I looked around. The two men and the woman were gone now. God alone knew what had happened to her. Some Hero I was. I should have used my private detective skills to track the men down and seen if they needed help robbing a bank as well. Though I did not feel up to driving their getaway car, perhaps I could hold the bags of money for them.
How long had I been lying here? I looked at my watch. I blinked several times, not being able to focus enough initially to see it. The fact it was not on my wrist hindered that. It was gone. I patted myself down with unsteady hands. So were my cell phone and wallet. Great. Had my gun been stolen too? I thought about that for a moment. No, I had not been carrying it. I had been smart enough to not pack heat when I had started out on the town many hours before. Thank goodness for small favors.
Though I did not know the exact time, there was little doubt it was time to get up. I struggled to my feet. The world spun. Sitting up had been bad enough; standing up was more than my stomach could take. I threw up. I puked so hard I would have regurgitated my socks and shoes had I still had them on. Apparently they had been stolen, too. My socks? Really? The shoes I could wrap my head around, but what kind of filthy degenerate stole a man’s socks? The next time I got drunk and knocked myself out in an alley, I would have to be sure to do it around a better class of criminals.
I finished throwing up what felt like every meal I had since birth. Ugh! The aftertaste of my throw up was enough to make me gag. How about making sure there is no next time you get drunk, Captain Vomit? I thought.
I still had on my jeans and white dress shirt. The former was splattered with dirt and now vomit. The latter was a kaleidoscope of colors, none of which were white. I faintly remembered having started the night off in a checkered sports coat. It was, of course, now gone. It would have been an insult to my fashion sense to have my socks stolen but my nice sports coat left behind.
Nature called. Urgently. I unzipped my pants, fumbling clumsily in my haste to pull myself out before I had an accident. I pulled my penis out through the fly of my pants and underwear in the nick of time. My urine stream added to the fetid wetness of the alley. Though I seemed to have lost my dignity along with my shoes, socks, jacket, phone, watch, and wallet, I still had my underwear on. So that was something. If I went around wearing my underwear as outerwear as some other Heroes did, perhaps I would not have been so fortunate. Someone would have stolen it for sure. So it was a good thing I did not wear a costume. Who needed to fight crime dressed like a trick-or-treater anyway? Not this guy.
My seemingly limitless stream of pee made me remember how much drinking I had done that night. The bar I had been in had to throw me out at closing time. The employees had not had an easy time doing so. I was a big boy at a shade over six feet, two inches tall and over two hundred pounds. I was a former mixed martial arts fighter and current Hero. Throwing me out of anywhere when I was not cooperative was not an easy task. Even though I was still drunk, I felt a flush of embarrassment at my behavior that night, all of which culminated in me puking and peeing in a filthy alley like a feral dog with a stomach virus.
I thought before I had lost my dignity. No one had made me drink. So no, I had not lost my dignity. Nor had it been stolen. I had given it away.
My bladder finally emptied. I tucked myself away and zipped up. Concentrating mightily to keep myself upright, I staggered out of the alley back onto the street’s sidewalk. At least I had the decency and good sense to get drunk in my home city, Astor City, Maryland. This was McAdams Street. Home was just blocks away. Astor City was one of the biggest cities in the United States. It was a bustling metropolis that never completely went to sleep. So whatever the exact time was, it clearly was still very early in the morning as only a few cars were on the road and even fewer people were on the street.
Despite the throbbing of the painful gash on the back of my head and having thrown up, I was still very much drunk. Each step I took required will and concentration. I turned left on McAdams. It was still raining steadily. None of the rain was hitting me, though; I was still using my powers to keep it off of me. I walked almost an entire block. Something was wrong. I peered around. Things did not look right. The Jeffersonian building was on my left. Normally when I walked home on McAdams Street, the Jeffersonian was on my right. What a dirty trick to move an entire building just to confuse me. The work of supervillains no doubt. Crafty bastards.
No. Wait. The building had not been moved. I was walking the wrong direction. I turned around. It took longer than it really should have. I might have spun in a circle a couple of times. Not sure though. Eventually the Jeffersonian was on the correct side. All was right in the world. I apologized for slandering the good names of supervillains needlessly. I promised myself I would make amends by buying the next supervillain I saw a drink. I resumed walking. Though I looked, I spotted no supervillains. Shame. I kinda wanted another drink.
A bus drove by, sending sheets of water flying onto the sidewalk. I heard someone singing:
“The wheels on the bus go round and round,
Round and round,
Round and round.
The wheels on the bus go round and round,
All day long.
The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish,
Swish, swish, swish.
Swish, swish, swish.
The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish,
All day long.”
I suddenly realized I was the one who was singing. The microscopic part of my brain that was somehow still sober and already horrified by my behavior was further mortified.
Stop that! that part of my brain said.
Shut up! You’re not the boss of me! the rest of me responded. I continued singing loudly as the falling rain around me provided a counterpoint.
I remembered it all, now. I was Truman Lord, licensed Hero and private eye.
And I was a mess.
The third book in the Superhero Detective series can be found here:
KILLSHOT
Turn the page for an excerpt from Caped, Book One of the Omega Superhero Series.
EXCERPT FROM CAPED
I never wanted to be a superhero. I admired them, sure. I followed their adventures, absolutely. But be one? No thanks. Superheroes got punched, tortured, shot at, cut up, plotted against, and had buildings and other insanely heavy things dropped on them. And that was if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, you were killed like Avatar was. If it could happen to Avatar, the world’s greatest and most powerful Metahuman and licensed Hero, it could happen to anyone. I had no interest in being one of those anyones. If it was up to me, I would have stayed a nobody and a no one. Being a nobody was no fun and God knew it would not get you laid, but at least it gave you the chance to die at home in bed instead of at the hands of some bloodthirsty supervillain. Being a licensed Hero was super dangerous, not to mention super scary. Uh, no pun intended, I guess.
So no, I never wanted to be a superhero. But, like Dad always said, you had to play the cards you were dealt. I found out what kind of cards fate had in store for me the day I got into a fight in the men’s bathroom at my college.
If I had known about all the crazy and deadly stuff that encounter would lead to, I never would have gone to the bathroom that day. I would have just held it. Or, peed my pants. Gross and unsanitary, maybe. Safer though.
***
I washed my hands after using the urinal. I was in the bathroom of the Student Activities Center at my school, the University of South Carolina at Aiken. My hands still were hot, as if they were being held too close to a fire. I held them under the faucet’s stream of cold water for a while. The water felt great, but did not solve the problem. My hands still felt hot.
I was starting to get worried. Maybe I needed to go to the doctor, or at least to USCA’s health clinic. Though I had been inside of air-conditioned classrooms most of today, I had spent a lot of time earlier this week working outside on my dad’s farm. Maybe what I was experiencing was heat s
troke. It was very hot outside. It was August in South Carolina, after all. It was supposed to be hot out. I had never heard of heat stroke affecting just one part of your body, though. Nor had I ever heard of it setting in long after someone had gotten out of the heat.
My hands had felt weird the past several days. The feeling had started as a tingle, as if my hands had fallen asleep and circulation was being restored to them. A couple of days later the tingling had become pins and needles. The pins and needles had then transformed into a dull ache, like the ache of underused muscles that had been worked out hard at the gym. Now my hands were hot, like they were in an oven set on low. They were not in pain, but if whatever was going on with them got worse, I could see them getting painful. They had been distracting me in class all day, like an annoying itch you could not quite reach to scratch.
I pulled my hands from under the stream of cold water. I examined them carefully. Other than them being wet, they looked perfectly normal, like they always did. I held them up to my cheeks, like I was checking for a fever. They did not feel hot against my cheeks. Maybe the heat was entirely in my head. Maybe what I needed was a shrink, not a doctor. I grimacing in distaste at the idea of going to a shrink again. I had been to one when my mother had died from brain cancer five years ago. My school counselor had recommended to Dad that I go, so go I did despite the fact I didn’t want to. Even at the age of twelve, going to that shrink to talk about my feelings had seemed like a huge waste of time. My mother was dead, and no amount of talking was going to change that fact. When that knuckleheaded shrink had suggested I was secretly glad Mom was dead because I was tired of dealing with her lingering illness, I had gotten up and taken a swing at that know-nothing dummy. Dad had been mad at me until I had told him what the shrink had suggested. Dad never made me go back. I had thought at the time he kind of wanted to take a swing at the shrink too.
I grimaced yet again when I looked up to see myself in the mirror. I did not think I was ugly, so that was not the reason for the grimace. Brown hair, brown eyes, average height, average-looking face. If you did a Google search for “average white guy,” I would not be the top result—I was too much of a nobody to turn up in an Internet search—but I felt like the poster boy for “nothing special.” I had grimaced at myself because I was struck again by how skinny I was. Though it seemed like my stomach was a bottomless pit, I never could gain weight. Whenever I said that to a girl, she always said she wished she was like me. Not being able to put on weight might be awesome if you were a girl, but it sucked when you were a seventeen-year-old college freshman who was trying to attract girls. Girls went for big dudes who were athletic, dressed well, drove nice cars, and were into sports, not a skinny farmer’s son who read all the time, wore clothes from Walmart, drove a hand-me-down powder blue Chevy Cavalier the inside of which leaked like a colander when it rained hard, and who knew more about actual falcons than he did about the Atlanta Falcons. It was probably why I was a virgin. I desperately did not want to be. I had never heard of someone dying from lack of sex, but it often felt like I would be the first to pull it off. What a way to make it into the history books. If my name were Mary instead of Theodore Conley, at least then I could put “The Virgin Mary” on my tombstone. On second thought, I would be a boy named Mary. I doubted that would help my virginity problem.
My hot hands forgotten for the moment, I rolled up the right sleeve of my Avatar tee shirt a bit and flexed. My bicep barely moved. Ugh. I really needed to go to the gym more. The problem was, every time I went, I felt like a weak baby in comparison to the meatheads who seemed to live there. It was demoralizing. I was only seventeen, though. I prayed I was not finished growing yet. Thanks to my bookworm tendencies, I had graduated high school early and was a year or two younger than most of my classmates here at USCA. I had always been scrawny compared to other guys my age, and being around older guys here at college made the size difference worse. Maybe I would have another growth spurt and catch up to my larger classmates. And, maybe pigs would sprout wings and start calling themselves pigeons. I was not optimistic about either prospect occurring.
The bathroom door swung open. Startled, I jumped a little. I pretended like I was scratching my arm instead of feeling myself up. Too many of my fellow students thought I was a weirdo as it was.
John Shockey slowly entered. His left foot dragged a little on the floor as he came in. He was blonde, and shorter than I with a slightly hunched back and severely bowed legs. His right hand was twisted around at a weird angle, and the fingers on that hand pointed out in several different directions. He had a big overbite, so much so his mouth was never completely closed. His upper front teeth, yellow and angled like collapsing tombstones, were exposed a little. He always looked like he was grimacing, even when he was not.
“Hey Theo,” John said to me. His voice was slow and nasal. It sounded like he was mentally challenged. I knew he was not. I had a couple of classes with him and had been in study groups with him. Whatever was wrong with him physically did not affect him mentally. Because of his appearance, most people treated John like he had leprosy or something. Not me. I knew what it was like to be different than the people around you. I made it a point to be nice to him. John and I weren’t exactly friends, but we were friendly. I figured that those of us who lived on the Island of Misfit Toys had to stick together.
“Hey John.” I glanced down at his shirt. It was identical to mine, grey with a big stylized red A on the front—the colors of Avatar’s costume and the A that he had on his chest. I grinned. “Nice shirt,” I said.
John’s mouth widened into what was supposed to be a smile. It looked more like he was in pain. “Thanks. You too,” he said in his slow, slightly slurred voice. “Shame what happened to him. I still can’t believe it.”
I nodded my head in agreement. “I know, right? The world’s greatest Hero, shot and killed. I never thought the day would come Avatar would be killed, and certainly not killed by a bullet. I always heard he was invulnerable.” Avatar had been murdered a couple of months ago. The world still mourned for him. I had seen more Avatar shirts in the past two months than I had seen before in my whole life. I thought of most of those shirt-wearers as Johnny-come-latelies. I had been a fan of Heroes like Avatar and Amazing Man and of licensed superheroes in general for as long as I could remember. They were everything I was not—beloved, strong, confident, and fearless.
“I met him once,” John said. “He shook my hand. Greatest moment of my life.” He shook his head at the thought, though it looked like more of a muscle spasm than anything else. John shuffled slowly off. He went to stand in front of one of the urinals.
My hands were still hot. I turned on the cold water again and put my hands under the stream. Though running water over my hands had not made the burning feeling go away, it did make me feel a little better.
The bathroom door opened again. Three guys walked in, laughing and talking loudly. I glanced at them. I immediately looked away. I willed myself to be invisible. I wondered if this was how a deer who had spotted three approaching lions felt. Guys like me were the natural prey of the guys who had come in. They were Donovan Byrd, Marcus Leverette, and a guy I only knew as Bubba. They were upperclassmen, star football players, very popular, strong as bulls, and not shy about reminding you of all of the above. They hung out together all the time; you rarely saw one without the other two. They called themselves the Three Horsemen. The Three Jackasses was more like it. I knew better than to say that aloud. I did not have a death wish. If you were a pretty girl, the Three Horsemen tried to sleep with you; if you were an ugly girl they made fun of you; and if you were a guy who was not an athlete like them, they pushed you around. They were bullies. I did not like them. The fact I did not like them did not mean I was dismissive of them. I respected them the way a mouse must respect a snake.
The Three Horsemen ignored me like a king ignores a peasant. They strode past me and the sinks to the urinals behind me. I sighed slightly in relief. Though
my hands still hurt, I pulled them out of the water and shut the faucet off. This was no longer a good place to linger. The Three Horsemen might suddenly decide my mere presence somehow offended them. I got the sudden mental image of them pounding me into the floor of the bathroom like I was a nail. I suppressed a shudder at the thought. I hastily pulled out paper towels from the dispenser and started to dry my hands.
From the mirror in front of me, I could see that Marcus and Bubba went to stand in front of two empty urinals. Donovan stood in front of John’s back. Donovan was a tall, good-looking, light-skinned black guy with a shaved head. He was the football team’s star running back. He did not walk so much as he flowed, like a big cat. Bubba and Marcus were defensive linemen. Bubba was white, Marcus was black. Bubba had a head like a doorknob, a brain that was probably the size of a walnut, and a body like a side of beef. Marcus was equally imposing, though his head was more proportionate to the rest of his body than Bubba’s was. They were a bit shorter than Donovan, but much bulkier.
“Move out of the way, gimp,” Donovan said to John. “I gotta take a piss.” There was a fourth empty urinal he could have used, not to mention three empty stalls. Donovan was being an ass again. Big shock.
John looked over his shoulder at John. “I-I-I’m not finished,” he said, stuttering a bit. He was obviously intimidated by Donovan and his friends. I was too. “That one is open,” John said, nodding his head to the available urinal next to him. John was being bolder than I would have been.
“I don’t wanna use that one, retard,” Donovan said. “The one you’re at is my favorite.” He unzipped his pants. “Now move out of the way before I piss all over you.” Bubba and Marcus laughed.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 2): The Missing Exploding Girl Page 20
