The Powers That Be: A Superhero Collection

by Swardstrom, Will

  I mentally ran through the three battles going on around me. One individual—the bright green flashy person—appeared to be able to move extremely fast and he (or she—they were really quick) opposed someone who exuded massive quantities of very sticky, unpoppable bubbles. Another fight included a hero who appeared to have incredible strength, opposing a menace who controlled magnetic forces. The third duo was Earthquake and an eight foot tall gopher.

  Janie, I said to myself, I sure hope you’re lucky today. You’re going to need it.

  I snapped back to reality as I felt the ground pulsate around me. The shaking intensified and I noticed cracks beginning to form in the pavement next to me. Bubbles dropped to the ground from the El tracks above, which I noticed was not the most stable structure, either. The El was beginning to sway back and forth. I heard a noise behind me and saw two cars back by the intersection with Jackson rise up off the ground and begin to advance towards my position near the city bus.

  If all that wasn’t bad enough, small metal objects began flying from everywhere, attracted to something above my head. I wasn’t just running into danger at every turn, it was seeking me out.

  I decided to get moving. I ran down the side of the delivery van and peeked around it. I could see a side street there, Princeton. It was filled with bubbles. I wouldn’t be able to get through there unless I somehow figured out how to climb over them. Too sticky. There would be no way through there. Princeton did not continue past Fargo as it was fenced off and inaccessible. I had to keep moving.

  A crack opened up in the street to my left and continued separating in that direction. I ran away from the crack, back the way I came. There had been another parking garage there…but not any more. Not after those reckless fools had made mincemeat of the city. The crack continued going towards the garage and left several key structural supports lacking support any longer. Almost like a house of cards, the parking garage suffered a partial collapse on the Fargo Street side.

  Meanwhile, the delivery van I’d been using for cover was being lifted up off the ground. I grimaced as I felt a pain in my side, but I didn’t have time to focus on it because I noticed several other objects nearby had begun to levitate as well. The rebar and street signs strewn around the downtown area were swirling around in erratic patterns, almost as if I was in the eye of a hurricane. Hurricane Janie, I thought briefly. I could see through the girders that objects above the track were swirling with a frenzied intensity. It appeared as though what was happening at ground level was simply another side effect of whatever was going on above me.

  Time to move, I decided. I closed my eyes for an instant to focus on what I needed to do.

  Without any other options that I could see, I decided to make a break for it down Fargo Street towards Murphy. The downtown streets were still chock full of cars, taxis, trucks, and buses, but they weren’t on the ground anymore—they were all floating, heading towards the spot I was racing to leave.

  Lacking any other way since all the vehicles were converging on my location, I ducked under a Toyota Venza and started running. I saw a large SUV floating towards me on the right, so I juked left and tripped on a large pile of debris, sprawling in some of the mess strewn about from the former parking garage.

  I don’t have time for this, I thought. I need to get home.

  I picked myself up and kept moving. My eyes darted around and I began to panic. The footings for the El structural supports were starting to give way and rivets were popping out everywhere. This thing was not going to hold long and I was right underneath it.

  The debris pile was too large on this side of the street to keep moving ahead. A path was possible, but first I had to go under the El track on the right side of the street. I kept moving, evading piles of bubbles coming from the left then dropping in front of me. Abruptly, I came to a place where the debris met bubbles in a pile so large that I could not get through.

  I scanned the area, and noticed a van which had been wedged against the wall by the debris. If the roof of the vehicle was intact, it could act like a tunnel. I tried the back door, and found it unlocked. Opening it, I crawled over the seats to the front of the van. Wedged in the way it was, there was no way to exit through the driver or passenger doors—both were pinned against large debris or the building itself. I was about to back out the way I came in when I noticed the windshield was cracked in several places. Maneuvering my body, I got my feet turned around and managed some solid kicks at the front window. After a couple well-placed stomps, the windshield just popped right out.

  Once I was past the van, I heard an absolutely thunderous noise behind me; it shook the van and everything around me. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help looking back at the devastation I’d left. The El track was falling in pieces, as if it was made of plastic Hot Wheels track. Bubble Guy was on one of those collapsing girders. As it fell, the track turned and trapped his bubble between it and another gigantic piece of steel. The pieces kept moving and I decided I didn’t want to see what happened when the structural integrity of his bubble failed. I couldn’t see anyone else back there and I didn’t want to. I kept moving, quickly, but in a calculated fashion.

  The cacophony of noises continued behind me and I eventually was able to tune them out, but then I heard a noise that sounded uncomfortably familiar. I shot a look toward the closest support and saw a couple rivets pop out within just a matter of seconds.

  Uh-oh.

  There was no choice but to move. I bolted towards Murphy as fast as I could. I heard a slow creaking on my left and shifted my run towards the right as a girder came crashing down where I had just been. Another creak from my left, and I got to the wall and hugged it. The whole thing leaned away from me and came down on top of the debris from the parking garage.

  Now I could see the gopher man, the green blur, and the man in red all trying to deal with the last remaining visible villain. Red-tights Dude was carrying the mixer from the cement truck over his head while a green blur whizzed around the purple character, keeping him pinned in place. The large gopher was in the process of making his way over from his recent interaction with Earthquake. I don’t know what happened to Earthquake. Perhaps he was still under the taxi. Not my problem.

  Most of them didn’t see me, but Gopher Guy did. He ran over, picked me up in those massive mitts of his and launched me over the last pile of debris in my way. I heard him growl, “Now, get out of here!” as I rolled down the other side. I got to my feet and decided his advice was the best I was going to hear all day.

  I turned the corner and took off running. This street was clear with no obstructions. I ran for three blocks before I started to notice people in windows, tentatively peeking out to see if they could see any action. More than one person pointed in my direction as they were talking to someone else next to them. I turned back to my path. I didn’t care about them; I needed to get home.

  At Ticonderoga Street, four blocks away from the action, I ran up to a police barricade. The sergeant there was flabbergasted to see me, probably due more to my bedraggled appearance than anything. This blouse was going in the trash as soon as I walked in my front door.

  “Ma’am? You okay?” he asked.

  “I am now, Officer,” I answered. “I think maybe I should have stayed inside.”

  He looked past me toward the bubbles and the mess behind me. “I’ll say,” he said. “It looks like a bad day back dere.”

  “Right,” I said. “Bad luck for anyone back there. You seen any cabs?”

  “Keep going dis way,” the officer motioned without even glancing behind him. His eyes were trained on the chaos I’d just emerged from. “You go left at Ohio and you’ll see ’em out dere.”

  I thanked him and started on my way. The police officer called after me to stay safe. I suppressed a giggle and a groan and kept walking. I heard him yelling something else, but I never turned around. I reached Ohio and I found the cabs just as described.

  I took the first cab I found and gav
e the driver—he said his name was Mikey—my address. He was happy to take me home, but talked non-stop about sports. He was a fan of the Zephyrs and the Sox but had a strong dislike for “those northsiders.” Fine. As long as he didn’t want to talk about men in tights pretending to be heroes.

  Mikey, the driver, went on and on about a play that happened at the Sox game that day where a runner was caught between third base and home plate and had to run back and forth between them. Normally I wouldn’t have even listened, but my mind was still racing at 200 miles an hour. He told me that in a rundown play like that the runner is almost always caught, but, “that’s why dey practice them hotbox drills, so dose runners can get home sometimes if someone makes a mistake or da runner is fast enough.”

  I sat back and closed my eyes while the driver rattled on about his Sox and their 2-1 win—all because the runner was able to escape the hotbox. Pretty soon his talk was just background noise. I had already put the events of the day behind me and was looking forward to setting foot inside my home. It didn’t take too long before we pulled up to my building.

  The driver asked way too much for the drive. He said it was hazard pay, so I just pulled out my card and let it go. I was too tired to worry about driveway robbery.

  I turned and started up the steps and Mikey called out to me, “Hey, you okay?”

  I paused on the step and turned back. “Yes, I’m okay. Why?”

  He pointed. “It looks like you’ve got something sticking out of your side.”

  I looked down where he pointed and saw a piece of rebar sticking out of my right side. I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before. I grabbed it and pulled it out. No blood of course. There never was. I showed it to Mikey and said, “See? Nothing wrong. It must have just been tucked inside my pants.”

  He squinted for a second, then shook his head, muttering about the things he’d seen that day and gunned the car down the street, looking for the next fare. I watched the taxi speed away for a second and turned to head back up the stairs. The rebar I tossed behind me, clanging on the sidewalk.

  When I opened the door, the thunder of small feet from two little ones came quickly. “Mommeee!!!” I heard.

  I bent down to hug my girls; Julie, my spitfire of a five-year-old and Jodie, my eight-year-old adult-in-training. Jodie grabbed my hand and started pulling me to the stairs. “Mom, you have to get ready. My concert is in an hour.”

  We started trudging up the stairs when I saw Robert, my husband’s, head poke out from the kitchen door. “Hi babe. I’m surprised to see you. I saw the news and I didn’t think you would make it,” he said. “I thought you would get stuck at Westinghouse Station.”

  I crouched down on the stairs and hugged my girls. “It wasn’t easy, but I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  I didn’t need to be Galeburgh’s hero. I needed to be here, with my family.

  Julie pulled a piece of paper out from behind her back. On it, I was clearly labeled with a squiggly mop of hair and a cape. My precocious five-year-old leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Mommy, you’re my hero.”

  And that was all I needed.

  Note from the Authors

  This all started with a dream. I woke up one morning having dreamt that I had come out of a London tube station into super-hero chaos all around. I was narrowly escaping harrowing circumstances caused by supers in several instances. At another point in the dream I was on the lower deck of the down-town freeway that goes by Seattle and it was collapsing all around. I had to write down the basic premise of the dream, and it became an idea for a story, which I later began to develop.

  After my first story, The Price of Greatness, published in a short anthology with my brother Will and sister Betsy I wanted something completely different for a follow-up. The more I thought about it, my escape from super-hero madness story idea seemed a great direction to go. I decided on a city to set my story in and began to write. It all went fine until, the imagination met reality and they did not mesh so well. Several times I had to scratch, rewrite, scratch, rewrite, etc., and so forth in order to get it all to work in the geography I had chosen.

  Finally, I had a story laid out. I showed it to Will and Betsy. The response was generally positive, but I was not satisfied. I kept at it. The beginning that is in the story now has probably been through nine or more revisions by now, some quite drastic. Still, I wasn’t satisfied. What I saw seemed wooden, without character or spark. I knew it needed something, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Life became busy at home with a four year old and one year old and I let it go.

  Then on July 4th I decided to do what became best for the story. I gave it up. I asked Will if he would like to play in my playground and see if he could find the spark that was missing. So, I submit that if you see life and character and spark in this story, it is largely because Will brought heaping bucketfuls of it to the playground and added it in.

  What has resulted is a story I am proud of. As personal as the last story was to me, this one is… just an exploration of fun… and therefore strangely more personal. Thanks for rescuing me, Will.

  Oh, and we ended up taking out the original city in all but about two direct references. However, if you know the geography of this particular city, it will probably be very obvious to you. If you can figure out what city it is based on, extra credit points to you!

  Paul Swardstrom

  I wasn’t expecting this story, and that made it all the more fun. I had read the early drafts of Hotbox Runner and encouraged Paul to finish and then I’d look it over again. I forgot about it and a month or so went by. Late one night, I got a message: “Would you be interested in tinkering with my super hero story? I’m backward motivated right now.”

  I’ll say, I didn’t leap at the chance. I got away from writing my newest novel for a couple weeks and I knew if I agreed it would take more time away from my schedule. But, I think it was a needed thing. It was refreshing to look at the words on the page, and love them, but not hold an attachment to them since I hadn’t actually written them.

  This is still Paul’s story. I would estimate 75 percent of the words on the page are his, and 100 percent of the idea. I just added some flair. Thanks for reading the story. Indie authors like my brother and myself depend on readers taking a chance on our work. We really appreciate you spending your time and money reading ours.

  Will Swardstrom

  We’re Coming For You

  By Logan Thomas Snyder

  Isaac was in his garden when the visitors arrived outside his door.

  The garden existed entirely within his mind, a beautiful technicolor orgy crowded over with azaleas and tiger lilies and snapdragons and some he had crafted from the whole cloth of his imagination. The warm, sticky air reeked of honeysuckle and cherry blossoms. It should have been offensive but wasn’t. It was his fantasy, after all, and infinitely preferable to the chemical Candy Land of lurid colors and shifting, exaggerated shapes contained within the Whitecoats’ hypodermic sharps. Nearby but unseen a chorus of crickets chirped away tremulously. It was a welcome respite; their conversation was unintelligible to him, a dry, rattling exchange of clicks and clacks he had no investment in whatsoever. It could have been anything—a song of mourning, a battle hymn, some kind of therapy exercise like the one he cultivated so gingerly in his own head. Bottom line, who cared? Their words held no purchase for him at all.

  That was the most liberating thing about the visualization exercises. Technically they invoked more senses than the name suggested. He could literally smell and taste and hear, even feel everything he conjured forth in his mind. It was one of precious few places he was in complete and total control.

  In reality he was swaddled in an institutional room the same shade of buttercream sunrise as the robe and pajamas that fell neatly from his broad shoulders and long arms. “Too tall for his own skin,” his grandmother used to say of him as a still-growing boy. Personally, he used to think of himself as a freak, at least until he aged
up and came into his own. That was before the voices. If he was a freak then, what did that make him now?

  “He is our most outstanding example of the care and treatment offered by the Guilfoyle Institute,” Dr. Heinrich Svendsen informed the woman by his side. “Isaac Winters came to us an exceptional but broken young man, crippled by doubt, insecurity, and overwhelming expectations. He’s quite brilliant, but the victim of a culture that places an obscene amount of pressure upon the adolescent mind. By the time he suffered the effects of his breakdown, he had already scored within the upper fifth percentile on the SATs and ACTs and had earned his fair share of fully-funded scholarships. He was popular with his peers and a reliable presence as part of his school’s varsity basketball squad. The world, as the saying goes, was his oyster.”

  Yelena Cruz nodded absently, observing Isaac through a small pane of glass set within the heavy door separating them. He was oblivious to their presence, sitting upon his bed in the classic lotus position—legs pretzeled beneath him, the tips of his thumbs and middle fingers pinched together just above the knees. “Fascinating,” she said. Her voice was pitched low, as if she might somehow disturb his concentration through the three-inch pane. She was in her mid-thirties, with curious, inviting eyes and naturally curly coffee brown hair that fell just short of the small of her back. As the host of Extraordinary America, her face was known to tens of millions of true believers, conspiracy theorists, and curiosity seekers alike. That is, if the ratings were to be trusted. There had been accusations in the past. But that was neither here nor there. “He looks quite serene. What exactly is he doing?”

  “Practicing his visualization exercises, I expect. It’s an alternative form of therapy we encourage amongst our most promising patients. The idea is to immerse themselves within a mental landscape in which they feel most comfortable. It allows them both a means to cope with their circumstances as well as a sense of control over them. Isaac has become particularly adept at administering his own therapy through this method.”