The Sidekicks Initiative

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Jesus. Was it a woman? Sam couldn’t decide. Her voice was like the distant rumbling of thunder. It was a sound that suggested that no matter how good your day had been until that point, it was about to be ruined.

  “Dude just fell from the sky, man.”

  “Like an avenging angel of justice!” Randy added, before yelping loudly and sobbing for several seconds.

  “Nice outfits,” said the big guy. “Reckon one of them’d look good on me. What do you say, boys?”

  “Here, let me,” giggled one of the other two (possibly three) men. He was smaller and more wiry than the others, and moved like some kind of rodent.

  He was beside Sam before Sam knew what was happening. The rodent’s hand came up sharply, and Sam caught a glimpse of a claw hammer as it swung at him, pointy-end first.

  Sam recalled all those days of martial arts training, and all those nights spent fighting at Doc Mighty’s side, learning how to deal with opponents of every shape and size. He then ignored all that completely in favor of shutting his eyes and screaming, “No, don’t!” in a panicky voice.

  His hand came up as if working independently from the rest of him. He felt his fingers wrap around the rodent’s wrist, heard the crack of breaking bone and the clatter of the hammer hitting the ground.

  Sam opened his eyes just as the rodent screamed, his hand flopping loosely atop his broken wrist.

  The other guy lunged for Sam, thrusting forward with a homemade shiv. Sam drove an open-handed palm strike into the center of the man’s chest. The impact rattled Sam’s arm all the way up to the shoulder, but this was nothing compared to the effect it had on his attacker.

  The guy rocketed backward, both feet off the ground, his eyes and mouth forming three matching circles of surprise. He hit the wall a moment later, then slid onto the sidewalk, unconscious.

  Possibly dead, although Sam really hoped not.

  “You sonuvabitch!” roared the most-likely female gang member. She—arguably he—brought up a snub-nosed pistol and fired two shots directly at the center of Sam’s chest before he could get out another piercing squeal of panic.

  Sam stumbled back, releasing his grip on the first attacker and accepting that, yep, he was almost certainly about to die. He was very probably dead already, in fact, and these were just the final fleeting moments as his brain shut down and the life ebbed from…

  The suit made a couple of soft popping sounds. Two bullets chinked onto the ground.

  Sam patted his chest and let out an involuntary little giggle of relief. There was a dull ache there, but no searing pain, and—more importantly—no bloody holes in his flesh.

  “Dafuq?” whispered the big guy.

  The one that was very tenuously female raised the gun another couple of inches, and Sam’s urge to laugh quickly died away as he realized his face was almost completely uncovered.

  “Wait, don’t shoot!” Sam pleaded.

  Before the probable woman could fire, there was a scream from above. Everyone raised their eyes just as Anna lost her grip on the drainpipe. She landed, butt-first, on the gun-wielder. They went down hard, and only one of them got back up again.

  “Jesus, that was terrifying,” Anna whispered. Her face was pale behind the green figure-eight of her mask. “It was higher than it looked and really hard to get a grip on. The gloves are too slippy.”

  She leaned back and waved both hands up in the direction of the roof. “The gloves are too slippy!” she shouted.

  “Dafaq are you? Dafuq you talking to?” demanded the now sole-remaining gang member.

  “Oh, just this Nazi we know,” Anna said. She put her hands on her hips, adopting what she dimly recalled was a suitably superhero-ish pose. It was only then that she noticed where the thug’s eyes were pointing.

  “Hey. Hey! Eyes off the nipples, Tony Soprano,” Anna warned. “My face is up here.”

  Sam frowned. “Tony Soprano?”

  “It’s the only criminal I could think of,” Anna admitted. “It was that or Bluto out of Popeye, and I figured that was probably before his time.”

  The man-mountain growled, his hand tightening around his shiv. Anna drove the point of her elbow into the end of his nose. Judging by the expression that flitted across her face, she took immense satisfaction from the crunch it made, and even more so from the spluttering and squealing that followed.

  As he stumbled backward, the gang leader tripped over Randy. He flailed his arms for a moment, before toppling over like a felled great oak and cracking his head on the sidewalk.

  “Relax, guys. I got him,” Randy crowed. “Thanks for the assist.”

  “Assist? What do you mean assist?” Anna said. Her face lit up as she had a thought. “Wait! We should do a witty quip!”

  Sam groaned. “Really? Don’t you think that’s a little, you know, corny?”

  “Something about elbows, maybe?” Anna said. She clicked her fingers a few times. “Shit. We should’ve workshopped something up on the roof while we were waiting.”

  “Elbow face!” Randy piped up.

  Anna and Sam both looked down at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Randy tried again. “Elbow in face!”

  “Now you’re just describing what happened,” said Anna.

  “I’m making a quip,” Randy insisted.

  “That’s not a quip,” said Sam. “A quip is like…”

  He looked down at the sobbing, blubbering gangbanger and thought for a moment. “He nose not to mess with us again.”

  “Ha! Yes!” said Anna. “Genius. Because of his nose.”

  “That’s lame,” said Randy. “That’s not a quip. It’s a pun.”

  “Most quips are puns,” Sam pointed out.

  “Face…” Randy’s mouth contorted in concentration. “…elbow.”

  Anna sighed. “Now you’re just saying the same thing as earlier, but the other way around. Let’s go with the nose thing. It makes sense, it’s funny-ish, and holy shit, look at your leg!”

  “Huh? Oh, this? It’s nothing,” Randy said, sitting up and placing both hands on his shin. “I’ll just take care of it with a…”

  There was a crack as he twisted the lower half of his leg. Sam and Anna both recoiled in horror at the sound.

  “Got it,” said Randy.

  Everyone stared at it for a few shell-shocked moments.

  Sam swallowed. “Should your foot be facing that way?” he asked.

  “Which way?”

  “Back that way,” said Anna. “The opposite way to that one.”

  “Oh.”

  Randy looked from one foot to the other. Several times.

  “Now you come to mention it, that could be a problem,” he began.

  Then, his upper half flopped back onto the sidewalk, his head clonked against the ground, and his brain dragged him into unconsciousness before the screaming could start.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “It was actually—I hate to say it—but it was actually pretty awesome,” Sam gushed. “I mean, she shot me. She shot me, and I didn’t die!”

  “Wait, that was a woman?” asked Anna. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, I’m not a hundred percent, but I think so, yeah. But my point is, she shot me.” He lifted his t-shirt, showing his bare chest. It looked nowhere near as impressive as his supersuit had suggested. “Nothing. Look. Not even a bruise. And you fell…?”

  “Off a drainpipe,” said Anna.

  “No, I meant distance.”

  “Oh. Like, two stories.”

  “And you’re fine, too!” Sam said. “We took out a whole gang of bad guys, and we didn’t even get hurt.”

  “Except Randy,” Anna pointed out.

  “Obviously. Except Randy. But that was his own fault,” Sam said. He looked across the counter to Mari. “How is he, by the way?”

  Anna held out her tray and Mari deposited a scoop of some sort of congealed pasta dish into the offered bowl. The complex’s dining area was small and basic, with thre
e folding tables, a dozen plastic chairs, and a lingering smell that Sam hadn’t quite been able to place.

  “Randy is doing well, dear, thanks for asking,” said Mari, her digital lips moving in approximate sync with her voice. “His leg has been corrected. He’ll be joining us shortly.”

  Sam shuddered a little at the use of the word ‘corrected.’

  “That’s good,” he said. “Guess he won’t be doing the superhero landing again in a hurry.”

  “You know he will,” said Anna.

  Sam held his tray out to receive his dollop of pasta. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said.

  Chuck was already sitting at the head of one of the three tables, his own tray in front of him. He beckoned them over, gesturing to the seats on either side of him.

  “I hear you guys did OK,” he said, once they’d joined him at the table.

  “Yeah! We did good,” Sam confirmed.

  Chuck waved his plastic fork vaguely. “I heard ‘OK,’” he said. “What did you think of the suits?”

  “They were awesome,” said Sam.

  “I’m not sold on the nipples,” Anna added. “But other than that, pretty cool.”

  Chuck pronged a rubbery pasta shell with his fork. “You still didn’t use your powers,” he said, eyeing Sam.

  Sam shifted uneasily on the hard plastic chair. “No. I didn’t need to. We took them down without any of us having to use our abilities.”

  Chuck chewed on his pasta, nodding slowly. “Not really the point, though,” he said, once he’d swallowed. “I mean, we could’ve given the suits to anyone. We chose you because of your powers. That’s why you’re here.”

  “I’m just… It’s not that simple,” said Sam.

  “The suit should help you focus,” Chuck continued. “It should make it easier to do… your thing.”

  Anna reached for a wine bottle sitting in the middle of the table, then sighed heavily when she read the ‘0% Alcohol’ label.

  “Why?” she demanded, waving the bottle in Chuck’s direction. “Just… why?”

  “We did our research,” Chuck explained. “Alcohol dulls your allergy powers.”

  “I know! That’s why I drink so much of it! That’s literally the entire point.”

  “Does it dull all our powers?” Sam wondered.

  “No. Just hers.”

  “You still haven’t explained what your powers even are,” Anna said, shooting Sam a probing look as she poured herself a glass of the stupid and pointless fake wine. “So, spill.”

  Sam shook his head. “No, it’s not easy to… I mean, they’re not… It’s hard to explain.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s simple.”

  They all turned to find Kapitän Nazi standing by the table’s remaining empty chair, a tray in his hands.

  “That seat’s taken,” said Sam. “It’s for Randy. He’s coming down.”

  “Oh,” said the Kapitän. He looked across to one of the other tables, but Anna gestured to the chair he was looming next to.

  “It’s fine. We can pull up another one when he arrives.”

  Sam glowered at her, but she flashed him a smile in return, before diverting her attention back to the Kapitän. “So, you know what his powers are?”

  “Yes. I do,” Nazi confirmed, sliding onto the plastic chair. He flicked his gaze across at Sam while unwrapping some disposable cutlery from its sterile packaging. “But it’s not fair for me to tell you without his permission.”

  “Oh, come on!” Anna protested. “We’re supposed to be a team. How can we be if we don’t know what everyone can do? We know I can do the allergy stuff, Randy can do… well, fuck all, it seems. But Mystery Man here…? I’m drawing a blank.”

  “Woman’s got a point,” Chuck agreed.

  Kapitän Nazi rubbed his plastic knife and fork together as if sharpening them. “May I?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at Sam.

  Sam ground his back teeth together in time with Nazi’s cutlery rubbing. He grunted out something vaguely affirmative-sounding. “Fine. Whatever.”

  “Alright!” said Anna, shuffling her chair in closer to the table. “Here we go. Spill.”

  “He is… How can I put this?” Nazi said. He subjected himself to a mouthful of the pasta and chewed it thoughtfully. “He is a god.”

  Anna snorted. “Ha!” she said, her eyes flicking from the Kapitän to Sam and back again. “Wait… what do you mean? Are you serious?”

  “No, he isn’t,” said Sam.

  Nazi nodded slowly. “I am. He is. Basically. His powers border on being unlimited. Truly unlimited. He can manipulate matter with a thought. He can create physical objects from thin air, turn people into memories, alter the very fabric of reality itself. Properly focused, there is nothing he cannot do.”

  Throughout this, Anna’s gaze had drifted back to Sam and stayed there. He kept his head down, poking around in his pasta like he might find buried treasure in there somewhere.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “That would make him…”

  “The most powerful being on the face of the planet,” said Chuck. “Yeah. That’s about the size of it.”

  Anna knocked back her wine, remembered it was of the non-alcoholic variety, and shuddered with distaste.

  “But… I mean… Then why are you so—and no offense here—why are you so hopeless?” she asked.

  “I’m not hopeless!” Sam protested. “I helped fight off those guys.”

  “No, but you could’ve just blinked them out of existence,” Anna said. “Or, I don’t know, magicked them into jail, or whatever. Why didn’t you do that?”

  “Because I can’t,” Sam explained.

  Anna’s hand crossed over as she pointed to both Chuck and Kapitän Nazi at the same time. “But they said…”

  “I know what they said, and they’re technically right,” Sam said. “But I can’t control it. If I use my powers, I don’t actually know what’ll happen. Sure, I might stop a bad guy, but I might paint the city bright orange, instead. Or turn every car in the country into rubber. Or make every dog within eight blocks catch fire. It’s too risky.”

  “Especially if you’re a dog, I guess,” said Anna. She whistled quietly through her teeth. “Jesus. Guess we know where the ‘Random’ part comes from, huh?”

  “You see why I’d prefer to avoid using it?” asked Sam. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Maybe if you concentrated…” Chuck began, but a dry, mirthless laugh from Sam cut him off.

  “I’ve been concentrating every day since I was eight,” he said. “I’ve got the whole concentration thing pretty much nailed down, thanks.”

  “I can help, Sam,” said Kapitän Nazi. “If you’ll let me.”

  “Can we not do this?” Sam snapped, throwing his fork and knife down onto the table. This would’ve been more dramatic had they not been made from flimsy plastic. “I don’t need your help. I don’t want your help. I know what you are. I know what you’ve done. I don’t even want to look at you.”

  “He’s not the same,” Chuck insisted. “He’s changed.”

  “Oh, well that’s fine, then!” cried Sam, his voice taking on a slightly hysterical edge. “He’s different. He’s changed. Then let’s just overlook the people he killed. The lives he ruined. Will we? Will we do that?”

  Sam’s face twisted in contempt. “He hasn’t changed. It’s an act. It’s always an act.”

  “It’s no act,” said the Kapitän. “I assure you.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I know it’s difficult. I know I’m asking a lot, but you have to trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Sam hissed. “You’re out of your mind.”

  Anna shrugged. “I don’t know, Sam. I mean, I get that he did a lot of bad things, but maybe he is different. Maybe he deserves a second chance?”

  “What he deserves is to be rotting in a cell somewhere,” Sam spat. “Or, better yet, buried in the ground.”

  “Harsh,” said Anna.

  Sam’
s eyes widened. His fists clenched. “Harsh? Harsh? You want to know what’s harsh, Anna? Hmm? You want to know what’s really harsh? Torturing a ten-year-old! That’s harsh!” he roared, jumping to his feet. “Taking him and drugging him and hurting him for days on end. Days.”

  Anna’s face turned ash-gray. “Jesus. I didn’t… I mean…”

  “Easy, Sam,” said Chuck, reaching a hand out.

  “DON’T TOUCH ME!” Sam roared, wrenching his arm away. His breath came in big gulps, hot tears filling his eyes. “OK?” he said, more quietly. “Just don’t touch me.”

  “OK, OK, you got it,” said Chuck, keeping both hands where Sam could see them. “Just… Just calm down.”

  “Hol-ee shit,” Anna whispered. She was looking past Sam, her face a mix of wonder and horror.

  Sam turned to see the room’s other two tables hovering in the air behind him, their legs and tops twisted into impossible shapes that looped and interlocked in ways that hurt the brain and made the stomach flip.

  He let out an animal sob of frustration, pain, sorrow, guilt, and a dozen more flavors in between. The tables hit the floor with a splat, and collapsed into a goo that fizzled and bubbled for a few seconds, before dissolving into nothing.

  “I have to go,” Sam muttered. “I can’t be here.”

  He charged for the door without looking back, danced on the spot for a moment while he waited for it to slide open, then hurried through.

  Anna stared at the blotchy stains on the dining room floor indicating where the tables had been, then looked to the door just as it slid closed again.

  “Well,” growled a voice from under the table. “That was awkward.”

  “Randy?” Anna said. She kicked out a few times until her foot eventually found something solid. “What are you doing? I thought you were still getting fixed up?”

  Randy’s head popped up from the other side of the table, where Sam had been sitting. “That’s what I wanted you to think,” he said, before adding, “The night’s shadow,” in a slightly breathless whisper.

  Anna rolled her eyes, then looked back to the door. “I should go talk to him,” she said.

  Kapitän Nazi stood up. “No. Please, let me,” he said. “It should be me.”