Ex-Superheroes

by A. J. Markam

  “I’m sure you’re going to ask why,” Yuki seethed, “so I’ll show you: he fucked that gaijin whore. IN MY HOME.”

  Yuki’s image was replaced by video surveillance of me and Nova going at it. Full-on porno style, with Nova shrieking in ecstasy.

  Huh…

  Nova gasped, then looked at me in shocked outrage. “I thought you said she wouldn’t be PISSED!”

  I held up a hand to ward her off. “It’s – just hold on – ”

  The video cut back to Yuki, who was not only furious, but her eyes were brimming with tears. “I’ll trust you to make good on my offer after you have them, Antimatter-san. But I’ll only tell you where the Ephemera is once you agree to my terms. Just to prove I’m good for it, I’ll give Hunter and his whore to you for FREE.”

  She rattled off the warehouse address, and then the video was over.

  The image clicked back to Antimatter, who gave me a mild smile. “And here I am, at your backdoor.”

  “Do you always announce when you’re about to attack your enemies?”

  “I wanted to make sure you didn’t die right away in a surprise attack, not knowing I’d won… or that I was the one who killed you. See you soon, Hunter.”

  The video cut out.

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  “What are we supposed to do?!” Nova cried out.

  “Get dressed. We’ve got a battle to fight.”

  29

  Nova quickly changed into her uniform. I put on my pants, boots, and jacket. Nova had done a fuckin’ number on my shirt when she ripped it open during sex, but I wore it anyway. If I was going to go out, might as well go out looking like a hot chick couldn’t keep her hands off me.

  When Yuki had fixed up the bunker, she’d blocked off the original exit so it was only reachable by phasing through 20 feet of steel and concrete. She’d claimed there was an old ventilation shaft that led to the surface, guarded by a bank-vault-style metal door with a keypad. She’d told me the eight-digit code the first day we’d arrived. I just hoped I remembered it right.

  I punched the code into the keypad. There was a beep, and thick metal rods slid back into their housings with a SHUNK.

  I opened the vault door to see a small, cramped passageway stretching into complete darkness. Dusty cobwebs hung down from the low ceiling.

  Just inside the passageway was another keypad on the cement wall, caked thick with dust.

  “A little light, please,” I said to Nova.

  She fired up her hand like a torch, and I could see that the passageway stretched for at least 200 feet.

  I stepped into the passageway. “You coming?”

  “We’re just going to waltz down there like she didn’t betray us?” Nova snapped.

  “Yup. You comin’ or not?”

  She grumbled but stepped into the passageway behind me.

  I closed the vault door behind us and punched in the eight digits again, wondering if it would work.

  It did. There was a beep and the SHUNK of the vault door’s metal rods sliding into place.

  I just hoped Yuki hadn’t told Antimatter about the back door, was all.

  “Let’s go,” I said as I set off into the darkness.

  “They could be waiting up there for us!” Nova complained as she cast light from her fiery hand.

  “I don’t think they will be.”

  “You’re willing to bet our lives on that?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, I’m not!”

  “Stay here, then,” I said as I reached the vertical shaft and began to climb the rungs.

  Nova seethed in silence for a second, then followed me up.

  At the top of the shaft was a metal grate. I looked through it in all directions and couldn’t see anybody around us, so I slowly lifted it up.

  We were alone in a back alley on the other side of a neighboring building, not even next to the warehouse at all.

  Good girl, Yuki.

  I stood up and brushed the cobwebs out of my hair.

  Nova did the same. “Okay, this is weird – why didn’t she tell them about the back door?”

  “Because she didn’t betray us.”

  Nova’s eyes bugged out. “WHAT?! What the fuck are you – ”

  “THE GAIJIN!” a male voice yelled in Japanese. “THEY’RE BACK HERE!”

  I looked behind us. A lone Yakuza, probably a perimeter guard, had spotted us from a hundred feet down the alleyway.

  Well, shit.

  He immediately opened fire, and I threw up a shield.

  I guess an hour of hot sex had reinvigorated me, because the bullets felt like pebbles thrown by a ten-year-old kid.

  I slammed another forcefield into his face and broke his neck. Down he went.

  Unfortunately, he was replaced by another 20 armed Yakuza.

  I was tired of fucking around, so I just flattened them. Dropped a forcefield on their heads at about 2,000 foot-pounds per square inch.

  They all started out 5’8” and upright.

  A second later, their heads and ball sacks were all next to their ankles.

  Lot of blood, too.

  And screaming – although that got cut pretty short.

  Just like them. Ha.

  “Jesus,” Nova whispered, her eyes wide.

  I laced my fingers together, cracked them, and grinned. “Ahhh… it’s good to be back.”

  Nova looked at me. “Wait – what was that about Yuki not betra– ”

  She was interrupted by the CLANG CLANG CLANG of footsteps above us on a corrugated tin roof.

  “LEAVE THEM TO ME!” Spike roared as he dove off the roof straight at us.

  Like I said – not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  I slammed him midair with a forcefield and sent him toppling to the ground.

  “You wanna do the honors?” I said to Nova as Spike sprung to his feet.

  “With pleasure,” she snarled as she lit up like her namesake.

  Fire blasted off her from head to foot like a dam spillway during a flood.

  Even though I was five feet away, I had to throw up a forcefield, the heat was so intense.

  Her hair swirled in the blaze, her eyes shone white hot, and she directed all her anger and hatred at Spike with the intensity of the sun.

  And yet, somehow, he was taking it.

  He screamed in rage as he inched forward against the fiery onslaught. Every footstep was a battle, but he was determined to win it.

  He was paying a high price, though. His skin was literally burning off him and reforming right before our eyes. Beneath his charred hide, we could see raw flesh bubbling and searing.

  Spike didn’t give a shit. His arms stretched out towards Nova, his razor-thorned hands intent on grabbing her. The white pupils of his black eyes never left her face.

  “YOU STUPID BITCH!” he roared over the flames. “YOU THINK YOU GOT ME? FUCK YOU! I’M A GODDAMN SURVIVAL MACHINE! THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO KILL ME!”

  “Let me try, then,” I said as I stretched out one hand.

  Everything that came next was a roll of the dice. I’d done it years before, yeah, but it required a bit of guesswork, a little luck, and a LOT of concentration – which is why I hadn’t used it on Spike or Antimatter in the last battle.

  Spike was moving slow enough at the moment, though, that I figured I could reach deep into my bag of tricks.

  I don’t have to see where to put my forcefields. I’d proved that before, like when I cast one over the street to catch the 100 falling Yakuza and all that broken glass. I’d created it blindly, because I had a good idea of where the street was in relation to my body up there on the 80th floor.

  If I couldn’t see, then I had to kind of guess where to place my shields – either by memory, using other forcefields as sensory input, or being able to infer where they should go.

  I was also limited by a couple of things. One of them was that I couldn’t have my forcefields appear inside of solid matter. I wasn’t Yuki; my
shields couldn’t occupy the same space at the same time. They just wouldn’t form. My shields could easily displace air and water, but with solids, it was different.

  However, people’s lungs aren’t solid. They’re basically big empty sacks of air and lots of wet tissue.

  And no matter how tough Spike was, he still had lungs.

  I created a tiny sphere inside his ribcage, no bigger than a grain of sand. I knew where to put it because I could see the front of his chest, so I just aimed about three inches behind that.

  If even the slightest edge of the forcefield crossed lung tissue, it wouldn’t work.

  I must have gotten lucky, because I felt the tiny sphere form.

  Then I began to expand it.

  From a grain of sand to the size of a tennis ball in half a second flat.

  Now, the interior of the sphere was a vacuum. Nothing in it. So the bigger it got, the harder it was to maintain the vacuum.

  So I put a tiny hole in the side of the sphere so air could get sucked in.

  Air, lung tissue, whatever.

  Now I could make the sphere much bigger, much faster.

  Spike got a strange look on his face. Even with his skin being burned off like an onion by a blowtorch, he knew something bad was happening.

  His chest jutted out and there was a horrific CRACKING sound.

  And then his ribcage burst open from the inside.

  Just opened him right up like a butterflied shrimp.

  You couldn’t see my forcefield directly, but you could see its shape because it was covered in blood and lung tissue.

  And there was his heart, beating in the open air.

  Pretty goddamn disgusting, actually.

  Of course, now that his most vulnerable organs were exposed, Nova took full advantage of it.

  She blasted him even harder, and all that pink tissue scorched black in the heat.

  Spike let out a strangled cry, and then fell on his face.

  I thought he was dead. He had to be. NOBODY could survive what he’d just been through.

  Nova thought so, too, and quit blasting him with fire. We just stared at the charred human remains, the ribcage open like the gullwing doors of a DeLorean.

  And then he moved.

  He jerked his head up to look at us, and a cascade of charred flesh flaked off his face like ash from a burnt log. His eyes found ours, and he grinned.

  “YOU… STUPID… FUCKS,” he wheezed. His vocal cords were so badly damaged that he barely sounded human. “YOU THINK… YOU CAN KILL ME?!”

  He started to crawl along the ground towards us like something out of a horror movie.

  Not much rattles me anymore.

  I gotta admit, that fuckin’ rattled me.

  Nova stepped back, shaking her head in horrified disbelief.

  “I’M GONNA RAPE YOU…” Spike rasped as he crawled towards Nova. “GONNA RAPE YOU TO DEATH…”

  That’s when Yuki appeared.

  “Not today, fucker-san!” she yelled as she phased up out of the ground in front of Spike’s stunned face.

  Before he could react, she grabbed the back of his head, pulled his charred skull down into the concrete –

  And then let go.

  “Let’s see you get out of that one,” she snarled.

  Fuuuuuuuuck.

  Imagine that your hand is phasing through a wall, when unexpectedly your body returns to solid state.

  Imagine every nerve ending screaming in agony as your muscle, tendons, and bone suddenly take up the same space as brick and mortar.

  Imagine not being able to pull yourself out. You’re now part of the wall.

  Imagine blood vessels on your body’s side of the wall engorging as the blood has nowhere to go. It can’t go through brick, but your heart keeps pumping, and pumping, and pumping, swelling your arm up and turning it bright purple…

  Imagine your hand on the other side. Maybe you can’t feel it, technically, because the pathway of the nerves has been severed – but the part of your brain that normally ‘feels’ it is going off like a five-alarm fire.

  Now imagine it’s your brain that got stuck in that wall instead of your hand.

  Spike’s entire body wrenched in agony. His arms pushed uselessly against the ground, trying to pull his head out. His legs spasmed and thrummed against the ground like a shooting victim bleeding out –

  And then, after about 20 seconds, he lay still.

  Dead.

  Finally.

  “Holy shit,” Nova whispered in terror.

  “That’ll do it,” I muttered as I looked at the neat, even curve where Spike’s neck ended and the concrete began.

  Yuki winced like she was in pain, and her eyes filled with tears. “I hate doing that… I’ve only done it once before, and I hate it, I HATE it…”

  “He deserved it, and there was no other way to put him down,” I said as I pulled her in and hugged her to my chest. “You did good, kid. You saved our lives. Thank you.”

  I don’t know if she actually saved our lives, but… close enough. At least we didn’t have to deal with Spike anymore.

  But You saved our lives sounds a lot nicer than Thanks for killing the fucker.

  Yuki held on tight. I could feel her body tremble as she sobbed in my arms.

  I was about to say something else comforting when a banshee erupted behind me.

  “What… the actual… FUCK?!” Nova yelled.

  Yuki and I both turned to her.

  “What the hell did you do?!” Nova demanded.

  Yuki wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I phased him into the ground and – ”

  “I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT! I’M TALKING ABOUT YOU BETRAYING US!”

  Yuki looked at Nova like she was insane. “Hunter-san said to bring them here!”

  Nova’s eyes bugged out as she turned to me. “WHAT?!”

  “I told her to figure out a way to draw Antimatter out,” I confirmed.

  “You told her to bring them here?!”

  “Yes!” Yuki said chirpily. “It was all part of the plan!”

  Nova glared at me. “You told her to videotape us FUCKING?!”

  I raised one finger. “NO, I most definitely did NOT tell her to do that.”

  “I had to make it believable why I’d betray you!” Yuki protested, then grinned and wiggled her eyebrows. “Pretty hot stuff, Nova-san.”

  “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?!” Nova raged.

  “Later,” I snapped. “We still have Antimatter to – ”

  Speak of the devil and he shall appear.

  30

  First came the characteristic THOMPF of dual streams of energy starting up, and then parallel lines of fire streaked overhead.

  I instinctively put a forcefield over our heads as the bastard strafed us from above.

  “AGHHH!” I roared. It felt like somebody had shoved red-hot pokers through the top of my skull.

  My forcefield flickered out after three seconds – luckily after he’d passed by on his initial sortie.

  Guess I wasn’t quite as recovered as I’d thought.

  I shoved Yuki towards Nova. “Get down to the bunker and do the rest of what we talked about!”

  Nova stared at me. “What?! What are you – ”

  “Come on, Nova-san!” Yuki yelled as she grabbed Nova’s hand and pulled her down into the ground.

  Once they were safe, I directed my attention back to the skies.

  Antimatter had looped around and was coming in for a second try.

  I considered throwing up a shield right in front of him and trying to break his neck – but the bastard had both arms stretched out in front of him and was sparking two tiny balls of antimatter-generated energy in his palms. Not his normal plumes of fire, but crackling, black spheres of negative light.

  His ‘window breaker.’

  If he touched it to my shields, even for a second…

  Been there, done that, had the t-shirt and the hat.

  So, I settled on Plan B.


  I ran.

  I darted around the corner of the building and sprinted back towards the warehouse over Yuki’s bunker.

  I heard Antimatter soaring above me, firing blast after blast.

  I used a shield over my head to block his attacks from above – then used another forcefield as a battering ram to crash through the nearest door into the warehouse above Yuki’s bunker.

  It took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the dark, but they finally did. Giant metal shelves stretched 30 feet up to the ceiling, filled with pallets of shrink-wrapped boxes. No idea what the fuck was in them, just that there were mountains of them towering over me in the darkness.

  I heard the twin streams of fire putter out, then the eeeeee of the ruined door as it moved aside to let in a silhouette. Antimatter kept one hand out in front of him, still holding a tiny ball of crackling black energy in his palm.

  I would have loved to have used a forcefield to crush his body – but one touch of what was in his hand and it would be game over for my powers. And I needed them for what was coming next. Couldn’t play my hand prematurely.

  “Hunter,” he called out. “Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be.”

  “Cool – walk away, then,” I suggested from the shadows.

  As soon as he heard my voice, he swung his arm over and ignited the crackling sphere in his palm. A blast of energy roared through the warehouse, obliterating metal shelves and torching the pallets full of boxes collapsing on the floor.

  He’d missed me, but not by much. Five or six feet at most.

  I created a forcefield around my body and lifted myself two inches off the floor, then used it to propel me noiselessly through the darkness. As long as I didn’t crash into any shelves and make a noise, it would be harder for him to track me even when I spoke. Moving targets and all that.

  Plus, I had the protection of my shield.

  Which hopefully would hold.

  As I flew away from the burning boxes, I called out sarcastically, “Or, you know, we could talk it out.”

  Antimatter walked slowly into the warehouse, stalking me like a panther. “When we first met this evening, I thought to myself, ‘I should just kill him.’ But instead I let you talk. I made that mistake once. Never again.”

  “Okay,” I called out as I moved fast across the ground, “let’s just make it simple: tell me who set up all the assassinations two weeks ago.”