Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  I made my way over to Teflon Boy, who was sitting in the dirt playing with some rocks. He looked up at me, a little trail of blood coming out of his nose. I could tell he was basically unharmed. He smiled up at me, wiping his nose and holding the blood up to show me. “Did you know, Mister, that a person’s body is ninety-eight ’cent water?”

  I bent over and grabbed his arm. “Come on, big boy,” I said, “we’re going on a little trip.”

  “Okay, Mister,” he said as I helped him lumber to his feet. “I like trips.”

  I saw his battered novel lying in the dirt where he’d been sitting and I retrieved it for him. “Don’t forget your book,” I said. He was going to need it.

  Nobody was really paying attention to us as I pulled Teflon Boy down the ditch away from the bus. I could still sense the kid, although increasingly faintly as they walked away from us. After we’d gone about a hundred yards, I had to help Teflon Boy climb up out of the ditch, and we skirted around the base of the hill that the vampire had crested.

  I stopped to orient myself to where I’d last sensed the kid. His terror was so intense that even though they were maybe half a mile ahead of us, he still stood out in my mind like a flickering candle. At least he was still alive.

  Before we headed out after them, I did what I could to prep myself with what I had available in my valise for the coming confrontation. I also checked to make sure my cell phone had a signal, and I cut some branches of sage away with my knife. Then Teflon Boy and I started trudging into the desert, wending our way around the gnarled proliferations of sage that jabbed and scratched at us at every turn, sometimes slowing down so I could brush away my footprints with the branches where they seemed especially obvious. It was slow going. But I didn’t think we had that far to go. The kid ahead of us had stopped moving, and we were beginning to close in on him.

  Teflon Boy kept chattering away in his familiar low mumble. “Are we playing a game, Mister? I like games. Me and my grandma used to play games … ”

  When we were still a few hundred yards away, far enough that I hoped Arthur wouldn’t hear him, I sat Teflon Boy down and told him to wait and to “shut up” if he could, which I doubted.

  But it didn’t really matter.

  A Rock in the Head Leaving my branches of sage behind, I headed on alone. I didn’t bother to keep quiet. There didn’t seem to be any point. But as I headed toward the kid, whose terror became more palpable with every step, I kept a close watch for the vampire. I had almost reached the kid when I heard the crunch of a step behind me. I tried to turn but something hammered into my head, and the next thing I knew I was sprawled on the ground.

  He hadn’t knocked me out. That’s just stupid Hollywood drivel. Very few people have the skill to do that without finishing someone off at the same time, but I was dazed as Arthur moved quickly behind me, tying my hands and then flipping me roughly over.

  He chuckled coldly, looking down on me. Then he reached down and placed his hand over my face, seeking through me the kid who lay shivering on the ground some twenty feet away. “Oh, yes!” he said triumphantly as he reveled at a distance in the kid’s pain. “Oh, you are going to be so popular. I can’t wait to get you home.”

  “What about the kid?” I asked.

  “Hey, it’s a twofer, stupid,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I thought.” And then I lifted my right leg and swept it as hard as I could sideways into his calf.

  He lifted his hand from my face and smacked me on the side of my head, setting my ears to ringing. “Be good,” he said flatly, “or I can make it very uncomfortable for you.”

  He looked down and he laughed at the dark stain spreading across my pants leg, and on his as well. “Brave killer wets his pants,” he giggled. And then, surprised, he sat down heavily. “Oh,” he said. Then he keeled over.

  That’s the key failing of vampires, I thought, as I reached into my left sleeve with my right hand and retrieved the scalpel I’d taped there. They tend to be a bit overconfident.

  Careful not to touch any of the wetness on my pants leg, I slowly stood and stripped off the gloves I’d been wearing, just in case I’d punctured them in the fall, and pulled another pair out of my back pocket. Slowly, keeping an eye on the collapsed figure of the vampire, I stepped out of my pants and set them aside, grimacing. The rest of this adventure would be conducted in my boxer shorts. I’d forgotten to bring another pair of pants. Not exactly distinguished. I started stripping off the protective garbage bag panels and the fluid-filled Ziploc that I’d taped to my leg and over my feet.

  Once I was safe from the little surprise I’d prepared for him, I reached around and pulled the syringe I’d taped to my back from under my shirt. Twisting off the plastic needle protector, I rammed it home in Arthur’s butt. I thought he might have been waking up a bit by now, but he didn’t even flinch as I squeezed it empty into him. I strapped his wrists together with a little duct tape I’d brought with me for that purpose and checked him over for any little surprises, not finding anything except his little survival knife. Then I just settled down on a handy rock, munching on a granola bar I’d had the foresight to put into my shirt pocket, and waited for him to become lucid enough to talk. I could feel the kid cowering out in the darkness, but he’d just have to wait.

  Creating a topical knockout drug is actually a somewhat tricky problem. Most of the easily available ones don’t work unless someone actually imbibes them, or unless you have the opportunity to inject them. There are some nerve agents and the like that work quite well, but who wants to mess with that? One little mistake and you and half the people around you are dead. But there’s this neat stuff called DMSO that athletes sometimes use to ease muscle pains and that soaks right through the skin into the body. Mix enough knockout into a couple of ounces of DMSO and, voila, you’ve got quite a nasty surprise for a vampire.

  As I sat there, I tried to screen out the terror of the kid whimpering to himself only twenty feet away. It was better for everyone all around if he never saw me. Life’s about compromise, kid, I thought, though he probably wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment.

  A Little Chat About ten minutes after I stuck him, Arthur began to stir. I walked over and yanked him up into a sitting position against a convenient sage bush. Somehow, his stupid hat had stayed on, if a bit crookedly. It occurred to me that he looked like some baby-faced, nerdy little professor, out sampling the genetics of jackrabbits or the geology of lava cones or some equally useless pursuit. And it was still disconcerting to be staring right at him but to be unable to sense him at all. It was like watching an incredibly elaborate breathing mannequin.

  I slapped his face a couple of times, and his eyes half-opened, but he seemed to be having trouble focusing, which was right about where he should have been. I slapped him again, just cause it felt good. “Okay,” I said, “talky talky time.” The syringe had been full of Sodium Pentothal sometimes called a “truth serum.”

  “Hey!” I said as he shook his head in confusion. “Where were you going?”

  “Going?” he muttered, “Going, going, gone,” and then he giggled. Okay, try another tack. “Look, you little freak, where’s home? You talked about home? Where is it?”

  And he started singing, “Home, home is where the heart is. Oh … Hooome is where the heart is.” And it kind of went on like that. I couldn’t get a single coherent answer out of him. It just made the throbbing headache he’d already given me with a rock even worse.

  That’s the problem with Pentothal. You see, it’s not really a truth serum—there isn’t actually any such thing as a truth serum. It’s more like a “loosener.” It makes people talk, but they don’t necessarily say anything useful; they don’t even necessarily tell the truth. Delusions, fears (not that he had any of those), fantasies, they all get mixed up together. But, what the heck, it was worth a try. My calendar wasn’t exactly full. So I kept this up for an hour or so, and dusk began to spread across the land as the sun met the
horizon. Above us, as we had our insane little chat, the sky began to flare in streamers of orange and red and yellow.

  Then, suddenly—and this never happens with normal people—he just snapped back together. One minute he was babbling on about the merits of different species of desert jackrabbits, and the next he was utterly silent, gazing up at me with a kind of detached, almost scientific interest. “Well,” he said, and smiled. “You know, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.” And that was it for me. I stepped back and picked up a rock the size of my shoe that I’d selected just for this purpose. He must have known what was coming, but he just ignored it.

  “So,” he said calmly, “Be honest with yourself. I mean, you really like to kill people, don’t you? I mean, deep down, you think it’s kind of fun, right? I know you do, son. I’ve been inside, there. You’re just a cold-blooded killer.” I stood there for a moment, watching him watching me. “We’re more similar than you’d like to admit, you know,” he said.

  I slammed the rock down into his forehead with both hands. Blood and chunks of skin and little bits of bone splattered everywhere. Then I stood, dropping the rock beside him. I paused for a moment to wipe the worst of the gore from my hands and face, and shook the front of my shirt to dislodge some of the bits of him stuck there.

  Teflon Boy

  As the last light emptied out of the day, I stumbled back to where I’d left Teflon Boy. “Pretty sky,” he said to me, when I returned. I pulled a little micro LED light out of my valise, along with a thick package of wipes. After cleaning myself up as best I could, I led Teflon Boy back to where Arthur’s body slumped. The kid the vampire had taken seemed finally to have fallen asleep. It was a relief not to have his constant terror pressing in at me.

  I sat Teflon Boy down on the rock where I’d been sitting before, and I made him hold the rock I’d used, rubbing his hands across it. “He’s really a mess,” Teflon Boy commented as I scooped some of the bloody muck from Arthur’s forehead and kneeled before him and flicked it at him with one finger for a while until he was spattered all over. The spatter pattern, it’s key. A bad spatter pattern is the first thing they notice, and even pretty ignorant crime scene folk get nervous when the spatter isn’t right. But I examined him in the light of the LED, and I decided it was good enough. I mean, we were talking Eastern Oregon hick cops, here.

  I backed out of the little space where the whole encounter had run its course, brushing all around the site, looking for any place I might accidentally have stepped. Then I told Teflon Boy to do a little dance around the vampire, which he did with great enthusiasm, humming the theme to Star Wars.

  “Okay, Kiddo,” I said to him after he’d sat down, “in all those Dean Koontz books you’ve read, was there ever one where someone killed someone by whacking them in the head?”

  He looked at me quizzically, as if I were stupid, and said, “ ’Course there is. Don’t you remember that time when that nice woman was being chased by … ” I let him babble on a little and then I told him that some nice people were going to come get him in a few hours, and they would be really interested in that particular story. “Be sure to tell them, tell them the whole thing. Otherwise, they’re going to be disappointed.”

  “Oh, yes. Sure. I can tell the story. I can do that.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then one more thing. In a little while after I go away, you might want to go wake up that nice little boy who’s sleeping behind that bush over there.”

  “Oh, a boy?” he said and started to get up, but I waved him down. “Not now. Okay? In a little while. And … ” I shrugged. “And give him a hug for me, okay?”

  I pulled my pay-as-you-go cell phone out of my valise, and checked again that there was a signal out there. I dialed 911, turned the volume down, and laid the phone next to Arthur. Then I backed away, dragging the sage branches in my path.

  “Good-bye, Mister,” Teflon Boy called.

  “Good-bye … ” and I realized I had no idea what his real name was.

  Just as well, I thought. “Good-bye,” I said, again. I hoped they had a lot of Dean Koontz novels wherever they were going to put him. But, of course, it wouldn’t really matter much. He was Teflon Boy, after all. He would get a good opportunity to use his superpower in service of mankind. At least, that’s what I told myself.

  Emerging Again Today At a good distance from the deed, I hurled the branches and my stained pants away and kept walking.

  The moon showed half a face in the sky, casting enough light that I was able to turn off my LED. Every once in a while I would halt and gaze up, astonished, at the immense scattering of stars that seemed to hang just above my head, filling all the space of the firmament. I’d never felt so close to the universe. They say it should make you feel small. But it didn’t. It made me feel alive.

  I had learned at least something about the location of the nest. Not much, but enough to start looking. He’d known too much about that little dry lake, about the shamans and the rock paintings and the land. His fellows were close. I was certain of that. Perhaps even closing in on his body and the kid and Teflon Boy. I hoped the sheriff would get there first, but it didn’t really matter much in the end. What mattered was that we would find them. They couldn’t hide forever out here.

  The heat quickly fled the land as I walked and it became as cold in the dark as it had been hot in the day. Wrapped in a silver cellophane space blanket, switching my valise from hand to hand as it got too heavy, I walked through the night. I weaved through long stretches of spiky sage that scratched furrows in my bare, shivering legs; waded through little seas of bunchgrass; crunched again for a time over the hard surfaces of broad alkali flats; and skirted around the weathered spout of an ancient lava cone.

  As I walked, constellations rose and fell at the horizons. The Earth spun beneath my feet and carried me through the sky as I carried myself across the empty land.

  When dawn finally began to spread a purple haze across the eastern sky, I stopped and dug a shallow grave for myself in the shading lee of a cliff. I wrapped myself in my plastic blanket, clicked on the homing beacon from my valise, and pulled the dirt over myself until I was mostly covered.

  I fell into an exhausted sleep, and my dreams were filled with shamans and vampires and jackrabbits as I lay in the embrace of the all penetrating pungency of peppery-sweet sage.

  I slept the sleep of the dead, the sleep of the just, cradled mostly away from the heat of the day, and they came upon me as the sun reached the middle of the sky. I arose from my grave, shedding dirt in all directions, to meet the faces of my friends: Ant Boy and the sparkling air around lovely Lightning Bug, and, of course, the sweet, angry whisper of always invisible Shade. The blades of their helicopter thumped away where it had landed on a nearby hill. I could feel them all from inside themselves, and they felt so familiar. Just for a moment, however unwanted, Doctor Death was back in the embrace of the League.

  “Okay,” I said, after coughing the dust from my throat. “Let’s hunt some vampires.”

  SUPERHERO GIRL

  JEI D. MARCADE

  I wake to the sound of my name. The TV is still on, stuck on a ghost channel. Otherwise my room is dark, and it feels empty, but I know what I heard. I know who it sounded like.

  “Ofelia?” I whisper harshly. At first there is no reply. I wait, listening hard.

  Her voice comes tinny and faint between bursts of white noise: “I’m—here. Come—find me!”

  There is a shadow on the screen, moving through lines of static. A small figure lost in an electric blizzard. It has faded by the time I draw closer. It could have been anything.

  I swear it was her.

  She’ll come back. She always does. All I have to do is let myself believe it.

  Ofelia was a superhero. She told me so without reserve. “It’s safe for me to tell you,” she said. “I can sense you’re not a villain. Besides, it would be unfair to keep it from you. It won’t be easy, you know, being involved with a superhero girl.”


  It did take some getting used to. She received her mission briefings in birdsong, in radio static, encoded in every third word backwards from a breaking news bulletin on the televisions in a specific store window. She saw battle plans drawn out for her in cloud patterns, coffee cup rings, the movement of players on a soccer field. During these moments she would stand frozen in mid-motion, her head cocked to the side, listening intently. Then she would drop—literally drop—whatever she was doing and dash away, calling apologies over her shoulder.

  “I’ll just … wait for you here, then,” I said the first time it happened.

  “No, no,” she shouted back. “This could take hours. I’ll call you!”

  I scooped what I could of her ice cream cone off the sidewalk and dumped it in the trash.

  Her friends told me that it was just another quirk of hers, that she said things like that when she needed to use the restroom, or go back to her apartment for something she’d forgotten, or attend a lecture. I had to admit that I didn’t know what her class schedule was like.

  When I told Ofelia what they’d said, she laughed fondly. “They’re just trying to protect my secret. They don’t think you should know about me.”

  And I kept her secret. I didn’t tell my friends that she helped keep the world safe for us. I didn’t tell my friends much of anything about her. Maybe I was trying to preserve the intimacy of our relationship. Maybe it was because of something else.

  The first time we made love, I saw the faded red lines across the tops of her thighs, straight and thin, precisely drawn. There were a lot of them. I pretended not to notice, but she saw me looking and said in explanation, “Robot ninjas with laser-bladed throwing stars. I was lucky; if I hadn’t jumped back when I did, they would have taken my legs clean off. It was a tough mission; I almost didn’t make it.”