Heroes Without, Monsters Within

by Sheryl Nantus

  The anger knot in my belly loosened as I realized the truth in his words. I released the charges, letting them run down and out of my body, back into the world. The edges of my fingers sparked, lighting up the dim room.

  “I just don’t need you undercutting my authority. I’m trying hard to be a good leader, but…” I left the sentence hanging, the frustration choking my thoughts.

  Hunter frowned, looking puzzled. “Who ever said that you weren’t a good leader?” His attention darted to the door and the outside world. “Did you get this from a tabloid? Did Outrager say something to you?” His voice rose with each word.

  I lifted my hand. “No one’s said anything. I just, I just…” The words kept getting caught in my throat. “I just don’t want to make a mistake. Mistakes used to get us a rematch, now they can get us killed.”

  “Yes, yes they can.” He moved closer. “What’s bringing this on?”

  “Outrager said something about remaking our world. I don’t know if I’m the right one to lead this team if we’re going to hunt down other supers.” There. It was out. My chest ached with a sort of painful healing.

  Hunter shook his head. “Bullshit. You put this team together, and you’re the only leader they want. Or they’ll ever have.” He took my hand. “You can do this.”

  “I’m not Mike. I don’t know how to do this.” I waved my free hand at the floor. “I know how to sell books, that’s all. Buy one, get one free, and check out our bargain bin before you leave.”

  Hunter pulled me towards him with a light tug on my arm and cupped my face with his strong, calloused hands. “Mike knew your potential. I can see what he saw, and he wasn’t wrong.” He smiled. “You can do this, Jo. I know you can.”

  I closed my eyes, a sense of peace trying to quell the dagger of panic still digging into my gut.

  “Besides, you think anyone else could run this crazy crew?” Hunter drawled.

  “You could. You were a Guardian. Like Mike.”

  “Oh. Is that what this is all about?” His light breath tickled my cheek, the heat from his body scorching my skin. “About you, me and Mike?”

  “I-I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “I’m not Mike,” he murmured.

  “I know that.”

  “I can’t be Mike.”

  “I know that too.”

  “I can’t bring Mike back.”

  “I know that, damn it.” My stomach twisted into knots.

  “Then why the drama?”

  “Because I don’t want Mike. I want you.” The words came out before I had fully processed the thought. I opened my eyes and stared at him. My mouth stayed open, shocked at the output.

  He gave me a sheepish smile. “And now the truth comes out.” His hands came up, reaching for the wall behind me. I spotted the Agency’s metal bracelet on his left wrist, the small digital screens now deactivated. I knew he’d asked Outrager how to take it off and had been rewarded with a stoic nod and silence up to this point. A constant reminder of who and what he was, it shifted out of eyesight. As his hands settled on each side of my head I realized that I had backed myself into the corner of the small room. Talk about a set-up.

  “You get me, you get the Guardian. And the super.” Hunter moved in even closer, his hips pinning me against the wall. “You get the entire package,” he whispered, his lips only a few inches from mine, “for better or for worse. I can’t stop being any part.”

  I felt the heat coming off his body, felt the waves crashing against me. When I dropped my guard I could see the electromagnetic waves around us, shooting off everything. Right now he looked like a supernova.

  “I got that, Mr. Good Luck Man.” I closed my eyes and pulled back on my powers, dimming his image in my mind’s eye. “Just don’t forget who’s in charge here. This team has only one leader and it’s me.” I forced an authoritative tone into my words, not sure if I was trying to convince one person or two.

  Soft lips brushed against mine. “Yes, ma’am. Now let’s go out there and solve this. I’ll look like a whipped dog, and you can save face.”

  “I could just whip you for real,” I murmured, keeping my eyes closed.

  “We’ll have to save the foreplay for later.” Suddenly the heat disappeared.

  I opened my eyes and found myself alone. Except for a heart racing a thousand miles a minute.

  Damn all men. Especially Guardians and supers.

  After a minute to cool off I walked into the main room. Hunter sat on the couch, trying to look properly chastised. Peter had joined Steve over by the window, studying the street. Jessie worked on the keyboard, and David was clearing away the cups and plates. They all studiously avoided eye contact with me or Hunter.

  “Okay, let’s take this from the top.” I pointed at the frozen image on the screen. “Who is GroundPounder?”

  “He’s a super with the power to control the earth around him. Specifically, able to tear up matter with a wave of his hand,” Hunter said. “I don’t know his real name, but—”

  “We’ve got a visitor,” Peter interrupted. I saw it in his eyes, the faraway expression that said he was communicating with one or more of the animals outside. No better self-defense system than having nature on your side. “It’s your Agency buddy.”

  The first rumblings of a migraine trembled at the back of my neck, centered on the plug. “Of course it is. With his usual perfect timing. Let the bastard in, please.”

  Jessie tapped out a sequence on the keyboard, releasing various automated locks on the back door. A few minutes later the ominous creaking on the steps signaled the arrival of one of the men who used to enslave us.

  “Good evening, Protectors.” John Outrager stood there with a wide smile on his face. Wearing the standard Agency black suit, he strolled into the room and stopped in front of me. His silver hair flew out behind him like a horse’s tail, which pretty well defined the man for me. “How are we all this evening?”

  “Tired. Pissed off,” Steve growled. He leaned against the wall and crossed his thick arms in front of him. “And Jo’s got first call on the shower. Privileges of rank and all that.”

  John grinned, a thin evil grin that reminded me over and over again about the horrors the Agency had inflicted on us. “Still working on the extra plumbing?”

  I glanced towards the rough opening in the wall leading into the shop beside us. It’d taken Steve all of five minutes to punch through the flimsy wall, leaving the support pillars intact, but it’d take longer to repair the abused small washroom and give us a second shower facility. The boys had already moved their cots and blankets over there to get some sort of privacy, but one functioning shower stall with three men and one woman, not counting Jessie and David, wasn’t going to work forever.

  “We’re fine, thank you.” I gestured towards the blurry image on the screen. “One of yours, I assume?”

  “One of yours, to be honest.” He withdrew a file folder from his briefcase. “When the initial quake happened, we considered the data and decided to take a closer look at the possibility that a super was involved.” He nodded at the screen. “We got the same results as you did, obviously.”

  “The Agency doing their own investigation?” I moved in for the kill. “Did you clear this with Jessie? Or myself?” Under the new rules we had to approve everything. In theory.

  Outrager rolled his eyes. “We are perfectly within our mandate to investigate any and all occurrences that could be super related.” His tone shot up a notch to pissy. “If we waited to hear on you for every odd happening we checked out, you’d never get a chance to pose for those promo shots.”

  My mind flashed back to a leather outfit still hanging up in my old apartment in Niagara Falls. Another version of the poster featuring me in that costume had just been released by the Agency’s promotional arm with Mike airbrushed out of the image. According to Jessie it was selling better than the original print.

  I hated it even more.

  “Point taken.” I conce
ded the low ground. “However, you should have contacted Jessie here as soon as you identified the super.”

  Outrager cocked his head to one side as if he’d swallowed a fat canary. “Which is what I’m doing. Hunter may have recognized him. GroundPounder.”

  “Glorious.” I settled on the couch at the other end from Hunter. “And why, perchance, is he whacking off in Erie?”

  The older man flinched slightly at the language. He walked over to stand by the large television screen, studying the image. “He’s a rogue super.” His dark eyes shot to Peter. “You might remember him. You fought him once.”

  Peter frowned. “I don’t think… Oh, wait, I remember the fellow.” He turned from the window and addressed us. “It was a year ago, maybe. We were set up for a tag-team match with Slow Joe and Morning Glory. Glory, she could do things with plants.” He waved his hands in the air. “It was a bit of a downer. A few dogs, a handful of birds and we had the victory. Didn’t even make the front page.”

  Outrager let out a pained sigh. “Ah, for the good old days.” He ignored my pointed glare and continued his briefing. “GroundPounder was directed to Philadelphia for the defensive line there. Like you were, Peter.” The jab didn’t go unnoticed as I saw Peter flinch. He’d followed instructions and gone to Philly. There he lost his Guardian/lover in the battle and ran for his life until he found us.

  I lifted a finger, silencing Outrager. “Who is he?”

  The puzzled stare brought my blood to a boil. “What?”

  “Who. Is. He?” I dragged the sentence out to five syllables, causing my long-dead high school English teacher to spin in his grave.

  “Oh.” He flipped through the pages. “Brian Richard Lamarr. Red hair matches his temper, high-school dropout and military reject based on his psych profile. Long list of convictions from when he was a juvenile, mostly petty theft and simple assaults, nothing he couldn’t talk or threaten his way out of. Spent two years in jail by the time he was twenty-five years old and acquired his powers. He came to us when he survived being shot in the head by his girlfriend.”

  “By his girlfriend?” I asked.

  Outrager’s mouth twisted into a sneer. “A bad breakup. Seems he was rather aggressive with his advances after she moved out, resulting in more assault charges. She got a restraining order, but when he broke into her house she shot him in self-defense.”

  “And he survived.” I stated the obvious.

  “Mr. Lamarr was in a coma for two months while recovering from surgery.” The papers fluttered through his fingers. “Without any family to authorize withdrawal of life support, it fell to the government to decide what to do.” He closed the file. “Fortunately for us we knew he had developed these skills, and we took over the case. When he woke up, we were there for him to offer our support through recovery and discovering his new abilities.”

  “Then you took over.” I finished the familiar scenario.

  “That’s what we do.” Outrager gave me a gentle smile, reminding me of a spider eyeing fresh prey. “We took him into the program and taught him how to use his skills.”

  “Which he’s now abusing,” Hunter added. He must have seen my blood pressure rising.

  “Yes, well.” Outrager turned his attention to the sheet. “Seems while he was in Philly fighting the aliens he killed his Guardian or allowed him to be killed and went into hiding.” His lip curled upward in disapproval. “He ran.”

  “Like a lot of us did. To survive,” Steve interrupted him, striding across the floor. The tall Pittsburgher towered over Outrager. “Your point?”

  “My point is…” the Agency man didn’t miss a beat, continuing to talk, “…that the U.S. government knows a super did this.”

  The throbbing moved behind my left eye. “What are they going to do?”

  “They want to know what you’re going to do.” A smile twitched at Outrager’s lips. “After all, you’re responsible.”

  Hunter leapt from the sofa. “You can’t say that.” He strode forward, stopping only inches away from the agent, his face scarlet. “It’s not her fault.”

  Outrager held his ground. “Oh, really? You, Jo Tanis, took it upon yourself to deactivate the plugs. We can’t kill or track any of the supers out there now. Which was fine when it was only you good guys, the heroes, but you also released a slew of angry, ticked-off villains out there without anyone controlling or watching them. No Guardians, no explosive plugs, no way to track them. And you’re surprised we’ve got a crisis on our hands?”

  I got to my feet. Hunter opened his mouth to respond, but I waved him off. “You’re right.” I looked around the room. “He’s right.”

  Outrager’s satisfied grin tempted me. My fingers itched to shock it right off his face. Instead, I paced around the room, shoving my way around Outrager and Hunter.

  “I was hoping they’d all be like Meltdown. Just slink quietly into the woodwork and get a new life, away from all this crap.” David coughed at the mention of Harris Limox, one of our founding members and originally a villain. He’d left right after the last big battle, promising me that he’d go straight. “I guess I was hoping too much.”

  “You’re not responsible.” David sat down in one of the thinly padded chairs near the couch. “You can’t force people to do something they don’t want to do.” He turned his stare on Outrager. “When you did it, it was wrong. You took Jo and the others and made them dance to your tune.”

  “To save the world,” Outrager replied, “which, in case you didn’t notice, they did. Thanks to our careful training and preparation.”

  I held up my hand. “Let’s not go over all that, otherwise I’ll have to throw you out a window, and I really don’t want to make a mess for David to clean up.”

  David pressed his lips together into a thin smile, but he remained silent.

  Outrager let out an exaggerated huff. “Yes, well, I’m a bad, mean old man and all that. The fact is right now various government bodies want to know what you’re going to do about it.”

  “Catch him?” I waved my hands in the air. “Isn’t that the logical assumption here?”

  “How?” Peter chirped.

  “That’s our job. We’ll figure it out.” My focus fell on Outrager. “Where’s his girlfriend?”

  He gave me a blank look.

  “If Lamarr is still pissed off at her, he’s going to go hunting for her now that he’s free. Where is she?”

  “Oh, that.” Outrager dismissed my question with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. “We put her in witness protection right after he woke up. She’s long gone under a different name in another part of the country. He’ll never be able to find her.” A weary look came over his face. “You’d be surprised how many people we’ve had to put into the program to keep them safe from supers—their old friends, enemies and family. Remind me to brief you on that sometime, you might enjoy the lesson.”

  I ignored the insult. “Thanks for the visit. Goodbye. Leave the file.”

  He frowned.

  I glared. I also allowed a few sparks to escape from my fingers.

  After a minute he spun on his heel and headed for the stairs. “I’ll be in touch. Enjoy.”

  I sighed and collapsed onto the couch, listening to the steps creak and moan with his exit. Hunter took up my pacing routine, his face contorted in either constipation or worry. I figured the latter.

  “Jo, I didn’t sign up with the Protectors to be a bounty hunter.” Steve sat down on the workout bench. He rubbed his head, brushing his fingers over the bare skin. “I’m not comfortable hunting down our own. Not for the Agency, not for nobody.”

  “He’s not ‘our own’,” Peter protested. “We’re lucky he didn’t kill anyone today. But what if he sets off one of those things in New York City? Or Los Angeles?”

  “Or Toronto,” David added, his soft voice dominating the room. “But does it matter where?” He interlaced his fingers and leaned forward, his gaze moving from one face to the other. “It’s not what you w
ant to do, but it’s what you have to do. If you don’t act on this, more supervillains will come out of the shadows to demand money, payoffs to not attack and kill people, holding the world hostage.” David’s attention turned to me. “I’m sure that wasn’t what you wanted, Jo, when you started all this. But it’s what you have to do to…” A wry smile appeared. “Save the world.”

  The last three words put their grip on my heart and squeezed tight. It’d been Mike’s last order to me, right before he set off a self-detonation sequence in his metal suit and died in an effort to take out one of the aliens attacking Earth. Save the world.

  “And that’s what we’re going to keep doing.” I wrinkled my nose as the smell of sweat assaulted my senses. “But first, I need a shower. And so do the rest of you.” I pointed at Jessie. “Please try to figure out how to find this guy. Does he have any seismic traces he leaves behind, some sort of wave he puts out before he strikes, something. There’s got to be something we can use in that Agency file. Hunter, add what you can from your own experiences and help decipher any Agency bafflegab. I’ll clear the shower as fast as I can.”

  Without waiting for an answer I strode into my bedroom. It took a few minutes to grab a clean pair of track pants and T-shirt, and I headed for the small bathroom and the shower stall.

  There was plenty of hot water, and I took advantage of it, scrubbing the grimy sweat off as fast as I could. The almost full cucumber-and-green-tea shower gel bottle sat unmolested on the small plastic shelf beside the thinning bar of white soap. I flipped the cap and dumped a good amount into my hand, ignoring the communal soap. A generic washcloth hung on the rack, but I’d be damned if I shared it with the rest of the boys. They might not mind, but I had no wish to swim with that much DNA. The first whiff I got of cucumber and green tea from any of them, and I’d be switching to another fragrance of shower gel.

  My mind raced through various levels of confusion, settling down to draw up a wish list.

  I hoped that Jessie could track this punk. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to kill this super. I hoped that I wouldn’t end up regretting turning off all the plugs, even if it’d saved my own life.