Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

by Chris Strange

  “Come on.” She made her way along the street running parallel to hers, trying to stay inconspicuous while her heart hammered. Solomon jogged behind her, boots pumping on the footpath. They came to an abandoned architect’s office she knew gave a good view of the street outside her building, and she clambered through the long-broken window. Solomon grumbled as he followed, and together they climbed the darkened stairwell and reached the windows on the upper floor.

  Solomon was right. There must’ve been about fifty Met Div coppers out there. The street was cordoned off, with Met Div vehicles at either end. They operated in units of four or five, splitting up groups of people and comparing them against rosters.

  The process looked ordered, clean. No one made a fuss. The coppers were all in uniform, with dark blue, silver-buttoned tunics and round-topped custodian-style helmets. Most standard New Zealand coppers were unarmed apart from a nightstick. That wasn’t enough for taking down metas. In addition to the pistols at their belts, each Met Div officer carried an L1A1 self-loading rifle. The black plastic frames shone in the early morning light. Few metas were bullet-resistant. A few rounds from one of those guns would put most down easy.

  Niobe scanned the crowd, looking for familiar faces. She could make out several people who lived in her building. But she couldn’t find Gabby. She had to be safe. Damn it, Niobe should’ve been there to protect her.

  “We’ve got the ringmaster himself out to conduct today’s circus,” Solomon said in a low voice. He pointed with two fingers.

  She saw who he was pointing at. Senior Sergeant Raymond Wallace was speaking into a car radio while he watched the proceedings, his free arm gesturing as he spoke. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was built like a rugby player, with broad shoulders and a thick, muscled neck. His handlebar moustache hid whatever limited facial expression he was capable of showing, and a scar cut through the thick brown hair on his head. She’d had cause to conduct her own investigations into Senior Sergeant Wallace before. He was a veteran of the war, took a bullet in the arse in Italy. He still limped a bit. Clean record, for the most part. Like that meant anything.

  A shout cut through the ordered hubbub, and her heart rate kicked up again. A pair of coppers appeared in the doorway of her apartment building, escorting a skinny man in his late twenties. The man hollered and tried to twist away from the coppers, but they met him at every turn with a nudge and a gun barrel to the back.

  For a moment, all she could feel was relief that it wasn’t Gabby. Then she looked closer.

  “Son of a bitch,” she whispered.

  The Carpenter shot her a look. “You know the kid?”

  “That’s the McClellan guy.”

  He rubbed his chin for a moment. “McClellan? You mean the stretcher? Amorph?”

  She nodded. They’d encountered him a few times back in the old days. The guy had had a complicated life, living on both sides of the law. But when he met his wife-to-be he’d settled down and gone straight. He was a hell of a sportsman, and he’d even been on track to get into the Black Capes, New Zealand’s metahuman cricket team. He’d been out of trouble for years. What were the coppers doing with him now?

  And then it dawned on her. Oh, shit. “His wife gave birth last week.” She scrunched her cigarette pack in her pocket. “It’s a goddamn cradle-snatch.”

  McClellan screamed and twisted. Niobe knew what he was about to do before the coppers did, and her heart went to her throat.

  The stretcher wrenched his arm away from one of the coppers, slammed an elbow into the man’s nose, and grabbed his rifle by the barrel. Instantly, the surrounding coppers raised their weapons.

  “Idiot,” Niobe whispered. “Stop it.”

  McClellan pointed the rifle at the coppers and shouted loud enough for Niobe to hear. “Leave her alone, you goddamn pigs. She’s just a baby!”

  Out of the apartment doorway came more coppers. Two escorted a hysterical red-headed woman. McClellan’s wife. The other copper carried a swaddle of white cloth in his arms. Niobe could just make out the pink flesh of a baby.

  Senior Sergeant Wallace snatched his helmet from the top of his car and approached McClellan, making soothing gestures with his hands. The other coppers fingered their rifles nervously.

  “Spook,” Solomon said, “we gotta get lost. This is going to get crazy.”

  She ignored him. She couldn’t move away if she wanted to.

  Everything happened in slow motion. McClellan made a grab for the baby as the officer passed. A single gunshot rang out. She couldn’t tell who fired. A spray of red flew from McClellan’s flank. He dropped the rifle and screamed.

  McClellan spun, his arms stretching like a rubber band. A moment later, they were ten times their normal length. They flew out and knocked a group of coppers from their feet. McClellan continued to scream as his body stretched, flattening out like putty. He tried to envelop the officer carrying his baby with both rubber arms, but the officer broke into a sprint. The rest of the coppers opened fire. The morning rang with the thunder of gunfire.

  The crowd of metas screamed and scattered, running for shelter. A stray bullet pinged off the wall a few feet from Niobe, but she just stared out at the carnage, throat constricting. What the hell was the idiot doing?

  McClellan kept going despite the bullet wounds. She didn’t know what the anatomy of a rubber man was, but they couldn’t have hit anything vital. Yet. Screaming, he wrapped a pair of coppers in his arms and flung them across the street.

  Niobe scanned the street for the officers with McClellan’s wife and baby, but there was too much chaos. All she could make out was Senior Sergeant Wallace sprinting back to his car, shouting orders as he moved. He ripped open the passenger door and pulled something from the glove box. It looked like a hand-held radio. Gunfire ripped around him as he twiddled the knobs and jabbed two buttons at once.

  It took her a few moments to pick up the smell of sulphur in the air. It must’ve been strong for her to smell it from here. McClellan’s screams grew louder.

  “They flipped his kill-switch,” she said. The Carpenter just nodded.

  McClellan’s movement slowed. As the smell of sulphur became stronger, his stretched limbs grew stiff. The flesh cracked like a superheated car tyre.

  Senior Sergeant Wallace had a megaphone to his mouth. “Cease fire,” he boomed. “Damn it, cease fire.” The officer’s gunfire dropped off.

  McClellan grew still, frozen, a silent scream still fixed on his face. For a moment, there was no movement in the street. Then he toppled backwards, limbs still stretched out in every direction. Everyone went quiet.

  A bang cut through the silence. The back of McClellan’s head blew out, flinging fragments of solidified blood to the concrete. The small explosive charge would’ve been planted near his brainstem, along with a small package. Niobe knew the mechanism. At a particular radio frequency from Senior Sergeant Wallace’s box, the package had released sulphur and exothermic chemicals into his bloodstream. It was clever, in a way. They’d vulcanised the rubber man.

  She swallowed back vomit and forced herself to breathe.

  “He didn’t have to do that,” she said. “The bloody idiot could’ve gone quiet.”

  The Carpenter didn’t seem to have anything to say. He took his hat off and pressed it to his chest. His lips moved. A silent prayer. She didn’t follow suit. She didn’t have anything to say to God.

  “All metahumans will clear the area,” Wallace’s voice boomed from the megaphone. “Return to your homes.” His voice held no malice, but no regret either. Son of a bitch. Murderer.

  Wallace handed the megaphone to one of the other coppers and gave more orders. At the officers’ insistence, the metas that hadn’t fled shuffled back into their buildings. Most didn’t look at McClellan’s stretched body, still lying stiff and cracked in the street.

  “They’re taking the woman as well as the baby,” the Carpenter said. He’d finished his prayer, apparently. Niobe followed his gaze and found McC
lellan’s sobbing widow in the shadow of the building opposite. They were leading her around the corner. “What the heck are they doing that for?”

  “She’s an accomplice. That’s prison time.”

  The Carpenter muttered something under his breath, his eyes dark behind his mask. “She’ll have a rough time of it.”

  “Yeah,” Niobe said. She studied the dead man stretched across the street. “You know, for a while, Amorph was one of us.”

  The Carpenter nodded.

  Niobe made up her mind in an instant. She reached into her pocket and tossed the car keys to the Carpenter. “Do you think you can get the baby?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “I’ll try.” He turned and jogged back down the stairs, and she followed. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll get Mrs McClellan away from the coppers,” she said. “If I can. Sound good?”

  “Sounds stupid.”

  “You always liked stupid.”

  She emerged into the morning light and followed the Carpenter towards the corner. The metas were slowly dispersing, refusing to make eye contact. Even the ones in costume walked with shuffling steps and bowed heads. No one spoke above a whisper. Niobe checked her goggles and started to move.

  The Carpenter’s head snapped around to follow one meta making his way down the street. She followed his gaze.

  “Hey!” Solomon called. “Hey, Brightlance.”

  The dark-skinned man was dressed in a yellow bodysuit with a tattered red cape pinned to the sunburst in the centre of his chest. He glanced back and kept walking.

  “Piss off, Carpenter. Now’s not the time.”

  Niobe kept one eye on the coppers as the Carpenter caught up to the ex-hero. Bloody hell. They didn’t have time for this.

  “Just give me a second,” the Carpenter said, loud enough for her to hear even a few steps behind. “We need your help with something.”

  “I know what you want. Piss off.”

  “You knew Amorph better than we ever did.”

  “Only because I was the one giving him a hiding whenever he tried to shoplift from Mum’s store.”

  The Carpenter grabbed Brightlance by the shoulders. “He turned it around. You turned him around. He got himself a family. Now you want to let the coppers take them away?”

  Brightlance planted his feet and shoved the Carpenter away from him. His palms glowed threateningly with blue light.

  Niobe reached into her coat and took a step towards them, but the Carpenter put his hand towards her, waving her back. Goddamn him. Grinding her teeth, she stopped and returned her hands to her side. She could see Mrs McClellan being escorted away. The woman had nearly disappeared from sight. Bugger this.

  “You really want them to take Amorph’s wife?” the Carpenter said, his voice low. “You really want them to have his baby? They’ll put a kill-switch in her.”

  Brightlance’s palms didn’t stop glowing. “She won’t be the only one. You think they’ll hesitate to flip my kill-switch if I try something? Go home, Carpenter. Take your pension, keep your head down, and go home. No one wants bloody superheroes running around anymore.”

  The Carpenter tried to take him by the shoulder again, but Brightlance shrugged him off and turned away, his cape fluttering in the breeze. He didn’t look back as he strode away with the rest of the metahumans.

  Niobe tried to see the Carpenter’s face, but his hat cast him into shadow.

  “We’re out of time,” she said.

  He watched Brightlance’s back for another moment, then turned and nodded. “I’ll do what I can. Meet me behind the old museum in an hour.”

  She slapped him on the arm, nodded, and broke into a run. She’d lost sight of McClellan’s widow, but she couldn’t be far. Sweat soaked into Niobe’s mask as she made her way through dirt-filled backyards and slipped over fences. She kept one hand on her bowler hat to keep it from flying off. Her heart started to thump, spurring on her legs even as her brain told her to stop and think. She hadn’t acted like this for years. Police raids weren’t that uncommon in the Old City. People got arrested. So what? Brightlance was right. These weren’t the old days. Justice died along with the superhero.

  But the McClellans were decent folk. Hotheaded, sure, but decent. They’d probably never seen her in the building, but she’d seen them. This was their first kid. Metas going into labour were supposed to present themselves to one of the Neo-Auckland hospitals. Newborns were typed and gene-tested for any signs of metahuman mutation. Tier two and three metahumans had kill-switches implanted before they turned ten. And if parents were unlucky enough to have a tier one metahuman for a baby, they didn’t even get a chance to name them. The Seoul Accord stated that metahumans with the strength of Mr October or Kingfisher presented too great a risk to be allowed to live.

  The McClellans had tried to hide their baby. They’d failed. The cape coppers were good at their jobs.

  Niobe crouched and peered around a low brick wall. The officers were dragging Mrs McClellan to their Black Maria police van. The woman was hysterical, barely able to walk. Her powers had no combat use. All she could do was read auras to determine someone’s mood and personality.

  The woman collapsed to her knees a few feet from the van. The coppers exchanged a look. “Get up, damn it,” one of them said. He slapped her across the face with his open hand.

  The sun was slowly rising, but the coppers were in the shadow of the building. In full light, Niobe’s powers were useless. It’d kill her to turn to shadow in full sunlight. But there was still enough darkness here. She took a deep breath, held it, and slipped into shadow.

  It was harder to make out figures during the day when she was in shadow form. Everything was bright, almost painful. But it wasn’t hard to follow the vibrations as the coppers stomped their boots and gave the woman a few good whacks.

  “Bloody freak,” one of the coppers growled. “You’d think these bitches would learn to keep their legs closed.” He gave her another half-hearted kick. “Get the fuck up.”

  The other one pressed his hand to his nostrils for a moment. “Goddamn it. I think the rubber man broke my nose. It won’t stop bleeding.”

  “It ain’t broken. You just got smacked around a bit.”

  “No, it’s broken!” He raised his rifle, aiming the butt at the woman. “Your fucking husband broke my nose!”

  Niobe reformed behind him, wrapped her arm around his neck, and pressed the barrel of her modified revolver against his temple.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she said, and aimed her revolver at the other officer’s head. “Not if you don’t want me to break some more bits off you, anyway.”

  The copper she held stank of sweat. The other one snarled behind a thin moustache, hand moving to the rifle slung across his shoulders.

  “For the love o’ God, don’t!” the one she held yelled at his companion. “She’ll kill me.”

  The copper was taller than her, so she kept her knee pressed into the back of his leg, bringing him into an unbalanced half-crouch. The moustachioed copper scowled, eyes narrowed. He let the rifle slip from his shoulder and clatter to the ground.

  “Freak,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Spare me,” she said. She nodded to the red-haired woman still sobbing on the ground. The woman didn’t seem to know what was happening. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. “Pick her up—gently—and put her on the bench over there.”

  He paused. Niobe pulled back the hammer of her revolver. That got him moving. Grudgingly, he took her under the arms and led her to a rickety bench on the side of the road. She’s walking all right, Niobe confirmed. No serious damage. Thank God.

  Niobe put her gun arm across her whimpering hostage and gestured to the apartment building they were using for shade. “Into the stairwell.”

  He hesitated at that.

  “I could’ve shot both of you already,” she said. “And I really, really wanted to. Don’t make it any more tempting.”

 
; He backed away and opened the stairwell door. Niobe held her hostage tight and followed.

  “Cuffs,” she said. “Get them out.”

  Officer Moustache’s frown deepened, but he pulled the handcuffs from his belt and made to toss them to her.

  “No,” she said. “Cuff yourself to the rail.”

  He did so.

  Keeping one eye on him, she took the other set of cuffs from her hostage, put one bracelet around his wrist, and cuffed him opposite his partner. She took both their sidearms, unloaded them, and tossed them as far up the stairs as she could reach.

  “Why do you hide behind that mask, eh?” The moustachioed man sneered as she turned to leave. “To hide your identity? Or do you just get scared when you look in the mirror and see a freak?”

  She holstered her revolver and turned her back on the cape coppers. “I don’t cream my pants beating a widowed woman senseless. Tell me again who’s the freak.”

  She went back to the officers’ car and ripped a handful of wires out of the police radio. Just in case.

  Mrs McClellan hadn’t moved from the bench. Her sobs had quietened, but her freckled face still ran with tears. Niobe wordlessly put an arm under her shoulders and helped her to her feet. Her cheek was red and angry where she’d been hit, and she’d probably have a black eye. But Niobe knew her real hurts ran deeper.

  Most of the coppers must have already pulled out, because Niobe didn’t see anyone as she made her way to the museum. She’d move faster if she could envelop the woman in shadow and slip through the shaded areas, but subjecting the poor woman to that would do nothing but traumatise her further. A few curtains moved as they walked, but the streets were deserted, and no one came to help them.

  It took her half an hour to get to the museum. The edges of the obelisk-shaped war memorial were worn and rounded. Dead trees and bracken surrounded the hill, and what little grass remained was mostly brown. The Carpenter was waiting there, leaning against the bonnet of the car. When he spotted them, he ran down through the abandoned car park and took the woman’s other side.