Computer programmers had an expression: Garbage in, garbage out. The same was true of the human body—if you consistently fed it crap, you would have a crap body. The reverse was also true. That was why our fridge was packed with high-quality foods. In addition to us shopping at organic grocery stores, Isaac and I had pooled our meager salaries to join a community supported agriculture group. Through the CSA, Isaac and I got food from local farmers. There was no farmland in Astor City of course, but the surrounding counties had plenty of farms. Every week the CSA made a delivery to our house consisting of whatever produce, meat, and dairy that was in season. If no one was home, the delivery guy left the food in a cooler we kept on the porch of the house. If it weren’t for the watchful eyes of Deshaun and Fidel, I had no doubt the food would disappear shortly after it was delivered. Though I hated to admit it, living on a street with watchful drug dealers had its perks.
With Athena’s advice about discipline and preparation ringing in my ears and the form-hugging fabric of my costume on my mind, I considered making a stir-fry with the steak and fresh vegetables delivered by the CSA the day before. The meat was from a grass-fed, antibiotic-free, hormone-free cow. The cow had lived so well, it was a wonder it had died. The stir-fry would be high protein, high fat, high calorie, and low carbs—the perfect building blocks for growing muscles. I could end the meal with my usual kale shake, composed of a ton of kale, an unpeeled cucumber, an avocado, fresh ginger and garlic, and several strawberries blended together until it was a radioactive green smoothie. It tasted about the way you’d expect it to. I often added some hemp protein powder to the mix, mostly for the protein, but partly in the hopes there was some residual psychoactive marijuana in the hemp to help me forget I was drinking a kale shake. Isaac called the shakes my Hulk Loads. I had never turned into the Incredible Hulk drinking them. They did turn my poops green though. Baby steps.
My stomach recoiled at the thought of yet another healthy meal, and my mind recoiled at the thought of making one. Screw my muscles, I thought. I instead pulled out some leftover pizza. It was Bertrand’s, but he had told me earlier I could have some.
I popped several slices into the microwave. The smell of melted cheese, sausage, and pepperoni soon filled the room. If there was a Heaven, it probably smelled like a pizzeria. If I was going to take a break from patrolling, it seemed only proper to take a break from clean eating too. I was in the mood for comfort food, not utilitarian food. I’d return to my strict diet tomorrow. As my father James used to say, “All things in moderation, including moderation.” Not all his Jamesisms were draconian.
I took the pizza into the living room. I opened the drapes. The late afternoon sun poured in through the two windows. There were thick metal bars outside the windows, as there were on all the windows of the house. The bars were relics from a time long before I moved in when the neighborhood had been more dangerous than it was now. Through the corner of one window I saw the lower part of Deshaun’s legs stretched out on the sidewalk as he waited for a customer and kept watch over the street. Last night a Hero had beaten a civilian up after breaking into his place, and today a drug dealer was protecting that Hero. The whole world was topsy-turvy.
I settled into the couch and turned on the television. I had just missed the local news. I normally watched it before I went out on patrol as it gave a nice summary of the not so nice crime going on in the city. The fact I watched local news didn’t mean I liked it. It was wall-to-wall murders, stabbings, assaults and corruption interspersed by ads for fast food joints, car dealerships, and payday lenders. They should have called the local news Death, Destruction and Desolation Delivered With Delight. Too long and too alliterative, maybe. The newscasters always seemed so thrilled to talk about someone’s grisly murder. Maybe they had lived in the big city too long and had lost sight of the fact that every murder victim was someone’s child. The fact the local news channels had reported favorably on some of my and Isaac’s nocturnal crime-fighting exploits did not make me feel better about them.
I channel surfed as I ate the pizza. Nothing captured my interest. The scripted shows I came across didn’t draw me in. When you were used to flying around the city and battling criminals, watching a bunch of actors pretend to do so held little appeal. My reality was far more dramatic than fiction.
Though I had intended to avoid news entirely, I eventually settled on watching CNN. After a while, CNN might as well have been watching me. I stared off into space. Images of what I had done to Mad Dog paraded in front of me. The blood on the carpet around his head looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.
CHAPTER 6
“Well if it isn’t the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s middleweight contender,” Isaac said after he walked in the front door. “Did you find somebody new to beat senseless today? Or did you switch species and decide to kick puppies instead?”
I was still in front of the television with most of my pizza, now long cold, in front of me on the coffee table. Isaac came into the living room, put his laptop bag on the floor, and plopped down heavily in a chair on my left in front of the windows. He was shaved bald, fully exposing the light brown skin of his head. His lack of hair made the jagged scar on his forehead from our fight with Iceburn years ago even more prominent. The Academy having forced all us males to keep our heads shaved while we were there had turned Isaac onto the benefits of not wrestling with a full head of hair every day. Straight black glossy hair was on his hands and knuckles. Naked, he was hairy everywhere except on his back, like a wolfman with male pattern baldness on his back.
Isaac wore a crisp white shirt and grey dress slacks. He had just left work. He worked for Pixelate, a company not too far from Star Tower. Pixelate did movie animation. Isaac worked as an illustrator there. As drawing, painting, and sculpting mythological creatures helped him transform into them—as Isaac often said, “If I can’t visualize it, I can’t become it”—Isaac had become quite the artist in the years I had known him. His Heroic training had given him a marketable job skill, helping him to land his job at Pixelate. There was a pretty big demand for talented artists, but not so much for guys like me who could juggle telekinetically thanks to my Heroic training. The main reason I had my job was because the Old Man was friends with the Times’ publisher. When he didn’t have his costume on, the Old Man was the uber-wealthy philanthropist and retired industrialist named Raymond Ajax who knew movers and shakers around the world. The Old Man had pulled some strings for me to get me my job.
I said, “I see you’re launching right into criticizing me again. Whatever happened to ‘Hey man, how was your day?’ Or, ‘Anything interesting on the news?’ Instead you’re busting my chops. You’re worse than a nagging wife. If this is what being married is like, I’m glad I haven’t taken the plunge yet.” I left unspoken the fact that women were hardly breaking the door down, trying to get to me to marry them. “That reminds me: I’m pretty sure Bertrand thinks we’re gay. All the time we spend together, the fact neither of us has ever brought a girl home, the late nights out together, only to return in the wee hours with cuts and bruises. I think he thinks we spend our nights partying at a gay bondage club or something.”
Isaac snorted.
“I wish I were gay just so I could come out of the closet,” he said. His brown eyes glittered maliciously. “It would give my homophobic mother a heart attack.” I had learned during the Trials that Isaac had a love-hate relationship with his mother. Mostly, he loved to hate her. Based on what I knew of her, I could hardly blame him.
“If we were gay, you know I’d be the top, right?” I said. “It’s my right as an Omega-level Meta. An Omega like me is named after Omega Man himself. A Beta-level like you is naturally beneath me.”
“Nuh-uh. You’re crazy. You didn’t even know what a top was until I taught you.” Isaac hesitated. “That sounded dirtier and gayer than I meant. Anyway, nobody—and I mean nobody, Omega-level or otherwise—gets to peel this brown peach.”
“That’s a visu
al I could have gone my whole life without.”
“You’re the one who brought it up. And yes, pun intended. But don’t think you’re going to divert me with all your gay talk from the topic of what happened with Mad Dog. I’m the master of changing the subject when I don’t want to talk about something. Don’t try to pull a me on me. You’ve been avoiding talking about what happened ever since last night.”
“What do you want me to say? That I went too far? That I lost my head? That I never should have pounded on Antonio the way I did?” I was suddenly exasperated. “Okay, I went too far. I lost my head. I should have given Antonio a cookie for abusing Hannah instead of a beating. Happy now?”
Isaac shook his head at me. “I just don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. It was bad enough that you wanted to break into Antonio’s place. I went along with that because the cause was just. And like you, I couldn’t think of a better way to stop him from abusing Hannah. But for you to pound on him like you did—” He broke off, his eyes suddenly widening. He leaned forward. “Hey, do you have a thing for Hannah? It would certainly explain your behavior. Trying to scare off the competition?”
“Of course not,” I said hotly, offended by the suggestion I’d used my powers to get a girl. Well, I was mostly offended. The truth of the matter was that, deep down, I wasn’t so sure what my motivations were. When I had originally befriended Hannah it had been to figure out what the deal was with her constant injuries. But now that I had gotten to know her, I could feel myself trying to ease myself out of the friend zone with Hannah despite the fact I was still very much in love with Neha. The few times Hannah had touched me had sent my pulse racing. Etched in my mind, I could close my eyes and visualize those moments as if they had been captured on film. In fact, just two nights ago I had a dream about Hannah. And it wasn’t the kind of racial equality dream Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had spoken of, either. Rather, it was the kind of dream you could turn into a white-on-Asian interracial porno.
Unmollified suspicion smoldered in Isaac’s brown eyes. But thankfully, he let the issue of my complicated feelings for Hannah go. “So why did you go all WWE on Antonio then?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Isaac shook his head. “If you think I’m going to let you off the hook that easily, Antonio’s energy blast must’ve knocked something loose in your head last night. You haven’t been yourself for a while now. Last night was just the starkest example of it. As your friend, if something’s troubling you, I want to know about it. As a fellow Hero, if what’s bothering you is making you cross the line and beat someone to a pulp, I need to know about it. You didn’t see your face as you were pummeling Antonio. I did. The way you looked, if I hadn’t been there, you might have killed him. I’m not going to let that happen again.” Isaac’s face, which normally had a half-grin dangling from it, was dead serious. “So, you’ve got a choice: either tell me what’s bothering you so we can do something about it, or I’ll report what happened last night to the Guild and you can tell them what’s bothering you.”
I was shocked. “You wouldn’t dare. I’ve known you for too long. You wouldn’t do that to me. Plus, you broke into Antonio’s place with me. You’d be on the hook with the Guild as much as I’d be.”
“I don’t care. Right now, with you bottling up whatever it is that’s bothering you, you’re a danger to yourself and others. I’d rather get both of us into a little trouble now than see you in serious trouble later after you badly hurt or kill someone. Plus, like you said, we’ve known each other a long time. Long enough for me to know that, despite whatever’s come over you lately, if you did seriously hurt or kill somebody, you’d never forgive yourself. So what’s it gonna be: talk to me, or talk to the Guild?”
Isaac and I stared at each other. The only sound in the room for several long moments was the voice of a CNN reporter dispassionately talking about a fresh atrocity in Peru perpetrated by its dictator, the supervillain Puma. The United Nations was debating a resolution asking the Hero team Sentinels to intervene.
After a while, I looked away, breaking our gaze. I let out a long breath.
“Okay, you win. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me.” I paused, not knowing where to begin. “It’s everything.”
Isaac leaned back, put his feet up on the coffee table, and laced his fingers behind his head. “Everything? You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”
“Everything. Mechano. Being a Hero. Life in the big city. Neha. Everything.”
“All right, we’ll tackle them one at a time. Let’s start with Mechano. Since you know he was the person who made attempts on your life during the Trials, I still don’t understand why you don’t report him to the Guild. The Guild has an investigative division devoted to looking into allegations of Hero malfeasance. All us new Heroes were introduced to Ghost, the head of Guild investigations, when we were sworn in.” Isaac paused, shuddering at the thought of Ghost. “Remember how he looked during our swearing-in ceremony? Like he had just stepped out of someone’s nightmare. He might be the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something as I’ve seen my mother without makeup. Ghost has the reputation of being entirely fair and going where the evidence leads him. Even with a Hero of Mechano’s prominence, if Ghost concluded that Mechano tried to assassinate you, the Guild would take his cape away and turn him over to the civil authorities for prosecution so fast that his murderous metal head would spin.”
“As I’ve told you before, it’s not that simple. If I report what I know about Mechano to the Guild, they’ll ask me how I know what I know. And if I tell them that, I’ll get someone else into trouble.” I shook my head. “I won’t do it.”
That wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was that I knew Mechano had tried to murder me because I had cheated on the final test of the Trials. In that test, I had to battle Isaac. Hacker, a fellow Trials participant who had owed me a favor due to me saving her life earlier in the Trials, had at my request used her Metahuman hacking ability to reprogram Overlord before my battle with Isaac. Overlord was the artificially intelligent computer designed by Mechano which oversaw the Trials. Overlord determined who won the duel between potential Heroes that comprised the final Trials test. Before Hacker had monkeyed with its system, Overlord had been programmed to declare just one of the duelists the winner. The winner got his Hero’s license; the loser was out of luck and would have to go through the Trials all over again if he wanted to get his license. That hadn’t seemed fair to me at the time. It still didn’t. So, I had Hacker change Overlord’s programming so it would declare a tie and that both Isaac and I were the winners if the result of our battle was close.
When inside of Overlord’s system, Hacker had stumbled upon two shocking facts: the world-renowned Hero Mechano had planted nanites into Overlord’s system which had tried to kill me earlier during the Trials; and, Mechano had programmed Overlord to allow the planting of a bomb into one of my Trials’ tests. That bomb had nearly blown my head off—not to mention other body parts I had grown quite attached to—plus almost killing a bunch of innocent bystanders. As that bomb was a bigger version of the bomb slipped into my pocket by the blonde woman in D.C. before the Trials, perhaps Mechano had been behind that attempt on my life as well. For all I knew, Mechano was also the one who had hired Iceburn to kill me after my powers first manifested, leading to my father’s death.
So, after completing the Trials, recuperating from them, and then getting my Hero’s license and white cape during the Guild’s investiture and swearing-in ceremony, I had known what was next on my to-do list: Confront Mechano and find out why he had made attempts on my life. Also, figure out if he was behind Iceburn being sent after me and, if so, kick his mechanical butt from here to Pluto for being responsible for Dad’s death. Oh, and avoid Mechano throttling me with his super strong robot body, or blasting a hole through me with his energy beams, or doing something even more unpleasant to me. Let’s not forget that very important part.
/> My list of things to do post-Trials had been all too clear. What had been a lot less clear was how to go about crossing all those things off my list.
You could go a bunch of different routes once you got your Hero’s license after the Trials. Some Heroes joined the military or went into law enforcement. Other Heroes went into private industries where their powers would prove useful. Hacker for example worked for a tech firm in Seattle. Others went into private security. Neha had done that. She had moved to Chicago to work for a famous reality television star. Thinking about her made my heart ache, even all these months after our fight.
The most traditional route for Heroes, though, was to use your powers to fight crime and Rogues, the technical word for supervillains. Though some Heroes fought crime out of the goodness of their hearts, many others also leveraged the fame acquired through their crime-fighting efforts to make money. Massive Force, for example, was a textbook example of how to make crime-fighting lucrative. Before he was murdered here in Astor City, he had made a boatload of money on toys carrying his likeness, by making paid personal appearances, and through television, movie, and book deals. Though I had a hard time picturing an action figure being made in my likeness, maybe one day someone would instead make a movie about my life. It could focus on how a small-town farm boy felt overwhelmed by the big city even though he was a Hero. Its title could be Stranger in a Strange Land. I hoped Robert Heinlein’s estate didn’t sue me.
Some Heroes banded together in teams to fight crime. Mechano was a member of such a team. And not just any team. Mechano was part of the Sentinels, Earth’s oldest and most preeminent superhero team. The Sentinels were headquartered right outside of Astor City. As Athena had been so fond of saying, every battle was won or lost based on who was better prepared to fight it. In light of that, to prepare to take on Mechano and perhaps all the Sentinels—God help me!—if they too were involved in Mechano’s shenanigans, I needed to find out everything I could about him. Not only would such information help me figure out how to take him out if I needed to, but maybe it would also give me a clue as to why Mechano had attacked me.
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