Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  Bosco begins his downward trajectory, and with a jolt of fear I realize there’s a not unrealistic chance he could land on someone. It takes every bit of acceleration I have, but I manage to get to him before he hits the ground. What I was planning on doing when I got there, I haven’t the foggiest. The impact is enormous, an almost cataclysmic smashing of bodies that jolts me all the way through. My collarbone complains sharply, and my rib injury from the jetliner rescue starts to act up again. But somehow I manage to get my arms around his waist and keep them there, so we’re gaining altitude fast.

  Mechanical punches begin to fall on my head, neck, and shoulders. These are blows that could shatter concrete and bend steel. Yeah, they hurt, but none of them are doing any real damage. My skin holds, and my bones don’t shatter. With my shoulders drawn in tight and my head ducked low, he can’t get the angle he needs to make me regret it.

  “Hey, lemme go!” Bosco shouts over the wind. “You ain’t supposed to be fighting in throwaways!”

  “You’re not supposed to be setting up to murder people. Let’s go squeal on each other to the Legion and see whose ass they kick!”

  Bosco’s answer is a double-fisted hammer blow, right to the back of my head. It jolts me around a little, but I maintain my grip. “Hey, hey, this ain’t funny!” he shouts. “I was just gonna rough him up, I swear!”

  “Aw, come on, hit me like you mean it, you weenie,” I shout. Something wild has come to life inside my chest. Pure, savage joy pours through every part of me.

  Standing up for myself has never been something I’ve been any good at. There was a time in middle school when I knew the names and habits of my bullies better than my teachers. No matter how much I wanted it, I just couldn’t get them to treat me with respect or even just leave me alone. Maybe it was the way I liked to carry my books—that hadn’t been beaten out of me yet—or the way I liked to cross my legs. Maybe it was just that I was a quiet, shy kid who thought all the boisterous exuberance of early testosterone exposure was somehow distasteful and uncomfortable. So I got bullied a lot. When I told my parents, Dad said I needed to handle it myself, that it was an important step in becoming a man. I didn’t have the courage to tell him I wanted nothing of the sort, and so for years I endured torment at school in silence, because I knew if I said anything about it at home again, I’d be blamed for it. There was nothing I could do, so I endured and learned which parts of school were safe to hang out in. The anger was there, but I packed it up and stored it away, deep inside me where it piled up into great heaping mountains that I pretended I didn’t have.

  But that feeling of helplessness is falling behind me as fast as the city lights. Bosco’s blows get weaker but faster as his panic begins to take hold. His terror makes me feel amazing. I begin to laugh. Every stupid half-formed fantasy of standing up to the bullies and beating them into a hospital bed comes back to me at once. Years of bottled rage are uncorked. Someone has to pay for what was done to me. Now, I’m strong enough to make him pay. For a heady moment I consider trying to get Bosco up into orbit for real.

  But then he starts weeping, the bastard. His weeping ruins it, and probably saves me from doing something I’d regret for the rest of my life.

  My ascent slows, and he’s not hitting me anymore, just bawling. He’s trying to say something through the tears—and I’m sure there are tears, I can hear them, although I can’t get a good look at him in the dark and have no idea what a metal man’s tears would look like—but I can’t make it out.

  “Shut up!” I shout at him, and by some miracle he pulls it back to a wet sniffling. “You’re a bully and a coward. If I hear about you threatening baselines again, I will drop you off in Antarctica and let you walk home. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, yeah, please. Just lemme go.”

  We’re over the water now, and I can’t resist. He makes a big splash.

  • • •

  Our fight carried us about a mile from the Flying Dutchman’s rear exit, and it takes me a few minutes to find my way back. Calamity waves me down with a glowstick from a rooftop.

  “You okay?” she asks as I touch down. “That was some racket.”

  “Yeah, fine. I dropped Bosco into the Sound. What happened with, uh, you know?”

  “He got the hell out of dodge.” Calamity tips her head back to gesture over her shoulder. “I followed him to make sure he got to his car all right.”

  A little pang of regret shoots through me. We might have arranged to arrive too late. I might have been free of him. But now I’ve got to go back home and face him again. Damnit.

  “Thanks,” I say, suddenly exhausted. “We should probably head home.”

  “Sure, but come with me back to the Dutchman. I need to pick up my guns.”

  We make our way through the empty streets, sliding around the pools of yellow streetlight and flitting from shadow to shadow. When we’re back inside the long hallway, Calamity speaks again. “That was amazing, you know that, right?”

  I shrug. “I guess. Is he really nonpartisan? If he’s going around trying to kill baselines, that seems pretty blackcapey to me.”

  “He’s a thug, for sure, but he’s too stupid and lazy to be a blackcape. He works in construction, I hear, and hauls things around.” She pauses for a moment. “Come to think of it, I don’t think he’s actually killed anyone. He just likes to make them scared when he beats them up.”

  “And what, people just put up with someone like that?” I ask.

  “What, exactly, do you expect anyone to do about him? As long as he restrains himself from making corpses, the cops ain’t interested in a tussle, and the Legion is far too high and mighty to worry about every rat in the gutter. You’re about the first person in this town who is able to fight him that has bothered to.”

  A little nugget of outrage starts to burn in my gut. “It’s not like he waited to see if I could take it before he hit me at full strength. If I were anyone else, he’d have killed me.”

  “Yes. And that’s why I’m glad you stopped him,” says Calamity. “Danny, I know I was pretty harsh on the Legion, but I see this kind of crap every other week. They don’t bother with small stuff like Bosco beating up a baseline every now and then.”

  “They wouldn’t—I mean—they’ve got to have their reasons, don’t they? Maybe it’d cause too much chaos or something. They need to keep the peace, right?” Even to myself, that sounds lame.

  “Ain’t no peace without justice, hun,” says Calamity. “I don’t care why they sit up there in their little tower and let bullies like Bosco run around free. I just care that they do.”

  “I’ll ask them,” I say. “Maybe I can change their mind.”

  She nods, and we keep walking. A moment later she says, “Danny, promise me, if you ever do join up with them, like, full-time, that you won’t forget tonight. You won’t forget us small fry.”

  “It’d be pretty hard to forget you, Calamity.”

  For a moment I’m scared I’ve offended her. She straightens up, looks at me funny. Finally, just as I’m about to apologize, Sarah says, “Thanks.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  So we don’t find Utopia that weekend. Or the next night, or the next. Then we get walloped with homework, and we have to take the rest of the week off to catch up. Sarah says once she turns sixteen she’s going to test out and get her GED so she can start caping full time. She never says so out loud, but I get the feeling her parents know what she’s doing. Testing out won’t be an option for me. I’m stuck here until I can turn eighteen and become a legal adult. There’s no way my parents would let me leave school.

  Speaking of, here comes Dad. He lumbers into our kitchen, stepping over the broad, curling crack in the linoleum we’ve trimmed down but don’t have the money to fix. The house is starting to fall apart in a dozen tiny ways. Someday, we are assured, there will be a summer of do-it-yourself projects to mend the place up. Mom and I aren’t holding our breath, though.

  My gaze drops t
o my cereal, and I try to eat quickly without being obvious about it. Watching Dad closely is a habit that’s so natural I don’t even notice I’m doing it half the time. I don’t think he’s been sleeping well. His eyes have bags under them, and when the weekends come he doesn’t bother to shave. He’ll pad around the house for hours, sometimes all day, in nothing but his boxers, undershirt, and bathrobe. He never says anything about what happened with Bosco. As far as he wants to pretend, nothing happened. That’s fine; I don’t like thinking about it either. That whole episode is soaked in regret and guilt for me. Contempt, too. He talks a big game about being a strong man, and then he needed to get bailed out by a little girl. Calamity had a quiet word with the bouncer at the Flying Dutchman, and Dad won’t be allowed in again, so at least I won’t need to tail him to keep him from going back.

  It really worries me that Dad is out searching for metahumans to “fix” me. Not that I’m scared he’ll find a fix. Calamity is right: once I explain I have the mantle, nobody would be stupid enough to try shapeshifting me against my will. My concern is that Dad’s already found one metahuman who was willing to smash his bones for fun, so who’s to say what else he’ll find as he staggers through the underworld, shrieking for help?

  “What’s this I hear about you quitting the football team?” he asks as he fills the coffeepot with water. His voice is mild, but I know not to let that fool me.

  Swallowing my food is a good excuse for taking a moment to think of my reply. “I didn’t quit. Coach and I agreed that since I’m not a boy anymore—”

  “Danny, you are a boy,” snaps Dad. “You were born a boy, and I raised you as one.”

  There’s like ten million things wrong with that sentence, but all I can think of to mutter by way of reply is, “Yeah. Well. Things change.”

  He puts the pot down. “Son, I know it’s scary right now—”

  “I’m fine.” He didn’t call me “son” very often before my change, but now he can’t get enough of it, like if he denies I’m a girl enough, he can make it untrue.

  Dad sighs, and pulls out a chair. He sits down next to me and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Son, you don’t know what you’re saying.” Ugh. The Concerned Father. I hate it when he does this. He’s not any less likely to erupt when he does this, but it gets under my skin so much that I’m more likely to say something that will set him off. “This is stress that nobody could be ready for, and you’re doing the best you can. I’m proud of you for holding up so well. But pretending like it’s fine, and like you could be happy this way—that’s not going to make it better. You’ve got to face your problems, not deny them.”

  With every word, the resentment builds in me until I can barely keep my face clean of it. In a voice so steady it surprises me, I say something really stupid.

  “Dad, I’m transgender. I like being this way. I’m not going back, and you can’t make me.”

  He gets this confused look on his face, with an undercurrent of something that scares me, so I push on quickly to get it all out while I’ve still got my nerve.

  “I’ve known I wanted to be a girl for years. This change is the best thing to ever happen to me. I won’t go back.”

  He sits back in his chair, and looks at me like he’s never seen me before. The deep flush starts low on his neck and moves upward. His eyes go hard, and I brace up for another Vesuvian detonation of Mount Screamer.

  His words are lost in the sheer noise of it. He gets up and paces around as he bellows, as if his rage is too wild for him to be still. When he blew up after I went back to school I thought we’d touched bottom, but I was wrong. He’s letting loose with everything now.

  Freak. Tranny. Faggot.

  He goes down the list.

  Worthless. Disgusting. Failure.

  There’s no end to it.

  Abomination. Sinful. Unnatural.

  I’m fighting to become safely dead inside.

  Queer. Homo. Shemale.

  But he knows how to dig in under my guard.

  This is my fault. I am so stupid. Why am I always so stupid? What is wrong with me? I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have let him believe the lie. Pathetic. I’m pathetic and stupid.

  He runs out of steam, the way he sometimes does, but his rage is still there, so he makes me an accomplice. “Well?” he demands. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I’m sorry,” I mutter.

  “Speak up when you’re talking to me!” he snaps.

  “I’m sorry!” I say. This is the only safe thing to say when he’s like this.

  “Get out,” he snarls. “Get out, you disgusting little freak.”

  Every ounce of my self-control is needed not to use my powers to bolt up into the stratosphere. With my eyes on the floor and my heart slamming in my chest, I leave my bowl where it is and walk-run out of the room and up the stairs. My hands shake as I throw some textbooks and paper in my backpack, and I seriously consider leaving through the window. But no, if he doesn’t hear me come down and leave through the front door he might come up to investigate. So I leave through the front door, as swiftly and silently as I can. It’s not safe to come back here for a few hours at least.

  I should have let him die.

  I’m so stupid.

  • • •

  By the time I get to the library the shaking and the fear has dribbled away. Now I’m feeling angry and mean. On the train, a man old enough to be my father—and right then, even that was enough to hate someone—leaned forward and said, “Smile dear, it can’t be that bad.”

  For a moment I was stunned. A boiling fury consumed me. Here I was, glowering in peace, and this…this insufferable jackass decided to insert himself into my life and pass judgment on all its events and my feelings. For a few seconds there, I seriously considered the merits of kicking him through the side of the train and down onto the streets below. But I didn’t, which I’m sure I’ll be glad of later. Right now, though, I just want to find someone and make them pay. For something. For anything.

  I texted Sarah on the ride over, and she meets me at the broad granite steps leading up to the library. The library is a palatial building, and even though it’s only three floors high it seems to tower over us with its soaring columns and mournful gargoyles. She skips and runs down the stairs toward me, a huge smile on her face that melts away when she sees the look on mine. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I snap as I pound up the steps. She blanches, and I pause at the doors. “I’m sorry. I had a bad morning.”

  “What happened? I thought you were grounded.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  I keep marching and stiff-arm one of the front doors. Sarah falls in behind me, and we pass through the foyer. We find an open table in a reading room to sit down at. The reading room is a kind of Gothic chamber, with vaulted ceilings and richly carved old wooden trim you don’t see in modern buildings. The floor is polished marble with strips of red carpet running down the main walkways. Tall, many-paned windows let the soft gray light of late morning in, and I don’t care about any of it. This is one of my favorite places in the city, but the dull ache of anger is blotting everything else out.

  I’m supposed to be catching up on history. The third time in a row I get to the end of a page before realizing I haven’t remembered a word I read, I close my book. “Screw homework, let’s go find a mugger to beat up.”

  Sarah looks up, lips pressed tight. “No. We’re not going caping while you’re angry.”

  “Why the hell not?” I snap.

  “Because when you go into it angry you make mistakes. And the kinds of mistakes you can make would be real bad.”

  “I can control myself.”

  “I don’t think that you can,” says Sarah evenly. “And in any case, I’m not going anywhere with you while you’re being like this.”

  “Being like what?”

  “A bitch,” says Sarah. “Danny, what is up with you?”

  I almost cuss her out,
pack up my laptop, and leave. Almost. But when I realize what I’m about to do, the anger rushes out of me, and all that’s left is the pain. She can see the change come over me, and her expression softens.

  “I came out of the closet to Dad,” I say quietly. “About how I’m transgender, and I don’t want to go back to being a boy.”

  “Oh,” Sarah says.

  “And he called me—” My throat clenches up, and I wait for it to pass. “Why can’t he just be happy for me?”

  Sarah opens and closes her mouth several times, and then finally says, “That sucks. I’m sorry you have to put up with that.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “I know. Still. Do you want to talk about it?”

  I sigh. “Not really. I’m sorry. I was an ass.”

  “Plenty of bridges in this town, I’m sure we can let some water pass under one of them,” says Sarah, with hints of Calamity.

  I open my textbook back up and try to pick up where I left off. What Doc Impossible said comes back to me. I’ve got to get better at dealing with my anger. I wish I could just flip a switch and make it go away. At least I have a friend like Sarah to set me straight. That’s nice, really. David was never one to talk about feelings. Said it was too girly.

  Girly suits me fine.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  By the time I finish the final draft of an essay about Mistress Malice’s campaign for world domination (short version: with over a quarter million confirmed dead including 39 heroes and 182 fighter pilots, Mistress Malice remains the undisputed heavyweight champion of supervillains, even almost 60 years after her death), Sarah has become Calamity in everything but costume.

  She’s scribbling in a notebook, pausing to think, scratching things out, scribbling again.

  “You got a plan?” Without really talking about it, we seem to have come to the agreement that Calamity is in charge, which is fine with me, since I don’t really know what I’m doing.