Hero Force United Boxed Set 1

by Baron Sord

  “Yeah,” Arnold said. “No burning my grandparents’ house down.”

  Heph said, “Light the drums up outside in the yard. You got a backyard, right?”

  “No way,” Arnold shook his head. “Gramps built that house by hand. No yard fires.”

  “He’s right,” I nodded. “I need something better. A safe and effective way to extract heat in a pinch. Any suggestions?”

  Heph said, “Yeah. Get your own oxy rig. That worked pretty good.”

  His cutting torch wasn’t as good as the desert, but using one would be a lot more controlled and therefore safer than a drum fire. But torches cost money which I didn’t have. With my metaphorical arch-nemesis THE BANK BREAKER constantly draining my accounts, I was bordering on broke at all times.

  I winced, “How much does an oxy rig cost?”

  Heph shrugged, “You can have mine. All you have to do is re-gas it.”

  “I can’t take your torch,” I said. “It would be like taking paintbrushes away from Van Gogh.”

  Heph shrugged, “I’ll give you my spare. I’ll just switch out the torches with an old one. I got plenty of those. For what you’re doing, you don’t need a good torch, just good tanks and regulators.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, man. All the good you two are doing for the world saving lives? It’s the least I can do.”

  “Thanks. I really appreciate it.”

  “No worries.”

  “I have to ask, how much does re-gassing the tanks cost?”

  Heph shrugged. “Maybe 50 bucks for a full tank? If you can find someone willing to fill it. Most gas shops want you to buy new tanks from them, but I’m sure you’ll find someone willing to fill these. Try out in Santee. They got lotsa shops there.”

  “Fifty bucks isn’t cheap,” I said.

  “That’s nothing,” Arnold said.

  “I doubt a tank stores as much heat as Heph’s desert. Even being conservative, say I went through a tank a day. That’s $350 a week, which is around $18,000 a year. I can’t afford that. Unless I don’t plan on using fire every time I go out.”

  “You haven’t so far,” Arnold offered. “You barely use it.”

  “At those prices, why start?”

  Arnold rolled his eyes, “You can’t be fricking Wildfire if you don’t use your flames.”

  All I could see was dollar signs, which always made THE BANK BREAKER wring his hands together greedily. That ass-clown was always looking to rob me blind.

  Heph said, “If you’re worried about money, and you don’t want to freeze people’s water lines, maybe you need a gas forge. It’ll waste less heat than running a straight torch.”

  “What’s a gas forge?” I asked. “And how much does it cost?”

  “You can build one yourself. Any metal container will do. Even a metal bucket will work. Fill it with sand for an insulator, connect a shop vac hose into the bottom to blow air in, put charcoal bricks on top of the sand, and boom, you got yourself a forge. The sand helps trap the heat so you don’t waste it.”

  “Makes sense,” I nodded. “But what is the fuel cost of charcoal briquettes compared to gas?”

  “Good point. So make yourself a propane forge. Propane is cheap. All you gotta do is run a hose from a portable propane tank and weld the nozzle to the side of any old metal canister. You know, a big metal can about yea big.” He held up his hands.

  “Like a five gallon bucket size?”

  “Yeah, but metal. The canister lies on its side and works as the forge. Bolt on some legs so it doesn’t roll. You want a small opening on one end for exhaust and a bigger one on the other for your hands to go in. You line the canister with ceramic blankets to keep the heat inside and seal it with ceramic paste. Seal the bolt holes too. With the paste. Boom, you got yourself a gas forge. You can stick your hands inside it and use it like an epic hand warmer.”

  “I get the basic idea,” I said. “I could easily transfer the heat from my hands and store it in my body. But I’d need plans or a step-by-step to build one. And I might need to borrow some tools. We don’t have much at Arnold’s house.”

  Arnold joked, “I can make one for you in Minecraft in about two minutes.”

  I rolled my eyes. The real world was much more complicated than Minecraft.

  Heph offered me a grin, “I can throw one together for you if you want. I’ve got a canister out back that’ll work perfect.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but you’ve done enough already. We’ll just start with the oxy-fuel tanks, but I’ll start thinking about a forge. Or moving out to the desert.”

  “Got space here,” Heph grinned, motioning at his hangar.

  If his property wasn’t so far away from civilization, I might take him up on his offer. But there was no sense in having fire power if you were too far away from trouble to put it to good use.

  When we went to load the tanks in my rented Ford Fusion, it turned out they didn’t fit. Not in the trunk, and not in the back seat. The oxygen tank was too tall. I wasn’t about to strap it to the top of a rental because I hadn’t paid extra for the damage waiver and we didn’t have a rack.

  “So much for that,” I groaned. “Now we’re back to square one.”

  Heph said, “You sure you don’t want me to whip up a simple hand forge for ya?”

  “Thanks, but it’s getting late and we have to drive back.”

  Arnold said, “The sun hasn’t even set. We have time.”

  “Correct, but there’s another mission-critical thing I need Heph to do before we go. Much more important than building a forge.”

  “What’s that?” Heph asked.

  “Do you have a diamond saw? Or maybe a tungsten-carbide grinder of some kind?”

  “Yeah. I got both. What for?”

  I chuckled, “My nails are getting long and I need a shave.” I rubbed the scruff on my cheeks.

  Heph laughed, “Yeah. I got you covered.”

  Turned out Heph had an antique barber chair too. It didn’t have any leather or cushions left, just the springs and rusty frame. Heph laid plywood over the seat, not that I needed it with my resilient skin. Then he reclined me and went to work on my beard. The diamond saw didn’t cut it (pun intended) because my 1/4-inch beard hairs were too flexible and Heph didn’t want to slice my skin open, so he was being extra careful.

  Eventually he stopped, “I don’t think the saw is working.”

  Arnold said, “Let me try.”

  “No, Arn,” I said. “You barely know how to use a screwdriver.”

  “So?” he challenged.

  “So, you’ll cut your fingers off with a diamond saw.”

  “No I won’t,” he said like he wasn’t so sure.

  Heph laughed at that and switched over to the tungsten-carbide grinder. He insisted everyone wear safety goggles. I wasn’t too worried about injury from flying debris hitting my eyes, but I was worried about it going into my eye sockets or up my nose. I didn’t feel like digging or flushing out metal shavings later. So I plugged up my nose and my ears with cotton balls. We also tied an old canvas tarp around my neck like a barber bib.

  The first few times the grinder disc hit my skin, there was the loud squeal of metal and Heph ripped the grinder away.

  “You okay?” he asked, scared.

  I reached up and rubbed my cheek. “Feels fine. Keep going.”

  The sparks flew as Heph ground away.

  While he worked, it didn’t take long for the grinder disc and the motor to overheat. Not a problem. While he was busy grinding away, I focused on drawing the friction heat from the disc into my face and down to my torso. That took care of the over-heating problem on the disc, and to a lesser degree the motor, but not enough to allow Heph to continuously work. At some point, he had to take a pause to let the grinder motor cool. I asked him to see the grinder. Holding it, my mental TGV revealed that the colorful conduction path between the disc and the motor had a bottleneck in the form of the drive shaft. Hence, my inability
to keep the motor as cool as I had kept the disc. The simple solution was for me to wrap my hands around the frame and extract heat that way. There were still bottleneck limits in the form of the motor’s multiple mounting brackets inside the housing, which minimized the conduction path from the outside of the housing to the motor. There was also the hot air surrounding the motor inside the frame, which acted as an insulator that slowed the overall rate of heat transfer from the grinder’s motor to me. Good news was, once I had my hands wrapped around the frame, not only did I cool it, but the air inside cooled too — albeit more slowly. Net result? Almost as good as sticking the entire grinder in a subzero freezer. No, better. Two minutes later, my TGV showed the entire grinder was back to room temperature.

  I handed it back to Heph and said, “Try it now.”

  Heph squeezed the trigger a few times and the grinder whirred impressively. He chuckled, “I need to keep one of you around the shop for times like this.”

  Later, after stopping several more times for me to cool the motor, Heph finally finished “shaving” my face. In the process, he had ground down three grinder discs to nothing. Fortunately, he had plenty to spare.

  “How’s that?” he asked.

  “Smooth as silk,” I smiled, rubbing my cheeks.

  “No razor burn?”

  I winked, “No grinder burn either. My skin feels irritated, but nothing serious.” It was further proof that I might not have been 100% invulnerable, but I was 99.9% of the way there. “Now for my nails.”

  Arnold smirked, “Do I need to say it?”

  “Let me guess, gay?” I said.

  Arnold grinned, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  I chuckled and sat up in the chair and braced my hands on my knees and extended my fingers slightly. Said, “You ready?”

  “Yeppers,” Heph nodded.

  In a lilting voice, Arnold quipped, “Welcome to Heph’s Heavenly Salon, where we do nails with nail guns. We’re talking maximum mani-pedi, boyz!”

  “That’s right,” I chuckled nervously. “We can’t forget my toes. I hope you don’t mind?”

  “No worries, man,” Heph chuckled.

  He ground through another six tungsten discs doing my nails. They were more difficult than my face because they were harder than my beard hair, but he managed. When he finished, I held up my hands and wiggled my toes to inspect his work.

  Heph laughed, “Never thought I’d ever do a pedicure. It’s a bit ragged, but we gotter done.”

  “Yeah we did,” I grinned. “Thanks again, Heph.”

  “Any time, man. Next time, call ahead,” he winked. “I may be busy doing nails for the Transformers.”

  Arnold chortled, “Talk about Megatron’s Nail Salon.” Arnold looked past me and Heph and joked, “Oh look! Optimus Prime is here for his six o’clock! And don’t forget Bumble Bee at seven!”

  Heph and I both laughed.

  When Heph whipped off my canvas barber’s bib, he said, “Let me know when you need a haircut.”

  “Will do,” I chuckled.

  “We’ll have to figure something out. I don’t think the grinder’ll… cut it,” he winked at his pun.

  “Ah ha ha ha,” Arnold laughed.

  —: o o o :—

  When Arnold and I started our drive home, the sun had set but it was still twilight out here on the desert dirt roads.

  Arnold said thoughtfully, “We need to get an awesome hideout like Heph has. Then you can get all that cheap desert heat.”

  “It needs to be close to home, though.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we should move into a steel mill. You can bathe in the giant buckets of molten metal whenever you need to fuel up.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, but there aren’t any steel mills in San Diego that I know of.”

  “So says Dr. Geography.”

  Sensing we had left Sanity City and were heading toward Insane Island, I chuckled, “How about an active volcano? We could build our base inside Mauna Loa or something.”

  “Yeah!” His eyes lit up. “We can move to Hawaii!”

  “The only problem with that is, I’d always be stuck there waiting for the next flight to the mainland whenever people here needed help.”

  “So fly here yourself. You were saying maybe you could fly with enough practice.”

  I rolled my eyes, “If I ever figure out that trick, I doubt I’ll go any faster than a commercial jet.”

  “You don’t know that!” he argued.

  “Speed isn’t the point. I’m talking fuel costs. Keeping me in the air won’t be cheap. Logic says, flying faster costs more, just like with fighter jets. Think of all the propane I’ll go through.”

  “Zero! You’ll be living in a freaking volcano!”

  “That’s right,” I chuckled. “Will you be living there too? Sleep on a bed of hot magma every night like I will?”

  “No, but—”

  “I hate to say it, but cost is a factor. I need to eat, remember? Are we going to pay for someone to truck food up to Mauna Loa?”

  “Like an offering to the God of Wildfire?” Arnold grinned.

  I chuckled, “In a D&D campaign or R.A. Salvatore or Tolkien novel, definitely. But not in real life. I don’t want people making offerings to me. I’ll have to come down from my mountain whenever I get hungry because you can’t store refrigerated food in a volcano.”

  “Yeah you can. Just make a volcano-proof refrigerator.”

  “You make it in Minecraft, right?”

  “Right,” he grinned.

  I rolled my eyes, “And speaking of food, look how much I’m spending now. After shooting off fire all day today, I can only assume that me flying will make me more hungry. No, it’ll be way cheaper to fly commercial, which means I’ll have to book tickets in advance if I want to come to the mainland to help people.”

  “Think of the frequent flyer miles!”

  I smirked, “Think of the cost. Tickets from here to Hawaii aren’t cheap.”

  “Screw tickets! You don’t want to fly on passenger jets anyway. You want your own jet! I’m telling you, we need a fighter jet. Something that does mach numbers. Mach 1, Mach 2. Mach 3.”

  “At least Mach 3,” I snickered as I returned to Insane Island to speculate wildly with Arnold.

  “Maybe an SR-71. Don’t the X-Men have one of those?”

  “A fantasy one. The real ones have been decommissioned.”

  “So we’ll recommission them! Or buy a used one on the cheap!”

  “A Blackbird? For cheap? Ha! I’m sure a used one will run you a hundred million.”

  “We’ll pay for it,” Arnold waved his hand dismissively.

  “And that’s not taking into account fuel and maintenance. You’d need an entire support crew just to get it off the ground.”

  “We’ll pay for it!”

  “But the Air Force won’t sell it.”

  “We’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse,” Arnold said in his best Don Corleone accent.

  “Yeah,” I grinned, playing into the ridiculous fantasy, “then we can land it at Heph’s airport. And speaking of Heph, why not ask Hugh Hefner to move the Playboy Mansion to our secret hideout?”

  “Hell yeah!”

  “We can have one babe mansion here at Heph’s, and one in Hawaii.”

  “Shit yeah! Think of all those babes in bikinis! Boobs and asses, Doug! Boobs and asses!”

  “It’s tits and asses,” I smirked.

  “Those too!” he laughed. “Fake ones! Real ones! Every kind of boob there is!”

  I snorted, “Then we’ll fly back and forth to Hawaii whenever I need to fuel up my powers where we both live… IN A FRICKING VOLCANO!” I was being sarcastic but I was laughing along with Arnold.

  “See?” Arnold cackled. “Now you’re talking!”

  —: Chapter 18 :—

  “Eat lead, you Panzer driving pricks!” Arnold shouted at his mammoth plasma TV in the living room at home, busy playing Call of Duty WWII whil
e I relaxed on the couch.

  “You’re storming the beaches of Normandy. No one is driving any Panzers.”

  “They will be later,” he grunted, his face taut and eyes fixated on the screen while he white-knuckled the controls and flicked buttons. The TV showed his character’s POV as he ran from behind the cover of one anti-tank “Czech hedgehog” (steel beams welded into a star shape) to another, bullets whizzing past him.

  For once, we didn’t have anybody to rescue tonight in the real world. Probably because I was tired from burning up all that fuel at Heph’s earlier today. No matter how much food I had eaten since getting home, I wasn’t hearing any distress calls clearly enough to chase them down. Thank my lucky stars for that. Exhaustion had it’s benefits.

  Yes, I could probably prime the pump by eating a bunch of sugar — or caffeine — which always seemed to do the trick of bringing in the distress calls with crystal clarity, but I was more than happy to relax and work my way slowly through the bag of burritos we’d brought home from Lucha Libre. Right now, the distress calls were nothing more than a blurry red haze of unidentifiable noise. I planned on keeping it that way until tomorrow, if at all possible.

  Tonight I needed rest.

  An hour later, Arnold was still playing Call of Duty WWII while I sat in a food coma digesting my dinner.

  “Run away, run away!” Arnold laughed as a battalion of Panzer tanks rumbled into a French village, cannons booming. With Arnold’s Dolby surround system, it sounded like we were in the middle of an actual war zone.

  I said, “Have you ever realized how violent first person shooters are?”

  “Yeah,” he scoffed, eyes on the TV. “That’s why I play them. Duh.”

  “Maybe you should try flight simulators. I find them very relaxing.”

  He snorted, “I find taking a dump very relaxing.”

  Amused, I said, “Are you equating flight simulators with sitting quietly on a toilet?”

  “Who said anything about quiet?” he snorted.

  “Are you suggesting I take loud dumps?”