Omega Superhero Box Set

by Darius Brasher

  It exploded in my face.

  2

  Only two things kept me from getting my fool head blown off. The first was the fact I always raised my personal force field when I flew to keep from hitting birds, bugs, and other debris while I was in flight. The field I normally used when I flew was permeable to air so I would not suffocate.

  The second thing that kept me from doing a Headless Horseman impersonation was the flash of light from the ball before it exploded. I wish I could say I was smart enough to have deliberately made my force field air impermeable before the explosion, but I can’t. The explosion happened too fast for me to consciously react to it. Rather, me making my force field air impermeable in reaction to the light flash was entirely unconscious, a muscle memory reaction thanks to countless hours of Heroic training.

  Even so, enough heat and force from the blast made it through my shield to sear my face before I made the shield air impermeable. It felt like my head and upper body had been plunged into lava. I almost blacked out. My control of my powers faded. I felt myself dropping out of the air like a shot duck.

  Fortunately, muscle memory kicked in again. My barely conscious mind raised my personal shield again mere moments before I slammed into a tree branch. I crashed through it like a missile. Splinters went flying. I bounced off of and crashed through more branches as I descended.

  I slammed to a stop when I finally hit the ground. Everything hurt. It felt like a giant had flung me to the ground, and then had stomped on me. I tasted blood in my mouth. At some point I had bitten down hard on my tongue.

  Flat on my back, I moaned in pain. Through bleary, half-shut eyes, I saw that I was surrounded by trees. I felt grass and damp dirt under me. Had I fallen into Rock Creek Park? That was the only place I knew in D.C. that had this kind of greenery. My eyelids felt droopy. Rock Creek Park was as good of a place as any to take a nap.

  Darkness closed in around the edges of my vision like a camera shutter. I fumbled for the specially-made watch on my wrist. The Old Man made us Apprentices wear it when we weren’t in costume. With unsteady fingers, I flipped up the watch face. I managed to hit the tiny panic button mounted inside.

  So much for being ready to take on the Sentinels, I thought hazily. I got duped by a mere girl. She probably isn’t even a natural blonde.

  That was my last thought. Then the darkness constricted around my eyes and swallowed me whole.

  When I finally was able to pry my eyes open, I looked up at the concerned face of Isaac Geere, one of my best friends. His code name was Myth. He was a light-skinned black guy who was a couple of years older than I. There was a jagged scar on his forehead that was a lighter color than the rest of his skin. It was a relic of a fight we had had with Iceburn when Isaac and I had gone through Hero Academy together.

  “That tears it,” I said as I looked at Isaac. “I’ve died and gone to Hell.” My mouth didn’t quite feel like it was a part of me, as if it was being operated by a ventriloquist. Plus, something was wrong with my voice or my hearing. My voice sounded like a whisper, as if uttered from far away.

  Isaac’s face parted into a grin.

  “You’re not dead,” he said. “We’re stuck with you for a while longer, I’m afraid. A shame. I had called dibs on your room.”

  I turned my head a little to look around. I lay in bed, but not the one in my room. I was in the infirmary in the Old Man’s mansion. While the mansion was the Old Man’s house, it also doubled as his lair and base of Heroic operations. A fully equipped, state-of-the-art infirmary was but one of the many things the mansion concealed behind its sprawling red brick facade.

  I was in pain, but it was as if I was standing outside my body experiencing it secondhand. Being in pain and alive was better than being in no pain and dead, however.

  See there, Blondie? I thought triumphantly. It takes more than a planted bomb to keep a good man down.

  No, wait—I was in fact lying down. Foiled again!

  Darn you Blondie! I thought. If she were here, I would have shaken my fist at her. Assuming I could raise my fist, which I couldn’t seem to do right now. It didn’t matter. I was beyond caring. I felt like giggling.

  Whatever pain meds they had me on, they were good ones.

  Isaac and I were not alone. My other best friend Neha Thakore, known as the Apprentice Hero Smoke, was here. She was twenty-one and had a lithe, athletic body. Thanks to her Indian ancestry, she had olive skin and black hair. I happily knew from personal experience that silky black hair wasn’t just on her head. Her hair was so shiny, it was the color of wet road tar. I had told her that once post-coitus, as the ancient Romans might have said. Those naughty dead devils. Neha had not taken my pillow talk road tar observation as the compliment I had meant it as.

  Neha got out of the chair she was in and approached me. I thought she was going to hug me. Thinking of Blondie, I flinched mentally. Once bitten, twice shy. But, despite my recent experience with Blondie, I’d let Neha hug me. Neha and I had been doing a lot more than just hugging awhile now, anyway. I’d risk a hug from her.

  Instead, Neha punched me in the thigh.

  “Ow!” I said, though the punch hadn’t hurt. I barely felt it. I wondered if street dealers knew about the drugs I must have been on. “Can’t you see I’m on my deathbed?”

  “You’re not dying. Don’t be a baby. If you hadn’t hit your panic button you might’ve bled to death in the woods, though,” Neha said. “Besides, your legs aren’t injured at all. I wish I could say the same about the rest of you. You’re lucky I don’t punch you again. You scared us half to death. You should’ve seen the way you looked when the Old Man flew you back here. You were a mess.”

  “How long have I been unconscious?”

  “Two and a half days.”

  Two and a half days? I would have thought it was more like two and a half hours.

  “What in the world happened to you, anyway?” Neha asked. “After the Old Man brought you here, he sent me and Isaac to where he found you to investigate the scene. We found fragments from an explosive there.”

  I opened my mouth to tell them when Isaac held up a hand.

  “Hold that thought. There’s no point in you telling the story multiple times,” Isaac said. He went over to the intercom mounted in the wall and hit a button on it. “I’ve got an update on Sleeping Beauty. With the bandages on his face, he isn’t too beautiful. He isn’t sleeping anymore, either,” he said into the intercom. He winked at me.

  “Be right there,” came the voice of Amazing Man.

  While we waited for Amazing Man to arrive, I had Isaac give me a hand mirror. As my arms still didn’t seem to work correctly, I levitated the mirror in front of myself with my telekinetic powers. At least they worked.

  From the neck up, I looked like a badly wrapped mummy. Long white bandages were on my neck and face. Where my skin was exposed, it alternated between being dark red and white and blistered. My eyebrows were gone, as were most of my eyelashes. Much of my brown hair was gone. The patches that remained looked like they had been singed in a fire. The whites of my eyes were no longer so; they were tinted red. Both eyes were swollen.

  I never thought of myself as handsome. Looking like this, I didn’t have to worry about anybody else thinking I was, either.

  “Too bad Halloween’s not approaching. I could license my likeness and make a killing on Halloween costumes,” I said. Though I looked a mess, I didn’t seem to care much. In fact, it was an effort to keep myself from laughing.

  “It was much worse when the Old Man first brought you in. You were near death,” Neha said. “After leaving you here in the care of the doctor on staff, he flew across the country to fetch Doc Hippoc.” Doctor Hippocrates was a Hero, and had been the chief physician at Hero Academy when Neha, Isaac, and I were there. One of his Metahuman powers was the ability to augment and speed up the body’s ability to heal itself. Doc Hippoc’s powers had saved Isaac’s life after Iceburn collapsed a building on top of us. “It’s b
ecause of Doc Hippoc that you’re not either dead or disfigured.”

  “I’m not disfigured, huh? Are your eyes working? I’m not going to win any beauty pageants looking like this. Unless my competitors are zombies. And I can’t lift my arms. See?” I tried to raise them. Nothing happened. “Worst magic trick ever.” That struck me as the funniest thing I had ever heard. I giggled like a schoolgirl.

  “Dude, you look much better now than you did a few days ago,” Isaac said. “You had third degree burns on your face and neck. Your skin was literally charred. You looked like a burnt marshmallow.”

  “Marshmallow? Is that some sort of racial crack?” Despite looking like I had escaped from a house fire, I felt frisky. I wondered if I could start taking all the time the drugs they had me on. Sobriety was overrated.

  “Yes,” Isaac said with a grin.

  “As for your arms,” Neha said, ignoring our banter (she did that a lot), “Doc Hippoc has you on a mild paralytic to keep you from moving around too much as your body finishes healing itself. Your torso got burned too, but not quite as badly as your face. You did suffer some nerve damage there, though. You also suffered some vision and hearing loss, but Doc said he repaired most of it and the rest would come with time. Since he said you’d be screaming your head off without it, he’s also got you on pain meds. Something in the morphine family.” Whatever it was, I highly recommended it. “Other than maybe some discoloration on your face and left hand, Doc says you should be as good as new in a few more days.”

  Despite looking like something undead, I felt fine already. I wanted to pull Neha into bed with me and show her how fine I felt. But it would be weird to do it in front of Isaac.

  “No, no, no,” I said to Neha, shaking my head at her, “not in front of the children.”

  Neha and Isaac looked at each other, puzzled. Their reaction to what I had said was not only the funniest thing I had ever seen, but the funniest thing I could imagine ever seeing. I started laughing so hard my chest hurt.

  “I gotta get Doc Hippoc to give me some of those drugs,” Isaac said to Neha. That just made me laugh harder.

  I was still tittering when the Old Man came in. To be honest, just thinking of the word “tittering” made me start laughing out loud again.

  The Old Man looked at me with quizzical steel-gray eyes.

  “I see the medication Hippocrates has you on is doing its job,” he said.

  The Old Man’s real name was Raymond Ajax. As Raymond Ajax, the Old Man had made a killing buying, restructuring, and selling chemical and engineering companies, which was how he had been able to retire early and devote his efforts full-time to being a Hero. The Old Man was one of the greatest living Heroes, and I was proud to be one of his Apprentices. When we were in public and in costume, we Apprentices called him Amazing Man; when in public and out of costume, we called him Mr. Ajax; when it was just the three of us, he was the Old Man. We never called him Raymond. It would have been like walking up to the U.S. President, slapping her on the bottom, and saying “Nice tush, toots!” It was unthinkable.

  The Old Man was dressed in a plain white tee shirt and gray sweatpants with a MIT logo on it. The Old Man had gotten one of his several degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had gotten his insanely ripped body from being a super strong Meta and decades of weight training. My arms couldn’t even budge the electromagnetic weights he worked out with; it was a struggle moving them even with my powers. The Old Man had gotten his white hair from being old enough to be my grandfather, though he was fond of saying, normally after one of us had done something stupid, that his hair had been jet black until he had started training Apprentices.

  The Old Man was tall, taller even than Myth who was a couple of inches taller than I. Even casually dressed, he dominated the room the way a movie star dominates a scene. His muscles rippled under his shirt as he picked up a chair and put it next to my bed. He sat down, straddling the chair.

  “All right,” he said, “now that you’re awake, tell us what happened.”

  So, I did. Along with telling them all about the attempted bank robbery, I also gave them a precise description of the girl who I suspected had planted the explosive on me. Eyewitness accounts from laymen tended to be shockingly inaccurate. I had read a bunch of studies on the subject during my training, so I knew that better than most. I was not a layman, though. If I missed any of the important details of what that blonde had looked like, it was not for lack of undergoing rigorous observational training during my Heroic studies. I only left out that she had smelled like strawberries and that I had snuck a peek down her blouse. Neither fact seemed relevant, but both would make Isaac make fun of me.

  As I spoke of the woman, Isaac rapidly made a sketch of whom I described. Isaac had become quite the artist. He normally used his artistic abilities to draw, paint, and sculpt various mythological creatures. Doing so helped him more effectively transform into them with his Metahuman powers.

  After I made him adjust the nose and the bustline—in Isaac’s initial rendering, the former had been too big and the latter had been too small—Isaac’s sketched looked exactly the way I remembered Blondie.

  Isaac handed the sketch to the Old Man. He looked at it carefully.

  “I begin to see why you would let this woman close enough to touch you,” he said. If I hadn’t been so doped up, I would have been embarrassed. “I can’t say she looks familiar. The fragments from the explosive Isaac and Neha found haven’t led to any clues. I’ll check with the bank to see if they have a camera that wasn’t disabled by the robbers. Maybe the bank captured footage of her. If not, I’ll run Isaac’s sketch through the Heroes’ Guild’s databases and see if I can identify her. I’ll also check with the D.C. Metropolitan Police. They can ask the robbers they took into custody if the woman was working with them.”

  The Old Man sighed noisily. “If only a big-time Hero such as myself had some eager, well-trained Apprentices who could do this kind of grunt work for him.” He looked at Isaac and Neha pointedly.

  “He’s speaking of himself in the third person again,” Neha said to Isaac.

  “I told you buying him that ‘World’s Greatest Hero’ mug for his birthday was a mistake. He’s gone and let it go to his head,” Isaac said to her.

  Isaac took his sketch back from the Old Man. Neha patted me on the leg with a smile before turning to walk out of the infirmary. Isaac followed her, but not before blowing me a kiss with a grin.

  The Old Man turned his attention back to me once they were gone.

  “Now that we have some privacy, I want to talk to you alone about what happened at the bank,” he said.

  Despite having landed flat on my back in the infirmary, I was still pretty pleased with how I had handled things at the bank. The Old Man probably wanted to single me out for special praise; he didn’t want to do it in front of Neha and Isaac so as not to play favorites. I had my modest yet Heroic “aww, shucks, it was nothing” speech all ready.

  What the Old Man said instead sobered me up some despite the narcotic glow I luxuriated in.

  He said, “Theo, I’m concerned you don’t have what it takes to be a Hero.”

  3

  “Now don’t get me wrong,” the Old Man said, “you work hard. You never would have made it through Hero Academy if you weren’t capable of hard work. You’re smart, you’re eager to learn, you enjoy helping people. On top of all that, you’re an Omega-level Metahuman. You have the potential to be one of the most powerful people in the world. You’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what you have the genetic capacity to do. Just as your powers first manifested when you were under stress, I suspect your Omega-level potential will show itself in times of great stress.”

  The Old Man shook his head.

  “On paper, you’re exactly the kind of person who should become a licensed Hero. The problem is you lack a certain something. Worldliness? Savagery? Toughness? You’re just too nice, too accommodating? All of the above?” The
Old Man shook his head again. “If it weren’t for the fact that I can fly as fast as I can and was able to both retrieve you and bring Doctor Hippocrates to you before it was too late, you could easily be dead right now. If you become a full-fledged Hero, you won’t have me or anyone else around to be your guardian angel. You’ll have to rely solely on yourself and your instincts to keep you from getting seriously injured or killed. More importantly, the people around you will have to rely on you to keep them from getting injured or killed.

  “The woman who slipped that bomb into your jacket? You shouldn’t have let her anywhere near you. She could have been with the bank robbers. She could be one of those anti-Meta activists we see more and more these days itching for a chance to have one less Metahuman in the world. For all we know, she works for whomever hired Iceburn to kill you. You know we never figured out who it is. He’s still out there somewhere, probably still gunning for you for reasons we can only guess at. When you used your powers in that bank, you were a target: not only for the bank robbers, but for anyone who has a beef with Metahumans in general and with you specifically. But instead of keeping that fact at the forefront of your mind, you let some stranger in a volatile situation come up and hug you. Why? Because she looked harmless? Because she was cute? Because you’re too nice to tell her no? I can’t imagine Neha or Isaac letting that girl get close. They have a ruthlessness you simply don’t. Sure, Isaac hides his under a layer of jokes and silliness, but it’s there, like an iron fist gloved in velvet.

  “And what happened in the bank is not an isolated incident. I’ve been watching how you conduct yourself as an Apprentice with some concern for a while now. What happened with the blonde girl is just the latest in a series of red flags.”

  My heart rose to my chest as the Old Man spoke. The worst of it was, I realized he was right—neither Neha nor Isaac would have made the mistake I had made. Despite being doped to the gills, I felt like crying.