The Endless War That Never Ends

by Christopher Brimmage

  Mr. Lopez frowned. “Then why don’t you tell me the last thing I said.”

  Arturo shrugged. “You made some sort of analogy relating covalent bonds to children sharing a toy, and then said something about how whichever child wants the toy has access to it. But I’ve gotta say, Mr. Lopez, that analogy falls apart on so many levels.”

  Arturo raised an index finger. “First,” he continued, “children are inherently terrible at sharing, especially when it comes to toys. Second, it’s not like the atoms are giving anything up when sharing an electron. They’re both accessing it, unlike a child lending its toy to another child. Third, I think you could make this much more interesting if you let us—”

  Arturo glanced out the window as he was speaking and noticed a symbol floating in the air above the city. It was in the shape of a yellow and purple Black Widow spider. His watch began buzzing on his wrist. He sighed.

  Mr. Lopez’s frown grew even deeper. “Well? Are you going to continue?”

  Arturo frowned. “A-Actually, I need to go to the bathroom. Right away.”

  Mr. Lopez pursed his lips. “You know the rules. Between classes.”

  Arturo glanced left and right for an out. The signal in the sky and the buzzing of his watch meant every second he remained here in class, people in the city were being injured or killed. I need to get out of here, he thought. But how?

  Mr. Lopez, interpreting Arturo’s silence as acquiescence, continued, “As I’m sure the rest of your classmates would like to learn this subject so that they can pass their state tests and graduate, let’s continue. Covalent bonds are strongest whe—”

  “Wait, Mr. Lopez!” shouted Arturo, his mind whirling with desperation. Suddenly, the metaphorical fishing pole of his brain managed to snag itself an idea. He smirked. “I was reading an article in Popular Science that showed this really cool diagram of a covalent bond, but explained it using terms so that us kids would find the idea, like, super hip. Look, I’ll draw it on the board.”

  Before Mr. Lopez had time to react, Arturo was up and on the way to the whiteboard. He grabbed a blue dry erase marker from its home on the little aluminum shelf attached to the bottom of the board. He began drawing.

  “Arturo, sit down at once or I’ll have security escort you to the principal’s office!” demanded Mr. Lopez. Arturo continued drawing, waving the marker from side to side with gusto.

  “Mr. Lopez, you ain’t got the balls.” Arturo dropped the marker and walked backward a few feet, his masterpiece now visible to the entire class. It obviously had nothing to do with covalent bonds, despite his claim to the contrary. He could feel the shocked eyes of his classmates on his back. He heard them begin to snigger, and then he heard Mr. Lopez heave an angry sigh.

  Emblazoned upon the whiteboard in the dull blue of old marker was an enormous spider. However, instead of webbing emanating from its spinner, a giant penis exploded onto the whiteboard, taking up half the board with its garish erection. In small block letters next to the penis, Arturo wrote Mr. Lopez’s face. Arturo pointed to the picture’s distinct lack of testicles. “See?” he inquired. “No testicles.”

  Angry redness crept up Mr. Lopez’s neck and then spread across his face. Arturo grabbed a red marker from its perch and added the color to the drawing in mimic of Mr. Lopez. The classroom erupted in laughter.

  Mr. Lopez yanked the class phone from its hook on his desk and pressed a button. He screamed into the receiver, “I need a removal! Now!”

  Mr. Lopez sat down on the edge of his desk, balled his fists, and bored into Arturo with his angry eyes. Every shred of decency within Arturo wanted to apologize, but he knew he could not, knew he needed to get in trouble for the greater good of the city. Mr. Lopez yanked a discipline referral from a stack on his desk and began filling it out with such furious stabs of his pen that he ripped this referral and had to grab a new one.

  After what felt like an eternity, the door finally burst open. A tall black police officer with salt-and-pepper hair strode into the classroom. Mr. Lopez pointed at Arturo. “Get him out of here before I hurt him,” demanded Mr. Lopez, handing the discipline referral to the school’s on-staff uniformed officer.

  The officer glanced over at the board and shook his head. “C’mon, Arturo,” he said. He grabbed Arturo by the elbow, not ungently, and led the young man to retrieve his backpack before walking him out the door. “Your daddy’s prob’ly looking down on you from heaven and covering his face in shame.”

  Arturo visibly deflated in response. His father had been murdered not four months prior, and it was all Arturo’s fault. The wound was still fresh, and he suspected that it would always remain so. He dragged his feet and allowed himself to be led from the classroom.

  The duo entered the hallway, and as the classroom door shut behind them, the officer slapped Arturo upside the back of his head. Arturo squealed in surprise. “Hey, Uncle Jasper! Stop that! I got a good explanation.”

  Jasper slapped him once more. “I can’t believe you, kid.” He glanced down at the discipline referral. “You drew a penis on the board and insulted your teacher. You can kiss that perfect record goodbye. Your daddy’d have beaten the hell out of me if he knew I’d let you get away with this kinda behavior while living under my roof.”

  Arturo pointed at his watch. “There’s been an alert, and Mr. Lopez wouldn’t let me leave class, so I couldn’t sneak away.”

  Jasper sighed. He stared down at the discipline referral. After a few moments, he wadded the referral into a ball and mussed Arturo’s hair. “Fine. Go on. I’ll cover for you. Just be careful.”

  Arturo smiled his familiar half-smile. His eyes shone with relief. “Thanks, Uncle Jasper. I will.”

  With that, Arturo retrieved his mask from his backpack. Its bright yellow cloth was tinged with jagged purple lines he had drawn with a Sharpie marker. He intended for the purple lines to resemble webs, but they actually looked more like misshapen cartoon zebra stripes. He had cut two holes for his eyes to allow him full visibility.

  Arturo tore off his shirt, yanked off his shoes, and ducked out of his pants. Rather than a masked, naked pre-teen standing where Arturo had just been, there stood a boy adorned in a spandex bodysuit with the same yellow-and-purple pattern as the mask. Arturo’s school clothes lay in a pile at his feet. “Uncle Jasper, can you help with those?”

  Jasper leaned down and began stuffing the school clothes into Arturo’s backpack. “Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “I’ll leave your backpack on the roof. You can pick it up later.”

  “Thanks!”

  And with that, Arturo raced out the nearest exit of the school. As he leapt into the air, he raised his right hand toward the nearest building and dug his ring and pinky fingers into a secret spot on his palm. Gray webs launched from his wrist1, and he swung on them toward downtown, toward the city he intended to save for the umpteenth time.

  *

  Arturo leapt onto the nearby wall, narrowly dodging the energy beam. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back and practice your aim? Maybe come back when you can actually get somewhere close to hitting me?” mocked Arturo.

  Arturo’s arachnid intuition buzzed in the base of his skull, warning him of more impending danger. He crawled a few dozen feet up the side of the building and backflipped into the air. Another energy beam crashed into the spot he had just occupied, disintegrating the bricks and mortar and leaving naught but smoking carnage in its wake.

  Arturo spun in midair, launched webbing toward the nearest building, and swung to face the source of the beams: one of his oldest nemeses, The Hippo Horseman. The villain was exactly what his name implied: a hippopotamus in knightly armor sitting astride a winged destrier2.

  The winged destrier flew in small circles, keeping The Hippo Horseman afloat nearly fifty-feet in the air. The villain twisted in his saddle with each small circle, holding his lance aimed in Arturo’s direction. Though the hippopotamus’s plate armor was comically undersized, its black color with red chasing was co
ated in just enough dust and debris to make the monstrosity look downright menacing. Many in the superheroing community treated The Hippo Horseman like a joke because of his ridiculous name and appearance, but Arturo knew better. And today Arturo’s concerns proved true, because a half-dozen city blocks lay demolished and in disarray in the villain’s wake.

  What Arturo did not know was that if he were to ask The Hippo Horseman why he had chosen to perform such a dastardly deed today, Arturo would have learned that the villain had worked up the courage to go on his first date in years, but the woman had faked a mid-date emergency to leave early. The Hippo Horseman had intuitively understood what was happening due to its common occurrence in his youth, so he decided to supply her with a real emergency and thus transform her lie into a reality. If Arturo had asked, he would have also learned of the years of abuse and ridicule the villain had suffered at the hands of his father and of the constant heartbreak and emotional turmoil that led him to this point of destructive despair. But instead of asking any questions, Arturo did as any red-blooded superhero would do at a time like this when his city is under attack: he launched toward the hippopotamus and punched the beast squarely in the nose.

  The Hippo Horseman roared in anger, and his horse reared up and kicked at Arturo. Arturo easily dodged and swung over to a nearby wall. He waved his hand back and forth in front of his nose. “Dang. Don’t roar at a guy without sucking down a couple dozen breath mints first. Hold on a sec, I think I’ve got some right here,” quipped Arturo, as he mimed checking his bodysuit for pockets.

  The Hippo Horseman launched another destructive energy beam from his lance, but the villain telegraphed it so obviously that Arturo would have been able to dodge it even without his arachnid intuition. Arturo leapt into the air, spun, and launched webbing at the horse’s closest wing. The webbing covered the wing in a cocoon so thick and heavy that the normally majestic appendage soon drooped into immobility. The horse’s other wing flapped twice as fast to try and make up for the loss of the left one, but this attempt at compensation only left the horse spinning in sad little lopsided circles as it not-so-gently began to lose altitude and fall from the sky. The Hippo Horseman tugged hard on the reins to try to control the spin, but the animal was already too off-kilter, and soon it began to tilt to the right.

  The Hippo Horseman dropped his lance to the ground, now about twenty-feet down, and jumped from his horse. The hippopotamus landed in a crouching position more deftly than any behemoth had a right to do, none the worse for wear. The horse, however, crashed atop a taxi cab, squealed in dismay, and then quietly limped into a nearby back alley. Arturo noted to himself that he would need to deal with the wandering warhorse later, as the ultimate threat here was The Hippo Horseman, who seemingly on cue stood to full height on his hind legs, drew his longsword from its golden scabbard, and shook it in Arturo’s direction.

  “You leave me naught a choice but to squash thee like the bug thou art, oh dastardly Arachnid Pre-Teen,” bellowed The Hippo Horseman. The ivory hilt of his sword was shaped into the head of a hippopotamus with rubies for eyes. The ruby eyes seemed to catch fire, and then these flames encompassed the blade and launched from its point toward Arturo.

  After once more dodging The Hippo Horseman’s attack, Arturo sighed in annoyance at the necessity of facing this fiend again. On his first superheroing adventure, he had fought this villain. And though Arturo had planned to name himself The Great Spider or The Golden Arachnid or some such majestic moniker, The Hippo Horseman had called him The Arachnid Pre-Teen in front of news cameras, and the name had stuck. No matter how much he tried to get people to refer to himself as something more befitting a superhero, his pleas and attempts to rebrand himself fell on deaf ears within the superhero and journalist communities alike.

  Arturo swung forth and kicked the hippo in the head with the heels of his feet. He managed to knock the black helm from the top of the villain’s head, where it tumbled to the ground with a metallic CLANG. The hippo swiped at Arturo with his sword, but Arturo ducked beneath it. He backflipped over another swipe, and then shot webbing at the hippo’s feet, binding the beast in place atop the concrete.

  Arturo’s watch buzzed, so as he dodged an enraged cut and blinded the hippopotamus with webbing aimed directly at his eyes, he tapped a button on his watch. A holographic face appeared above the watch, at which Arturo had learned from experience never to look during the middle of a fight. The face was one of a grizzled old man with salt-and-pepper hair wearing the hat of a four-star general and the eyepatch of a man who has seen his share of combat.

  “I’m in the middle of something here, General Vehemence,” squealed Arturo, continuing to flip and bounce and dodge around The Hippo Horseman’s wild slashes and furious energy bolts.

  The face scowled. “Stop toying with that monstrosity and put it down! Use as much force as necessary! We’ve got something else much more powerful on the radar, coming in hot.”

  “Fine,” muttered Arturo. He leapt into the air, webbed the hippopotamus’s hand and sword to the ground, and then punched The Hippo Horseman in his blinded face over and over until his legs collapsed out from under him. Arturo continued punching until the hippopotamus lay still. So much hippopotamus blood spattered across Arturo’s uniform that it looked like he had added an abstract layer of red to his yellow-and-purple costume.

  Through broken and splintered teeth, The Hippo Horseman chuckled a diabolical chuckle. Arturo punched him again. “What’s so funny, Chuckles?” demanded the boy.

  “Thou wast so distracted by me, thou didst not ever notice my trap until thou wast ensnared. In thy next life, try to remember this lesson,” muttered the hippo.

  Arturo’s arachnid intuition suddenly began buzzing. It felt like a wasp had taken up residence in the base of his skull and was attempting to sting him into oblivion.

  Over the next few seconds, Arturo learned five things: First, that he had been so consumed by knocking the hippopotamus unconscious that he neglected to notice the leviathan charging for a final blast—this last one coming not as a concentrated beam aimed in one direction from sword or lance, but an explosion emanating from across the wide berth of the hippo’s plate armor. Second, that being at the epicenter an explosion hurts more than anything else he had thus far experienced in his brief superheroing career. Third, that explosions ruin costumes, the destruction of which is an often-unforeseen expense to a superhero for which he/she neglects to account when entering the profession. And because Arturo was a pre-teen too young to have a job, he had to rely on an allowance from his poor Aunt April and Uncle Jasper—meaning he would likely have to patrol the streets in a shredded costume for a few months while scrimping and saving. Fourth, that though General Vehemence leads L.A.N.C.E., the most powerful spy agency on the planet, he has terrible timing, as evidenced when the man began screaming a warning of “Get out of there!” seconds too late, just after the hippo launched its energy blast. Fifth, that he still has a lot to learn about battle tactics, as the hippo had never in any previous encounter remained so immobile and allowed himself to be so easily beaten to a pulp. If Arturo would have thought this through, he would have suspected a trap and would not have been so surprised when he found himself being hurtled upward into the air toward three of the other most powerful members of his rogues’ gallery: The Dive Bomber, Professor Squid, and High Toxicity.

  The Dive Bomber, a living cruise missile full of mystic powers allowing it to explode and then reconstitute itself, crashed into Arturo’s chest—nearly impaling him—and drove him into the ground, where it exploded at point-blank range. Arturo screamed in agony. He barely managed to remain conscious.

  As the smoke began to clear, Arturo stood slowly, only to find his arachnid intuition too overwhelmed to warn him of a barrage of Professor Squid’s mechanical arms snaking toward him. The devices beat him even more senseless, and then they snatched him by the arms and legs, holding him immobile in the air so that he could not escape the impending attack
from the next member of his rogues’ gallery. High Toxicity, an alien humanoid with poisonous breath and the ability to create famine from his fingertips, emerged from the smoke with hands raised in Arturo’s direction and mouth wide open, green gas emanating steadily from it.

  “I see what you mean about coming in hot,” muttered Arturo to General Vehemence’s hologram. “Maybe a little help here?”

  “These fools are not what I was talking about,” replied General Vehemence. “Get out of there!”

  Arturo could not quite believe his eyes, but without warning, a pink blob rose high into the air, as tall as the nearby building to which Arturo had but minutes ago clung in his fight with The Hippo Horseman. Tentacles the size of brownstones whipped out from the blob and crashed down upon both High Toxicity and Professor Squid. Blood and bone spattered across Arturo’s face, and he screamed in terrified response to the carnage.

  General Vehemence’s flying submarine swooped down from the clouds and opened fire on the gigantic pink blob. More tentacles emerged from the blob, in the center of which Arturo could see a woman that looked very similar to the girl in his homeroom class on whom he had a crush, Ginny Longfellow. These tentacles wrapped themselves around the nearest buildings and ripped them from their foundations. Arturo watched in helpless wonder as the blob flung the buildings at General Vehemence’s flying submarine. Explosions wracked the warship. It lilted to one side and began a slow crash toward the ground.

  Much to Arturo’s dismay, the woman within the blob then looked directly at him, noticing him just as his schoolboy crush never had. Arturo noted that one of her arms had no flesh covering it, but rather consisted only of bone. She pointed at him with this arm, and four spikes erupted from the blob. Faster than Arturo could comprehend, these spikes impaled him. He wanted to scream, but blood filled his mouth.

  And just as the darkness of death descended across his eyes, bright white lights erupted on the peripheral of his vision.