Corpies (Super Powereds Spinoff Book 1)

by Drew Hayes

  “Zone,” he called into the earpiece, picking up his pace. “Zone, if you are near the conflict, I need to know. That spot is about to get very hot, very fast, and every Hero dropping in is expecting civilians to be out. Give me some sort of sign, even if it risks you being discovered.”

  “We’re here.” This time the words were so thin that Titan wouldn’t have heard them at all if he weren’t specifically listening for them. He bounded across a street; already he could faintly make out the sounds of fighting going on. It had been a rough situation before. Now, it was downright horrid.

  “Understood,” Titan said. He stopped his charge a block away from the coordinates Dispatch had provided. Once he was in, things would be sheer chaos, which meant all plans needed to be laid out before he entered the fray. “When you say ‘we,’ I assume that means you have the child with you. You should see me in less than a minute, and I’m pretty sure that everyone there is going to care a lot more about me than you. If you can get clear, do it, and let me know as you go. If you can’t, then get to me. I’ll keep you safe.”

  There was no response this time. . . not that Titan was particularly surprised. Whatever was happening a mere block away was more than enough to keep Zone, one of the team’s most mobile members, completely pinned down. It was certainly a shitshow, and since Titan couldn’t suppress it fast enough to get people clear, he’d just slap himself into the center of the storm.

  With a mighty burst of power from his legs, Titan leapt up onto the roof of the nearest building, carefully controlling his landing to avoid anything more serious than a few damaged shingles. He’d barely set down before he was in the sky again, heading for higher ground. As the air whistled by him, he spoke, trusting his communicator to pick up the words.

  “Dispatch, this is Titan. I’m about to begin engagement, but there’s a civilian and a member of my team pinned down somewhere in it. If there are any other Heroes in the area, please let them know.”

  “We’ve got two more en route; I’ll brief them on the situation. Currently, you will be the first to arrive,” Dispatch informed him.

  “Well then, at least I get to make my entrance as showy as I want.” He landed on the third building, a four-story number composed of lifeless gray brick. It was an apartment complex, one in which he imagined all the residents were locking their doors and calling the cops. From its roof, he could see the fight below; several people still scrapping while others were motionless in puddles of blood. The brawl had probably started in the alleyway and then spilled into the street as things grew more frantic. Titan saw one man hurling bolts of gray energy, another taking gunfire without so much as a wince, and a third zipping about in a blur. Two others had shifted into quasi-animal forms that looked like a bear and a boar, respectively. The rest probably had some abilities as well, but Titan couldn’t loaf around and wait to see what they were. He needed to get a handle on this situation, and fast.

  The whistling sound reached a few of the more attentive criminal’s ears first. It came less than a second before impact, however, which meant even if the bullet-proof thug had taken the time to look up at the noise, it was unlikely that he would have had time to dodge. As it was, he didn’t even see the several-hundred-pound mass that landed on his shoulders and shattered the bones that had born countless attempts at injury as easily as dry spaghetti. The thug let out a strangled cry from the ground, which was heard by almost no one, as all attention was on the massive man who had just dropped out of the air and taken out the toughest person left in either gang. This mystery man took two steps forward and spoke in a booming voice that echoed through the streets like a bomb’s aftershock.

  “My name is Titan—yes, that fucking Titan—and the next person who moves to do anything besides get on the ground will be broken.”

  For a moment, the gangs looked at one another, uncertain of what to do. They had, after all, been fighting each other. Eventually, survival instinct manifested, and all present realized that the Hero was easily the greater threat. Every last one of them charged, and Titan readied himself to make good on his word.

  57.

  What Titan had entered in with Elemental Fury was a fight. It required strategy, restraint, planning, and cunning all piled on top of his already-impressive physical abilities. Titan was good at fighting; it was why he’d been able to take down such powerful enemies in the past. He enjoyed a good fight, but what followed after the two gangs merged into a single force dedicated to bringing him down was nothing like a fight. It was a brawl.

  Even after all these years, Titan could still feel the adrenaline surging through his veins as he stared down over a dozen opponents, all coming at him together. His fingers tingled. Time began to feel a bit slippery. When it was over, he wouldn’t remember many of the fine details. Those would be lost in a sea of snapping bones and anguished screams. But as it was happening, Titan took in everything without exception.

  As he grabbed the bear-shifter’s arm and snapped it in half, he could smell the man’s cologne when he fell, hitting the ground with a painful thud. When Titan caught the speedster’s clumsy punch, he noticed the young boy’s nose piercings just before he drove a foot down and shattered those speedy legs. At the moment that three of the gang members leapt on his back, he caught sight of their terrified but determined faces in one of the few unshattered windows on the street. That moment would stay with him, making him wonder if there was a better way than coming in full force. He almost hesitated, then he remembered that Zone and a child were somewhere in the area trying to stay safe. Titan’s resolve hardened. As he stripped each person from his back and hurled them into the concrete wall, he tried to keep from killing them, but he made certain that none would be rising anytime soon.

  A bolt of gray energy hit Titan’s side, and he glanced up to see the culprit staring at him, eyes wide with surprise. Evidently, he’d been expecting a different result. Either these punks didn’t watch the news or they didn’t believe the hype. Those that survived sure as hell would from here on, though.

  It was funny: all the money and time spent on PR by Heroes and their agents, yet nothing spread true fear in a Hero’s opponents like being in the middle of a Hero’s path of destruction.

  Titan closed the gap to the blaster, knocking aside a pair of men in leather jackets who tried to take a swing at him. He reared back, ready to put the young man down, but a gust of wind made Titan suddenly aware of a hole in the side of costume where the energy had hit him. It was perfect erosion: no shredded cloth or scorched material. Titan let his battle-drunk brain work for a moment, remembering the original report he’d been given about a dead Super with corrosion energy, and noticing how this fellow had puffy circles around his eyes, as if he’d been crying. Supers weren’t inherently more likely to have Super children, but those in the same family often had somewhat similar abilities.

  Instead of punching him in the head, which could potentially result in brain death even if he was only aiming for a knockout, Titan shattered the man’s legs, leaving him to howl in the street. Technically the kid could still use his powers, but without HCP-grade training, it was unlikely he’d be able to focus through the pain. If he did, then Titan would finish the job, but it felt wrong to kill someone who was acting out of grief more than anger. At least, not without giving them a chance.

  The effortless defeat of their energy blaster seemed to have broken some of the criminals' spirit, as they now looked at Titan with a new sense of awe and dread. They’d clearly thought that he’d be taken down by one good shot. Faced with the reality of a Titan utterly uninjured by what was presumably their most powerful remaining offense, their willpower began to fracture and break. Several dashed away, running for the alley where the fight had started.

  “Goddamnit! I just stepped out and I’ve got a fucking wave coming at me,” Zone panted frantically in Titan’s left ear, no longer bothering to whisper.

  There was no time to think, no opportunity to concoct some cunning plan. The s
pan of seconds it would take would likely mean the difference of life and death for Zone, to say nothing of the child in his care. Spinning in the direction of the runners, Titan could see Zone and a young girl in his arms, halfway emerged from under a pile of trash in the alley. In front of those two were five fleeing criminals, one of whom was the shifter in boar form. Zone was standing directly in their way. If the gang hit his teammate and the civilian, especially knowing Titan was at their backs, chances of casualties were high, if not completely certain.

  Pressing his boot into the concrete so hard that cracks spiderwebbed out from under it, Titan pushed off in a charging leap. He stayed low: the goal this time wasn’t to get a better location, it was to play human bowling with himself as the ball. Arms spread out wide to catch all that he could, Titan hurtled through the air, slamming into four of the five would-be-escapees with such force that he could feel their bones break as he made contact. Just before he was about to come to a stop, he twisted in midair so that his back hit a nearby brick building before the four already-battered bodies clutched in his arms. Titan let them drop to the ground; now that they were gone, he had a more important target.

  The shifter was still getting up from the ground where he’d thrown himself to avoid to Titan’s charge when the Hero stepped forward, putting himself firmly between Zone and the boar. A pair of piggy eyes darted back and forth, locking on Zone, or perhaps the child crying in his arms, and lingering there for a moment. Titan could practically see the wheels turning, trying to figure out if he could get there fast enough to take a hostage.

  “Ah ah ah.” Titan wagged his finger in the air, drawing the boar’s gaze back to him. “You’ll never make it. And if you try, I’m going to be less gentle than I have been with your friends. A lot less gentle.”

  “Maybe so,” the boar-man snorted. “But I bet one of us will make it.”

  “You want to know one of the most important rules in battle, BeBop? Always be aware of your surroundings. And maybe you should have noticed that I’m no longer the only Hero on the scene.”

  The pigman quickly turned around, barely getting a chance to see the new uniforms tearing through his fellow gang members and enemies before he felt a powerful hand grip him by the collarbone.

  “Another good rule in battle: don’t take your eyes off the fucking enemy.”

  Titan was quick with crippling the shifter, and luckily the criminal quickly passed out from the pain of his broken limbs. That attended to, Titan jogged back over to Zone and the young girl.

  “You should be clear now. Get her to safety and then rendezvous with the team. I have to keep helping clean up here.”

  “No problem,” Zone said, slightly readjusting his grip on the sobbing girl. “And thanks for the assist.”

  “That’s what teammates do,” Titan replied, turning back to the fray still going on.

  “Also, why the hell did you call that guy Bebop?”

  “Didn’t watch many cartoons as a kid, I take it?” Titan shook his head and allowed himself a small laugh, despite the horror of the day so far. “I’ll explain when things are done.”

  “Good enough for me.”

  Zone darted off, racing through the alleyway and back toward what one could only hope would be safety. Unfortunately, unless someone else had shown up to unblock the bridge, that area was also a rapidly deteriorating situation waiting to turn into a tragedy.

  Titan scanned the scene, noting that a Hero in blue shooting white fire and one who had shifted into a ten-foot-tall spiny creature had picked off most of the stragglers. As he looked, his eyes fell on a fallen, weeping form, and an idea surfaced in the sea of his thoughts.

  “Dispatch, I need you to patch me in to a DVA representative. I may have a way to help our overpass situation, but I’m going to have to make some promises.”

  58.

  Titan crouched down by the young man with the shattered legs. This kid wasn’t the only one with such injuries dotting the fractured city street. The legs were the best place to go for, usually. It made it impossible to run away, crippled mobility, and put people in too much pain to focus enough to use their abilities. Titan had broken more legs than he could count in his years wearing the mask, and as such had become reasonably adept at gauging the severity of a wound just from looking at it.

  “It’ll heal,” he said, drawing the young man’s attention to his presence. “Not well, mind you, but it will heal in the sense that you’ll have two legs. You might be able to get around without a wheelchair, if you don’t skimp on physical therapy, though your days of running marathons are pretty much a thing of the past.”

  “Fuck you,” the criminal grunted from the ground.

  “Now now, I’m not saying all this to be cruel. We’ve got a healer currently heading to this area to patch up people hurt in the overpass accident, the one your. . . I’m going to guess brother. . . caused.”

  The criminal looked up from the concrete for the first time, his still-red eyes widening as he locked met Titan’s gaze. “How did you know?”

  “The reports from the fight said the energy projector had a corrosive property. Your attack burned through my costume in less than a second, and these things are made of pretty sturdy material. It seemed like a reasonable guess that two men in the same gang with similar powers were related. Let me guess: you both got the same energy type, just one as a projector and one as a blaster.”

  “My brother and I have. . . had the same energy.” His eyes darkened, and Titan could practically see the resolve building as he tried to gather up enough focus for another attack.

  Titan reached down and flicked the young man on his earlobe.

  “Ow!” The young man rubbed his ear, all focus scattered in the brief shock of pain.

  “Listen. . . I’m sorry, I never got your name. I’m Titan, in case you missed it the first time.”

  The greeting was met by a hard, sullen stare.

  “Giving me your name isn’t going to get you any more in trouble than you already are, and it will make it easier for me to try and dig you some of the way out of this shit heap. I understand you’re upset about your brother, but you have to at least partly realize that this was something he brought upon himself. So you can lie here, be pissed, then go to jail and live with hobbled legs for the rest of your life, or you can hear me out and see if you might like what I’m selling before turning me down. You’ve already seen what’s behind door number two, why not at least take a peek behind number one?”

  He kept on staring, and Titan shifted his weight, preparing to get up. As he moved a single word slipped out of the young criminal’s mouth. “Eli.”

  “That’s progress,” Titan said. “Listen, Eli: right now there is a very rare, once in a lifetime opportunity sitting before you. We need to get people off that overpass as quickly as possible, and your power could make that happen. And we’re prepared to compensate you for it.”

  Eli snorted. “My power can’t help anyone. All I do is destroy stuff.”

  “Today that’s exactly what we need. The Super world is a funny place; you never know which ability will save the day. This time, it’s yours, so be grateful. Few people ever get the chance to really make a difference.”

  “You want me to just forget about the fact that you all killed my brother, and that you broke my damn legs into pieces? You and all those Heroes can go fuck yourselves.”

  Titan leaned back a touch, a feat that was actually quite impressive in his crouched position. “Honestly, I don’t blame you for that sentiment. If the tables were turned, I’d probably feel the same way. But there’s a flaw in your logic, Eli. Those people stuck out there aren’t Heroes. They’re just regular folks. Families going to work or school who got caught up in a battle of beings that exist on a scale they can’t even comprehend. Now when I look at all the bodies that were dropped around here, I don’t see any with big corroded holes in them. That tells me that you, Eli, are not a killer. Even when you shot at me, you went for the side,
an attack that would injure but probably not kill. Maybe I’m wrong and you don’t mind letting dozens of innocent people die out of spite, but I don’t think I am. I don’t think you want all that blood on your hands. But make no mistake: if you do nothing and let people die, you will feel the weight of their loss for the rest of your life. Trust me.”

  “It’s your job to help people, not mine,” Eli protested.

  “It’s everyone’s job to help people. I just get to do it on a bigger scale. Today, so can you.”

  Eli stayed silent for a long moment, before pushing himself up a few more inches. “You’ll fix my legs?”

  “We’ll have to. You’re going to need your focus for what’s ahead,” Titan told him.

  “What about jail?”

  “Like I said, it’s pretty obvious you didn’t kill anyone, so that’s in your favor. I’ve already gotten word from the DVA that if you’re willing to pitch in on saving those people, they’re willing to be lenient on you. You may even be able to get on some sort of work release; there’s bound to be plenty of people who could use your abilities. And on top of all of that, I’ll personally speak on your behalf if your case goes to trial. I might not be the most popular Hero around anymore, but people tend to listen when we say someone isn’t beyond saving. So you tell me, Eli, are you too far gone?”

  “N. . . no. I’ll take the deal. Patch me up then show me what you want destroyed.”

  “Wonderful. Oh, and Eli, this probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: if you try and double-cross me or hurt anyone, I’ll break a lot more than your legs.”

  “You’re right, it did go without saying,” Eli replied.

  “Glad to hear. Dispatch, this is Titan. I need Fix-It brought to my location as soon as possible. We’ve got a way to get this situation under control.”