Heroes Without, Monsters Within

by Sheryl Nantus

  Including those, I assumed, that had been murdered by the Agency for not wanting to go and fight a near-suicidal battle.

  My hand drifted to the back of my neck, to the ridged scar that held the now-inert plug. The small explosive could take my head off if activated by the Agency and their agents, the Guardians. Implanted as soon as we were identified as supers, it allowed the Agency to keep control over us. But thanks to the help of Jessie, we’d been able to first jam the signals and then destroy the system itself, scrambling the activation sequences to the degree that no one could ever use them to threaten us again. We still couldn’t remove the plugs themselves without major surgery and risking an explosion, so the unpleasant reminder of our slavery stayed with us.

  Someone squeezed my hand.

  “You’re frowning,” Hunter whispered, “and you’ve got chocolate on the side of your mouth.” A light pressure brushed over my skin, either his fingers or his lips. “All gone now.”

  “Not in front of the kids,” I grumbled, keeping my eyes closed.

  “Bad memories?” He wasn’t talking about his stolen kiss.

  “Yes. Hard to forget where we came from, what we were. There’s always going to be a shadow there.” I exhaled, feeling the jet list to one side.

  “Just don’t forget you’re not alone.” His hand slipped into mine.

  I sighed. Sometimes I missed being a clerk in a used bookstore.

  We arrived at Toronto Island Airport in darkness, the jet coming in for a smooth landing and immediately turning off the main runway towards a waiting private hangar. Peter looked out the window towards the small ferry that ran between the airport and the mainland.

  “Are we going to take the ferry?” A tinge of sadness softened his voice, and I couldn’t blame him. May had bonded almost immediately with the young man upon his arrival in Toronto, smothering the lost super with a mother’s love. She adored the ferry trip the one and only time we used it, and I thought of her every time I saw the ship. Peter still wasn’t totally comfortable flying with me, but he’d gotten better in the past few weeks with our short hops around the city, half of them to give me more practice carrying passengers and half to let the public see us in action.

  “No, I’m flying us back. No time to sightsee.” I pulled in the waves from around me as I sat in the chair. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d be able to manipulate the electromagnetic waves present in everything, around everyone, and use them to do amazing things, I’d have thought you were crazy.

  Until a mugger slammed a brick into the side of my head late one night and made me believe in crazy.

  Finally the plane came to a full stop, the private crew going about the routine of closing down the engines and opening the hatch. I was the last to leave, focusing in on controlling the waves I’d snatched up. Gathering them was one thing, stuffing them into an invisible sack and putting them to use was another. It had taken months, years to get to this point, and I still hadn’t reached my full potential, according to the Agency scientists.

  I headed down the steps and met the rest of the team on the tarmac. Night had fallen while we traveled. We’d spent all day helping dig out the victims of the earthquake. Steve, AKA Slammer, had pulled on a white shirt he’d stashed somewhere on the plane, the pristine fabric standing out in stark contrast to his torn and dirty jeans. Peter laughed at something the large man said, brushing a hand through his red hair. The stage name Ani-Man just didn’t suit him. On the other hand, it could have been worse.

  He could have been called Surf.

  Hunter handed me a loose nylon harness, the blue and white cords wrapped and tied off in large loose loops.

  I’d been able to fly for years, either solo or hanging on to Metal Mike’s suit as we raced into battle. One of the last things we’d been working on before that final, devastating event in New York City had been expanding my skills to include carrying others—but the kicker was that I needed physical contact in order to keep a body aloft, and there were only so many parts of me to grab onto, at least outside of the superhero porn videos. In a moment of crisis we’d created the harness, and it’d worked pretty well so far, other than the obviously silly image of me flying, dragging two or three men behind me like an aerial tow truck.

  I slipped the cords on, winding them around me. “Load up, boys. I’m feeling the need for speed. And pizza.”

  Peter stifled a yawn with one hand, the contagious action rolling from Steve to Hunter and back to me. I tugged on the knots, doing a final check. Steve and Peter stood behind me, holding on to the back loops, and Hunter took my hand after slipping his arm through one loop on my side. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. Sure, I could have told Steve to jump his way home, but the man had done a Herculean amount of work today, and the least I could do was offer him a ride.

  A few minutes later we were aloft, skimming along the water at first until I gained altitude, not caring if anyone saw us. At night, you tend to keep your eyes on the ground, not look up into the sky for a bird, a plane, a passel of supers hanging on to one woman for support.

  It was a short hop over the lake, and soon enough we were in downtown Toronto, zigzagging between buildings on our way to what had once been the Bookworm’s Hideout, a used bookstore on Queen Street West. Now it, and the former specialty condom store beside it, had become our headquarters, informally named the Lair.

  We’d had offers to move into office towers, clock towers, imposing old castles that screamed medieval torture sessions, but I’d decided to stay put. Jessie had worked hard setting up the Lair, and right now I didn’t trust anyone else to give us a secure location. The Agency might be working for us now, but I didn’t doubt for a second that they’d love to have eyes and ears inside our home. Not to mention the ability to control us again.

  “Jo.” Hunter’s yell brought me out of my daydreaming. “Hit the brakes.”

  I snapped back into full awareness just in time to see us coming in to the rooftop way too fast.

  My sneakers ground into the pebbles as I fought for control, tripping and skittering along the gravel. We finally stuttered to a stop a few feet from the edge of the building. I swung forward into empty space, leaning towards the street below us.

  The only thing keeping me from falling on my face was the harness cutting into my shoulders and the counterweight of the men behind me. Hunter let out a yelp, pulling as hard as he could as he dug his heels in, holding at the edge of the short brick wall.

  I held my breath, not sure what to do next.

  With a loud groan Steve fell backwards, bringing me along with him as we collapsed into an undignified pile of jumbled limbs sticking out of a sweaty superhuman blob.

  Definitely not a Kodak moment.

  “No offense, dude…but I usually like to be on top,” Peter mumbled. I could barely hear his voice, having Hunter sprawled across my chest and Steve poking my sore ribs with his elbow. I chuckled despite the aching in my muscles.

  Steve laughed and staggered to his feet with little effort. We all went with him, swaying back upright. The nylon cords started cutting into my sweaty and torn white shirt as I was dragged across the gravel again. Hunter pulled free first and grabbed me around the waist, snarling when he saw the pain on my face.

  “Let go, guys,” he snapped. “You’re going to tear her arms off!”

  The tension on the cords eased, allowing me to catch my breath. I fell forward into his arms, my eyes closed. I felt like I’d run a marathon on crutches.

  “Is she okay?” Steve’s thick Pittsburgh accent came from a distance.

  “She’s fine. Just tired.” Hunter’s fingers brushed across my cheek. “Been a long day for all of us.” I sensed myself rising into the air, hefted into his arms. “Run ahead and tell David we’ll need a good strong pot of tea.”

  I curled up into the sweaty, stinky warmth and relaxed. It’d been one helluva run for the past few weeks, and I’d take every moment of peace and quiet when I could. Even if it did mean allowin
g Hunter to carry me down the stairs in a bumpy, jarring ride hardly befitting the leader of the Protectors.

  We bumped against the door, and I knew we were inside the upper floor of the old bookstore, now the newest and grubbiest superhero headquarters.

  It smelled like freshly baked cookies and sweaty socks.

  “I’ve got the water going already. Sandwiches in a minute, but I’ve got something to hold you over until then.” David Tierney’s voice was soft and quiet, almost a whisper. The ex-bookstore manager had taken on the job of being our full-time housekeeper/cook/general nag when it became painfully obvious that there was no way he could keep the Bookworm’s Hideout open with us lurking upstairs in my old apartment. The bottom floor remained as it was, the stacks of books providing ample fodder for anyone wanting something to read, but the “Closed” sign hadn’t been changed for weeks.

  The smell of fresh cookies brought me up and out of Hunter’s arms, wriggling free just as he attempted to lay me down on the sofa.

  I let out a contented sigh when I spotted the overflowing plate on the coffee table. “David, you’d make a great wife for someone.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears. And don’t be tossing crumbs everywhere, take a napkin.”

  Peter laughed and grabbed a handful of chocolate chip cookies from the tall stack on the table. I liked hearing him laugh, it showed progress. He’d been grieving for his lost lover these past few weeks, as I had been for Mike. I’d heard him sobbing some nights behind the barricade in the boys’ dorm. I’d joined him a few times, weeping for the loss of my Guardian, my lover, my friend.

  Then there was Hunter. I knew he missed May, placed into his care after she developed her powers and needed a Guardian. The day she died, assigning Hunter to be my new Guardian with her last breath, we all felt the full impact of our freedom. We were free to save the world if we wanted.

  We were also free to die for it.

  David interrupted my morbid recollections. “Other than being hungry, how are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine.” I shuffled up to one end of the black leather cushions and accepted the thick ceramic mug of hot sweet tea David offered. Anything less than three teaspoons of sugar wouldn’t do it for me these days. “I’m just wiped.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Jessie’s voice came from behind a stack of computer monitors. The red-haired über-geek had transformed a near-empty loft into a cyberhaven that I didn’t even try to understand. It was all I could do to work the television remote.

  Losing Mike, deactivating the plugs, building a team out of second-rate actors, defeating an alien invasion and saving the world. All within a few weeks.

  I was getting too old for this.

  Steve came out of the kitchenette and pushed a paper plate towards me containing the biggest deli sandwich I’d ever seen in my life. “Here. Eat.”

  I accepted one half and tucked the monster meal into a paper napkin embrace. The mustard was hot, the rye bread soft and the meat spicy. My stomach growled, demanding more.

  “That’s a welcome sight.” David hovered around me. He tugged at his brown cardigan, pulling the long sleeves over his hands. For a surrogate father, he did love to nag. “You’ve been looking thin lately.”

  “Not if I keep eating like this,” I mumbled through a manuscript of meat. “Jessie, give me a report on what’s happening. I can eat and listen at the same time, despite news releases to the contrary.”

  “Well, I’m still fending off women who want to date the computer genius behind the Protectors.” He rolled into sight, perched on a chair. “And, of course, David’s got his own fangirl base. You should check out the website. They’re lining up to ruffle his pages.”

  The balding man huffed as he sat down beside me on the couch, but his cheeks held a trace of scarlet. Hunter came around the corner, cradling his cup of coffee. I saw Steve in the far corner of the loft, already working out on a set of donated free weights. His silver-streaked arms glistened with sweat in the light. For a supervillain, Slammer had come a long way from brawling with the Alphas and getting his ass kicked for the cameras. Here he was after a long day of lifting debris, going through his workout routine as if nothing had happened. A part of me hated him for that. The other part envied him. The third part wondered why I spent time wondering in parts.

  “Tell me about the quake.” I took another sip of tea. Hunter sat down at the other end of the couch and shifted his weight, making the leather squeak. He didn’t look at me, too busy studying his coffee.

  Jessie leaned back in the chair, stretching the springs. “In a nutshell, no one knows why the quake happened. There’s no fault line nearby, nothing natural or man-made that would cause this. I was able to download a satellite image of the exact spot where the initial impact occurred. The waves surged out from that point and caused the damage. It took some work to do the calculations, which is why I didn’t have anything for you until now. I checked and double-checked while you were on the way back.”

  “Double-checked what?” I asked.

  “There was a person at the exact point where the quake originated. That’s what we have on the photograph.”

  The tea suddenly turned bitter. “Show us, please.”

  He turned around and tapped one of the keyboards with his index finger. The widescreen television set mounted on the wall flickered once, dumping the local news channel, and then returned with a fuzzy image.

  “I put it through the enhancement process. Quite a few times.” More tapping.

  The image shifted and blurred, reblurred and then became clear.

  It was a person down on one knee as if praying, shoulder-length red hair falling over the shoulders. He pressed both palms to the ground, a smirk on his face as the waves rippled out from his fingers, the earth warping under his touch.

  It was another super.

  Chapter Two

  “Fuck me.” Peter said it for all of us.

  I cringed, expecting May to snap at him. In the short time she’d been with us, her dislike of swearing had impacted all of us. The silence following Peter’s words choked my response.

  “Oh yeah. Big time.” Steve dropped the weights with a crash. The barbells bounced once on the hardwood floor before rolling to a stop. He got up from the workout bench and strode over to one of the windows. We’d had the glass changed out to that one-way stuff, David’s suggestion to keep some things private. This was after one of the tabloid rags had caught a long-distance picture of David holding a plate of sandwiches, running the photo with the title “SUPERMUTATED MEAT ENHANCES THEIR POWERS!”

  I giggled for a full day until the tabloid printed a retraction, and we had the windows changed out.

  Now I was double glad we’d done so. If Jessie’s discovery went public, there’d be trouble. A lot more than people worrying about what we stuffed in our pieholes.

  I stared at the blurry figure. “Have we identified him yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ve got the database running through all the known supers.” Jessie raised his hands in the air. “A lot to go through. Gotta let the system do its magic.”

  The sofa creaked under Hunter’s maneuvers, drawing my attention. David leaned back between us, trying to make himself as small as possible.

  “You knew.” I paused, a light coming on in my mind. “You knew as soon as we got to Erie, didn’t you?”

  “I suspected, but I wasn’t sure until now.” Hunter put the cup down on the table with a light tap. “It’s a guy called GroundPounder.”

  “You suspected…” the words were thick in my mouth as I choked them out, “…and said nothing while we dug people out of the rubble.”

  Hunter stared at the floor as if he was a puppy and I’d caught him peeing on the expensive new carpet.

  “I wasn’t sure. There was no point in stirring something up if it wasn’t there.” He finally looked at me. “There was no point in getting you upset, like you are now. You had a job to do, and you needed to focus on that.”


  “My room. Now.” I shoved the empty sandwich plate into David’s hands. “Excuse us for a few minutes, fellas.”

  I got up and strode towards the small enclosure that served as my private room, since we had no other women around. I hadn’t made the single bed when we’d raced out to the disaster site, the tangled sheets providing a makeshift cave for my old beloved teddy bear. I kicked a pile of dirty laundry out of the way and marched alongside the bed. I didn’t look behind me; I knew he followed me in.

  “Jo,” Hunter said, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. “Don’t be mad.”

  I didn’t look at him. I felt like I was back in the Niagara Falls condo with Mike, about to have another fight about why he couldn’t tell me certain things because he was a Guardian and I was a mere performer. Except those fights usually ended with good make-up sex. Since Hunter and I had barely managed a handful of minutes alone in the past few weeks, I doubted that was going to be the outcome.

  “You kept this to yourself all day?” My words were coming out in short pants, the anger building. I grabbed the waves around me instinctively. My fingers sparked, the electric bolts dancing from tip to tip as I stared at him.

  “Jo. Calm down.” This was the Guardian in him talking, his tone sharper than before. “I thought it could be him, but I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t want to start something without having some proof behind it. What was I going to do, stand on a pile of rubble and yell out that a super did it? You told Jessie to find out what happened and he did.” He jerked a thumb at the bookcase and the men behind it. “Jessie proved a super was behind it. Now we move on and deal with it.”

  “Deal with it?” The sparks leapt from hand to hand, my temper tantrum taking material form. “Deal with it? I’m supposed to be leading this team, and I don’t need you keeping secrets from me.”

  He opened his arms, wearing a wide, sad smile. “I’m not keeping any secrets from you. You know that you can trust me.” His deep blue eyes found mine. “You know that, Jo. I’m not going to endanger the team, but I’m not going to speak up until I’ve got something to say, something important. I used to be a Guardian, but I’m not the enemy. Never was.”