Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (52 page)

“How kind of you to notice.”

“One of those documents had a set of coordinates centred in the state of New Mexico. As soon as we realised what it was, we bundled you up and sent you on the first rocket-plane to America. Can you guess where you are now?”

He licked his lips. He knew, but he wasn’t going to say it.

“You’re in the prison that the remnants of the Manhattan Eight built. You’re in the prison that held Dr Atomic until his death.” The radio crackled. “Still think you can escape?”

“Ways and means, Niobe. Ways and means.”

“Your voice is shaking,” she said.

She thought she could goad him, but she was wrong. He’d face the long dark willingly if he had to. Others had already paid the cost. Now it was his turn. But he didn’t think it would come to that.

“Tell me,” he said. “What of the boy? What happened to poor Sam Oppenheimer? Did you manage to save him after all?”

The delay was so long Morgan wondered if the connection had cut out. But finally she spoke. “Sam’s alive.”

“But he’s not the same, is he?”

“He will be. The best psychics and psychiatrists in the world are going to treat him. We’ll undo the damage that you did.”

He smiled. “Where is he now?” Then he realised. “He’s in this facility with me, isn’t he? Where else would you restrain the son of Dr Atomic?”

“Where else,” she agreed.

“I saw him once, you know. Dr Atomic. I must have been about ten at the time. I spent all my pocket money on Dr Atomic comics—”

“Fuck you, Morgan,” she said. “This isn’t a comic. Enjoy your darkness. It’s all you’ll be getting for the rest of your life. Don’t expect a bloody Christmas card.” The transmission went dead.

Morgan settled back down in bed. The darkness was absolute, but it didn’t feel as oppressive anymore. He’d done what he set out to do. And the world would know it was him, one way or another. A plan was never really finished.

Perhaps the woman was right. Perhaps he was no different from all the other supervillains. But was that such a bad thing? He shook his head and smiled. Somehow, a peace had settled over him.

“Thank you, Spook,” he whispered into the darkness. “Thank you for helping me understand myself.”

This prison may have held Dr Atomic, but he’d been a madman at the end. No prison was impenetrable. Somewhere on the other side of these walls was a young boy with more power than the world had ever known. If the world forgot that, they could be reminded.

And Morgan Shepherd wasn’t dead yet.

It was a week before they held Solomon’s funeral. There were a lot of bodies to deal with, and not enough people to deal with them.

The news reported Solomon’s death, of course, but it was just one name in a long list of normals and metas who’d died. Some called for a state funeral, but his wife—widow, Niobe supposed she was now—insisted that it would be small. He would be buried as Solomon, not the Carpenter. A father and husband, not a superhero. It made it easier for Kate that way. Niobe didn’t think he’d mind. But really, he was all those things. He was the best man she’d ever known. He’d always been a hero. He always would be.

Niobe stood apart from the small crowd of people gathered on the windy hilltop outside Neo-Auckland, watching as they lowered the casket into the ground. It wasn’t a proper cemetery, but he wouldn’t have wanted that. It smelled good here, like grass and flowers and a hint of salt coming off the sea in the distance. It was perfect for him. Well, almost.

The other guests threw glances at her dressed in her mask and hat, but she wasn’t the only one in costume. Brightlance and Ballista stood amongst the group, heads bowed as the minister spoke in monotone. Somehow, it didn’t look strange.

When the tears came, she let them come. Her goggles grew misty. Her missing hand tingled in her pocket. That was the hand she’d massaged his heart with, trying to bring him back. She still wanted to. But she couldn’t, and that was okay. Eventually, the tears dried.

She left before they’d finished piling the dirt on top of him. She walked down the hill and sat in the car. It was only five in the afternoon, so she had some time to kill before nightfall. She opened the glove box and pulled out the latest psych report Wallace had got for her. Sam had good days and bad days. Mostly bad days. And the nights were worse. The microphones in his cell picked up the screams and mutterings of his nightmares. She’d tried to listen to one recording. She’d shut it off after thirty seconds. Some instinctive part of her wanted to sit on the edge of Sam’s bed and stroke his hair, tell him it was okay, everything was all right. That was madness, of course. He was thousands of miles away, and he’d still snap her in half as soon as he saw her. But the feeling remained.

It wasn’t hopeless, though. His lucid periods were becoming longer and more frequent, and his violent outbursts were lessening. In those times he seemed to enjoy talking to the psychiatrists, even if it was only through an intercom. There was even word from the metahumans on the lunar colony that several of their psychics would return to Earth to aid in the boy’s treatment, including Niobe’s old flame, Madame Z. Niobe couldn’t figure out if she was happy about that or not.

The Blind Man had examined Sam before they’d sent him to America. Niobe had stood beside him, still weak from the fight, and watched for six hours as the Maori man sat with his palm against the boy’s forehead. And then the Blind Man opened his eyes and said there was hope. “He has great
mana
,” the old man had said. “He may yet wash away what he has done.” Maybe he’d even be a hero one day. Even greater than his father.
There was hope
.

When the sky turned pink, she got out of the car and walked back up the hill to the Carpenter’s grave. He was alone up there now, everyone else mourning somewhere else over pastries and stories. The wind had died down a little, and now the grass barely whispered. She knelt down near the upturned soil and removed her mask.

“You were right,” she said. “Damn you, you were right.”

She didn’t have a spade or a trowel, so she used her remaining hand to dig a small hole over his grave.

“You’ll never guess what I spent the morning doing,” she said. “Running goddamn try-outs. A new superteam. The money I got from Frank Oppenheimer is more than enough to get us started. There’s a lot of us oldies out there remembering what it’s like to be a hero. And I’ll be buggered if some of these new kids aren’t even better than we were. This one girl, Dancer, she’s pretty much a shoe-in for the team.”

She fished in her pocket for a few seconds until she found what she was looking for. The totara seed looked like a tiny red berry with a green stalk attached. She dropped it into the small hole and shuffled the upturned dirt back over it.

“We’re still deciding what to name the new team. The current favourite is ‘The New Wardens’. Original, eh?” She patted down the earth, sat down, and faced the sea. “Of course, we don’t even know if it’s going to get off the ground yet. Lots of variables to factor in. But I’m hopeful.” She almost laughed. “You hear that? Hopeful. Me.”

The evening was warm. She sat silent for a while, watching the fading sky. It made her smile. She liked the night. It always comforted her. It made her think things might be all right. She glanced at the signaller dangling from her wrist. The Carpenter wouldn’t mind if she held on to it.

“Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. Mrs McClellan got her baby back. They dropped the charges against her, so we tracked her down to tell her it was okay to come out of hiding. The kid’s got a hell of a pair of lungs. By the sound of it she’s gonna be a banshee-type meta by the time she’s five.”

When the last of the daylight vanished and the stars appeared, Niobe stood and brushed herself off. She had places to be. Gabby would be waiting for her.

“I’ll come back next week,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll have some more stories by then. Everything’s changing so fast. It’s a new world, Carpenter.” She smiled. “See you round, mate.”

The first totara shoots had already started to poke their way out of the dirt. She pulled her mask back on and returned to the car.

She was right; Gabby was waiting for her. A light was blinking on the dashboard when she got in the car. She flipped open the panel to reveal the screen and small keyboard.

—
Everything okay?
the readout said.

Niobe had to search and peck at the keys to type the response. It was a great system Gabby had come up with, but it’d be easier if Niobe had paid attention in typing class at high school. Another hand would’ve been useful too. She couldn’t wait until Gabby put the finishing touches on the prosthetic hand she was building.

—
Yeah,
Niobe finally responded.
I’m ready. Where are you?

—
Look up.

Niobe leaned over the steering wheel and looked up at the sky through the windshield. There, amongst the stars, was a speck of orange flame, and above it, the glinting of silver armour.

—
Looking good, babe,
Niobe typed.

—
We’ve got something coming in. Pile-up on the southern highway. Four cars, a bus, and a fuel tanker. We’ll be faster than the firemen. You up for it?

Niobe turned the ignition and shifted the lever of the new automatic transmission. The car rumbled to life, good as ever.

—
Race you there
, Niobe typed.

—
You’re on.

The fire streaked across the sky. They were the strangers who guarded the world through the night. And they had work to do.

Niobe gunned the engine.

Author’s Note

I love superheroes. There’s something pure and uplifting and primal about the idea of superpowers and saving the world and good and evil. When we live our entire lives in a place where nothing is certain, where everything is a shade of grey, sometimes we need to escape to a world where there are people who are just good, without a reason or a motive or an agenda. I love being able to visit a world where good people have the power to change the world for the better.

For too long, the superhero genre (whatever that is) has been portrayed as nothing more than a power fantasy for young males. But as Kurt Busiek so eloquently put in the first Astro City trade paperback,
Life in the Big City
, the superhero is, above all else, a symbol, a metaphor. (By the way, if you’re not already familiar with
Astro City,
check it out. It’s a fantastic comic and requires no prior knowledge of the major superhero universes.) The superhero is incredibly versatile. He can be a symbol of whatever the hell you want him to be. Superhero stories can be about living gods destroying and creating on whims, like the gods of ancient Greek myth, or they can be normal people like us, just trying to get by. They can be stories of young people, old people, male, female, gay, straight, bi, human, non-human, or anything in between. They can be stories of love, terror, hope, action, or wonder. And they can be all of those things at the same time. Are superheroes simplistic and juvenile? Sure, to some degree. But that purity is what makes the superhero such a powerful metaphor. A story about a superhero can be as simplistic or as complex as the writer chooses to make it.

While this book may be gritty, I never intended to write a “realistic” superhero story. Alan Moore’s
Watchmen
, Nolan’s Batman movies, and many other stories have already explored what happens when you put a superhero in a relatively realistic environment, and they’ve done it better than I ever could. I think it’s pretty clear that in real life, superheroes would break the world. If people with the power of Superman, Green Lantern, Iron Man, or Professor X existed, the world would change completely, and probably not for the better. But I don’t believe that means there’s no room for unrealistic superhero stories. On the contrary, I think one of the strongest drivers of the superhero mythos in the public consciousness is that sense of wonder, that sense of strangeness. And I don’t think superheroes are going away anytime soon.

I had a blast writing this book. It took me a bit longer than I thought it would and the total word count was greater than I expected, but I’m proud of the finished product. It has been incredibly satisfying to inject a bit of myself and my Kiwi culture into the superhero genre. Whether you guys enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it remains to be seen. I owe a great debt of gratitude to all those who helped this book come to fruition. I want to thank Nen and Diana for all their hard work in helping me improve the book. This book wouldn’t have been possible without them. I take full responsibility for any and all errors, at least until I can figure out how to pin them on someone else. I have to offer a big thanks to Kitty for her mad art skillz. Thank you to my friends and family who encouraged me on this crazy writerly quest. And of course, a huge thank you to everyone who helped make the superhero such a powerful figure in popular culture, from Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, the creators of Superman, to modern day creative geniuses like Joss Whedon, whose big screen take on The Avengers is currently tearing up the box office.