V Is for Villain

by Peter Moore

  “Look over there on the left. That guy is about to escape, and…here…I…come.” On the screen, Artillery (Blake) whipped around the corner, either in low flight or long leap, and hit the Phaeton solid in the chest. In our living room, Blake shouted, “Woo-hoo! Yeah!” as the Phaeton on the screen went rigid and fell over like a petrified tree.21

  Phaeton or not, I got queasy about Blake’s excitement at having killed the guy.

  Mom came into the living room. “Dinner. Time to turn this show off.”

  “It’s not a show,” Blake said. “It’s Justice Force battle footage.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly want to have a look, but after we’re done eating. Come into the dining room.”

  Mom was indulging Blake as he gushed details about the battles he’d made me watch on TV. After just having seen all this, it was kind of irritating to have to listen to a replay of it.

  He shoveled a heaping forkful of steak and mashed potatoes into his mouth. He chewed mightily, looked over at me, and swallowed big. “What’s with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s that face mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You made, like, a sneery face.”22

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s the problem?”

  “I didn’t make a face.”

  “Mom?”

  “You made a face.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to.”

  Blake sat back in his chair and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “It looked like you had some kind of problem.”

  “I just don’t see why you guys outright kill whatever Phaetons you come across.”

  Blake laughed. “What are we supposed to do, take ’em out to dinner? These are the bad guys, Brad. Getting rid of them is what we do.”

  “Why can’t they be arrested? Or maybe they could get some kind of gene therapy and reverse the effects of what they did to their chromosomes.”

  “That’s not possible,” Mom said. “Gene therapy can’t undo what they did, even if we could capture and hold Phaetons to administer it.”

  “Well, still. Maybe they could be, like, rehabilitated or something. I don’t really see why they have to be murdered.”

  “Whoa, slow down there, pal,” Blake said. “Murder is a word we use when we talk about humans, not Phaetons.”

  “Some people consider Phaetons to be human.”

  “Well, those people are wrong. Phaetons are not human anymore, not really.”

  “Well, so they don’t have typical Regular DNA. But then again, neither do you. Right?”

  A tiny, tiny twitch started by Blake’s left eye. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice it, but over my life, I had come to recognize it as a sign that he was either angry or frustrated or both.

  “Okay, you really don’t know what you’re talking about.” He put his fork down and leaned on the table. “Have you ever even seen a Phaeton in real life? Ever been up close?”

  “All right,” Mom said. “This is nothing to fight about.”

  “Nah, Mom,” Blake said. “If Brad is man enough to make these statements or whatever, then he should make sure he knows what he’s talking about. So, you didn’t answer, Brad. Have you ever even seen a Phaeton up close and personal?”

  “Well, no, but I’m just saying that—”

  “You never had one charging at you full speed. Never had one leap at you, get its hands on your neck, breathe its foul stench right in your face. Am I right?”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence. “You’re right,” I said.

  “You’re damned right I am,” Blake said. “So I don’t think you’re in a spot to be passing judgment on how the Justice Force, or any other hero team, does its job.”

  This was a side of Blake the public never got a chance to see. Angry Artillery.

  Snot-nose little pissant loser. A voice again. Was that really what I thought of myself?

  I nodded.

  “Okay, then,” Mom said. “I’d really prefer we talk about something else and have a peaceful dinner.”

  But Blake was looking at me coldly. He wasn’t done. “When you get powers and join a team, when you’ve been on the front lines of the war against villains and Phaetons, then you can talk about this kind of thing. Until then, you should stick to doing your homework and living under the safety of the people who protect you.”

  It’s rare that I have trouble finding words to express my thoughts, but at that time, I had nothing to say. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sure what I actually thought anymore.

  That is what I’m here for: to protect and serve the needs of the people. I don’t like having to kill criminals; believe me, I don’t. But if they’re going to commit crimes—if they’re going to kill civilians, well, then that’s really a risk they’ve chosen to take, isn’t it?”

  ARTILLERY (BLAKE BARON)

  Address to United States Senate

  when awarded the Congressional

  Medal of Honor

  July 4, 2016

  Hell, no, I don’t regret it. None of it. I’d do it again, too. He beat me fair and square. That is, if you consider ten against one fair. But yeah, he was the one who got in the so-called deathblow. Fine. He wins. For now.

  “I’ll be dead in a few hours, maybe sooner. But listen here: once I’m gone, twenty more Phaetons will rise up in my place. This here thing ain’t over. Not by a long [expletive deleted] shot.”

  BLOODBATH

  Deathbed statement,

  Radcliff, Kentucky

  June 29, 2016

  Lurking

  Iwas about to step out the classroom door after English when something made me stop. Right outside the door, I heard a conversation among Layla, Javier, Boots, and Peanut.

  Layla said, “Because I think he has a lot to offer.”

  “I just don’t think he’s vital,” Javier answered.

  “He’s got all the right ideas,” Boots said. “Politically, Brad is cool.”

  “He does not sound too cool to me,” Javier said. “He sounds like a hero-worshiper to me.”

  Layla defended me. “He may seem that way, but underneath, he’s not. He just hasn’t woken up yet.”

  “Ach, Gott in himmel! We are supposed to be his teachers? When, or if, he shows he is like us—then, I think, is when we talk about bringing him in.”

  “I’m okay with letting him in, if he wants to be,” Boots said.

  “Yes, but I am not,” Javier said. “He could be a danger.”

  “He wouldn’t hurt us,” Layla said. “I can tell.”

  Javier made a harrumph sound. “And so how do you know this?”

  “You know how I know.”

  There was a silence between them, and the regular noise from other people continued in the hallway.

  “I’ll vouch for him,” Layla said.

  “What reason have you to say that?” Javier said. “You hardly know him. You are not using your head.”

  Layla was getting heated. “You’re the only one against it—”

  “I’m against it, too,” Peanut said, sounding tentative.

  “Oh, please,” Layla said. “You’re only following Javier’s lead. Use your own mind and you’ll realize that Javier has no basis for his position. At all.”

  “It is called being careful,” Javier said.

  “It’s called being paranoid. Look. He’s just right for us. I know he is. And I want him in.”

  “Only if he can prove that he is vital material.”

  The second bell rang and they moved off to the next class. I missed the rest of the conversation.

  “I know something you don’t know.”

  Layla said it in a
teasing voice, quietly, as she passed behind me in science class. I’d been in the A-program for almost a week, and practically every time we had Integrated Science, Layla had sung to me, “I know something you don’t know.” At first, I tried to get her to tell me what she was talking about, but it became obvious that she had more fun when I played her game, so I stopped asking.

  I was sitting alone at one of the desktop computers. I could have paired up with someone for a while to work on a project, but that really only made sense for people who had complementary powers: heat formation and freezing ability, invisibility23 and thermovision,24 telekinesis25 and telestasis.26 I didn’t have any powers I needed to develop.

  I did, however, have a few ideas I needed to develop. Miss Franks, or rather, Tricia (I still wasn’t used to calling a teacher by her first name) had given me a few days to find something I wanted to work on. So now, half a week later, she came my way and had a look at my computer screen.

  “Ah. Doing a little reading on the Kraden Project,” she said.

  “Do you know much about it?”

  “I wrote part of a master’s thesis on it, so yes, I know a little bit. What aspect are you looking at?”

  I had a decision to make. My ideas were pretty easy to dismiss as crackpot nonsense. Except, maybe, to someone with an open mind. I could float the ideas out to Tricia, but it would be taking a chance.

  “I have this idea that the Kraden Project scientists in the 1950s were wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, about pretty much everything.” I kept my voice low. “They thought they had created ‘powered genes’ and, by using an early version of genetic engineering, grafted the powered genes onto regular human DNA.”

  “It’s pretty well documented. The Kraden Project was where the first metahuman genes—and the first metahumans—­were created. But you have a different theory?”

  There was something in her voice. It wasn’t mocking or skeptical. This was the very first person I had ever gotten up the nerve to say my theory out loud to.

  “I think the powered genes were always there. The first heroes were not actually created during the 1950s; that was just when the scientists inadvertently activated dormant genes, genes that had been there all along. The geneticists and government agencies thought they were building new genetic material, but it would never have worked if the base genes hadn’t already been present.”

  Tricia nodded, thinking. “And you believe this why?”

  “Because I think you can’t create a hero. You’re either born one or not.”

  “Destiny?”

  “Science. I don’t believe you can graft powered genes onto regular ones. I think the powered genes became ­activated by accident during the Kraden Project in the U.S., and the other ones in Russia and China, and then those genes were passed down.”

  “Then how do you explain why your brother has powered genes and you don’t?”

  Ah, the core of my theory—that is, the huge hole in my theory. “I can’t.”

  Pretty interesting. Oh, great. Should I tell her that I got psychosis instead of strength? I glanced over at Layla. She was looking at her computer screen, but I would have sworn she had been watching me until I turned her way.

  “Okay, Brad. So this is an intriguing hypothesis. Scientific method, though. Do you have any evidence to support it?”

  “Well, not a lot. None, really. Nothing you’d call hard scientific evidence. But they shut down the Kraden Project in—what? 1983? And that was because they had no success creating metahumans through gene grafting. Since then, Phaetons are really the only ones who have gotten anywhere at all with trying to graft genes, and we know how that turned out. If I’m wrong, why can’t scientists re-create what they did way back when?”

  “That’s a good question. There’s a theory that it had to do with the atomic tests the Americans and the Soviets were conducting in the Aleutian Islands.”

  I nodded. “Right, and the unusual, once-in-a-century weather conditions.”

  “You’ve done your research.”

  “As much as I could.”

  Tricia nodded and smiled. “All very interesting, Brad.”

  “You don’t think it’s ridiculous?”

  “I think there are a lot of things I can’t explain, so I’m open to ideas. Original thinking is what causes us to move forward. If the ideas can be supported. Keep at it. And keep me posted.”

  I felt Layla’s eyes on me. I looked over, and sure enough, she was watching me. I smiled, and she smiled back before turning to her computer. I wondered again what that argument right before class had been about. I knew it had something to do with me, but I didn’t know exactly what it was about.

  I was happy about the conversation with Tricia. I’d gone out on a limb a little bit to test the waters, and she didn’t think my ideas were idiotic. There were still a few ideas, though, that I’d held back. One was that Kolvasz-­Zimmermann’s life—or death—might somehow help me understand why Blake was powered and I wasn’t.

  I looked up the scientist. His death in prison, specifically. The autopsy report, made public by a Freedom of ­Information Law request, confirmed that he had an astonishing amount of barbiturates and alcohol in his system, enough to kill a silverback gorilla. The report, however, also noted that five of his front teeth—two top, three bottom—were cracked off halfway. Much as one would expect if something like, say, a bourbon bottle had been forced into his mouth.

  And then, with no warning, the screen went black and a message came up in red letters. It had the FBI-AVID27 logo, and below that, this message:

  User: Bradley Baron

  Reason for surveillance and intervention:

  keyword search triggers 8450485-B, 384948-A(3), 9338288-J § 2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 42

  Dear Mr. Bradley Baron:

  You are hereby instructed to report to the local FBI-AVID Unit at 335 Federal Plaza within the next 12 hours. You will be interviewed by two agents of AVID regarding questionable Internet activity and suspicious subject searches. This appointment is mandatory, and you must attend. Please type in the time in the box below that you intend to attend.

  You do not need to bring legal representation with you, as it is not needed.

  I typed into the box:

  I will attend the interview tonight. But just for my own information: is this in any way connected to the hours of homemade porn made by—and of—Layla Keating that I watched? I mean, that stuff is sick!

  My screen flickered and then there was an image of ­yellow smiley face almost filling the screen. And then a big boot appeared at the side and kicked the face repeatedly. It became a frowny face, with one eye closed and a big dent in its head.

  Layla came over and sat next to me. “Good one. What tipped you off?”

  “How it was written. ‘You do not need to bring representation with you, as it is not needed.’ Although, I guess, with the FBI, that redundancy could’ve actually been confirmation that it was legit.”

  She smiled. “That’s true.” She nodded at the computer. “I heard your conversation with Tricia. Pretty interesting.”

  “And you think I’m crazy.”

  “Not exactly. Just because you’re crazy about me doesn’t mean you’re crazy.”

  “Who said I’m crazy about you?”

  “Are you denying it?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Turn more red, why don’t you?”

  “You really like trying to embarrass me, huh?”

  “Kind of. And I’m not just trying, I’m succeeding, if you ask me. Anyways, here you are, doing plain old research, like a Regular, when instead you could be sharpening up those skills.”

  “I don’t have powers with skills that need sharpening.”

  “Ah, but that’s where you’
re wrong,” she said.

  “Really? And how would you know?”

  She gave me that evil grin. “Because I know something you don’t know. Want me to tell you?”

  I didn’t like the idea of letting her think she was manipulating me. But the truth is that I was pretty damned curious. Maybe I didn’t have good reason, but I believed her—I believed she knew something important to me. “You seem so desperate to tell me, fine. What?”

  It was written on her face so clearly I could practically hear her: Desperate, huh? Trying to turn the tables on me. Slick.

  “Finally, you admit that you really want to know.”

  “No, I’m humoring you.” I didn’t know if I could win this little power game with her, but I wasn’t about to go down without trying.

  “Humoring me. Right. If that makes you feel better. Anyway, here’s the thing.” She lowered her voice to just above a whisper, which seemed a little melodramatic to me at the time. “You know we have our little group. But the part I never told you is that we’re more than just school friends. It’s more like sort of a club. . . .”

  “What, like a club with a secret handshake and all that?”

  “It’s more serious than that. We’re committed to fighting for justice.”

  “There are more than fifty hero teams—plus independents—­who are already doing that.”

  “You know that’s not what we mean by justice. We’re talking about real justice.”

  I took a look around to see if anyone was close enough to hear. “Sounds pretty dissident and subversive to me.”