We Could Be Heroes

by Harmon Cooper

  And even as the only guy left standing swiped at her, Zoe ducked his punch, moving back to the shadows and coming back out again, not to fight him, but to bring a knee down onto the blinded guy, the guy letting out a loud umph! as the air left his lungs.

  The man she had first kicked in the face finally got his weapon up, which meant that she had two enemies left, both with ranged weapons.

  Another thing Zoe’s trainer had taught her was about dealing with someone with ranged capabilities.

  The time it takes to fire versus the time it takes to clear the distance between you and the shooter can often be negligible depending on your speed and their combat skill.

  Zwapp!

  The energy beam moved close enough to Zoe that she could feel its heat. Unfortunately for the shooter, she had already cleared the distance between her and the man, preparing to pounce, going in with both a claw and a fist.

  This was an attack that provided a boost to her punch via the metal on her hand, and the sharp sting of a claw as she finished with a swipe. The third goon fired his weapon at her, but Zoe was already on the ground by this point, the blast going over her head and striking the first man down.

  “Options are up,” Zoe told the third thug as she turned to him, ignoring the second set of screams now.

  Whatever they had loaded into the wrist guard wasn’t set to stun; it was set to boil and sizzle, the air now filling with a metallic smell, the first man shitting himself as the energy did its damage.

  “I’ll kill you!” the third man bellowed, noticing their size difference.

  Zoe had mostly kept to the shadows, in order to confuse her attackers and make her attacks appear random. But now that the man saw that it was clearly a woman, he was feeling confident enough that he stupidly lowered his weapon to address her physically instead.

  Which was the last mistake he made that night, Zoe bringing him down with a few quick jabs, no claws this time, all muscle.

  In the end, one goon had been blasted with an energy weapon, another had had his eyes gouged out, and the final had been beaten to within an inch of his life.

  Zoe was out of breath by the end of the fight, but it felt damn good to be in control, powerful, able to best three large men. Once she was sure they were down, she turned her attention to what they’d been smuggling.

  She assumed it was some type of narcotic, but after she approached the crate, Zoe heard some struggling inside, realizing almost immediately that it was something else entirely.

  “Shit,” Zoe whispered, firing off a mental message to Sam.

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda

  (Vampires have to eat too!)

  If only there had been more time, Sam Meeko and Ozella Rose would have reached Dr. Hamza Grumio’s place just a little sooner.

  They would have already knocked on his door, and discovered that there was some seriously weird shit going on inside, including but not limited to, the woman he was torturing in one of his holding cells.

  Or enslaving.

  Or experimenting on, if you asked him, for the good of all Centralians!

  If only Sam and Ozella had figured out where Dr. Hamza lived sooner, left the diner a little earlier, or perhaps, if the three goons Zoe bested had appeared a bit later, putting more time between Zoe’s attack, her message to Sam, and now.

  But that’s not how things played out, and standing before Dr. Hamza’s place, practically lifting his fist to knock, Sam received the message from Zoe Goa Ramone, informing him of her discovery.

  “We have to go now,” he told Ozella, dropping his hand.

  “What is it?” Ozella asked.

  “It’s Zoe; she’s run into something.”

  Sam ordered an unlicensed teleporter, someone who was off the books, not employed by the Centralian government. It wasn’t hard to find one of these teleporters, and now that they had a union, one could simply contact the union via a mental message, and the teleporter would appear.

  The only thing was, sometimes there was a little bit of a wait for one of these exemplars.

  Luckily for Sam and Ozella, the teleporter appeared within three minutes, a female with her hair combed over to the right, the other side of her head shaved. She wore a pair of sweet oval glasses, and a low-cut top, several necklaces too.

  “And where are we going?” she asked, even though Zoe’s location had already been forwarded to the service.

  Sam confirmed the address with the teleporter.

  She nodded and reached both hands out, a whirlwind of energy lifting the three. They reappeared at the mouth of the alley, on a deserted street, the only streetlamp half a block up, its light flickering.

  “Enjoy,” the teleporter said before she tornadoed away.

  “Is this going to be illegal?” Ozella asked.

  Sam had already taken a step into the alley, but Ozella stood back, her hands behind her body, her chest jutting out just a little.

  “Well?” she asked.

  Sam had already realized via his sniffer that many of the ways Ozella stood naturally looked like a pinup from adult-rated loli cosplay magazines.

  Even if she didn’t always know it, Ozella had a profound effect on men.

  “I don’t know if it’s going to be illegal or not, but let’s go with the assumption that it will be,” he finally told her. “Zoe makes her own rules, always has, and always will.”

  “I guess you two stand to lose more than me, so let’s just see what it is,” Ozella said as she took a step toward him.

  They turned into the dark alley together, and it was only after walking about fifteen yards that they came upon Zoe Goa Ramone, standing in front of a wooden crate, three men stacked on top of one another off to the right.

  Sam wished he hadn’t taken a whiff of the air, smelling the blood, the garbage, the fact that one of the assailants had shit himself, and…

  “No way,” Sam said, picking up his pace.

  “What is it?” Ozella asked as she caught up to them.

  “It’s not…” Sam pinched his nose. “What have you found?” he asked Zoe. “Why were you here?”

  “These guys are from the same organization that kidnapped me the other day,” Zoe said, some of her dark hair now in her face, her head still covered by the hood with tiger ears. “I heard them mention this place, so I scoped it out.”

  Ozella rounded the crate and looked inside. “But… but they’re just children,” she whispered, her face going white.

  “We’ve got to alert the authorities.” Sam ran his hand along his chin, his mouth open as he took breath in, afraid to use his superpowered sniffer once he saw the kids in the crate.

  “And what are they going to do?” Zoe asked, her hands on her hips.

  “Their job?” Ozella looked to Sam for support.

  “Yes, they’re going to do their job.”

  And in that moment, Sam noticed a familiar face in the crate, a teen with red hair, the same one he’d seen on the trolley, the one he knew was going to die.

  “It can’t be,” he said, moving closer to the crate.

  “Don’t reach in there,” Zoe said.

  “What happened to them? They’re all…”

  “Drained,” Ozella said, finishing his sentence. “What is it, Sam?”

  “The one with red hair, I knew this was gonna happen to her, she’s the one I told you about. I could have stopped this!”

  “Use your nose,” Ozella urged him. “What do you sense?”

  “Like you said, they were drained.”

  “How?” Zoe asked, peering into the crate. The children were all dead and their bodies pale, as if they had been…

  “Their blood,” Sam said, taking a big sniff in.

  Even though he didn’t want to fucking do it, Sam stuck his head into the crate to confirm what he was sensing.

  As he was pulling his head out, one of the children reached out and grabbed his arm, the young boy gasping, his eyes blood red.

  The fist that
Zoe sank into the kid’s head caused the boy’s neck to snap, letting out a terrible screech that sounded more animal than human. He twitched for a moment and exhaled a final breath.

  “Shit…” Sam whispered. “Shit, shit, shit, shit. Shit!”

  They saw a light appear at the end of the alley, a telltale sign that the Centralian fuzz was about to make their presence known.

  This was a warning that citizens had voted on a few years back, and while law enforcement didn’t like that they had to give their cover away, it did give people ample time to decide if it was worth sticking around.

  For Sam, Zoe, and Ozella, especially with two of them having rap sheets, it was time to bail.

  “This way,” Zoe said, racing forward, fast as Sam had ever seen her.

  He took off after her just as Ozella slipped, hindered by the short heels she was wearing.

  Sam scooped the schoolgirl cosplayer into his arms, ignoring the embarrassed look on her face as he tried to catch up to Zoe, who made it to the end of the alley and pulled a hard right, then a left, then another right, directly into the waiting portal of the unlicensed teleporter she’d ordered.

  The three of them vanished in an instant, seconds before the police arrived.

  Chapter Twenty-Four: When in Doubt, Team Up

  (Time to make it official. When in doubt, form a team of heroes and go around handing people their asses.)

  “There’s no way I can just sit by and let that kind of shit happen,” Zoe Goa Ramone said as she paced back and forth. Maybe to emphasize her point, or perhaps because it was getting hot, she tore her hood off, tossing it onto a couch, huffing, upset to find herself helpless yet again, not able to see justice served.

  They were in Helena’s mansion, something she didn’t seem too excited about, Sam still holding Ozella in his arms, a cut on her knee evidence that she’d fallen.

  “What’s going on?” Helena Knight asked as she stepped out of her bedroom, light on her feet as always, wearing low-rise pajama pants, her midriff exposed, a tight bralette that nearly showed her nipples.

  “Is she always wearing this kind of stuff around here?” Zoe asked Sam.

  “Beats me, I just moved in,” he told her as he set Ozella down on the couch.

  “When you move in, you can wear what you want too,” Helena said, a coy smile on her face. “So what’s going on? And what’s wrong with Ozella?”

  “I’m fine, just fell,” Ozella said.

  “You may not like what we’re about to tell you,” Sam started to say.

  “Let me handle this.” Zoe cleared her throat, a brisk smile coming to her face as she turned to Helena. “I wanted to get a little revenge for what happened the other night, when I was kidnapped. So I went to a location that I heard the guys discussing and waited. I don’t know how long I was going to have to wait. Anyway, eventually they came, and I pounced,” she said, showing her metal claws, the nails extending.

  “And that’s it?” Helena asked, looking from Zoe to Sam. “Why the panic?”

  “No, there’s more to the story,” said Zoe hurriedly. “They were transporting a crate, and inside the crate were dead bodies. Children.”

  “Dead children?” Helena gasped.

  “Children that had been drained of all their blood,” said Ozella in her soft voice. “By vampires.”

  “Hold on…” Sam’s eyes went wide as he recalled what he’d sensed from the children, a terrible creature feeding on them, a man… No… A woman… No… Sam couldn’t tell, but whatever it was, it had drained the children completely, all aside from that one. “I think we have bigger problems,” Sam finally said.

  “Bigger problems than vampires?” Zoe shook her head. “First of all, I’m not going to consider them vampires just yet without more evidence. There was that outbreak in the Western Province, but that was there, not here, and years ago. Those types of things don’t happen here in Centralia.”

  “Or at least they aren’t supposed to,” Helena added.

  “That kid was still alive though, the one that lunged for me. He might have bitten me if it hadn’t been for you punching him in the head,” Sam told Zoe. “What if the police get there and he attacks them?”

  “I hit him pretty hard with a metal fist,” Zoe reminded him. “And that area of the city is usually patrolled by exemplars, so I don’t see that happening. Besides, I knocked the shit out of him. If he wasn’t dead before the punch, he was after.”

  “This is all quite unsettling,” Helena said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  Sam felt a surge of excitement as he glanced between the three women. He knew two of them who were pretty good at fighting, and one was incredibly smart, this coupled with the fact that she could apparently heal from damage rather easily with the help of the mysterious ghost woman named Dinah.

  “So I’ve been thinking,” Sam said, his fists curling at his side. “Somehow, I’ve been re-granted my exemplar ability, and as crazy as this sounds…”

  Zoe’s eyes softened.

  “I think we should form a group—and I don’t know the details of it yet,” Sam said, his hands coming up as if they were trying to protest his last statement, “but I think the four of us together could do some good around here, and by here, I mean Centralia.”

  “I’m in,” Zoe said quickly.

  “You know that three of us are in trouble with the law, right?” Helena asked. “Although I may be able to work around that, as I have done in the past.”

  Zoe rolled her eyes.

  “I’m aware of the law,” Sam said. “But I’m not afraid of it, and I think I have an angle.”

  “I don’t really have any powers,” Ozella reminded them, and even though he was trying to breathe out of his mouth, Sam took a deep breath in through his nose, sensing Ozella’s imaginary friend again.

  Dinah was there, nude, sitting cross-legged before Ozella, her mouth on the small wound on her knee.

  Sam shook his head, looked away and looked back again to see that Dinah was just finishing up, wiping her mouth, Ozella’s wound completely healed.

  “I…” Sam took a deep breath in, this time through his mouth. “As I was saying, I might have an angle here.”

  “An angle?” Zoe asked.

  Sam produced the small vial from his pocket and showed it to them. “I found this in the park earlier when we were doing some volunteer work for H-Anon,” he said, nodding to Helena. “It was invented by a man named Dr. Hamza Grumio, and whatever was inside this vial triggers a person’s exemplar power.”

  “Hold up. You’re saying it turns someone into an exemplar?” Zoe asked. “That’s impossible.”

  “We are already exemplars,” Sam said, “all of us. Our powers are just dormant and this medicine he’s created, this serum or whatever, opens up that dormant power. Everyone in our entire world is an exemplar. It doesn’t matter if they’re from the Western Province or the Eastern Province, the Northern Alliance or the Southern Alliance, or Centralia itself, everyone is an exemplar, but all the non-exemplars’ powers are dormant. We all know this.”

  The four of them nodded. This was in fact common knowledge, something that Centralian mothers used to remind their half-powered children that they too were special.

  “And whatever was in this vial activates that power, brings it out of hibernation. In fact, Ozella and I were going to meet the man when we got your message.”

  “Sam was just about to knock on his door but we came to help you instead,” Ozella chimed in.

  “Then let’s go meet him now,” Zoe said, trying to cover the way she was smiling at Sam by looking away.

  “It’s late,” Helena reminded her. “Not everyone is out prowling around at night. And if he is a scientist, he may be working, or he might have worked the last forty-eight hours in a row, and is just now trying to get some much-needed rest. I say we visit him tomorrow, as a group, and feel it out a little. We shouldn’t come on too strong. And if it’s money that he needs, that’s not really a problem
,” she said with a thin smile.

  “I have money too,” Zoe snapped back.

  “There may be more to it than that,” Sam told them, not yet ready to reveal what he had been sensing about Dr. Hamza. From what he could tell, the guy had a serious shady streak.

  “What were you saying earlier?” Ozella asked Sam. “About forming a group? Let’s return to that discussion. We don’t know what this doctor-guy has yet, and until we do, we shouldn’t speculate.”

  “Right,” Sam said. “I’ll just get to the point: I want us to form a group and try to get to the bottom of, well, for one thing, whatever’s going on with these vampires. The police may know some things, but their investigations usually get bogged down, especially if they involve something that spans several departments. We’re smaller, and we can move much faster.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Helena said, taking a light step forward, and balancing on one foot, her ankle coming to rest on her shin. She stuck her hands in her pockets, bringing her low-rise sleep pants down just a little bit further. “You’re asking us to form a group of vigilante heroes, right? I mean, let’s just be frank with it, that is what you’re suggesting, right?”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” Sam said, stumbling over his words.

  “Because you know I’m down,” Helena said.

  “I already said I was down,” Zoe added quickly.

  “As long as you guys will have me,” said Ozella quietly.

  “So everyone is in agreement then,” Sam said, trying to stop himself from clapping his hands together with excitement. “Good! That was easier than I thought it would be.”

  “Did you expect us to say no?” Zoe asked.

  “I didn’t know how you’d take it…”

  “Vigilante heroes,” Ozella said with a whisper. “I like it.”

  “In that case, looks like tomorrow’s going to be pretty busy.” Helena yawned. “We’ll need to start training together, and I’ll need to see about getting us some proper uniforms.”