We Could Be Heroes

by Harmon Cooper

  At least they hadn’t gotten their asses kicked, right?

  And they probably would have too, because fake tiger-eared Zoe had been tracking some organized crime movement in one of the red-light districts, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Centralian police forces were also aware of them, well, things may have turned out differently.

  Sure, Zoe was fast with her kicks and swift with her punches, but she was a non-exemplar, just like Sam… just like Sam had been.

  He wasn’t so sure any longer.

  And Sam didn’t want to call it yet; he didn’t want to start thinking of himself as an exemplar. Once you were classified as a half-powered, a non-exemplar, you pretty much remained that way for life unless you won a superpower through the Hero Lottery.

  And Sam didn’t play the Hero Lottery because he knew it was rigged, and even if it wasn’t, rumor on the street was that they handed out pretty crappy powers. Who wanted the ability to turn things yellow, or the power to make your farts toxic?

  Nope, no Hero Lottery for Sam.

  But back to the Heroes Anonymous meeting, this one led by a pretty big looking dude named Bill.

  Sam had already spoken and confessed his sins, which at least got a chuckle from the small crowd. He sat behind a brooding guy with white hair and orange eyes, someone dressed a little too fashionably for a meeting like this.

  It had been two days since Sam’s arrest, and he was hoping Zoe would be here. But no, the woman fond of cosplaying as a tiger must have chosen a different time for a meeting, leaving Sam with a bunch of faces he didn’t recognize.

  He’d invited Helena too, but she had something to do, something regarding the board of the Knight Corporation. His fake fiancé was supposed to meet up with him later, and Sam was definitely looking forward to it.

  Helena was a pretty cool lady, super hot too, with a good sense of humor and a mischief behind her eyes that Sam had yet to fully discover, likely because she was finishing her period when they’d first met.

  Yep, Sam could smell that kind of stuff too, yet another gift and curse that came with his newfound olfactory power.

  Still trying to become a better mouth-breather, Sam sometimes made the mistake of inhaling through his nostrils, taking in information from whatever direction his face was pointed, which just so happened to be the head of the man in front of him, the guy with white hair and orange eyes who was dressed in all black.

  Sam was lost for a moment in the guy’s story—a former fighter, a dark secret, a wife on her deathbed, an exemplar?

  “Yikes,” Sam said under his breath, remembering to breathe out of his mouth. His needed to shut that shit down.

  Blah blah blah, blah blah, the meeting dragged on and on, and now Bill the H-Anon sponsor was going on about how none of them were unique, that they were all normal people, non-exemplars, that they shouldn’t go around parading as exemplars, that for many of them, one more strike meant a prison sentence.

  As he said this Bill looked directly at Sam, who had already started to focus on something else, this time a few of the posters on the wall.

  Motivational posters—Sam always liked those.

  So if Bill’s message was supposed to reach Sam in some way, it didn’t, especially after Sam received a mental message from Zoe saying that she was in trouble, and she needed his help.

  “I’ve got to go,” Sam said, standing immediately.

  Rather than get the stink-eye from Bill, or take any breaths through his nose as he passed by a few people, Sam just focused on making it to the back door. Once he did, he turned to Bill and offered him a quick wave and a bow before stepping out.

  Free at last, free at last, Sam was free at last!

  Down the hallway he went, where a stinky dude passed him, triggering an array of intuitions, leading Sam to conclude that the man simply didn’t like taking showers, and he didn’t care what people thought about him (which was probably why his wife had registered him for hygiene classes).

  Once Sam was outside, immediately noticing the drop in temperature, he fired off a mental message to Zoe. First of all, you aren’t supposed to be doing any of that type of work, he thought to her. But I guess it’s too late for me to remind you of that now. Where are you?

  Zoe’s message appeared in his head moments later.

  Sam, they’re going to bring a telepath and shut me down. Shit, this is so embarrassing. I’m in the old Casper Flour warehouse on 39th and 62nd. I’ve got like ten minutes or something. Maybe less. Help me!

  Zoe the wannabe beast morpher was not supposed to be doing any type of hero work. If she contacted law enforcement, they would come to her assistance, but they would also arrest her for impersonating an exemplar.

  And that would be her third strike.

  I’m on my way, he finally thought back to her, and I’m bringing a friend.

  Chapter Eight: Someone Save Zoe!

  (The set up finished, the action begins!)

  Just like any rich country, there was a lot of dark shit going on in Centralia. The beacon on the hill always had its shadow, and the brighter the beacon, the deeper and further the shadow stretched.

  But Sam Meeko couldn’t give two shits about philosophical dualities.

  Our sort-of hero of this harrowed tale stood outside the old Casper Flour warehouse on 39th and 62nd Streets, his fists at his side, clenching and relaxing as he waited for Helena to arrive.

  “Come on, come on,” he mumbled to himself, doing his best not to just rush in there and start fighting people.

  Most Centralians learned to fight in grade school, it was part of the physical education curriculum, and Sam wasn’t weak, but he also hadn’t fought someone in a long time, and like most non-exemplars, he didn’t have a weapon.

  He didn’t have a permit to have a weapon, and Sam didn’t qualify for one of the permits. About a year ago, when he was doing pseudo-hero work with Zoe Goa Ramone, back when they were banging it out on the regular, Sam thought about illegally purchasing some tech from the Eastern Province, where most of the badass technology came from.

  But then they broke up, or whatever happened, and the thought found its way to that storage box at the back of his mind labeled “wishful thinking” where he stashed all discarded ideas.

  Now Sam was wishing he had followed through with it, especially with the fact that Helena was running late.

  His nostrils flared as he took in a big whiff of his surroundings, the history of the buildings coming to him, the last time the trash was collected (both visual and something he could smell probably without his powers), the life story of a woman that passed on her way to the red-light district.

  I’ve got to do something, Sam thought as he brazenly crossed the street, approaching the warehouse. There were lights on at the top, which he could see once he stepped over to the alley, the light on the second floor casting a bright arc to the building next to it.

  A flash of energy across the street caught his attention, and he looked to see a teleporter surrounded by golden energy appear with Helena, who wore a pair of high-waisted pants, a blouse and a pair of suspenders, her short gray hair combed off to the side and a big smile on her face as she spotted him.

  “There’s my husband-to-be,” Helena said after she crossed the street. “Sorry it took me so long. I had to vote on a few things shareholders were disagreeing over.”

  She came into Sam’s open arms, and gave him a playful kiss on the cheek.

  And even though he tried to breathe through his mouth as soon as she approached him, Sam was unable to stop himself from inhaling her essence in time, which merely told Sam that her menstrual cycle was finished, that she was down to get down tonight if an opportunity presented itself.

  Sam’s cheeks turned red for just a moment; he felt like a voyeuristic asshole for practically reading her mind, but he really had been trying to avoid it, and he wasn’t expecting her to get so close to him right after she appeared.

  “What matters now is saving Zoe,” Sam
said, his next thought coming out verbally.

  “Was there something else that mattered before?” Helena asked, as she stretched her arms over her head. As she did so, her shirt lifted, showing her tight belly button.

  “You can fight in that outfit, right?” Sam asked.

  Helena started to bend backwards, her suspenders reaching their breaking point as the bottom of her shirt met the bottom of her breasts. She was in a half wheel pose now held with extreme precision. Helena casually lifted one leg off the ground and then the other, so she now stood in a modified headstand. “Yes, I can fight.”

  “Great,” Sam said, trying not to stare too long at her rock-hard abs.

  “Why are we here anyway?” she asked as she righted herself. “You said you would tell me when I got here.”

  “Because Zoe is in that warehouse, and she’s been kidnapped,” Sam said under his breath. “I didn’t want to put this information in a mental message because, you know, just in case our thoughts are monitored. I mean no one knows if they really are or not, but just in case they are.”

  “Zoe, the woman who was in jail with us?”

  “Yes, that Zoe.”

  Helena’s eyebrow rose. “The same Zoe who you used to date and who still likes you?”

  “‘Yes’ to the first part of that question, and ‘no’ to the second part. I mean, I don’t know if she still likes me or not.”

  “Your nose can’t tell?” Helena asked, placing a single hand on Sam’s arm, electricity igniting between them.

  “I mean, I don’t believe everything I smell. Yeah, I’ll stick to that last statement.”

  “She seemed like a ball buster to me; I’m pretty sure if they tried anything, they would have regretted it since,” Helena said, turning to the warehouse.

  “She’s not as tough as she seems.” Sam stepped into the alley, circling around the back of the building and looking for an open window.

  There were a few windows on the back of the building, all of them shut, and the lights were off on the other side. As carefully as he could, Sam stepped onto a pipe coming out of the building, testing its weight, and once he saw it could hold him, he went to work on the window, trying to pry it open as best he could.

  Sam eventually got it open, but not very much, and he definitely wouldn’t be able to fit in there in its current state.

  He could however stick his nose in and take a big whiff…

  One million images came to him all at once, happier times when the building was used, when the people that worked there lived in the same district, arguments between supervisors and underlings, plots to get different jobs and pursue long-lost dreams.

  Another inhale and Sam begin to sift through all of this, almost as if he were swimming upstream, moving images all around him as he came to one of the more recent entries in the warehouse’s history.

  It was hard as hell for him to cut through all the memories, but he once he did, Sam sensed three outlines upstairs, a fourth person sitting in a chair.

  “There are three men and they haven’t received word from their boss yet as to what they should do with Zoe, who is currently seated. One man is now watching her, the other two are outside the room.”

  “Exemplars?” Helena asked.

  “I can’t tell.”

  “We’ll just have to be extra careful then,” Helena said as she moved to the door, confirming a suspicion Sam already had already sensed. “The door’s locked; I’m assuming going through the front entrance is an option, but a risky one, right?”

  “And if we break a window, they will definitely hear that.”

  “How much wider can you open that window?” she asked.

  Sam put his palms beneath the cracked window and pushed up. The damn thing would hardly budge. Summoning all his might, and perhaps some might he didn’t know he had, Sam was finally able to push it up about nine more inches.

  His muscles were screaming as he turned to Helena and asked her if this was enough space for her to squeeze through.

  “I’m pretty sure I can fit through that.”

  Sam stepped aside, making sure that the pipe could hold both of their weights.

  He knew how to push someone over a fence, as he had done that sort of stuff when he was a kid, but giving someone a lift into an open window was something he hadn’t tried before.

  But it made sense, though, so he cupped his hands together, allowing Helena to put her foot in his hands, the thin non-exemplar slipping into the window, her back arching forward, Sam’s eyes jumping to the curve of her lower back and her rump as she squeezed in, as the pressure left the palms of his hands.

  A few moments later and Sam looked left to see the back door opening quietly, Helena standing there with an irritable look on her face.

  “What is it?” he whispered, instantly seeing that the front of her blouse was black with soot.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said as she dusted herself off, “let’s just get up there.”

  ***

  The two would-be heroes carefully made their way through a large room, parts of the wall missing, bricks scattered across the ground and fluffy hunks of insulation lining the perimeter.

  Sam had no idea how this was going to play out. He knew that Helena was agile, that she was a practitioner of combat dance, but aside from a few contortionist moves, he hadn’t actually seen her in action.

  Compared to some of the other warehouses in Centralia, this one was quite small, two large rooms on the bottom, an additional floor on top, a basement below and a conveyor belt that ran from the front room to the back.

  Before they could enter the front room, Sam grabbed Helena’s wrist, turning her to him.

  “You have to be careful,” he told her. One quick inhalation through his sniffer and he could tell that Helena was more or less relaxed, that she wasn’t feeling the same tension he was experiencing.

  The lean woman was damn right calm, no more anxious than she was when they were getting fake engaged two days ago.

  “I’ll handle everything, and if any of the guys are still scrambling to their knees after I’m done, you come in and punch them in the back of the head. Or kick them.”

  “Got it.”

  “In other words, I will soften them up and put them down, and if I fail in the ‘putting them down’ department, I need you to come in and finish the job.”

  “I mean, I thought I would go in first…”

  Helena covered her mouth to hide her laugh. “That’s sweet,” she finally said. “Sam, if we’re ever going to do anything that’s actually heroic, we’ll need a real strategy. That means using our strengths and working together. Make sense?”

  “Totally,” Sam said with a nod. “I’m ready to back you up as soon as I see an opening.”

  Helena Knight placed her hands behind her back and performed an aerial, which is a cool way to say she did a no handed cartwheel, landing with absolutely no sound.

  Unnecessary? Yes, but it was cute, and afterward, as she took the stairs like a goddamn ninja, Sam felt pretty confident that some mobster dudes were about to have their asses straight up handed to them once Helena came around.

  Just be backup, Sam reminded himself as he took the stairs carefully, cringing every time he made even the semblance of sound. You are a badass… he reminded himself.

  Sam was breathing through his mouth now, trying his best to chill his nerves, to replicate just how calm Helena was.

  Sam looked to the stairwell on the right hand side of the room, and then to the second floor, which was likely where the warehouse manager would have sat and looked out at his employees, old eagle eyes looking for slackers.

  Helena had her back against the wall now, and momentarily forgetting to breathe out of his mouth, Sam took one whiff in her direction and nearly fell backward.

  She’s turned on? he thought, noticing the way her tongue was flitting against the top of her cheeks, her chest heaving up and down.

  Not trusting his sniff, Sam took anot
her whiff and quickly concluded that what he had sensed was true: Helena was wet as hell.

  And just as he was about to say something about it, she slipped around the corner and Sam heard the surprise yelp of a man as the combat dancer sprang into action.

  Sam turned the corner just in time to see Helena spin kick the living shit out of the first guard, run up the wall to avoid a chop from the second guy, flip around, drop to her haunches and take the first guard’s leg out by sweeping her foot the reverse direction.

  The second guy came at her and she used his momentum to run him into the wall, fist first, his knuckles breaking through the wall and getting stuck for a moment.

  Commotion exploded out of the room as the third guard stumbled out into the hallway, a wrist guard weapon from the Eastern Province on his arm.

  He fired a blast at Helena that went wide, the deadly ballerina one-hand cartwheeling out of the way just in time.

  The first guard was just about to get his bearings when Sam launched into action.

  He punched the guy in the back of the head, Sam’s knuckles stinging but his punch solid, the guy out cold as the third guard, the one with the weapon, turned to Sam.

  Sam had never heard someone snap their neck, but he was pretty sure that was the sound that reached his ears as Helena moved into a handstand, wrapped her knees around the guy’s neck, used her momentum to send her body to the right and bring the man into the wall, his neck and head now at the mercy of her knees and the floor.

  “Yikes,” Sam whispered as she stood and dusted off her legs, the third guard’s body in a sideways kneeling position, his spine all sorts of twisted.

  The only man left standing was the second guard, who had just managed to pull his arm out of the wall.

  He ran toward Helena to clothesline her; she simply stepped aside, pushing him into the open doorway and going in after him.

  Sam moved into the room too, where he locked eyes with Zoe, whose tiger ears were on the floor and stamped on, her metal claws thrown across the room.