Superheroes In Denim

by Lee French

  Bobby shrugged, not sure he saw how Stephen reached that conclusion. “Maybe we played dumb better’n we thought.”

  The vampire raised an eyebrow and quirked one corner of his mouth up into a grin. “Perhaps. If we don’t do this for them, though, they’ll just go in without the quality information we could get them, and probably several people will get killed, including this man who may or may not be in need of killing.”

  “Well, okay. So now what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sighing lightly, Bobby rubbed his face. “I got an idea, but it ain’t a good one.”

  Stephen snorted. “Where have I heard that before?”

  “C’mon.” Bobby chuckled. He tapped Stephen’s shoulder as he stood and they walked together up to the front door.

  “This is your brilliant plan?”

  “Worked last time, didn’t it?” They walked through the courtyard outside the house, past cameras that tracked them. Bobby resisted the urge to wave. When they reached the front door, he used the knocker shaped like a lion’s head. “If somebody shoots first, we eat them.”

  “I am amenable to your plan.”

  “If’n that means you’re up for it, then okay, good.”

  A dusky skinned man in a black suit opened the door and looked down his nose at them. “Can I help you?” He looked and sounded certain the answer would be ‘No, sorry to bother you’. He also had a British accent, suggesting where he learned the language.

  “We’re looking to have a chat with Mr. Hanamidi, please.”

  The man looked at Bobby like he was a very strange creature, indeed. “Why do American soldiers want to speak with Mr. Hanamidi?”

  “On account our boss says we gotta. You can tell him if he don’t talk to us, a SEAL team’ll probably be here sometime in the next few days to talk with bullets ‘stead of words.” In an effort to show his earnestness, he lifted his hands and unbuttoned his jacket to show he had no gun or explosives. With a light jab from his elbow, Stephen did the same.

  The man looked them both over skeptically. “Wait here.” He shut the door.

  Bobby turned and waved at the cameras, and pulled his jacket off so they could see without a doubt that he had no weapon. “C’mon, play nice.”

  Stephen heaved a long suffering sigh and followed suit. “If they want us to pull down our pants, I’m going to be very unhappy.”

  “Me too.” Grabbing a protein bar out of a pocket, Bobby ripped the package open and chomped it. “These things’re awful.”

  “And yet, you eat them.”

  Looking down at the bar, he sighed, then swallowed the bite as quickly as possible. “Yeah. I s’pose it’s better than a half-rotten apple from a dumpster.”

  “I’ve seen you eat those, too.”

  Nodding, Bobby took another bite. Just as he finished that and was about to stuff the rest of the bar into his mouth, the door opened again. The man in the suit gestured for them to come inside. “Mr. Hanamidi will see you.” They followed him, Bobby tucking his ‘food’ into a pocket for later. It wasn’t as nice on the inside as it seemed like it should be from the outside. Compared to that little village, though, this was a palace. It had hardwood floors, white walls and ceiling, and decent wood and metal furniture.

  The butler led them a short way in and gestured to a small room with one couch and two chairs, some knickknacks on a coffee table, and bookshelves full of books along the walls. The person who must be Mr. Hanamidi stood at a bar on one end of the room, pouring amber liquid into a glass. “Would either of you like a drink?” He looked like the locals, with the proper dark olive skin tone, graying black hair and beard, and dark eyes, yet he sounded American. At a guess, Bobby would peg him as being in his 60s, maybe a well-aged 70.

  “No, thanks,” Bobby said as he sat down on the couch. Stephen shook his head and paced nonchalantly to a bookcase, where he started examining the contents. “I appreciate you seeing us, Mr. Hanamidi.”

  “The way you phrased your request was convincing.” He waved to the butler and the man left them, pulling the door shut to give them privacy. Mr. Hanamidi brought his glass to one of the chairs opposite Bobby and sat down. At this point, he noticed Bobby’s unusual icy blue, almond shaped eyes, and looked a bit longer than would generally be considered polite. He glanced at Stephen, but the vampire had his back to them. “I’m not surprised to know someone in the military wants to kill me, but I am surprised you both would warn me about it.”

  Stephen stepped to the next bookcase, still examining the titles. “As it turns out, their duly appointed assassins aren’t really of a mind to just kill people for no reason.”

  “We noticed you ain’t got a whole lotta security, and were kinda wondering if you might be able to tell us why the folks pulling our strings think you’re a warlord what oughta be dead.”

  Hanamidi laughed. “Is that really what they told you?” Shaking his head with amusement, he snorted. “How pathetic it took them this long to find me. I assume you know nothing, then?”

  “You assume correctly,” Stephen said. “We’d like to learn.”

  “Mmm. Knowledge. It’s a double-edged sword, often.” Hanamidi took a sip of his drink and regarded it. “Do either of you know much about physics and the Theory of Relativity?”

  “Nope, nothing.” Bobby shrugged.

  Stephen turned to regard Hanamidi, his brow raised. “Is this about time travel?”

  “No, not exactly.” Hanamidi looked at Bobby, apparently intending to direct the explaining at him. “My parents were Afghan, they wound up in Russia before I was born, where they both became scientists. When I was ten, they defected to America. It was a popular thing to do then, in certain circles. I studied physics, like my father, and went into government service, where I was tapped for a very sensitive project that had been going on for a long time already, some forty years. It was called Maze Beset.”

  Surprised by this unexpected connection, Bobby leaned in and nodded along. Stephen stopped pretending he had any interest in the books and stared openly at Hanamidi.

  “Ah, so you know something more than nothing, then. What have you heard of the project?”

  “We ran into Kurt Donner,” Bobby explained, remembering the homeless man in El Paso. “He didn’t tell us nothing more than the name. Then he keeled right over and died.”

  Shaking his head, Hanamidi said, “I don’t know that name. He might have worked there at a different time or in a different part of the project. I was in Sierra Tango Alpha, STA, the Space-Time Anomaly section. The whole thing was so hush-hush that I only knew my partners. I saw other people around, but wasn’t told anything about the other sections. They had data from what they asserted was an anomalous space-time event that occurred over Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Our task was to recreate it somehow.”

  Stephen snorted. “Seriously? Roswell?”

  “Yes, seriously.” Hanamidi shrugged. “A weather balloon really did crash, but it wasn’t the only thing to happen that day. I know very little about that—it was need to know and we were told we didn’t need to know. What I do know is that the data I was working with was…” He took another drink, this one more than just a sip. “It made no sense in some ways. We were able to reproduce one part or another part, but never all at once. It was highly suggestive, though, of things that hadn’t even been dreamed of when it first happened.” His eyes lit up with interest. “So much of what we know now, in astrophysics specifically, and other branches of physics generally, came from the research done there, the experiments, the attempts.”

  “I don’t know nothing about none of that,” Bobby said slowly, frowning. “You recognize us a little, though, don’t you? You kinda looked at the eyes.”

  Hanamidi took another swallow of his drink and sighed with nostalgia. “I saw a picture once. I wasn’t supposed to see it. She was a beautiful creature, even in a black and white photo, but so sad. It was in a folder that a woman dropped and scattered the papers all over. I picke
d up the photo and she snatched it out of my hands without an explanation.” His eyes unfocused. “Such haunting—and haunted—eyes.”

  “What’d they look like?” The answer seemed obvious, but Bobby had to ask the question, especially since Hanamidi didn’t seem like he was going to snap out of his reverie any time soon without help.

  Another tiny sigh escaped him and Hanamidi looked down at his rapidly depleting drink. “Just like yours.” His gaze went to Stephen first, then Bobby. “Exactly like them, in fact. I’m not sure what color hers were, but I expect it was the same as yours, or quite similar to it. Her face was more angular, and the one ear I could see had a point at the top corner, but your eyes, they’re hers. I have no idea who she was, but she must have had something to do with the Anomaly.”

  Stephen frowned through all of this, then finally shook his head. “She sounds like an elf.”

  Hanamidi chuckled. “I’ve seen some of the fantasy art. Yes, that is generally what she looked like: an elf. Less humanish than is typically portrayed, though.” He shrugged. “In ‘95, they decided I was ready to retire and be replaced by a younger scientist who they could pay less. Someone tipped me off that my ability to enjoy my retirement would be rather shorter than I would like, so I fled back to my parents’ homeland, knowing I could hide effectively here. Who knew the US would decide you could succeed where the Russians failed? Not I, certainly. And now, here you are at my door, telling me I have been found.”

  Bobby sighed heavily and rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I ain’t here to kill nobody what I ain’t gotta.”

  “We could just report back that we’ve done it and let you leave on your own.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Hanamidi snorted. “They aren’t stupid enough to let me walk out of here alive now that they know where I am. It’s possible they sent you to flush me out, expecting you to let me go but hoping you’ll be too stupid or thick to ask questions. After all, I’m an Afghan in Afghanistan who they labeled a ‘warlord’; that should be enough for any red-blooded American boy to mindlessly kill me.”

  Uncomfortable with that statement, Bobby shifted in his seat and rubbed his face again, trying to figure a way out of this without anyone having to die. “We could get you out of here without anyone seeing it if the lights are turned off.”

  Hanamidi sighed and stared off at the wall again. Perhaps half a minute passed in silence, with Bobby and Stephen sharing a glance, then watching the other man. What might be going through his mind, Bobby had no idea. “Perhaps.” He said it like someone asked him a question. His gaze snapped back to Bobby, intense and piercing. “If I give you some papers, would you swear to get them to my daughter? ”

  It was a weird question, and Bobby blinked, but also nodded. “Um, sure, soon as I could, yeah.”

  The scientist stood up abruptly. “Give me…ten minutes should be enough. Too much longer and they’ll start to question what you were doing in here all this time.” Without giving either of them a chance to respond, he left the room, his stride swift and purposeful.

  Bobby watched him go, bewildered. “What in heckbiscuits was that?”

  His mouth sliding downward into a grimace of distaste, Stephen shook his head. “Not sure, but I have a guess. Ten minutes strikes me as about enough time to put together a packet for his daughter to claim his assets, if his affairs are already in order, as they say.”

  Understanding what Stephen just hinted around the edges about took Bobby a minute. “You think he’s going to tell us to kill him.”

  “Sometimes,” Stephen sighed, “the best way to deal with something like this is to let it happen.”

  “That’s—It ain’t right is what it is.” Bobby stood and wanted to throw something. Instead, he tucked his hands into his armpits and paced, kicking the couch as he went by. “I ain’t no killer.” The moment it left his mouth, he knew he’d just lied; he’d killed three men. Clinging to that made him a damned hypocrite. “I mean, not like this, not a-purpose-like, not because somebody told me to. Them, I killed because they were gonna do stuff to me or somebody else. This guy, he ain’t doing nothing to nobody.”

  “Relax.” Stephen sank into his chair, grimace turning to disgust. “You don’t need to stain your hands, I’ll do it. He won’t even feel any pain.”

  Bobby froze and faced Stephen. “Shoot, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “No,” Stephen smiled darkly, “I didn’t think you did. But, the fact remains that I can do this and you don’t have to.”

  “We could still sneak him out some—”

  “It won’t work. No matter how much you want it to, Bobby, it won’t.” Stephen snorted. “He’s right: they’re probably watching, they know we walked in through the front door, and once we report it’s done, they’ll find a way to make sure we weren’t lying. That means there needs to be a body, and it needs to be his. Since neither of us has any way to generate a fake body, we need the real one.”

  “This is—” Kicking the couch again, Bobby couldn’t settle on any one word to fit best there.

  “Demented? Yes, but life is like that. Remember how I said this isn’t going to be about right and wrong? Welcome to that world. We have to make choices and live with them. Our choice, the one to do their dirty work in the hopes we’d be able to get to Jasmine, set us up for this choice, and now we have to deal with it.”

  Jasmine’s name felt like a slap in the face, and Bobby turned away to not have to look at Stephen’s determination and gods-be-damned calm. This wasn’t right, no matter how it got sliced or diced or blended. Noticing his belly rumbling again, he pulled out the last of that crappy bar and jammed it into his mouth. Really, he couldn’t decide which thing bothered him most: that they were talking about killing someone, that Stephen was so unfazed by the idea, that he found himself hungry while talking about it, or that not killing Hanamidi might be worse overall than killing him.

  “This sucks.”

  “I agree completely.”

  Someday, Bobby would be able to sit his ass down on a porch again and not have to deal with all this crazy crap. He’d drink a beer and watch the world drift by, knowing no one waited on his decision to save or damn them. Today wasn’t that day. Tomorrow didn’t look promising, either. “I guess maybe I oughta scrap with some of his people while you’re…doing that.”

  He couldn’t find it in himself to look at Stephen, so he just heard the vampire say, “That sounds like a good plan.”

  The door opened again, and Hanamidi walked in with determination written across every inch of his being. He offered Bobby a large envelope. “I’m not sure how to ask this. You’ve both been decent and reasonable.”

  Scowling, Bobby took the envelope. Tidy yet hasty letters on the manila paper gave them a destination in Albuquerque.

  “Ah, I see you’ve figured it out, then.” Hanamidi moved stiffly to the bar. “To you who are young, this probably seems strange, but I’m seventy-three and my wife passed a few years ago, I haven’t seen my children since we fled without them. I don’t even know how many grandchildren I have, if any. Living here, it’s like half of a life.” Shaking his head, he huffed out a not-quite-amused breath. “You know, I’ve thought a few times about saving everyone a lot of time, effort, and money by eating a bullet.” He poured himself another glass of amber liquid and drank it down.

  Stephen crossed the room with small, slow steps. “At least this way we were able to learn something that may eventually help us discover who we really are. If it helps to know, there will be no pain.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Unwilling to stand there helplessly and watch, Bobby fled the room. He saw the butler standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall and staring, his face pale. “I’ve been with him since he got here,” the man said. “He’s a good man, a good employer. Like a brother.”

  Bobby squirmed as he walked over. This was not fair, it was not fun, and it was not right. He was going to do it anyway. “I gotta rough you up some,�
�� he said apologetically. “I ain’t gonna do nothing that won’t heal.”

  The butler looked up at Bobby and nodded. “That’s a small mercy, I suppose, but I expect anyone who comes to verify his death will kill me. I’m too big a risk to be left alive.”

  Blanching, Bobby thought very hard about turning around and just walking away from this whole mess. “I ain’t gonna do that. We could help you run for it, get you out far enough anyone watching can’t just cut you down. A good shiner’d probably be a good idea still, though.”

  Much relieved, the butler nodded. “Yes, that might work. Thank you.”

  Tasting bile, Bobby scowled again as he made a fist with his right hand. “Dammit, don’t thank me for doing this.”

  Chapter 6

  Stephen reported in to Klein as they left the house, his face dark and brooding but a bounce in his step. They flew away, the vampire carrying the unconscious butler, and left him in an alley a few blocks away where the man claimed he should be safe enough for a few hours, long as they covered him with garbage. Bobby clenched his jaw the whole time they spent tending to the task in silence.

  The pair took back to the air and went looking for the cave entrance. It was only a short hop, giving Bobby barely enough time to even deal with the facts of everything that just happened, let alone how he felt about it. Frequent glances at Stephen kept him from saying anything about it, worried, the vampire might need the silence.

  They returned to the ground about a mile from the dot on the map, neither of them ready to tackle this situation. Bobby re-formed and shoved protein bars into his mouth to keep it busy while Stephen sat and stared into the darkness. Glancing at Stephen’s watch, he saw the time: 11:32pm. Not even midnight, and they’d already finished two-thirds of their to-do list.

  Bobby chewed and stared and stared and chewed. He hadn’t done anything, except stand by and let his friend murder a man, and beat up another one for no reason. He listened to dry leaves scraping across the hard- packed earth in a light breeze and wondered if he’d left a piece of his soul behind in that house.