The forward momentum of my kick at Antaeus carried me forward, making me stagger again. I almost fell. Before I could recover, I felt two quick hard punches in the small of my back. I gasped in pain. Antaeus again. I twisted, sending my elbow arcing back toward where his jaw should be. That whooshing sound again. My elbow impacted only air. I had put a lot of force into that elbow strike, and my momentum sent me spinning. Physics was a bitch sometimes. I was thrown off balance. This time, I actually did fall. Antaeus reappeared. His foot shot towards my side. Apparently he had not heard you were not supposed to kick a man when he was down. Rude bastard. I rolled away from his foot, lessening the blow. Only somewhat, though. I grunted in pain. Antaeus might have broken ribs had I not reacted in time. I grabbed at Antaeus’ ankle, intending to bring him down to the ground with me. Whooshing. My fingers only managed to grab air. Fighting Antaeus was like fighting a ghost, a mean, evil ghost who could punch and kick me with impunity yet whom I could not seem to lay a hand on. This was no Casper the Friendly Ghost.
I hastily got to my feet. I would have drawn my pistol, but what was the point of shooting at a target that blinked in and out of existence? I spun around, looking for Antaeus, and no doubt also looking foolish. Fortunately for my Heroic dignity, no one was around to see me spinning in place like a top or to see me getting my ass literally kicked. I was on the shoulder of a lonely mountain road in Maine. It was early. The sun had not yet burned off the thick morning fog. Across the road from where I stood was a guardrail; beyond that was a steep cliff and a deep lake. I had been in a car chase with Antaeus, and I had successfully forced him off the road, making his car crash. I had gotten out of my own car and dragged Antaeus out of his wrecked vehicle. I was about to question him and hopefully get the information I needed out of him when he had surprised me by teleporting right out of my grasp.
Antaeus was not the only one with superpowers, though. I was a hydrokinetic, meaning I could mentally control water. Hydrokinesis was perhaps not as flashy as being able to teleport or fly or shoot plasma from your eyes, but it had its uses. Water was almost everywhere and in everything, and not just in liquid form. The thick fog around me, for example, was nothing but water vapor. While I had fought Antaeus, I had sensed with my powers a displacement of that water vapor the times right before Antaeus had re-appeared to hit me again.
I turned to the right, probing the foggy area around me. Though I was looking around with my eyes, I was even more intently looking around with my powers, waiting to feel that slight displacement of water vapor that indicated Antaeus was about to reappear to take another swipe at me.
There! To my right, and slightly behind me. I spun towards where I sensed the water displacement. I sent a hard left jab shooting toward where the smaller man’s face would be if he were already visible. Antaeus appeared out of nowhere right where I expected him. My fist collided with his nose. I heard and felt a satisfying crunch. There was a spray of blood. Antaeus’ head was flung back. He cried out in pain. Now he knew how I had felt when he had been kicking and punching me. Turnabout was fair play.
I did not have time to savor the schadenfreude, rest on my laurels, or cradle my now throbbing left hand. Antaeus would no doubt teleport away again if I did not stop him. Like me, he was not wearing any sort of costume. He was dressed in jeans and a black and blue button-down, long-sleeved shirt. I grabbed him by his shirt and belt buckle. I heaved, lifting him off the ground. Though I did not have super strength, I did work out religiously. I did not exercise as much as I did for show, or just so I could flex impressively when pretty women were around. Okay, maybe I worked out as much as I did partially for that reason. But mostly I worked out so I would be ready to deal with people like Antaeus. Being a Hero was not for the weak or the easily winded.
“Hey!” Antaeus said, squirming, his feet not touching the ground. “Put me down!” His broken and bloodied nose muffled his voice. He kicked at my groin. I twisted a bit so the kicks hit the meaty part of my thighs instead. The kicks still hurt, but the pain was not debilitating. Just annoying. I let go of the front of Antaeus’ shirt. I backhanded his face, hard. The slap sounded like a gunshot. Antaeus’ face was flung to the side. A spray of his blood sailed through the air.
“Shut up,” I said. I gripped his shirt again. “If you don’t stop kicking me, I’m going to throw you off the side of this mountain.” I was almost annoyed enough to actually do it. This had not been the first time I had been punched and kicked. It would probably not be the last time. That did not mean it was fun. Maybe going into accounting was not such a bad idea after all.
Antaeus stopped kicking me, though he still continued to squirm a bit in my grasp. I was satisfied to see he did not teleport away. I had apparently guessed correctly that he could not teleport unless he was in contact with the ground. I had the misfortune of dealing with teleporters before. Because of that, I knew that teleporters had some sort of limitation on their teleportation abilities. Some of them could only teleport as far as they could see; others could only teleport when nothing was touching them; still others had to rest up between teleportation feats. All of them had some sort of limitation. I did not know why. I was a private eye and professional butt-kicker, not a physicist specializing in Metahuman abilities. Maybe God limited teleporters’ abilities to give the rest of us a fighting chance. Who knew? I was not a theologian, either.
Antaeus’ name had clued me in on what his teleportation limitation might be. His birth name was Jonathan Strayhorn; Antaeus was his code name. Most Metahumans chose a code name because the name indicated that Meta’s abilities, or because the name was imposing, or because the name hinted how the Meta’s powers were derived. I knew Antaeus was the name of a demigod from Greek mythology. That mythical Antaeus had wrestled with Hercules during the eleventh of Hercules’ famous Twelve Labors. Antaeus was invincible as long as he stayed in contact with the Earth. Hercules had defeated Antaeus by lifting him off the ground and squeezing him to death. I had guessed—correctly, it seemed—that Antaeus had chosen his codename because his teleportation powers only worked when he was in contact with the ground. Supervillains really ought not bake a hint to their powers’ limitations into their code names. It was a dumb thing to do. But supervillains were rarely also rocket scientists; they did dumb things all the time.
And yes, I was a superhero who was well-versed in Greek mythology. That was because becoming a licensed Hero was a far more arduous process than putting on some colorful pajamas, tossing on a cape, and sallying forth to punch criminals in the face. In order to pass the Hero Trials and be awarded a Hero license, you had to have a working knowledge of a wide range of disciplines. One never knew when mythology, the battle tactics of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, how to defuse a bomb, or the migratory habits of the monarch butterfly would prove to be useful in fighting crime. A licensed Hero was a jack of all trades, and master of a few too.
One of the things I was the master of was extracting information from supervillains. I gave Antaeus’ dangling body a good hard shake to get his attention.
“I know you teleported into MetaHold, the prison holding the supervillain Chaos. I also know you siphoned some of his energy off of him before teleporting away. That energy was later used to kill a Hero. Who are you working for?”
“Screw you,” Antaeus said, still squirming.
I took one of my hands off of Antaeus long enough to slap him again. In response, Antaeus spit blood into my face. Blood and spittle got into my eye. Rude, not to mention unsanitary. I blinked it away. I took that as a sign Antaeus would not be answering my questions. I suppressed a sigh. I had seen this movie before. It would have been a nice change of pace if supervillains did things the easy way just once. Oh well. The hard way it was.
Still holding the squirming teleporter aloft with stiffened arms, I strode across the empty mountain road. Being careful to not drop Antaeus, I stepped over the guardrail.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Antaeus cried out. Panic w
as in his voice.
“Taking out the garbage,” I said, stopping at the edge of the cliff. Though the fog was thick and I could not see how high up we were from the waters of the lake below, I knew we were over two thousand feet away from the water’s surface. I could faintly hear the water far below. The sound was eerie thanks to the fog’s muffling effect. Fear of falling was one of man’s most innate fears. There was a tightening in my loins. Being on the edge of the cliff made me nervous. Imagine how dangling from it made Antaeus feel. He was squirming around even more fiercely now, his wide terrified eyes rolling around in his sockets like marbles.
“If you don’t stop moving around so much, I’ll drop you for sure,” I said in warning. Antaeus immediately stopped squirming, though his head still moved from side to side as he looked down into the fog. It was like looking down into the gaping mouth of an immense cottonmouth snake.
“Let me down! I’m scared of heights!” he cried out. “I won’t teleport again. I promise!”
“I don’t believe you.” My arm holding Antaeus up by his pants was getting tired; I shifted a bit so I was holding Antaeus up and out just by his shirt. “Besides, it’s the fall, not the height, that’ll kill you.” As I spoke, I took water vapor out of the air and moisture out of the ground to form a small coating of ice around my shoes. It anchored me to the ground. It would never do to accidently fall off a cliff to my death while interrogating a supervillain. Saint Peter would laugh at me when I got to the Pearly Gates. Or, Satan if I went to the other place.
“The world’s record for cliff diving is at almost two hundred feet,” I said to Antaeus. “And that was done by a cliff diving expert. We’re several times higher than that, and I’m guessing you’re not a diving expert. At this height, if I drop you, hitting the water will be like hitting a brick wall. You’ll likely break every bone in your body. If that’s not enough to kill you, drowning will.” I gave his body a slight shake. “Now tell me what I want to know about who hired you to break into MetaHold or I’ll drop you like a bad habit.” I especially liked the “bad habit” part. I had been waiting to use that line on someone.
Antaeus still looked terrified, with his eyes rolling around like the reels of a slot machine.
“You’re not going to drop me,” he said, though his now high-pitched scared voice did not sound terribly confident. It was hard to sound sure of yourself when another man was dangling you over certain death. “You’re a Hero. You don’t kill people.”
“Don’t you bet your life on it. There’s nobody around to tell on me if I drop you. If someone asks, I’ll just tell them I was chasing you and you fell. Such a tragic accident,” I said. As if on cue, there was a loud rip. Antaeus’ shirt tore a bit. Antaeus’ body slipped down slightly in my grasp as a result. He cried out in alarm. His legs sawed in the air. His hands clawed at my arms. I ignored the mute pleas of his hands and I tightened my grip. “Now tell me what I want to know,” I demanded insistently. “Your shirt won’t hold out forever. They don’t make them like they used to. Outsourcing.”
“Let me down, let me down, let me down,” he gibbered. He probably didn’t even hear my outsourcing remark. I had boiled the United States’ manufacturing problem down to a single word in front of an unhearing and unappreciative audience. A waste. I was casting my pearls before swine. “I’ll talk, I’ll talk,” Antaeus cried.
“Talk first, down second. I’m not as trusting as I used to be. Getting kicked in the ass tends to have that effect.”
“Okay, okay,” Antaeus said. His mouth was opening and closing like a fish out of water. “I was hired to teleport into Chaos’ cell. The guy I did the job for is—”
Antaeus did not get a chance to finish his thought. His shirt suddenly ripped again with a loud sound that was like a stack of papers being torn in half. Suddenly I was only holding shirt fragments. Antaeus screamed bloody murder. He plunged into the fog below. He was swallowed up by it so quickly I would have missed it had I blinked. I did not miss his scream, though. His wail of fear and anguish stabbed at my eardrums even after he was gone from view.
I cursed. Just a second or two more, and I would have had the information I needed. Nothing was ever easy. I dissipated the ice anchoring me to the ground at the speed of thought. I dove off the cliff headfirst into the foggy void in which Antaeus had disappeared a split second before.
I had not been lying to Antaeus: hitting water after falling from this great of a height would be like hitting concrete reinforced with rebar. I was already rocketing down towards the lake below like a bug about to go splat on a windshield when it occurred to me that diving off the cliff after Antaeus was one of the stupidest ideas I ever had. That was saying something as some of my prior stupid ideas had been real dillies. Hindsight really was twenty-twenty.
I plunged down like a dropped rock. I wished, not for the first time in my life, that flying was one of my superpowers.
Hunted can be found here:
HUNTED
Turn the page for an excerpt from Caped, Book One of the Omega Superhero Series.
EXCERPT FROM CAPED
I never wanted to be a superhero. I admired them, sure. I followed their adventures, absolutely. But be one? No thanks. Superheroes got punched, tortured, shot at, cut up, plotted against, and had buildings and other insanely heavy things dropped on them. And that was if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, you were killed like Avatar was. If it could happen to Avatar, the world’s greatest and most powerful Metahuman and licensed Hero, it could happen to anyone. I had no interest in being one of those anyones. If it was up to me, I would have stayed a nobody and a no one. Being a nobody was no fun and God knew it would not get you laid, but at least it gave you the chance to die at home in bed instead of at the hands of some bloodthirsty supervillain. Being a licensed Hero was super dangerous, not to mention super scary. Uh, no pun intended, I guess.
So no, I never wanted to be a superhero. But, like Dad always said, you had to play the cards you were dealt. I found out what kind of cards fate had in store for me the day I got into a fight in the men’s bathroom at my college.
If I had known about all the crazy and deadly stuff that encounter would lead to, I never would have gone to the bathroom that day. I would have just held it. Or, peed my pants. Gross and unsanitary, maybe. Safer though.
***
I washed my hands after using the urinal. I was in the bathroom of the Student Activities Center at my school, the University of South Carolina at Aiken. My hands still were hot, as if they were being held too close to a fire. I held them under the faucet’s stream of cold water for a while. The water felt great, but did not solve the problem. My hands still felt hot.
I was starting to get worried. Maybe I needed to go to the doctor, or at least to USCA’s health clinic. Though I had been inside of air-conditioned classrooms most of today, I had spent a lot of time earlier this week working outside on my dad’s farm. Maybe what I was experiencing was heat stroke. It was very hot outside. It was August in South Carolina, after all. It was supposed to be hot out. I had never heard of heat stroke affecting just one part of your body, though. Nor had I ever heard of it setting in long after someone had gotten out of the heat.
My hands had felt weird the past several days. The feeling had started as a tingle, as if my hands had fallen asleep and circulation was being restored to them. A couple of days later the tingling had become pins and needles. The pins and needles had then transformed into a dull ache, like the ache of underused muscles that had been worked out hard at the gym. Now my hands were hot, like they were in an oven set on low. They were not in pain, but if whatever was going on with them got worse, I could see them getting painful. They had been distracting me in class all day, like an annoying itch you could not quite reach to scratch.
I pulled my hands from under the stream of cold water. I examined them carefully. Other than them being wet, they looked perfectly normal, like they always did. I held them up to my cheeks, like I was checking for a
fever. They did not feel hot against my cheeks. Maybe the heat was entirely in my head. Maybe what I needed was a shrink, not a doctor. I grimacing in distaste at the idea of going to a shrink again. I had been to one when my mother had died from brain cancer five years ago. My school counselor had recommended to Dad that I go, so go I did despite the fact I didn’t want to. Even at the age of twelve, going to that shrink to talk about my feelings had seemed like a huge waste of time. My mother was dead, and no amount of talking was going to change that fact. When that knuckleheaded shrink had suggested I was secretly glad Mom was dead because I was tired of dealing with her lingering illness, I had gotten up and taken a swing at that know-nothing dummy. Dad had been mad at me until I had told him what the shrink had suggested. Dad never made me go back. I had thought at the time he kind of wanted to take a swing at the shrink too.
I grimaced yet again when I looked up to see myself in the mirror. I did not think I was ugly, so that was not the reason for the grimace. Brown hair, brown eyes, average height, average-looking face. If you did a Google search for “average white guy,” I would not be the top result—I was too much of a nobody to turn up in an Internet search—but I felt like the poster boy for “nothing special.” I had grimaced at myself because I was struck again by how skinny I was. Though it seemed like my stomach was a bottomless pit, I never could gain weight. Whenever I said that to a girl, she always said she wished she was like me. Not being able to put on weight might be awesome if you were a girl, but it sucked when you were a seventeen-year-old college freshman who was trying to attract girls. Girls went for big dudes who were athletic, dressed well, drove nice cars, and were into sports, not a skinny farmer’s son who read all the time, wore clothes from Walmart, drove a hand-me-down powder blue Chevy Cavalier the inside of which leaked like a colander when it rained hard, and who knew more about actual falcons than he did about the Atlanta Falcons. It was probably why I was a virgin. I desperately did not want to be. I had never heard of someone dying from lack of sex, but it often felt like I would be the first to pull it off. What a way to make it into the history books. If my name were Mary instead of Theodore Conley, at least then I could put “The Virgin Mary” on my tombstone. On second thought, I would be a boy named Mary. I doubted that would help my virginity problem.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 3): Killshot Page 25