Memoirs of a Crimefighter

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Memoirs of a Crimefighter Page 15

by Seth Jacob


  Back off. Walk away slowly.

  Do it. Or he dies.”

  Captain Haiku pressed the knife against the throat of the young chef who couldn’t have been more than a year older than me. The kid looked at me from across the room, and I’ll never forget the terror in those eyes. I backed up a few steps.

  “I’ll do it. I will.

  I’m leaving. Don’t follow me.

  I swear, I’ll kill him.”

  Captain Haiku kept his eyes locked with mine as he walked backwards with the kid towards the exit. Metallic liquid dripped out of the ceiling behind Captain Haiku. He didn’t seem to notice. A few drops of the chrome liquid even dropped onto his pirate hat and rolled down onto his costume in glistening beads. Mr. Mercurial’s strange, silvery body formed out of the droplets of metallic liquid falling from the ceiling like it had been poured into a mold, and he raised a finger to his shiny smile and gave me the “shhh” signal.

  “Teen superhero.

  A two word contradiction.

  You’re no hero, kid.”

  Mr. Mercurial waited through this entire last haiku and mockingly counted the 5-7-5 syllables on his fingers behind Captain Haiku’s back, then his left arm dissolved into a morphing mass of metallic tendrils that surged onto Captain Haiku’s body. The knife in his hand was plucked away by a little strand of living liquid metal, the metal flowed over his entire body like a net of thin silver wires enveloping him, and Mr. Mercurial pushed the now free chef aside with his other arm.

  “You know, haikus are really supposed to be about, like, the seasons and nature and rose petals and stuff. This is supposed to be your schtick, and you’re not even doing it right, you clown,” Mr. Mercurial laughed as the metal of his dissolved arm trickled around Captain Haiku’s mouth and formed an improvised gag that prevented him from saying another one of his improvised poems. Joe Metal and Insight waltzed into the kitchen. Joe’s eyes flickered as he read tweets about Captain Haiku’s failed robbery of The Lair, and his hand danced as he typed on an invisible keyboard.

  “So looks like Mr. Mercurial took down Captain Haiku, that means The Obscure Crew beat him, bro. We get the warrant money…I’m already tweeting about it.”

  “Obscure Crew? That is easily the worst superhero team name I’ve ever heard,” I said, and I watched Mr. Mercurial’s flowing liquid form move from Captain Haiku’s mouth to envelop his nose. The ex-poet laureate struggled for a few seconds before passing out.

  “It’s too late bro, it’s official. ‘Obscure Crew just beat Captain Haiku at The Lair, video available later.’ Just blasted that out to the internet on all social media platforms,” Joe was really rubbing it in as his eyes rapidly scanned invisible websites that fed directly into his visual cortex from his exoskeleton armor. I had just met him, but I hated this guy.

  “Boys, boys, there’s no need for a pissing match,” Insight said as she levitated a bottle of champagne off of a shelf and into her hand. She put her arm around Mr. Mercurial, who was beaming from metal ear to metal ear, and she popped the cork out of the bottle of champagne with a little puff of purple telekinetic energy.

  “What’d you say your name was again, man? Spectator? Spectator, come over here, pose for a picture,” Insight insisted in a teasing way. She knew what my name was, and I was annoyed that she was fucking with me, but I stood with the two of them with Captain Haiku’s unconscious body anyway.

  “Joe, take a picture for the website,” Insight laughed, and arcs of her purple telekinetic energy guided champagne up and out of the bottle and into her mouth like the bubbling liquid was weightless. Octagon shaped ports on Joe Metal’s armor flashed as he took a few pictures of us standing together, and for the last picture, Insight telekinetically sprayed champagne all over the four of us until the bottle was empty.

  “We just had a team-up, gentlemen!”

  I went to the Domino Mask bar for the first time with Insight, Mr. Mercurial, and Joe Metal to celebrate the capture of the ever elusive Captain Haiku. I didn’t even want to go with them, but Insight persuaded me to join them in the “Obscure Crew” ritual of celebratory drinks. I think she may have even used a little telepathic peer pressure, but I’ve never asked her, and I don’t think I really want to know the answer. We were all under 21, but we got into the Domino Mask with no trouble at all. How do you check ID’s at a bar that caters exclusively to superheroes that have secret identities to protect?

  “I don’t know what your problem is, Spectacle. You’re lucky that we showed up. The Obscure Crew is the shit. We’re gonna be the next superteam on the cover of Teen Spandex. You’re lucky to even be connected with us at all, bro,” Joe Metal boasted as he poured vodka from a tube jutting out of his armor and into my glass.

  “I wish you’d stop saying that, Joe. We shouldn’t care about being on the front of some corporately owned, corrupt super-rag. That’s all an artificial social construct, man, it’s all illusion. We should want to be invited to be on that podcast Superhumanity, or to like, speak at TED or something,” Insight interjected, and then she went back to haggling over the price of SUHP from Silver Scribe, who was bartending at the Domino Mask and dealing a little SUHP on the side in those days.

  “Again, I’ve really got to stress this, Obscure Crew is a terrible name. And also, again, you guys cherrypicked the shit out of that fight with Captain Haiku. I had that locked down,” I said, and I choked down the vodka Joe poured for me.

  “I told you, Joe! I told you Obscure Crew was stupid. We should have gone with my team name idea, The Funny Bone Three. That’s much better,” Mr. Mercurial said enthusiastically with a massive metal smile stretching across his face. You could never tell when Mr. Mercurial was serious. He was pretty much always fucking with people to amuse himself.

  “Whatever, Spectacle. Maybe you had Captain Haiku beat, maybe you didn’t,” Joe Metal said without dignifying Mr. Mercurial’s interruption with a response beyond glaring at him for half a second. He poured vodka from the spigot in his armor directly into his mouth.

  “I totally did. You’re serious about your team though? You, Insight, and Mr. Mercurial?” I didn’t want to admit it, even to myself, but I was a little impressed by Joe’s ambition.

  “Yeah, bro. Look, it used to be that if you were a member of the Teen Superbs, you were pretty much on deck to join the Superb 6 when spots opened up. Now look at the Teen Superbs: they’re a total joke. Supra was never even a member of the Teen Superbs, and she was the last person to join the Superb 6. They don’t even think about Teen Superbs anymore for membership. That’s not the way the world works anymore…with the internet, anyone can get themselves noticed by the Superb 6,” Joe was getting excited, and he took a breath and another sip of his drink before continuing.

  “I’m trying to make the Obscure Crew like our generation’s Teen Superbs, you know? The way it used to be back in the day, pre-internet, when the Teen Superbs was the only way to break into the Superb 6. If we hustle now, if we really go crazy on social media and consistently produce content and relatable online personas, we got a shot at making the Superb 6 before we’re 30. Being a superhero is all about marketing, bro,” Joe was a little drunk, but he was passionate. He even briefly stopped scanning the invisible social media feeds that his armor streamed into his optic nerves while he made this pitch.

  “Our generation’s Teen Superbs. That’s interesting…the Teen Superbs of the Millennial Generation,” I took another drink of the vodka Joe poured for me. I remember thinking, even though I still disliked the three of them, that the concept was intriguing.

  “That’s what we should call ourselves…The Millennials. That’s much cooler than the Obscure Crew,” Mr. Mercurial chimed in. He stretched his lips into his beer like a long, living metal straw made out of his face, and I gagged while he glanced at me mischievously.

  “I don’t know about you, Spectacle, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting the Captain Haikus of this world. I want to be in the Superb 6. That’s w
here the money is, bro, not in getting cats out of trees and archenemies and all that bullshit. I want to get paid big to save the world while I’m still young,” Joe said, and then his eyes started flickering once again as he immersed himself in the stream of social media.

  “Amen to that, Joe. I mean, I dunno about all that internet stuff, but I want this team to be something special, man. I want it to be, like, a piece of art,” Insight smiled.

  “Like a fucking awesome band that blows everybody’s minds and changes their perspective about what music can be. I want us to be, like, a force for expanding consciousness in the crimefighting community. I want to get stoned out of my mind on SUHP with Sleight of Hand and talk to him about the 60’s, hippy era of superheroes, man. I want to party on the deck of the Superb 6 headquarters before I’m too old to make it look good,” Insight said, and her eyes lit up with sparkling purple telepathic energy.

  “To partying on the deck of the Superb 6 headquarters before we’re bald, and our knees hurt, and we complain a lot about people speeding, and our music preferences are decades out of date, and we wear velcro shoes with really high black socks!” Mr. Mercurial practically shouted in my ear, he raised his glass of beer high, and even Joe Metal couldn’t help but laugh. The four of us clinked our glasses together, and that’s how it all started.

  We drank the way that only the underage drink, with the feverish excitement that came with the chances of getting caught, and the reckless abandon of young people who had not yet learned that they won’t live forever. We danced for hours in the Domino Mask. I can still picture Joe Metal drunkenly doing the robot on the dance floor in his booze stained exoskeleton armor with Mr. Mercurial as they both laughed their asses off. I still think about the long, philosophical but slightly pretentious conversation I had with Insight about the nature of being a superhero in the 21st century. I remember how idealistic we were about superheroism, and how half of our talk took place telepathically in our intoxicated brains.

  To this day, I can still see Mr. Mercurial making me laugh until I couldn’t breathe while he morphed his silvery face into a perfect impression of Captain Haiku. I can still hear him coming up with haikus about porn stars off of the top of his silly, shiny head. I can see it all, as hazy as the pictures might be. I can see us drinking all night in the Domino Mask until they closed, I can see us drunkenly jumping and flying and stretching above the city streets, and I almost made an ambulance crash with a sloppy leap through an intersection. I can see us taking drops of SUHP in Joe Metal’s apartment. I distinctly remember the moment that I was sitting there, drunk and high out of my mind on SUHP while we watched old Superb 6 cartoons in Joe Metal’s place, when I realized that these people are awesome, and I loved being around them.

  Chapter 14: No Archenemies

  Master Boson is one of those supervillains who is distinguished not by his talent, of which he has none, but by the fact that he has an extraordinarily gifted lawyer. Only a little less than a year ago, The Millennials stopped Master Boson from robbing a liquor store and sent him on his way to jail. This was the same night that I found out my father died of a SUHP overdose, and it was also the same night that Master Boson’s lawyer got his client out of police custody on a technicality.

  Apparently, Master Boson’s electromagnetic powers disabled all the security cameras. There was no actual evidence of his participation in any crime, other than his terrible ninja mashed up with molecules costume, for which I have no doubt the fashion police would prosecute him to the fullest extent of sartorial law. A little less than a year later, The Millennials beat up Master Boson and his henchmen the Ninjatoms again, and sent them all on their merry way to jail, again. Afterwards, we had the obligatory drinks at the Domino Mask, again, and really, stopping Master Boson from robbing a pawn shop was just the thinnest of excuses to drink to absurd excess. This sort of thing is cute when you’re 19. Not so much when you’re 29.

  “I’m actually happy that he got out of jail so easy. It was just a matter of time before he went back to his small time robberies, and we got to catch him again and double our warrant money,” Joe Metal said to no one in particular as he sat at the bar of the Domino Mask and looked into his bottle of cheap beer. I sat there next to him looking into my own beer and feeling a strong sense of déja vu.

  “Fuck, I actually hope that lawyer of his gets him out of prison time so easy again. Catching Master Boson over and over again establishes a brand identity for our team that I can work with online. Maybe we can catch him next week, if we’re lucky,” Joe looked up from his beer, and his eyes scanned back and forth while he read through endless, invisible tweets that his armor leaked directly into his brain like a morphine drip.

  “Yeah. If we’re lucky.”

  The Domino Mask was packed that night. I hadn’t been there in the month since I met The Punster, and it seemed like a completely different place to me even though they had changed nothing about the cultivated look of dirtiness there. Young superheroes drank and talked and danced on the dance floor, and I could barely hear myself think. The dance floor was a gyrating mess of brightly colored spandex, and they all seemed so…relentlessly happy. There was an overwhelming air of satisfaction, like everyone there knew that they were fighting the good fight in their day jobs and they had earned a little time to blow off some steam. I remembered feeling that way once, but I didn’t anymore. Not while I knew that punning bastard was out there making every single person in the Domino Mask dance his hollow two-dimensional dance when they fought C-list supervillains, like shadow puppets fighting on the wall.

  “Joe, I’ve gotta talk to you about something.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you as well. About our social media strategy for The Millennials, I really think we should go with my idea to wire us all up with streaming video. 24/7 live streaming, POV video of each member of the team. It’s like I said bro, privacy is dead, and after it goes viral and gets insanely popular, we throw some ads in and just start fucking printing money. And you really need to step up your posting game—”

  “No, not that. I’ve gotta talk to you about something else, something really important. Outside.”

  The Domino Mask has an area outside that’s enclosed by a small fence, and on a good night it’s packed with superheroes smoking cigarettes and talking over the blaring music and each other. I’ve spent a lot of nights in that back area. I’ve wasted a lot of hours looking at the wooden fence plastered in graffiti and hastily scribbled drawings of silly things like Beyond Man’s head on Queen Quantum’s body and The Abnormalite riding a golden unicorn through a ring of fire. I’ve made a lot of happy memories in that dirty, cigarette butt littered back area.

  There were a few clusters of superheroes outside smoking as I stood in front of Insight, Mr. Mercurial, and Joe Metal. The three of them sat in front of me on this cheap wooden bench built into the graffiti coated fence. They were talking to each other about this article about Sleight of Hand’s third divorce in Spandex, and they were already deep in pregame mode for a party over at Crystallor’s new apartment.

  “Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and say no, no you can’t get a bigger cut of our profits, Spectacle,” Joe Metal said, and he freshened up his drink with a double shot of vodka from the spigot jutting out of his stainless steel armor.

  “…No, no I don’t want a bigger cut of The Millennials’ profits, Joe. That’s not what this is about…”

  “Okay, my turn to guess…you’re starting a twelve step program? Because seriously, I’m no teetotaler or anything, but you’ve been hitting it hard this past month,” Mr. Mercurial joked, and his perpetual smile wrinkled the tiniest bit into an expression that was very rare for him. It was the smallest hint of concern.

  “…No, no, nothing like that. It’s actually…this is gonna be hard to explain…”

  Insight looked up at me from her drink. Her eyes radiated purple, telepathic energy and pierced into mine for a split second. I could feel her on the borders of my m
ind, and that was all it took. Her normally care free, fun loving expression dissolved into a look of intense worry.

  “Oh my god, Spectacle. What’s wrong?”

  “Wait what? What is he thinking, Insight?” Joe Metal snapped out of scanning the various social media feeds.

  “I don’t really know how to say this…I don’t really like talking about private stuff like this…here’s the thing. My dad died, almost a year ago now. He didn’t like talking about private stuff either, apparently, because it turns out he was a superhero too. He was Jack Titan, you probably haven’t heard of him.”

  “…man, I’m so sorry. I had no idea,” Joe Metal said, and he put a heavy armored hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s alright.”

  “How did he die?” Mr. Mercurial asked.

  “SUHP overdose.”

  Insight gave me a hug. I could smell crystal SUHP smoke on her clothes. Joe Metal and Mr. Mercurial were quiet.

  “Are you okay?” Insight asked as she broke the hug. Her SUHP dilated eyes glittered with purple telepathic energy again, and I could feel her gauging my emotions.

  “I’m okay, actually. I mean, it fucked me up, in a big way, for a long time…but I’m getting better, I think.”

  “You should have talked to us, man,” Mr. Mercurial said this, and I could have sworn that I saw metallic tears welling up in his eyes…but his whole face was made of liquid metal, including his eyes, and it was really hard to tell if it was just my imagination or not.

  “Yeah…I didn’t really deal with it that well…I was sort of working through it in my own way, you know? And I had this box of all his superhero stuff, I was trying to learn about his life as Jack Titan and then it got stolen, and well…that’s what I wanted to talk to you guys about.”

  I took a deep breath, and then I continued.

  “This supervillain, The Punster…he was my dad’s archenemy. He’s this pun obsessed psychopath. My dad’s death, it sorta snapped him out of semi-retirement, and now he’s back in a big way. He’s organized all of the heavy hitter villains. I mean, all of them. The Abnormalite, The Immaterial Man, Dragon General, Dr. Delusion, Mistress Gorgon…and an army of other small time assholes.”

 

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