Collateral Damage

by Steve Beaulieu

  Lightning fingers arced off of the beast to the nearest traffic light post. The walk/don’t walk sign flickered from red to white and back again, apparently trying to incite a dance riot. The giant bellowed and collapsed against that towering metal pole, three wooden shafts sticking out from the lump that was its head. Electricity danced up and down its length, against the wrecked facade of the 7-11, and into a metal junction box on the curb.

  Longbow arched an eyebrow in Spitball’s direction.

  “Coincidence!” the speedster barked, some spittle jetting from his mouth.

  Then the corner junction box exploded. A flash of sparks and flames leaped in all directions.

  And Miracle Worker screamed.

  It was the first time Spitball had ever heard such a thing. The man they casually called W was generally pretty neutral, emotionally speaking, and he’d certainly never expressed pain before. At least not in his presence. W’s thick, steel wool beard frazzled outward and tried to flee from his face, maybe just as freaked out as Spitball had been. The pack on W’s back then exploded just as the junction box had. A spray of sparks burst behind him and flames licked at his scrunchy-tied dreadlocks. His mirrored lenses lit blue for an instant. His hands and muscles tightened in a feedback spasm and Miracle Worker fell smoking in the middle of the street.

  With the electric lightshow at an end, the tarry colossus staggered back to its feet. The left side of its body appeared charred and crusty, but it didn’t stay that way. The skin that had been cooked hard was being reabsorbed before their gawking eyes. In a matter of seconds, he’d be his old, pliable, monstrous self again.

  So far, the creature was winning.

  One superhero down. Two to go.

  (Well, one and half; Spitball didn’t count Wrongbow as a whole, legit superhero…)

  2

  “Move, Robin Hood!”

  Spitball grabbed Longbow by the strap of his quiver, rolled him onto his back in a fireman carry, and sprinted away.

  Or tried to, at least.

  The guy probably weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, plus another ten pounds or more in gear. And starting from a cold stop, Spitball had minimal momentum built up to boost his kinetic power. He took four or five steps hyper-quick, then fell flat on his face right in the intersection. The man’s weight on top of him pressed air from his lungs and nearly squeezed his lunch from other places.

  “Get off me!” Spitball squealed.

  Longbow scrambled off and quickly bear crawled away. Spitball rolled and a big splat of sludge-arm impacted the very spot he’d just occupied.

  Spitball kept rolling until he was only a yard from where Miracle Worker lay. He looked up and saw that W was still twitching. His teeth were tight, his fingers squeezed white on the lightning gun in his hands.

  He’s still getting juiced, Spitball thought.

  “I’m coming, Walt!” he cried (hoping he’d said it so fast that no one else—including Longbow—had understood that he’d just used the man’s real name).

  He leaped to his feet, sprinted this way... Skipped to a stop.

  Then he sprinted that way... And skipped to a stop.

  His eyes scanned the streets for something he could use to bat away the cables that connected W’s backpack to the streetlight. If he touched it but failed to disconnect him, Spitball could end up starting his own circuit for the power to flow through.

  Then he spied it: a bicycle parked next to a blue mail box.

  “Better than nothing,” he grumbled. Then he yelled to Longbow, “Distract it!”

  The SWAT-team reject complied, loosing two shafts into the beast.

  Spitball tapped his ear piece again. “Women in tights! Where are the women in tights?” But he didn’t wait for a response.

  He zipped over to the bicycle, an obviously well-loved, pricy-looking model with shock absorbers and foot straps on the pedals. And it had an equally expensive looking U-bar lock, securing the front tire to the leg of the mail box.

  “Well that sucks. Super-strength and steel-chomping fangs are not part of my power profile.”

  He looked up and down the street in a hurry and saw nothing else of use. No other blunt instruments, and nothing that might help him borrow this bike.

  He looked at his hands, fingertips rubbing together like a safecracker’s. “Manual dexterity, don’t fail me now.”

  At high speeds, his fingers could work like a pneumatic ratchet. At least, that was the intent. But after only one second, he realized that wasn’t going to work.

  Then he slapped his own forehead (a little too hard at that speed): “Tool belt!”

  The superhero team under Miracle Worker’s unofficial leadership now came equipped with pouches and hidden pockets stuffed with various useful items. One of which was an omni-tool sporting pliers and a small variety of allen wrenches. (Really, anyone could pick up such a tool for cheap at their local hardware store or Wondermart. He didn’t know why more superheroes hadn’t thought of such a thing before.)

  “Of course, I never thought I’d be stealing someone’s overpriced bicycle to save the day, either.”

  Using his handy-dandy pocket tool, he had the wheel spun off in no time, grabbed the rest of the bike, and flashed to where W was still plugged in.

  A slow-motion dance was in progress in that same intersection. The ten-foot slime monster pulled the shafts from its head with one fingerless appendage and reached toward its tormentor with the other. That arm extended further and further toward the archer, slow as molasses from Spitball’s perspective. Longbow was drawing back to fire another near-worthless arrow into the beast’s throat. At least he wasn’t alone. Silk Spider had just arrived on-scene and was standing on top of an abandoned red coup, casting web lines into the thing’s back and shoulder in an effort to arrest its reaching arm.

  Spitball arrived at his destination and the world crashed back to normal speed. W lay there still, teeth clenched tight, fingers locked on that damn gun like it was saving his life, rather than threatening it. The blur of black and yellow stopped quick and swung the blue bicycle down hard. Its frame bounced off the humming cables.

  “Creepshow,” he said, banging down again and again. He was holding the awkward implement by the rear tire and seat, hoping the rubber there would offer some insulation. “I’m naming this monstrosity Creepshow.”

  Several high-speed crashes later, the connections where Miracle Worker had patched into the city’s power grid finally broke free.

  His beard leaked a long sigh of relief, but W didn’t otherwise move.

  Just yards away, the fight was a perpetual draw. Spider’s webs had only limited purchase on the creature’s liquid-like skin, and the archer was running out of arrows. “We can’t keep this up forever,” Spider said over the comm.

  A jet and amber streak zipped around the thing, stopped just long enough to draw its attention, then shifted away again.

  “If he leaves a little part of himself behind with each step and every missed fist-o-slam…” Spitball dodged another blow as the thing’s big arm crashed down, leaving black residue on the asphalt. “Maybe he’ll eventually be all over the place.”

  His distraction worked—for the moment, anyway.

  Longbow turned away to search the trunk of a curbside car that had been bashed open. “I don’t think so,” he shouted. “I notice he picks up lost goo whenever he walks over it again. And look at the street.” He came out with a crowbar and tossed it to Spider. “He’s leaving footprint depressions, just a centimeter or so deep. I think he’s absorbing the asphalt.”

  “And who knows what else?” Spider said. She caught the improvised weapon and took a big, two-handed swing. Black goo spattered as she went clear through its left leg.

  But the wound filled in as it pulled a one-eighty twist and swiped at her.

  “It does look bigger to me,” Spitball said.

  Spider rolled away from the monster and came up next to her teammate. “Walt?” she asked quietly.
/>   “He’s alive,” Spitball said. That was as much as he could say for sure.

  She touched her earpiece. “Anne, where are you?”

  Mannequin’s voice came back: “Fifth street. Crowd control.”

  “Go get her,” Spider told Spitball. He was en route an instant later and heard Spider’s voice in his ear. “Anne, I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to do your trick. I don’t know what else to do, and Miracle Worker is done. I’m sending the kid your way.”

  “He’s already here,” Mannequin replied.

  From just a few blocks away, you’d have thought it was just a traffic accident, or maybe even a movie shoot going on. The typical crowd of gawkers were gathered behind police barricades, cell phones held up in front of their faces, snapping shots or rolling virtual film.

  All you people would die for a good selfie, wouldn’t you? Spitball thought. Then again, he was a young man of the cell phone age, too, and might have been guilty of that himself not so long ago.

  The police were keeping a growing crowd at bay while superheroine Mannequin addressed a clutch of cameramen and reporters. She wore the “new Phen Five” look, too: the all-black, form-fitting Miracle Mesh jammies with occasional belts and pouches. The difference was, on her, it looked good.

  Everything did; Anne Luna had once been a supermodel, after all.

  That was before her famous face had suffered burns during a big, End-of-the-World-type superhero event. Luke had not known her at that time, not personally at least. (Before becoming Spitball, though, Luke Gillis had spent the better part of his young life as a rabid fanboy.) After a short hiatus, Mannequin had returned wearing a mask that covered her entire face; a porcelain-white replica of herself. To be honest, it was kind of creepy.

  But now, she didn’t give a damn about the burns or a mask. Her Filipina-tan skin, shoulder-length brown hair, and those trademark cheekbones still accented her smile, scars or no scars. In fact, Mannequin had become the public face of the new Phen Five, just as she had been in the Stormfront days.

  They called themselves the “new Phenomenal Five,” but there were currently only four of them. And given their questionable legal status at the moment—exposing the government’s zombie-related misbehaviors will do that—finding a fifth member to draw into their unique world of trouble had not been a particularly high priority.

  (And if Bow Boy thought today was an audition for the fifth slot, he had another thing coming…)

  “Ready to go?” Spitball asked Anne (in his best TV voice).

  There was a collective gasp of awe followed by the rezooming of cameras. The speedster had, after all, just zipped in at a Twitter-dominating velocity. So the reporters started in on him, too:

  “Spitball, are you afraid you’ll be arrested today when this is all over?”

  “Do the feds know who you really are? What do you think will happen if they find out?”

  And one was really clever on the draw: “Can even you outrun the federal government?”

  He scooped Anne up over his shoulder and turned back toward the way he’d come. “Say good-bye, Mannequin.”

  She straightened one arm against his back, boosting her up enough to address the crowd again. “Good-bye, Mannequin.”

  And in a streak of black tights, they were gone.

  • • •

  It took only seconds for Spitball to carry Mannequin the three blocks to the fight scene. Anne was still as thin and lithe as she’d ever been on the catwalk, and carrying her was relatively easy, especially once he got moving.

  He set her onto her feet next to Miracle Worker and she immediately crouched down to see if he was okay.

  “Feedback popped my safety measures,” W whispered, even his voice sounding strained and frazzled. “Most of the power still went around me, though. Not through me.”

  She placed a hand on his chest. “You’ll be okay, then?”

  Spitball turned back to the action to assess what he might have missed in the last twenty or thirty seconds.

  The monster had raged another block north and now had its back to him. It was standing about knee-deep in a yellow cab that had crashed into and destroyed a glass-paned bus stop. The driver’s side door hung open. Longbow was behind the thing with an empty quiver on his back, stabbing it with the crowbar Spider had been wielding when Spitball left. The length of iron went in and out of the amorphous beast three times, barely pulled free again on the third.

  But where the hell was Silk Spider?

  It wasn’t until he heard her cry out that he realized what he was seeing. Why else would the creature be trying to swamp an unmoving vehicle?

  (For a young man gifted with superspeed, the gears in Luke’s brain sometimes turned at an embarrassingly slow pace.)

  Spitball dashed in and rejoined the battle royal. But while he moved with fluidity, everyone else stood practically frozen in time.

  The sudden jolt of panic in realizing Spider’s situation had subconsciously shoved Luke into hypermode, that space between seconds that he himself could rarely find the door to. Sure, Spitball was fast—he could always be fast—but entering that preternatural state that defied the laws of physics was a trick he was still a long way from mastering. When it did happen, breaking that barrier was usually thanks to pure instinct. For him, there was fight or flight, and then there was hypermode.

  He found Silk Spider just where he thought she’d be: trapped in the front seat of the taxi cab.

  She gripped the steering wheel, mouth open wide in an angry cry. It was hard to tell at her almost non-existent rate of speed, but it looked like she was trying to lever herself to the right. A flood of living tar was frozen in a surge under and over the open hinges of the driver’s side door.

  And Spider’s left foot was caught in it.

  Creepshow’s entire lower half had partially engulfed the front of the car and was in the act of pouring itself into the front seat by any means necessary. In a matter of seconds, the monster would fill the space and effectively swallow the superheroine inside.

  A matter of seconds, in real time. Fortunately, Spitball had now penetrated the limbo between those seconds. And now he alone had time to intervene.

  He zipped to the other side of the vehicle. The passenger side door was wedged closed against the metal frame of the bus stop. The broken windows waited there like jaws of jagged teeth. Even if she could get away from the thing trying to absorb her, even if she could force open that passenger side door with her superior strength, Spider would likely be sliced and diced trying to crawl through the perilous glass shards.

  Longbow (that wannabe), was standing calf-deep in the creature’s rear, trying his damnedest to get the thing’s attention. He was practically throwing himself into it, basically offering to let it eat him instead. In reality, he’d probably end up as the second course; this thing looked like the buffet-stalking type.

  He was pretty much sacrificing himself to save Silk Spider, however futile an effort that might be.

  Huh. Maybe Dongbow isn’t so bad after all.

  Of course, his sacrifice would be in vain. After the monster absorbed both Spider and Longbow, it would probably get even bigger. Not only would they die, but their deaths would contribute to making the monster even more unstoppable. And the bigger it got, no doubt, the hungrier it would get.

  3

  The suspension of the world was beginning to wear off. The frozen state of everything was thawing. Spitball noticed an ever-so-slight uptick in the movement of things. The glistening of sunlight off the monster’s oily black skin. The pitch of Spider’s screaming as the soundwaves came more quickly. Although slowed to a near stop, they still carried a mix of anger and fear. (Yes, even she was capable of that emotion on occasion, and this being one of them made it an even more dire situation.)

  Don’t think about that, he told himself. If he started meta-thinking, if he came out of the moment to think about how horrible it was and allowed his confidence to get sapped away, he’d likely
slip back out of hypermode. And if that happened, they were all doomed.

  “Fear is the mind killer,” he quoted. No time for fear or doubt. Just action.

  Spitball sped around the combined wreckage of bus stop and taxi cab and took a flying, flipping leap over and between Longbow and the monster he’d dubbed Creepshow. While accessing the secret door to hypermode was a trick still out of reach to him, he had become more adept at one aspect of his power: momentum. Mass-times-velocity equals… a whole lot of energy. When moving at great speed, even Spitball’s meager buck-sixty of bodyweight accumulated a lot of kinetic power.

  He catapulted himself into the air, flinging his feet over his head and grabbing the newcomer’s crowbar with one hand. His kinetic energy carried him well over the monster’s sticky shape and tore the iron bar from both it and Longbow’s grip. Spitball landed on the other side, slid about five feet as if on ice, and hoped he hadn’t just broken the archer’s fingers.

  A fractal moment later he was back on the cab’s passenger side, eliminating all of the glass teeth, beating the bus stop frame out of shape, and forcing open the door.

  All the while, the world was speeding up a millisecond at a time.

  Spitball raced back around the car. It occurred to him how like sex trying to stay in hypermode was: you go faster and faster, trying to make the most of it while it lasts, all the while losing your grip on the moment; the longer it goes, the harder it is to hold on to, and you know at any second you could pop and it’d all be over.

  “Definitely never relay that metaphor to Cheryl,” he told himself aloud.

  Cheryl— Silk Spider—would never want to hear such a thing come out of his mouth anyway, but if she knew he’d come up with it while rescuing her from a giant spooge monster… She might just break a body part for him.

  Feeling himself about to be pulled free from his superspeed nirvana, Spitball leaped into the air and brought the crowbar down in both hands. Chopping with it as such velocity turned its blunt edge into a high-speed iron cleaver. It sliced all the way through the amoeba pseudopod that held Spider’s left foot and separated her from the fearsome blob.