Hero Force United Boxed Set 1

by Baron Sord

  Arnold laughed loudly.

  I said, “Okay, Arnold and I were thinking we should do something about Gray Eyes. My preference would be to go to the police and tell them the situation.”

  She smirked, “What? That he’s extorting us?”

  “No.” I lowered my voice to a faint whisper, “That he shot Arnold.”

  “Sorry again about that, Arnold.” Kristy said. “If those stupid TV reporters at the fire hadn’t asked me so many questions, I would’ve gotten to you guys sooner. But I swear, I shocked those jerks at the drug warehouse as soon as I showed up and juiced up. I’m really sorry it took so long.”

  “Juiced up?” I said. “Where? Outside the warehouse?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Was that you dimming the lights?”

  She nodded, “Probably. I had to get power from outside before I came in, otherwise I couldn’t’ve shocked everyone at once. Anyway, Arnold, I’m really sorry I didn’t get there before you got shot. Otherwise, I would’ve gone inside sooner. Since you had, juicing up seemed like the right thing to do. I was worried about those drug ladies getting hurt too. I hope that’s okay?” Her concern pained her face.

  “No worries,” Arnold said. “They didn’t get hurt, and I’m not dead, right? And look! Now I’ve got a bitchin’ pimp cane.” He held it up and spun it around. “How awesome is that?”

  “I want one,” she grinned appreciatively.

  “I can totally get you one,” Arnold said confidently.

  She smirked, “No, not really.”

  Arnold turned to me and grinned, “I think she just burned me, Doug.”

  “I think you’re right.” I turned to her, “Did you just burn Arnold?”

  “I did,” Kristy giggled. “And there’s more fire where that came from.”

  Arnold said. “Wait, can you do the fire thing like Doug?”

  “No. Just electricity. Doug, can you do electricity?”

  I shook my head, “No. I tried your power outlet trick the other day and it didn’t work. I could feel the tickle of 110 volts coming out of the wall, but I couldn’t store it or release it.”

  “Interesting,” Arnold said. “You guys have different powers.”

  Kristy shrugged. “So?”

  “So, maybe you need to team up with Doug and me. We can play off each other’s strengths.”

  She sighed, “I fly solo, you guys.”

  I said to Arnold, “But she can’t fly.”

  Kristy groaned, “Whatever. I’m not teaming up with anyone.”

  “I’m serious,” Arnold pressed. “You should join Hero Force United.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Our superhero team,” he said.

  “Our?”

  “Me and Doug.”

  Kristy smirked, “What super powers do you have, Arnold? The gift of gab?”

  “That, and I’m The Machinist,” he said proudly.

  “Do you like, control machines or whatever?”

  “You could say that,” Arnold grinned.

  I said, “He doesn’t have any powers like we do.”

  “Obviously,” Kristy snorted.

  I nodded, “He’s an engineer. He’s like Alfred from Batman or Q from James Bond.”

  “Oh,” Kristy smiled. “Does that mean you have some super Batmobiles or Batplanes I should know about? Or an invisible Wonder Woman jet I can borrow?”

  “Not yet,” Arnold said. “But I got Doug a fire coffin.”

  “A what?!” Kristy laughed.

  “It’s a furnace for him to sleep in. So he can charge his fire power.”

  “So you’re like a fire vampire?” Kristy grinned.

  “That’s what I said!” Arnold chuckled gleefully.

  I added, “But it isn’t hooked up yet. Propane isn’t free, and we need it to power the coffin.”

  She winked a mischievous smile, “I just plug myself in at night. My electric bill is crazy.”

  “Wait,” Arnold said. “You sleep while shocking yourself with an electrical cord?”

  “Uh huh,” she nodded. “But it doesn’t hurt.”

  I said, “If you’re worried about your electric bill, you should get solar panels. San Diego gets plenty of sun.”

  “That’s a great idea,” she said. “How much are they?”

  I said, “Fifteen to thirty grand, depending on how big your house is.”

  She shook her head, “I don’t have that kind of money. And I live in an apartment.”

  Arnold said, “I’ve got a huge house. I’ve been thinking about installing an array of solar panels in the yard, but I never got around to it. Now sounds like the perfect time.” He looked at Kristy. “You can move in with us. Get all the free electricity you need. It’ll be like living in the Hall of Justice, only we’ll call it the Hall of Heroes.”

  I was stunned.

  Had he just asked Kristy to move in with us?

  He had.

  I had no idea how we’d gotten on this topic, but I was all for it.

  Arnold added, “Kristy, you won’t even have to pay rent. Doug barely does.”

  “It’s true,” I encouraged. “Arnold hardly charges me anything.”

  “Move in with us,” Arnold said.

  Kristy laughed, “That’s a terrible idea. I’m not moving into a frat house with you slobs.”

  “We’re not slobs,” Arnold said. “I keep an impeccable house.”

  “It’s true,” I said with an encouraging smile because I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask her to move in with us, no matter how badly I wanted to.

  Kristy shook her head, “Not gonna happen. So quit dreaming.”

  “You’ll change your mind,” Arnold insisted.

  “No I won’t,” she snorted.

  “Here we go!” The waitress said as she arrived with our food. She held one of those huge family platters on her shoulder and set it down on a folding stand before covering our table with hot plates brimming with Mexican food.

  Kristy and I both attacked it.

  “You guys are animals,” Arnold chuckled as he reached over to dip his tortilla chip in the communal bowl of guacamole. “Can I dip, or is one of you going to bite my fingers off?”

  “Go for it,” I chuckled.

  After devouring two plates of food, Kristy paused for a breath and said, “Why was it again you guys made me come out here? Not to join your Hero Club, I hope.”

  “Hero Force United,” I corrected.

  “Not interested,” she said, grabbing her fork and jabbing it into a fresh plate of carne asada nachos drenched in cheese and sour cream.

  “Oh come on!” Arnold begged. “It’d be awesome! I mean, just think of the headline: Lady Liberty, Wildfire, and The Machinist form Hero Force United, the first real superhero team in history!”

  “Wildfire?” Kristy said quizzically. “What happened to Firebluh—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “Oh, that’s right. Wildfire is Doug’s new name.”

  “Yeah,” Arnold said. “Cool name, right? It was my idea.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, “I was gonna say you could call him the Fire Vampire, but Wildfire is definitely better.”

  “See?” Arnold grinned at me. “Women like wild. What did I tell you?”

  I nodded agreement.

  Arnold turned back to Kristy. “So it’s settled, right? The three of us are officially Hero Force United?”

  “No, Arnold!” Kristy groused. “I’m not joining your Hero Club! I do my own thing, okay?”

  “Hero Force United,” I muttered.

  “Whatever!” she grumbled. “I’m not joining! End of discussion.” She shot me an irritated grimace, “Is this why you called me this morning, Doug? To join your team? Ugh! We could’ve settled this over text and I’d still be sleeping.”

  “No,” I said. “We wanted to talk to you about Gray Eyes. Think about what he and his men did to all those people at the drug warehouse. And to Arnold. Gray Eyes and his men are all guilty
and I think we need to do something.”

  Arnold whispered, “Gray Ass needs to die.”

  I said forcefully, “I would prefer we send him to jail somehow.”

  “Oh.” Kristy set her fork down. “Oh, you guys are serious.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  She looked straight at me through her big sunglasses. They were a rich brown hombre that faded to transparent at the bottom. Enough sunlight passed through to make her eyes darkly sexy, just like the rest of her.

  “What do you think?” I asked. “If we work together, we can find Gray Eyes and bring him to the police. Between the three of us testifying, they’ll have enough evidence to prosecute him and he’ll go to jail.”

  Arnold muttered to himself, “We should just kill him.”

  Kristy ignored him and took a huge breath before letting it out slowly. Then she thought for a while. “I say we forget about it. I don’t want to get entangled in a bunch of court drama that goes nowhere. Just because we go to court doesn’t mean he goes to jail. I mean, who are we? Just a bunch of randoms saying Gray Eyes is bad? Nobody’s gonna believe us. It’s been forever since he, you know, did that thing to Arnold.”

  She had a point, but I pressed, “But we saw everything.”

  “And lied to the hospital,” she added. “Remember that pervy cop? Total ew.” She meant Officer Eyeballs.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but if we all present our eyewitness accounts to the police, and agree to testify in court, it’ll be our three sworn testimonies against his one.”

  Kristy sighed, “But we lied, Doug. Why would they believe us now?”

  “Because we’re not lying,” I insisted. More importantly, telling the police was our only option short of taking the law into our own hands, which I desperately wanted to avoid. “Even if Gray Eyes only goes away for a few years, that’s something.”

  “Okay,” Kristy said, “let’s say we tell the police and they believe us. What if Gray Ass—”

  “It’s Gray Eyes,” I corrected.

  She said, “I thought Arnold said Gray Ass.”

  He smirked, “I did. It’s zombie gray. With beetles and cockroaches coming out.”

  Kristy frowned for a moment, wrinkled her nose and said, “Ew,” shook her head, stuck out her tongue briefly, added, “Just… ew.” Then she shivered momentarily before saying, “Anyway, what if Gray Guy…” She glared at me, clearly challenging me to correct her. I did not. She continued, “…what if he hires a bunch of lawyers and they twist everything around so he isn’t guilty?”

  “But we have to at least try,” I pleaded.

  “Still,” she sighed. “I don’t know about you, but I barely have time to sleep anymore. I’m barely working on my comic book as it is because I’m so busy helping people, and I have to get ready for New York Comic Con in like two weeks. I don’t have one more spare moment for one more thing. If we get caught up in a court drama, I won’t have time for anything.”

  “We wouldn’t get caught up,” I argued. “We’d just have to tell our story to the cops. We could do that in an afternoon. We could even wait until after you’re back from Comic Con to tell them, if you prefer. And, it would be months until the case went to trial. Maybe even years. We wouldn’t have to worry about appearing in court for a long time.”

  “Ugh!” She shook her fists in frustration and rolled her head back, exposing her slender neck as she grumbled, “But I don’t want to deal with cops or court! Not now, not ever!”

  Arnold said, “Doug, you’re forgetting one thing.”

  “What?” I grunted, still mildly annoyed by Kristy’s resistance.

  Arnold continued, “What happens if you testify and someone figures out you’re the Masked Jumper?”

  “Yeah,” Kristy insisted. “I thought you didn’t want that. You said so at the hospital.”

  I shook my head, “I don’t, but why would that even come up in court?”

  Arnold shrugged, “Who said anything about court? Gray Eyes could just go to the media and tell them, just to piss you off.”

  Kristy said, “Or to make Doug look bad.”

  My eyes popped in surprise. They were both right. I was so focused on doing the right thing, I was missing the forest for the trees.

  Arnold said quietly, “Or we kill him and save ourselves the drama.”

  “No,” I hissed. “I’m not a vigilante. We have to think of a better solution. Maybe not court, but something else.”

  Arnold rolled his eyes.

  Kristy said, “I’m with Doug. No killing. I say we wait and see if Gray Guy—”

  “Gray Eyes!” I grumbled to myself.

  Kristy ignored me and kept right on talking “—shows up next week at my work for his money. If he does, we’ll worry about it then. If he doesn’t, I say we forget about him.”

  —: Chapter 61 :—

  Kristy drove home in her Audi.

  She didn’t wanna go to court mainly because of Brock.

  Somehow, she’d end up the one in trouble, not Gray Guy.

  And there was no way she was moving in with Doug and Arnold.

  Kristy knew better.

  Moving in was the fastest way to sabotage any relationship.

  Kristy’d learned that the hard way.

  She was flattered Arnold wanted her to join Hero Force Whatever so bad, but it probably wasn’t a good idea.

  Even if they never went to court, people still might find out Kristy’d killed Brock. If that happened, it’d make Doug and Arnold both look bad.

  She couldn’t do that to them.

  What would Arnold’s parents think if they found out Arnold was on an effing superhero team, already ridiculous, and one of them was a dancer murderess?

  That’d break their hearts.

  Kristy couldn’t do that to them.

  Having Doug in her comic was one thing. She’d put him in without even asking, and it was too late to take him out anyway. Issue #3 was already printed and getting shipped this very minute to New York Comic Con.

  Being on Doug and Arnold’s actual superhero team?

  No, just no.

  For their sake.

  —: Chapter 62 :—

  “Okay, spill it,” I barked at Arnold as we drove home from Oceanside in his Prius after lunch with Kristy was over.

  “Spill what?” Arnold said.

  “You were acting really weird around Kristy.”

  “Weird?” he snorted. “How am I acting weird?”

  “Whale watching? Moving in with us? Spill it, Arnold. What happened when she drove you to your parents’ house last night?”

  “Nothing happened,” he grumbled.

  “That I believe. I mean, what did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Doug! If you don’t believe me, ask her!”

  I tossed a glare at him and said, “I thought about asking her over lunch, but I didn’t want to embarrass you. And I’m not going to read your mind to find out for myself. I could, but I won’t. So fricking tell me, Arnold! What happened?!”

  He scowled at me — no, snarled — his upper lip curling back over his teeth. His eyes were wild behind his glasses. He blurted, “You are such a fucking dick, Doug! You know that?!”

  “What did I do?” I chuckled defensively.

  He shouted, “YOU GOT FREAKING SUPER POWERS, THAT’S WHAT! I DIDN’T GET ANY! GEEZ!” Finally, he looked away and stared quietly out the window.

  I waited patiently for Arnold to talk.

  He always did.

  Ten minutes later we were still driving south on the 5.

  He started mumbling to himself, “It’s just that she was laughing at everything I said. We were having so much fun.”

  “Who? You and Kristy?”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “It’s like she’s perfect for me.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I sighed. “I don’t think she’s interested in me, you, or anybody.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “She told yo
u that?”

  “Yeah. I even asked her straight up if she was into chicks.”

  “Is she?”

  “No. She said she flies solo,” he said with disgust.

  I smirked, “She told me the same thing.”

  Arnold turned to me and pleaded, “But she’s so awesome, Doug! She even told me how funny I am! She’s perfect, Doug! Everything about her is perfect!”

  “I know, man. Believe me, I know.” I sighed, “Arn, listen to me. Do not obsess over her. I’ve done it enough times to know. So have you. Remember Lisa Trager in college?”

  “Yes,” Arnold groaned defensively. “The only reason she filed a restraining order on me was because I set her dorm room on fire with all those candles.”

  I snickered, “I still can’t believe you did that. I told you it was a bad idea, but you didn’t listen.”

  “It was supposed to be romantic! Chicks love candles!”

  “She was asleep!”

  “I couldn’t set them up while she was awake! I was her secret admirer!”

  I laughed, “You snuck into her room wearing an Elmo mask!”

  “How else was I going to do it? It wouldn’t be secret if she knew who I was,” he snorted like it made perfect sense. “And I saved her life!”

  “From your fire!” I laughed.

  “She didn’t die, did she? She didn’t even get hurt!”

  “You did!” I grinned. “Her roommate kicked your ass when she woke up!”

  “So?” he snickered guiltily. “She played lacrosse. She was really strong. And I was busy trying to put the fire out. She only cared about kicking my ass. She could’ve helped with the fire, but noooo! She was like,” he switched to a piercing falsetto voice, “HEY, EVERYONE! LET’S BEAT ARNOLD UP FOR DOING SOMETHING ROMANTIC!”

  I chuckled and shook my head, “Do you hear yourself?”

  “What?” he laughed.

  I sighed and said, “At any rate, do not obsess over Kristy. You’ll make yourself miserable again, and you won’t get anywhere. Try and let it go. I know I am.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he snorted. “You’ve got Stazia. I don’t have anybody.”

  “I don’t have Stazia.”

  “You will. Trust me, if you don’t do anything dumb, you will have her every way to Sunday you can think of. Me?” he scoffed derisively. “I’m a short fat computer nerd with glasses. I’ll be lucky to marry a mule one day.”