by Jen Finelli
“You called.”
A soft, young voice—Andy whirled.
In the shadows of the moonlight, on the raised, brick baluster of the roof, stood a teenage girl dressed in black. She wore a black Muslimy head-covering thingy; her bangs flickered in the wind.
“Hey, who let her up here without telling me?” Andy snapped. His soldiers turned, and gaped, each staring one at the other. They started to chatter, to accuse—
“I let myself up,” she said, stepping down off the baluster onto the cement roof. “I got your message.”
Something like a cape stretched off her shoulders into the shadow. Was it a cape? A cloak? Some weird Arab thing...
“So why'd you come?” Andy smirked. “You know you're not walking out of this the way you came in.”
“Well, why'd you call me?” She nodded to the four shivering, half-naked hostages covered in kerosene. Andy caught the hatred in the father's eyes, and grinned a little.
“You had them to make an example of, so why invite me?” the girl asked.
“Meddlers should get their fair share, too,” Andy shrugged. “Threatening them was the only way you'd come.”
“It's theatrics,” the girl nodded. “You know, I have to hand it to you, using the Daily Review to make everyone think the hate's fake—while you went viral? That was bold. Are you're making money off the views, too?”
“My Youtube channel has ten million subscribers. I'm a huge web series now, apparently,” Andy smirked.
“So you'll let them go? Set me on fire instead?”
“Is that what you want?” Andy chuckled. The girl was certainly dressed for the occasion, make-up and all.
“Yes,” she said. “You can let them go now.”
“Sorry, honey, we don't work like that. No negotiating with terrorists, and so on.” Andy flicked two fingers, and Bonnie and Clyde rose to get the girl ready. “You're all staying for the show.”
The girl backed towards the other hostages. Andy waved at Jojo to get a camera rolling. Whatever the girl thought she'd had planned, it ended right here, in a burst of flame, and everyone needed to see it.
The girl grabbed the two children and jumped off the roof.
Screams, horrified, long blubbering screams, bubbled from the parents, their eyes wide and teeth gnashing with hatred beyond despair. Andy rushed to the edge of the building. The grit of the brick dug into his palms as he held his breath: in the shadows below the building he couldn't see the forms splattered on the pavement. He couldn't see any people at all. Wind tickled his forelock.
Oh, there: those blobs he'd mistaken for bushes, motionless by the sidewalk. Gross, something twitched...broken.
Well then.
Andy turned back to the parents. He sprinkled the ash of his cigarette on the banister. “Smart girl. Now your kids don't have to suffer.”
The mother's face wrinkled in ways faces just shouldn't wrinkle. The man screamed vitriol without real words. It was uncomfortable, and stupid to watch, so Andy didn't. He rolled his eyes, lit a match, and threw it at them.
A black comet shot down onto the roof, between the hostages and the falling match. “What the—?” Flames caught dark, flowing cloth; with a loud whoosh a column of fire enveloped the darkness.
The hostages, very much not on fire, stopped wailing, as confused and slackjawed as everyone else; the burning figure whirled.
“Free yourselves and run to the edge!” the flames cried, raising two thin arms to throw a knife to the store owner.
Everyone sat still for a moment. The flames crackled. The girl inside them didn't burn.
“Hey! I said run!” She snapped, and finally the hostages obeyed.
Andy saw the Muslim hood-thingy now. The meddler. He grabbed the nearest machine gun and fired on the barefoot animals plat-plat-platting across the roof. The burning girl leapt: with a flapping gust of wind two huge black wings unfurled from her back, stretching from tip to tip almost the width of the roof, to shield her rescuees from the hail.
“What the f—”
“No swearing,” the girl shouted back to Andy.
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, excuse you.” She pounded her wings hard against herself to smother the flames, clicked two harnesses around the hostages, and leapt off the roof just as a rocket-launcher blasted the baluster behind her.
“Will you quit filming and help us over here?” Andy roared at the camera man.
The screaming hostages trailed under the girl's wings as she fell. Andy's guys aimed weapons rattattatting after her; Andy helped one of this ladies move her rocket launcher closer to the edge of the room. In his hurry, his finger caught in the crease of a machine part. It pinched; he yanked it out and bled as a flap of skin came off.
Rocket launchers notwithstanding, the flying girl glided into the darkness, and then into the red and blue lights and shadows of the police cars waiting at the end of the street.
No swearing? Andy stared after her. He sucked on his finger, then put his cigarette back in his mouth. So. She was one of those psychos. Andy earned the big lieutenant strategist money because Andy knew people, and this kid? He had her number. He could still save this if he crushed the whole superhero fantasy right now. Now...or never.
“Hold this,” he handed his cig to the woman beside him, and drew his knife.
Birth of the Black Butterfly
Asia stretched out her back and panted as the police reunited the shop owner's family. In the cool breeze, her sweat seemed to tingle on her face.
So flame-resistant cotton actually resisted flames, who knew. Coating it in ethanol had the intended effect, too—on fire, yet not on fire.
Still, Asia began to tremble as she stepped away from the police into the shadows of the trees near the Daily Review. Heat, heat covering her body, stretching up to her face, fire, fire...
“I don't like fire,” she said to Carl on the phone.
“You just figuring that out?” he said. “I was more worried about the glider holding up. Guess we did the math right.”
“I don't like math, either,” she said.
“Well someone's really picky today! I'm sorry your near-death experience wasn't to your satisfaction,” Carl teased. His voice grew somber as Butterfly. “You okay, mami?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“This wasn't a mistake?”
“We saved four lives. I saved four lives. The police can relocate them and put them in Witness Protection now. So the 109s can't just kidnap them again?”
“Most likely, yes.”
“Then it wasn't a mistake.”
Asia glanced over her shoulder, back to the building roof where the get-a-way helicopter began to whir. Silhouetted against the moonlight stood the leader, the guy calling the shots, watching her. The man in the tight black shirt. His high cheeks relaxed, his piercing eyes focused on hers as that powerful, scruff-shadowed jaw split in a grin. The glint of a knife flashed in his hand...as he took a swan dive off the roof.
“Oh, crapola,” Asia muttered, running towards him. Her tiny feet now on tip-toe, she leapt, yanking the pulleys on her shoulders to give her wings one heavy flap. Moving air swished down around her as she flapped again—
Not enough—she couldn't get off the ground—she fell on her knee, scraped it, and the suicidal maniac neared the earth—
“Jump!” Asia squealed, yanking the pulleys again. This flap caught a gust of wind and brought her airborne.
She saw the knife waiting for her. She collided with the falling idiot and rose, into the air, as her hands fumbled to find it, stop it, before he traded his death for hers. What a sick man, what a sick sick man—
He slashed at her, and she jerked back mid-air, throwing them both into a spin. The blade caught one of the metal bars on her left wing, tangled it. Her hijab flew off, her hair flipped over her lips, the dizzying upside-down-right-side-up-left-right-what-the-whirling tumble stole her gut and hurt her head, she couldn't see, a sharpness dug into the edge of he
r shoulder and she screamed, her hands found his hands, sweaty—
“Okay, fine.” She pushed him off her and grabbed her pulleys for a solid flap, righting herself before leaves smacked her chest and she almost crashed into a tree.
Her rescuee fell into the tree, and then through it, and managed to grab a branch before falling out of it. He crunched as his leg twisted; a strained grunt through his teeth when he didn't get back up told Asia he'd survived.
Asia glided to a landing a few meters away, clutching her shoulder. A safe distance. The man tried to claw his way up the tree-trunk to pull himself to standing, his face lined now, twisted as he ground his jaw and breathed whistling, withheld pain.
“You're tough,” Asia said. “That's admirable. You're handsome, too: what's a good-looking guy like you doing working for a bunch of monsters? You could be a model, or a movie star. What's your name?”
“Andy,” he said, following her gaze down the street to the policemen running towards them. “You're sick, you know that?” He chuckled as tears shone in the corners of his dreamy eyes.
“Me?” Asia asked. “You're the one who's sick. I won. You didn't die, and I won.” She would've laughed, but watching him struggle turned her stomach. I saved his life, she told herself as blood seeped through his jeans around his knee. Her knee ached with his. Her nose itched as tears collected, threatening to seep down its sides. This poor, sick man...
“You like getting hurt, and you like jerks,” Andy said, stumbling forward with his bloody knife. “You don't go for the bad guys because you're good, you go for us because you hate yourself! You think you deserve to be punished, and deep down, you want an alpha to help you, to teach you, to beat you, if need be. You women, you all like bad. Since we're not swearing,” he laughed, with a squeal of pain. “You're female dogs who crave masters.”
Asia's stomach grew cold. Cruelty flashed into her mind; she restrained it for justice as she wrapped her hijab up around her face, almost like the hood of a burka, and taking several steps back, drew the weapon of her generation.
She drew her phone.
“I am,” she paused.
Black wings hung around her. An icon is in the action, not the name, yes? “I am Black Butterfly,” Asia said. “This is for all of you who just watched the 109 livestream that was supposed to end with four people set on fire. It’s real.” She aimed her weapon. “This is Andy. He believes he has power. He tried to show you that power by live-streaming terror. Look at his power now.”
“Hey, turn that off!”
“Look at his hobbling. Look at his weakness.”
Then, she ran from him, and putting her phone in her mouth for a second, yanked her pulleys again. I'm getting the hang of this, she thought as she lifted into the air. Her belly trembled, but soon she'd reached a gliding height, and there, she held her phone out towards the city.
“This is you. You are weak, too, like Andy. I'm weak like Andy, heck I'm terrified, here in the air, and we're all terrified, and so broken and flawed! Some of us are cruel, and some of us are cowards. We take revenge instead of seeking justice because we don't have the hearts to admit that we know the difference: that we could be heroes. We're all sick.
“But I don't believe in what we are, but what we will be. Andy will be a better man. I will be a wiser girl. And you, my beautiful city, you...
“You will be brave.”
~The End
I think Butterfly would like persecution.com and
https://www.mnnonline.org/middle-east-refugee-crisis-how-you-can-help/.
The Man by the River
Skye Yamada-Johnson
Introduction
I hope you’re enjoying the anthology so far, and I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to drop a few notes on the next story.
First, this is how you get to see my art style evolving! Even though I’m a professional writer, and not a professional artist, I began to draw Skye’s comic since at the time I didn’t have the money to hire someone else for it. The first two pages SUCK, and the last two pages aren’t bad!
Before you continue, read the first part of this origin story at http://becominghero.ninja/comic/inside-the-comic-when-skye-was-little-skye-origins-1/ For you, however, I wanted to make a special treat, so I’ve added several pages and an alternate ending! I think the alternate ending really ties together Skye’s place within the team. For those of you who like continuity, Jun’s actually joining the team at the same time, but since she isn’t much of a character in the Becoming Hero novel I left her out of this anthology. If we make a second anthology I’ll include her, along with Aquabird, Lynx, and the cool plant guy none of you know about yet.
So yeah! Sorry for the interruption and all.  Read that link, then read this!
Fun fact: This was the cover for the print comic edition of this story, which was available only in comics shops in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and at the Austin WizardWorld ComicCon in 2016.
The spinning blade tore into my left arm with a wet whir; the gloves Carl gave me discharged electricity right into the cyborg's face as I kicked, thrashed, yelled nonsense, anything to get this thing away from me. What was this, what had I gotten myself into, what—
The android fell back for a second, sparking. She twitched and seized as she tried to restart herself.
“You've grown stronger,” she said with half her mouth.
“You cut my arm with a buzzsaw!” I said, staring at the blood dripping onto my Mom's carpet as I snatched my cell phone off my desk. Carl's name came up first, and I pressed it hard.
The phone rang as the android charged again. I dodged to the side as my Mom knocked on the door, and the android crashed into my computer, knocking it onto the floor.
“Turn down the video game, Skye!” Mom yelled. “I'm recording!”
“Yes ma'am, sorry!” I yelled back. Holy crap, I had to get this thing away from my house and my family.
I dove out the window, clutching my phone. Oh my gosh it kept ringing! I ran back and forth across my backyard, dancing with the dead; through the screen door I could see my Mom's back as she set the table inside.
Carl finally picked up.
“Hey, papi, what's up?”
“There's a cyborg zombie trying to kill me! Peyton somehow put like a robot in his wife's corpse and it's gross and trying to kill me!”
“Short it out with your charge gloves!” The android gave my Mom's bushes a close trim as I ducked another buzzsaw.
“I tried that already, she got back up!”
“Hold on, we'll be right there,” Carl said. “Hey Butterfly—” He spoke into the background, but I didn't hear what he said; the saw made another loud pass right next to my ear.
I ran into the woods behind our suburb. The cyborg charged after me, screaming things about her husband's genius. Twigs and bark flew in the air around me as she chopped her way through the foliage.
“You're husband's still alive!” I yelled behind me. “He's just in jail! In the hospital in jail!”
“You broke his neck!”
“I don't think I did that!” Erk. “Carl, I'm heading for the reservoir!”
“Roger that,” Carl said. I ran past the tree where Mark and I had hidden. She ran through it. I climbed the fence. She tore it down. The chain-link tangled around her saws. They screeched like fingernails on chalkboard as she fought through the metal and I backed to the edge of the water.
“Look, I'm sorry about what happened to you and your family,” I said, my palms out in supplication. “I couldn't let him kill my friend. My friends are everything to me.”
“Your friend? Your friend!” She screeched. “You do not know loss of friends! You do not know suffering, or love! You're a child! A stupid child!”
“See, now you're just being a jerk,” I said. “Maybe Peyton deserved to get shelved.”
She screamed and charged. I side-stepped, and she tumbled into the poisoned water.
Her green eyes widened as Peyton's chemicals
bonded with the BRCA mutation in her flesh and began to short out her circuits. She sank with a gurgling cough, staring past me, or into me, at some horror I couldn't imagine, and now I knew what Peyton meant about the distant stare of the dead.
Robotman and Black Butterfly landed next to me.
“You did it,” Carl said.
“Uh...yeah...I guess...” I shivered. Butterfly watched my face, and wrapped her arms around my side for a sympathy hug.
“Thanks,” I said, bleeding on her. My arm stung, but it wasn't dripping too bad anymore, and it moved around just fine as I kind of pushed her away. “But, um, I'm—”
“Oh, I'm so sorry, you're bleeding! Hold on—” She started to take off her headcloth to wrap it around my arm.
“Butterfly,” Carl interrupted to hand her a roll of medical tape. I guess he got it out of the compartment in his arm? I returned his fist bump as he debriefed me and dropped me a few pointers, but I couldn't really take my eyes away from the running water. You could still kind of see her hair waving in the cloudy depths like river weeds.
“I need to be able to fly like you guys,” I said.
“I'll fix that.” Carl said.
“I also need something long-range. I can't be wrestling these crazy people all the time.”
“Wind goes with the hurricane theme, I'll see what I can do,” Carl said.
“And we need to go get ice cream,” I said.
“That we can do.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
And with a long sigh, and the hands of my new friends on my shoulders, I turned around…and let it go.
~The End
This is just a fun little superhero story.
But I don’t think I’m ever going to forget my first breast cancer patient.
That’s why when Breast Cancer Awareness day rolls around, I hope that before you get sucked into the hype you pause to think about whether or not you’re actually helping. Posting your bra color doesn’t help. Posing shirtless doesn’t help. Dressing up as a big breast doesn’t help. In fact, these efforts often actually hurt by propagating societal misconceptions that breast cancer is a women’s disease, when in fact it can happen to men—men who then feel emasculated, ashamed, and afraid to seek help, because their illness has been painted with a broad pink brush. And some of us are just plain stupid: last year, one guy scammed dozens of women into sending him naked pics for his own personal use in the name of “breast cancer.” It’s a huge corporate sales event, too, but a lot of places will make things “pink” for breast cancer awareness without actually donating any money.