Ex-Superheroes

by A. J. Markam

  I moved my neck to the side and immediately got confirmation as I felt stiff metal links surrounding my neck.

  Damn it.

  Well, it was a long shot, anyway. Even if Stu hadn’t told them who I was, they would have found out with a facial recognition scan. When there’s a prison break at a jail for supervillains and you find somebody floating unconscious in the water afterwards, you gotta take precautions. You don’t want some psychotic human flamethrower waking up without restraints on.

  I did a quick inventory of what I knew for sure.

  I had a headache, but nothing approaching the pain from before when I was using my powers.

  My clothes were dry, and different from the orange jumpsuit I’d been wearing.

  The duds were standard military issue, so I was 99% sure who I was the guest of. Unless the prison break guys were unreasonably forgiving and had just finished shopping at an Army Navy surplus store.

  My hair was still slightly damp, which meant that I hadn’t been unconscious for too long. A couple hours at most, maybe.

  And I was handcuffed to a chair and had a collar on that removed all my powers.

  My conclusion:

  I was alive… but I was also well and truly fucked.

  Then the door opened and all my suspicions were confirmed.

  A guy walked into the room wearing camo field fatigues. He was white-haired but still physically powerful, with a barrel chest and an extra 30 pounds around his gut. He had a lantern jaw and a blunt face, and he looked at me with wary eyes.

  His last name was on his patch, but I didn’t need to see it to know who he was.

  “General Harding,” I said.

  “McNeil,” he answered gruffly.

  He had four black stars on the front of his shirt – one more than the last time I’d seen him.

  “Congrats on the promotion,” I said.

  He smiled wryly as he sat down in the chair behind the metal desk. “Congratulations on being alive.”

  “Thanks. I try.”

  Then somebody else walked into the room, and suddenly my situation wasn’t quite as shitty anymore.

  It was a woman, early 20’s and hotter than hell. Wavy, honey-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her face was beautiful – high cheekbones, tiny nose, full lips, heavy black lashes, emerald eyes.

  Her skin was flawless and silky smooth. A bit on the pale side for my liking. I’m more partial to darker skin – Mediterranean, Persians, that sort of thing. But then again, I’m even more partial to beauty. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and she was still a stone-cold 10.

  But it was her body that had me salivating. I’d guess she was about 5’10”, slim and fit with curves in all the right places. She was wearing some sort of red leather jumpsuit with black piping, gloves, and boots, like something a showy motorcycle rider might wear.

  Only supers wore outfits that over-the-top, which meant she had to be superpowered. Which made complete sense, seeing as Harding was the head of the U.S. Military’s Super-Powered Combatants Corps. The SPCC.

  Of which I had once been a member, before I jumped ship three years ago.

  I idly wondered what her power was, other than giving me a hard-on.

  Her waist was tiny and her hips were full. What little I saw of her backside looked like she had some African-American DNA somewhere in her lineage – otherwise I don’t know where a thin white girl would get a booty that fucking amazing.

  She had long, slender arms. Legs that went on for days. There was a zipper up the front of her jumpsuit that was pulled up way too far for my tastes – but I could still see her double D’s pressed firmly against the leather, with just a hint of deep cleavage visible at the top.

  FUUUUCK.

  You have to understand something. I’d been locked up for 12 months with absolutely no women in sight. Karkarin was a men’s prison – they kept the superpowered chicks somewhere else. Not only that, but there was no TV, no internet, no porno mags of any kind. Hell, not even a Victoria’s Secret catalog to whack off to.

  Apparently, when you have super powers and you get thrown in the clink, there is no such thing as ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’

  The last woman I’d seen was the 50-something judge at my sentencing, and the only way she would have won a beauty contest is if it was against a bunch of manatees. And even then she wouldn’t have been a lock to win.

  This chick?

  God DAMN.

  Now, I’d had hotter. Not way hotter, but… slightly hotter.

  But when you’re a man dying of thirst in the desert, a glass of water tastes better than anything you’ve ever had in your life.

  And this chick wasn’t a just a tall glass of water. She was the best damn cocktail imaginable.

  I’d sure as hell like to have my cock in her tail, that was for sure.

  She looked at me coldly as she stood to the left of Harding. I didn’t have to be a telepath to read her mind:

  Make a move, asshole. Just try it.

  Not that there were that many moves I could make, cuffed to a metal chair bolted to the floor, with a power-dampening collar around my goddamn neck.

  “Lieutenant Smith,” Harding said to the woman without looking at her, “meet ex-Major Hunter McNeil.”

  Smith, huh? Pretty drab name for such a spectacular face.

  She looked at me like I was something the cat had dragged in after the dog shit it out. “‘Ex’? So… dishonorably discharged.”

  It was more a statement of distaste than a question.

  I gave her a tight smile. “They court-martialed me, too, but I was already long gone.” Then I turned to Harding. “I was always surprised you guys gave me over to the Feds. What, didn’t you want to keep me for yourselves, just so you could watch me suffer up close?”

  “Oh, I wanted to,” Harding said, “but Karkarin had better containment facilities. Speaking of which, we need to ask you some questions about what happened there.”

  “Lot of flooding. The remodeling’s gonna be a bitch.”

  Harding smiled wryly as he spoke to his subordinate. “You’ll find, Lieutenant, that McNeil is a wise-ass. Something we never completely broke him of during his time in the Corps.”

  “‘Never completely’?” I scoffed. “You didn’t even come close.”

  “Be that as it may, I still need to know what happened at Karkarin.”

  I thought about being a wise-ass again and saying, What’s in it for me? but that was only going to forestall the inevitable. I was going to tell them what’d happened. There was no good reason not to.

  But I did want something for my trouble.

  “Just tell me one thing first,” I said.

  The hot chick looked pissed, like she was offended I was making demands, but Harding just asked, “What?”

  “I came up to the surface with a couple of guys from the kitchen. One of ‘em’s name was Stu. I’m pretty sure he saved me from drowning. Is he okay?”

  Harding looked at me like he was trying to figure me out. “He’s fine.”

  “Is he here?”

  “No, we sent him and the other five men back home.”

  I raised one eyebrow. “Home home? Or some black site where you waterboard your ‘guests’?”

  “They’ll stay in detention for a couple of days until we get a handle on the situation, no waterboarding necessary. We’re 99% sure the parties involved weren’t using the kitchen help as intel.”

  That was probably a reasonable assumption. Although I’d never known the Army – or the SPCC – to be reasonable.

  “Would you pass on a message for me?” I asked.

  Harding looked intrigued. “What?”

  “Tell him ‘thanks.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Harding kept watching me closely. “Tell me about what happened at Karkarin.”

  “It was a botched prison break,” I said, and then related everything that I’d seen. Told them about Doug Part
h, too, and using him to get out of my collar.

  “You said ‘botched.’ Why?” Harding asked.

  “They knew who they were looking for, but they had no idea where the targets were. Not only that, they broke in 15 minutes too late. If they’d come in through the walls before 0600, everybody would have still been in their cells. The guards would have kept everybody on automatic lockdown, and the bad guys could have just walked around picking everybody up like they were checking off a grocery list. Instead, they were herding cats. Half the prison was out of their cells, and the bad guys had to wander around aimlessly hoping they ran across them. And then,” I added sarcastically, “there was that minor detail about flooding the prison before they found everybody they wanted. So, yeah – I’d say ‘botched’ pretty much covers it.”

  “Who were they looking for?”

  “Doug said he was trying to find Rodovan Golubovic, Vasily Romanov, and Enrico Paredo.”

  Hot Chick tried not to give anything away, but I still saw her face twitch.

  So she knew what they’d done, but she wasn’t desensitized enough to think of them merely as crimes on a rap sheet. Guess she hadn’t spent enough time in the Corps yet to have dealt with the truly evil fuckers.

  Harding didn’t blink, though. “Why did Parth confide in you?”

  “He trusted me from prior business dealings.”

  “Trusted you to do what?”

  “I told him if he took off my collar, I’d help him.”

  “Help him do what?”

  “Whatever he needed.”

  “Which was finding Golubovic, Romanov, and Paredo.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and realized that it sounded like I’d secured my freedom in exchange for freeing a couple of terrorists and murderers. “Though he told me that after he freed me, and I – ”

  “Or maybe he communicated it to you days ago,” Hot Chick snarled. “Or weeks, or months.”

  I stared daggers at her. “I am NOT the inside man here, babe. You’re barking up the wrong tree. Plus, I double-crossed Parth. I didn’t help him find those three assholes.”

  “Like we’re supposed to believe that.”

  “Believe what you want, but it’s the truth.”

  “I don’t think – ”

  I talked over her. “Hey, General, you mind putting a muzzle on your Chihuahua so I don’t have to listen to her yap anymore?”

  Hot Chick seethed. “You’re lucky you’re locked up.”

  “That’s the only way you’d ever have a shot at me, babe.”

  Harding tried to regain order. “Quiet, McNeil. Lieutenant – ”

  She just had to get in one more jab before Harding ordered her to shut up. “If I went after you, you wouldn’t know what hit you.”

  “Could you do it in the nude with some baby oil?” I smirked. “If you’re taking requests, that is.”

  Her arm jerked involuntarily at her side like she was about to do something decidedly superpowered to me.

  “LIEUTENANT!” Harding roared.

  Hot Chick immediately lowered her arm.

  “You’re here to observe,” Harding snarled at her. “Control yourself.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said quietly, her eyes downcast.

  “I understand emotions are running high, but any more outbursts from you and you’re done. Understood?”

  “…yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  She said she was sorry, but she still kept giving me looks that could kill.

  Harding turned back to me. “Let’s get back to the prison break. You convinced Parth to free you from the collar, and then he said he wanted your help to locate the three men on his list.”

  “Yes,” I said, looking pointedly at Hot Chick. “He freed me, THEN he said he wanted my help locating the three assholes.”

  “And you said ‘no,’” Harding continued.

  “Actually, it wasn’t so much ‘no’ as it was ‘I don’t know.”

  “Explain.”

  I took them through the entire sequence: my lies to Parth, the black guy showing up and killing guards, and how I’d interrupted him with a forcefield bitchslap.

  “Why didn’t you kill him?” Harding asked.

  “It wasn’t for lack of trying. You know the saying ‘use it or lose it’?”

  “Of course.”

  “Apparently after being in a collar for a year, I lost a good bit of it.” I winked at Lt. Hot Chick. “But don’t worry – now that I’m out, I’m looking forward to using ‘it’ a lot more often.”

  She didn’t say anything, but I could see the muscles in her jaw stand out as she clenched her teeth.

  “Power atrophy,” Harding nodded. “I’ve seen studies on it.”

  “Good, I was afraid you were going to tell me it was all part of ‘Too Many Birthdays’ syndrome.”

  “What happened next?”

  I finished up with my escape and taking Stu and his friends up to the surface.

  Harding sat back in his chair and regarded me with curiosity. “You could have gotten away clean if you hadn’t saved those men.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows.”

  “Why did you help them?”

  “Because I’m a smuggler, General,” I said. “Not a murderer.”

  “Allegedly,” Hot Chick muttered under her breath.

  Harding glared at her. I knew he was about to boot her out of the room, so I stepped in. Now that she’d (mostly) shut up, I was enjoying having some eye candy to look at. Way better than a 60-year-old overweight dude with a military fade, that was for sure.

  “He believes me,” I said to her. “I can see it in his eyes.” Then I spoke directly to Harding. “Although the question is why you believe me.”

  Harding forgot Hot Chick and turned back to me. “You saying I shouldn’t believe you?”

  “I’d like you to believe me, since I’m telling the truth. But the truth never stopped anybody from believing whatever the fuck they wanted to.” A thought occurred to me. “Unless… somebody else vouched for what I just said.”

  Harding nodded. “The kitchen workers corroborated your account of the rescue. And we managed to save a number of guards, a couple of whom attested to how you saved their lives when you attacked Soundwave.”

  “Soundwave?”

  “Call sign for Leonard Washington, the African-American male who broke in with Pincer, aka Douglas Parth.”

  “Oh God, please don’t start using those fuckin’ names,” I groaned.

  Harding smiled. “You never did like yours, did you?”

  “No, because it’s fucking retarded,” I snapped, then squinted. “Wait a second – you knew I had nothing to do with the break-in, so what’s with all the questions?”

  “I had to make absolutely sure,” Harding said.

  “Why? So you didn’t ‘accidentally’ torture me first?”

  “No, because I’m here to make you an offer.”

  I wanted so bad to look at Hot Chick and say, What – a blowjob?

  I would’ve loved to have seen her reaction.

  But I restrained myself.

  “What offer?” I asked.

  “First I have to deliver some fairly shocking news.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s that?” I scoffed. “You finally figured out after all these years I was right?”

  I expected him to react in anger. At the very least, a lecture. Harding knew why I’d gone AWOL three years ago. He just hadn’t cared about my reasons then, and I was pretty sure he didn’t give a shit now. He was a Good Soldier who put National Security above all else. As such, he expected everybody under him to blindly follow his orders, no matter how fucked-up and war crime-y they were.

  I’d quit following his orders, so he helped the politicians lock me up and throw away the key.

  Unexpectedly, though, Harding didn’t say anything. He just stared at me in silence.

  Hot Chick looked downright sick.

  “…what?” I demanded, feeling vaguely unsettled.

 
Harding cleared his throat. “Three days ago, 623 super-powered individuals across the globe were assassinated in a coordinated strike. For all intents and purposes, every superhero on earth is now dead.”

  5

  I sat there, stunned. Absolutely speechless.

  When I finally found my tongue again, all I could say to Harding was, “You’re fucking with me, right?”

  “Unfortunately, I am not.”

  “All of your guys are dead?!”

  Harding gestured to Hot Chick. “Lt. Smith is one of the few SPCs we have left.”

  SPC – Super-Powered Combatant. Military lingo for anybody with powers.

  So she was a super. I’d been right.

  Then I got an even worse feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Was it just military, or – ”

  “Military and civilians.”

  “Mr. Justice?” I asked. He was basically the patron superhero of Washington DC. Stupid-ass name, but good guy.

  “Dead.”

  “Black Lioness?” She was LA’s number-one hero.

  “Dead.”

  “Captain Valiant?”

  I felt strange even saying the name. He headed up a whole group of supers in NYC. The guy was such a fuckin’ boy scout, I usually called him Captain Valium. Boring and white-bread as hell. But now –

  “Dead,” Harding said.

  “But they’re the most powerful people in the world!” I said in shock.

  Harding paused for a second, then murmured, “Were. ‘Were’ the most powerful people in the world.”

  I felt sick. I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I had to. “What about the ones I helped turn?”

  I was talking about all the freedom fighters in other countries I’d smuggled Ephemera to. The men and women who had almost single-handedly liberated their countries from oppressive regimes.

  Harding went stone-faced. “As far as we know… all of them.”

  “ALL of them?!”

  Harding nodded grimly.

  FUCK.

  “Akeyo in Kenya?” I asked.

  “Confirmed dead.”

  “Agustina in Chile?”

  “Missing, presumed dead.”

  “Chatwalit in Thailand?”

  “Confirmed dead.”

  God DAMN it!

  I wanted to destroy something, I was so angry.