Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  “So, Captain Miracle!” a voice booms from a rhododendron clump. Chester Barnes stops dead. For all his powers, he’s a little shocked.

  “You know I can see right into that rhododendron,” he says.

  “You know, would you ever, once, let me finish?” says a peevish, cigarette-thick voice from inside the shrubbery. “Just let me say it. So, Captain Miracle! Tonight!”

  “Tonight what, old enemy?”

  “Tonight … we fly!”

  Dr. Nightshade, evil genius, Pasha of Crime, Tsar of Wrongdoing, steps from the rhododendron. He wears his purple cape and leotard; the Facility Belt has been let out at the waist and the mask sags over one eye. Chester doesn’t remember him so short.

  “So you made it then, Chester.”

  “Well, Sean, you made it hard to refuse.”

  “Good to see you anyway,” says Dr. Nightshade. He extends a gloved hand. Chester Barnes takes and shakes it warily. “I don’t want to seem an ingrate, but I did kind of make an effort.” He indicates his costume. Chester Barnes steps back. With his two hands he takes his cardigan and tears it open. Golden yellow on scarlet shines forth: a glowing letter M.

  “Give me two minutes.” Chester Barnes steps into the bushes. Dr. Nightshade averts his gaze. In less than the advertised time he steps back, a hero in scarlet and gold, creased at knee and elbow, loose across the chest and tight across the belly. Chester tugs at the cape.

  “I could never get this bloody thing to sit right.”

  “I never bothered,” Dr. Nightshade says. “Pain in the hoop, capes. Shall we, er?” He nods down the empty path. They walk together, hero and villain.

  “It feels rather odd,” Chester says, tugging decorously at his crotch. “What if someone sees us?”

  “I don’t know, it feels kind of free to me,” says Dr. Nightshade. “A bit mad and wild. And there’s much worse goes on in this park after dark.”

  They stroll through the trees to the high point overlooking the football pitches. The grounds are closed up, someone has left a light on in the pavilion. Beyond the dark circle of Ormeau Park, Belfast shines. Aircraft lights pass overhead.

  “There’s no one else understands, you know,” Dr. Nightshade says.

  “What about all those alumnus groups, the online forums, Heroes Reunited, all that?”

  “Ach, who could be arsed with that? It’s all bloody talk, and a few wankers like to hog the forum. And anyway, it’s our thing, you know? A Belfast thing.”

  “No heroes or villains here,” Chester says. “Only politics. I thought you went to Spain after you got out?”

  “It was good until everyone started moving there and, well, to be honest, it’s expensive now. The pound’s weak as piss against the euro and I’ll let you into a wee supervillain secret: I was never that well off, thanks to you. Those Criminal Asset Recovery boys; that’s a real superpower. It’s just, well, in the end, you understand more than anyone else.”

  Traffic curves along the Ormeau Embankment. The river smells strongly tonight. The night smells merely strong. Chester Barnes looks up to the few stars bold enough to challenge Belfast’s amber airglow.

  “Do you ever?” Chester asks. “Have you ever?”

  “Oh no. It doesn’t seem right. You?”

  “No, never. But tonight … ”

  “Let’s see if we still can. One last time,” says Dr. Nightshade, suddenly fierce and passionate. “Just to show we bloody can!”

  “Because we bloody can, yes!” shouts Chester Barnes. “Who’s like us? Who can do what we can do? They’re all too busy on their iPods to look up when they hear something go over their heads, too bloody busy texting to look up when they see a flash of light up there in the sun. Come on, we’ll not get another chance.” He punches a fist at the stars, then runs after it, down the hill, pell mell, headlong, in golden boots over the dew-wet grass.

  “Hey, wait for me, you bastard!” cries Dr. Nightshade and runs after his enemy, the only one who can ever understand him, but Captain Miracle is ahead and drawing away and Dr. Nightshade is panting, heaving, the breath shuddering in his chest. He stops on the center spot of the football pitch, leaning on his thighs, fighting down nausea. Captain Miracle is far ahead, almost at the Ravenhill Road gates. Then he hears a strange cry and a peal of laughter, ringing out over the traffic and looks up to see a streak of gold and crimson arc up into the sky. The curve of light bends back over him, dips with a supersonic roar, then turns and climbs toward the lower stars with a faint, half-heard shout: “Away! Avaunt!”

  WILD CARD

  LEAH BOBET

  Act I Chicago, IL, July 10, 2012

  “And I need to pay this power bill too,” the old man at Sondra’s till said. “Miss, quickly. I’ve got somewhere else to be.”

  Have you ever, she thought acidly behind her bright professional smile, heard of Internet banking?

  “All right, we can do that,” she said through her teeth, and took the creased and overdue power bill from the laminated counter in front of her. The sound system was playing something overly perky and full of jazz clarinets. One hour into her shift, and her neck already hurt from holding the frustration in. Right—get into finance. It was better than working in diners, scraping cold french fries off plasticky plates and sucking up for tips. Her temp agency placement counselor had neglected to mention that working in a bank was still working retail, with all the disdain and stupidity and pointlessness of retail, just with less comfortable clothes.

  She wrinkled her nose just as deep as the skin on her customer’s hands. The paper was damp. He’d sweated all over it.

  She was dusting her hand on her black dress-code-approved skirt when the entire east wall of windows teetered in their frames and fell out of the building.

  It took a moment for her brain to catch up: there were the windows, the gorgeous view of the trees and sidewalk and coffee shop across the street, tilting down, creaking, and crashing to the sidewalk. There were the pedestrians, scattering into the street; the sound of shrieks and car horns and tires as a cab yanked itself out of the way.

  There was the red Volkswagen driving right through the space where the windows used to be, spinning a circle on the marble floors, and screeching to a halt in the foyer.

  What? she managed, damp sticky bill still in hand, before the doors opened and the masked men tumbled out.

  “Oh, shit,” Pierre at the next desk said, and dropped to the floor. She looked down and saw him fumble for a button under the desk. The silent alarm. He was hitting the silent alarm button.

  This was a robbery.

  Two men in black masks opened wide burlap sacks with big black dollar signs stenciled on them, thick with the scent of permanent marker, and two more fired three rounds into the air. Customers screamed. The old man in front of Sondra’s till clutched his brown porkpie hat.

  A pair of pinstripe-suited legs emerged from the passenger side of the Bug, capped in shiny black leather loafers. Their owner ducked out gun first and tailcoat last. His face was painted carnival white, with his lips outlined in a terrible red grin.

  The clown-painted man in the three-piece suit drew a slow arc with his automatic across the teller counter and stopped in a direct line to Sondra’s chest.

  “Take me,” he said, in an old Chicago mobster accent that had to be dead fake, “to the vault, doll, and nobody gets hurt.”

  “Me?” she said. It was hard to breathe. Her voice came out in a squeak.

  The clown squinted, jerked his big chin past her. “No, her. You see any other dollfaces in here?”

  Sondra turned to see Charlene, the tall, blond assistant manager, teeter toward him on her black four-inch heels, eyes huge and terrified. She dropped the phone bill and sat down behind the particle board counter, guaranteed to stop exactly no bullets from entering her delicate and precious flesh.

  Damn, but she hated this job.

  J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC, July 19, 2012

  “I’m about r
eady to present the case,” Nikki Lau said, and SSA Esther Falkner—now Special Agent in Charge Esther Falkner—looked up from the bullet-point list on her computer monitor.

  Lau was framed in her doorway, not a hair out of place, as usual. Falkner scrutinized her for signs of excessive politeness. The way the team looked at her was different now; had been different ever since she’d been formally invested as Special Agent in Charge and Reyes had cleared the last dusty rubber bands out of his desk.

  His door sat locked now. Technically, Falkner had a right to move into the bigger office. But she hadn’t yet, and was pretty sure she wouldn’t, ever. She wasn’t Reyes, this was her space, and moving just frankly sucked.

  No, she decided; no excessive deference here. And so: “I’ll be right there and get you properly sent off,” she said, and locked her computer even though nobody was going to be in the unit, never mind her office.

  “Not coming along?” Lau asked, lingering in the doorway.

  “Paperwork,” Falkner said, and for a moment, brutally regretted it. There were good reasons to be sidelined: she had a job posting to draft to fill the vacancies in the unit. Her back was having one of its bad weeks: a nagging, pulling pain that meant walking that much slower and taking that many more painkillers to settle down. Deborah had a softball game tonight at seven, and she’d promised she’d actually be there.

  She had always been the backup team lead in Stephen Reyes’s absence, and now that he was gone, it was her job to develop someone else’s capacity to lead them. Which meant her team working without her, live without a net.

  Desk job, she thought, and her soul sighed like a big exasperated dog. This was how it ended. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

  “I’ll see if I can get Celentano to lend us Tan or Pauley,” she said. “The job posting goes up this week. It’ll get better when we have another pair of hands.”

  There was no question that she’d get that temporary loaner; one or even both. Victor Celentano’s quarrel had, for whatever reason, been with Stephen Reyes. Falkner had ended up on the ACTF in the first place because upper management saw her as diligent, someone who could keep the pressure from blowing; keep Reyes’s less social tendencies in line. And even though she’d interpreted that expectation in her own ways for years, relations between Shadow Unit and Down the Hall had never been so cordial.

  Lau nodded. “I’ll get everyone together, then.”

  Falkner took a minute to drain her coffee and send her phone to voice mail before she trailed Lau to the briefing closet, where her team—four bodies large, which meant three too small—was already seated around the table. They didn’t rib her at all for being last through the door. Definitely excessive politeness. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it. “Thanks for the forbearance, folks. Please go ahead.”

  Lau stood up and prodded her laptop to life. A grainy shot of security camera footage flicked onto the screen: two men in black balaclavas, holding weapons on a cowering crowd against a background of shattered glass and potted green plants. Two more masked men held something crumpled in their hands. There was a fifth, tall and narrow, standing with them in a pinstriped suit, his back to the camera.

  “We’re looking at a string of armed robberies in downtown Chicago, all by the same gang. They’ve pulled off four broad daylight bank robberies in as many weeks. They’re smart enough to not fire a shot unless it’s into the ceiling, and so nobody’s been hurt except cuts and scrapes from broken glass, which kept it to a pair of major crimes detectives before, well, this.”

  Lau clicked the remote again, and the pinstriped man filled the screen. A close-up this time, including rumpled brown hair and his face: covered in white paint and a false clown grin, cheeks famine-victim hollow.

  “Why so serious?” Chaz Villette said, and Hafidha rolled her eyes.

  Brady leaned in, examining the pixelated screen capture. “So gamma bank robber drives through the glass, they take the cash, and … what?” Brady asked.

  Lau’s face was poker-star blank. Which meant this was going to be extra good. She only saved the Inscrutable Asian look for when she really wanted to make you drop out of your chair. “They didn’t drive through the glass. The windows conveniently fell right out of the wall, and the UNSUB drove right through the hole. In a stolen VW Beetle.”

  Chaz Villette blinked. “Five guys in a VW Bug?”

  Lau clicked to the next slide: a close-up shot of something metal that didn’t yet make sense. “Unfortunately, that’s not actually the manifestation. The windows came out because the adhesive holding them in suddenly failed to adhere. And then the local police and the insurance investigators realized the burgled vaults wouldn’t lock again after the robberies. They didn’t just open the vaults; they replaced the steel in the vault lock with calcium carbonate. The magnet keeping the vault locked had nothing to grab on to except Tums.”

  And yes, there it was: the picture was the side of a bank vault door. Lau traced the white blotch on the screen with a red laser pointer. The work was seamless. Falkner would have sworn it came that way factory-direct.

  “How’d they do that?” Brady said, even though he surely knew the answer.

  Lau wiggled her fingers. “Maaaagic.”

  “So that’s the manifestation,” Chaz said, forehead wrinkled. “Transmutation. Alchemy. That could go really bad if he escalates.”

  Falkner caught the look on his face and nodded. “There’s iron in blood.”

  “Dental fillings,” Brady added, suddenly somber.

  “Why not just buy some lead and turn it into gold and skip the bank robbing part?” Hafidha asked dryly.

  “That,” Falkner said, “is a question you lucky folks will all get to answer in Chicago.”

  Reactions around the table; reactions for everyone. Brady’s eyebrow went up, Hafidha leaned back, and Chaz pulled that still, blank face that surfaced when he didn’t want to react. “I’ll be available by phone from the office, and there will be one more agent. In the meantime, though, Agent Lau is in charge.”

  Lau blinked. Me?

  Falkner leaned back in her chair, confident, leaderly: Yes, you.

  To her credit, she adjusted quickly. “All right,” Lau said. “The plane’s almost ready to go, so we’ll call it wheels up in an hour and map the robbery sites in transit. Let’s get moving.”

  The look she cast Falkner on the way out the door was equal parts surprised and intimidated and determined and actually-I-don’t-like-surprises. That’s right, Falkner thought, walking back to her office. We call this maneuver the Mean Sergeant.

  That look was perfect.

  They were going to do just fine.

  The file dropped on Arthur Tan’s desk just in time to catch the last crumb from his sandwich.

  He looked up, and the perpetrator was standing right above him: Victor Celentano. Make that Unit Chief Celentano.

  “Sir,” he said, and wiped the second-last crumbs from his mouth with as much dignity as was possible. “We have a case?”

  Celentano shook his head. “Down the Hall does, and they’re still a man short. The flight leaves for Chicago in forty minutes.”

  “Right,” he said, and wiped his hand on his cafeteria napkin. “I’ll liaise with them right away.” Internally, he winced. Padma was going to hate this. He would have to send her sushi delivery for dinner tonight before he left. The good kind, with the hand rolls.

  Tan picked up the phone and dialed Sushi Garden by memory. Flipped open the case file idly as he did, paging through the incident reports and eyewitness statements.

  Stopped, and dropped the phone into its cradle.

  “Hey, Pauley,” Tan said.

  Pete Pauley spun his desk chair around, pen behind his ear. “Mm?”

  “Do we have,” he asked, and held up the photo between thumb and finger, “any official Bureau procedures for supervillains?”

  Act II Chicago, IL

  “It had to happen sometime,” Lau said, go bag in han
d, as they climbed the short steps of the Racine Avenue police station. It stood like a camel-colored cinderblock at the busy street corner. Long plastic blinds fluttered in the blocky windows. In L.A. the building would have been snapped up for a dance club. Or a boutique hotel. And in DC, it would be government property and surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

  “What, Chicago?” Brady said. “Last I heard it’s been happening since the 1830s.”

  She shot him a dirty look and almost missed the edge of the top step. “No,” she said, like you did to a big brother or a small child. “Supervillains. Enough people read comic books that this was totally in the bag. Not everyone’s worldview is straight out of American Gothic.”

  “Or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Hafidha added.

  “Hey,” Brady said. “Other states have also had chainsaw massacres.”

  “Name one,” Hafidha replied, and then they opened the door and were inside.

  Their liaison officer was already at the desk: a white, broad-stomached, thin-haired man with a meaty handshake. “Detective Pete O’Leary,” he said, and thankfully stopped crushing Lau’s free hand before she had to cry uncle. “Glad to have you on board.”

  “Agent Nicolette Lau,” she said; the extra syllables in her first name gave her more leaderly gravitas. “These are Agents Brady, Villette, Tan, and Gates.”

  “A pleasure,” O’Leary said to the lot of them, and waved them around the desk. “We have a spare office, but it’ll be a tight fit. We’re just a little neighborhood station here.”

  “Not to worry,” Lau said, remembering the spaces they’d worked out of in Chillicothe, in Natchez, mobile in rural Texas. This would be what they called a policing first-world problem. “I’m sure we’ll do just fine.”

  The office was perfectly fine: a vacant one the size of Reyes’s office—his old office, Lau reminded herself—with two desks hastily shoved against opposite walls. Hafidha dropped the two suitcases that held her mobile office on the one farthest from the door and proclaimed “Shotgun,” cheerfully.