Super Born: Seduction of Being

by Keith Kornell

  Before, I had always had a target, a plan in mind, before donning the outfit—but not tonight. Tonight, I would be on the prowl for a new way to use my powers. I didn’t feel like hiding or being cautious anymore. Paige was at Kelly’s house—she would be fine. It was time for me to show how strong I could be.

  * * *

  When I awoke the next morning, my eyes slowly opened and began to focus. I had slept like a log, and it took a minute to become aware of my surroundings. When my eyes did focus, a shot of adrenaline made me leap to my feet. My hands—there was dried blood on my knuckles, and on the side of my hand below the little finger. In horror, I flipped my hands around, over and over, searching for the wound from which the blood had come. There was nothing.

  I inspected my bare arms and torso, but found no source for the blood. I ran to the dressing mirror to check my entire body. Then came another shot of adrenaline at the sight of lines of blood on my cheek and even in my hair. On the floor beside the mirror was the pile of my black B.I.B. clothes ripped and stained with crimson that varied from specks to small pools.

  My thoughts grew to panic—not only did I have no idea where the blood had come from, I had no recollection of what had happened last night. I remembered leaving the house; I remembered standing on a rooftop downtown with a strong breeze filling my hair and cape, then nothing else until waking up.

  In alarm and frustration, I pounded the frame of the mirror with my fists, rattling the glass, until it almost broke. I had imagined showing everyone how powerful and potent I could be, yet I was powerless even to remember what I had done, and to whom. I slid down the mirror until I was a ball on the floor. I sobbed, and tears began to run down my cheek, drifting through the blood and ending up pink as they dropped to the floor. After a moment, I gained control and opened my eyes to look into the mirror. I didn’t know who this was either.

  I heard Paige’s voice calling from down the hall. “Mom? You better get up or you’ll be late for work…I’m leaving for school. Are you up?” she said, knocking on the door.

  In an instant I was composed. “Yeah, I’m up, honey. Have a good day,” I said, quickly donning a robe.

  “Okay, see you at Lori’s after work. I hope she’s not having meat loaf again…Mom, I’m sorry about the fight last night. I know you work really hard and you do your best for me. I was just being a jerk.”

  Now I felt doubly upset, I didn’t know where I’d been the night before and could think of little else while my daughter showed her concern for me. What kind of mom was I?

  “I’m really sorry too, honey. If anybody’s a jerk it’s me.” I quickly got to the door, one-eyed my face beyond the door jamb, and waved. “Love you.”

  “Love you too..See you at Lori’s.”

  “Have a good day.”

  When I heard the door slam, I leapt to the bathroom and started the shower. How much water would it take to wash this blood down the drain?

  * * *

  All day at work, my mind was an unfocused maze of thoughts and fears. Occasionally, I would hear co-workers talking about the news, something that had happened the night before. Now and then, I would hear someone use the word B.I.B. I wanted to ask them what had happened, or check for the news on my computer, but was afraid of what I might find. Finally, just before lunch, my friend Jan came by.

  “Some crazy night, huh?”

  “What? Something Happen?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Jan was obviously excited to find someone who hadn’t heard the news. “The B.I.B.—nobody sees her for a while and then, bam, sounds like she was in five places at once last night. Of course, nobody will confirm it was her, but who else could it be? There were a lot of witnesses. They’re talkin’ about the police going after her this time.”

  “Anybody hurt?” I finally had the courage to ask.

  “Oh yeah, lots of people. Hospitals and jail are full of ’em. Mostly lowlifes. I would think twice before committing a crime in Scranton after last night. She didn’t arrest ’em; she pummeled their asses first this time. It’s all good as far as I’m concerned, though. I heard she broke bones on two wife-beaters and nearly castrated some guy while he was having sex with his ten-year-old stepdaughter, sick shit. All in one night! She was, like, everywhere. Just goes to show you the amount of crap happening every day. It’s scary. Oh, and did you see the pictures of the beer trucks? You gotta see those!”

  Jan sat on the corner of my desk and stole my keyboard. She typed frantically, and up popped a slide show of pictures from the local news channel. “Watch this.”

  The first picture was of the mayor standing in his driveway with his hands on his hips and a sour look on his face. In the foreground, surrounded by police, was the massive Miner’s Lite beer truck that had crushed his black Cadillac. “Is that cool or what?” asked Jan.

  The second picture was a series of shots of the headquarters for Camino Waste Management. The first was a picture of the top of the building with just the tops of two Miner’s trucks showing, the rest of the trucks having landed inside the building. The second was a view of the same building from an aerial view showing the two trucks inside the building. The third was a picture of Carmine Camino standing in the parking lot of his headquarters with hands in the air apparently yelling at a nearby policeman. Beside him sat the remains of a heavy-lift helicopter, with its tail section bent and nearly broken off, its rotor blades bent and tied into a big bow.

  As those pictures flashed I couldn’t help but laugh at a trickle of memories that was coming back to me. But it took me a while to remember intercepting the other trucks as they were dropped from the helicopter, intended to hit an innocent church, school, and home and redirecting them at the mayor and Camino. When I saw him and the mayor at the Miner’s truck impound lot, I’d put two and two together and got ‘Camino’s a rat.’ I remember lifting the helicopter off the ground after it had returned to its field to make sure it was done playing beer truck catch with me for the night. I hoped bringing their little game to their home turf might make them realize the discredit-the-B.I.B -game was not worth the price.

  The next picture brought back memories that…weren’t so good. There was a picture of a man with blood pouring from his nose as he weakly supported an arm being bandaged by EMS staff. He looked like a pure victim. It didn’t show in that picture, but that guy’s next stop after the hospital was jail, for trying to jack a car from a couple of young women.

  Then there was a man sitting on a curb with blood streaming from his head. His pregnant wife, who he had just kicked in the stomach, wasn’t in the frame—she was being laid on a gurney—nor were the police that had surrounded the man. It seemed the media was intentionally trying to make me look like a villain, rather than a vigilante. Vigilante had a negative connotation, but it comes from the word for ‘ someone who watches over’ or and I was one in the purest sense of the word.

  Jan laughed. “She really beat the crap out of that guy.” In actuality I remembered only giving him a light tap that had knocked him over. The concrete road did the rest of the work. If I had beat the crap out of him, he wouldn’t have looked so good.

  As each picture slid by, I remembered more and more of the night before. But I’m not sure that was a good thing. I began to wonder what I was capable of. Moreover, what control did I have over it? I had certainly exerted a lot of force, but was it power?

  When Jan saw that I was not talking, she asked, “You okay?”

  “Didn’t sleep well. I’ll be fine.”

  “Can I buy you lunch?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got to pick up something for Paige. I’ll take a rain check.”

  “Okay, see ya later.”Jan waved and nodded as she left.

  I took a deep breath, sighed, and then examined my reflection in the window for a long moment. Who was I?

  Chapter 19

  Who Was I?

  When my lunch break came, I walked past the old prune out of the building into a sunny, windswept
afternoon that was warm for this time of April. I buttoned my light coat and hurried off down the sidewalk.

  With only a short lunch break, I had to rush to pick up some clothes Paige wanted from a store near the office. We had picked them out a few days ago, but I didn’t have enough money at the time. Ahead, I could see the streetlight about to change, so I broke into a jog to cross the street in time. At the same time, a young man with a large bag draped over his shoulder emerged from an alleyway with his head down. Neither of us expected the other to be there, but, in an instant, we had collided and almost knocked each other over. The collision sent the man’s shoulder bag to the ground with a metallic clang and made me lean on him to keep from falling.

  No damage done—I laughed, apologized, and tried to make light of the incident. But the scrawny, dark-haired man seemed panicked. His dark eyes grew wide and he flailed his arms to get away from me. That was just rude. Quickly, I knew something was wrong.

  He pounced on his bag, but not before I saw that it was filled with five or six pipes, capped at both ends, a configuration I’d seen many times before on the news. He clutched it to his chest, gave me a threatening look, and then ran back down the alley from the same direction he had come.

  I had a quick choice to make. Should I let him go, knowing a bag full of pipe bombs might go with him—or grab him now, right now? I didn’t want to be the B.I.B. right now. The events of the previous night had made me frightened and uncertain of the course I was on. But I didn’t know if I could live with myself if he wound up hurting anyone.

  Who did I want to be? In that instant, I would have to decide. With my costume lying bloody in the closet, I had no cover for my actions.

  For a moment I felt my feet anchored in rebellion against the seduction of the powers that drew me into this unpredictable life. Then the cloak of responsibility fell. If I did not do something this instant, this guy was on his way somewhere with a bag of explosives. Before he had traveled twenty feet, I was on him.

  His collar jerked back in my hand and his feet left the ground. I swung my arm to the left, and he flew like a shot into the wall of a building and the Dumpster that was beside it. He didn’t move, and his arm twisted unnaturally beneath him. I lifted the bag from the ground and held it at arm’s length as I heard the sound of voices coming down the alley. A burly biker dude, a middle-aged woman clutching her purse, and a young man and woman were coming my way.

  The biker walked up behind me and stopped. “You okay, lady? What’d this loser try to pull? I saw him hit you.”

  I stood with my back to him, not knowing what to do. Was I the B.I.B., a single mom from Scranton, or someone else?

  “Hey, lady?” he said, touching my shoulder.

  I hesitated for a long moment, turned, and handed the biker the bag, saying, “Call 911,” then assumed the best disguise I could muster—a deep, profoundly puckered fish face.

  The biker looked at the bag and saw the pipes, “Holy Shit,” he said under his breath. But before he could look up, I had moved down the alley, away from the crowd as quickly as I dared, and turned a corner.

  “Hey, lady!” called the biker.

  * * *

  The events of the previous night were a gold mine for my website. I was like a friggin’ six-year-old on Christmas morning again. There were dozens and dozens of sightings, reports, comments, and even some pictures. It sounded like the B.I.B. had been everywhere that night—in so many places I had to assume most of them were fake reports. There was so much content posted that I had to call Rebecca and ask her to reorganize and expand it. Despite the fact that the B.I.B. had dished out her own sense of justice this time, the comments on the site were overwhelmingly positive.

  The newspaper had the same problem, as I did, with the sheer volume of content. Eventually, they chose to run all of the news reports in the same section of the paper under the headline, “The B.I.B.?” When I saw those four pages of short articles on alleged this and possible that, it brought a smile to my face. I was no closer to finding the B.I.B., but I had to marvel at what she had done…again. Imagining her dealing out all this justice, like some kind of karma machine, filled me with pride. Then my thoughts drifted to the image of her inches away from me at O’Malley’s…damn, there was that pining again.

  For the first time since the Searchlight Event, the network news made mention of the B.I.B., calling her the “Scranton vigilante.” The network news and news magazine shows picked up on her for the first time, running spots that were somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It was pretty much like, “Those nuts in Scranton, here they go again…” but with somewhat more serious tones. I could tell many of the photos used were pimped from my site, despite the fact that I had paid good money for the rights, and included my copyright in the captions. (I really needed to find an attorney.)

  There was a short cell phone video of some big guy in the street trying to mess with her—that ended rather abruptly when the big guy didn’t take the B.I.B. seriously, and she dropped him as easily as if she was brushing her hair. Then it ended with a blowup of the Skelly’s photo; still my favorite and still my copyright, thank you very much.

  * * *

  I stood in what was left of my office at Camino Waste Management and watched as the riggers attached lift cables and chains to the Miner’s truck. Its rear end was still sticking up though my once-beautiful Italian marble floor, the truck itself lodged between floors after having fallen headfirst through the roof, through my office, and partially into the floor below. I could hear the sounds of hammering and cutting torches from below as workers tried to clear the scraps of steel that held the truck in place.

  I found the remains of my desk and computer in shards beside the back bumper of the truck, picked up the twisted keyboard, then shook my head and threw it to the ground. It occurred to me that if I had been at that desk when the truck hit, they would still be trying to collect all of my pieces.

  The riggers asked me to leave as they lowered a cable down through the expanded hole they had cut in the ceiling. The cable snaked down from a massive crane parked outside that would take the weight of the truck once the final bits supporting it were cut away.

  I reluctantly left my office and stepped into my reception area. When I closed the door, it was like moving into a different world—one where everything was still in its place, not having been turned upside down by some flying bitch. I would have to work out of the same space as my assistant, Larry, until my office was put back together.

  So I stepped in there and sat down in his squeaky, uncomfortable chair behind his plain metal desk. I spun around and took in the dump—tiny, compared to mine. His computer was old compared to mine. Hell, there wasn’t even a window. I sighed and noticed Larry had left his coffee cup on “my” desk. It was a B.I.B. mug bearing the picture of her at Skelly’s, just like the friggin’ T-shirts! I threw it through the open doorway and heard it smash against the wall.

  Larry ducked, saying, “Jesus!”. The mug had flown just past his head as he came down the hall.

  I couldn’t help but remember observing Gambrelli feeling the same frustration at dealing with the B.I.B. That bitch is gonna pay for this! She is going to pay! I thought, slamming my fist on the desk.

  When I touched the keyboard on Larry’s desk, his computer blinked to life—on the screen was an unfinished game of B.I.B. Rescue. My first thought was, “Wow, he’s got 27,500 points.” Then the anger exploded in me. Even my own people idolized her!

  I yelled for everyone to hear, “Son of a bitch, is everyone around here crazy?”

  Chapter 20

  Jones and I Regroup at O’Malley’s

  That entire day, I could not lose a nervous little feeling that someone was about to drop the hammer on poor, innocent Logan. I felt antsy, and had a feeling of foreboding about who knew what. After all, the media attention was making my website ring like a cash register. While I sat, advertisers were paying for hit after hit. What did I have to worry about? Yet I pa
ced in my apartment like a caged cat; actually, it was more like a kinda slow, meandering cat; okay, a large lap cat—a real nasty one after a full meal—but you get the picture.

  I decided that the publicity, the money, and the sense of what’s-gonna-happen-next had sidetracked my little voyage of discovery. Somewhere along the line, I had forgotten those blue/green-flashing eyes, the way she could drain a full beer bottle, and the fact that she left twenties as tips. Just the remembrance of which had suddenly created a feeling in my pants that hadn’t been there for what…weeks now.

  Holy shit! Weeks? What had I become, a friggin’ nun? No, nuns were women, so I took solace in that. At least I wasn’t becoming a nun, just somebody that wasn’t getting any very often. (But no one needs to know that, okay?)

  There was only one thing to do, and that was to get back to where I had been, my humble origins, (keeping the money and celebrity of course. I wasn’t crazy.) So I called Dr. Jones .

  “Yes, my friend, this has certainly been a crazy time, but I am glad that you are calling.”

  “Man, did you see the pictures of what happened?”

  “Yes,” said Jones, a bit dreamy.

  “We really need to find her before this thing gets out of hand. You know she didn’t make any friends last night, beating up the whole town.”

  “I am certain she had good reason…” He drifted for off a moment. “What is it that you have in mind?” he said. finally returning to planet Earth.

  Just like the first night I’d met Jones and struggled to understand his theory, I was back to stroking my hand through my hair (not a good sign). “I don’t really know Doc. I thought maybe you and I could meet and hash something out.”

  “Sound like a total non-plan to me; not even the beginning of an idea for a plan someday…but it works for me. Where and when, my friend?”

  So we decided to meet that night at eight—where else?—at O’Malley’s, where the whole thing had begun.

  I arrived promptly at 8:27, and Dr. Jones arrived promptly at 8:32. We sat in the same booth. Even though it was already summer, everything around us seemed the same as it had in January. The RFDs were pulling the restroom door in the wrong direction repeatedly, sliding off bar stools, and of course, there was the occasional sound of laughter and rifle shots from the back room, though it was blank rifle shots these days. The only thing missing was the luscious blond in the corner.