Normalized (The Complete Quartet)

by David Bussell

  “Yeah, but only number two?” I joked.

  “I know, I know,” she said, laughing. “It always bummed me out that someone beat me to the top spot.”

  “You never stood a chance,” I told her.

  “How’s that?”

  “I’ll give you one guess who my number one fan was,” I said, as I went for the pin in my wallet.

  May 17th

  Talking with Doctor Love had given me some perspective. She was right, I wasn’t a superhero. I couldn’t go on doing this alone. Like it or not, I was just a man. No matter how many bit-players I took off the streets – how many rungs I climbed that ladder – I’d never make it to Professor D’eath. There was no way I could take a fight to the Moon, and even if I did figure out a way they’d need tweezers to collect what was left of me. Fact was we had a Hitler-grade planet vandal hovering over our heads and there was nothing I could do about it. This was a job for superheroes, and when it came to superheroes, there was only one game in town.

  I wasn’t expecting a huge fanfare when I strolled into C.H.A.M.P HQ, which is just as well as I sure wasn’t getting one. Everyone was too busy to pay me any mind. Too busy brushing by with stacks of cardboard boxes and loading them onto wooden pallets. What was going on I wondered? Seemed a little late for a spring clean.

  I aimed for the reception area but the forty-foot tall Captain Might statue pointed its genitals at a vacant desk. Sheesh, what was I thinking with that thing? Looking at it towering overhead I remembered that old line, “just be yourself,” and thought how it ought to come tagged “...unless you’re a giant, self-absorbed prick, in which case, be some other guy.”

  That was all behind me though. The only thing that mattered now was getting the band back together, and I didn’t much care who played frontman. Persuading Birdy to join my side wasn’t going to be easy, I knew that, but for the sake of everyone it had to happen. I was still mad at him for the sh*t he’d pulled, but I was ready to put all that in the rear view so long as he was.

  I rode the elevator to the exec floor and found Birdy in my old office. All the furniture had been removed except for a desk in the center of the room, which Birdy sat behind like the lone crewman of a galleon on a voyage to nowhere. He slapped the top of the desk as I entered and managed a strangled laugh.

  “Congratulations, brother, you won.”

  “What happened?” I asked, referring to all the nothing going on.

  “Oh, you didn’t hear? They’re shutting us down. No one cares about superheroes since Mister Normal crashed the party.”

  “They’re really going to hand crime-fighting back to the people?”

  “Maybe they should, Dad used to do okay at it.”

  “Dad didn’t have lunar death cannons to deal with.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. Guess you should have thought of that before you started your little revolution.”

  “Come on, Birdy, I never asked for any of this.”

  “But it’s what you got, right?”

  “I’m not the one who wrote checks his ass couldn’t cash. You’re the guy who promised the press you had everything under control when you were thrashing around in the dark.”

  “They put me on the spot! I was sure I’d figure out a way to put another cape on the Moon – I even got NASA involved – but I couldn’t talk anyone into taking the job.”

  “Not even Fish Face?”

  “Not even him, and he already carries his own oxygen.”

  “Talking of Fish, why didn’t you tell him who Mister Normal was? Why didn’t you tell everyone?”

  “Because respecting secret identities is part of the Heroes Code.”

  “If you respected me you would have let me help you, not benched me in the burbs.”

  “I only did that to keep you safe – the same reason I sent Fish Face to bring you in.”

  “I was doing great out there! You should have been thanking me, not arresting me.”

  “Thanking you for what?”

  “How about the fact I gave you Fraulein Frigid, Strong-Man, Miss Fortune...”

  “You collared a bunch of chicklets and the press made you MVP for it. Meanwhile the rest of us were down in the trenches busting our humps with every other hood in town!”

  “Look, I get that you’re upset...”

  “You do? Wow, these must be the legendary powers of deduction I’ve been hearing about.”

  I feel like he’d had that zinger holstered a while.

  “Nothing changes, does it?” Birdy went on. “You get the glory and the limelight, just like always.”

  “Hey, don’t get all high and mighty,” I said. “If it weren’t for me you wouldn’t even be in the superhero game.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” he said, his voice jumping a couple of octaves. “How could I forget? It’s because of you I’m a superhero, isn’t it? And remind me, what were the amazing boons bestowed upon me by the incredible Captain Might? Superhuman strength? Heat vision? Unchecked animal magnetism? None of it. My twin brother got to buzz skyscrapers and I got to be Flightless Bird Man. I’m the red-headed stepchild of this racket!”

  He really was giving me the business.

  “I didn’t come here to fight, Birdy, I came here to ask you to be my partner again.”

  He laughed. “That’s a good one; your ‘partner.’ Except I was never your partner, was I? I was your sidekick. The dead weight you carried around in that goddamned man hammock. That’s what I got. That’s what I got for all the years I had your back.”

  “Had my back? You mean the one you stuck a knife in?”

  “Oh, I’m the backstabber?”

  Birdy grabbed something from his desk drawer and held it up. It was Unmasked magazine – the latest issue – the one with me and Doctor Love on the cover making eyes at each other. Suddenly I got what Birdy and I were really fighting about.

  “I worked morning, noon and night to keep this ship afloat,” he said, “and what did I get for it? My twin brother stealing my girl!”

  Doctor Love had left him? Because of me? I could certainly see how Birdy might want to jerk a knot in my dick about that.

  “You don’t care who you hurt, do you?” he shouted. “Just so long as you get to be the big man.”

  “To be fair, Birdy—”

  “—Fair? What the hell would you know about fair?

  He made a lunge for me but Fish Face, who’d had stepped in to see what the commotion was, sidled up from behind and restrained him.

  “Cap?” he said, finally twigging who I was. “You’d better get out of here,” he said, struggling to hold Birdy back.

  And that was that. End of discussion. I’d done what I could to get Birdy on my side but some bridges you can’t rebuild. How did we get to be this way, bro? How did we get so out of touch? The two of us drifted apart like a bad boob job.

  The elevator ride to the lobby felt like a descent into hell. That was the way we were all headed after all. Without my brother’s help there was no way to fight Professor D’eath. No hope for mankind. What could we do now but roll over and die?

  Then, as if to make my point, the clock struck midnight and the Statue of Liberty traded places with the clenched fist of a mushroom cloud.

  *****

  Has the dynamic duo really become a dynamic one-o?

  Is it finally time for Professor D’eath to start genociding everyone?

  And did our hero’s former bodyguard tell some nurse he just fell on that mailbox?

  Find out next week… same Cap-time, same Cap-channel!

  *****

  *****

  Part Four: Cape Closed

  The Journal of Captain Might

  Written by Captain Might

  Footnotes after the fact by Captain Might

  May 18th — August 5th

  *****

  May 18th

  It started with the Statue of Liberty blowing up and went downhill from there.

  People rushed outdoors and lined the stree
ts to watch the aftermath, craning their necks to ogle and stare. There it was – The Statue of Liberty, America’s defining symbol of freedom and the birthplace of Captain Might – pancaking into a dirty great cloud of dust. This was Professor D’eath’s message to the citizens of New York, and as messages go, it was about as subtle as Nicolas Cage doing vocal warm-ups.

  Next came the Mandroids – hundreds of them, thousands even – emerging from nowhere to bring the City to its knees. Before anyone could lift a finger to stop them the robots crippled our defenses and destroyed every route in or out of Manhattan. D’eath didn’t waste time making demands or asking for surrender, he grabbed what he wanted with both hands and there was nothing we could do about it.[107]

  All at once I knew the Prof had played me. This here was some next level crazy; the robot pterodactyls and shrink-ray attacks I’d dealt with in my superhero days, those were just capers by comparison. A series of misdirections designed to keep me busy while he performed the real magic trick, and now, after all this time, I was finally going to see what he pulled out of the hat.

  Using his technological know-how, Professor D’eath once again seized control of our communications networks, jacking the broadcast of every transmitter in town. I watched as the Prof’s face scrolled onto the curved ticker of a Times Square billboard to deliver his inaugural speech.

  “Greetings, loyal subjects, your city now belongs to me. Kindly return to your domiciles and bolt your doors – this disturbance will be over momentarily.”

  Panicked rubberneckers began to scatter and disperse (the ones who knew what a domicile was anyway). I grabbed a passer-by and asked if he’d been there to see the laser hit. He told me there was no laser, just a big bang then the Statue of Liberty disintegrated. Demolished at ground level? But why? Surely destroying Captain Might’s place of origin would have been the perfect demo of D’eath’s diabolical contraption?

  Unless... to make a shot like that the Moon and the Earth would need to be lined up just so.[108] Could that be why D’eath was dragging his feet on obliterating us? Because his gun didn’t have NYC in its crosshairs just yet? And if that was the case, how long until we are in his sights? Days? Hours? Before I’d even finished typing this sentence? Obviously not that last one.

  I tried opening my calendar so I could do some calculations but my phone was stone dead. Too much goddamned Snapchat I figured, but no, it wasn’t just my phone that had croaked. I looked about and saw people jabbing angrily at their handsets, saw electronic billboards with no picture, stoplights blacked out.

  Not only had Professor D’eath demolished a national landmark and overrun the streets with his clockwork goon squad, it seemed he’d turned the city into one big electronics dead spot. Boy, he really climbed to the top of the assh*le pyramid this time.

  May 19th

  I had to get back to C.H.A.M.P and find out how they were dealing with the Prof’s invasion, but with comms scrambled and the internet locked down, the only way I was getting that information was by visiting the clubhouse in person.

  It wasn’t easy. The streets were a no-man’s land, and with good reason – stepping outside was like strolling across a live shooting gallery. The sound of gunshots crackled all around and stray bullets zinged inches overhead. One came so close it almost put a parting in my hair. It’s like D’eath turned Manhattan into a goddamned John Woo movie.

  I picked my way across town, dashing from cover to cover and wading through the dead rivers of automobiles that choked the streets. I arrived at C.H.A.M.P to find the building’s east side decorated with a giant smoking hole. Whoever had come knocking, something told me they hadn’t stopped by to get their parking validated.

  I clambered through the hole, took a spot behind a jagged mess of bricks and mortar and peered into the lobby. I readied myself for a horror show, but despite the damage to the outside of the building, the interior wasn’t the slaughterhouse I’d feared. There was no sign of any bodies. At least not yet.

  C.H.A.M.P’s staff – some superhuman, some regularhuman – were being held at gunpoint by the Professor’s Mandroids. Also part of the houseclean were C.H.A.M.P’s convicts, who’d been dredged from the basement Supermax. The robots had them arranged in a marching line, heroes and villains, ass-to-balls. I scanned the captives for Birdy but came up wanting.

  A Mandroid at the rear of the line prodded the hostages towards a second robot at the exit of the building. The robot scanned the hostages in turn, waving a device over them before indicating they either leave the building through the legs of the Captain Might statue or join another line where they were cuffed and stamped with an ‘S.’ As I continued to watch, it became obvious what was happening. The robots didn’t care about good or bad, they were separating the norms from supes. Things were suddenly getting to look real holocausty.

  That’s when I spotted an emergency exit open across the other side of the lobby – just a crack – but wide enough that a finger was able to slip through and make a discrete beckoning gesture. Whoever it was outside was attempting to lure the prisoners out of harm’s way. Heads turned as captives picked up on the signal, but only a cluster halfway down the line looked set to take the risk. The team of four checked to see if the coast was clear then stepped onto their metaphorical starting blocks. Feature players in my story by this stage, I recognized them right away. It was the Murder Circus.

  Acro-Bat dropped the flag and the group made a beeline for the exit. At the last moment the door was flung open fully and I saw their liberator.

  It was Gerry, a ring of keys clutched in his old man hand.

  The Mandroids had let Gerry go, only for the intrepid janitor to double back and use custodial his know-how to supply his fellow men with an escape hatch. Colleague or inmate, it didn’t matter to Gerry, just so long as it stopped them from getting shanghaied by D’eath’s soldered stormtroopers. Like I’ve been saying all along, it’s guys like Gerry who are the real heroes.

  Acro-Bat bolted through the opening, then Fraulein Frigid, then Strong-Man. Miss Fortune was about to follow suit when shots rang out and she hit the tarp like a sack of hammers. She didn’t get up again – a couple of slugs to the brainpan saw to that. The rest of the Murder Circus tried dragging her body out of there but couldn’t even do that for the gunfire. Some of the other prisoners tried to turn the tide and rush their captors but the Mandroids closed ranks and poured ice on the revolt, firing a volley of warning shots and sending them diving for the floor.

  Gerry stood with his hands over his head as the Mandroids yanked him inside, sealed off the exit and formed a semi-circle around him. They advanced on him slowly, forcing his back to the wall before fixing him in their crosshairs. Gatling guns began to spin, seconds from discharging their deadly payload. I had to do something!

  My jaw tightened and I felt a surge go through me. Old instincts lit up and I visualized myself bouncing between the Mandroids like a white-hot pinball, punching them to dust quicker than they could form a regret. Then, quickly as the rush came, it vanished, leaving me with nothing. An amputee’s phantom tingle.

  There was nothing I could do. The Mandroids opened fire. Pockets of pink mist erupted from Gerry’s back as bullets riddled his body. I yelled out in protest but my shout was swallowed by the noise of the barrage.

  I crumbled to my knees, paralyzed, as the firing squad rounded up their remaining prisoners and bullied them out of the building. Away they peeled in perfect synchrony – not a moment of pause, not a trace of remorse – on their way to perform the next item on their diabolical to-do list.

  I rallied to Gerry’s side and whipped off my glasses.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I told him, doing my best to ignore his janitor overalls turning into a one-note Jackson Pollock.

  I grabbed his frail hand a squeezed.

  “We’ll have you back on your feet in no time, buddy. Changing the toilet rolls and mopping our floors. Hell, you can start by cleaning up this mess!” I joked, referring to th
e blood he was leaking everywhere.

  Gerry just lay there.

  “Tell you what, pal, you pull through this and I’ll let you take another run at my poker money, how’s that sound?”

  “No can do, Cap,” he replied with a smile, “cashing out now.”

  Then his lights dimmed and he went slack in my arms, a look of serenity spreading across his smiling face.

  Except that’s not what happened. What happened is that he coughed up a clot of blood, grabbed me by the shoulders and rasped “Don’t let me go, Cap,” before dying like a stuck pig. Because that’s how people die. Not with some quip or a snappy comeback, but clutching onto you and pleading for their goddamned lives. That’s how it really goes, but we can’t stomach that, so we dumb it down. We make sh*t up, because the reality of death is just too horrible.