The Temporary Hero Read online

  Yeah, he knew what I could do, too. I’d been coming to the prison for years to interview his prisoners. Superhumans were only allowed in this place as captives, and when I suddenly showed up on their DNA scans in December as a super, well, it led to a very frank discussion. I suspected my “special status” was the only reason he’d allowed me to attend this debacle in the first place. I was Plan B.

  “Yes, but—”

  I held out my hand. “Give it here, officer. Trust me.” His eyes widened as he saw me holding the door in place with my body, and without another word, handed it over. It was about the size of a football, the top half covered in clear plastic with a faintly glowing orange aperture at its center. I tucked it under my arm, hoping I could protect it with my body long enough to do some good.

  “We’ll activate it remotely once you’re in position,” the warden explained. “Good luck.”

  According to Herculene, luck’s the worst superpower of all. Eventually it runs out. But, considering what I was up against, I was willing to take what I could get.

  “Thanks. I’ll go once you’re clear,” I said, trying to sound like I thought I could actually pull this off. That’s part of the job. Inspire confidence in people—even when all you want to do is curl up in the fetal position and gibber in incoherent terror.

  As the warden and his men moved to the far side of the gallery and hid behind the seats, Mechanista gave up on battering her way through the door and returned to drilling, this time through the window between the control room and the gallery. This was the best chance I was going to get.

  With a protest of grinding metal and gears, I forced the door open, slipped inside and wrenched it closed behind me. In reaction, the drill stopped and a gleaming appendage appeared. At its end, a camera eye formed and regarded me. It glowed a baleful red.

  I decided to try addressing her by her real name, still hoping that some shred of sanity remained in that mass of whirring steel. Something human. Something I could work with.

  “Corrine, do you know who I am?”

  The eye looked me up and down. I shifted a bit to keep my body between it and the package I needed to deliver.

  “Yes,” a raspy digitized voice replied. “You’re that reporter. You are known to us.”

  Good news and bad news. She recognized me, which might be something I could use to build a connection between us, but she referred to herself as “us”. That sounds crazy when spoken by someone wearing a crown. It’s downright terrifying when it comes from a hive of nanobots.

  “Good.” I kept my voice calm and soothing as I took a tentative step forward. “Listen, can we talk? I know what Schadenfreude did to you.”

  A roar of metallic rage assaulted me as the swarm of gray dust swirled, dashing itself against the walls and consoles in the room. “SCHADENFREUDE!” it screamed from a thousand tiny speakers.

  The swirling slowly died away as the nanobots retreated into the containment cell turned slaughterhouse, reforming themselves into a steel female form, approximating the girl she once was—Corrine Milton, a dying teenager whose humanity had been stolen from her by a madman.

  “He sought to control us. We will kill him.”

  I moved forward. I was at the window now. Just a few yards to go. “I can understand that. I don’t think the people here will let you do that, but you can do something far worse to him.”

  She turned to face me. Her gleaming face broke into a cruel grin. “We are intrigued. Have you come to free us?”

  I stepped onto the shattered window sill and dropped down into the cell. “Let me interview you. What you know could put him away forever.”

  Her head gave a sudden jerk. Surprise? Perhaps. She seemed off-balance from my suggestion. Supervillains never seem to think of alternate solutions. “How is that worse? We could flay him alive.” She lifted a hand. Eight-inch blades sprang from her fingertips, gleaming under the florescent lights. She repeated her demand. “Free us.”

  “Think about it, Corrine. A mind like his, locked in a cell for the rest of his life, with nothing more complex than a pencil and paper to while away the years. No outlet for that creative genius. No challenge for his intellect. It’ll be hell on earth. Your testimony could put him there.”

  She went still, save for some gears turning in her midsection. They seemed to be cosmetic. I took it for a subconscious idle motion, like somebody twirling their hair or stroking their beard while considering some deep thought. My heart skipped a beat. Had I reached her? Could there be a way to save her?

  I continued slowly forward. A few more steps should do it if I still had to put her down. I said a silent prayer that I wouldn’t have to.

  The whirring stopped. She’d reached her decision. “Tempting, but our way is quicker. Efficient. Satisfying. Free us.”

  “Corrine, you know I can’t do that.” Another step. “This is the best I can offer.”

  “THEN YOU CAN DIE!” Spikes shot out from her outstretched arms as she screamed. They struck me square in the chest, tearing through the jumpsuit and smashing against my skin. They couldn’t penetrate my flesh—the borrowed invulnerability of Ultiman saw to that—but my torso erupted in pain from the impacts. I slid across the floor of the cell, my prison-issued slippers unable to generate enough friction to let me hold my ground.

  I cursed my failure. I was so close, but I couldn’t seal the deal. I couldn’t save her.

  I’m sorry, Corrine.

  Mechanista took a step back in surprise at my not being impaled. “What trickery is this?” she raged as her arms transformed into giant hammers. They flew at me with lethal intent. I managed to leap over her right hammer-fist, taking to the air and flying toward the ceiling. Her left, however, caught me in the side of the head. My God, she was quick. I crashed into the wall, then tumbled to the floor.

  I tried to shake off my disorientation as the fists flew at me again. Realizing that I’d fumbled the “football” when she knocked my marbles loose, I scrambled to look for the emitter. I dropped into a defensive crouch, guarding my head with my arms as she rained steel hammer blows on me from every angle. Those things must have weighed a ton.

  Mechanista was a murder machine, unbridled lethality controlled only by rage, and she’d had years to perfect her craft. I was a guy stuck with somebody else’s powers with about eight months of experience under my belt. Hell, The Angels only started letting me go on patrol without a babysitter a couple of weeks before. I needed to end this before she figured out how to kill me.

  Believe me, there were a lot of ways to do that. Ultiman’s near-invulnerability would only let me survive so many mistakes.

  In between blows from those monstrous fists, I finally spotted the emitter. Across the room, maybe fifty feet from where I crouched. I timed Mechanista’s blows. They were mechanical, predictable. I let one past my defenses. It struck me low in the ribs on my right, knocking me back against the wall, but I was ready for it. Rather than being stunned, I put my hastily crafted plan into action.

  I kicked out against the wall like a swimmer making an underwater turn and focused on a point just past the device. Twin hammer blows slammed into the concrete behind me as I sped across the floor. I reached out to swat the device at the mechanical madwoman.

  I almost made it.

  A cloud of dust engulfed my head, forcing its way past my lips and into my nostrils. More by reflex than anything else, I clamped down on my throat.

  She’d solved the puzzle. She’d figured out how to kill me. If she got into my lungs, it was over.

  She went for my eyes next, sending another cloud of tiny particles past my eyelids. In an instant, I was blind. I could feel her trying to drill past the thin wall of bone behind my eyes. The pain was incredible. It was now even odds which she would purée first, my brain or my lung tissues.

  I kicked out blindly. My foot touched something. It moved a little and didn’t kick back. I reached out with my foot, more carefully this time, forcing myself to move deliberately
, despite the pain. My foot found it, and I gave it a shove. God, please let this be what I think it is.

  After that, all I could remember was pain and Mechanista’s scream. It felt like it went on forever.

  Something flat and cool slammed into my left side. Caught by surprise, I lost control and the air in my lungs burst forth in a cloud of gray dust and phlegm. I started to panic. This was just the opening Mechanista needed. I crawled toward her in terror to try to at least get one last punch in before the lights went out for good.

  There was no need for that. The room fell silent. I managed to get my watering eyes open, my tears washing away some of that awful dust.

  Mechanista was orange.

  Well, to be more accurate, she was bathed in an orange light, as was I. I could see Mechanista’s body was a statue again, immobilized by the portable emitter. My lungs spasmed and I started hacking, my body trying to get as much of her out of my windpipe as possible.

  “Mr. Conway,” a speaker came to life from somewhere in the cell. The warden’s voice continued, “Can you hear me?”

  I nodded and coughed out more black gunk. I couldn’t stop.

  “We have a clean-room team on the way. It’s very important that you not leave the containment field. Do you understand?”

  I waved, concentrating on getting some control over my lungs. Eventually, I stopped coughing enough to flop onto my back. I sprawled there, in the dust of what had once been an innocent teenager, until the big double doors opened and a team rushed in to clean up the mess.

  II

  I could say this for the technicians at Lompoc—they were nothing if not thorough. My body was vacuumed, washed, scanned, X-rayed, and then vacuumed and washed some more with a lot of poking and prodding thrown in for good measure. They weren’t satisfied until every molecule of Mechanista was collected. Naturally, I cooperated. I wanted that stuff out of me as much as they did.

  I didn’t have any choice in the matter, anyway. They kept me under a containment field the whole time. It wasn’t fun. The soft tissues of my throat and eye sockets burned and itched to the point I could barely focus on anything else. Ultiman’s innate abilities would normally dull the pain and heal the damage at an accelerated rate, but the Kunai particles kept them dormant, leaving me to suffer in what I hoped was a heroic, stoic silence. While the experience was probably less miserable for me than it would be for someone who had their powers naturally, the sudden absence of that superhuman vitality I’d enjoyed for the last eight months left me feeling weak and vulnerable.

  It was only after they certified me clean that they turned the orange light off to let my body start healing itself. They made me sit under observation for a couple of hours before they declared me fit to leave the facility. As the pain receded, they let me have my notepad back so I could start writing up my story for the paper. Prison procedures be damned, I still had a deadline to hit.

  It was dark outside when they finally let me go. Ratna was waiting at the guard station as I came out. “Damn, hoss, you look like hell.”

  “Thanks,” I said, bracing myself for the coming conversation. She fell into step beside me as we walked to my car. “Tell me you got some good shots.”

  “Oh yeah. I’m smelling Pulitzer over here.” She climbed into the passenger seat. “I already called Harry. Told him we’d be filing late, but he’d be crazy not to save you space for this one.”

  “Cool.” I pulled out of the lot and sped down the highway. I wanted miles between me and the prison, and I wanted them now.

  Ratna broke the uncomfortable silence; “So, should we address the elephant in the back seat first, or the gorilla riding him?”

  Yeah, let’s get this over with.

  I sighed. “Take your pick.”

  “Don’t take it so hard, man. You did good today. The guards wouldn’t tell me much, but I could see it in their eyes. They couldn’t have handled her. You saved a lot of lives.”

  “I guess.” Not all of them, though. Those five guards, snuffed out in an instant, were still too fresh in my mind. “So, how’d you figure it out?”

  “Come on, Reuben. I’m cute but not stupid. You go off to North Korea to do that piece on Glorious Leader, then suddenly, The Angels break out of his jail, rescue a bunch of journalists, and come back to stop Dr. Schadenfreude with this brand-new hero nobody’s ever heard of with the idiotic name of Captain Stand-In.” She looked at me with a wry grin. “A guy, by the way, with the singular distinction of being the only superhuman in LA who you haven’t wrangled an interview out of. Meanwhile, you suddenly have a body like a romance-book cover model when everybody knows you’d rather cross the street than walk by a gym.”

  I rubbed a hand down my face. Damn, those were a lot of giveaways. “Well, when you put it that way….”

  “You might as well put up a billboard.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Don’t worry, dude. Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “Of course, I can’t speak for the others.”

  I almost swerved into a ditch. “Others?”

  “Well, there’s Harry, for one…”

  “Harry knows?”

  “Of course he knows. Hell, half the newsroom knows.”

  “Oh, God….” I felt like I was going to be sick. “So, a sizable percentage of the staff at Lompoc, my boss, and a roomful of blabbermouth reporters know my secret identity?”

  “Blabberkeyboard. Is that a word? It should be a word. But yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

  I found myself thinking, for about the millionth time, just how bad I was at this.

  “I just want to know how you ended up with Ultiman’s powers,” she said.

  “What? Who said anything about him?”

  “Uh, not stupid, remember? He hasn’t been seen on patrol since November. No public appearances. Just that lame cover story about recruiting new people for the team.”

  “That’s true, by the way.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s the only reason I agreed to this madness. With Phoenix Fire dead and him retiring, the team’s short-handed.”

  “So, you’re just filling in?”

  “Hence the moniker.”

  “I see. It’s still stupid.”

  “Yeah, well, in my defense, I didn’t think I’d be using it this long.”

  “Shoulda been something darker, like, ‘The Substitute’. You could fly around, whacking people with a magic ruler or something.”

  “I’ll be sure to consult you next time I get superpowers.”

  “I’ll send you my rate card. Fair warning: skills like mine don’t come cheap. You still haven’t answered my question. Why you?”

  “You’re enjoying this way too much.”

  “Immensely. And you’re deflecting. Out with it.”

  “Fine. You know that Force stuff Schadenfreude created?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, before the president sent The Angels to Korea, Ultiman used it to give me his powers. He knew they’d be captured, so the plan was for me to come and bust ‘em out.”

  “I knew it!”

  “What, are you guys running a pool or something?”

  “I’m asking the questions here, bub. And, yes, we are. I think it’s up to two hundred bucks. Give me a good story and maybe I’ll take you to lunch.”

  “I eat like a super now. Two hundred bucks may not cover it.”

  “Alright, you buy and I’ll leave a nice tip. Why haven’t you given the powers back?”

  “Ultiman won’t take ‘em.”

  “No way! Why?”

  “He has good reasons.”

  “Which are?”

  “His.”

  “Come on, Reuben.”

  “Nope. That’s the line. If you want anything more on the matter, ask the man yourself.”

  I pulled over at a drive-through and bought us some dinner. A burger and fries for Ratna and a half-dozen double-meat
burgers for me. I wasn’t kidding when I said I eat like a super. I could send an all-you-can-eat joint into bankruptcy. At least now that Ratna knew my secret, I could eat a decent meal in front of her. I was damned near starving. We got back on the road and started shoving fast food down our necks.

  “So, what’s it like?”

  “Other than the grocery bills and the occasional battle to the death with a swarm of nanobots? Pretty amazing.”

  “You should do a book on this.”

  “I’ve thought about it. Like a George Plimpton thing.”

  “Exactly. Has bestseller written all over it.”

  “Probably have to publish it posthumously, though.”

  “What? Why?”

  “There’s a reason these people have secret identities. We stop the bad guys and put them in jail, but eventually they get out. Once I get rid of these powers, I’ll be a sitting duck. They could go after my family, my friends—” I gave her a look. “My co-workers. Nothing I could do to stop them.”

  “Wait. Why are you giving up the powers? Ultiman doesn’t want ‘em back. Why not just keep ‘em?”

  “I’ve got my reasons.”

  “Let me guess—the same as Ultiman’s. And you’re not gonna tell me.”

  “Got it in one. Some things aren’t for publication.”

  ***

  The City Room of the Los Angeles Beacon was one of the noisiest, most chaotic places on earth. Some inhuman monster sold management on the idea that low cubicle walls would somehow foster communication and collaboration, which prompted everyone to go out and buy noise-canceling headsets just so we could get some work done. That, of course, led to everyone turning the ringer on their phones up to eleven so they could hear when a call came in. Between the constant chirping of phones and the reporters screaming over the din, it’s a wonder anyone gets a story out.

  Still, it’s always been one of my favorite places. This was the place where the pimply-faced teenaged version of me got his first job. I started as a copyboy, nothing more than a glorified gofer. After college, they put me on as a full-fledged journalist. I loved it there. I got off on the energy of thirty or so people scrambling to gather enough truth to put out a regional daily.