“No, like a musical cymbal. From a drum kit. On her head,” said Sam. “And she said ‘Ah-so!’ a lot.”
Randy snorted. “That’s not racist. Chinamen say ‘Ah-so!’ That’s not racist, that’s just a fact.”
“They don’t!” insisted Sam. “And you can’t call them ‘Chinamen’ these days.”
“Why not? They’re men from China.”
“And women,” Anna pointed out.
“Chinawomen,” Randy corrected.
Sam waved his hands vaguely in front of him like he could somehow swat away Randy’s objections. “You just can’t call them that.”
“Well, what should I call them?”
“I don’t know, I’m not the… naming police. Asian Americans.”
“Su Man Chu wasn’t American,” Randy pointed out.
“Oh…”
“Or Asian.”
“See?!” Sam exclaimed. “Racist!”
Randy pulled his goggles down over his eyes. “Take. That. Back,” he warned.
Sam looked to Anna for support, but she was fumbling with a pack of peanuts and didn’t notice. He shrugged. He’d had enough fighting for one day. One lifetime, in fact.
“Remember, I took out two of those henchmen,” growled Randy. “And I would’ve got the third if his neck hadn’t been freakishly strong.”
Sam held up his hands in surrender.
“Fine. I take it back. She’s not racist,” he said. He nudged Anna. “Aren’t you allergic to peanuts?”
“Meh. I’m allergic to most things,” she replied. The bag tore open in her hands, launching the nuts everywhere. She sighed and swore quietly below her breath.
“Thank you,” said Randy, raising his goggles back onto his head again.
Sam squinted. His brain whirred, trying to remember what he’d been talking about. “For what?”
“For acknowledging that Su Man Chu wasn’t racist,” Randy replied.
“Oh. Right. But what she did was cultural appropriation.”
“I don’t know what that means, so I’m going to let it go,” Randy told him. He lowered his tongue into his glass and lapped up some more of his water.
Sam had never really been sure about Butterfly Kid, even back in the day. Randy had never really spoken to the other sidekicks then, tending to stick close to Su Man Chu. Sam had read his origin story comic, detailing how Randy’s parents had died in a plane crash in the Canadian Rockies, and how their baby son had been raised by a troop of butterflies. The comics had tended to take some pretty huge liberties with the truth, though, so Sam had no idea how much of that was accurate, and he hadn’t really liked to ask.
He was almost certainly an orphan, though. They all were. Sam didn’t know if it was in the rules somewhere, or if his own orphan status had simply started a trend among the other heroes. Sam had become the first sidekick after Doc Mighty had saved him from a burning children’s home. Sam had been the only survivor, and the sounds of those screams had haunted him most nights since.
“I want to make a toast,” said Anna. She searched through the sea of glasses until she found one that still had liquid in it, and raised it into the air. “To the Justice Platoon. Yes, they were a bunch of self-serving assholes who exploited us for their own commercial gain, but… but…”
She closed one eye and concentrated for a moment, then clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. “Actually, I can’t think of a ‘but’ right now.” She raised both the glass and her voice. “To the Justice Platoon!”
“Damn right!” cheered a guy in a checkered shirt and baseball cap, raising his own glass as he passed the table. “Those guys are heroes!”
“Right?” Anna laughed. She punched the air a few times, then dropped her voice to a whisper once the man was out of earshot. “Wow, is he going to be disappointed when he hears about the whole…”
She drew a thumb across her throat and mimed being dead.
“I gotta go for a pee,” Sam announced. He hadn’t actually meant to say it aloud, but his inner monologue had taken it upon itself to become an outer one. He leaned on the table and spent a few seconds trying to extricate one of his legs from the other.
With this difficult mission eventually accomplished, he stumbled away from the table, stopped, then wandered in the opposite direction.
“You love him, don’t you?” said Randy.
Anna spluttered into her drink, spraying it up her nose. “Shit! What?” she spat, wiping her face on her arm. “Why would you say that? No!”
“You’ve always loved him,” Randy said. He licked his own drink, holding her gaze.
“No, I… Will you stop doing that? It’s fucking weird. Drink it normally.”
“I am drinking it normally,” Randy insisted. He lapped at it again.
“That’s not how normal people drink.”
“It’s how normal butterflies drink.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not a butterfly,” Anna pointed out.
“I’m the King of Butterflies,” Randy countered.
“Still not a butterfly,” Anna said. She gestured to him. “What’s with the get-up?”
“It’s my costume,” Randy said in his now-trademark growl. “Some of us didn’t turn our back on our duty.”
Anna blinked. “Our doody?”
“Duty!” Randy barked.
Anna shook her head. “I’m still hearing ‘doody,’” she said. “It’s hard with the whole Batman voice you do.”
“Du-ty.”
“How are you spelling it?” Anna asked him, staring intently at his mouth.
“D-U— Forget it! Doesn’t matter,” Randy hissed. “Some of us didn’t turn our back on the mission.”
Anna nodded slowly and drained the dregs from one of her many glasses. “So, what? You’re, like, a full-time superhero these days?”
“Yeah. I am,” Randy confirmed. “Pretty much. I was practically a member of the Justice Platoon.”
“You were?” Anna gasped.
“Practically,” Randy confirmed. He lapped his drink again and peered at her over the rim. “Nice change of subject, by the way. Anyone else wouldn’t have noticed. But I did.”
“Well, good job,” said Anna, giving him a thumbs-up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get some more alcohol. A lot more alcohol.”
She hesitated halfway to her feet. “And no, of course I don’t love him. Eurgh. As if.”
A few minutes later, Sam stumbled from the restrooms, still struggling with the fly of his work pants. The bottom of his shirt had gotten partially stuck in the zipper, and this was making fastening it much more difficult. He hadn’t wanted to stand there in the middle of the restroom fiddling with the front of his pants, although he couldn’t quite figure out why he’d thought it would be better to do so in full view of everyone in the bar.
He was so focused on the task at hand that he didn’t notice Anna until he bumped into her.
“Sorry,” he said, then she came into focus and he smiled. “Hey!”
“Hey,” she replied. Her eyes flitted down for a moment. “Problems?”
Sam blew out his lips. “Where do you want me to start? My job sucks. My wife left me. I—”
“I meant with your pants,” Anna said. She held up an empty glass, trying to catch the attention of the bartender. He was fixated on the TV screen mounted on the wall behind him, though, and didn’t notice.
“Oh! Yeah. It’s fine. It’s just the zip,” Sam said. He did a little jump and yanked harder on the zipper as he was coming down, in the hope that gravity helped him out. It didn’t.
Anna clonked her glass on the bar a couple of times. “Barkeep!” she said. “More drinks, my good man.”
“I think it’s broken,” Sam said. He sniggered. “I broke my pants.”
He had a very hazy thought about bank balances and price tags, but it felt like a distant worry that he could come back to at a later date.
“Jesus, what does a girl have to
do to get some service around here?” Anna demanded.
Sam looked over at the bartender. The guy was well within earshot, so he must’ve heard Anna’s increasingly emphatic demands. Damn, that was rude.
Through the blur of all that alcohol, Sam noticed that everyone else at the bar was staring in the same direction as the bartender. He followed their gaze until he found the television.
It took a moment. Several of them in fact. A full twenty or thirty seconds passed before Sam successfully processed what he was seeing.
The giddy, lightheaded happiness drained out of his body and seeped into the floor. He leaned on the bar to support himself, not because he was drunk, but because he was suddenly sober. Perhaps more sober than he’d ever been before.
A female newsreader stood on-screen. Behind her, several paramedics walked around, examining several fallen… What were those things? They had been people at some point, Sam thought, but now they were gristly lumps of meat, their outsides and insides having been swapped around.
There was blood on the street. So much blood. In the background, the front window of a branch of Cityopolis Central Bank had been smashed open. Another of the mutilated people was impaled on the broken glass. Part of a uniform could just be made out among the shape’s twisted innards-turned-outtards. It had been a cop.
Had been.
“We’re dying of thirst over here!” Anna announced.
“Anna,” Sam said, and the urgency of it cut through Anna’s own drunken haze. He nodded to the screen, and she frowned as she stared up at it.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
As if in answer to her question, the newsreader was replaced by some amateur footage taken from just outside the bank. A towering figure wearing a horned animal skull on his head and an armor of leather and bone splashed through the blood puddles. He held a squirming female bank teller in one hand, hefting her into the air by her throat.
She kicked and thrashed in his grip for a few moments, before something exploded simultaneously through her back and front. Her stomach, Sam guessed, from the way her intestines spilled out through the holes. The guy with the skull helmet tossed her lifeless body aside, then turned his attention to the person filming. The footage froze as he closed in, giving a blurry close-up of his leering face.
“Who the hell is that guy?” Anna muttered.
“He calls himself the Beef Chief,” said Randy, appearing between them in a genuinely impressive display of stealth. “Absorbo had some run-ins with him a few times a couple of years back. Big hitter. Far as anyone has been able to figure out, his powers grant him mental command over meat.”
“Meat?” said Anna.
“M-E-A-T,” said Randy, bypassing any confusion.
“How the hell does that work?” Anna wondered.
“Those people,” Sam whispered. “Look what he did to those people.”
The amateur footage cut out and was replaced by some lingering and lurid high-definition close-ups of blood pools. A scattering of hundred dollar bills floated atop one of them, suggesting this had been a robbery gone wrong. Or gone right, depending on who you were.
It was the next puddle that made Sam’s chest go tight, though. A child’s soft toy lay there, partially submerged. One glassy eye was above the surface. It stared blankly at the camera, and Sam couldn’t shake the feeling that it was staring directly at him.
“My God,” Sam wheezed, turning away from the screen. “What did he do? What the hell did that guy do?”
“He made a bunch of people’s guts explode,” Randy explained. “And then partially turned them inside-out.”
“What? No, I know, I just… I mean…”
His legs gave way. He sat heavily on the floor. Nobody at the bar noticed.
“Those people,” he whispered. “All those people.”
“Why didn’t the cops do something?” Anna demanded.
A man at the bar answered. “You kidding me? They tried to. He killed eight of them. Split them right open. This was after he’d taken out maybe a dozen people in the bank. Kids, too.”
“Jesus,” Anna whispered.
“Where was Doc Mighty? That’s what I want to know,” said another man a little further along. “Where were the Justice Platoon? Ain’t they supposed to protect us from guys like this?”
Sam clutched his head in his hands and rocked back and forth. The eye of that soft toy seemed to accuse him from the puddle on the screen. This is your fault, it told him. This is on you.
He thought back to the other soft toy in his jacket pocket.
He thought of his child, and of those children who would now never be returning home.
The rest was easy.
Chuck crossed the reception area, his hand going to the gun tucked into the back of his pants, more through force of habit than anything else.
He paused at the door, took cover beside it, and then rolled up the blind. “Huh,” he said, peering through the glass.
The door creaked a little as he pulled it open.
Sam stood outside on the street. He was swaying slightly, looked like he’d been crying, and part of his white shirt poked out through the zipper of his pants like some weird fabric penis.
Anna stood a few steps behind him, her face pale behind her freckles. Randy was beside her, his cape pulled up over his face in a pose that was presumably meant to be mysterious.
“So,” said Chuck. “You saw?”
Sam swallowed, then nodded. “We saw.”
“Well, OK,” said Chuck. He stepped aside and opened the door all the way. “Then I guess we’d best get started.”
Chapter Nine
Chuck stood by the sliding doors of a wide elevator, but hadn’t yet pushed the call button. He regarded the trio standing before him, two of them gently swaying, one hiding his face with a bright red child’s cape.
Anyone looking closely at Chuck’s face would have seen that his current expression was the visual equivalent of a lengthy sigh. Fortunately, Sam and Anna were too inebriated to notice this, and the change of humidity between outside and inside had made Randy’s goggles steam up to the point he could barely see a thing.
“And you’re sure about this?” Chuck asked.
“We’re sure,” said Sam.
“Ish,” Anna added.
“Oh. Yeah. We’re sure-ish. But, like, mostly sure and just a tiny bit ish.”
Anna frowned at him. After a brief spell of near-sobriety, she had returned to a rubbery-faced level of drunkenness which made her look a bit like a cartoon character.
“Maybe not a tiny bit. Let’s say a bit. We’re a bit ish.”
“I’m not any ish,” Randy said. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my whole damn life!”
Chuck clicked his fingers a couple of times. “Uh, Randy? We’re over here.”
“Oh.” Randy rotated himself thirty degrees in the direction of Chuck’s voice. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my whole damn life!” he repeated, lowering his cape and punching a fist into the opposite palm for emphasis. “Nobody turns the good citizens of Cityopolis inside out. Not on my watch.”
Chuck puffed out his cheeks and looked between them all again. “OK. OK. But this is your last chance to back out. Once you’re in, you’re all the way in. Your lives? They’re not just lives anymore. They’re secret identities. If you do this, everything changes. Everything.”
Sam raised a hand.
“You don’t have to put your hand up. What’s the question?”
“Can I still see my son?”
“Of course,” said Chuck. “We’re not monsters. But make no mistake—if anyone finds out who you are, they could go after him. Your very existence will put him in danger.”
Sam pictured that soft toy lying in the blood pool. He felt the other one tucked up in his pocket. “Way I see it, he’s already in danger,” Sam said. “At least this way maybe we can protect him. All of them.”
“And everyone’s agreed?” Chuck a
sked.
“You’re goddamn right!” Randy spat.
“Yeah. You know, ish,” said Anna. She pinched her forefinger and thumb close together and held them up. “Can we get on with it? I’m this close to throwing up.”
“OK, then if everyone’s in, let’s do this,” Chuck said. He tapped the only button on the wall by the elevator door. The door slid aside smoothly, revealing the starkly lit elevator car beyond. It was large enough to accommodate twenty or more people, or roughly five Chucks.
After ushering the others inside, Chuck stepped in. The weight of him made the elevator cable squeak, and Sam was relieved that he was too drunk to really dwell on what would happen if the cable snapped.
They started moving without Chuck having to press anything. A tiny jerk and a microsecond moment of weightlessness told them they were traveling downward, descending into some underground lair built deep below the city.
“Only a handful of people alive know about this place’s existence,” Chuck told them. “Even fewer have ever seen it. Until you are ready, this will be your home.”
The elevator glided to a stop. Chuck straightened the lapels of his jacket and adjusted his tie.
“Lady. Gentlemen. Welcome to the Sidekicks Initiative.”
Sam’s eyes twinkled with anticipation and wonder as the door slid open.
They immediately stopped twinkling when a small, cluttered storeroom was revealed. Battered cardboard boxes had been stacked haphazardly against every wall, and a layer of dust had accumulated across pretty much every surface.
The only dust-free exception was a table near the center of the room. It was the kind of thing you might find in a staff canteen—thin Formica top and black metal legs. A stack of newspapers sat on top, alongside a dirty mug with a fork in it.
“Sweet,” said Anna. “Justice Platoon, eat your heart out.”
“Yeah, we had some budget cuts a few years back,” Chuck admitted, scratching the back of his head in a subconscious attempt to hide his embarrassment. “This isn’t all of it, we just moved a lot of stuff in here so we didn’t have to heat the rest of the place.”
Sam noticed a fold-down camp bed in the corner of the room, half-hidden by towers of boxes. He chose not to comment on it. Hell, his own apartment wasn’t much better.
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