Black Power- The Superhero Anthology

by Balogun Ojetade

“I guess you’re right,” Afrikah sighed.

  “Damned skippy,” Akin said. “Now, let’s get home and get changed. Timothy is setting up the meeting right now. The pastor will be expecting us tonight.

  TWO

  Deacon Robinson – Timothy – scooted out of his Corvette. He stretched the cramped muscles of his long, sinewy legs before sauntering toward the church. He sported a suit of charcoal gray sharkskin over a pale blue Yves St. Laurent shirt and silver-gray silk tie – his “Deaconing suit,” he called it.

  The fresh, close cropped, faded cut of his hair and beard was equally precise.

  The Bishop is dead, he mused. Long live the old redneck. Timothy smiled. He felt it – destiny. The Reverend A.J. Pearl was coming and he was going to take the Bishop’s place. Finally, there would be some soul in the pulpit! He felt it deep inside him with a sense of terrible excitement and exultation.

  He did not know why he had these feelings, but something spoke to him in a voice that could not be denied, of a time now for great change at Christ Holiness Cathedral, time for his part to be played.

  THREE

  Angela Rafael was smart, attractive…and haunted.

  She wasn’t sure exactly when the latter characteristic surfaced, but it was shortly after she’d picked up an old bible at a yard sale and wine-tasting a couple of months ago, but really, something had been simmering in her gut, like an emergent disease, for quite some time before that.

  She fled her own apartment, where the haunting began, and moved in with her fiancé to escape the spirits that assaulted her. That move, and a few days off from work, did the trick. For the past two nights, Angela had slept like a baby; no night terrors; no runs to QT at 2:00 am for coffee to avoid sleep.

  This morning, the day rose uncharacteristically cool for a June morning in Atlanta. Angela awoke convinced that the strange dreams and presences that had been haunting her since that first terrifying episode ten days earlier had left her apartment by now, had given up waiting for her to return home and moved on, perhaps to find some other poor soul to terrorize.

  Sorry, that’s their problem, she thought.

  Buoyant with renewal, she sang in the shower – Minnie Riperton’s Loving You was her favorite shower song; she sang all the way to work – Prince’s She’s Always in my Hair was her favorite driving to work song – with the car stereo on full blast and was still humming cheerfully as she entered the front doors of Donkey Bottoms Sportswear, Inc. just before 7 am. She even managed a warm smile and friendly greeting for Chanel, the receptionist. Usually, Angela didn’t give her the time of day.

  “Oh, hi right back atcha, Ang’,” Chanel said, smiling tentatively as she pulled her too-tight pink pencil dress down over her voluptuous curves.

  Angela continued past Chanel into the large inner office where her desk, with its perpetual pile of unfinished paperwork, awaited.

  Luna, the other production assistant – and Angela’s best friend – ran to Angela and wrapped her thick arms around her. “O…M…G, you’re back! Girl, I am so glad to see you! You-know-who has been giving me hell since you’ve been gone!”

  Luna took a step back and gave Angela the once-over. “You okay now?”

  “Yeah, Lu’,” Angela replied. “I’m fine. Sorry my absence made extra work for you.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “He is such a bastard!”

  “Nah, it’s cool,” Luna whispered. She indicated Mr. Grimes’ office with a jerk of her chin; “I worked fifty hours and he refused to pay me overtime; even threatened to suspend me for working too many hours… for his trifling ass! Honestly Ang’, I don’t know how you deal with it day after day; I’d get sick too.”

  “He shouldn’t have done that crap to you,” Angela hissed. “It’s his responsibility to deal with customers and suppliers, but he’s gotten so used to dumping that job on me that I guess he figured he could unload it on you, too. And not pay you for the extra work? I’ve half a mind to go tell him so, right now!”

  “Just let it go, sis,” Luna said. “It’s not worth it. It’s all just part of the game.”

  Angela nodded, but something Luna said was bugging her. “Why?” she demanded.

  “Why, what?” Luna asked.

  “Why did you say ‘let it go’?” Angela answered. “Is there something going on I should know about?”

  Luna’s gaze fell to her feet.”It may be nothing, but…”

  Angela craned her head toward Luna. “But?”

  “I heard Grimes on the phone yesterday talking to Mr. Brookes,” Luna replied.

  “And?”

  “And it sounded like he was getting chewed out for something, so I eavesdropped a little bit,” Luna said with a shrug. “And I heard him mention your name a couple of times. I couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but I got the impression that the little bastard was trying to shift the blame onto you for whatever it was that pissed Mr. Brookes off.”

  Angela nodded. “Go on.”

  “Anyway,” Luna continued. “I heard him say something about putting you on probation when you returned from sick leave.”

  “Probation!” The word exploded from her, much louder than she intended.

  Chanel peered around the doorjamb. Angela lowered her voice to a whisper. “That ugly frog-faced little punk gets twice the salary I do and for what? Sitting on his goddamned hands? But he’s got the huevos to put me on probation?!” Her Cuban accent got stronger. It always did when she was angry.

  “Ang’, it’s a job,” Luna said, putting her hand on Angela’s shoulder. “You either want it or you don’t. If you don’t, go tell Grimes to kiss where the sun don’t shine. But if you do want it, or need it, you just have to accept the fact that…”

  “Yeah yeah, I know,” Angela said, interrupting her. It’s all just part of the game.”

  ***

  The news she was to be put on probation faded the brightness of the day. The entire morning, as she caught up on her memos and correspondence, Angela vacillated between anger and depression over the manager’s treachery and lies. At 11AM, shortly before the temporary reprieve of lunch, the intercom on her desk buzzed.

  “Ms. Rafael,” Fred Grimes’ high pitched, nasal voice piped through the metal box. “Please come to my office immediately.”

  The line clicked dead before she had a chance to reply. Her stomach twisted into knots. Her legs felt weak as they propelled her reluctantly across the room and through the heavy door into the production manager’s office. The door wheezed shut behind her.

  A scattering of reports were spread across the highly polished – and seldom used – surface of the oversized desk that dwarfed the small, middle-aged man behind it – Angela described him to others, with great disdain, as “petite.” He was hunched over the reports, studying them – for her benefit no doubt – his plump little belly bulging hard against his too tight suit as he tapped his pen against the papers thoughtfully. In truth, he was simply making Angela wait what he felt was an appropriate period of time before acknowledging her presence; a trick she knew only too well.

  “Sit down, Ms Rafael,” he said without looking up. It was an order, not an act of hospitality, designed to get her down to a physical level where he could – at a moment of his choosing – rise to loom over her threateningly with all sixty three inches of his gnomish body.

  After six years of working for the man, she was wise to all his tricks. Despite her quaking knees, she remained standing.

  “What’s up, Mr. Grimes?” She asked, trying to keep both the fear and the belligerence out of her voice.

  He looked up, giving her a ferocious scowl. “Ms Rafael! I asked you to be seated. I suggest you comply!” Anger shook his face, bulged his already protuberant eyes. Angela wanted to laugh; she wanted to continue to defy him. But she needed the damned job. Since he was obviously looking for any excuse to jump on her, she grudgingly sat – sullen, silent, waiting for him to get on with his prepared line of bull.

  “Our summer line of sho
rt-short overalls is not selling as well as we’d projected, Ms. Rafael,” he said. “And do you know why?”

  Yep, because they suck, Angela thought, compressing her lips. Aloud, she said nothing.

  “Because they were late getting to our distributors, Ms Rafael, that’s why,” he huffed. “They got there too late to compete, and that’s why they aren’t selling. And do you know why they were late getting out, Ms Rafael? Do you?”

  Angela grimaced, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling.

  “Don’t give me that look! Don’t you give me that look!” Grimes shrieked, jumping out of his chair and banging a tiny fist on the desk so hard his pens jumped in their holder. His face was beet red and his trembling lips made his wispy little mustache twitch. “You know you dragged your heels on this project from the very start and continued to drag them all the way through production. That’s why the damned things were late and that’s why they haven’t sold!”

  “Mr. Grimes,” Angela said calmly. “That’s a load of crap and you know it.”

  The petite man sputtered in shock and outrage, waving his soft, professionally manicured little hand frantically in the air.

  “First of all, the order was less than two weeks overdue,” Angela continued, her voice growing stronger. “Well within our four-week margin, Mister Grimes, so ‘late’ was not the problem. As a matter of fact, even if they had been late, if the design had been worth a damn, our regular customers would have bought them up anyway. But frankly sir, the design…your design… sucked.”

  “Ms Rafael, you’d better watch your mouth!”

  “Or what?” Angela rose to her feet in a fury. But something made her pause, fading her anger-contorted features into a softer look of puzzlement. Her hand dropped to her side. Something had subtly changed in the atmosphere of the office. The air had thickened to invisible syrup and felt charged with electric energy not unlike when a summer thunderstorm approaches. Some small being in the pit of her stomach cried out, scraping at the base of her spine. Innately she knew what was coming, but also knew there was not a thing she could do to prevent it. The aura in the room said that reality had – once again – been displaced.

  Mr. Grimes fell back into the chair behind his desk. A mask of terror was stretched across his face. She looked to her left, at the mirror on his wall and stared at someone who looked a lot like her, but with an eerie, mocking smile which bent the corners of her lips but left her eyes strangely cold and dead.

  For an instant, her features seemed to melt and ripple, as if a wave had passed through them.

  Angela blinked rapidly to clear the haze from her vision, but the image didn’t fade; it continued to grow more vivid and complex. Her face was changing, melting and remolding before her eyes. First, it turned into a caricature of her: her chin receding further and further until it disappeared altogether; her wide, thick-lipped, pretty mouth stretched, exaggerating into a grotesquery; her big, pretty eyes enlarged until they seemed about to pop from her head. Angela gasped, trying first to say something, then to turn her head away from the vision: She found she could do neither. Her nose grew shorter and shorter, flattening into nothing but two slightly ridged nasal apertures; her caramel complexion took on a greenish hue, gradually deepening into the color of Spanish moss, and her shapely body grew rounded and hunched.

  “Ms. Rape-her-well, huh?” she hissed, her voice a hoarse rasp that slithered from deep inside her bulging throat. “That’s what you call me, you and that lard-assed, rotten milk-toned idiot you work for…you thought I didn’t know?”

  “Oh, my God!” Mr. Grimes cried.

  “No need to call me your God, you ignorant little mince,” Angela wheezed. “Don’t you know who I am? Here, let me give you a little hint.”

  Angela roared. Her face rapidly reformed itself again – her bulging eyes closed and then reopened slowly, exposing two fiery red, almond-shaped orbs, with vertical black slits for pupils. Her fat round head elongated and narrowed into the head of a lizard, her lipless reptilian mouth gaping open to expose two gleaming rows of needle-like teeth protruding from oily black gums. From deep in her throat, a narrow pink ribbon of a tongue uncoiled and flicked out an alarming length, nearly touching Mr. Grimes’ face where he sat, paralyzed by terror.

  Angela’s eyes locked onto Mr. Grimes, fierce and unrelenting in their power. “And there were gathered before Solomon his hosts of jinn and they marched forward into battle.”

  Angela’s mouth opened to an impossible width. She exploded forward, swallowing Mr. Grimes whole as he screamed.

  FOUR

  Murder hung in the air like a fog and clung to everything; a sticky miasma that made the flesh crawl and the heart pound. Something bad had happened at Christ Holiness Cathedral.

  Akin crept into the church, with Afrikah at his flank.

  Everyone in the church was dead except for Timothy and maybe the woman – who cloaked herself in the shadows of the Bishop’s office – whose name Akin perceived was Angela. He wasn’t sure about Angela, though, because she wasn’t always completely herself. Sometimes she was Angela Rafael; other times, she was someone – or something – else entirely. But always, underneath it all, she was Angela.

  The rest of the congregation was nothing more than skeletons, their flesh like tattered tarps, colorful shrouds for the dead.

  A soft tap on the door and the creak of hinges announced Akin’s arrival.

  “Timothy?” Akin said.

  “I’m here,” Timothy replied. “I ate the organs of the congregation. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s fine,” Akin lied, dragging a crate filled with paperwork away from the wall to make an impromptu seat for himself. “But you and Angela can’t deny what you are.”

  Angela lumbered out of the darkness. She had the appearance of a large, tailless crocodile, with features reminiscent of who Angela once was.

  Afrikah raised her fists to her chin, assuming a boxer’s stance. She shot a glance at Akin. He shook his head slowly. Afrikah lowered her hands, but they remained firmly balled into fists.

  Angela looked down at the floor. “And what, exactly, are we?”

  “You’re a young man and young woman with some incredible gifts, Ang’.”

  “Don’t call me that!” Angela snapped. “Only my friends call me that!” The floor creaked under her weight as she rocked back and forth on her heels.

  “You can’t afford to forget who you really are, Angela.”

  “Who I really am is why all of my co-workers and the good people of this church are dead. Who I really am is why I am going to come over there in a minute or two and tear you and your girlfriend apart.”

  “You’re not a demon,” Akin said. “You’re not possessed by one. You’re gifted. When they manifest, we may think we’re going crazy, or that we are really aliens from the planet Zerburt-Five, or that we are possessed by Satan. I can help you learn who you really are. Or, you can kill us and never learn what you can really do.”

  “I vote we kill you,” Angela said.

  “But Angela, Reverend Pearl is destined to run this church,” Timothy said. “Father revealed it to me.”

  “Do you know what Father revealed to me?” Angela said. “He revealed that your Reverend Pearl here is a goddamned liar. He was running a con. Going to make you think he was exorcising demons. Little did he know he’d run into a couple of real ones.”

  “Satan isn’t your father,” Akin said. “I’m telling you, it’s your…”

  “Shut up!” Angela roared, cutting him off. She charged forward, her maw opening wide to expose her teeth, each the size and shape of an ice pick.

  Afrikah whipped her leg in a wide arc, slamming her shin into Angela’s gut.

  Angela folded over Afrikah’s leg. A whoosh of air erupted from her mouth.

  The force of the kick sent Angela flying backward. Her back slammed into the Bishop’s desk. The desk shattered into splinters. Angela landed on her haunches.

  “Take a chi
ll pill, Ang’,” Afrikah said.

  “No!” Timothy screamed. Oddly, the scream sounded musical, like the hard strumming of a harp.

  Afrikah wailed in agony as scores of lesions appeared on her body.

  Akin inhaled deeply. He sent fibers from his mind outward until he connected with Timothy’s mind. Timothy’s psyche folded in upon itself, whirling and shaking violently. Good, Akin thought. He’s struggling. He can still be reached.

  Akin sent instructions through the psychic filaments, commanding Timothy to shut his mouth.

  The pain assaulting Afrikah subsided. Her flesh immediately began repairing itself.

  Angela struggled to her feet.

  Afrikah darted forward with blistering speed. She wrapped her arms around Angela’s neck and squeezed.

  Angela struggled to break free, but Afrikah was too strong.

  “Akin…” Afrikah said, peering at him over her shoulder.

  “Surrender,” Akin said. “Surrender and I promise to help you.”

  “I…okay,” Timothy sighed.

  Akin felt the truth in his words.

  Angela, however, wanted only to bring death; to silence the world forever and then pick the flesh from its bones.

  Angela dug her claws into Afrikah’s arms.

  “Damn it!” Angela screamed. “Akin!”

  “Angela,” Akin sighed as he stared at the floor. “I’m sorry.”

  Afrikah tightened her hold on Angela’s thick, reptilian neck, squeezing with all her might. She arched her back as she thrust her arms toward the ceiling.

  Angela’s head tore from her shoulders with a loud pop.

  Afrikah tossed Angela’s head into a corner. She snapped her head toward Akin. Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes. “Dammit, Akin,” she said. “No more grifts!”

  Akin nodded.

  Afrikah stormed out of the church.

  Akin turned his attention to Timothy, who stared, wide-eyed, at Angela’s headless body. He did not move.

  “Timothy, we have to go,” Akin said. “The police will be here soon. Someone just reported a disturbance coming from the church.”

  Timothy blinked rapidly, bringing himself back into focus. “Where will we go?”