Memoirs of a Crimefighter

by Seth Jacob

  “Pretty sure that’s our line, kid,” Mr. Mercurial said, and his arms melted into long silver ropes that bound Dr. Delusion.

  “You idiots couldn’t just stick to fighting bush league supervillains, could you? That’s what you fuckers are good at, not this shit. Not the fucking business. I’m telling you right now, The Punster will make you fucks disappear. It’ll be like you never even existed,” Dr. Delusion snarled at us while Mr. Mercurial tightened his silvery grip on him.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  –

  “To the New Millennials!”

  Joe Metal raised his glass of champagne to toast our month of success against The Punster’s highly organized crime spree. Insight, Mr. Mercurial and I raised our own glasses. It felt good to take a night off after weeks of hard work to obstruct The Punster’s machinations. It felt good to just hang out like we used to in Joe Metal’s apartment.

  “I dunno about ‘New’ Millennials. I think we’ve still got a lot of work to do, but fuck it, I’ll toast anyway,” I said. We clinked our glasses together. Joe downed his glass of champagne in one quick motion. When he came up for air, the look on his face had changed from celebration to worry.

  “Uh…I think there’s something you should see, Spectacle,” he said. He was frantically scanning the social media feeds that his armor leaked into his nervous system.

  “You should sit down. Fuck me, I think maybe I should sit down,” Joe said. We walked over to his couch and plopped down on it. A metal plate on the shoulder of Joe’s armor pivoted to reveal an opening where a small projector flipped up out of his exoskeleton. A Youtube video projected onto the blank wall of Joe’s apartment where a TV normally would be. The Punster appeared with a warm, friendly smile on his face.

  “God damn it,” I said before Joe had even started playing the video.

  “Hi there, folks. I’m The Punster, or rather, I was in another life. You probably haven’t heard of me, but I used to be a supervillain many years ago. The key phrase there is ‘used to be’,” The Punster said. He was wearing a purple wool cardigan and khaki pants, and he was sitting in a regular office chair with a black wall behind him. There was nothing that could give away his location.

  “For some time now, a young, confused superhero named The Spectacle has been obsessed with me. Back when I was still working, I had something of a rivalry with his father, a superhero who called himself Jack Titan. Well, I’m afraid to say that Jack Titan passed away due to a tragic overdose of SUHP, and The Spectacle seems to blame me for that,” The Punster said with an extremely sympathetic look on his wrinkled face.

  He looked away from the camera and paused, and his gray eyebrows arched in concern. His tone of voice, his body language, his facial expression, even his purple wool sweater…everything about him screamed sympathetic grandpa, not psychotic, murderous supervillain. The Punster was a hell of a performer.

  “I understand that this is a very hard time for the young man. I feel for him…I remember what I went through when I lost my own father. But I had nothing to do with Jack Titan’s death, that I can promise you. I’ve been retired for years, and not a day goes by that I don’t regret my life as a costumed criminal. I was a weak, pathetic man who broke the law to feel bigger than I was. I was sick, and I hurt people, and I can’t begin to express how deeply sorry I am for my actions in that time of my life,” The Punster said.

  “Thank god I had just enough sense to quit before I got myself killed or worse, got someone else killed. And I’ve been an honest businessman ever since. I’ve been extremely fortunate. I’ve made more money as a legitimate businessman than I ever did as a ridiculous costumed criminal…but The Spectacle, he’s infatuated with me. He thinks I killed his father, and I’m not ashamed to say that he’s scaring me. I’m afraid for my life,” The Punster said.

  “This is complete bullshit,” I said.

  “That’s why I’m offering one million dollars for the capture of The Spectacle. I don’t want to see the boy hurt or killed, I just want him to get the help that he needs,” The Punster said. Despite his convincing performance, I noticed the smallest hint of the same demented smile I saw when he had me tied up in the Flasked Crusader.

  “Everyone deserves a second chance. I’m willing to spare no expense to help The Spectacle. Every day that he runs free, threatening myself and my family, I’ll add one hundred thousand dollars to the million. Please, help me save the son of an old friend who passed away. Help me make it up to Jack Titan, who I never got a chance to repay for helping me when I was a dangerous, misguided young man. Thank you so much for your time, and God bless,” The Punster said, and the video stopped. It already had over a million hits.

  “Wow. You gotta hand it to him…this Punster guy has got massive balls,” Mr. Mercurial said.

  “Yeah…I know you guys don’t want to hear this right now, but this video, it’s all over the internet. People are going batshit about it…you’re trending, bro,” Joe Metal said.

  “Yeah, great. I’m trending.”

  “This is not good, man. Any time you show your face, you’re gonna be mobbed by people trying to get that reward money,” Insight said.

  “Yeah, yeah I am.”

  “Maybe we should take a break for a while? You know, lay low for a little bit,” Joe Metal said. His eyes darted back and forth as he pored through a sea of articles, video responses, tumblr posts, and tweets all about The Punster’s farce of a video.

  “No. This doesn’t change anything. This just proves that The Punster is getting desperate. He’ll try anything to slow us down. We have to keep at it. We’re gonna nail The Punster to the wall, it’s only a matter of time,” I said. I gulped down some champagne and tried to convince myself that I was right.

  –

  Insight didn’t know what was inside the eighteen wheeler, but she saw enough for us to assume that The Punster was going to make an outrageous amount of money from whatever it was carrying. She tried to peer inside the trailer that the truck was towing, but there was overwhelming psychic pain connected to whatever was in there. She said that it was like trying to stare at the sun to count the flames. All she could tell us was that Mistress Gorgon and her Harpies were escorting the freight to the airport, and if The Punster put her, one of the most dangerous superhumans alive, in charge of this, it had to be of utmost importance to him.

  “Fleece Shipping. He’s not even trying to be subtle with the puns anymore,” I said as we looked down at the eighteen wheeler from the rooftop of a ten story building. The truck was marked “Fleece Shipping” with a cartoon sheep winking above the name of the fake company, and it was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. Fleece, as in to steal. The old bastard just couldn’t help himself.

  “My armor’s got a visual on Mistress Gorgon. She’s in the cab with three of her Harpies,” Joe Metal said.

  “Can you see what they’re carrying in the back? I’m sorry guys, every time I try to look in there, I’m getting telepathic feedback like crazy,” Insight said.

  “No, no they’ve got it heavily shielded. I’m picking up some vague heat signatures but still, they’ve just got so much thick metal on that thing that it’s hard to say what it could be,” Joe Metal said, squinting as he tried to decipher the readings his armor’s cameras supplied him.

  “What’s the play here, Spectacle?” Mr. Mercurial asked me, and I waited for a punchline that never came.

  “Uh, what?” I said after a few seconds of anticipating his inevitable joke.

  “I mean, how do you want to approach this?” Mr. Mercurial asked. My three teammates stared at me while I paused. The look of focus that they had, and in particular Mr. Mercurial’s seriousness, surprised me. I had an abrupt moment of clarity. For the first time, I felt like I was a part of a team of competent, responsible adults. For the first time, I felt like an honest to god grown up.

  “We could just have Joe and Insight lift that trailer right off the cab…but if it has something dangerous, some sort
of supertech inside, it could blow and cause a lot of damage,” I said.

  “I could slip down there and melt through the cracks of the trailer door, try to do a little recon and figure out what’s inside,” Mr. Mercurial offered.

  “No, that’s no good. I read on Mistress Gorgon’s wiki that those snakes on her head, their tongues have really great senses of smell. She’d smell your metallic body odor before you even touched that trailer,” Joe Metal said.

  “Metallic body odor? Yeah, you smell great stewing inside that sweat factory you call armor,” Mr. Mercurial said with a smile. Joe elbowed him in his liquid metal shoulder which rippled with the playful nudge.

  “I wish there was another way to do it…but I think we’re gonna have to go down there and tackle Mistress Gorgon head on,” I said, watching the truck plod through the rush hour traffic.

  “Look…I know she’s powerful, and dangerous, and honestly, pretty scary. But we can do this. I know we can. We survived The Immaterial Man, and she’s on the same level as him. And I wouldn’t want to go down there with anyone but you guys backing me up. I mean that,” I said. I looked back down at the truck and its winking sheep logo.

  “Enough of the corny pep talks man. Let’s do this thing,” Mr. Mercurial said and his silver smile widened.

  The stoplight in front of the Fleece Shipping truck turned green as I jumped down into the middle of the intersection. One of the Harpies that tried to murder me in the Z Ray Lounge was behind the wheel of the vehicle, and Mistress Gorgon was sitting in the passenger seat of the truck next to her. Mistress Gorgon did look stunning in her elegantly designed, black cocktail dress, but she did not look happy to see me. Her marble eyes filled with anger, and the tangle of spaghetti-thin, black snakes that was her hair convulsed and writhed on top of her head.

  The Harpy threw her door open and hopped out of the cab with her fists glowing red hot with superhuman power, but it wasn’t her that concerned me. Mistress Gorgon stepped out of the passenger side of the cab, her black stiletto heels click clacking on the asphalt, and the snakes above her beautiful but enraged face arched toward me with their jaws unhinged. The rush hour traffic behind the truck shed any pretense of civility at the sight of her. Drivers frantically gunned their engines and raced through the light. Cars swerved in front of each other and cut each other off and tires squealed and horns beeped erratically like Morse code and I was almost run over by a freaked out soccer mom in a minivan, and Mistress Gorgon…she just stood there in the crosswalk seething.

  “Your father would be so disappointed in you,” Mistress Gorgon spit at me. Her reptilian tresses hissed, and then they spewed blue flames at me.

  “Spectacle, I’ve got this Harpy covered,” Joe called out to me as I jumped up and over the blue inferno. Joe jumped in front of the Harpy’s blast of searing red energy and saved me from being incinerated by the rose colored plasma as I dodged Mistress Gorgon’s fire. Two more Harpies piled out of the back of the truck cab, and Insight and Mr. Mercurial landed on the street prepared for them.

  More sky blue flames gushed at me from the open mouths of Mistress Gorgon’s snakes, and I jumped out of the way. I felt some of the stubble on my face singe down to my cheek as I charged at Mistress Gorgon and threw a punch at her tan, dimpled cheek. She caught my gloved fist in her hand like catching a wiffle ball. Two of my knuckles broke in her hand as she squeezed her finely manicured, black fingernails into my fist.

  “You idiot man-child. We gave you every chance to stay out of this and save yourself, and you still couldn’t do the right thing,” Mistress Gorgon said, her marble eyes lighting up like white headlights.

  “You, of all people, don’t get to tell me about doing ‘the right thing’,” I shouted. I grabbed her wrist with my free hand. I pivoted on the balls of my feet, yanked her by the arm, and chucked Mistress Gorgon over my shoulder and into oncoming traffic as hard as I could, like I was pitching a fastball. She smashed into a sports car that was racing through the intersection and no doubt trying to get as far as possible from the superhuman street fight in progress. The entire front end of the car was demolished as she flew into it, the airbags inside the car went off and the middle aged driver was knocked out from the impact, and Mistress Gorgon, she stood up from the totaled car with not so much as a broken nail.

  “Really. That was your best, Spectacle? You’re not even close to the man that your father was,” Mistress Gorgon jeered. She stalked toward me, those black high heels click clacking on the street, the snakes on her head squirming and drooling blue fire off of their forked tongues, and behind her, I saw that my teammates were preoccupied with fighting her three superpowered Harpies.

  “Punster doesn’t want us to kill you…but he didn’t say I couldn’t give you third degree burns over your entire body,” Mistress Gorgon said, and those serpents gushed a blue bonfire right at my face. I fell backwards onto the street and lay there as the blue fire blazed over me. The heat was unbearable, my eyes teared up, my face was drenched in sweat, and I rolled across the ground and sprung to my feet. I heaved my fist right between her marble eyes with everything I had, and the impact cracked louder than thunder. A little hairline fracture was on her forehead when I pulled my fist back, like her beautiful, ageless flesh was made of rock, and she laughed as the fracture fused back together almost instantly.

  “You know you could have made millions, right? If you had just listened to reason. If you had just made the mature decision and taken The Punster’s, honestly, his overly generous offer to work with us, all of this could have been avoided. I may have even kept you as a pet,” Mistress Gorgon’s eyes glowed like spotlights, and my feet and legs felt ice cold. I glanced down and saw that they were encased in her supra-stone and rooted to the ground. I was a marble statue below the knees. I wrenched at my legs, but I couldn’t move an inch.

  “Your father would have taken that offer without blinking, Spectacle. He would have been so disappointed in you. Speaking of blinking, you’ll want to keep your eyes closed for this next part. Punster wouldn’t want you blinded with melted corneas for whatever games he’s got planned for you,” Mistress Gorgon said, and the gaping maws of those snakes salivated with blue embers. I closed my eyes, and thought, “Well, at least I tried.”

  I heard a bang. When I opened my eyes, I saw that a pick up truck had driven into Mistress Gorgon at full speed and knocked her out of the intersection and onto the sidewalk. The driver, a thirty something construction worker, wasted no time pointing a shotgun at my face through his window. Dumbfounded, I raised my hands in the air. Several more construction workers hopped out of the back of his pick up carrying shovels and hammers and wrenches and screwdrivers. They surrounded me and went to work on the stone.

  “Get him in the truck, let’s go, chip away that rock. Let’s go boys, there’s almost 2 mil on the line here,” the driver said.

  “Don’t move or I’ll blow your head off,” the driver added as the men hit the supra-stone as hard as they could with their tools.

  I saw Mistress Gorgon was stunned on the sidewalk where she landed, but she was slowly getting up. Glowing white rock chipped off of me, and I felt every blow pound in my legs as the men desperately hammered and chiseled away at the stone. I saw my teammates above the Fleece Shipping truck fighting the superpowered Harpy henchwomen in the air. They were gaining the upper hand, they were doing a very good job of protecting the people trapped in traffic, but they were too engaged with the Harpies to divert attention to the recovering Mistress Gorgon.

  “I’m serious, kid, I’ll shoot,” the driver said. I had started laughing and I hadn’t even realized it. I felt the supra-stone loosening while the men worked hard for money The Punster would never give them. Mistress Gorgon was up now, and she was stalking into the street and towards me. Her hair of serpents spit up a crown of blue flame, and the click clack, click clack of her heels got louder with every step.

  I grabbed two hammers so fast that the men couldn’t even see it happenin
g, and I brought them down on the supra-stone crusted over my legs. The stone and the hammers shattered like panes of glass, the driver pulled the trigger, but I was already gone. I was already leaping in the air above him and arcing down at the Serpent Seductress. Mistress Gorgon’s marble eyes barely had time to flutter wide with shock as my fist clashed with her face.

  She reeled from the blow, but those snakes didn’t even flinch. Blue fire roared by me as I bounced to her side and bombarded Mistress Gorgon with punches, as many blows as I could throw and as fast as I could throw them. My knuckles screamed in pain, my shins that I had just hit tremendously hard with hammers felt like they were going to buckle under the pressure of my rapid bobbing and bounding around her flaming snake locks, and my right forearm blistered with burning heat as blue fire caught on my costume jacket sleeve.

  “Please, this is childish. Just give up. You couldn’t hurt me if your life depended on it, and it does. I’ve had more of a work out having sex with your father,” Mistress Gorgon said as dozens of branching cracks in her tan face sealed up almost instantly. Fire spread down my arm, and she smiled. Those snakes on her head hiccuped tiny blue mushroom clouds as they prepared for one last blast of fire. I ripped off my costume jacket and threw it on her head right as the fire came pouring out of their mouths.

  My jacket trapped the flood of fire on top of her head, and her entire skull went up in flames. Mistress Gorgon’s shrill shrieks of pain are branded in my memory, and by the time she finally got the blinding, burning jacket off of her scorched face, Insight, Joe Metal, and Mr. Mercurial were standing behind me with unconscious Harpies at their feet. I still can’t believe it as I’m writing it now, but Mistress Gorgon, a supervillain with half a century of experience, a superhuman thought to be one of the most dangerous women alive, the infamous Serpent Seductress, turned and ran.

  She bolted into thick crowds of pedestrians on the sidewalk, knocking them to the ground and freezing them in their tracks with her supra-stone glare, and we were right behind her. She was fast, but not fast enough to lose us. We almost had her.