Herman wrapped his hands around the tacos and concentrated on pulling ambient heat from the background radiation of the universe into his palms. He couldn’t help the other patrons, but at least his tacos would be hot.
Foiled Again
The vacationing hero pulled the second steaming taco from the foil pack and his mouth watered in anticipation, now that it knew what to expect.
“You have met your end!”
The words were meant to ring out, but they barely carried over the crowd. Herman’s subconscious rated the declaration as being so unremarkable it did not register as directed at him.
Moments later, the words came again but the man saying them stood directly in front of Herman and his half-eaten taco.
“You have met your end, Gamma Man.”
Being so close to the alpha hero had taken some of the steam out of the young man’s declaration. Still, he stood there as if he wanted to prove he was the fastest gunslinger by challenging the most skilled shot in the west.
“How do you people find me?” Herman said, exasperated. “I’m on vacation. Go back to your basement and find a gene that will get you a life.” As an afterthought, he added, “And that’s not my name.”
The villain was incensed by Herman’s refusal to take him seriously. Although—could someone who was willing to undergo illegal gene augmentation be called a villain, or just an idiot? Herman had been in this scenario too many times to really believe the twenty-something guy would go away.
Herman stood up and wiped his mouth with a napkin imprinted with a smiling fish taco. He pulled his top button and his clothing transformed into his well-known, spandex-laden persona. His vacation was over.
“Let’s have it, son,” Herman said, wearily.
“Call me ‘The Crusher!’” the other man exclaimed.
Herman used to assess personal risk when confronted with an unknown villain. Now, he just let them attack. He actually felt bad for The Crusher and all the others who had come to challenge him. Herman knew he would not die. He knew it better than he had ever told anyone.
Herman told himself his gift to the myriad villains who challenged him was to give them at least one moment to think they could truly beat him. Secretly, he wished one of them could.
“Alright, The Crusher, do whatever it is you do.” He waved his hands around, dismissively.
“You will die!” The Crusher regained his confidence with Herman’s lack of taking the offensive.
The chairs and tables in the outdoor space started flying away from them. Telekinesis. People who had been gawking at the two of them ran to find cover.
A whistle shrieked across the square and the officer on his horse started galloping toward them. The horse suddenly stopped, causing the officer to sail off his mount. He came down hard on the cobblestone quad. He recovered quickly, and stood to continue toward the center of the fray, when a well-aimed chair knocked him in the head.
Herman shook his head in disappointment at himself. He should have just stopped The Crusher at the outset, then the officer would not have been hurt.
“Now listen here, son—” Herman found himself interrupted by a tremendous shaking. The people who had been running away were being picked up along with cobblestone bricks, added to the mix of swirling bric-a-brac. What began as a chorus of shrieks slowly lost its voice as people and solid objects found each other in the fray. Herman had a brief moment of shock at the human toll. It was enough time for The Crusher to encase him on all sides by cobblestone bricks, chunks of concrete, and bodies.
The heavy materials pushed in on all sides. Any movement on his part gave the mound room to work its way closer to him, making him less and less mobile.
Herman’s temperature began to drop. He could feel his extremities turning solid. Freezing. He would be a block of ice within a minute. That was The Crusher’s ploy, keep him immobile long enough to freeze him. After that, who knows, take him somewhere? Try to crack him into frozen chunks? Perhaps The Crusher had no plans of surviving at all and this was the last chance at notoriety for a depressed man. Herman could appreciate that.
The hero pulled ambient energy from the world around him and warmed himself.
It was time to end this charade. Herman pushed out with his own telekinetic power, much more potent than The Crusher’s. He was free of the bricks for only a moment before the villain started throwing them back at Herman.
The Crusher did not relent, did not stop sending detritus at Herman. Herman’s response seemed to be just to deflect the objects sent toward him, spending all his energy to keep up with the onslaught. But there was more, Herman would send all the flying material behind The Crusher, slowly building a cell with the inanimate objects, putting the people down away from the fight in hopes some would survive.
The pile of debris grew to the size of a house and Herman quickly pulled the entire pile forward and around The Crusher, giving him a taste of his own assault. Herman then held the material tight around the villain until he could feel the telekinetic struggle stop. Herman pulled the boy out of the pile. He was alive, but passed out.
They’re becoming more violent. If I just killed one, Herman thought, maybe they would quit trying.
Hero’s Remorse
“What happened to Benny? He decided I was beyond hope, didn’t he?” Herman asked the female therapist, Sara, sitting next to him in a small office with one too many bowls of potpourri.
The crow’s feet Sara could not conceal with makeup exposed her as someone with experience, but not elderly. The government used to throw interning counselors at him, until he had caused a dozen or so to get out of the helping field altogether. One of them even took a vow of silence and meditated at a monastery the rest of his life. Herman felt envious of that one.
The CIA stepped in at that point and used professional psychologists. Psychologists, he was sure, that would bend the rules of confidentiality for the CIA.
“He didn’t decide you were beyond hope, Herman. He retired. You’ve been working with him a good fifteen years. He could have retired five years ago, but he really cared for you,” she said softly, but firmly. He had all the superpowers, but she was the all-powerful one in her bailiwick.
“Still, I liked him. He should have told me he was leaving.”
Herman really did like Benny, who seemed to understand why he hated being a hero. It had been a while since he’d had someone he was willing to lie to in therapy. With Sara, he seemed to fall back into it easily enough.
“His notes say you talked about his retirement in session for the last several months—even says you threatened to burn down his house if he left.” She countered him, without asking him why he lied.
“Do I have to worry about you burning his house down, Herman?” she asked.
“It wasn’t a threat, more like hyperbole,” he replied.
“So you plan to do something to him?” she pressed.
“You don’t let up, do you?”
“Do you?” she asked back.
“What is his new therapy technique? I liked the way Benny did it,” he said, agitated.
“How did Benny do it?”
“He’d let me tell him what I was thinking and he wouldn’t judge me. Also, he would know I’m not going to do anything harmful, even if I say the words. This is therapy, lady, it’s the only place I can process through my feelings.”
“Ok, then. Tell me what you are feeling and I will listen,” she said.
Drat, he thought, she’s good. In under two minutes she had been able to get him to talk directly about the very thing he had tried to avoid.
“Did you hear about my trip to Boston?”
“Your vacation,” she stated.
“It wasn’t a vacation, much more the opposite. There was a parade, a stage, speeches, politicians. Even a blasted brass quintet. I spent a whole day as the main attraction of festivities, when all I wanted was a break.”
Sara replied, “They appreciated you saving them from The Crusher.�
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“That’s not it. Three deaths and a dozen more hurt,” Herman said. “The politicians wanted photo ops for their re-election campaigns, the rest just wanted to see the oddity that is me. Anyone who thinks about it for five seconds would realize The Crusher would not have been in Boston if I had not been there first. I brought the danger and the death by existing.”
“That’s a fair point, why celebrate someone who cleans up a mess he made himself,” she reflected.
“Exactly.” He decided he would like her after all.
“All I could think during the whole affair was if I had just squeezed a little harder when I trapped him, he would have died and then…no parade, no politicians would want to be near me, I could have quietly left town. The death would have been labeled an accident the guy brought on himself by attacking me. Still, my being the direct cause of any death would have left a sour feeling.”
“But that’s not what you did,” Sara observed.
“No, I didn’t, but as the decades roll by I find it harder to remember why I don’t hurt people who hurt others. It’s an axiom of an ethical principle based on a moral law that I decided on long ago. I’ve forgotten the proof, I’ve lost the dots I need to connect the lines allowing me to remember why I keep fighting the good fight.”
“So, why don’t you quit?” Sara probed into a wound deeper than she knew.
“I have. I’ve tried. These gene hacks find me anyway. The government always has some catastrophe they need me for. The world always finds ways to destroy itself and I’m just the one needed to keep the world from dying.
“I’m not allowed to retire and since I don’t show signs of aging, I don’t see an end in sight. I’m a living legend but my fear is that my story is an epic. I’ll be saving the world long after you and your children’s children are dead.” Herman was staring blankly at the floor. What depressed him most was how true his words were. Sara was probably in diapers when he started acting the hero and now here she was counseling him in her forties.
“You know what the worst part is? Do you know what they called me at the celebration?” he asked.
Sara replied, “Gamma Man.”
“GAMMA MAN!” he spat.
“If you don’t like the name, give them a better one. I think they will demand a hero’s name for you, though.”
Still angry, Herman continued, “I don’t even know how it happened. I am not a lab experiment, I did not get bit by a radiated platypus, I was just born this way. I am nothing special. I am Herman. Herman.”
“Again, if you don’t like the attention, why don’t you retire?” she asked.
“I told you. I can’t retire. Everyone, good or bad, wants to be around me.”
Sara, during this, her first session with Herman, challenged him in a way Benny had never dared.
“Herman, it seems to me you know what you have to do to make people not want to be around you. You told me yourself.”
Her assertion took Herman aback. He had to think about what they discussed.
“You mean kill someone who deserves it anyway,” he stated.
“It would be a change in policy for you. People, governments, villains, none of them like change. Especially violent change.”
“Aren’t you supposed to keep me in line?” Herman said.
“I’m your psychologist, not your mother,” she replied.
Herman definitely liked her.
Crushing Confession
The Crusher stared at the missing outer wall of his cell, beckoning him to freedom. Of course, it wasn’t he who had removed the wall. His powers were being subdued by drugs.
Fear, however, kept him on his cot. Fear, and pieces of the wall now pressing down on him, held there telekinetically by Gamma Man.
Herman’s green and yellow tights were a beacon of peace and safety for all the world. The Crusher would know this was not Gamma Man’s usual modus operandi. Herman did not use unprovoked violence or torture. Yet, here Herman was, making The Crusher plead with his eyes, not for freedom from a cell, but for his next breath. The breath that would keep him alive that much longer, but the cost of his next breath could kill him anyway.
Herman gave his demand. “You get one breath. Use it to tell me who hacked your genes or you will not ever breathe again.”
The Crusher was a dead man either way, but dying later was always preferable to dying sooner. The pinned man sucked in a breath as slow as he could in an obvious effort to think of another way out.
He found none.
He could name one of a thousand licensed gene doctors, but his lie would be quickly discovered. He was only left with the truth.
“Doctor Jupiter,” The Crusher said.
Herman flew off, leaving The Crusher to figure out how to get out from under the rubble with his powers subdued.
Final Words
Doctor Alan Jupiter’s laboratory was state-of-the-art. It was protected by armed guards, blast doors, security panels, and, finally, a retinal scanner.
Herman hunched forward and looked into the scanner, the last bit of security between him and the doctor. He watched as a red laser passed over his own eyeball. He was vaguely aware of a small beep. The beep was followed by the door beside him being released.
Herman walked into the lab unchallenged, just as he knew he would.
“Herman!” Alan said like an old friend. “What can I do for you? Did you find a new power? Do I need to find what gene it came from for you?”
Herman also thought of Alan Jupiter as an old friend, or he had. Alan had been with him from the beginning. He was the first genetic specialist who had worked with him to try to figure out why Herman was the way he was.
The hero walked toward Alan along the far right of the room, where the doctor had suddenly decided he should file away the papers he had been intently working on when Herman walked in.
“Just wondering what you’re up to, Alan,” Herman asked, trying to not let it slip that he knew Alan had been producing the gene-hacked villains.
“Oh, you know— this and that. What I always do, try to figure out what makes you tick,” Alan replied while turning a key to lock the file cabinet as if someone who could get past all the security outside this room would be foiled by a thin metal drawer.
“But I haven’t seen you in, what, five years now? Surely, there’s nothing new to keep you busy. Plus, I told you my theory. You won’t find the answer in my DNA.”
Herman was now standing on the opposite side of a large table from the man whom he had once thought of as an ally.
“Right, right. Your ice theory.” Alan said.
“Glass theory.” Herman knew Alan was stalling, but he was drawn into giving his thoughts on his powers again. “If you take a glass and pour water into it, its shape is predetermined. You can freeze the water and take it out and understand the shape, even make an approximate replica, but it was never the water that created the shape. I’m the glass. My DNA looks the way it does because that is the way it has to look to fit my mold.”
“Yes, I know your theory, but you’ve never given me any reason to believe it. The fact we can transfer your flight and strength genes into other people shows it’s all in your genome. Herman, the genome is a complicated thing. I’ll be working on the puzzle of your powers until I die. Who knows when we’ll have another plague, right?” he replied.
“The plague…that was you.” A sudden crash of Herman’s reality made him pause, feeling a loss of control over the confrontation he had worked out in his head.
The plague had happened about thirty-five years ago. Thousands of people were dying. Alan had convinced him to allow a full study into his superior genetic code to look for a cure. Herman allowed it and the plague was under control within a week.
Herman had thought the turnaround time was too quick. Now that he suspected Alan had ulterior motives for wanting access to his genes, it seemed the plague might have been a ruse, planned by Alan himself to get Herman to capitulate. After “finding” a
cure, Alan’s research could continue, with a full genetic code and full government funding.
It was only a year after the plague that the gene augmentation industry was developed. Leaked research, no doubt, but he’d never blamed Alan for the leak.
“You’re losing your memory. We cured the plague together.” The doctor’s act was flawless, but Herman could smell fear on other people. Alan feared him. The scientist started edging around the wall toward his desk.
“I know what you have been doing. I want to know why. Why hack kids? What are they, grad students? Why have them attack me?” Herman was breathing heavily, becoming angrier with each realization of the years’ of trust this man had duped him into.
“Now, Herman, anything I did, I did for the good of you and mankind. You haven’t exactly been needed recently. These ‘kids’ have kept you on your toes and every time you use your powers, it helps further my research. Someday, I’ll be able to move beyond giving people two or three modifications just to see if they got any of your powers. Then we can have an army of superheroes to protect us. It’s not just me, the government wants the army, too. Think about it, you could retire knowing we are safe. Isn’t that what the file says you want? To retire?” The scientist had moved to his desk and sat down casually. Alan’s fear was dissipating.
Herman, however, was yelling.
“Don’t patronize me, Alan! I will not let you continue this charade. You will rot in a cell for the rest of your life next to all the souls you condemned when you sent them to attack me.”
“Herman, friend. I am truly sorry, but I know more about you than you do. Do you think I wouldn’t be prepared if you came for me? I am truly sorry.”
Alan reached under his desk and Herman heard an insignificant click.
The Powers That Be: A Superhero Collection Page 6
