by Baron Sord
Arnold groaned, “Google it, iSearch it, I don’t care. Just watch the video. Then call me back.”
He hung up before I could say anything.
I stopped under a shady tree and iSearched San Diego News. It took me a minute to find the video. For some reason, I expected to see something about the home invaders from last night.
Nope.
The headline read:
REAL LIFE SUPERHEROES SAVE LIVES.
I clicked on the video.
My stomach knotted in anticipation.
I couldn’t hear the sound over traffic and I didn’t have earbuds, so I just watched. The video started with a news anchor talking. Then it showed a picture of a solar eclipse. No green circle of light like I had seen yesterday, just a generic non-green eclipse photo. Then it cut to shaky far-away video of the front of the convention center. It took a moment for the camera to lock in on the burning Impala. The shot was from up high, like someone in a tall building had recorded it from one of the skyscrapers in downtown San Diego.
In the video, tiny me and tiny Lady Liberty busied ourselves pulling the kids out of the back of the Impala. Then we dragged the burning sedan across the asphalt like it weighed nothing. Prior to that moment, we had picked up a Cadillac CTS completely off the ground and carried it like it too weighed nothing, but that wasn’t in this video. Either way, us effortlessly moving cars didn’t look believable. But there it was in the video.
The video cut to the car exploding.
Then I did the impossible.
I sucked the fire out with my arms while my clothes burned off (without tiny me realizing it), then shot jets of flame into the air. Seeing it from the POV of someone watching was surreal. I could’t believe my own eyes. I was watching me do the impossible. It looked like a clip from a big-budget Hollywood action flick that was supposed to look like shaky smart phone video.
But I had lived it.
The video cut back to the newscaster in the studio, who continued talking.
Loud traffic was still whizzing by, so I stuck my Robot phone’s speaker up to my ear and listened.
“The man wearing the flag around his waist has not been identified. The woman with him has been identified as Lady Liberty, the creator of the self-titled comic book character of the same name.”
A loud truck rumbled by on 6th Avenue.
Trying to hear the video, I plugged one ear and jammed the phone speaker against the other one.
“Jeff Strickland, the owner and publisher of Crash Comics, was asked to comment.”
“No, I won’t give you her name,” Jeff said in the video, his voice gruff and annoyed. “That’s a private business matter.”
I pulled the phone away just in time to see Jeff’s dumbstruck face. He looked like he’d been ambushed by a reporter as he had walked out of the Bayfront Hilton across from the convention center. That must’ve been the hotel where he had told me he was staying last night.
“Can you tell us where to find her?” an off-camera reporter asked Jeff.
Jeff said, “She wants to be left alone, so stop bothering me. That’s all you’re getting.” Jeff pushed past the camera and never looked back.
The video cut back to the news anchor.
“The man wearing the flag has yet to be identified.”
That man was me.
Fuuuuuuck.
I didn’t want to be a media celebrity.
Being famous seemed awesome until you were. Just ask a celebrity. Images of rabid paparazzi flashed in my head. They’d be climbing the trees outside Arnold’s house, waiting for me to bend over with my ass crack showing so they could snap photos of my butthole and sell them for $10,000 a pop. Or catch me picking my nose. The headlines would read:
Nose-Picking Superhuman Doug Moore Is All Too Human.
I turned around and walked home.
I didn’t want any part of it, and I didn’t want to risk having someone at Comic Con recognize me.
So much for having super powers.
Something told me my life was going to super suck very soon if I wasn’t careful.
—: Chapter 5 :—
Back at the house, I downed a gallon of water, ate four huge meat-cheese-and-lettuce sandwiches with plenty of mayo, then went back to sleep. No distress calls woke me. I suspected I wouldn’t hear any until my super body replenished my Midi-chlorians or whatever they were called.
I woke at 6:00pm when Arnold texted me he was coming home from work with Mexican food. I texted back to get me three burritos. When I heard him drove up in his Prius, I met him outside.
“There he is! There’s the superstar!” Arnold held a plastic bag with takeout in one hand, and a pink cake box in the other. His oversized SPAWAR polo shirt fluttered over his ample frame.
I asked, “What’s in the box?”
“A surprise.”
“Is it a cake?”
“Noooo,” he chuckled. “It’s a surprise.”
Inside, we sat down at the kitchen table and chowed down on burritos and tortilla chips. I told him the basics of what had happened today with Jimmy and Vanessa.
“If this keeps up,” Arnold said, “you’re gonna need your own comic book. Maybe you can get Lady Liberty to draw it for you. I looked up her art online. She’s really good.”
“I’ll draw my own comic, thank you very much.”
“Just sayin’. But if you need any help coloring or whatever, you should definitely give her a call.”
“I don’t have her number.”
“Oh, that’s right. But you have Vangelina’s number,” he grinned.
“No I don’t,” I grumbled.
“But you know where she lives.”
“So?”
“So, don’t you think you oughta do the right thing and give that woman what she wants? Based on your story, she is literally begging for it. Begging, Doug. Begging. How many hotties have you ever had beg you to bone them?”
“Zero,” I sighed.
“My point exactly,” he smirked.
“She’s married, Arn. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Vangelina is begging for you to bang her?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Doug. Listen to me,” he said in a calm and serious tone. “Listen to her. You are breaking that poor woman’s heart. Why won’t you give her what she wants? Would sleeping with her be so bad? You don’t even have to date her. Just bone her a few times until you get it out of your system.”
“Believe me, I thought about it. A hundred times. But I can’t. I mean, how would you feel if she was your wife?”
Arnold’s eyes lit up, “Like a fricking baller! Vangelina is a supermodel!”
I chuckled, “You know what I mean. If you were married to her and you found out she slept with some other guy behind your back.”
“She’s gonna do it anyway.”
“I don’t want to be that guy.”
His smile faded and he nodded gravely. In a somber tone, he said, “Does it weigh on your conscience? I mean, how do you sleep at night?”
“Huh? You’re making it sound like I’m a cat murderer because I won’t sleep with a married woman.”
“In a way, you are.”
“Huh?”
“It must be difficult knowing that Vangelina is lying in bed all alone right now—”
“It’s not even seven o’clock. The sun’s still up. I doubt she’s asleep.”
“Exactly. Because she can’t sleep. Because of you. She’s probably tossing and turning right now,” he continued, “wishing you were murdering her cat this very minute.”
“She has a dog. He’s a Yorky named Stefan.”
“No.” He shook his head like I was missing the point and patted my forearm gently. “Her other cat.”
“Huh?”
“Her pussy cat.”
I snorted a laugh and threw his hand off my arm. “You have a one track mind, Arnold.”
He nodded and grabb
ed a tortilla chip, “And you should too, Doug. I’m just looking out for you, homegrown.”
After finishing my three burritos and most of the chips, I was still hungry. “What’s in the pink box?”
“Not you, my friend. Not you.”
“What?” I was totally confused. “The cake box. What’s in the cake box?”
Arnold stood up, got plates from the cupboard, and a big knife. He opened the cake box on the counter. “Happy Birthday, brother.”
I stood up and looked. The cake was red, white, and blue and it said #1 Doug in big frosting letters.
“It’s not my birthday,” I said.
“Of course it is. Today is the day you officially became a superhero.”
“That was yesterday, and I’m not a superhero.”
“Google News says you are.”
“That’s not what iSearch News said.” I had checked earlier after Arnold’s text had woken me. I couldn’t find a single article about me or Lady Liberty on iSearch News. Perhaps the iSearch algorithms were filtering out the stories because it thought they were fake news.
“So what? If either one of them says it, it must be true.”
I snorted a laugh.
Arnold cut two huge slices of cake and served them up on plates from the cupboard. He always celebrated worthy occasions with sweets. In his mind, Monday through Sunday was a worthy occasion.
“Hey,” Arnold said as we ate cake, “I wanted to ask you something about last night.”
“Yeah?” My mouth was stuffed full of frosting.
“You have a blue tongue.”
I stuck it out at him. “How blue?”
“As blue as your balls,” he chortled to himself.
“Shut up,” I chuckled. “What’s your question?”
He chuckled, “No, seriously. Last night, when we were at that house, did you send me your thoughts? Because I could’ve sworn you told me not to let that guy get away. The one who ran outside.”
“You heard that?”
“So you did send me your thoughts? I mean, actually send me your actual thoughts? Like ESPed them to me?”
Yes, I sent you my thoughts.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Do that again.”
Did you not hear me the first time?
“Holy shit, Doug! You have freaking ESP!”
“Telepathy.”
“Whatever! I can hear your thoughts in my head! That’s un-freaking believable!” He laughed hard. “Wait, can you read my mind?” He knew everything else, so why not the rest?
“Yes,” I sighed.
“No way! What am I thinking right now?” He smiled at me and thought, Go bang Vangelina. Get your business all the way up in her business and take her to pound town.
I chuckled, “Go bang Vangelina. I don’t need to read your mind to know that.”
“What else did I think?”
I told him word for word.
“Doug! This is fricking epic! You are a mind reader! And you can send your thoughts!”
I was happy it didn’t bother him and I grinned, Don’t tell anybody. I’m deadly serious.
“Hell no I won’t! Are you crazy? Do you realize how much money we can win in Vegas? We could make a killing at poker, Doug! You’ll know what everyone is holding! This is incredible!”
“No, Arnold. We’re not going to cheat Vegas or anyone else. I’m not a cheat. End of story.”
“Okay, maybe not cheat. But there has to be some… mmm…” he rolled his head side to side, “some legitimate ways to put this to good use. I’ll have to think of how, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.”
“No, Arnold. I’m not going to cheat anyone. It’s bad enough that video is online. I don’t want more reason for people to come knocking on my door because I’m a super cheat.”
“Our door.”
“Exactly. I’m not using my powers to cheat people and make enemies for both of us.”
“Okay,” he sighed, “we’ll back burner that topic for now. But we need to monetize this somehow. You can’t keep doing this for free.”
“No way! I’m not charging people to help them.”
“Forget about that for now. Anyway, how’s your head? Any more distress calls from people in need?”
“No.” I told him my theory about a recuperation period.
“Makes sense. Like a cooldown in Warcraft or whatever. Did you do anything else while I was at work? You know, anything heroic?”
I shook my head, “Nah. I ate and slept and felt guilty as hell about it.”
“Why? Because you didn’t bang Vangelina?”
“No,” I grinned for a moment then went serious. “Because there are people out there I could be helping—”
He cut me off with a smirk, “There are people out there you could be banging.”
“Like that would make me feel better.”
He laughed, “It sure as fuck would.”
“You know what I mean. I’m telling you, Arn, last night when I started getting all those distress calls for the first time, I heard thousands. It’s a slaughterhouse out there. Countless people in trouble or pain or dying.”
Arnold gave me a sympathetic look, “You can’t save everybody, Doug. You’re just one man.”
“I know, I know,” I groaned. “Plus, I got the impression some of the people in trouble were far away.”
“How far? Last night we drove, what, about ten miles?”
“Seven.”
“Were you getting messages from farther than that?”
“I think so. I’m just guessing, but I might have been hearing people who are maybe fifty miles away? A hundred? A thousand? I don’t really know. Some were… brighter and louder than others. Others were so faint I could barely hear them. Kind of like a distribution map.”
“That’s good. You’re learning how this works.”
“How is any of this good?” The reality of it smacked me in the heart. This power of mine brought with it a tremendous burden. “Hearing people screaming in your head because they’re dying or getting beat up or whatever is awful. It’s fricking awful!”
“Yeah, I bet it is,” Arnold said quietly. He offered a sincere smile, “All we can do is help the ones we can and pray for the ones we can’t.”
“We?”
“Fuck yeah, we,” he laughed. “You think I’m letting you get killed by yourself? I’m your sidekick, remember?”
“Arnold, you’re not the one who’s invulnerable.”
“Neither are you. We don’t know how long this thing lasts.”
I stared at him. “You can’t risk your life like last night, Arn.”
“Why?” He frowned. “You did.”
“It’s not the same.”
“The fuck it’s not,” he chuckled. “I don’t want you dying on me, Doug. Nobody dies, all right?” He stared at me, his eyes intense. “Not you, not me, and not the people we’re trying to help.”
I was stunned. This was a side of Arnold I didn’t know was there. Best friends could be full of surprises.
“Okay,” I chuckled, “but if you get killed, I will seriously kill your ass.”
“I expect nothing less,” he grinned.
“Okay, if we do this, we do this right.”
“What did you have in mind?”
—: o o o :—
While we ate cake, I made Arnold get his laptop and order a bulletproof vest online.
I said, “You need to get a level III vest.”
“Don’t you mean IIIA?”
“I mean level III.”
He frowned, “Do you have any idea how heavy those vests are? They have hardened steel plates. Or ceramic. I can’t carry all that weight around. I’ll have a heart attack.”
I smirked, “You can’t afford to get shot by an AK-47 or an AR-15 either.”
He rolled his eyes, “How many people are going to shoot assault rifles at me?”
“Did you forget last night? Or do I need to remind you we are going into dangerous situat
ions?”
“They didn’t have assault rifles. I’ll get a IIIA vest. Those stop everything below a .44 Magnum SJHP. Look at the chart.”
I scanned the ratings chart on the website. Sure enough, IIIA was rated to protect against 44 Magnum SJHP (Semi-Jacketed Hollow Point) on down to lower calibers. .357 SIG and Magnum, .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol), .40 S&W (Smith & Wesson), 10mm, 9mm, .380 ACP, .32, .22 LR (Long Rifle). Pretty much every handgun anyone would ever carry.
Arnold said, “And this one has level 2 edge and spike protection and it’s only six hundred bucks.”
I read the product page for the SAFEMAX Kevlar vest rated at IIIA + EB2 + S2. The EB2 stood for “edged blade protection, level 2” which used a layer of chainmail to stop knives, axes, broken bottles, anything with an edge. The S2 stood for “spike protection, level 2” which used a layer of plastic laminate. It protected against needles, nails, screwdrivers, etc., in case you were ever attacked by a nailgun villain or the Snap-On Tool Man.
I said, “That’s not bad. I like the edge and spike protection.”
“See? It’s perfect,” he said. “I’ll order it. And if we ever fight anyone with any kind of long rifle, I’ll run away. Assault rifles, hunting rifles, whatever.”
“Like that’ll do any good. Can you run 3000 feet per second?”
“I don’t need to. I just need to find cover or stay out of the line of fire.”
I gave him a doubtful look. Hopefully, if we ever had to handle a distress call where people were shooting assault rifles, I would know beforehand and could make Arnold wait in the car. Or stay home.
“And get a ninja mask,” I added. “No, get two. My knit cap is too hot. Look for something lycra.”
“Agreed.” He searched while I forked up cake. “Here’s one. It comes in black or white. One of us should totally get white.”
“Why? It’s too visible.”
He smirked, “Duh. So we’ll look like a team-up of Snake-Eyes and Storm-Shadow from G.I.JOE.”
I chuckled, “No, get black. Then we can both be Snake Eyes.”
“Definitely,” he grinned. “We’ll be twice the badass.”
“Exactly,” I smiled and cut myself another slice of cake.
“Geez, Doug?!” He groused, “Will you stop eating all the cake?! You’ve already eaten half. I’ve barely had a quarter.”
