“No way. No way was this natural causes,” he muttered, staring at the seam where one wall crashed into the next. “Hawk King was murdered,” he said. “And if someone could kill him, that means all of us, and the world…are in for shit beyond anybody’s reckoning.”
Into Battle: But Where—and Who—Is the Foe?
Ironically, at the exact moment that global peace has triumphed, the gravest threat to superheroic mental health has become paranoia.
Although supercitizens now can bask in the summer sun of safety, the hypervigilance of their careers has cast them into a winter of ODI-CFFB: Obsessive/Defensive Ideation and Compulsive Fight-or-Flight Behavior, much in the way that a satyr or nymphomaniac, if placed in solitary confinement, may fall into chronic masturbation with attendant carpal tunnel syndrome.
The death of a loved one or a revered icon such as Hawk King is often a trigger for paranoia, but that paranoia speaks to a deeper drive than fear. Paranoia is a defiant charge to a cold, unfeeling cosmos: “Hear me! I exist! I’m important!” Because after all, if someone is actually orchestrating the chaos of the universe against you personally, then you do matter. When no one seems to care anymore, at least “enemies” give you the comforting illusion that you count.
As we’ll see throughout Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself, above all other psychic threats, paranoia holds more destructive potential than even Cosmicus, the Digester of Worlds. As the old saying goes, paranoia can indeed “destroy ya.”
CHAPTER TWO
Facing the Ultimate ArchEnemy
SATURDAY, JULY 1, 9:30 A.M.
Stages of Grief
Although as a hyperhominid you’ve spent your entire career risking your life, there’s only one task as difficult as facing the unresolved scandals and unsightly scars of your secret origin. And that is facing the deaths of others, especially that of a fellow hero.
After all, you’ve spent your professional career beating the odds, continually cheating the grim reaper at his own card table. But Death plays the ultimate trump card and is the only archenemy guaranteed to cash in everyone else’s chips.
The morning after such an epoch-shattering event as the death of Hawk King, it would have been predictable for my team of sanity-seekers to skip out on therapy at my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic. That’s because they, like everyone else, were falling up and down the escalator of the nine stages of the Brain-Silverman Grief Scale™ (Revised):
1. Confusion
2. Obsession
3. Lust for vengeance
4. Self-pity
5. Boundless contempt
6. Reckless adventurism
7. Depression
8. Paranoia and
9. Hollow acceptance
Regardless of each hero’s sadness, the F*L*A*C’s orders were emphatic: even at this moment of global mourning, any of my F*O*O*Jsters who failed to attend therapy and achieve measurable improvement would be summarily removed from the ranks of Earth’s most celebrated superteam.
And thus, in the bright sunlit Saturday morning of the Anger Room, my heroes sat in a circle of morbid moroseness.
In their fumbling individual attempts to bear the psychemotional weight of their legendary mentor’s death, each F*O*O*Jster shared something with the group to ease individual and collective sorrow, and offered a few halting remarks met by sodden silence. In doing so, each one evoked aspects of his or her personality which had until that point remained hidden—tenderness, nostalgia, melancholy, compassion, and more—a stunning departure from the factionalizing and fractious fracas factory of the previous day.
Wally W. Watchtower brought with him a pharaonic crown given to him by Hawk King, an interroyal gift from an ancient Egyptian king to the surviving prince of the doomed planet Argon; Wally explained how that gesture, in late 1944, had helped him rise from confusion as a wandering, superpowered Jehovah’s Witness farmboy from Kentucky to his grand destiny as Omnipotent Man. The Flying Squirrel distributed free advance copies of two books from PiltdownPerennial: a coffee-table book of the most famous photographs of the Egyptian deity, plus a small, black, clothbound volume of wisdom-quotations called The Utterances of Hawk King; even Festus Piltdown’s perpetual gadfly, the X-Man, seemed impressed and moved by the gift.
André supplied a sumptuous collection of delicate confections he’d baked personally, from flans to mille-feuille, and while serving them to everyone uttered not a single bzzzt!; Syndi distributed advance CD singles of the dancebeat eulogy she’d rushed into production the previous night called “Hawk On (Long Live the King).” And during a moment of intense quiet, Iron Lass produced a gleaming silver ram’s horn she’d brought from Aesgard more than a millennium before, from which she elicited a sound like Louis Armstrong on a muted trumpet, rendering in tear-trickling agony what she later informed me was Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.”
Only one of my sanity-supplicants came empty-handed: the X-Man. But even he would nonetheless later share something—a situationally inappropriate but entirely predictable paranoid rant.
Stages of Grief: Confusion
How do you all feel,” I said, looking for anything to get our discussion started at last, “about…oh, the media coverage of Hawk King’s passing?”
Getting no response, I held up a couple of newspapers. The Los Ditkos Sentinel-Spectator carried the headline NATION MOURNS FOUNDING F*O*O*JSTER. The Los Ditkos Sun announced HAWK KING: DEAD AT 7000+. USA Today blared “AVIAN AVENGER” DEAD/“NATURAL CAUSES” RULES F*O*O*J CORONER.
Each front page displayed iconic photographs of Hawk King, two of his classic portrait and the third an image of him seated in a golden woven-wicker throne. From the portrait beamed his golden beak and gold-rimmed black eyes, his black-feathered face topped with golden pharaonic crown. In the seated image, his black body gleamed, bedecked in golden Egyptian skirt and sandals; his hands clutched a golden crook and flail, and his black-golden wings were spread as if to devour the seven winds.
I clicked on the television; PNN was broadcasting aerial shots of tens of thousands of people gathered on the mall of the F*O*O*J’s Fortress of Freedom and at the gates of the ferries over to Sunhawk Island and the mysterious Blue Pyramid. At both places, mourners deposited offerings of handmade Egyptian mortuary ushabtiu figurines, pipe-cleaner and tissue-paper lotus flowers, and small bottles of milk and beer. According to the reporter, arrests for public drunkenness and lactose-intolerant public vomiting had skyrocketed.
“And the radio call-in shows,” I said, further prompting them while shutting off the TV, “are equally wrenched by misery.”
To my group’s silence I added, “Perhaps it would help if people shared their own memories of Hawk King. Their personal experiences of him.”
The Flying Squirrel sucked in a big preamble breath; since he tended to dominate discussion, especially by name-dropping Hawk King and verbally footnoting his every connection with him, I immediately prompted Iron Lass, the only person Festus Piltdown III seemed never to interrupt.
Her eyes shifted toward me dully, the glint from their cold metal apparently rusted over. She was actually slouching—this, despite routinely targeting me and her teammates with comments about our posture during our previous sessions.
“Hawk Kink,” she said at last, putting down a piece of André’s baklava onto a coaster, “vuss ze greatest of us all.”
After a pause, I asked her to continue.
“Alzough, ja, I am a goddess, I felt, perhaps becoss he is an even olter deity from a more ancient panseon…venever I vuss in his presence, I could unterstaandt vut mortals felt when zey met Odin, ze lordt of Aesgard. Hawk Kink inspiredt…ze only vurt I can sink uff iss…awe. I vuss alvays in awe of him. He vuss a brilliant scientist, a brilliant alchemist, a brilliant leader, ja, all of zat. But more. He vuss…”
She stopped, looked down, cleared her throat.
Festus Piltdown sucked in another preelocutory breath, but Iron Lass flashed a glare at him until he le
t it out wordlessly.
“I vurked viss Hawk Kink for fifty years. I haff liffdt two sousand,” she said. “Zere vill never be anuzzer like him.”
I waited for the pathos of Hnossi Icegaard’s words to permeate everyone’s thoughts.
When Festus looked ready to speak again, I asked Wally to share his feelings. At that moment he was leaning his head toward his shoulder, as if the weight of his grief exceeded the strength of his neck. His hair, flattened, lacked its usual gloss and front-row e-curl. When I called his name, he perked up momentarily, his ever-present, generally unrealistic optimism seemingly recharged. But just like that, the lightning in his expression grounded itself in the deep, dark rings beneath his eyes.
“Wellsir, ma’am-doctor,” said Wally, “the King recruited me. Hnossi, too, an Lady Liberty, an, well, all of us in the original team—course ev’rabody knows he foundeded the F*O*O*J. Don’t know…I mean…it’s like, let’s say if suh’m came up, an ya didn’know what to do about it, y’d just ask him, y’know? Djunnerstann what I’m sayin?”
He scanned the faces of his two older colleagues, but neither met his eyes.
And in words so childishly pathetic I will never be able to forget them, Wally W. Watchtower looked imploringly at his comrades, his hands upturned and empty on his knees, and, with voice cracking, asked, “And now…what’re we sposta do if suh’m goes wrong…an we don’know how t’fix it?”
Saturday morning sunlight fell into Wally’s eyes, twinkling wetly. Wally leaned over and picked up André’s entire uncut apple strudel. As soon as he sank his teeth into it, the strudel began crumbling over his suit and cape. He blew on the dessert, crackling the entirety of it into a strudel-cicle, crunching chunks between his teeth in mournful mastication.
“Good fritter, Br’erfly,” he said, looking at the floor and chewing. “I should show y’all m’recipe for fried peanut butter–banana–and–candy bar samwidges.”
By then, not even the younger heroes would look at him.
I asked Kareem to share his thoughts.
“Since there’s no reason to believe Hawk King could have died of natural causes,” he said without hesitation, his voice as raw as an abrasion, “we’re dealing with a murder.”
Stages of Grief: Obsession
All eyes clutched Kareem, like a loan shark’s hand on the neck of an overdue lendee.
“The murder of the world’s smartest man, by the very nature of such a crime,” said the X-Man, “indicates threat on a scale we may never have seen before. Despite my persistent warnings, this organization has been overconfident, stuffing its belly with its own myths. And we’ve been acting as if all our enemies were dead or locked up on Asteroid Zed, as if all the ones up there now have been rendered totally harmless—”
“This is not the time for your postseason quarterbacking, Edgerton!” said Flying Squirrel. “Difficult F*O*O*J decisions were being made on a daily basis by heroic men facing death for decades before you were born. You’re going to choose a time of planetary mourning to let loose your astigmatic recriminations?”
“Look, Festus, unlike some people around here, I actually cared about Hawk King, which is why I’m putting my energy into investigating, not mourning. Now look at this.”
Kareem closed his eyes, enunciated the word suspects, and a rotating rogues’ gallery glistened blackly into shadow-shapes above us.
“These,” said Kareem, pointing to the lower ring and the upper ring in turn, “are the Beta-and Alpha-level foes of the F*O*O*J who are still unaccounted for. The Heavyweights,” he said, gesturing to the lower ring.
Although the images were devoid of any color save black, we could make out the forms as Kareem announced their names: the glinting man-lizard called the Crystal Crocodile, the oversized crushing hands of Key Grip and Best Boy, the robed and lightning bolt–excreting Shockrates, and the obviously shaped Specially Relative Einstein Baboons.
“And the Superheavyweights,” said Kareem, pointing to the nuclear-armored dictator Baron Von Drako, then to the horned head of the star-consuming titan Cosmicus and his herald the Gold Glider, then to the swirling miasma of horror called L-Raunzenu, then to the aardvark-faced sociopath Warmaster Set, and finally to the shambling mass called Ymir the Planet-Corpse.
“How is it possible,” asked Kareem, while his audience gazed up at the rings of terrors orbiting above their heads, “for someone of Hawk King’s power to have been killed? And how could he have failed to see such an attack coming in the first place?
“His Udjat—that’s what you people call the Eye of Horus, what should be the Eye of Heru if you could bother to learn the Afro-Egyptian name—should’ve alerted him. So what we’re looking at is someone with soular-invisibility, dimension-shifting, or counter-remote-viewing.
“On the Heavyweights list, it’s possible Shockrates could’ve generated a strong enough electrical field to disrupt the Eye…and the E-Baboons might’ve been able to use a string-dimensional tunnel to get inside the Blue Pyramid. But neither should’ve had the power to kill him.
“Of the Superheavyweights, Cosmicus seems unlikely—we would’ve detected his Nebulanaught approaching, just like we would’ve seen Ymir’s iceberg fleet if he’d reconstituted himself at the north pole. Warmaster Set’s vendetta is seven thousand years old…but there’s been no sighting of him or anyone else on that list since the Götterdämmerung. Of course, there’s always the possibility of L-Raunzenu.”
A monstrosity of pure terror described in the Encyclopedia of F*O*O*J Adversaries, Vol. III (Revised) as “a cosmic culmination of a billion horrors, personified and transmogrified into a universal force of unstoppable, ravaging evil,” L-Raunzenu, in the most literal way possible, was everyone’s worst nightmare.
But despite media fireworks about the threat posed by L-Raunzenu, fewer Americans were killed by that entity during its entire existence than the number of people in the same time period who died from rattlesnake bites or choking on chicken bones. And the L-Raunzenu death toll was simply insignificant when compared to, say, the annual human and financial cost of alcohol-and tobacco-related illness and morbidity.
But, blinded by grief-induced obsession and paranoia, Kareem was oblivious to such basic logic.
“Of course,” continued Kareem, “there’s also the matter of those supervillains who are accounted for. Who are on Asteroid Zed right now. Menton—”
Everyone glared at him. He shut his mouth, realizing the enormity of his breach of etiquette.
“Ve don’t speak his name…so idly, Kareem,” whispered Hnossi, narrowing her eyes. “Unt need I remind you zat he’s been in a Psionic Impotence Helmet for five years?”
“I’m aware of that, Hnossi,” he said slowly. “But Ment—the Destroyer’s abilities were off the scale. Do we really know if a P-Imp hat could stop him?”
Iron Lass rolled her eyes at Kareem’s abbreviation. He continued without regard for her disdain. “And on that exact same topic—”
Knowing where he was going, the older F*O*O*Jsters reacted instantly.
Hnossi: “Zere are certain lines zat even zey—”
Wally: “Now, Kareem, I know what y’all’re about t’say, but lemme tell you suh’m—”
Mr. Piltdown: “I don’t care what they were alleged to have planned—even you can’t seriously accuse them of striking out against our greatest—”
“They went bad. Very bad,” said Kareem, too loudly. Then he whispered something inaudible.
Behind him, massive shadow-sculptures, like a miniature Mount Rushmore, oozed into existence. Even in black, the busts were unmistakable: on the left, the elder, Gil Gamoid, with his thick neck, wild beard, wild eyes, and spike-teeth; and on the right, junior with his ram’s horns and flowing mane, the N-Kid. The two titans from the distant world of Ur-Prime, orbiting the mysterious quasar Q-939.
“Yes, they were founding members of the F*O*O*J. Yes, they were great heroes. Once upon a time. But now they’re locked up wearing P-Imp hats on Asteroid
Zed. Because they’re paranoid schizophrenics. Who were conspiring to commit mass murder.”
“Zey were foundt not guilty—”
“On account of being criminally insane, Hnossi? You call that a defense?” he sneered. “Hell, I rarely grok brain-to-brain with you people, but on this issue…you not only floor me, you basement me. Those two ‘heroes’ were planning to massacre all of you! You Stone Agers aren’t exactly the most forgiving freaks in the circus, so why all this sympathy for Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid?”
“Listen to me, Edgerton,” growled Festus. “And this will be more complex and nuanced than your minstrel show ever apparently gets, so listen closely—”
“You hear that, Doc? Aren’t you gonna censure him? Well, if you’re not reporting him to the F*L*A*C for that cracker-ass crack—”
“Listen, sonny, those two heroes—yes, heroes,” said Festus, “were wounded terribly in the line of duty. Mentally poisoned, probably by the Destroyer—but possibly by L-Raunzenu. But even given the awesome extent of their mental damage, they would never, I’ll say that again, never plot against our Founder.”
“Even though both of them plotted to kill the rest of you—”
“Even if they did, which was never proven in court—”
“Come on! Hawk King recruited them into the original F*O*O*J, and he used the Udjat to uncover their plot! He built ’em up and he took ’em down. Don’t you think that in their current state they might just want revenge?”
“Why now, Edgerton? Can you answer me that? Why would they or anyone else want to move on Hawk King now?”
“You’re the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Detective. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Damn, dawg,” said the Brotherfly, “fuck this.”
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