Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (35 page)

I shrugged, sliding the box over to him. “The lead didn’t pan out, but I did find this in Old Montréal. Surprise! It’s an early birthday present.”

Mikey looked sideways at me as he placed it on his lap. I kept my face blank, hoping Pierre had been right: that the Captain couldn’t use his powers to see through the box while in human form. If that was true, then he wouldn’t be immune to Pherognome’s potion either.

Mikey watched me a little longer before finally relaxing. When he opened the box it triggered the bottle to spray in his face. He leapt up with a curse, wiping the stinging perfume from his eyes. “Myra, what the hell?”

I hit him in the chest repeatedly with my fists, driving him backward across the lawn. “You two-timing bastard! How could you? I loved you! And poor Sufferjet… what you’ve done to her is monstrous!”

He grabbed my arms but did not transform into the Captain like I’d hoped. He was still scrawny Mikey, with his messy hair and pimples. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I want a divorce, you creep! Leave Earth and never come back! Once I tell the world about how you drugged and raped Sufferjet your days of playing hero will be over!”

He looked down at the perfume bottle then back at me. “Of course, Montréal. The Pherognome. Ace, I can explain.”

“Can you? Go on, try!”

The tears in my eyes seemed to collapse his will. “I love you, Myra, really! You’re all I’d ever need, but the Captain needs more. Sufferjet is the most powerful, most gorgeous woman in the whole galaxy. He deserves her. I’m living two lives, I figured, why not two wives?” The last was said with a shrug, as if that explained it all, made it somehow okay.

I pulled out my recorder, waving it in his face. “Thanks for the quote, Mikey, I think I just found my headline.”

He stepped toward me, his expression changing to anger. I thought of what Pierre had said— how the Captain would probably kill to hide his crime. Mikey raised his hands in surrender, though his smile told me he planned on doing anything but. “You can’t publish any of this, Myra, it’s all lies. You’re under the influence of that ugly little maggot. He’s driven you crazy, turned you against me. Come home, let me help. You love me.”

A pop can hit him in the side of the head, followed by a full bottle of water. A mob of bicyclists, rollerbladers, and pedestrians from the nearby seawall climbed the hill, surrounding us. “Get away from her, you pig!” shouted a woman, throwing her purse at him. People picked up rocks and threw those as well. One hit Mikey in the temple, drawing blood. As he stumbled back he yelled, “Enough!” in a voice louder than anything I’d ever heard from him.

Amid a swirl of golden dust he transformed into Captain Stupendous. He levitated off the ground in a triumphant pose, hands on hips.

A dog-walker slung her bag of gathered poop. It exploded across the C on his chest, and I burst into laughter. The rocks kept coming, and even though they no longer hurt him physically, I could tell that mentally he’d been defeated. Raising an arm into the sky he flew away, leaving the crowd screaming in his wake.

* * *

He was mistaken if he thought he’d find safety at CSL headquarters. Together, Sufferjet, Grizzlyman, and Ice Flow broke his arm (he was merely
nigh
indestructible), shattered his teeth, and shredded his precious uniform until he flew away half-naked. No one has seen him since. Pierre’s spray worked like a charm, reversing the special pheromones coursing through the Captain’s body, making him repulsive, in either form, to anyone who came near him instead of loved by all.

Pherognome and I were blamed, once a few weeks had gone by and everyone realized they’d been under a spell. Even with the recording no one believed my accusations against him. He wouldn’t do those things, they said, not their precious hero. He too must have been under Pherognome’s spell. My spell.

At my trial Sufferjet came to my defense, but since she’d been under Pierre’s influence once before it was easy for the prosecution to discredit her testimony. Stupid Stupendous had drugged and raped her yet still they took his side.

What made him want to be a hero? What makes any of them? Most would reply,
It’s the powers, stupid
. But I disagree. If you could mend bones with telekinesis, wouldn’t you become a doctor? If you were impervious to bullets, wouldn’t you be a police officer?

I think I know the answer: fame. What other reason would you have for putting on tights and parading around like a peacock?
It’s the ego, stupid.

Now, villains I understand. They want to rule the world because they think they can do it better than everyone else. Who’s never thought that? Or they just want to be rich. Makes sense.

Of course I can’t judge, having lost my impartiality, along with my freedom. I’m the greatest villain of all time now, having destroyed the world’s greatest hero. Only he wasn’t so great. He was just another boy pretending to be a man.

I wonder where he is now— hiding on some desolate island maybe, or out in space, playing hero to a race without an olfactory sense?

You know what? I don’t care.

* * *

Alarms sounded throughout the prison. Guards ran past my cell, their fear obvious. When the wall behind me crumbled, I saw Sufferjet hovering in the air in full battle armor, her war helmet hiding everything but a big grin. Curled like a kitten in her arms was the injured Jaguar, barely conscious. She looked thin and frail but happy to be back in her woman’s arms.

“Shall we depart these premises with haste?” asked Sufferjet. “Jaguar has convinced me that life as a wanted vigilante is more fun than following the rules of mortal men.”

“Sounds good, but I need to adopt a supervillain name to tie this story together. How about ‘the Divorcee’?”

Jaguar smiled weakly. “Needs work. We’ll figure it out later. Now let’s go.”

And so we did.

* * *

P. E. Bolivar is an air traffic controller at the Vancouver International Airport.

Friday Nights at the Hemingway

Arun Jiwa

Friday night at the Hemingway was a quiet affair. The bar’s three patrons crowded together at a table toward the back. There was a time when you had to know Dev or someone who knew Dev to get an invite on a Friday evening. But Dev had been notoriously difficult about any publicity since the accident, and eventually business moved away from the Hemingway.

Dev set down a pitcher of lager and slid an appetizer tray across the table. “Last call will be in half an hour,” he said, though it was only a casual notice. Maia, Rohit, and Ben were regulars, upholding a tradition from the old days, when The Alliance frequented the Hemingway on Friday evenings.

“The rumor I heard was that Shade’s an alien, she came from a planet with no sunlight,” Maia said.

“No, my brother went to school with her boyfriend,” Ben reached over for the pitcher and filled all three glasses. “He knows for a fact that there was an accident at Faustech Labs. Shade, was an intern there, you know, in her pre-Shade days.”

“What about the Probabilist? Supposedly, he was a teenage stock-market genius. Made millions before the Alliance figured out he could predict other events too.” Rohit leaned over and gave a thumbs-up to Dev, who nodded. They were quiet for the next few minutes as they ate their appetizers and checked their phones.

“Let’s talk about someone who’s actually done something in the last decade. Not the ones who show up for publicity stunts once a year,” Ben said.

“Like who— Gargoyle? Crimson Falcon? They’re all paid retainers to stay out of trouble.” Maia quirked an eyebrow. “And rightly so. You don’t want them jumping in and saving cats from trees or putting out fires. Can you imagine Gargoyle trying to put out fires?” She mimed the action with her hands and the three of them laughed.

Ben pointed to the bar. “What about them? The Alliance. You don’t think that the Earth’s five strongest heroes just vanished all of a sudden, do you?”

The picture that hung over the bar showed the five original members of the Alliance, all patrons of the Hemingway. Shade, The Probabilist, The Architect, Tesla, and Dr. Kepler the Puppetmaster. In the picture the five of them stood in front of the bar, with Dev standing off to the side.

Ben set his pint glass down unsteadily and motioned for silence. “You remember the news story about Dr. Hugo Moriarty, from eight years ago? World-famous criminal suddenly disappears?” He waited for confirmation from the other two before continuing. “Well, if you look up news after that incident, the number of hero-related stories drops off sharply.”

“So what?” Maia countered. “The tenth time Gargoyle and Captain Neutron worked out their marital problems in public, it stopped being news.”

“Not just that, though,” Ben said. “What about Shade? Tesla? The Puppetmaster? The Architect?”

Dev had stopped what he was doing to listen to the conversation.

“Do you think that they all just vanished overnight?”

“Like I said, paid to stay out of trouble,” Rohit said. “There hasn’t been anyone who’s threatened the world in a big way since Dr. Moriarty disappeared.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Ben said. “Dr. Moriarty was rumored to control criminal cells all over the world. He was running a big-time operation. Even if the Alliance took him down, why would they keep quiet about it? Who was his number 2? They could still be at large.”

“What do you think, Dev,” Maia asked, turning around in her seat.

Dev set down the bottle he was holding and thought for a long moment before answering. “They weren’t my friends. I didn’t know them as people, just who they were when they wore the mask. One day they simply stopped coming. You can speculate on that in half a dozen ways, but maybe they were tired of all the attention and decided that they could work better if no one knew what they were up to.”

“But that still doesn’t explain how they’ve stayed out of the public eye for so long,” Ben said.

“Between the five of them, they have almost unlimited resources at their disposal. How hard do you think it would be if they all decided to disappear?” Dev brought the bottle around to the table and poured them a round to cap off the evening.

“All the press conferences, the answering to government agencies, the public media circus. Sure, some superheroes get used to it, but that’s not saving the world.” He raised a glass to toast. “To those who would protect us.”

The others raised their glasses and drank.

* * *

Maia and Rohit left together shortly after, and Ben waited for his cab. He sat at the same table and took in the photograph.

“Let yourself out when your cab gets here,” Dev said to Ben. “I have to organize some inventory in the basement.”

“I don’t believe it,” Ben said.

“What?”

“All of the world’s problems are still there. Poverty. Crime. War. Disease. I can’t believe that they would put their privacy ahead of the world that they’re supposed to be protecting.”

Dev leaned against the door leading to the basement. “You assume they had a choice,” he said softly.

Ben gestured to the photo again. “It’s true that Shade became who she was from the accident at Faustech Labs. What about the Probabilist and Tesla? They were born into it. It’s like they were handed a gift that no one else has, and they have a moral obligation to help those who don’t have it.”

Every gift contains a curse, Dev thought but didn’t say. “Go home and sleep it off, Ben,” Dev said, and he put a Command into his voice. “And when you wake up in the morning, you’ll Forget all of this.”

Ben nodded slowly and looked down at his phone. Dev didn’t like using a Command on someone if he didn’t have to, but it was going to be a long night and he didn’t have time to debate morality with a college kid.

* * *

When Dev returned from the basement, a moment later, the Phantasm was waiting for him. Its hands wrapped around Ben’s throat, draining the boy of his life.

Dev grabbed a nearby bottle and flung it at the creature’s head.

The Phantasm was forced to be corporeal when he ate, and in this case it worked to Dev’s advantage. It moaned and dropped the boy. Its face twisted grotesquely, and it opened its mouth to scream.

Dev lifted Ben and moved him to the back of the bar with a flick of his hand. He picked up a chair with his other hand. He and smashed it into the Phantasm’s face, while the creature was stunned and still corporeal. Occasionally, one of Moriarty’s minions or henchmen or sidekicks discovered who Dev really was and attacked him.

It was dark enough in the bar that Dev could conjure the Shadow legion. At his orders, formless creatures writhed up from the floor and wrapped tendrils of darkness around the Phantasm, trying to contain it. The hollow-eyed creature shrugged them off and moved toward Dev.

“Stop,” Dev said, putting a Command into his voice. The Command usually worked on living beings, but he wasn’t sure if the Phantasm fell into that category.

It continued to lurch forward. The Phantasm was both notoriously hard to kill and impressively stupid.

Dev flicked his hand and sent tables and chairs hurtling toward the Phantasm. The onslaught of furniture threw it back, but it began to decohere again, losing corporeality and shifting into its ghost form. From their last fight in the Rockies, Dev remembered that the Phantasm was nearly impossible to see or sense when it ghosted. If it escaped now, Moriarty’s remaining cells would know where to find him.

Dev was out of options: there was only one thing left to try. “I bet whoever you’re working for will be pleased that you found me,” Dev said, stalling the creature while he moved into position. “I have to give you credit for getting past all of the defenses and false trails. I’d ask you how you did it, but the place isn’t really clean enough to sit down and chat.”

When he was sure that Ben was shielded behind him, Dev instantiated a wormhole and tunnelled it into one of the rooms in the basement. The floor beneath the Phantasm distorted, and colors prismed in glittering constellations as the Phantasm was sucked into the temporary warp.