Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story

by Bousquet, Mark

  “I’ll do it,” the one he needs says, moving onto the bed to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him passionately.

  And then there were twelve.

  And then there were thirteen.

  And at some point he passes out and when he awakes, he finds an entire day has transpired.

  29

  “You look like shit, kid,” the older, thinnish man with thinning black hair says with a smile from atop a stool.

  “Get bent, Penthouse of Clubs,” Kid Rapscallion says as he stands before the glass prison cube that houses superpowered criminals here in the Stockade, a hero-controlled prison located in a pocket dimension. Vincent Vogelsung sits inside a glass cube inside a larger, igloo-shaped room of metal. Inside the cube is a stool, a bed, a desk, and a toilet.

  “You’re as clever as they say,” the man smiles.

  “I’m sorry, how do I address you?” Kid asks. “Five of Clubs? Penthouse Man? Traitor? Shitbag? What the hell kind of name was Five of Clubs, anyway? Couldn’t count to six?”

  “Vincent will do,” the former hero and villain says, “and I picked that moniker because it was unassuming. I never wanted to be on the cover of magazines or invited to join the Revolutionaries.”

  “So you were really just pretending to be a hero but were actually a villain?”

  “My lord,” Vincent laughs, rising off the stool, “it can’t work the other way, can it? Did Francis pick you out of a hat?”

  “We’re not here to talk about Francis.”

  “Oh, of course,” Vincent winks.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means, no matter what you are vocalizing in a given moment, everything you say and do is a comment on your relationship with Francis Flack.”

  “If I wanted a shrink, I’d go see Therapist Z.”

  “Fine,” Vincent says, “we can play this your way. To what occasion do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

  Jason slaps a photo on the outer wall of the prison cube:

  I WILL WATCH LAS VEGAS BURN FROM THE TOP OF THIS CITY. NO ONE CAN STOP ME.

  Vincent is momentarily confused and then begins to laugh. “You’re not here because you think I did this, do you?” He motions around to his cage. “You do realize I’m in the Stockade, right? Oh my dear, dear boy,” he says, wiping tears from his eyes, “she’s had you running blind and stupid at the end of her leash since you met her, hasn’t she?”

  Jason scowls. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Vincent sits back on the stool and continues to laugh when he is interrupted by Striped Star’s voice on the com system. “Jason,” she says, “you need to come see this.”

  30

  For all his complaining about the Revolutionaries and their old fogeyness, Jason would never deny that feeling of awe one experiences walking into a room and seeing someone like Striped Star or Eagle ’62 standing there. These were the lineage heroes, and while there had been two Striped Stars before this one (one during World War 2 and another in the 1950s), and while Eagle ’62 had taken on the red, white, and blues from Eagle ’41 after the first soldier’s 21 year run in the tights, these were the heroes everyone in the community looked up to, the heroes everyone wanted to be.

  The were the fucking Revolutionaries, yeah? And while Jason knew they weren’t perfect, that the team had had their share of problems - both in and out of costume — even the so-called “Reality Generation” of heroes like himself could feel their wills bending to one of respect when they were in their presence.

  Jason wondered how much of that was because they’d been around for forty years and how much was because of their actual worthiness. Yeah, sure, they’d save the world hundreds of times, but —

  “Focus your thoughts,” the Psychic Navigator commands as Jason enters the massive, circular control room at the heart of the Fort. Unlike Star and Eagle, who still looked much like they had for the past 40 years (him because of the government serum that gave him his powers and her because she’d received a blood transfusion from the actual, honest-to-goodness God of War), the Navigator was starting to age. Graying hair dominated his temples, and there were lines on his gaunt face. He’d been in this life since the 1970s and there wasn’t anything keeping him from looking like a guy in his mid-50s. “There is a serious issue at hand.”

  Jason turned to give the Revolutionaries’ resident telepath/telekinetic a withering glance that told him what he could do with himself.

  “I believe that is Duplication Girl’s forte, is it not?”

  “Knock it off,” Striped Star orders from the center console. The walls of this round room are viewing screens, and before Jason turns to look at the various images playing around them, he lets his eyes take in Star. Statuesque, beautiful, and noble, her genetic lineage seemed to meander through as many different races and ethnicities, as possible, ending up in her, an American Army brat of Mexican parents who could trace her father’s side of the family back to the Aztecan gods and her mother’s to Mount Olympus. Dressed in leather armor, her omnipresent sword hanging off her hip, Jason feels the stirrings of desired conquest in his loins, but pushes them aside as he asks her, “What have we … oh, hell.”

  On the screens around him are the same scene played out from multiple angles:

  Colbie Cross, dressed in a Kid Rapscallion costume, lashed to the roof of the Grand Vegas.

  31

  Apes riding dinosaurs terrorize Las Vegas. Jason’s eyes see these images and his brain properly processes them, but he has eyes only for the costumed villain standing over Colbie. The villain wears a white uniform with almost unnoticeable silver stars that rotate around her body from her left boot to her neck. Her face and hair are covered by a white mask with a silver star in the center.

  “We’re running our recognition program,” Striped Star announces, changing one of the screens to the computer program cycling through every superhero and law enforcement database on the planet, “but there’s no costume match, no body match, no S.O.P. match on record. She calls herself Fake Out, but we think she’s a completely new villain.”

  “She’s not,” Jason says, his heart knotting up and twisting. Though he can’t see her face beneath the mask, he knows the body and knows the smile. “Her name is Rebecca Rokers,” he says. “The Penthouse Man is her uncle.”

  Striped Star’s face tells him she’s not ready to believe the young hero who once asked her what it was like to be the most jerked-off to woman in history, but Jason doesn't see it because his eyes are locked onto Becca’s smile.

  “It’s her,” he stands his ground. “Believe me.”

  “How can you be sure?” Striped Star asks, looking to him for just a moment before turning to the Psychic Navigator. “Does he know her? How? What is the nature of his —?”

  “The nature of my relationship with her?” he asks, spinning on Star, resenting her turning towards the Navigator. “You make everything sound so goddamn clinical. The nature of my relationship with her is that I put my dick in every hole she has on a regular basis,” he says, balling his hands into fists.

  “Based on all intelligence reports, you could make the same claim about many women,” Striped Star reminds him. “What makes you so certain?”

  “Because for the past two months she’s been my goddamn assistant.”

  32

  None of the punching and kicking matters.

  There is a larger point to be made on that, Jason thinks, as Striped Star tells him that none of the apes riding dinosaurs are actually there, that what they’re seeing on their monitors is some kind of mass illusion. If they were there and Kid Rapscallion had to spend the night punching and kicking his way through the dinosaur-riding apes each encounter would be forgotten midway through the next opponent.

  Once upon a time, the punching and kicking is what the whole superhero endeavor was all about. Jason is pretty certain this is a function of the ‘60s.

  In the ‘40s, the stakes were too high for violence
to be the cool part of the gig.

  The ‘70s made violence an unglamorous pursuit, the ‘80s turned it cynical and data-driven, and the ‘90s were just lost, with heroes increasingly seeing it all as a business. By the time Y2K took over the world’s computer systems, the new generation of heroes were mostly like Jason - in it for themselves, seeing the punching and kicking as paths to soda endorsements and invites to the Grammies.

  Jason does not apologize for this. He’s still saving kids and old ladies and, yeah, the whole fucking world.

  Why shouldn’t that come with a few side benefits? How’s an 18-year old kid playing superhero supposed to pay his medical bills if it’s all about doing it as a comp?

  It’s not just inside the community that this is the case, either, he thinks, as he steps onto the Fort’s teleport platform. Striped Star is joining him and the call has gone out to other heroes that there’s mass panic over a bunch of illusions in Vegas, but Jason has asked her to leave Fake Out/Becca to him and not to tell Rapscallion. Star says yes, but she says it in a way that indicates the Navigator will be watching him closely to make sure he doesn’t end up costing Colbie her life, and that she won’t call Francis but Navigator damn sure will.

  The public doesn’t care about the punching and kicking anymore, either. It’s about the celebrity more than the deed. It’s about how much damage was done to property more than whether you stopped the villain or not. Saving a million lives means nothing to the public, anymore, either, if two old ladies get taken out in the crossfire.

  As his molecules are taken apart for the transport to Earth, Jason is already thinking about how this is going to play in the media. Colbie matters, of course. She matters to him and she matters to the public, but if Becca kills her, the media will turn this whole thing into a story about What Kid Rapscallion Did Wrong and not Villain Kills Kid.

  That’s the business.

  All 876 known Heavens help him if the press finds out he’s been fucking the villain.

  33

  “I want to know why,” Kid Rapscallion says.

  He stands on the roof of the Grand Vegas, ten feet from Colbie, who is shivering in a white-shirt and jeans, lashed directly to the roof of the building. Becca, dressed in her white uniform with silver stars stands near Colbie’s outstretched arms with a smile on her face. She has no weapon in her hands and Jason cannot see how she’s managed to pull off the illusion around them. Even though he knows it’s all fake, Jason has to train his body not to react to the swooping dinosaurs and machine gun-wielding apes.

  “Why does there have to be a reason?” Fake Out asks with a smile. “There is no reason. The acts themselves are the reason. This is what we do, Jason. It’s all a play that the universe has spun before and will again. It needs heroes and villains to fight with one another. I’ve been in this life from the start of mine. My parents were criminals, of a sort. Henchmen for various groups, and when CPS took me away from them, they gave me to my uncle because he was on the other side of the fence.

  “Except, of course, he wasn’t, was he? Did you like meeting him? This was all his idea, you know. Not to focus on you, of course, but to latch onto whatever do-gooder replaced Five of Clubs and make them look foolish. That’s what Uncle Vincent did to the superhero community, and that’s what I’ve done to you, Jason Kitmore. I’ve made you look foolish.”

  She reaches into the top of her glove and holds up a small computer tablet. A video is playing. It’s a compilation of Kid Rapscallion snorting cocaine intercut with Kid and Becca fucking intercut with Kid Rapscallion fucking the air as Becca stands to the side, whispering to him a picture that Jason believes is actually happening.

  Jason shakes and sighs and feels stupid and angry and if he wasn’t smart enough to know the Fort had a camera trained on him he would walk across this roof and snap Becca’s neck.

  But he is smart enough to know this, so he asks, “What do you want?”

  “I want you to stop me,” she says. “It’s all a game, baby. Stop me and you’ll get this tape. But if I make it to morning, that recording goes to every media outlet I have an email address for.”

  “This is stupid!”

  “This is the life,” Fake Out shrugs. “Heroes have been punching villains since 1939, Jason, and not one bit of it has made a damn difference. So we play because the universe demands we play. Come get me, sport.”

  Kid Rapscallion rushes forward, diving at Fake Out’s center and just as he did with Rapscallion the day before, he passes straight through the body and crashes.

  “Fuck!” he yelled as he slams into a large air shaft.

  Behind him, Fake Out laughs.

  34

  “I want to kill that bitch!” Colbie yells as Jason slaps a small metal disc into her hand. “I want to fuc-”

  She disappears.

  “Thanks,” Jason thinks and an image of the Psychic Navigator nodding enters his mind.

  35

  It does not take long to find Fake Out because Kid Rapscallion is rolling with the full power of the Fort behind him. Psychic Navigator quickly finds Becca inside the Grand Vegas’ security room, and he heads into the building to confront her. When he does, she is sitting behind the secretary’s desk and smiling in her new uniform.

  “You’re messed up,” he accuses.

  “No more than you,” she says, frowning as she rises to her feet and holds out her arms. “You can arrest me now.”

  “You’re just going to give up?”

  She nods, and Jason sees there is a difference between the illusion of her on the roof and the actual her that stands before him. “We could go through all of the fighting,” she says, defeat fully evident in her voice, “but we know how this works. Eventually you’ll catch me. Or worse, you’ll get one of the Revolutionaries to do it. The bigger a fool I make of you, the more interested the other heroes will become in stopping me, and I really am not ready to do that.”

  “You did this for what, then?” he asks. “Just to make me look dumb?”

  Fake Out pulls off her mask, revealing Becca underneath. She looks tired and ready for this to be over. “I am not going to say,” she says, “that I started out evil but then really fell in love with you, or anything. I liked what I did. All of it. I’m probably even more fucked up than you, but then, why wouldn’t I be, right? Who were my role models? Birthed by henchmen and raised by the man pulling the biggest scam the hero community had ever seen. Truth is, I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Are you asking for sympathy?” Jason asks. “Seriously?”

  “No,” she admits. “I’m asking you to arrest me. I did what Uncle Vincent asked me to do, just as I always did. Do you know who Wolfskinder is?”

  “Of course,” Jason says, unsure of where this is going. “The Wolf Children. Baron Black’s kids.”

  “Great grandkids now,” she says, moving across the plush carpet, still with her hands out. “There’s three of them that run ROMULUS. Uncle Vincent did a deal with them a few years back, and one of them, Gregori, wanted me included as part of the deal.” Becca hangs her head and Jason isn’t sure if she’s playing him or revealing herself to him; it’s unsettling because whether this is another lie or the actual truth, it’s a side of Becca he can’t read. “There’s all this talk about old heroes like Rapscallion running around with young male sidekicks, right? It’s all a big joke, like priests and their altar boys, but if that’s what the rumors are about the good guys, what do you think the bad guys are doing?”

  “Are you telling me Gregori raped you?” he asks, feeling his confusion give way to anger.

  “So literal,” she laughs a bit maniacally. “All you heroes, so fucking literal. Is it rape when I’m given to someone as an object? My uncle told me to let him do whatever he wanted, so I did. He’s hot. Maybe I wanted it. Maybe I would have done it, anyway. It’s the life, Jason.”

  “That’s not an excuse.”

  “Now you’re being all noble?” she asks. “You? Where was that nobil
ity when you had me tied to the bed?”

  “That was … that was … Jesus.”

  “Uncle Vincent wanted his replacement taken down,” Becca shrugs, putting her head on Jason’s chest. “He thinks the city will ask him to come back, I think. I don’t know. I don’t want sympathy. I liked the game we were playing. I liked all of it,” she says, her hand going to his crotch. “One last time?” she suggests.

  “No,” he says, and they’re both glad for a brief moment of doing the right thing.

  36

  “Are you coming back upstairs?” Striped Star asks as Kid Rapscallion hands Fake Out over to her on the roof of the Grand Vegas.

  “I am not,” he says.

  “Kid —”

  “Save it, Star,” he says. “I don’t want you to turn this into a life lesson or a teachable moment.”

  Striped Star has been doing this too long to take gruff from someone like Kid Rapscallion and isn’t deterred by his words. “Your actions here have shamed the community,” she says. “You might not care what the press does with this, but heroes everywhere will face repercussions because of this. You don’t want a lecture? Then stop doing things that lead to them. Did you even wonder why Duplication Girl wasn’t down here trying to calm the public? Navigator says her mind is having difficulty re-integrating itself and she’s —”

  “Get stuffed,” Kid Rapscallion says to one of the most respected heroes in history as he holds up the tablet playing Becca’s compilation. “I’ll take care of this. I only need one thing from you.”

  “What?”

  “Hit me.”