Despite having been in Astor City all these months, I still loved to look at the huge buildings. I hadn’t gotten used to their size. On the small farm I had grown up on, trees had been the only skyscrapers. Aiken, the small town closest to the farm, hadn’t had a building taller than three stories. Even Washington, D.C., the city I had served my Apprenticeship near, didn’t have any buildings taller than the Washington Monument, which was only 555 feet tall.
The UWant Building made the Washington Monument look like a child’s toy. It was the tallest building in the entire country. Star Tower, where I worked, had been the undisputed king of downtown until the UWant Building’s completion over a decade ago. Star Tower had been built by a book publishing company with the help of state and federal funding. It had been the first piece of major construction in the city after the V’Loths had destroyed Baltimore in 1966. In addition to the V’Loths mostly leveling the city, they killed hundreds of thousands of its residents. After the Hero Omega Man sacrificed himself to kill the V’Loth queen and end the alien invasion, Baltimore changed its name to Astor City as a symbolic “screw you” to the V’Loths. Their home world orbited a nearby star. “Astor” was a corruption of “aster,” the Greek word meaning star. I knew that because training to be a Hero had taught me more than merely how to throw a punch.
When work on Star Tower finished a little under two years since it was started, the building had been the tallest in the United States. If naming Astor City after the word for star was saying “screw you” to the V’Loths, naming the country’s tallest building Star Tower and building it in the ruins of the city the V’Loths had destroyed was giving the V’Loths the middle finger.
Now, the UWant Building was the country’s tallest. Its emerald color made it look like something out of the city of Oz. It had been built by UWant, the world’s dominant Internet search engine. If it wasn’t a sign of the times that a building built by an Internet company had eclipsed a building built by a book company and the government, I didn’t know what was.
The rise of the Internet and the decline of traditional media were why I worked downtown in the Times’ annex in Star Tower instead of the Times’ headquarters on the outskirts of the city. The Star Tower annex housed the Times’ digital and social media platforms. Though you didn’t have to be psychic to foresee that the digital versions of the Times would soon overtake the paper version both from a popularity and revenue standpoint, the Times’ annex was still seen as the redheaded stepchild of the company by most of the graybeards who had worked at the Times longer than I’d been alive. Stan Langley, a longtime editor at the paper who had been transferred from headquarters and put in charge of us at the Times’ annex, was the only member of the Times’ old guard who didn’t treat us youngsters at the annex with utter contempt. Other than Mr. Langley, the graybeards seemed to view the Internet as a passing and quite distasteful fad that was likely responsible for the national debt, terrorism, and their erectile dysfunction.
If they asked me, I could give them the addresses of some websites that could probably help them with that last part. As a healthy young man who hadn’t slept with anyone since Neha and I had our falling out before I moved to Astor City, I had more than just a passing familiarity with porn. The good little Catholic boy still living inside of me had been shocked by some of the things I had seen online, but apparently not shocked enough to stop me from seeing them.
While I and my fellow rat race survivors waited for the light to change so we could cross Tennessee Avenue, two teens ambled past us into the busy intersection, talking loudly to one another as if they were miles rather than inches apart. One was white, the other Hispanic. The vulgar slang the guys used was English, but just barely. Their baggy jeans hung halfway down their butts, exposing their tight underwear. I wondered what kept the beltless jeans from falling to their ankles. I doubted it was modesty.
Cars honked and slammed on their brakes with loud squeals as they tried to avoid hitting the teens. Completely ignoring the cars who had the green light, the teens slowly swaggered across the road as if they had designed it, cleared it, paved it, and the city had named it after them.
After the teens were out of their way, the cars proceeded through the intersection. No one rolled down his window to tell them to get out of the middle of the street. Life in Astor City had probably taught them that wasn’t a good idea. Just yesterday a guy driving through the part of Astor City known as Dog Cellar—which was the kind of bad neighborhood you’d expect it to be from its nickname—had stopped his car to tell three teens who were jaywalking to get out of the road. The three pulled the guy out of his car, beat him unconscious, took his car for a joyride, and then wrecked it. The news had said the guy was from out of town. That was unsurprising. Natives knew to avoid Dog Cellar if they could. They especially knew better than to challenge the young men of various races who aimlessly wandered the city like packs of feral dogs. I had dealt with my fair share of them when I patrolled the city at night as Kinetic. Their amoral opportunism and casual criminality was more than a little scary. And I had superpowers.
Like the towering buildings of downtown Astor City, seeing young men who seemed content with having nothing productive to do was not something I had gotten used to. The way I was raised, if you weren’t asleep or sick, you were supposed to be working, studying, or doing something else productive. Idleness was seen as shameful. If you didn’t have a job, you went door to door offering to cut people’s lawns, or walked up and down the road to pick up glass bottles and aluminum cans to redeem them for recycling money, or any number of other ways to make an honest buck. You did something.
Then again, between working during the day and fighting crime at night, I was almost always exhausted. By contrast, the shiftless young men who wandered the city seemed well rested. Maybe they had a better handle on how to live life than I did. Perhaps one day I’d shelve my upbringing, pull my pants down to my thighs to give my junk some fresh air, and give those guys’ devil-may-care lifestyle a whirl. After all I’d been through since developing my powers, God knew I needed the rest.
The ambling teens were almost across Tennessee Avenue now. Thanks to Heroic training that had long before now become reflex, I noticed that the sagging pants of the short Hispanic teen hung diagonally, a little lower on the right than on the left, as if the right pocket contained something heavy. Curiosity made me gently probe the inside of that pocket with my powers. My mental touch was met with hard steel and smooth wood made warm by the teen’s body heat. A small caliber pistol. Maryland had some of the toughest gun laws in the country. Even if the teen was older than he looked and was an adult, it was unlikely he had a license to carry. It was more likely the teen would one day wave that gun in the face of someone who was more scrupulous than he was about following the state’s gun laws.
Back at the Academy, Athena had tried to break me of the habit of moving my hands when I used my powers, but she had never been able to do so. Even now I needed to move my hands to use them. I lifted my hand, pretending like I was swatting away a fly. Instead, I unobtrusively used my powers to pull down the jeans of the teen, pantsing him like I was a high school bully. The teen cried out in surprise, grabbing at his falling pants. Too late. The jeans pooled around his legs. I pulled the gun out of the pocket, making it look as if it had bounced out thanks to its collision with the asphalt. I made the gun skitter away from the teen, forcing it to slide into a storm drain a few feet away from him.
The teen cursed, pulled his pants partly back up, and shambled over to the storm drain. After a brief hesitation, he lay down on his belly on the side of the street. He stuck his arm into the storm drain up to his shoulder and groped for the gun. His search was in vain; little did he know that I had made sure the gun was well out of his reach. Some of the pedestrians waiting at the intersection with me tittered at the display, but not too loudly, not wanting to be heard laughing at the teen or his friend who stood over him. If you drew attention to yourself on the stre
ets of Astor City, you almost always regretted it.
Once the walk sign said we could cross Tennessee, I and my fellow stick-in-the-mud, law-abiding pedestrians did so. We passed the teen jaywalkers. The shorter one still groped for his gun. Though I suspected the stories I heard about there being mutant alligators in the Astor City sewer system were merely urban legends, the devil in me wished one of those gators would happen along and make an hors d’oeuvre of the teen’s arm. Smugness tugged the corners of my mouth into a slight smile. Despite not yet having done anything about Mechano of the Sentinels, at least I had done something about a punk with a gun. Baby steps.
I broke away from most of the pack by taking a left at the corner, and then a right onto Williams Place, the street on which I lived. Row houses lined both sides of the street. Most were well-kept and looked recently renovated. A handful were old and rundown. Tennessee Heights was well on its way on the gentrification road from poor to solidly middle class.
The house I shared with Isaac and guy named Bertrand Dubois was one of the ones that had seen better days. It was one of the few rental houses on the block. Our landlord, a squat cigar-chomping guy named Mario, had asked “Do you want to live in a palace, or do you want cheap rent?” when we three roommates had asked him for the umpteenth time that certain repairs be made. Since none of us were swimming in loot—if we had been, there would have been no need for us to be each other’s roommates—we had opted for the cheap rent. Astor City was an expensive place to live, and an affordable place wasn’t easy to come by. Having it fall down around our ears in slow motion was a trade-off we were willing to accept.
I nodded at Deshaun as I sidestepped his outstretched legs on the walk to my house. He nodded back in acknowledgement. His baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes. He was a very fleshy black guy who carried a lot of his weight in his midsection. When he stood, he looked like a partially melted chocolate bar. He wasn’t standing now. He sat in his usual spot on the short stone and concrete wall that lined both sides of the street. His thick legs were stretched out in front of him onto the sidewalk. He wore a red, black and yellow Astor City Stars basketball jersey, so oversized that it looked like a tent even on Deshaun’s overweight body. And, just as the two jaywalkers had, Deshaun wore baggy and saggy blue jeans. Jeans dangling at half-mast seemed to be as much of a uniform for young knuckleheads as costumes were for Heroes.
Deshaun was one of several drug dealers who operated out of a dilapidated house at the end of the block. The house was owned by a guy named Mitch who had inherited it from his deceased parents. Mr. and Mrs. West, the nice elderly black couple who lived directly across the street from me and had been there since they were dewy-eyed newlyweds, told me Mitch’s parents had been teachers who were pillars of the community. Mitch had followed in their teaching footsteps by teaching guys like Deshaun how to sell drugs. Deshaun and another guy named Fidel took turns dealing on my street. Deshaun had the day shift; Fidel had the night shift and would replace Deshaun in a few hours. Deshaun and Fidel dealt drugs on my street twenty-four hour a day, seven days a week, in fair weather or foul. Like the U.S. Post Office, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night would stay these dope peddlers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
Unfortunately, I knew all too well from life on our block how the drug dealing process worked: People looking to score would approach either Deshaun or Fidel. They’d talk about what the customer wanted, negotiate a price, and then money would change hands. Deshaun or Fidel would go to one of the places on or around the street where they had their supply stashed—they never kept the drugs on their person to guard against the unlikely event the police hassled them—and then return with the goods. The other guys who worked for Mitch had a similar setup all throughout Tennessee Heights.
Tennessee Heights was Mitch’s territory. Mitch had carved it out as his area of operation long before I had arrived in the neighborhood. From what I’d heard, the guy who ran the Tennessee Heights drug operation before Mitch had objected when Mitch showed up after his parents’ death and started dealing in the area. Those objections took the form of pitched gun battles between Mitch’s forces and the other guy’s. Mitch’s adversary one day disappeared. Word on the street was that he had taken up residence on the bottom of nearby Astor Bay with his insides well ventilated by bullet holes. Since then, Mitch had ruled the Tennessee Heights drug roost. Mitch apparently paid kickbacks to someone higher up in the city’s drug trade hierarchy, but I didn’t know who. Or was it supposed to be whom? I didn’t know that, either. I was a Hero, not a grammar nazi. I did know though that those kickbacks went in part toward paying the cops to keep them off Mitch’s back.
I felt Deshaun’s dark eyes on me as I mounted the short steps of our two-story row house. When it was new ages ago, the house probably had been dark red. Now the house was a faded pink, like a dollhouse that had been handed down through generations of careless children. Black ornamental shutters hung sloppily from the dirty windows, reminding me of fake eyelashes on a drunk old lady.
I pulled my house keys out of my pocket. I still felt Deshaun’s gaze as a tightness between my shoulder blades. His gaze made me uncomfortable, the way being around a dog who’d bite you if he had a chance would make you uncomfortable. Though we acknowledged each other when we saw one another, I didn’t like Deshaun. I didn’t know anything about him other than what he did for a living and who he worked for, but that was enough. I was very anti-drug. Sure, I knew there were otherwise law-abiding people who smoked a little weed after work to unwind or did a bit of coke on the weekends to loosen up with no lasting ill effect. I had also seen far too many others in my short time as a Hero whose lives had been ruined by drugs: the mother who rented her underage daughter to men for the night to score a meth fix; the father who spent his last dollar on crack and zoned out on the drug while his crying children went hungry in the next room; the fresh-faced college co-ed who died with a heroin needle in her arm and her dealer’s penis in her mouth. Those were just a few of the lives I had seen ruined by drugs. Too many. If every illegal drug in the world were piled up and doused with gasoline, I’d be the first one in line with a lit match.
I knew my dislike of Deshaun was mutual. He had offered me a free sample of his wares the first week I had moved in. With a sly smile, he had called it a “housewarming gift.” I had refused it. No dealer could get me hooked with that old “the first one’s free” gambit. I’d been forewarned by watching my fair share of reruns of after school specials as a kid. My refusal had perhaps been more firm and impolite than it should have been; I hadn’t known at the time I’d be seeing the guy almost every day. Deshaun probably thought I was the world’s biggest square. Maybe he was right. You couldn’t pay me enough to put a thief into my body that would steal my brains. Drugs and superpowers did not mix. And, though Deshaun obviously didn’t know I was a Hero, he might have come to sense after we first met, if only subconsciously, that we were on opposite sides of the legal tracks. A wolf probably didn’t have any great affection for a shepherd either, and for much the same reason.
Though neither Isaac nor I made much money, we had taken some of the money we had saved during our tenure as Amazing Man’s Apprentices and splurged on a state of the art alarm system. The system was linked to the watches Isaac and I wore. They were part timepieces and part communicators, relics from our days as Apprentices that the Old Man (what we called Amazing Man) had let us keep. Since my watch was not going off, I assumed no one had broken into our house. Even so, before slipping my key into the lock of our front door, I used my powers to do a quick scan of the house to double check that all was well. After all, Antonio had an alarm system, and look at what had happened to him. Kinetic had made a lot of enemies in Astor City fighting crime at night. As far as I knew, no one knew Kinetic was little ol’ me, but it was better to be safe than sorry and wind up walking unexpectedly into the welcoming but deadly arms of a vengeful criminal. Besides, attempts had been made on my
life before. Not only had Mechano tried to kill me during the Trials, there had been that bomb-planting blonde in D.C. Plus, the Metahuman assassin Iceburn had tried to kill me multiple times. Though Iceburn was in federal prison, whoever had hired him was still out there somewhere, presumably still grinding his ax against me. Though no attempts had been made on my life since I moved to Astor City, I never could shake the feeling that the sword of Damocles hung over my head, dangling by a thread, ready to fall and slice me open.
Yeah, I had mastered the art of paranoia. I was thinking of teaching a class in it.
No one was inside the house according to my powers, including Isaac and Bertrand. Well, no one human. My telekinetic touch felt the bodies of several mice scurrying in the walls of the old house. There were also a couple of rats the size of small dogs. The female rat was in the middle of “doing her wifely duty,” as my grandmother might have put it. Despite Nana’s folksy phrase, it seemed to me the male rat was doing most of the work. I suppressed a shudder as my mind brushed over the frenzied rodents. There’s nothing like a little rat porn to start the evening off right. It was estimated the number of rodents in Astor City exceeded by a large margin the millions of humans who lived here. Big city life was even more glamorous than I’d dreamed.
I closed the front door behind myself, relieved to leave Deshaun’s gaze on the other side of it. I let out a sigh of relief. I had survived another day in the big bad city. Actually, I spoke too soon. Since I intended to go out on patrol tonight, the city would get another chance to have a whack at me.
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