Kingdom of Heroes

by Jay Phillips

  “What the hell?” Emily asked, her voice seemingly filled with shock from either the doors opening by themselves or the fact that it was a sign their time together was up. He wasn’t sure either way.

  He looked down at her. “The Agent is tired of waiting.”

  “Any chance we come out of this alive?”

  He stared into the now open elevator. Peterson was still unconscious on the floor. “Slim to none,” he answered.

  “I’ll take it. It’s better than no chance at all. Besides, things could be worse.”

  “How?” he asked as they stepped into the lift, their hands still firmly clasped together.

  “You could be a figment of my imagination. Now that would just be awkward,” she added as the doors slid closed behind them.

  _______________________________________________

  “Who’s your friend?” Emily asked as she looked down at the unconscious man in the storm trooper attire.

  “Him?” The Detective responded, pulling himself out of a momentary daze. He was suddenly easily distracted; he assumed it was from the loss of blood. “That is my old dear friend Petey Peterson. Just ignore him; he’s trying to sleep.”

  She looked down at him before launching her shoeless right foot into Peterson’s ribs. He let out a little moan. “That felt good,” she said as she moved the hair out of her face that had fallen from her sudden movement. “I really hate these guys.”

  “Are you ready for this?” The Detective asked, his voice filled with a sudden sense of doubt that hadn’t been there before.

  She smiled her usual sad smile. “Not really. But I guess we’re past the point of having any other options.”

  He nodded and reached across the elevator to the large panel of numbered buttons. Without a word, he pushed the button marked with a large “P,” and the lift began to move.

  He reached into his coat and pulled out the pistol he had taken from Peterson. “Here,” he said as he reached out to hand it to her. “Take this.”

  “I don’t want that,” she said in a hesitant tone as her arms recoiled from the weapon. “What in the hell am I supposed to do with a gun?”

  “Shoot people,” he answered. “Preferably not me or yourself, you know, just the bad guys.”

  She sighed as she reached over and took the gun, holding it between her forefinger and thumb like she was holding a dirty napkin.

  He smiled at her. “If you hold it like that, you’re probably not going to be able to shoot too many of those bad guys.”

  “Jackass,” she replied, moving the pistol into the palm of her hand and turning it from side-to-side. “I know how to hold it; I know how to use it. I just said I didn’t want it.”

  “If I don’t survive this---,” he began before she opened her mouth to interrupt him. He kept going, stopping her from speaking. “If I don’t come through this and you do, you’re going to need an escape plan. That gun could be your way out.”

  She shook her head. “Why do you think I have a chance of making it out if you don’t? You think The Agent is just going to kill you and just let me walk? Fat chance.”

  He stepped closer to her and stroked her hair with his good hand. “Just hang on to it. It will make me feel better. Please.”

  She looked up at him. “Damn you and your handsome face. I bet you use those good looks to get everything you want.”

  He chuckled lightly. “Usually they just get me shot or stabbed.”

  “Will it make you feel better if I hang on to this,” she paused before she said the word, “gun?”

  “It will.”

  “Do you have another, or am I supposed to be holding the only one?”

  He opened the left side of his coat and showed her the holstered weapon inside. He didn’t dare tell her he only had four bullets left in that one. He didn’t have to.

  “Seriously,” she replied as she placed the gun behind her back, reaching through the top of her dress and storing it in in between her skin and her bra strap. “Giving me the weapon with the most bullets. I’m not even going to start with everything wrong with that.”

  The elevator stopped moving, and the doors slid open with a nice whoosh sound. The Detective stepped toward the opening until he heard a sound from behind him. He turned in time to find Emily on her knees, grasping her head and crying out in pain.

  _______________________________________________

  “What the hell?” The Detective bent down beside her, not sure whether to touch her or let her be.

  “My…head,” Emily managed to get out. “I…can’t…see.”

  “Your eyes?” he asked, knowing each question sounded dumber than the last.

  “No,” she answered as she attempted to climb to her feet. “My…mind…my…powers…they’re…gone.”

  He placed his arm around her and held her up. Her face was filled with pain; every little movement created a new grimace and pained expression. With an arm around her shoulder, he walked her toward the open elevator door.

  He himself was tired and bleeding from too many different locations. The walk was slow and tedious; he considered himself lucky to be on his feet at all, let alone actually managing to hold her in his arms as they moved. It wasn’t that she was too heavy; it was that he was to the point of being too tired to move himself.

  He started to ask her what had happened when he remembered where they were. It had long been known that The Agent had designed his penthouse home to be completely telepath resistant; it had been layered in the same material as Barren’s telepathic proof patches that seemed to be all the rage these days. No wonder, The Detective thought, that she felt blind. Having a second sight taken away would have been like him losing his sense of smell. He had come to rely on it almost as much as he did his eyes.

  They walked to the edge of the elevator, and he stood in silence in the spot where the lift met the penthouse, in awe of the massive room in front of him. The elevator opened into a giant kitchen which led into a living area. The cathedral ceiling was at least thirty feet high, stretching into a point in the center that could have been at least forty. On each side of the living area, plastered to each wall, were two giant monitors, each as high as the ceiling. Each monitor was separated into hundreds of quadrants, each section showing a different camera view from no telling how many different locations or cities.

  Most impressive, though, was the thirty foot high window that separated the living area from the giant balcony just beyond it. Even from where The Detective stood, all the way on the other side of the room, he could see the entire city through the glass, the night sky lit up by the hundreds of skyscrapers that had once been the city’s claim to fame. He could see the rain still pouring from the sky, which found itself intermittently lit up by the occasional flash of lightning. He found it almost breathtaking.

  The only light in the whole area came from the two giant monitors and the world outside the window. Everything else was bathed in darkness, creating deep pools of shadows throughout the two rooms, shadows that, The Detective knew, could hide just about anything or anyone.

  Without warning, the world around him came back into harsh focus, and he remembered the young woman who struggled to hang onto his one good shoulder. He looked around and found a mahogany topped bar type structure in the middle of the kitchen, complete with matching chairs, and he led her there, setting her carefully in one of the chairs. She buried her head in her hands; he could smell the tears that silently fell from her eyes. The pain, he knew, had to be overwhelming, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  He leaned over and kissed her on top of her head. She reached up, pulling him in closer. She let go of him as she raised her head away from her hands. She turned towards him, a forced smile stretched across her pain filled face. “I’m okay,” she lied, tears still visible in her wet brown eyes. “I’m better now.”

  He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “You lie so pretty,” he replied with a smile of his own. He looked around;
the scene was missing something or someone as was the case. “So…where’s our host? Thought he would be out here to kick my ass already.”

  “He’s here,” she said through a grimace. “I can almost feel him.”

  “Your powers are back?”

  “No,” she answered as she shook her head from side-to-side. “It’s like there’s a persistent fog crammed inside of my skull, and there’s no room for it. It’s making my head feel like it’s going to explode. But if I shut my eyes and try real hard, I can almost feel the people around me. I can’t read them, but I can feel them. I can sense your presence right here next to me, and I can almost, not completely, just almost, feel him in the other side of the apartment.” She pointed past the monitors to a doorway that seemed like it would lead to a hall. “He’s somewhere in that direction.”

  The Detective nodded in reply as he walked away from her and towards the other side of the counter, where, against the adjacent wall, stood all of the kitchen’s appliances: a stove, a dishwasher, and most importantly, at least to him, a refrigerator. He placed his hand on the door and started to open it, only to notice a set of fingerprints all over the handle. Someone’s cleaning lady wasn’t doing a good job. He ran the tip of his forefinger across the prints, recognizing one of them almost immediately. Suddenly, everything made a whole lot more sense.

  Without another thought on the subject, he opened the refrigerator door and began prowling through all of the delicacies within. Meat, cheeses, milks, it was a smorgasbord or flavors, and he was starving. He took out several options then turned to grab a loaf of bread he saw on the counter. He smelled the air around it. Fresh baked bread, outside of pretty girls who smelled like honey, he couldn’t think of anything that could have possibly smelled better.

  She watched him as he placed his hat down on the counter and piled various varieties of cheese and meats onto the bread. “Are you seriously making a sandwich? We‘re going to die soon, and you‘re going to make a snack?”

  “Yes and yes,” he answered as he put the last piece of bread in place. He picked it up and took a bite. “I am starving, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to die hungry if I don’t have to. Want one?”

  “No thanks,” she answered with a small smile and the lightest of laughs. “I’m good.”

  “Your loss,” he answered.

  “I see you’ve made yourself right at home,” a booming voice said from the other side of the room. The deep, commanding voice belonged to an older man who stood in-between the giant displays. He was tall, around six-four or five, still broad shouldered and impossibly muscled even after all these years. The only sign he had aged at all was his hair and neatly trimmed beard, both the gray color of an old man. Without another word, The Agent walked toward them.

  _______________________________________________

  The Detective stared at The Agent, finding him disappointing on several different levels. He had at least hoped they would find Rogers living all alone like a recluse, with foot long nails, a beard down to his waist, and Kleenex boxes for shoes. If they hadn’t found that, The Detective at least wanted him to be in his old red, white, and blue spandex superhero getup from the pre-Seven days; instead, they found him in an ironed pair of slacks, a blue sweater, and a pair of expensive Italian loafers. Life, it seemed, was just continually full of disappointments.

  “Detective,” Rogers said, the word seeming to roll off of his tongue as if it were a swear, “you finally made it. Mostly in one piece, it seems.”

  “Sure did,” The Detective responded in-between bites of his sandwich. “Small talk, small talk, small talk, I’m glad we got that out of the way.”

  The Agent ignored him as he walked closer to where they were. He looked Emily up and down, though not in a lecherous way, more like a grandfather who hadn’t seen a grandchild in a long time. “Emily, my dear, it’s been far too long; my God child, look at how you have grown.”

  She sat up straight in her chair, seemingly doing everything she could to not show any of the pain she was feeling. The Agent noticed despite her best efforts.

  “I do apologize for your discomfort,” he said with a look on his face that could almost be described as compassion. He had crossed the distance between them and now stood almost next to Emily and across the counter from The Detective. “It’s a side effect of the telepathic block I have built into my home. Hopefully, the pain will subside as your mind adjusts to the lack of sensation.”

  She nodded, still doing everything she could to not give away the tremendous amount of pain she was in.

  “And I forgot to tell you this,” The Agent continued, “I called the hospital earlier, and they said that Fire was awake and out of recovery. She should be fine.”

  The Detective chuckled, almost choking on the last few bites of sandwich as they went down.

  “Do you find something amusing, Detective?” Rogers asked, turning his gaze toward The Detective and brandishing a look that was far from compassionate.

  “So far, just about everything,” the Detective answered as he wiped the crumbs from his hands. He thought about making another sandwich, but he didn’t want to be seen as a glutton, especially not in front of someone he’d just met. “You take her against her will then threaten her life if she doesn’t guide me here. You’ve been pulling me around like a dog on a leash for the last day and a half, and you walk in here and act like we’re your guests from down the hall. A whole lot of this shit is funny.”

  He could see Emily physically shift in her chair, as if what he had just said had made her quite uncomfortable. Obviously, she knew Rogers better than he could ever hope or want to, and she probably knew what made him tick and what was likely to set him off. All The Detective had were stories and rumors about the man’s volatility, and none of them were anywhere near pleasant.

  The Agent looked at him, the older man’s face moving from angry to almost amused within the span of a few short seconds. “The impetuous of youth,” The Agent said as he sat down in a chair next to Emily and stared at The Detective from across the counter. “I believe I sent you on a task to find a killer. What did you find out?”

  The Detective smiled as he reached into his coat and pulled out the journal he had taken from Adam’s. He slid it across the counter towards The Agent; several pages, including the envelope and the suicide note, spilled across the counter. The Detective leaned against the bar and stared at Rogers. “I found quite a bit, and some of it is interesting.”

  The Agent returned The Detective’s smile. “Do tell,” Rogers said in return, the two men now staring at each other quite intently.

  “The man in the Iron Knight’s suit,” The Detective began, a look of satisfaction beginning to form in the back of his eyes, “the man who systematically murdered all of your old friends, is none other than your own adopted son, Adam. The blocks Quincy placed inside his mind, the blocks that prevented him from remembering what you and your little band of sidekicks did to his family, broke free when he opened that letter right there, the letter you sent him.”

  The Agent smiled again. The smile wasn’t pleasant or an expression of happiness. It was more like a wild animal as it lined up its prey; the look of a tiger about to go in for the kill. “And exactly how do you come to that interesting conclusion?”

  “Your fingerprints,” The Detective answered. “They’re all over the letter, and when I opened your refrigerator, guess what I found all over the handle. That’s right, the exact same prints. You sent the letter to your own son, knowing exactly what would happen when he read that line, knowing he couldn‘t help but seek revenge on the lot of you. Hell, you probably had Quincy leave it as trigger just for that exact purpose.”

  “And what purpose would that be?” Rogers asked, the same smile still plastered across his gray bearded face.

  “This is the fun part. You wanted him to kill the rest of The Seven. You wanted him to wake up and do what you didn’t want to, or maybe just what you weren’t able to do. With them go
ne, you consolidate power. No more having to wait for a convening to make a decision; now you can rule like the tyrant bastard you’ve always wanted to be.”

  “Brave words for a man with all the powers of a hyper active golden retriever.”

  The Detective smirked. “Do I look like someone who cares whether I live or die? If you don’t kill me now, I’ll probably just walk outside and bleed to death in the rain, or hell, I walk in front of a bus tomorrow. We all gotta go, might as well be doing what I love.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Finding would-be despots who suffer from delusions of grandeur and telling them to go fuck themselves.”

  “Doesn’t sound like something that comes up too often.”

  “It’s one of those once in a lifetime kind of hobbies, so you have to take it where you can get it.”

  The Agent lightly laughed from under his breath as he leaned away from the counter. “I must give you credit, Detective; you really have earned your moniker.” He walked towards the living area until he stood in front of the giant glass window that looked out over the terrace. He stared out over Metro City’s skyline, silently taking in the view of his city as lightning lit up the night sky.

  The Detective took the momentary respite to walk around to the other side of the counter. He leaned in next to Emily and asked her as softly as he could: “Are you okay?”

  She looked up at him and smiled. It was that same tragic half smile he had come to know her for, but it was better than nothing. “I’m okay,” she answered in a whisper. “He was right. My mind is starting to adjust. Powers are still gone, but at least the pain is starting to fade.”

  “Good,” he said in return as she started to stand up; he put an arm out for her to hold, and she used it to pull herself out of the chair. She seemed much stronger than she had been just a few minutes earlier.