We Could Be Heroes

by Harmon Cooper

  Helena smiled at the strange, buxom woman. “Brilliant,” she finally said. “These are all things that I need to find out to better understand my power.”

  “All right, what do you have for me?” Zoe asked as she stepped up, scooting in next to Helena, their hips touching.

  “The term to describe what has happened to you is bio-morphing,” Ozella explained. “In Centralia’s system, you would be a Type II Class C, I believe, but that’s neither here nor there, and the Centralian system isn’t that great for ranking.”

  Ozella tore a sheet of paper out of her notebook and gave it to Zoe, allowing her to look it over.

  Zoe Goa Ramone

  Codename: Tiger Ears

  -Biomorphing

  -Heightened Agility

  -Heightened Senses

  *Olfactory

  *Auditory

  *Vision

  -Strength

  -Claw Retraction

  Known Limitations: Halfway morphed and cannot morph back, no long-range capabilities, power limitations.

  “Do I have everything correct?” she asked.

  “Halfway morphed,” Zoe said under her breath.

  “I don’t know how much you have tested your strength as compared to however strong you were before, and I’m going out on a limb here by assuming that you’ve had changes in your sense of smell, hearing, and your vision. Is this correct?”

  “It’s correct,” Zoe finally said. “Although my nose is nothing like Sam’s.”

  “You should be happy about that,” he told her, mouth-breathing as always.

  “I don’t know, I think I could deal with that a lot better than I can deal with this,” she said, pointing to her face.

  “There are a number of things that we can do to improve the power that you have,” Ozella said. “For one, we need to know how sharp your claws are, and what they can cut through. We can test this, and have Dinah around to heal you up if you end up injuring yourself. If we know your limitations, then we will know what you are truly capable of. Right now, it seems like we’re just winging it.”

  “You’re not wrong there,” Zoe said, folding the paper and sticking it in the little side pocket of her tight training pants.

  “And since you have a tail now,” Ozella said, “we should test the limitations of your agility, maybe using Helena. You know, we do have an advantage since we have someone who can heal us. This means we can push ourselves to limits that we have never tried before. And like I said, I’m still working on a way for me to improve your powers, but that might be a ways off.”

  “You made a chart like this for yourself, right?” Zoe asked Ozella.

  “Of course I did! It’s important that I treat my powers the same way I treat yours—after all, we’re teammates.”

  “And what codename did you give yourself?” asked Sam.

  A nervous smile stretched across Ozella’s face. “Human Shield.”

  Chapter Forty-Three: Let the Assault Begin!

  (Cue the slow, cinematic walk as our four would-be heroes are now in uniform, ready to change Centralia and hopefully not die over the next few hours, thus ending the novel before it reaches its natural conclusion.)

  It felt empowering to be suited up. Sam Meeko now wore a flexible, dark blue uniform with subtle white highlights.

  It was the same color as the mask that went over his head, a hood attached to it, the mask framing his jawline and moving over his nose, allowing his sniffer to be on full display.

  On his arm was the wrist guard he’d taken off Dr. Hamza, Sam a little more comfortable with it after seeing its capabilities back in the apartment building.

  He glanced again at the others, seeing how their uniforms had come out.

  Helena Knight’s outfit was long and sleek, with two white lines moving down her shoulders over her nipples, and all the way down to her legs. At first Sam thought this looked a little strange, but then she began moving as she normally did in her combat dance, and he noticed that the white lines made her form hard to track as she moved.

  Helena had a smaller mask too, just something that covered her eyes and wrapped around the back of her head, her hair up into two tight ponytails.

  Maria the designer had indeed gone for the schoolgirl motif for Ozella Rose, crafting her a white number with dark blue accents that matched the mask on Ozella’s face.

  As Maria had told them, the uniforms were all made out of a strong material that was developed in the Eastern Province, able to withstand energy attacks in certain levels of physical altercations, absorbing most of the hit, which was why Ozella also wore tights made of the same material which dipped into a pair of flats, the bottoms made of a rugged polymer for grip.

  Of the four of them, Zoe looked the fiercest with the sleeves of her outfit coming just to her elbow so she could transform her arms, her uniform snug around her breasts and ass, as well as a striped pattern meant to look like a slash moving up in a V-shape from her crotch and stopping under her arms. Her legs and feet were covered, so she likely wouldn’t be morphing this part. If she did, she had been promised that this material would give way to let the transformation happen.

  Like Sam, Zoe had a hood, and unlike Sam, she didn’t wear a mask, her hood held securely to her face by her cat ears, which jutted out of holes in the top of it.

  “Are we going to keep admiring ourselves, or are we going to go?” Zoe asked. They were in Helena’s gym, all standing before the wall length mirror.

  A part of Sam wanted to strike a pose with them all around, but he knew that this would be stupid, that what they were doing was serious, and that even though Dinah could heal them, they did not yet know the limitations of Dinah’s powers.

  They needed to be careful.

  “Let’s go over the plan again,” Sam said, just to act like he was the one who was in charge here. In reality, if anyone was in charge it would be Helena or Zoe, with Ozella keeping track of all the finer details. “We are hoping that the mobster Helena turned, let’s call him ‘Unibrow,’ will let us in so we don’t have to fight our way into the warehouse.”

  “Speaking of which, I figured this would help,” Helena said, going over to one of the side tables and taking out a piece of paper. She set it on the table, showing them the schematic of the warehouse facility that her family owned. “I meant to show you guys earlier.”

  No one had really said anything yet about why the people smuggling children for vampires were using her family’s commercial shipping facilities.

  Zoe had wondered about it, and she secretly felt like investigating it on her own; Sam assumed that it was just a simple contracting mishap; and Ozella hadn’t thought too deeply about this detail.

  Only Helena had been proactive about it, taking a break during lunch to go over some of the details that her assistant had sent to her, including the schematic.

  Sam sensed all this, of course, but didn’t say anything, returning his focus to mouth-breathing as Zoe and Helena pointed at different points on the architectural layout.

  “We’ll need to keep to the shadows,” Zoe said, indicating a section on the right-hand side of the map. “The thing is, once one of us is spotted, we will have to fight our way to this exemplar named Donovan, and fight our way out. That’s on top of rescuing the children. I’d like to avoid that.”

  “Maybe it would be smarter for us to follow instead of assault,” Ozella suggested. “What if we just followed them? That would also lead us to the vampires in question.”

  Sam shook his head, still not believing the fact that they were actually trying to go up against vampires.

  This was another thing he hadn’t thought much about, and aside from the comics and fantasy novels that he’d read in his youth, he really didn’t know much about the strange breed of exemplar, aside from the fact that they were supposed to be extinct.

  “It’s too risky,” said Helena. “Once teleporters get involved, we won’t be able to track the kids. In the future, we can address this through te
ch, but this is our first assault, and we don’t really have time to stock up the way that we would like, or arrange for custom weaponry to be built. In short: we go after Donovan, he’s the guy with the info and the four of us can take him this time.”

  “Agreed, and stocking up is key,” Zoe said. She had mentioned earlier that she could bring some of her smoke bombs, which Sam thought might be helpful. The smoke bombs were now attached to a belt she wore with pouches on it, angled around her hips, not supported by anything.

  “Agreed,” said Sam.

  “Agreed, I guess,” Ozella said.

  Helena nodded. “Great, then let’s move to the location. I’ll call Lance to arrange transport.”

  ***

  Lance the teleporter definitely gave them some flak about their uniforms, but the four would-be heroes mostly ignored him, which took even more self-control from Zoe, who felt like lashing out at the guy after he made a comment about her needing to clean her tail.

  He was gone in a golden flash, leaving them in an abandoned industrial area across from the Knight Corporation’s facility. There was a river not far from them, which later opened into a small sea, seagulls in the air, squawking, their feathers ruffled by the cold wind.

  The sun was setting now, some of the shadows in the industrial area long and angular, allowing for plenty of natural camouflage.

  Zoe in the lead, the team moved toward the main street, Sam’s nostrils flaring at every scent that came to him, his mind having to wade through all the stagnant memories that sat heavy in the air.

  As they moved, Sam’s mind drifted to some of the things Ozella had said earlier.

  What would it be like if he could turn his power off? For one, he’d be able to eat regular food again. It would also make everyday life more comfortable, less jarring when a strange smell smacked him in the face.

  He glanced to Ozella, now in her superhero schoolgirl uniform, her face covered by a mask and her eyes darting left and right as she scanned through whatever it was that had painted itself across her mind’s eye.

  Dinah was next to her, visible to the group, ready to help them in any way she could.

  The ghost woman was still naked, which was a little strange, but Sam had stopped trying to quantify everything he experienced, knowing that the reality that had taken shape around him defied convention.

  Helena spotted the mobster they’d dubbed Unibrow, and as soon as he saw her, he gave her a “hold on a moment” signal. He wore a large wrist guard now, which was attached to an apparatus on his back.

  Once he saw that they were clear to enter, he ushered them over.

  As they walked past him, Helena took one look at the man and he started taking off his weapon, discarding it behind a small crate. Unibrow then proceeded to lay on the ground behind cover.

  Zoe wasn’t so nice with the next guy they encountered, who just so happened to stumble upon them entering through the front, before they could slip into some shadows.

  She was on the man before he could get a shot off, twisting around his body and pulling his arm back, dislocating it. The man yelped as she brought him to the ground, his face smacking against the pavement, the man instantly out cold.

  “We need to stay quiet,” Helena reminded her after Zoe had moved the man to the shadows.

  “I was just getting warmed up.”

  They continued to the left, through a pathway that cut between two buildings. They heard voices in one of the buildings, and dipping beneath the window, Zoe was about to slip into the front door when Sam stopped her.

  “What?” she whispered over her shoulder.

  “Send Dinah instead,” he said, nodding to Ozella.

  “Good idea,” Ozella said, and before she could even relay the message, Dinah passed through the wall, and into the room.

  Sam found an angle where he could look into the space without being seen. What he saw next was one man falling to his knees while the other looked around frantically to see what had happened to him, only to fall as well, both of them landing in a heap together.

  Dinah came out of the building, and the four decided to check inside. They quickly opened the door, Ozella going over to one of the men and taking off his wrist guard.

  “I’ve been needing one of these,” she said as she put it in her red backpack. “But I can figure out how to use it better later.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Sam said, looking to the other wrist guard. “Should we take that one as well.”

  “Is there room?” Helena asked Ozella.

  “I think it’ll fit,” Ozella said as she started to put the other wrist guard in her backpack.

  “Hold on,” Zoe said, stopping dead in her tracks, her tiger ears twitching. “Movement outside.” As soon as she said this, the door opened, and a man entered the room.

  The man didn’t even have time to get his arm up or aim his weapon at them; he was already under Helena’s spell, Sam glancing left to see her pupil now shaped like a target, spinning as she stared at him.

  The mobster grunted and left the room.

  “What did you do with him?” Zoe asked, clearly on the verge of pouncing on the guy.

  “I have a new idea,” said Helena. “I will work to take over the minds of anyone else we run into before we can reach the children. Then, when all hell breaks loose, which it probably will at some point, we have several people on our side. For now, he’ll just stand guard, or look like he’s standing guard.”

  “Genius,” Sam said, ignoring the scornful look Zoe flashed at him.

  “It’s a great idea,” Ozella said as they exited the building, moving left, keeping to a dark shadow provided by a two-story building to their left. This was some type of watchtower area, which had windows facing the main area of the warehouse as well as the port to its left.

  They were going to move to the main building, but looking up at the watchtower, Sam had a sinking suspicion that they should clear this out as well. He stopped Helena as she turned to the right, waiting for the opportunity to move to the shadows cast by another building.

  “Let’s clear out the watchtower,” he said.

  “Good idea,” said Helena. “Zoe, and Dinah?”

  Zoe looked to the watchtower, and offered them a genuine smile. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  She took off toward the fire escape, Dinah slowly moving after her without the fervor of the tiger girl. It was interesting watching Zoe move up the fire escape, using her newfound agility to perform some moves that Sam knew she couldn’t have gotten away with in her non-exemplar form.

  She crouched by a window, Dinah at the front and pressing into a brick wall. Her ears twitching, Zoe waited for the right moment to slip in through the window, the only sound from the watchtower being a sudden bump, which a person would have only heard if they were listening for it.

  A few minutes later, Zoe exited through a different window, leaping down onto the ground, superhero landing and all. She hopped back into the shadows and made her way over to the group just as Dinah stepped out of the front entrance.

  “A few guys in there,” Zoe said, wiping a bit of blood from her lips. “Don’t worry, their blood, not mine.”

  “You’re biting people now?” Sam asked.

  “Whatever it takes to get the job done.”

  ***

  The four continued clearing the courtyard of any guards, Helena doing the same thing she had done before by hypnotizing them into working for her.

  “This way,” Zoe said, leading the group toward the left side of the main structure, Ozella at the back, a nervous look on her face.

  The main structure was close enough to the next building to provide some shadow. There was a window too, but it was black with soot, and it was dark in the alley, making it nearly impossible to see through.

  “We could send Dinah again,” Ozella suggested.

  “Agreed, but she shouldn’t take them out. We need to get a sense of what’s actually happening in there,” said Sam. “Then we can go a
bout formulating a plan.”

  “I could send one of the thugs in,” Helena said, nodding to another building, where one of her mind slaves stood guard.

  “Not a bad plan…” said Zoe. “Maybe there’s a rooftop entrance.”

  They all looked up at the same time, Zoe calculating a way for her to get onto the rooftop without making much noise.

  She jumped to the right building, and from there to the left, where she pressed off the wall, grabbed onto the building’s gutter and quietly flipped herself up to the roof, little to no sound made in this process.

  “You going up too?” Sam asked Helena as she looked from the left wall to the right.

  His answer came in the form of a huge explosion, a blast of energy that flung Zoe off the roof, and onto the pavement in front of the warehouse.

  A huge door opened, several men with wrist guards spilling out. Helena’s hypnotized gunners started firing, the fight at the front of the warehouse intensifying as a portal opened, more armed men and women appearing.

  By this point Dinah was already next to Zoe, healing her wounds, the half-tiger girl breathing heavily, slashes and burn marks on the human side of her face disappearing as Sam ran past, his wrist guard aimed at one of the men that had come out of the warehouse.

  Triggering his weapon, Sam blasted the man down and moved for cover behind a stack of metal pallets, ready to take on the next mobster that came his way.

  Helena was already going to town on some of the men that were trying to approach them, the combat dancer taking on two guys at once, spinning, kicking, flipping out of the way, and eventually turning one of them on the other, the man cutting his former teammate down with a blast before turning back to the main fight.

  “Come on, Zoe!” Ozella said as she helped the injured beast morpher up.

  “I’m okay,” Zoe said, shaking her hands out. “I’ve got this.”

  Springing into action, Zoe dropped to all fours as she raced toward a guy lifting his wrist guard in Ozella’s direction.

  Zoe leapt, the blast firing just over her shoulder as she tackled the bastard, brought him into a headlock and snapped his neck.