Memoirs of a Crimefighter

by Seth Jacob

  “Seriously, Spectacle? Seriously? You’re doing crystal SUHP now? After what happened to your dad?” Ultra Lady snatched the baggie off of my keyboard and held it up in front of me.

  “That’s…that’s not what you think. One of The Punster’s Goons must have left it there while I was passed—while I was asleep last night. It’s got a pun note on it.”

  “Oh. ‘Soup de Grâce’?”

  “It’s a stupid pun on final blow, or—”

  “I know what it means. What I don’t understand is why The Punster gave you your father’s things. And why is he even bothering to taunt you with this?” She shook the baggie of SUHP in my face.

  “I don’t know what to tell you…”

  “Spectacle, enough. Stop lying to me.”

  “I don’t know, okay?”

  “This isn’t just about you anymore. If The Punster is really working with all those villains…this is serious. You need to tell me what you know, right now.”

  “I told you what the Superb 6 needs to know already, just leave me alone—”

  “What the Superb 6 ‘needs to know’? What’s that supposed to mean? Spectacle, you’ve got to come clean—”

  “Fine! Okay? Fine!” I threw the empty beer bottle I was holding at the wall and it shattered. Ultra Lady didn’t even flinch. She just stared at me with those big, green X-Ray eyes.

  “The Punster…he’s deliberately distracting superheroes with big, extravagant superfights by paying off all the lower tier supervillains, your Armadillotrons, your Professor Dinosaurs. These guys attack jewelry stores and malls and coffee shops, they make a huge scene and attract all the crimefighters. Meanwhile, The Punster and the major players are committing a series of under the radar crimes. They’re robbing the city blind while all the superheroes preoccupy themselves with pointless, superpowered pissing matches.”

  “Was that so hard? Why couldn’t you just tell me that?” Ultra Lady asked sincerely. I almost didn’t answer her, but I was a little drunk at this point. I just had to talk to someone about it.

  “Because…maybe The Punster is right. He said he’s going to use the fortune he makes from this to do some real good. You know…give millions to charities, fix up inner city schools, establish scholarships for underprivileged superhumans, create SUHP addiction treatment centers. Address the problems that create violent costumed criminals.”

  “You actually believe that?” Ultra Lady laughed.

  “The Punster…I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe he’s right. Maybe the only reason supervillains even exist is because our society is fucked every which way to begin with. Maybe what we do is a complete waste of time…we’re just fighting an endless parade of supervillains while we completely ignore the problems with our society that creates them.”

  Ultra Lady took a deep breath. She leaned towards me and put both of her white gloved hands on my shoulders. She gripped my shoulders firmly with fingers that could stretch titanium like silly putty. She looked me right in the eyes, and I tried to look away, but she wouldn’t let me turn from her.

  “Spectacle…you have got to listen to me. The Punster…is in…your head. You’ve got to know that. He was obsessed with your dad. He’ll say anything to fuck you up. And whatever he said worked.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “Okay, are you for real? I’m in the Superb 6, Spectacle. You don’t think I’ve had my share of supervillains play mind games with me? The Punster planted the seed of doubt in your head. Forget everything he told you.”

  “You didn’t hear what he said. You didn’t hear how he said it.”

  “Spectacle…snap out of it man.”

  “…The Punster said he’d kill me if I interfered. And I believed him,” I shrugged off Ultra Lady’s hands as I said this, and she let me.

  “You don’t get it. I’m not like you, Ultra Lady.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit, I saw you fight Mistress Gorgon’s Harpies. You’ve got serious potential—”

  “No. That’s not what I mean. I mean, I’m not fucking bulletproof. I can’t survive an explosion like it’s nothing. I can’t lift a hundred tons, I can’t outrun sound waves. The Punster…he killed my mother, Ultra Lady. He killed. My mother. And he’s got some of the most powerful superhumans on the planet working for him. Maybe he’s lying about trying to fix the issues that create supervillains, maybe he’s not. But he’s not lying about killing me. That’s real.”

  “Okay, so, finally, it comes out. That’s why you didn’t want to say anything. You’re scared of The Punster.”

  “You’re goddamn right I’m scared. I don’t care anymore, Ultra Lady. Honestly, I got what I wanted. I wanted my father’s box of stuff. And I’ve got it. I’m perfectly happy fighting the C-list losers and collecting the respectable warrant money. Let the Superb 6 handle The Punster and his bullshit.”

  Ultra Lady stood up from the couch quickly. It was like a switch had flipped in her head, and she knew this debate was going nowhere. She walked away from the couch and around the coffee table. She peered into the cardboard box which contained everything that was left of my father, and she glanced at me with a look on her face that screamed ‘I hope it was worth it’. She opened the window that she had floated in through, and she hesitated before climbing out of it.

  “Spectacle…the Superb 6 can’t solve all your problems. I came here today to tell you about Mistress Gorgon working with other powerful supervillains because I’m not gonna get another chance for a while. I’m going out of town, Spectacle. The Superb 6, we would normally handle The Punster, but we just can’t. This crime spree you’re talking about…it’s extremely important, but we just can’t spare the resources to manage it right now.”

  “How convenient.”

  “Seriously, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay…the Superb 6, we recently discovered a network of terrorists in the Middle East that has got a hold of a massive supply of SUHP left over from the Cold War and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. They’ve got thousands of oil drums filled with the stuff. They could fill up a dozen Olympic swimming pools with this shit, and they’re giving themselves insanely dangerous superhuman abilities with it…and some of them are even unlocking permanent superhuman potential. I’m talking about terrorists who were already willing to blow themselves up before they had superpowers. Now some of them have indestructible skin and pores that sweat radiation. Now some of these fuckers are as powerful as members of the Superb 6. Millions of people will die if the Superb 6 doesn’t focus all of our attention on stopping them.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “I’m serious, Spectacle. The Superb 6 can’t deal with The Punster. Saving millions, maybe billions of lives takes precedence over one little criminal conspiracy in one little city.”

  Ultra Lady gently floated through the window. She hovered outside of my apartment building for a moment, and I walked over to the window to close it.

  “Spectacle…” She tossed the bag of SUHP crystals at me through the open window. It hit my chest, and I caught it as it fell.

  “Grow up. Seriously, just fucking grow up. You can do this. You, and your friends in your team, The Millennials. You guys can stop The Punster and his thugs. You can’t always rely on the Superb 6 to be your babysitters. You have to grow the fuck up and face this thing. What else are you going to do?”

  Ultra Lady looked at the little baggie of SUHP in my hands.

  “Get drunk all day and high on crystal SUHP? I think you can be better than that. I hope you can, anyway,” Ultra Lady blasted away from me in a super speed blur before I could spit out the bitter, sarcastic response I had on the top of my head. I was left standing there, alone, in front of an open window and holding a baggie of SUHP. I felt the rough crystals in between my fingers through the plastic of the baggie. It would have been so easy…but I threw the baggie out of the window, and I closed it.

  Chapter 13: There’s N
o “I” in Superhero Team-Up

  I never expected a fight with a loser like Captain Haiku to radically alter the course of my life. I was just 19 years old, and I had been a superhero for only a year. When I first put on a costume, The Whimsy beat the shit out of me. That taught me to pick my battles a little more carefully. So I did some research, and I decided that I could beat Captain Haiku without even breaking a sweat. I read every article ever written about that ex-poet laureate turned supervillain, I watched the online videos of him robbing the audience of a poetry slam, and I even read every post on his blog which was written entirely in haiku. That’s why I found myself fighting Captain Haiku on that particular night.

  “All of your money

  Give it to my henchmen now.

  Or face destruction!”

  I was on the ledge of a building across the street from the restaurant that Captain Haiku was holding up. Even from that far away, I could hear him screaming his terrible poetry at the top of his lungs. In those days, I listened to a police band scanner app on my phone a lot and I was doing my homework (for a poetry class I was taking in college, believe it or not) when I heard dispatch call in a robbery in progress and described the suspect as “a lanky, Caucasian male dressed as a pirate with a big H on his chest, talking strangely, possibly under the influence of SUHP.” I threw my costume on and made my way across the rooftops of the city to the address as fast as I could. Dispatch didn’t mention anything about henchmen though, and I could see through the window of the supervillain themed restaurant “The Lair” that Captain Haiku had brought over a dozen of his lackeys with him.

  I leapt off the ledge, grabbed onto the metal bar of a stop light, and swung down to the sidewalk outside of the restaurant. The Lair was one of these gimmicky tourist attractions that was decorated to look like a supervillain’s underground bunker. The outside of the place had a facade of plaster painted up to look like thick titanium walls, and through the windows, I could see Captain Haiku with a musket terrorizing the patrons of The Lair.

  He sauntered around the restaurant that looked like a laboratory that was straight out of a cartoon with its bubbling tubes of brightly colored liquid and giant, paper mâché death machines dangling from the ceiling on wires. It was actually kind of funny to see Captain Haiku strutting around The Lair like he owned the place in his cheap, probably Halloween store bought pirate costume with a big letter “H” hastily taped onto his chest.

  A maître d’ dressed up in a generic supervillain costume, which was still somehow better than Captain Haiku’s crappy costume, cowered on the floor while several of his henchmen stood around her. His henchmen were dressed up in pirate outfits similar to Captain Haiku’s that made them look like his crew. They each had “H” patches with skull and crossbones on their shoulders, as if it was the official insignia of some absurd, haiku-focused pirate ship. They watched the maître d’ and customers to make sure that no one tried to call the police. They weren’t doing a great job, or I wouldn’t be there.

  I walked through the door of The Lair. Several henchmen whirled around and looked at me.

  “Excuse me…is there any wait for one?”

  For a full second, the restaurant was quiet and for once, Captain Haiku was speechless. Then, his gang of henchmen were after me like a school of ravenous piranha. One of them lunged at me, I spread my legs and jumped over him like I was playing leap frog. Another threw a punch at me as I landed, I grabbed his fist as it flew towards my face and I thrust it into the face of another henchman. People burst into laughter at their tables as one henchman accidentally knocked out the other.

  “Hey…is there any wait for three?”

  I didn’t know who he was at the time, but Mr. Mercurial said this as his liquid metal form spilled through the cracks of the closed glass doors of The Lair. Two more superheroes piled in after him, and I was pissed. I got there first, and I had the situation under control. Who were these assholes to just insert themselves into my win?

  “I already made that joke,” I said as I clunked two henchmen’s heads together and they both fell over on top of each other.

  “Yo, bro, we got this,” Joe Metal said as he clanked into The Lair in his exoskeleton armor.

  “You got this? Go fuck yourself, I was here first,” I leaned out of the way of one of the henchmen as he slashed at me with a butterfly knife. I brought my elbow down hard on his wrist and the knife flew out of his hand and stuck to a menu on the wall. It stabbed into the “World Domination Bacon Burger” like a dart hitting a bullseye.

  “There’s three of us, and just one of you. You don’t have to be so unprofessional about this. We’re all on the same team, man,” Insight said as she telekinetically caught one of the henchmen’s punches and bent his arm back in a direction it was definitely not supposed to go. She realized that a teenage girl at one of the tables was filming her with her phone, and she smiled for the camera as she broke the henchman’s arm with her mind.

  “Whatever. You just want the warrant money from catching Captain Haiku. You’re swooping in like goddamn vultures here,” I said as I sidestepped a henchman that was trying to tackle me. He flew by me and crashed into a fake control panel with flashing buttons and unnecessarily large levers.

  “Don’t forget about the publicity, we really want the publicity too!” Mr. Mercurial chimed in as he stretched one of his metallic legs over three tables and roundhouse kicked one of the henchmen from across the room. People at their tables screamed and gasped as his thigh muscle elongated several yards over their mediocre, tourist trap food. Mr. Mercurial also looked at people filming him, but he crossed his eyes and stuck out his silver tongue at the camera.

  “Mr. Mercurial, you’re not helping bro, just shut up for once,” Joe Metal sighed, and the motors in his exoskeleton armor whirred while he punched one of the henchmen in the jaw. His armored knuckles probably broke the poor guy’s jaw.

  “Listen to yourselves.

  Bickering like little kids.

  Unbelievable.”

  Captain Haiku said this from the back of the restaurant, and it was clear from his desperate, caged animal eyes that he knew that it was time for him to make his exit. At the same time, almost all of the tourists seated at their tables collectively snapped out of their shock and erupted into a frenzied panic. They practically stampeded for the front door and blocked our view of Captain Haiku who was making a break for the kitchen. His henchmen, like most henchmen are prone to do, just gave up as soon as they saw that their employer was running away and probably wouldn’t be paying them in the near future.

  “My Syllabullies…

  Don’t surrender! Kill them all!

  Leave no survivors!”

  Captain Haiku yelled as he pushed through the swinging doors of the kitchen, and stopped for a second to raise his musket at us and the charging mob of terrified tourists.

  “Syllabullies? You call your henchmen ‘Syllabullies’? Come on, man. I thought you were a writer,” Insight said, and she pinched the barrel of his gun shut with her telekinesis from across the room. She wasn’t scared of the gun even a little…she was having fun.

  “Form of…a wedgie! Shape of…public embarrassment!” Mr. Mercurial shouted as he stretched a spindly metallic arm across the room and through the throngs of pushing and shoving people exiting The Lair in a disorderly fashion. He snaked his arm around and behind Captain Haiku, and gave the verse spouting villain a wedgie so severe that it probably scarred him for life.

  “Seriously bro, we saw him first, we’re on top of this,” Joe Metal said, and he pointed a finger at Captain Haiku. Captain Haiku winced and dropped his useless gun, Joe Metal flicked his wrist…and vodka sputtered out of his index finger and drizzled onto the floor.

  “Apparently,” I said, and Captain Haiku, who looked like he wouldn’t sit right for a month because of the superhuman wedgie, shuffled into the kitchen of The Lair.

  “Ah shit, this thing’s always lagging, hold on, I got him now, I got him,”
Joe Metal said and he tracked Captain Haiku with his index finger as the kitchen doors swung back and forth. A packed herd of tourists bottlenecked at the doors of the restaurant while Joe Metal’s exoskeleton hummed, the octagon shaped ports in its stainless steel surface glowed, and he followed the bolting Captain Haiku with his finger.

  A father shepherding his family out of the restaurant accidentally bumped into Joe Metal’s shoulder right as he fired a concentrated stream of sound waves from the tip of his armored finger. There was a deafening blast like the thrum of a hundred thousand bass guitars rocking the same deep power chord all at once. Joe Metal’s arm was jerked to the left and the powerful sonic blast that would have knocked Captain Haiku out and probably damaged his hearing permanently fired wild and shattered one of the glass tubes filled with bubbling colored water. Shards of glass flew everywhere. Hands flew up to cover ears, and women screamed. Green water burst out of the tube and rained down all over everyone in The Lair.

  “Fucking amateurs,” I muttered under my breath, and I wiped colored water out of my eyes. I jumped onto a table, then onto the shoulders of one of the Syllabullies, and I launched myself off of him and towards the still swinging kitchen doors. I rocketed through the air and just narrowly missed a papier mâché death ray hanging from the ceiling. I landed in front of the kitchen doors and, not sure what was waiting for me behind them, I slowly pushed through the swinging doors.

  “Superheroes. Hah.

  More like some super-lushes.

  You kids fight like drunks.”

  Captain Haiku stood at the far end of the kitchen near a back door. He had a knife to the throat of one of The Lair’s chefs.

  “Captain Haiku…don’t do this.” I had only been a superhero for a year. I didn’t have any training whatsoever. It suddenly hit me that I was totally unprepared for a situation like this where one wrong word could cost someone their life. Also, Captain Haiku was right. I had been drinking a little bit before going out on patrol.

  “Here’s how this will go: