Ex-Superheroes

by A. J. Markam

  “Hello, Mr. McNeil,” he said, not a trace of an accent in his voice.

  “Hello, Hiroshi.”

  If my casual use of his first name bugged him – to a Japanese speaker, it was pretty insulting – he didn’t show it. Instead he gestured at the seat across the table from me as though to ask, Do you mind?

  So polite. So urbane.

  As though we hadn’t been trying to murder each other just a week ago.

  And as though he hadn’t brought a hundred thugs with submachineguns currently pointed at my head.

  “By all means,” I said. “Sit. Have some champagne.”

  As he sat down, Hiroshi put out one hand as though to say, No thank you on the wine.

  Spike stayed standing behind his boss. He was wearing his armless, legless wrestling suit that showed off his thorn-studded grey hide. Looked like he’d recovered from having most of it burnt off.

  “Hunter McNeil,” Spike chuckled. “Glad you didn’t die, pal.”

  “Can’t say the same for you, Spike.”

  “That’s okay, buddy. I just want a shot at killin’ you myself.”

  “Get in line.”

  Antimatter stared me down. “Where is my Ephemera?”

  “I like that,” I said. “Straight to the point. All business.”

  “I do not care for foolish pleasantries. All I want to know is, where is my Ephemera?”

  I could see Yuki struggling not to yell, It’s MY Ephemera now! but she managed to stay silent.

  “What are you planning on doing with it, Hiroshi? Gonna start up an army?” I looked around at the Yakuza pointing their guns at me. “This the pool you’re recruiting from? The best of the best, the cream of your crop?”

  “I am,” Antimatter said humorlessly. “And they are.”

  “Might wanna rethink that whole promoting from within thing,” I said. “It’s always good to bring in new blood.”

  “Perhaps I should make an offer to your companions, then,” Antimatter said. “Lt. Angelica Smith, codename Nova. And Yuki Inaba, professionally known as Yurei.”

  ‘Yurei’ was Japanese for ghost. Actually, more like a restless, unhappy spirit.

  Didn’t matter. The point was, he was letting me know that he knew these weren’t just two hot chicks by my side. He knew who they were… what they could do… and in Nova’s case, that he had a mole on the inside of the SPCC.

  So it wasn’t just the Australians who had tipped him off.

  I saw Nova’s eyes widen as she realized the implications.

  I wondered if she knew he was just tooling me, though. Playing a game of ‘whip it out and measure it.’

  Then he took it a step further.

  “Didn’t you have a code name back in the day?” Antimatter asked, as though he couldn’t quite recall. “It was – what was it?”

  “Mr. Shield,” Spike snorted, then guffawed.

  “Ah, yes,” Antimatter said, and for the first time he smiled – though it was more like a trained lizard that had learned to smile. Not human at all. “Mr. Shield.”

  I glared at him. I couldn’t help myself.

  I fuckin’ hated that name.

  “That was really your name?” Yuki asked incredulously. “Mr. Shield?”

  “Yes,” I seethed.

  “Really?” Nova asked, equally dumbfounded. “That’s terrible.”

  “I didn’t fuckin’ pick it,” I snapped.

  “Had I had that name,” Antimatter said with feigned sympathy, “I might have turned traitor, too.”

  “No, you just kept your codename and slaughtered all your buddies in your unit instead,” I said with a fake smile.

  “Yes. Exactly,” Antimatter answered, and dropped the whole ‘acting human’ thing. That’s what sociopaths do – they wear a mask. They have to imitate emotions because they don’t feel the things normal humans feel. When they drop the mask and you see the darkness underneath, it’s pretty chilling. Dead-eyed and inhuman.

  Sort of how Antimatter looked now.

  “If that is what I did to men I worked with daily for five years, imagine what I will do to you,” he said emotionlessly. “I grow impatient. I will not ask again.”

  I smiled. “Well, I would say I won’t ask again to fuck your mom, but I didn’t ask you the first ten times I banged her, so – ”

  Spike suddenly lunged for Yuki, the closest of us to him.

  The idea was to get his hand around her neck and see how smart-mouthed I was as a fistful of needles pushed into her jugular.

  Of course, the second we sat down – even before Antimatter and his hundred goons had shown up – I’d not only put forcefields around all three of us individually, I’d put an extra one surrounding our entire group.

  Spike slammed into the outside forcefield and bounced off harmlessly.

  I fired up another shield, rammed it into his chest, and knocked him back onto his ass.

  “Stay on your side of the room, ya butt-ugly sea urchin,” I said.

  Spike jumped to his feet, furious.

  The Yakuza fidgeted with their guns, unsure of what to do.

  Only Antimatter stayed silent and still, staring ice-cold into my eyes.

  I smiled at him and leaned across the table. “You wanna know where the Ephemera is? Okay, then, since you asked so nicely, I’ll tell you. It’s somewhere you’ll never find it. You could spend the next hundred years searching for it and come up short. So don’t bother killing us, or you’ll be out tens of millions of dollars.”

  “And what will induce you to tell me its location?” Antimatter asked. “Other than watching your two female companions be tortured to death… slowly. Perhaps I will let Spike have his way with both of them.”

  Spike chuckled. “I’d like that.”

  Yuki trembled the slightest bit on my right.

  “What would induce me to tell you its location?” I repeated. “Simple. I want a new plane.”

  Antimatter paused… then said, “Come again?”

  “You heard me. I want a new plane. You blew mine up.”

  “Because you stole my Ephemera.”

  “Yup. Still want a new plane, though.”

  Antimatter suddenly burst out laughing.

  The Yakuza started laughing, too, though a bit halfheartedly. Most of them didn’t speak English, thus they didn’t understand what the fuck they were laughing at. They just knew that when the boss laughed, you laughed, too.

  Then Antimatter stopped laughing, and the room went quiet.

  “The Ephemera you stole is worth $80 million US,” he said.

  I decided not to mention that his math was a bit off, seeing as we’d used one of the tubes to blow up the plane. Figured that would just muddy the waters.

  Antimatter continued. “A sparkjet like the one you want would cost at least $100 million.”

  “Can’t build an army of supervillains with a plane, Hiroshi,” I said.

  “I would be losing tens of millions of US dollars on the transaction.”

  “Guess you should have thought of that before you blew up my jet.”

  Antimatter fixed me with a cold stare. “Perhaps you should have considered more carefully before you stole from me.”

  I shrugged. “How else was I going to make any money?”

  Antimatter tilted his head to the side in mild surprise, then laughed. He looked around at his gangsters and rattled off some idiomatic phrase I didn’t understand, at which point they all laughed heartily.

  “I didn’t catch that,” I said.

  Yuki chimed in to translate. “Unless an idiot dies, he won’t be cured.”

  I smiled at Antimatter. “You think you’re going to be the one to ‘cure’ me, Hiroshi?”

  The laughter stopped, and Antimatter went back to mad-dogging me. “If you push me anymore… then yes.”

  “I want something else along with the plane.”

  “What? To rule the world?” he asked sarcastically.

  “No – but I’d like an introd
uction to the guy who does.”

  Brief silence.

  “I have no idea what you mean,” Antimatter finally said.

  “The guy who planned the assassinations two weeks ago. I want to talk to him.”

  “You are talking to him.”

  “No I’m not. I’m talking to an asshole who lucked into the biggest score of his life. You didn’t pull this off by yourself. You’re too fucking incompetent.”

  Spike looked down at his boss, trying to gauge just how badly Anti wanted to kill us.

  But Antimatter still had a hold of his emotions.

  “I seem to remember destroying your plane,” he said mockingly.

  “I seem to remember stealing your shit, AND I’ve still got it. No, somebody else was calling the shots, not you. Somebody else arranged everything so you could just waltz into the number one spot in all of Japan. Whoever it was, I want to meet him.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Oh, so you admit you’re the not The Guy,” I said. “That’s progress. Go on. Call him up.”

  Silence.

  “No? What, he won’t take your calls?” I taunted him. “What are you, his little bitch? When he texts ‘Where you at?’ at 2AM, you gotta show up at his apartment and bend over?”

  I knew that Antimatter would take a certain amount of shit to get his Ephemera back, but he wouldn’t stand for being disrespected in front of his men. There was a line I could cross, and after that I was toast, Ephemera or not.

  Apparently I was getting reaaal close to that line.

  Antimatter stared me down. “You are treading dangerously close to death, Mr. McNeil.”

  “That’s cute. Makes you sound like a real tough guy.”

  “Now who is trying to sound like a tough guy?” Antimatter asked.

  “Here’s the difference, dumbass: you try to sound like one. I am one.”

  “Too bad your powers are weak.”

  I paused.

  Not because he’d surprised me, but to make him think he had.

  To lead him into a trap. To make him think he was right.

  Overconfidence is always a killer.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “You and I had never fought before last week, but I had heard stories about you as a smuggler. Using your forcefields to destroy five jet fighters at once. Withstanding missile explosions. And yet, when I crashed through that first forcefield, I thought, ‘What is wrong with him? I could have broken my neck – why did he let me through?’

  “Actually, my misgivings started even earlier, back on the roof. I wondered why you didn’t engage me there. At first I thought you were protecting your sparkjet. Then I realized the old Hunter McNeil would have not only protected it, but crushed me with his shields. At first I thought it was some strategic plan of yours, and I was wary of a trap… but I gradually came to realize something: you have lost your powers. Or at least they have degraded substantially, perhaps because of your time spent in Karkarin. Otherwise, why would you come here asking for a plane instead of killing me and taking what you want?”

  I sat there looking at him for a few seconds, trying to project just the right amount of empty bravado. I wanted him to believe I was bluffing.

  Finally I said, “I just want my plane, man.”

  “Well, you are not going to get it. Give me the Ephemera, and I will allow you to escape with your lives. Otherwise I will let Spike rape your women, flay all of you alive, and make you eat your own skin.”

  “Naaah… I don’t like that deal.”

  Antimatter held up his hand and sparked a tiny, burning ball of energy in his palm. “It is the only one you will receive.”

  “Hey, Mama-san,” I called out to the old lady, who was flattened up against the wall behind the Yakuza. “Remember what I said when I told you what would happen if anybody tried to kill me?”

  She looked at me in confusion. “You… you said you would throw them out a window.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  And then I threw everybody out the fuckin’ window.

  23

  Actually, what I did was use my shields to force everyone and everything across the room and out the plate-glass windows.

  Well… I forced out everybody and everything except me, Nova, and Yuki.

  All of our legs were touching beneath the table – Nova’s right ankle over my left, and Yuki’s left ankle over my right.

  As soon as I gave the sign of asking Mama-san, Yuki phased us – and I created a 20 x 60 foot forcefield that swept all the way from the back of the restaurant to the giant windows overlooking the Tokyo skyline.

  I had to create a little cutout in the forcefield that allowed me, Nova, and Yuki to pass through, but that part was easy. As soon as the shield passed by us, I sealed it up again.

  The invisible wall got everyone and everything else, though. Antimatter, Spike, chairs, tables, Yakuza, guns – they all went barreling across the restaurant floor and blasting out the glass windows 80 stories above downtown Tokyo.

  Well, actually, I did another cutout for Mama-san and let the forcefield pass harmlessly around her. Killing old women ain’t my style.

  Neither is killing civilians. I knew there were probably 200 people out on the street below us, and I wasn’t about to have them killed by a bombardment of broken glass, tables and chairs, and tattooed Japanese thugs.

  As soon as I’d sent everyone hurtling through the window, I disintegrated the forcefield that had thrown them out.

  Then I created a second vertical shield, hundreds of feet high, that acted as a backstop. I felt bits of glass and a few bodies thump against it, but then everything began to fall straight down to the street below.

  At which point I created one last forcefield, sight unseen, completely by feel.

  300 feet long, 80 feet wide – and 15 feet above the street.

  I steeled myself for impact, then felt THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP.

  Forty tables, a shit ton of glass, and a hundred Yakuza hit the forcefield at the same time.

  Actually, make that 40 tables smashed, a shit ton of glass shattered, and a hundred Yakuza splattered across the forcefield at the same time.

  Eighty stories up means they were going a good 120 miles an hour on impact.

  And hitting my shield was just like hitting good ol’ asphalt.

  SPLAT.

  It was a helluva strain to keep the forcefield intact as over 20,000 pounds of assorted crap hit it at terminal velocity. However, I’d trained enough over the last week to keep the shield stable and everyone beneath it safe.

  I imagined the scene down in the street: utter horror and pandemonium as pedestrians and drivers looked above them at a football-field-sized scene of floating bodies, shards of glass, and a river of blood and brains. Sort of like a much lower Sistine Chapel, except all death and destruction instead of naked baby angels ‘n shit.

  Hopefully the pedestrians were running their asses off instead of hanging out underneath and taking selfies.

  “You DID it!” Yuki cheered.

  “Not completely,” I muttered.

  I knew two people were going to survive the fall.

  One of them I could already feel stirring on the forcefield itself –

  And the other never hit in the first place.

  In fact, there he went – a fiery trail zipping into the night sky.

  Shit.

  I didn’t have time to fuck around.

  The forcefield out on the street, the one covered with dead Yakuza? I started lowering it. As soon as I felt the resistance of car tops, I prayed all the pedestrians were out of the way – and let go.

  I didn’t have to see it to imagine it: a hundred corpses and millions of pieces of bloodstained glass hitting the street at the same time. Smack!

  Any civilian caught underneath that bloody shower would have nightmares for years – but if you gotta be hit with broken glass and dead bodies, better from a height of eight feet than eight hundred.


  And seriously, if you don’t have enough sense to run out from underneath something like that in the eight seconds I gave them, then you kind of deserve it.

  Outside the window, Antimatter lowered himself level with the window, his body held aloft by flaming blasts of energy from his feet. His fancy business suit wasn’t a ball of fire, so apparently his civies had been crafted to survive his powers, too.

  “Yuki, phase us down below, NOW,” I snapped as I grabbed both Angelica’s and Yuki’s arms.

  As we began to sink through the floor, I heard Mama-san shriek from where she lay slumped by the wall. “Tonmonoshitsu, they’re getting away!”

  Fuckin’ bitch.

  Spare somebody’s life twice and do they appreciate it at all? Noooo…

  Balls of light sparked in Antimatter’s hands, and suddenly a blast of crackling, flaming energy roared towards us.

  I threw up a forcefield to cover our escape. It felt like a thousand blowtorches were slamming my shield at the same time –

  But we dropped through the ceiling down to the next level.

  “Keep going!” I yelled at Yuki.

  Once we were two stories beneath the restaurant, Yuki brought us out of phase. We were in a vast, open-air office space – probably some kind of Silicon Valley wannabe with a lot of money to spend on being trendy. Everything was dark, and we could only see the outlines of desks and computers all around us.

  The women stood there panting from the sheer terror of the last 30 seconds.

  Fire alarms blared far overhead, muted through two floors of concrete. Apparently Antimatter had set the restaurant on fire.

  “What do we do now?” Yuki asked.

  To be honest, I didn’t have an answer. I’d figured out how to get rid of the Yakuza henchmen, yeah, but after that I was planning on winging it. That was usually what I did.

  I’d just opened my mouth to speak when a fiery hole punched through the ceiling about 20 feet away.

  Down dropped a familiar, thorn-covered figure who landed in a crouch on the floor.

  Apparently Antimatter had gone back down to ground level and picked up his favorite, thorn-covered asshole.

  “You know a fall like that wasn’t gonna kill me, right?” Spike growled as he stood up. “Hell, that was more like a chiropractic adjustment.”