The Sidekicks Initiative

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “He calls himself Savior,” Sam said. “He… He killed the Justice Platoon.”

  Silence fell. Even the inmates who had been muttering incomprehensibly to themselves stopped their incomprehensible mutterings.

  “The Justice Platoon are dead?” asked a woman with piercing yellow eyes and scaly skin. Her hair moved as if alive, weaving and entwining atop her head like lovers at an orgy.

  “They are,” Sam confirmed.

  “All of them?”

  “All of them,” Sam confirmed.

  The woman’s hair stopped moving for a moment. “Even Doc Mighty?”

  “Especially Doc Mighty,” Randy growled.

  Sam smiled awkwardly. “Well, I mean, I wouldn’t say especially. They’re all equally as dead as each other.”

  “Not Su Man Chu?” said Johnny Racist. “I really liked her.”

  Sam shot Randy a meaningful look. “Yes, Su Man Chu, Doc Mighty, Absorbo, Brown Thunder, Memetzo—they’re all dead. And the person who killed them, he’s killing other people. Innocent people.”

  As one, the assembled inmates gave off a general air of indifference.

  “And he’s going to come here and kill you guys, too,” said Anna. “Like, any minute now.”

  That got their attention. Sam had to shout to make himself heard over the sudden din. “Listen. Listen! We have a plan! We’re here to help you guys!”

  “Oh yes? And what might that be?” asked a woman whose face hung down like gloopy dollops of mud. Her voice was shrill and piercing, and cut through the racket better than Sam’s could.

  Sam took a deep breath, glanced at Anna for support, then began. “You’re all in here because you’ve done bad things. You’ve hurt people. Killed people.”

  “Ate people,” grunted a voice from the crowd.

  “Jesus, really? I mean… and that, yes,” said Sam. “The world sees you as villains, but someone recently made me realize that people are not black and white. That we are weighed both by the things we do, and the things we don’t do. That even the worst of us can become the best of us.”

  He pointed to the ceiling. “The worst of us is out there. He’s killing people all over the city. People whose only crimes are jaywalking, or littering or, God, just being human. He’s burning them up from the inside. Or he’s having dog monsters tear them apart in their own homes, in front of their families.”

  A number of the faces in the circle of inmates adopted concerned looks. A few feet shuffled uneasily.

  “And he’s coming here. The worst of us is coming here,” Sam continued. He looked imploringly at the faces around him. “This is your chance. This is your chance to be the best of us. This is your chance to help us stand up against Savior. To fight back. You’ve all threatened Cityopolis in the past. Now we’re asking you to help us save it. This is your chance to tip the scales.”

  He finished there. Anna gave him an encouraging nod and a down-low thumbs up nobody else noticed.

  “Fuck that,” announced a voice from the crowd.

  A rising tide of agreement followed, which quickly became a stampede. Sam, Anna, and Randy bunched tightly together as dozens of clinically insane supervillains raced past them, fighting each other in their rush to pile out through the front doors.

  “Exit!” proclaimed Opening Knight from the back of the mob. “Stage right!”

  He bowed theatrically, wasted a moment giving them the finger, then slipped out through the front door.

  Silence hung in the air for a few moments, broken eventually by the door clacking shut.

  “Well, I thought it was a great speech,” said Anna, patting Sam on the back. “I mean, if I’d been a mass-murdering superpowered cannibal, I know I’d have stuck around.”

  A voice crackled in Sam’s ear. “Uh, I got a lot of supervillains running past me right now,” Chuck said. “A loooot of supervillains. Tell me this is part of your plan.”

  “Yeah, it’s… It’s, uh…” Sam sighed. “No. No, it isn’t part of the plan.”

  “So… what are you saying?” Chuck asked. “That you just let a whole asylum full of crazy-assed criminals escape?”

  Anna touched her own earpiece and shrugged. “They were probably already going to escape,” she said. “At worst we just accelerated the process. On the other hand, maybe we slowed it down by a few seconds by keeping them talking. So, in a way, go us!”

  “From where I’m standing, looks like they’re the ones going,” Chuck said.

  Randy sighed. “Relax, Chuck. It’s a few supervillains. I’ll round them up personally when we’re done here.”

  “Oh, that makes me feel much better,” said Chuck, and Randy was the only one to miss the sarcasm.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I cleared out the Magma-Mutts, best as I can tell,” Chuck continued. “Not saying I got them all, but I don’t see any more of—”

  There was a roar of gunfire that made everyone grimace and clutch their ears.

  “No, I tell a lie. Just got another one,” said Chuck.

  “Any word from Mari?” Sam asked. “Did her searches turn anything up?”

  “Not that she’s told me,” Chuck said.

  Anna scraped her top teeth lightly across her bottom lip, frowning. “I know I’ve seen that helmet somewhere before. She’s seriously found nothing?”

  “No. Says it looks like it’s been deleted from the records or something. She’s looking into it,” Chuck said.

  “Deleted? Why would it be deleted?” Sam wondered.

  There was no response from Chuck.

  “Chuck? You there?” Sam asked. He tapped his earpiece. “Hellooo?”

  “Are you sulking?” Randy demanded. “Is this about the escaped villains? Because I’ll go bring them back now, if it’ll stop you panicking.”

  He looked back over his shoulder at the others as he set off walking. “Give me ten minutes, and I’ll be—”

  “Uh, guys!” Chuck’s voice was fast and urgent, barely a hiss through the earpieces.

  There was a BOOM from outside, and the entrance hall’s single large window lit up in red and orange.

  Sam and Anna both ducked. Randy stood his ground, fists clenched at his sides, cape billowing in the gust of hot air that blew open the front doors.

  There was a whistling sound that started low, then grew louder.

  The front of the asylum erupted as something large and heavy tumbled through it, spraying window and wood and chunks of masonry inward. Sam and Anna both grabbed Randy and dived behind the reception desk.

  Deadly shards of glass boinged as they stabbed into the desktop. Pebbles rattled against the wood like high-velocity hailstones. Anna mouthed a series of expletives, but the din of the destruction drowned out the actual sound.

  Eventually, an uneasy stillness returned, broken occasionally by the faint plinks made by small pieces of settling debris.

  Sam, Anna, and Randy cautiously raised their heads above the edge of the desk. The tank they’d driven here in stood on its nose in the center of the ruined hallway. As they watched, the hatch creaked open, and Chuck slithered out. He landed on his shoulder on a pile of rubble, tumbled awkwardly over, then slid to a stop on the floor, grimacing and clutching his ribs.

  “In case you haven’t worked it out yet,” he wheezed. “We have a problem.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  He drifted in through the hole in the front of the building on a cushion of warm air, sparks igniting in the space around him.

  Savior.

  The collapsing wall had created swirling clouds of dust. They flashed briefly in his aura of heat, giving him a shimmering orange glow as he descended onto the melting debris.

  His burgundy cape swished around him as he alighted with a clank that rattled his skull-motif shoulder pads. His eyes looked out through the holes in his helmet, taking in the room around him, before settling on the sidekicks.

  “Where are they?” he asked. It wasn’t a particularly menacing tone, and anyon
e listening in could be forgiven for thinking he was looking for his car keys, as opposed to several dozen mass-murdering super-psychos.

  “They’re, uh, they’re gone,” said Sam.

  “Gone?” said Savior. “How can they be ‘gone’?”

  Randy punched his hand. “We set them free before you could kill them all. Because murder’s a line we just don’t cross!” he growled. “Except that one time.”

  Sparks crackled from Savior’s fingers.

  “Maybe twice,” Randy added.

  “You—”

  “And all those other times, but they were technically accidents.”

  Anna shot him a sideways look. “Uh, Ran— Butterfly King?” she said. “Please stop talking.”

  Savior’s conversational tone was rapidly evaporating, leaving his voice with a dark, heavy residue. “You let them go?” he said. “You destroyed my Heat-Hounds, and you let them go?”

  “Heat-Hounds?” said Anna, unable to help herself. “And I thought ‘Magma-Mutts’ was bad.”

  A ball of heat struck Anna right between her artificial nipples. She spent a less than enjoyable few seconds hurtling backward, then slammed against the wall, her body imprinting itself in the plaster.

  “Ow. Battle Mode,” she said, somewhat belatedly. Her suit transformed around her, and she pulled herself free of the wall.

  Randy clenched his fists. “Oh, you’ve done it now, scumbag,” he snarled, leaping over the desk, before immediately being sent hurtling back over it by another heat blast.

  Chuck found his gun in the rubble. Moving silently, he took aim at the back of Savior’s head. The weapon’s twin barrels melted before he could fire. He grimaced as his skin sizzled against the suddenly burning trigger.

  Savior raised a hand toward him, but a yelp from Sam stopped him scorching a hole right through Chuck’s chest.

  “Jim, wait!”

  The words hung in the air for what felt like an eternity.

  Anna looked from Sam to Savior and back again. “Jim?”

  “He’s… He’s Jim Flammable,” Sam said. “Right, Jim?”

  Savior lowered his arm and turned slowly to face Sam, saying nothing.

  “It was your hands,” Sam said, gesturing to Savior’s crispy-fried fingers. “I knew when I saw your hands.”

  “Of course. It all makes perfect sense now!” Randy growled.

  “Does it?” asked Anna.

  “Probably,” Randy replied. “I mean… Sure, why not?”

  “You may call me Savior.”

  “OK, OK, sure,” said Sam, nodding enthusiastically. “Savior. Absolutely.”

  He took a cautious step closer. “But you are Jim, right?”

  “Was,” Savior corrected. “Once. But that was a long time ago.”

  Anna hobbled over to stand beside Sam. The collision with the wall had taken it out of her, and she leaned on his shoulder for support. This did not go unnoticed by Savior.

  “So… did you two finally get together?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Anna removed her arm from Sam’s shoulder. “No. We’re not…”

  “We just work together,” said Sam.

  “And what do you mean ‘finally’?” Anna demanded.

  Savior rolled his eyes. “Well, I mean, come on. It was obvious. You were both totally into each other.”

  “Right?” growled Randy. “Everyone could see it.”

  “Everyone,” agreed Savior. “And Randy, what happened to your voice?”

  “Nothing. My voice is naturally like this,” Randy snarled.

  “Is it? Jesus,” said Savior. “Do you have throat cancer?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure? Because you sound horrible,” Savior continued.

  “It’s not throat cancer,” Randy insisted. “It isn’t.”

  “Well, OK. If you say so,” said Savior. His mask tilted from side to side as he looked across the sidekick’s faces. “So… how’ve you all been? Sam, you’ve switched back to your old costume, I see. It looks good. A little neat, maybe.”

  “You destroyed my other one,” Sam said.

  “Did I?” asked Savior, sounding genuinely pained. “I’m sorry. Ugh. I feel awful about that. I get so carried away by the mission sometimes.”

  “The mission?” said Sam.

  “Yes. You know? The mission. Eradicating crime and those who profit from it,” said Savior. “That’s always been the mission, right?”

  “Hell, maybe I should be on this guy’s side,” growled Randy. “I like his style.”

  He caught the looks from Sam and Anna.

  “You know, except all the mass-murder stuff,” Randy continued. “Obviously that’s inappropriate.”

  “You’ve gone too far, Jim,” Sam said.

  “Savior. Please.”

  “You’ve gone too far, uh, Savior. You’re killing innocent people. Or, like, mostly innocent people.”

  The air came alive around Savior for a moment, hissing and crackling. The sudden spike in temperature forced Sam back a step, his costume lacking the heat shielding afforded by Anna and Randy’s.

  “You know what happens to innocent people, Sam?” Savior asked. He held up his hands, displaying the blackened skin and gnarled fingers. “This is what happens. Sometimes, the innocent have to suffer so that justice can be done. Doc Mighty himself told me that, right before he forced me to set myself on fire to help stop Doctor Tinderbox.”

  He lowered his voice into what was quite a convincing Doc Mighty impersonation. “I’m sorry, Jim, but you have to give it all you’ve got!”

  He doffed an imaginary cap and curtsied, adopting a snide, sniveling tone. “Yes, Doc Mighty. Of course, Doc Mighty!”

  Savior jolted and looked around, suddenly remembering where he was. This time, when it came, his voice was flat and devoid of any emotion whatsoever. “I burned for six minutes. You can’t imagine the pain. You know what I got for it?”

  “The satisfaction of taking down Doctor Tinderbox,” said Randy.

  Savior shook his head. “Not really. The Justice Platoon did that. I was ‘a distraction,’ they said. That was how I contributed. All that screaming and thrashing made it difficult for Tinderbox to concentrate, apparently. The Justice Platoon could concentrate just fine, by the way. I’m not sure they even noticed.”

  He inhaled deeply through his nose. “No. I got an alternate cover on that month’s comic. Lenticular. Look at it one way, and I’m normal. Tilt it a little, and I burst into flame.”

  Sam remembered that issue. It had been one of his favorites back in the day. He thought it probably best not to mention that, though.

  “And all that for what?” Savior demanded, anger coloring his words. “Tinderbox escaped six weeks later. He killed three people, caused millions in property damage, and skinned a panda.”

  “Fuck,” Anna ejected before she could stop herself. “Where did he get a panda?”

  “Not the point. The point is, I knew then that it was all broken. That it wasn’t sustainable. That the ‘heroes’ weren’t in it for the little guy, they were in it for themselves.” Savior gave a vague wave of a hand. “So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. By the time I’m finished, crime will no longer exist.”

  “But it’s wrong. Surely, you must see that?” said Sam. “I mean, what they did to you, it was terrible. Really. But what you’re doing? It’s not right. One of your dog things could’ve killed my son earlier.”

  Savior’s eyes widened behind his mask. “You have a son? Holy shit, that’s insane,” he said, laughing a little. “Where does the time go? Ha! It feels like just a few weeks ago that we were all kids ourselves, and now… Wow. That’s crazy.”

  “Speaking of crazy,” said Anna. “You murder a guy for littering?”

  Savior shook his head. “I stopped a criminal who had committed a crime.”

  “Yeah, but… littering? Seriously? That’s a death sentence-worthy misdemeanor in your book?” Anna pressed. “And how did you even find o
ut that stuff? What those people had done, I mean?”

  Even through his mask, they could hear the smile in Savior’s voice. “I had help,” he said. “Remember Calcu-Lass? Sidekicked for Absorbo for a while?”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah, I remember. She was pretty quiet. Had, like, supercomputer intelligence, didn’t she?”

  “She was hot,” Randy growled. “And a nerd. Like a hot nerd. Which is great, because they don’t know they’re hot, since they’re nerds. But, you know, take off the glasses, get them to shake their hair out a bit, and… Bam. Hot. I’d totally have tapped Calcu-Lass.”

  Burning embers danced in the air around Savior. “We’re kind of together,” he said.

  “I didn’t, obviously,” said Randy. “Absolutely nothing went on. No way. My only lover was crime. Our bedroom? The filthy back alleys of downtown Cityopolis!”

  There was a lengthy silence.

  “What the hell does that—?” Savior began, but Anna held up a hand to stop him.

  “Let’s not even ask,” she said. She put her hands on her hips and flashed Savior a smile. “So, you and Calcu-Lass, huh? That’s great. Good for you!”

  “Thank you,” said Savior. “I stuck electrodes in her brain and nailed her to a chair.”

  Anna’s smile remained frozen in place, but her eyes stopped lending their support. “Huh! Well, that’s, you know, less good. But still…” She clenched her fists and waved them beside her head. “Yay romance!”

  “Oh! I know!” said Savior, jerking with excitement. “You guys should join me. We should do a team-up. It’d be like old times, except without those assholes bossing us around and trying to ruin our lives.”

  “They weren’t trying to ruin our lives,” Randy growled. “They were our trusted mentors. They helped make us who we are!”

  Savior clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He gestured around the group. “Yeah. Kind of my point,” he said. “Besides, if they really had our best interests at heart, why does his logo look like a bullseye?”

  Everyone looked at the emblem on Sam’s chest. The letters ‘KR’ were positioned in the center of three concentric circles.