Memoirs of a Crimefighter

by Seth Jacob

  A swarm of people with dollar signs in their eyes herded around me. They grabbed onto my costume shirt, they clutched at my arms, they got in my face and screamed at me to leave that nice, old Punster man alone, and one woman even tried to pepper spray me but thankfully Insight telekinetically took away her mace. My teammates tried to pry them off of me, they held back flying fists and below the belt kicks, and I couldn’t risk using my super strength without hurting these stupid but innocent people. I couldn’t do anything but watch Mistress Gorgon get away.

  “Don’t help me, I’ll be fine, go after Gorgon,” I tried to tell my teammates, but they couldn’t hear me over the drone of these locusts trying their best to beat the shit out of me and collect their two million. By the time we got them off of me, Mistress Gorgon was gone. She probably used the same teleport device that she had used to get away from Ultra Lady at the Z-Ray Lounge.

  “This is unbelievable. We were so close.”

  “…You’re kidding, right? We’re alive! We just fought Mistress Gorgon, and we’re not charred corpses. Maybe I’m just a glass half full kind of guy, but in my mind, that’s a big win,” Mr. Mercurial said as we all walked back to the Fleece Shipping truck. It was parked in front of the streetlight and holding up traffic.

  “Yeah, I guess…”

  “Also, we stopped them from moving whatever product they’ve got in this truck. That should put a big dent in Punster’s bottom line,” Joe Metal said.

  “I really don’t like the energy around that truck. It reeks of hardcore bad vibes,” Insight said. The back doors of the eighteen wheeler had another cartoon sheep winking in an almost mocking way. It loomed over me as I cautiously unlatched the doors and opened them, ready for anything that could be inside. Light poured into the dark trailer, and the stench of urine and vomit and sweat poured out.

  There were over a hundred young women and children packed into the back of the trailer like sardines. They were shackled to the floor, and they had black bags over their heads. Many of them were emaciated. Mistress Gorgon was running a human trafficking ring of monstrous proportions.

  “Oh my god,” Insight gasped. Her eyes strobed with purple telepathic energy, and the mental suffering that burst through those doors and washed over her was so powerful, so profound that she passed out. Joe Metal caught her as she fell.

  I climbed up into the trailer. I tore apart the chains of the first person I came to, a young boy who looked like he couldn’t have been older than ten. I pulled the black bag off of his head, and he screamed. He screamed the hopeless, desperate scream of an animal that’s realized it’s going to the slaughterhouse.

  “It’s okay…it’s going to be okay,” I said, and the kid looked up at me, his huge eyes blinking and streaming tears. The kid hugged me.

  “It’s okay…I’ve got you,” I said, and I looked to Joe Metal behind me. His face was contorted in anger and disgust. Mr. Mercurial had a hand over his mouth, and he just kept shaking his head.

  We waited with the truck until the authorities came. We watched police officers help over one hundred women and children out of the truck trailer and out of their restraints. It was clear that Mistress Gorgon had been holding them captive for weeks. The wounds on their wrists and ankles from tight handcuffs, their starved and dehydrated condition, and most of all the look in their eyes, that stare that said everything I didn’t want to know, it was all evidence of the appalling, inhuman way that Mistress Gorgon had treated them.

  “This is too much,” I said to Joe Metal while children Mistress Gorgon and The Punster were going to sell into slavery were led into police vans that would take them all to child services.

  “Yeah…I know what you mean, man. I was still thinking The Punster was sort of a joke, but this,” Joe trailed off.

  “No, you don’t understand. This is too much,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Mr. Mercurial asked.

  “I’m going to kill him for this,” I answered.

  –

  It took Insight almost a week to recover from the overload of psychic suffering that spilled out of that trailer. It wasn’t a fun week. I was trapped in my apartment because any time I showed my masked face in public, people attacked me for the warrant that The Punster had promised them. Without Insight’s telepathic abilities, we had no way of predicting where The Punster and his cabal of supervillains would strike next. It was a week of waiting, waiting while Mr. Mercurial took care of Insight who gradually got better, waiting to see what fresh hell The Punster would unleash next, and waiting for hordes of armed maniacs to storm my front door for money The Punster would never give them.

  The Punster’s bullshit warrant was up to almost four million dollars by the time Insight was feeling better. When she had finally recovered from the overdose of human suffering that had left her practically catatonic, she had good news. Insight had a vision. She saw The Punster breaking into the Kirby Museum of Superhero History. She saw him in the “Supervillain Weaponry” exhibit. She saw him stealing the motorized mandibles of his Antdroid, the same Antdroid that he had tried to kill my father with decades ago. She had a vision of The Punster, just a demented old man with no superpowers, breaking into that museum alone and unarmed. It was too good to be true.

  “This place used to be a prison for superhumans before they converted it into a museum. It’s designed to keep superpowered psychos in…it’s pretty much a fortress. All we have to do is keep our guard up on the entrance, and he’ll be trapped in here with us,” I said to my teammates as we stood in the main room of the museum.

  The old Superb 6 satellite headquarters was above us, suspended from the ceiling on wires and gently spinning as if it was still in geosynchronous orbit. The museum had been closed and evacuated, and it was so quiet in there. My voice echoed off of its walls. We were surrounded by the largest collection of superhero artifacts in the world. Floors that used to be lined with prison cells circled the walls of the building all the way up to the ceiling, and each of them was packed full of superhero history.

  One of the floors above us showcased the costumes of superheroes that had died fighting to protect innocent people from psychopaths just like The Punster, superheroes who had made the ultimate sacrifice. Their uniforms, brightly colored and pristinely displayed under glass, looked down at us as we waited for The Punster. And the emptiness, the eerie silence of that shrine to costumed crimefighting history, it was almost like we were alone in a church. It felt like we were defending hallowed ground.

  “Why would he do this? It seems so stupid to try to come in here all by himself to steal this stupid pun themed piece of garbage. Especially when he’s been so careful to keep himself hidden so far,” Joe Metal said. His eyes rapidly moved back and forth as he watched security camera footage that his armor was tapped into.

  “Because he’s crazy,” I said.

  “Are you sure about this, Insight?” Mr. Mercurial asked.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Insight replied. You could still hear in her voice how angry she was at The Punster. What he and Mistress Gorgon did to those people was a crime against humanity, and Insight had felt every moment of their trauma as if it was her chained up in the back of that eighteen wheeler for weeks on end.

  “What’s to stop him from using The Specialist’s tech to teleport in, and teleport out? I mean, that’s what I’d do. If I were a diabolical archcriminal. Which I’m totally not,” Mr. Mercurial said with that infuriating yet somehow lovable silver grin of his.

  “I’ve got my armor set up to detect teleporter signals…if he teleports in, my armor will broadcast the exact opposite teleport signature which should cancel out their teleport tech. Still nothing on the security cams, by the way,” Joe said.

  “That all sounds great, but I still don’t feel good about this. Why would The Punster attack this place all by himself for some old toy he used back in his glory days? Seems like, I don’t know, beneath him. Doesn’t feel right,” Mr. Mercurial said.

  “You d
on’t get it. You’re thinking about this like a rational person, Mr. Mercurial. We’re not dealing with a rational person. The Punster is obsessed with the idea of the superhero/supervillain rivalry. He’s romanticized it. He’s built it up in his head to be this glorious game between two opponents. He wants to steal back his Antdroid parts because he wants a trophy that symbolizes his victory over my father, and over me. That’s what started all of this. The Punster needs his trophy,” I said.

  “No one’s ever accused me of being a rational person before, but I think I get your point,” Mr. Mercurial said, and his silver smile stretched even wider.

  “He should be here any second. I can feel it, man. Everything looked just like this in my vision,” Insight said anxiously.

  “There’s no way you could be wrong about this?” Mr. Mercurial asked again, his smile weakening a little.

  “No. I mean, sometimes my telepathic premonitions are off by little details, but nothing big enough to give us any trouble. It is possible to trick my telepathy, but you’d need a, like, impossibly powerful will to pull that off,” Insight said skeptically.

  “Whoa…what? Trick your telepathy? I don’t like the sound of that,” Mr. Mercurial said, and his chrome smile shrank even more.

  “It’s not an issue. The Punster would have to meditate for days nonstop, literally over twenty four hours of uninterrupted concentration to transmit a false vision this vivid, and I just don’t think we have to worry about that sort of––” Insight was interrupted by the glow of teleportation energy all around the museum. Even before they had started to materialize out of the soft white teleportation mist, I knew. I knew that we had done exactly what The Punster wanted. We underestimated him.

  The Punster appeared in front of me. The expression on his wrinkled face was the height of smugness. The Immaterial Man blinked into existence to his right, and you could almost make out a smile on his hazy head as his whiny disembodied howls of laughter scraped the air. The rotten egg smell of his foggy body was choking. Mistress Gorgon materialized to The Punster’s left, the snakes on her head hissing and salivating with dribbling blue fire. I made eye contact with those marble eyes of hers, and they screamed “I told you so.” The Abnormalite appeared behind us, and now we were surrounded as that eight foot tall, neon pink skinned, four armed, eight eyed behemoth of a man towered over us, breathing heavily out of his fanged mouth.

  And as if the three most powerful superhumans alive wasn’t overkill enough, dozens of lower tier costumed criminals flickered into the room through the soft white glow of the teleportation energy. Captain Haiku, Professor Dinosaur and his Henchasaurs, The Lacrosse Assassin, Master Boson and his Ninjatoms, Armadillotron and his armadillodrones, Dragon General in full military regalia with his huge scaly wings beating gusts of wind throughout the room and accompanied by his Reptilian Guard, even The Whimsy, the first supervillain I ever fought, they were all there along with a horde of C-list supervillains. And then came The Punster’s Goons, at least a hundred of those white hazmat suit wearing, gas masked thugs marched in through the entrance with their goo spray nozzles raised high like rifles at a firing squad. When the glow of the teleportation energy faded, the museum hall was crowded from wall to wall with an army of supervillains and henchmen.

  “Kill them all,” The Punster ordered.

  Chapter 16: Nobody Can Go to Jupiter

  One night when I was four years old, I couldn’t sleep. My mom used to read me stories or make me a snack when I couldn’t fall asleep. I used to get out of bed late at night and wander around our dark house until I found her. She was never mad at me for getting up out of bed, even though it was way past my bed time. She said she had trouble sleeping sometimes too. One night when I was four years old, I couldn’t sleep, but my mom died when I was three, and I didn’t know what to do.

  I haven’t thought about that night for a long time. I’m pretty sure I blocked it out. It came back to me crystal clear when I started writing these memoirs, like it was always there, tucked away in some locked drawer in my mind, just waiting for someone to find the key and open it up. I remember walking in the dark hallways of our house and passing framed photos of my family on the walls. I remember passing the kitchen and the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink which my father would let build up and then aggressively clean them all in one crazed session of scrubbing. In hindsight, it’s easy to say he was probably going through periods of manic depression, but at the time, all I understood was that the kitchen stunk.

  I remember, most of all, being afraid as I tip toed through our quiet house. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the dark, or the scariness of a big empty house late at night, although those fears were a part of it. It was really this fear that no one was looking for me. I wasn’t getting away with being up past my bed time…no one knew that I was out of bed when I wasn’t supposed to be, and no one cared. It was this gut wrenching idea that the person who loved me the most was gone, and the rest of the universe didn’t care if I was alive or dead. I was on my own, and no help was on the way.

  “Hey…hey buddy, what are you doing out of bed?”

  My dad noticed me wandering around the house just as he opened the door of his study. He was a big man, a lumbering, broad shouldered guy with a thick, curly brown beard who really did look like a Titan straight out of Greek mythology…but I remember that on that night, he looked small. He was propped up against the frame of the doorway as light flooded out of his study and into the shadowy hallways of our home. His shoulders were slumped, his head sagged downward toward his chest, and he looked like he could barely stand.

  “I can’t sleep,” I said.

  “Yeah…me too.”

  We stood there looking at each other for a few seconds. Then he straightened up, as if he just realized how unusually tired and weak he looked slouched against the door frame.

  “Come in here for a second…I want to talk to you,” he said, and turned to walk back into his dimly lit office with its mahogany paneled walls without waiting for me to respond. I walked into the study. It was a room I was never allowed to be in before, and although I didn’t know what it was then, the smell of scotch washed over me.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up, buddy?” he asked as he poured more scotch from a decanter into his glass.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? When I was your age, I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to be the first man on Jupiter. I wanted it so bad. I wanted to be the first guy walking around on that big red spot on Jupiter, I wanted my face on cereal boxes. A few years later, I said that in science class. The teacher, she laughed at me, and she explained to me that Jupiter isn’t like an enormous chunk of rock out there in space. It’s this big ball of gas floating out there,” he said. I just stared at him.

  “What I’m trying to say is that nobody can go to Jupiter, buddy,” he said, and drank the scotch and grimaced. Little beads of glistening yellow liquid clung to his beard and hung there like alcoholic Christmas ornaments. He didn’t say anything for a while. He just swirled the scotch around in his glass, and I remember being profoundly confused by the whole situation.

  “Do you miss mom?” he asked. I didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah. Me too,” he said, and then he drank the rest of the scotch in his glass. He poured himself some more before crouching down in front of me.

  “I want you to promise me something. Will you promise me something, buddy?”

  “Okay…”

  “Remember how…remember your mother and me, we used to say you’re special. You can do anything, you can be anything because, because you’re special you know? Do you remember?” He was slurring a lot. I thought maybe he was sick.

  “Yes.”

  “Here’s the thing, son. You’re not special. No one is. I want you to promise me that you’ll remember that, because it’s the truth, and I don’t want to lie to you,” he said, and I started to say something, but he interrupted me before I could.

&nb
sp; “I lie to you all the time, and I just, I just can’t about this. Because I thought I was special. I was arrogant and stupid and, and, and I thought I could just keep antagonizing him. I kept pushing and pushing and pushing him and I thought there was nothing a little nerd like him could do to me, and I was wrong and now she’s…she’s—” and he turned away from me because he was crying, and I started crying too. I never saw my dad cry before or since, not even at my mom’s funeral. I know what he was trying to tell me now, but when I was four years old, I thought he was talking about God.

  He turned back to me, letting his half empty glass slip out of his meaty hand and spill scotch all over the nice Persian carpet that I was never allowed to walk on before that night. He put both of his huge hands on my tiny shoulders.

  “I want you to promise me…promise me you won’t trick yourself into thinking you’re special. Always take the easy way. Don’t take the hard way because the hard way gets you hurt, and I never want to see you hurt. Have fun…have as much fun as possible and don’t worry about being special. Play by the rules. Always play their game and have as much fun as you can. Don’t try to break the rules. Do you understand?” he asked with tears swelling in his eyes, and I had no idea what he was talking about or what he wanted me to say to him.

  “I know this is hard, buddy, I know. I’m only saying this because I love you so much and I don’t want to see you hurt, okay? Nobody can go to Jupiter, son, so don’t even try. Promise me.”

  Chapter 17: The Museum Massacre or: The Last Stand of The Millennials

  The main hall of the museum exploded into a chaotic swirl of crisscrossing energy blasts of all different colors. The eardrum rattling noise was so overpowering that I couldn’t hear anything but a deafening buzz filling my skull. Insight threw up a purple telekinetic bubble around the four of us just before Mistress Gorgon’s hellfire could incinerate us along with a rainbow of searing energy blasts. The sea of fire roared around us like we were inside of a sky blue sun. Insight screamed and her ears and nose gushed blood as her telekinetic field crackled and warped under the strain of enough heat to liquefy granite. I looked at Joe Metal, and then at Mr. Mercurial, and we didn’t need to say anything. We knew Insight couldn’t hold the field up for much longer. We knew that this was it.