Collateral Damage

by Steve Beaulieu

  FIVE

  Police had cordoned off the offices for Channel 5. In most popular fiction of this sort, the channel’s headquarters would have certainly been located in one of the many skyscrapers throughout Carnival City, but in actuality, it was a small two-story building removed from the larger conglomerates downtown.

  I hovered over the scene, noting the placement of the police cruisers and the barriers to keep civilians at a presumably safe distance. After yesterday’s swath of destruction, I loathed the idea of entering another situation which may lead to an overwhelming loss of life.

  The civilians below looked up at me, some of them holding protest signs, others cheering for me. I’d often thought I might look cooler wearing a cape. I always imagined hovering, cape billowing in the breeze, but realistically a cape would only get in the way. A supervillain would certainly grab it, spin me like a bola, and hurl me into a building.

  No, capes were certainly not my thing. I was not a count with an insatiable taste for blood living in a Transylvanian castle; I was a superhero. Superheroes didn’t need capes. Hell, they didn’t need fancy costumes as long as they got the job done. As the world’s only real-life superhero, I should know.

  Nearby, a helicopter circled. The officers within eyed me warily. I returned my attention to the building below.

  No use delaying the inevitable, I thought. Go in.

  I somersaulted and willed myself downward, blasting through the air at speeds exceeding terminal velocity. I flipped and landed on my feet, although I slowed my descent at the last possible moment to avoid leaving an impact crater in the sidewalk in front of the building. When I was still learning how to fly, I’d cost the city thousands in repairs to sidewalks and city streets because I hadn’t learned how to properly harness my abilities. I was much better now, but I still hadn’t figured out how to avoid turning the city into a full-scale battleground when a supervillain was hellbent on smashing through it by using me as a battering ram.

  The words 43 dead flashed in my mind’s eye and I cringed.

  The building’s offices and halls had been vacated. I assumed most of the employees were evacuated, but I also had to consider many of these individuals might be hostages in the newsroom.

  I walked down multiple corridors until I found the entrance to the newsroom. A sign above the door proclaimed ON AIR and was illuminated in stark red neon. I opened the door and stepped inside, passing through a tight corridor lined with equipment and cables, which led out to the strategically placed cameras. Only a single camera operator remained at his station, and the city’s newest villain sauntered back and forth, huffing, his belly jiggling.

  “My sister, Erin, was a wonderful soul. Inquisitive, loving, athletic—whereas I am not,” he chuckled softly. “And she was an absolute joy to be around. I saw her less and less over the past few years as our careers led us down wildly different paths, but we always met during the holidays, without fail. We argued last Christmas, and although we talked about things via social media and over the phone, my biggest regret is that I will never hug my dear sister again. It saddens me the last encounter I had with her, face to face, was an argument that is, in retrospect, superfluous and downright silly.”

  He turned, noting my entrance, and his face brightened. “Ah, here's the hero now.” He indicated the cameraman should turn and said, “Go on, go on, show the world that Max Factor has arrived.”

  The camera operator revolved around the camera rig, guiding the lens until I was its focus. I ignored it, focusing entirely on my adversary. “You wanted me. Here I am.”

  He smiled. “Yes, indeed you are. Allow me to properly introduce myself. I am Travis Shore. You killed my sister Erin yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, “but your quarrel is with me, not these people. Let them go.”

  Travis’s smile grew wider. “Oh, I intend to. They are merely a means to an end.” He withdrew a USB flash drive from his pocket and held it up so I could see it. The camera operator had already circled around and backed up in an effort to get us into the frame together. Travis continued. “This flash drive contains classified documents. They explain exactly what happened to me and who you are dealing with. There are detailed descriptions and explanations. I want you to know why you cannot stop me and precisely what I am capable of.”

  He tossed it to me, and I caught it without difficulty, then pocketed it.

  “The clock starts now,” Travis said, expelling another series of huffs. “You have six hours. Then I’ll kill someone else.”

  His feet passed through the floor then, making him appear as if he were melting a la the Wicked Witch of the West. I ran for him, determined to arrest his descent, to pull him up, to force him to surrender. I was fast, and he wasn’t able to exactly elude me by slipping into the floor, but when I reached for his shoulder, my hand passed through him. A pervading numbness spread through my extremities, then passed, leaving me feeling absolutely nothing below the wrist.

  He smiled as he descended into the floor. “You can’t beat me. You can’t threaten me. You can’t stop me. Six hours, Max Factor. End your career, or I end another life. Simple as that.”

  He disappeared into the floor, and I stared after him, jaw agape, my hand hanging limply at the wrist. Outrage seized me and I punched the floor with my good hand, shattering the tiles and the foundation beneath, and hit my knees. “No!” I howled after him, not caring that everyone in the room was staring at me with stark terror.

  SIX

  An hour later back at the apartment, the slightest tingling sensation had crept back into my fingers as if thousands of the tiniest needles were piercing my flesh and bone over and over and over again, igniting an inferno in my nerve endings. It was maddening.

  One handed, I filled a jug with ice water and plunged my arm nearly to the elbow into it, ground my teeth together, and closed my eyes. I was thankful, feeling of some sort was returning to the limb. I took it as a good sign I would regain motor function in it once more, but the healing process was a tedious one and I did not have time to waste. In five hours, Shore would claim his next victim unless I figured out a way to stop him.

  Carrie had plugged the flash drive into her laptop and now sat at the dining room table, perusing its files. She was chewing her nails, I noticed; she only did that when she was especially anxious. With every passing moment, her eyes grew steadily wider.

  We sat in silence with my arm soaking in ice water and her eyes glued to the computer screen. The water had warmed enough for the ice to melt before Carrie spoke, and when she did, her sentiment wasn’t a positive one. “You are so effed.”

  “Effed?” I asked. “Is that a technical term?”

  She picked up a pen from the table and threw it at me. It bounced harmlessly off my right shoulder. “You’re screwed. Royally. I don’t know how you’re supposed to do anything to this guy. Every other supervillain we’ve encountered, there’s always been something you could do. There was always a weakness. This guy, though…You can’t touch him, Quinton. At all.”

  I sighed. “Trust me, I know. My arm is still feeling it.”

  “You’re lucky your arm’s feeling anything at this point. Dude, if you were anyone else, you’d probably never be able to use it again.”

  This was true, but my healing ability took its toll nonetheless. The bruising from yesterday’s battle was worsening at an alarming rate since my encounter with Shore. My body seemed to be focusing more on regaining motor function and feeling in my arm at the expense of allowing my other bangs and bruises to become more prominent. Maybe they would have gotten this bad anyway, but they seemed far worse than usual, especially the bruising on my face. I hadn’t peeled my shirt off, so I had no idea how the bruising around my ribs looked, but gauging by how I felt, it was undoubtedly a collage of pain worthy of an art gallery.

  I should have wished to be invincible, I thought, thinking back to the tomb in which I received my superhero abilities, recalling the shadows and
how they seemed to conceal the genie’s face even when I had reignited the torch and held it up to illuminate the space. I wouldn’t be dealing with this right now.

  But would I? Would invincibility make me more destructive? Would it have been more than forty-three people who died yesterday had I been invincible? No, invincibility would only make me more of a liability, not less.

  Besides, all three wishes were used up. Only the first wish had made a lasting effect on my life beyond the tomb. The latter two only lived on in memory, specifically in my nightmares. I shuddered—from the ice or from the memory, I can’t say—and recalled my father’s face after I’d made my second wish. I remember how he’d lurched through the dark, his face terribly slack on one side, eyes vacant, a deep, monotone grueling sound emanating from his throat.

  “I wish you’d bring my father back from the dead.” My second wish had been one made of grief, with ill judgment, and the genie had fulfilled it as he saw fit: not by restoring true life to my father, but by rendering him undead. He wasn’t a traditional brain-eating, flesh-craving zombie—like in the movies—but he wasn’t my father either.

  My final wish had been to return him to his eternal slumber. I’ve never cried so hard in my life, before or since.

  “Are you listening?” Carrie asked, and I turned to find her staring at me with the most incredulous look on her face.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, I was elsewhere for a moment.”

  “Where were you? Disneyland?”

  “No, I was thinking about my last two wishes.”

  Her scorn instantly softened into sympathy. “You did what any kid would have done. Hell, what anyone would have done.”

  I waved my good hand. “Doesn’t matter.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. It doesn’t now. What does matter is this Antimatter guy.”

  “We shouldn’t call him that.”

  “Well, call him that or not, there’s a reason he gave us the moniker,” Carrie explained, pointing at the computer screen. “Travis Shore is a scientist. He left Carnival City to work in Geneva.”

  Realization dawned on me. She didn’t have to tell me. “He works at CERN.”

  “Worked,” she corrected, “but yes. He was a particle physicist specializing in research into antimatter. Guess who was caught in a blast from a malfunctioning particle accelerator?”

  I closed my eyes. “Shore.”

  Carrie jumped up with enough force to knock her chair over backward. “DING-DING-DING! WHAT DO WE HAVE FOR HIM, JOHNNY?!” She rounded the table, approaching me. “This guy is not our typical supervillain, Quinton. He was one of the good guys up until recently, and even after his accident, he was still a rational, productive human being. Your fight with Meteos, the loss of his sister—essentially, your actions are what pushed him over the edge. He tendered his resignation yesterday.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to meet her gaze. “You know I didn’t—”

  “I know,” she said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “He’s smart enough to realize that too. But this isn’t about intelligence or who either of you were before yesterday. He doesn’t want to kill you. He wants you to quit.”

  “I can’t just quit.”

  “Can’t you?”

  I looked at her, and we stared each other down for a multitude of seconds that came damn close to becoming a minute. “Who would stop the supervillains if I quit?”

  “Who’s to say there would be more supervillains?” Carrie asked. “We’ve talked about your wish thousands of times, Quinton. There were no supervillains before you became a superhero. For the most part, you developed your powers and learned how to harness your abilities in a vacuum for years before you announced yourself, and there wasn’t a single supervillain during that time. Hell, no villains showed up until after you announced your presence to the world. Who’s to say once you hang up your mantle it won’t just stop?”

  I thought through the ramifications of what she said, and it brought me to one horrible conclusion. “Are you saying this is my fault?”

  She shook her head. “No, not directly, but I honestly think you are the catalyst. It’s like magnetism. The potential is out there, and once they start to manifest their powers, you just draw the freaks to you.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “I can’t just quit, Carrie. What about the villains we still know about? What about the ones that have escaped?”

  “They’re not your problem right now. He is.”

  “And what about when they are my problem again? What then?”

  Carrie reached up, placed both of her hands on my cheeks, and met my gaze. “Bro, they don’t have to be your problem. They never had to be. You brought this on yourself. You can end it. In his own twisted, grief-stricken way, Shore is offering you an out.”

  The water I soaked my arm in was nearly warm now. The feeling of needles had spread further up my arm, but the fiery intensity had dulled to a throbbing ache. I withdrew my arm and looked at my hand, willing my fingers to move, for my fist to curl, for my wrist to bend. My fingers twitched somewhat but otherwise hung limp. Better, but not quite where I needed them to be.

  “I need to go.”

  Carrie frowned. “Where?”

  “To Geneva. I can’t just call up CERN scientists and pick their brain about how to stop Shore. I can’t let them easily trace anything back to us. I need to meet them face to face.”

  I started for the window. I was still dressed as Max Factor, and I wasn’t about to just stride right out into the hall outside our apartment for any of our neighbors to see me.

  Carrie grabbed my arm, the good one. “Quinton, you have less than five hours. There’s no guarantee you can make it there and back in time, let alone get the answers you seek. There’s no guarantee the answers you seek even exist.”

  “I have to try.” I opened the window with my good arm and turned back to her. “See what else you can figure out. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

  Before she could say anything else, I was out the window and rising fast. Carnival City dropped beneath me. Soon I was among the clouds and, at least temporarily, alone with my thoughts.

  SEVEN

  The flight took longer than I hoped. While I have many capabilities, I am not as fast as a speedster superhero in the comics, and therefore my jaunt out of the country, while expedient, still set me back considerably. The stopwatch app on my smartwatch allowed me to keep track of how much time I had been gone—despite time zone differences.

  During the flight, Carrie’s words echoed in my ears, vocalizing the very thoughts I had wrestled with more and more since my introduction to the world as Max Factor. Had my presence served as a catalyst for the creation of supervillains? Was I ultimately responsible for everything that had happened in the interim? Now more than ever, the doubt gnawed at me, persistently chewing through the belief I had erected around myself as armor that I was, in fact, a true hero, that my presence was saving lives, not endangering them.

  CERN was a dead end. I spent half an hour on its campus, and most of that time was dealing with security. Throughout my experiences there, I nervously glanced at my stopwatch as the seconds and minutes ticked by; time was precious, and I had very little of it.

  I met with Dr. Moreau, one of Shore’s colleagues, to discuss Shore’s condition. He didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know from the files on the flash drive. When I asked if there was any way to combat Shore’s antimatter abilities and neutralize their effects, Moreau looked crestfallen. “I’m sorry, but we know little about how antimatter works. We simply don’t have the technology to render it inert, if it’s even possible. Maybe with years and years of research, it would be possible, but as it stands now, there’s nothing. I’m sorry, Max Factor, but I do not believe there is a way to neutralize what has happened to Dr. Shore. It’s impossible. I must go.” He turned and retreated into the building, past the security guards.

  If I had thought I had anything to gain by pushing the issue and following Moreau in
side, I would have, guards or not. They wouldn’t have been able to stop me. However, I was not about to force entry and inadvertently hurt anyone in the process. I sensed Moreau was telling the truth, loathe as I was to admit it.

  I checked my watch. It had taken me over two hours to fly to CERN. If I left immediately, I would just barely make it back to Carnival City in time before the next execution. I didn’t know what I would do when I got back. If I couldn’t attack Shore directly, perhaps I could level the playing field another way.

  I hadn’t taken the notion of surrendering to his demands seriously. I had every intention of finding a way to stop him, but I was at a loss regarding how such a feat would be accomplished.

  EIGHT

  I didn’t search for Shore when I returned to Carnival City. Instead, I went home, entering the apartment via the window. I expected Carrie to immediately interrogate me regarding the details of my trip in an effort to ascertain what I had learned. I’d rehearsed what I might say upon returning, knowing she might once again bring up the notion I might simply do as Shore demanded and quit, but only deafening silence greeted me, and disarray; the apartment was the scene of a violent struggle.

  The front door had been kicked in; the jamb was in splinters. The television was busted. The table had been overturned, and the laptop lay on the floor, a crack in its LED screen. The flash drive, I noticed, was no longer plugged into the computer; a cursory examination of the room yielded no signs to its current whereabouts.

  Hanging from a string suspended from the ceiling was an old voice recorder. A sticky note, which stated in bold, black script Play Me!, had been appended to it. I ripped the recorder free of its string and played the mini-cassette within. Shore’s voice drifted, crackling, from the tiny speakers.