Heroine Complex

by Sarah Kuhn

  My feet slipped from under me, skidding along the carpet, thunkthunkthunk. I pitched one foot forward, trying like mad to plant again, and wrenched my left arm free from the cape’s folds. The Tommy Thing yanked harder and the cape pulled tight at my neck, strangling me. I smacked my hand against my neck, my fingertips grappling at the cape’s collar. My breath got shorter and a sudden, idiotic thought popped into my head.

  This is about the dumbest way for a (fake) superhero to bite it: death by cape strangulation.

  I redoubled my efforts, leaning as far forward as I could while grasping at my neck, trying to find the cape’s snap closure. My fingertips slid helplessly over the slippery material of the collar . . . then finally, blessedly, hit a circular piece of metal. I yanked with all my might and heard the satisfying clack of the snap coming loose. The cape slid off my shoulders and I pitched forward, falling to my knees.

  “DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” howled the Tommy Thing.

  I rolled over, trying to get my breath back, my hands slamming against the soda-stained carpet. The Tommy Thing glared at me, crumpled the cape in his gargantuan paw, and tossed it to the side.

  “Nicely done!” Aveda crowed. “That was a Michelle Yeoh–level action heroine move, Evie. Now while you have everyone’s attention, let’s get to those talking points!”

  “Fuck this,” I muttered. I struggled to my feet, my eyes never leaving the Tommy Thing. Then I ripped the tiara-camera off my head, chucked it to the ground, and crushed it under one of my ten-pound boots.

  I heard a faint, pissed-sounding “Evvvvvvv . . .” amid the cracking of the plastic.

  “Tommy,” I said, my voice ringing loud and clear through the theater. “What do you want?”

  “GRAAAAAAWWWRRRR!” he screamed.

  “NO.” I stepped forward, trying to inject a little swagger into my stance. The boots helped. I found myself adjusting to them, using them to give me height and power. “Cut it out with the incoherent bellowing. Use your words.”

  He cocked his misshapen head at me. I took another step forward.

  “You said something about minions?” I coaxed. I realized I was using the same placating tone I usually used on Aveda.

  He clasped his taloned mitts together, looking unsure. “MINIONS BAAAAAD.” He extended a claw at the audience. “NO LAUGHING.”

  “Laughing?” I turned to survey the crowd, trying to figure out what he meant. I realized they didn’t seem all that scared anymore. Most of them avoided my gaze, their eyes shifting from side to side. They looked almost . . . guilty?

  “Um, you. Citizen.” I pointed at the messy-haired girl who had helped me out before. “Any idea what he means?”

  “Well,” she said, “the movie, Miss Jupiter. It wasn’t that funny.”

  My face must have looked extra-bewildered, because her words started coming out in a rush. “I mean. I loved the last Tommy Lemon movie—the one where he pretends to be a Saint Bernard so he can mother an abandoned litter of puppies? That was hilarious. But this one, it just . . . it . . .”

  “BABIES FUUUUNNNNNY!” wailed the Tommy Thing.

  “Middle-aged men dressed as babies are creepy,” the girl insisted. “No one wants to laugh at that.”

  “NOOOOOOOOO . . .”

  I twirled back around to face the Tommy Thing, who was thrashing around the screen, in the throes of what appeared to be a gigantic tantrum.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, striding forward. Maybe I was imagining it, but my feet seemed to be getting used to the giant boots. “You popped out of the screen and scared all these people and got all clawy and growly because they didn’t like your movie?”

  “GRAAAAAAAAAWR!” he growled in the affirmative.

  “Oh my God.” I gave him my best disdainful look. It wasn’t quite The Tanaka Glare, but it was something. “That is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve made millions of dollars dressing up in various asinine disguises and slopping it on the screen for people to consume. You got everyone here to give you their money. And you’re upset because they don’t automatically think you’re a comedy genius for slapping a bonnet on your head and drooling all over the place?”

  He crossed his bulbous arms over his chest, pouting.

  “You can’t control audience response,” I continued. “I wrote a paper on this in grad school. Once the artist puts the art out into the world—”

  “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

  The Tommy Thing’s arm shot out of the screen again, pawing savagely in my direction.

  “Hey.” I hopped backward, out of his reach. “If you would just listen . . .”

  “MRAAAAWWRRAAAAAA!” His arm extended, claws slashing. His movements were still on the labored side, but he was big and powerful enough that it didn’t matter. The audience screamed in terror. I dodged once, twice. Then felt something heavy land on my foot. I wrenched my foot back, hot ribbons of pain shooting up my leg. I gritted my teeth, ignoring the pain, my gaze falling to my left boot, which now sported a gigantic claw mark. And more than a little bit of blood.

  Dammit. I had actually begun to grow fond of those boots.

  The Tommy Thing roared again, his arms extending into the audience, claws slashing. Shrieks rippled through the crowd, nearly drowning out his roaring.

  “Hey, we can move!” the messy-haired girl cried. “The seats aren’t holding us anymore!”

  “THEN EVERYONE GET OUT OF HERE!” I yelled.

  Apparently I’d forgotten the rule about screaming “fire” in a crowded theater.

  People stampeded for the exits, everyone climbing over each other. The mob was an ugly thing, a mass of terrified faces, grabbing hands, and crumpled popcorn bags.

  “EVERYONE, GO STAND IN THE BACK!” I amended. “IN AN ORDERLY FASHION.”

  The Tommy Thing reached his claws out farther, trying to get at the mob.

  “Hey!” I snapped my fingers at him. “Right here. We were talking.”

  His eyes went to me, narrowing with malice. I shuddered, feeling the full weight of his gaze, the pure evil that seemed to thrum through the theater and straight into my soul.

  “That’s right,” I murmured. “Focus on me.”

  I closed my eyes as his arm extended, his claws slashing toward me.

  I can do this, I told myself. I can save all these people. If I can get him to concentrate purely on me, take me out, maybe his rage will be satisfied. And then maybe . . .

  Wait a minute. What the hell was I thinking? A realization smacked me upside the head.

  He might have unabashed rage, but my rage was better.

  My eyes flew open. I dodged his slashy claw just in time.

  “Forget the fear, Evie,” I muttered. “Focus on the anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to you blowing stuff up.”

  I darted out of the way of his claw again, hopping back and forth. I was vaguely aware of shooting pain in the foot wearing the ruined boot, but I did my best to ignore it.

  “Goddamn, Tommy Lemon,” I said, turning my voice into a growl. “Forget this movie. Your last movie sucked even harder. I took my sister to see it and she wouldn’t talk to me for a week. Our relationship is damaged enough and you made it worse.”

  His claw narrowly missed my left hip. “You’re a symbol for the worst kind of mediocrity!” I continued, darting behind a row of theater seats, dragging my aching foot behind me. “So lazy you can’t come up with a concept that’s half original. You keep dressing up as stupid things and making the same stupid movie. I wanted to stab myself during that last one! Stab myself!”

  “RAAAAAAAR!”

  I ran-limped down the row of seats as his claws slashed out for me again, destroying the seats one by one. The stuffing exploded out of them in angry clouds of white polyester: bam, bam, bam.

  “You’re a hack!” I screamed. I landed in the ce
nter aisle, dancing out of his way. “And I do not need your bullshit today. My crazy boss just moved me into her house against my will, I’m being forced to take orders from my juvenile delinquent of a sister, and I’m either hallucinating or not hallucinating demons, depending on who you talk to.” I raised my hand to point at him, my index finger jabbing defiantly at the screen. “Also? You ruined my shoes.”

  Rage surged through me and for the first time, my blaze of anger was shot through with satisfaction. I welcomed the heat in my palm. I encouraged it. I set it free.

  A bright burst of flame arced from my hand, catapulted itself toward the screen, and hit the Tommy Thing squarely between the eyes.

  “RAWWWWWWR—” His screams were cut short as he exploded, what was left of the movie screen caving in on itself with a ripppppp and leaving nothing but a big, black hole.

  I took an involuntary step back. In the back of the theater, someone started a slow clap. It gained strength, more and more people joining in, until it crescendoed into full-on applause.

  “Aveda Jupiter is on fire!” shrieked a little voice. Messy-haired girl again.

  I stared at my palm, then looked up at the destroyed movie screen.

  “Yeah,” I murmured to myself. “That just happened.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I COULDN’T STOP EATING. Loaded potato skins were my new best friends. Also stuffed mushroom caps.

  Lucy and Nate eyed me with awe (and, okay, maybe a little disgust) as I crammed another forkful of over-salted, over-cheesed goodness into my mouth.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned, licking sour cream off my fingers. “Don’t get me wrong, saving all those people was nice, but this might be the best reward for Evil Tommy Lemon slayage.”

  They just kept staring at me.

  “Guys, I’m kidding. And Aveda says I’m the stick-in-the-mud.”

  “We’re confused, Evelyn,” Lucy said. “Your diet normally consists of processed cereal products. Between the fancy dates last night and this feast . . .” She gestured to the artery-clogging spread in front of me. “Your taste buds seem to be undergoing some kind of shift.”

  “Or your metabolism is,” Nate said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table. “This latest incident of excessive hunger was preceded by a meaningful use of your fire power at the Yamato. Maybe using your power depletes your system in ways you weren’t previously aware of.”

  “So my need to eat potato skins is science,” I said. “It can’t be that I’m, like, enjoying them. Once again, science explains it all!”

  I gave him a mocking look. He held my gaze for longer than necessary and I flashed back to last night’s moment in the bathroom: his fingertips brushing against my skin, my heartbeat ratcheting upward. A flush crept up the back of my neck and I quickly averted my eyes, allowing them to roam the dank atmosphere of The Gutter, San Francisco’s seediest piano/karaoke bar.

  The Gutter was a place where I felt like I could hide. The lighting was bad, the red velvet tablecloths were worn to patchiness, and the clientele was beyond geriatric. Kevin, the owner, presided over the grimy bar with gusto. I watched as he planted his hands on his hips and frowned at someone’s (undoubtedly pedestrian) drink order. Somehow he managed to make even that minor a movement look simultaneously disdainful and fabulous, his tight BLATASIAN AND PROUD T-shirt flowing sinuously over his three-hundred-pound frame. Kevin—who was indeed a mix of Black, Latino, and Asian and enjoyed making people guess exactly how much of each—knew how to rock an empowering message tee.

  And as usual Stu Singh was perched behind his scratched-up baby grand, signature fedora in place. Karaoke requests hadn’t picked up for the night, so he plunked out his own composition, a melancholy little tune Gutter regulars had been hearing for the past few months.

  After Nate patched up my foot, which turned out to bear nothing more than a medium-size cut, Lucy declared we had to celebrate my Yamato triumph. I demanded we go to The Gutter. Then I demanded five orders of potato skins. Those gouda-stuffed dates had opened my eyes to the potential wonders of non-cereal foodstuffs. Call them the gateway dates.

  Surprisingly Nate agreed to come with us, but Aveda still couldn’t move around easily and said she needed her beauty sleep. I’d thought Bea would try to wheedle me into taking her underage ass back to the scene of one of her most recent alcohol-infused crimes, but she’d said she had “a lot of work to do analyzing today’s media metrics.” I didn’t know what that meant. I was just happy she hadn’t started a fight.

  “So,” I said, slathering guacamole on my last potato skin, “let’s talk about something more interesting than me.” Once I’d emerged from the heat of battle and wasn’t preoccupied with, you know, not dying, something had niggled at the back of my brain. Something I couldn’t quite put into words. I decided to try anyway.

  “What was that Tommy Thing today?”

  “What do you mean?” Nate asked. “As you pointed out in the moment: obviously a demon, not a special effect. Even Aveda came around to that line of thinking.”

  “A demon for sure,” I agreed. “But didn’t it seem like a different kind of demon than usual?”

  “They’re always different, though, aren’t they?” Lucy said. “They take the form of the first thing they see. And in this case, that seemed to be that dreadful cardboard Tommy standee at the entrance of the theater.”

  “Right,” I said. “But its skin was kind of weird and it chose to make itself very large—”

  “Which has happened before,” Lucy mused. “Sometimes they don’t get the texture or proportions exactly right. Remember that hair salon attack where Aveda had to battle strangely massive bottles of shampoo?”

  “True,” I said. “But what’s really weird is there was no ‘they.’ No swarm. It was just the one demon.”

  “I am conducting an exhaustive search of all past demon sighting reports to discern whether a single demon sighting has occurred before,” Nate said. “Perhaps I can connect today’s sighting to—”

  “It’s not just that, though,” I said. “He also didn’t immediately jump out of the screen and try to eat me.”

  “You weren’t bleeding, initially,” Nate said. “Not until he got your foot. And while demons may attempt to attack when you aren’t bleeding, they’re most vicious when they scent your blood—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “I’ve seen all of that up close and personal. Many, many times. But the weirdness of this particular demon goes beyond that, even. The way he acted, the way he moved . . .”

  Suddenly it hit me. The thing I’d been trying to articulate, the connection I couldn’t quite grasp.

  “He moved like the Aveda statue demons!” I yelped, slamming my fist on the table. Nate and Lucy jumped a little. “Slow and lurchy, not swarmy and piranha-like. But the way he interacted with me wasn’t like the Aveda statues at all. Or any demons we’ve seen before, really. We had, like . . . a conversation. Sort of. And there were times where he reacted like the real Tommy Lemon might. I mean, he was mad because people didn’t like his movie—”

  “And then tried to kill everyone,” Nate said. “Which is in line with the way the demons usually act.”

  “But the way he was talking about it was . . . nuanced,” I said. “I mean, in between the growly sounds. He seemed genuinely upset that people weren’t laughing.”

  “What are you trying to say?” Nate asked.

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head, trying to put my thoughts into some kind of coherent order. “I really don’t know. All this stuff contributes to this overall . . . feeling I got from him. An impression. That he was different.”

  Nate met my eyes. “Impressions—”

  “Aren’t exact data,” I interrupted. “Yes, I know.”

  “Perhaps the demons are getting more creative,” Lucy said. “It seems logical that an evil species would be content wi
th things like bitey little cupcakes for only so long.”

  “There were oddities about the attack today,” Nate said. “But we should start with the facts—”

  “‘Oddities’ meaning the force field that kept people stuck to their seats and me frozen in the back of the theater?” Lucy said, wincing. “Evie, if I haven’t said it enough already: I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you. Whatever that thing was, it was holding me in place. I couldn’t move until it released the crowd—and then I was just trying to corral them, get them under control. They were such an unruly mob—”

  “We’ve seen force fields before,” Nate interrupted. “Though they are very erratic and I haven’t been able to find a pattern yet. Sometimes they’re visible, sometimes not. Sometimes people can move in them, sometimes not. And sometimes it’s a mix. For instance, there was one at the attack a month ago at the bicycle shop: Aveda was the only one who could move through it, but she said it was like punching molasses. No, I meant like the lack of a portal—”

  “That’s right, there was no portal!” I exclaimed. “So where did that Tommy Thing come from?”

  “Maybe you missed the portal, love,” Lucy said. “You were running around quite a bit. Or it could’ve been behind the movie screen.”

  “There was no portal,” I said firmly. “Rose and her team inspected the site after the attack and she confirmed it.”

  Nate nodded thoughtfully. “I need to put this information in a spreadsheet.”

  “Forget the spreadsheet!” I sputtered, my frustration bubbling over. “We have to think beyond spreadsheets. We have to put all these impressions together, because they might actually mean something. Are the demons evolving? Changing?” Dread bloomed in my chest as a horrible new thought occurred to me. “Could this be a new invasion attempt by those human-shaped demons that tried to get through the first portal? Because the Aveda statues and the Tommy demon? Human-shaped. Very, very human.” I was babbling now, spurred on by my runaway train of thought.

  “That’s definitely not it,” Nate said. “These most recent demons still followed the pattern we know: they imprinted on a statue and a cardboard standee. And those are still objects.”