should call the cops?”

  Jane and Sharla are looking at her like she’s grown a few new heads, and under the pressure, Camille accidentally fades out.

  “Camille,” Jane snaps, “don’t do that! We know you’re there!”

  “Then don’t glare at her,” Sharla says, practically. “Just like you shouldn’t make me cry unless you’ve been praying for rain. We’ve discussed this.”

  Camille swims back into sight. “Sorry, Jane. I’ll try not to do it again. Or to accidentally trigger your superpower.”

  Jane looks like she might cry, and Camille feels terrible.

  “Jane,” Sharla says, “you need to stop feeling weird about your superpower. Remember last month when you almost got mugged leaving that club downtown? If you hadn’t been able to stun them with a powerful cone of niceness, what would have happened?”

  Jane is not mollified, but she folds the article on Admiral Razor into a small square.

  “I say we go for it. We strike tomorrow at midnight.”

  “I can’t do midnight,” Sharla says. “I have to get up early.”

  “Okay,” Jane says. “We strike tomorrow after work. And, Camille?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have a suitable outfit for this kind of thing?”

  Camille is fifteen minutes late to work. Her boss, Ari, is already pacing and pretending that her absence is a huge inconvenience to him. She knows it’s not, and that he doesn’t actually do any work for the first hour of the day. But for some reason it’s important to Ari that Camille be at her desk when he walks in, and for almost two years, Camille has been.

  “Camille, I need you here by nine on the dot, or it totally messes up my whole day! Where were you?”

  “It’s nine-fifteen,” she says. She’d been staring at various outfits laid out on her bed, trying to figure out what Jane meant by “suitable.”

  “That’s fifteen minutes of my day you wasted, Camille. Don’t let it happen again.”

  Camille is about to apologize, but instead she stands up straight and looks her boss in the eye, and says that she’ll need to leave an hour early.

  “Camille,” Ari says, “are you thinking about leaving me?”

  “We’re not married,” Camille says, crossly. “And no, I’m not looking for a new job.”

  “You’ve seemed very distracted recently,” Ari says. “There was that incident on the red carpet, you’re coming in late, you’re leaving early—what’s going on?”

  Camille knows she should sit down and shut up, but everything is so strange and she suddenly wants to tell someone about it, someone who won’t respond with a plan to use their powers to save the world.

  “Well,” Ari says, when she’s gotten to the end of the tale, “I know what you girls need. Representation.”

  That night, the way Jane looks at Camille’s outfit makes clear that it’s completely inappropriate. Camille wasn’t sure what superheroes wore on a mission, so she opted for her gym-going clothes: sneakers, sweatpants, snug T-shirt, and a Dodgers hat. She didn’t feel very superhero-like, so she also added black stripes under eyes, like a football player.

  Jane and Sharla are dressed in sharp Spandex suits with impressive utility belts. Jane is sporting a half-cape, and both wear masks over their eyes.

  “A Dodgers hat, Camille?” Sharla sounds disappointed.

  Camille, embarrassed, suggests that since she’ll mostly be invisible, it won’t really matter.

  “All right,” Jane says. “You’re new to this. We can go shopping later. For now, let’s roll.”

  The three of them climb into Camille’s Civic and head for the Valley.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” Camille says. “Ari kept talking to me about endorsement deals and product placement and Entertainment Weekly interviews.”

  The other two are silent. “I kind of told him. About us,” Camille says, a little sheepishly. “He kept trying to make me sign with him.”

  Another silence. Finally, Sharla speaks. “Ari wants to rep us?”

  “Yeah,” Camille says. “I told him about the Los Angeles Women’s Auxiliary Superhero League and our powers and Admiral Razor and everything.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Well, he wants us to change our name to Team Omega.”

  “Not an option,” Sharla says. Camille has already figured out that their name was mostly Sharla’s doing, so she isn’t surprised.

  “And he thinks we’d be perfect to cross-promote this new Leonardo DiCaprio movie he’s working on.”

  “Really?” Jane squeaks. Jane has seen Titanic almost a hundred times, but will deny it if asked.

  “Yeah,” Camille says. “He wants our missions to go through his office, though. No more freelancing, he says.”

  They’re getting close to Admiral Razor’s top-secret facility now, so they stop talking about Ari’s plan to make them LA’s top female superhero team, and Jane starts explaining what she calls her “mission blueprint.”

  To Camille, it sounds like the blueprint involves, pretty much, just walking up and demanding to be let in.

  “Sharla will take out the guards and we’ll slip
in,” Jane is saying. She and Sharla adjust their masks, and Camille pulls the Dodgers hat down low. She’s scared, but she also feels kind of like a badass. Camille has never been a badass, and this feeling is so enjoyable she sort of wants to pull over and find a biker bar and start some fights or something, but she parks behind a boulder as directed by Jane, and then goes invisible.

  The mission is the easiest part of her whole week. Camille sneaks up to the door and switches off the security lock, and then Sharla rolls the two guards off into a distant ditch with a concentrated gust of wind.

  Once inside the facility, it’s remarkably simple to get to Admiral Razor’s secret lab.

  “It would be much harder to find your secret lab if it didn’t have a sign on the door,” Jane tells the supervillain, who turns out to be a slightly paunchy middle-aged scientist. Aside from his crazy-eyed stare, there’s not much about him to indicate his evil status.

  “I’d heard about the new crew in town,” Admiral Razor says, reaching for his Psionic Staff and aiming it at the three of them. Camille prepares to go invisible to sneak up and wrest it away from him, but instead, Jane finally trots out her own power.

  “You don’t really want to do that,” she suggests, and the sound of her voice is so soothing that Camille finds herself smiling happily at her friend. “You want to use your knowledge for good, Admiral Razor. You know you do.”

  Admiral Razor drops his Psionic Staff and beams at Jane. He’s drooling a tiny bit from one side of his mouth.

  “Gross,” Sharla whispers, picking up the Staff.

  “Sorry,” Jane replies. “I think I overdid it a little.”

  “Jane,” Camille says, awestruck, “that is the best superpower ever.”

  Jane looks at her, a little shyly. “Yeah?”

  “Absolutely,” Camille says, and thinks for a moment. “If it bothers you, you don’t have to call it the power of niceness. We can call you, like … Hypnotique.”

  “I told you having a publicity assistant in the League would be great,” Sharla says. “See how she thinks?”

  “Hypnotique,” Jane muses.

  The three of them leave Admiral Razor tied to his Quake Generator and take the Psionic Staff to the nearest police station, where Camille, invisible, drifts in and leaves it on the front desk with a note explaining the plot they just foiled, and directions to Admiral Razor’s whereabouts.

  Back at Camille’s apartment, they find a reporter from the Times on her doorstep.

  “My name’s John. Ari sent me,” he says, before they can say anything. “Listen, I’m not out to expose you. But I’m doing a feature on LA’s new superheroes, and I’d love to get Team Omega’s take, for the female perspective.”

  Sharla steps in front of the reporter. She looks glorious and tough, her hair streaming down over her broad shoulders, her dark skin gleaming in the light.

  “We’re the Los Angeles Women’s Auxiliary Superhero League,” she says. “None of this Team Omega bullshit.”

  “We’re old school,” Camille hears herself agreeing.

  “All right,” the reporter says. “Don’t you think that’s kind of long?”

  “Don’t you think ‘Team Omega’ is sort of pretentious?” Sharla counters.

  The reporter considers it for a moment. “Yeah,” he finally says. “I actually do.”

  He and Sharla shake hands.

  “I’m Sharla. I control the weather. That’s Camille. She has the power of invisibility. That’s … that’s Hypnotique,” she finishes.

  Jane offers him her hand. “Actually, it’s Jane,” she says.

  The reporter’s taking notes. “Clean, simple—you ladies have got a real retro-chic sensibility thing going on. I like it. So, Jane, what’s your power?”

  Camille tenses, waiting for Jane to answer. Jane, though, lifts her chin, looks the reporter in the eye, and says: “It’s the power of extreme niceness, John. I’d demonstrate, but I’d reduce you to a quivering pile of goo.”

  John, scribbling notes, grins. “Goo, or good?”

  “That too,” Jane says.

  John laughs. Jane looks a little surprised. People don’t usually laugh at her jokes, and she doesn’t usually make them.

  As Camille watches, Jane’s model-thin, angular form relaxes, and her shoulders slide forward slightly from their regular ramrod-straight position.

  “I’m going to quit my job,” Camille suddenly says, surprising herself. The other three turn to look at her.

  “You are?” Sharla says. “Camille—”

  “No, I am,” Camille says. “I’m going to be a full-time superhero consultant. John, you actually happened upon us on the first night of our professional availability.”

  Sharla and Jane turn to stare at her, but neither contradicts her assertion that the League is available for the fighting of crimes great and small in the greater Los Angeles area.

  As she continues to talk, John scribbles busily, and she can hear Ari’s turn of phrase in her language. She resolves to thank him for the experience in the resignation letter she’ll be putting on his desk in the morning.

  John has a few more questions, but eventually, Camille feels that they’ve been talking long enough.

  “John,” she says, with a perfect note of apology in her voice, “sorry to cut this short, but we actually have to debrief now.”

  “Of course,” John nods. “I guess you’d have to, after saving Los Angeles.”

  “Good night,” Camille says, ushering him off the porch.

  “Camille,” Sharla says when they’re inside, “are we really going to do this?”

  “We really are,” Camille says, and she hardly feels afraid at all.

  WONJJANG AND THE MADMAN OF PYONGYANG

  GORD SELLAR

  1. Working Hardly

  “Then … ”

  —right uppercut to the chin—

  “ … tell me … ”

  —left hook to the temple—

  “ … the goddamned … ”

  —a finger in the little bastard’s good eye—

  “ … passcode!” Wonjjang finished the sentence with a backhanded slap hard enough to break a normal man’s neck.

  His enemy, of course, was no normal man: though less than four feet tall, Kim Noh Wang, the Madman of Pyongyang, was North Korea’s last uncaptured criminal mastermind. He wheedled: “Wonjjang, Wonjjang … we’re brothers! Don’t you realize that? We Koreans are of One Blood!” Wonjjang could hear the extra-big, bright-red lettering on the phrase “One Blood,” though he was only half-listening. The rest of his attention was directed downward, through the smoggy air. Far below, Khao San Road was a mess, stir-fried noodle stands and racks of snide T-shirts thrashed to pieces, their scattered contents lit by the setting sun. Hastily commandeered tuk-tuks and taxis barrelled away into the dusk in every direction, and panicked Western backpackers were scattering into the neon-lit Bangkok evening, like monkeys at the sound of gunshots.

  Blastman, with his American-flag cape billowing behind him in the wind, hurled balls of electricity from each hand and vomited gouts of lightning into the crowd of Kim’s hirelings and desperate Thai recruits. It was amazing what a few false promises could do for recruitment in the developing world, especially under a junta: a couple of anarchist monks and a squadron of ladyboy-terrorists in glittering gold miniskirts and bustiers had blockaded one end of the street and were advancing. The ladyboys shrieked hatefully as they scattered to avoid Blastman’s attack.

  “Hey!” Kim hollered in irate Korean. “Are you listening to me?”

  Wonjjang ploughed a fist into Kim’s face as the familiar lurch kicked in and their descent began. He scanned the ground until he found Neko, his team’s fearless catgirl. She was further up the street, standing in a pool of blood, her white kitty outfit and the walls all around spattered by her grisly handiwork.

  Perched in her white high-heeled boots, Neko dug her claws into one of Kim’s Nork—North Korean—henchtwits and lifted him above her
head, flinging him into a rack of knockoff Gucci and Prada purses. Wonjjang felt a strange yet stirring blend of repulsion and attraction toward the Japanese superheroine. Watching her slash the crap out of villains was hot. She was working on a band of soldier-uniformed Norks. Leaping from one to the next like the cat that was her namesake, she pounced, skewering them on her long claws in a single blurred flash of steel, and tossed their shivering corpses aside. Just as she was about to slash the last one into ribbons, Kim’s henchwoman Iron Monkey leaped down from a low rooftop onto her, shoving Neko to the ground.

  Wonjjang winced. How he wished he was down there, near her, so that he could help her out … or, at least, beat the crap out of Iron Monkey somewhere that she could see him doing it. He hoped against hope that she’d noticed him bounding up into the sky with Kim in his clutches, fighting for the shutdown code that would disable the chicken-plague bomb. Kim was, after all, “The Madman of Pyongyang,” officially—according to every trade magazine—one of Asia’s Top Five Supervillains. What could be more impressive than catching Kim Noh Wang? Wonjjang asked himself while the two superwomen wrestled on the cracked roadway. Then a pack of shaven-headed Thai monks in saffron robes—local heroes, maybe?—piled out of a levitating tuk-tuk and converged on them, and he could see Neko no more.

  “Come on!” Kim whined. “You’re not even listening to me! If I tell you the passcode, will you even hear it?”

  Wonjjang turned to face the psychotic dwarf and said flatly, “Fine. What is it?”

  “You think I’m so foolish? That I would just tell you?”

  “You want to live, don’t you?” Wonjjang’s eyes hardened, and he let go of Kim. The fall would kill him, despite his reinforced skeleton.

  But Kim just laughed, his carefully coiffed curls snaking up as he fell through the air. “Fine,” he shouted, shaking his head maniacally, as if in triumph. “And you will never know the … ”

  Wonjjang lunged and grabbed him again, plowing a fist into Kim’s tubby little gut. “Shut up,” he yelled against the growing din of the battle rushing up from below, and Kim obliged, bent double in pain.

  As he got close to the ground, Wonjjang focused carefully on his surroundings. He had only a few moments. He swivelled his head until he found what he was looking for: his teammate Laotzu was up the street, hunched against the collapsing wall of a blown-up shop, clutching the chicken-plague bomb precariously with both hands.