The lean combat dancer was out for the count now, and an absolutely huge man with gray skin was approaching her, his clothing torn and his muscles rippling, half his mask missing, his beady eyes locked on her as his fangs grew in size.
Bringing her blade into the vampires she was engaging, Zoe removed her weapon and dropped to all fours again as she raced over to help Helena.
Sam was also on his way to Helena, wincing as he moved, the pain from his wound starting to get to him.
The big gray vampire lifted Helena by her legs, and slammed her into the pavement like a child slamming a doll against the ground.
“Dinah!” Ozella shouted, pointing toward Helena.
Dinah instantly moved away from Donovan, floating as quickly as she could in Helena’s direction.
“I’m right here, you big fucker!” Zoe said, leaping onto the big vampire’s shoulders, attempting to drive her blade into his chest in a downward motion.
The towering vampire dropped Helena, now focusing on Zoe, his hand coming over his back as he flung the tiger girl a good twenty feet away.
Zoe landed on her feet, shaking her head quickly as she raced yet again toward the gray monstrosity.
Sam got a bead on him and fired off a shot that singed his right pectoral muscle. The man roared with fury, going for a piece of concrete that had been dislodged and hurling it in Sam’s direction.
No, Sam wasn’t that fast.
He took the brunt of the attack, his left knee cracking backward, bone pushing through his skin.
Sam was in too much agony to see that Donovan had made it into the portal. He did, however, notice that Dinah had reached Helena, healing the woman as quickly as she could.
Good, Sam thought, delirium setting in.
The pain was too much, but he tried to ignore it as he used his elbows to drag himself forward, still trying to get a shot on the big gray vampire.
Zoe was engaging the man again, avoiding his swipes as she tried to get an opening, hoping to bring her blade into his chest.
“Zoe…” Sam whispered, reaching out for her.
Mia came flying forward, striking the big vampire, both of them tumbling backward toward the teal portal. Sam glanced over his shoulder to see Mister Fist’s blurred form, the man’s veins pulsing, his posture screaming that he was planning to finish this now.
A wall of flames appeared between the would-be heroes and Mia and the biggest vampire. The wall continued to grow in size, and by the time it filtered away, Mia and the large vampire were gone, the portal closed.
It was at this point that Sam passed out, everything going black, the last thing he remembered being William’s clones piling on top of a few remaining vampires, keeping them prone while Zoe bladed their chests.
***
It felt great to be a hero to heroes, and even as they were berated by Mister Fist for intervening, Sam couldn’t help but feel proud of himself and his small team of superpowered misfits.
With Dinah’s help, his blackout hadn’t been for too long, and it was crazy to see the bone in his leg mend itself, his skin crawling back over it, fresh and pink. While he wasn’t completely healed up, still a few scratches and scrapes, he felt better than he had before, less nervous too.
It was Zoe, as usual, who changed the dynamics of the conversation between the two teams, the tiger girl stepping forward, her chest puffed out slightly, her energy blade still drawn, her shoulders moving up and down as she took in deep breaths.
“Do I need to remind you that we saved your asses,” she told the exemplar team.
Helena came forward next, her experience as head of the Board shining as she sought to not only take control of the situation, but also to steer it in a better direction.
“I was the one that gave you this information,” she reminded Mister Fist, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest, the fiery redhead known as Plume next to him. “And she isn’t wrong in saying we saved your asses.”
“Let me handle this,” Plume said, clearing her throat. “You did prove helpful today, and you seemed more effective than you were the last time we ran into each other. But we are not comfortable with a team of vigilantes parading around as exemplars. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“A simple ‘thank you’ would work,” Zoe muttered under her breath. Ozella stood behind her now, her head bent forward, Dinah next to her. The group’s stat keeper seemed like she wanted to say something, but she was way too shy to voice her opinion.
“Furthermore, you are clearly using illegal technology,” Mister Fist said, interrupting Plume, “and that’s on top of the fact that all four of you are committing a crime by impersonating an exemplar.”
“Did I mention that we saved your ass back there?” Zoe asked. “Because I feel like I didn’t mention that, like you didn’t hear that.”
Mister Fist tensed up. “That is no way to talk to someone…”
“No way to talk to an exemplar?” Zoe rolled her eyes. “Please. Spare me the speech, Papa Smoke. Accept what we have done, and move on. Or we could battle it out right here. You are already one member down with your telepath about as useful as a limp dick.”
“Zoe,” Sam started to say.
“She really has a mouth on her, doesn’t she?” William Bottorf asked, all of his clones gone. MindLenz was next to him, using William for support, a haggard look on her face.
“I’ll handle this, Zoe,” Helena told her in a voice that meant she should keep her mouth shut. Zoe didn’t protest; she knew better than to strike up an argument with Helena, especially after how she had betrayed the team.
“By all means,” the tiger girl said, stepping aside.
“She can be a little rough around the edges, but that’s why we like her,” Helena told Mister Fist and his team as she approached him. “So, here is how this is going to play out: we are going to leave now. I don’t know if or when we will meet again, but if we do, I hope that you understand that we are trying to make a positive impact on Centralian society, and while you are correct, we are a type of vigilante group, we are also out for justice.”
“Justice?” Plume asked. “In Centralia, you have to be legally licensed to dispense ‘justice,’ as you call it. To be legally licensed, you have to be on a registered exemplar team, or part of our military or law enforcement divisions. What you are doing is illegal and not approved. And while it is appreciated that you aided us to some degree, if we meet again, we cannot guarantee that we won’t turn you in to the proper authorities.”
Zoe started to say something and stopped, growling instead as she pressed the button that sheathed her energy blade.
“We have sworn oaths to the Centralian government to uphold the law,” Plume said. “You have done no such thing.”
“As I said…” Helena stood in front of Sam so he couldn’t quite see if she was using her power, but it sure seemed like she was.
“Go, now,” Mister Fist said, after taking a quick look around at all the bodies. “And we better not see you again.”
“Great, same to you,” Zoe said.
Lance the teleporter appeared, gold energy sparkling all around him.
“Hi, Lance,” Ozella said, waving at him.
“I’m not even going to ask,” he told them, raising his chin, as if he were above the messiness of what he had just witnessed.
And while Sam was actively mouth-breathing at the moment, mostly because of the stench of dead and burning bodies, he got the sense of what it would be like to see the carnage from Lance’s eyes.
Luckily, Lance was right when he said he wasn’t even going to ask.
Without another word, he transported the four back to Helena’s mansion and was off in another golden shimmer.
“I can’t believe we survived that.” Ozella exhaled audibly and sat on the armrest of the couch, her schoolgirl uniform torn and tattered, streaks of blood across her chest.
“I’m still processing the fact that we were seriously fighting vampires ten minu
tes ago,” Sam said, feeling a small amount of pain return to his body. He removed his hood, and peeled off his mask as well.
Helena walked into the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. It was weird that she’d been crippled less than half an hour ago, and was now up and at it again, as if she’d never been manhandled by a musclehead vampire. “We’re going to have to be careful with Mister Fist,” she said, once she finished drinking.
“Yeah? Screw that guy.”
“They know who we are, and if we push too many of their buttons,” she told Zoe, “they could easily turn us in to the authorities. They have enough evidence, plus they have a telepath who can back up anything the three of them have witnessed, even if she isn’t able to do anything with our minds.”
“Sorry,” Zoe said, but something about the way she said it made Sam believe that this probably wasn’t true, and it was one reason he liked her. Sam hated to admit it, but the way Zoe could snap back in an instant was one of her more appealing features.
Easy to argue with, sure, but helpful at times.
“What worries me more is that Fang seemed to know we were coming, well not us, but the other team. I can’t quite figure out how they would have known that,” said Helena.
“Maybe they took the first attack as a sign,” Ozella said, referring to the last time Donovan and his henchmen had run into Mister Fist’s team.
“That does make sense,” Zoe said as she removed her hood, her tiger ears springing to attention. “After the attack, they knew they were being monitored somehow, so they set up that final shipment as more of an ambush. Either way, we’ve got another issue on our hands.”
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
“We failed to stop them, and we failed to get Donovan, which would have led us to the source of the smuggling.” Zoe shrugged. “We have no leads now.”
“Maybe I should go back and sniff around for a moment,” Sam suggested.
“The place will be swarming with cops by now,” Helena said, “investigators too. It might be worth checking out in a day or so, but there’s a pretty good chance you won’t find anything by that point, especially if they bring in some Class Es.”
“We could always find out information the old-fashioned way,” Zoe suggested.
“What do you mean?” Ozella asked.
Zoe grinned. “Centralia has quite the underbelly. Maybe it’s time for us to visit some of those less desirable locations and kick up some stones, see what kind of worms we can find underneath.”
“I’ve got an angle I can work too,” Helena said as she removed her mask.
“Well, I guess that’s two leads,” Sam said, wiping his hands together. “And at least we have powers now, at least we’re together. Heroes Anonymous. Who would have thought that four former non-exemplars would be able to help the legendary Mister Fist? It just goes to show you what we can do, what all non-exemplars can do, if their dormant powers are unlocked.”
“It is rather miraculous, brilliant even,” Helena said. “And regarding our name, I think I have come up with something that fits our operation a little bit better, something that more accurately describes us…”
Epilogue: Vigilante Justice
Ozella Rose was in the study as usual.
She should have been getting ready to go to bed, but she still found it hard to turn off her mind, all the data she’d been presented with back at the shipping facility doing something to her energy levels, Ozella was wide awake, sitting at her usual table, Dinah across from her.
Dinah was braiding her hair at the moment, watching Ozella look through a couple of books she had specially ordered that had been delivered while they were out.
Typical Dinah.
Helena had an extensive library, but she didn’t have books about some of Centralia’s popular role-playing card games, the ones Ozella had grown up watching others play.
However shy she was at the age of twenty, Ozella was five times that before she reached ten, and perhaps some of the exemplars who went to her childhood school, the Class E intelligence-based kids, would have let her play with them if she had asked.
Perhaps.
But a few of them were careless, and Ozella had eventually collected enough abandoned cards to figure out how the games worked, later convincing her parents to buy her more. She had a fair number of books about the role-playing card games too, but now that she had Helena’s seemingly infinite resources, she was able to order rare prints and whatnot from libraries that catered to the ultrarich.
Yet another advantage of staying in this mansion.
There was a lot on Ozella’s mind as she flipped through one of the books, this one on the creation and subsequent expansions of a role-playing game known as Kingdom Cards, which was based entirely on power-ups.
It was a strange game, actually, and reading more about what the creator wanted, Ozella understood why it was unique.
Kingdom Cards didn’t have the same type of stats as many of the other games, where you played one card against another, using various modifiers.
The game dealt mostly with the acquisition of power-ups, which came randomly in a story created by the card you played. There was a Dungeon Master for this game, and the DM was the person who played the cards, not the actual players, the players vying for power-ups to use later in campaigns against one another, or in story arcs created by the DM.
As she skimmed through the text looking for an idea, or possibly something that would unlock a piece of her power that she hadn’t tinkered with yet, her mind drifted away to the name Helena had come up with for their team.
Vigilante Justice.
It was a fierce name, immediately sounding like it belonged to a team of rogue exemplars, which was kind of what they were going for. Part of Ozella wished it was a little friendlier, but if they did this right, then hopefully the name would strike fear into the minds of criminals across Centralia.
Giving up on the Kingdom Cards book, Ozella opened another book about the spread of vampirism in the Western Province.
Ozella’s world consisted of five countries, each with their own issues, and Ozella was from Centralia, the innermost country, the richest and most powerful country.
The Eastern Province was known for its technology, but it was also the poorest country, their government secret and clandestine, the leadership holding a great power over the people and their livelihood.
The Western Province, the one where vampires hailed from, was the location of most of the world’s proxy wars. There were great cities in the West, but the border zones were a free-for-all, and the exemplars that came from the West were always a bit abnormal, different from those who came from other countries.
The Northern Alliance was an isolationist country, known for its heat, clever craftsmanship, and of all the countries, it was the one that Ozella knew the least about.
This was unlike the Southern Alliance, which had been the topic of discussion among Centralians since long before she’d been born. The South was cold, known for its patriarchal traditions, made up of various tribes who identified themselves with red tattoos on their necks.
But back to the country that mattered the most to Ozella at the moment.
Vampires in the Western Province stemmed from a single exemplar. The man could either turn them, like the vampiric ninjas they fought back at the shipping facility, or simply use them for food.
Each of the people he turned took his full power, and were also able to turn others, hence the need for the entire country to be quarantined years back, while Western Province and Centralian forces worked to contain the infection.
The vampire infestation, known as the Western Plague, was supposed to have been eradicated, yet here they were, making their way over the border.
Ozella read about the topic for another thirty minutes or so, realizing that she would need to pick up a few other books if she really wanted to do a deep dive.
It was while she was yawning that her eyes jumped from Dinah back to
her book about Kingdom Cards.
Maybe…
There was no way it would work; nothing she had tried previously had had any effect.
But this was more direct.
Ozella got out her Book of Known Variables and turned to the page where she had classified her own power.
She knew instantly how she would word it, but she didn’t know if she would have to give it to herself, or if it would appear on its own.
“Come with me,” Ozella said to Dinah, nodding for the ghostly woman to follow her into her bedroom across from the study.
With her book in hand, pen in her mouth, Ozella stepped into the bathroom, and paused in front of the mirror so she could see her reflection, and the stats she had written for herself.
Dinah was still in her bedroom when Ozella wrote the word “Power-Up” and put a colon next to it, waiting to see what would appear.
As soon as she wrote the word and dotted the colon, the number one appeared.
“I have a power-up…” Ozella whispered to herself, confirming that she hadn’t written the number in her book, that it had appeared on its own.
She couldn’t help but smile at herself in that moment, her lips lifting up, her eyebrows rising as she started to chuckle. “I have a power-up?”
It was clear what the next question was, and rather than say anything, Ozella wrote how do I use my power-up? on a blank page of her book.
It was one skill she hadn’t really played with enough yet, simply asking questions.
An answer appeared a moment later, the words taking shape over her reflection: command.
“Command,” Ozella said, licking her lips to see if anything happened.
Once she was sure nothing had happened, she focused again on the words floating before her, deciding to try something different.
“Use power-up…” Ozella whispered, and as she did so, the number one fizzled out, replaced by the number zero.
Ozella looked down at her hands to see if there was anything different about her.
She then looked at her palms, noticing that everything was the same, and from there to the bathroom mirror, her dirty blonde hair, the pajamas she was wearing, her initials on the breast pocket, the PJ set a gift from Helena.
We Could Be Heroes Page 34
