“We didn’t break into anything,” I said. “We opened the door like we owned the place and strolled right in.”
“Try that argument on the judge who presides over your felony trial. Call me to let me know how it goes. Assuming they let you make phone calls from prison. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been locked up like you have. Why a salt of the earth Hero like me hangs out with a jailbird like you is a mystery.” There was another barely seen head shake.
When we had arrived at Antonio’s apartment earlier, I had used my telekinetic powers to unlock the door. The door had opened for us as easily as if we were Antonio’s landlord. We discovered once the door was open that Antonio had an alarm system. It beeped at us, demanding attention, as soon as we were inside. Leave it to a criminal to be security conscious.
As its beeping had made obvious, the alarm system had been armed. Its luminescent numeric keypad was mounted next to the door. I had been about to reach inside the guts of the alarm with my powers to disconnect the power when Isaac warned me against it. A lot of alarms were designed to go off in a remote location when the local power was killed, he had said. So, I instead had lightly run my telekinetic touch over the keypad. Most of the keys were stiff from disuse. Three of them weren’t—the five, the two, and the zero. Surmising those keys weren’t stiff like the others because they were the ones Antonio used to deactivate the alarm, I started hitting those keys, hoping to stumble on the correct combination of numbers before the alarm went off. The math that had been drilled repeatedly into my head at the Academy told me I had about a seventeen percent chance of getting the access code right with each attempt if the code was merely three digits.
Fortunately, the guardian angel who protected Heroes turned burglars must have been looking out for us. The access code had been zero-two-five. I had gotten it on my third try.
“With you clearly misunderstanding what constitutes breaking and entering, how you managed to pass the Academy’s Hero Law class is beyond me,” Isaac was saying. “Maybe you cribbed the correct answers off my test papers. Now, where was I before you interrupted me with your jailhouse lawyer nonsense about how we didn’t break into anything? Oh yeah, I remember—I was talking about what a great idea coming here is. It’s so great, thinking about it makes me sick to my stomach. We’re dressed up like the Hamburglar, sitting in the dark apartment of a sociopath who terrorizes people for a gang of even worse sociopaths, waiting for him to come home so we can beard the lion in his own den. And did I mention this apartment is numbered 1313? Everybody knows the number thirteen is good luck. Nothing but rainbows and butterflies. It’s why the Apollo 13 mission went so swimmingly. Everything about this whole situation is just peachy-keen. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Swimmingly? Peachy-keen? Beard the lion in his own den?” I repeated. I grinned. “You sure do talk funny for a black guy from Los Angeles.”
“You sure do talk funny for a black guy from Los Angeles,” Isaac repeated mockingly in an over-the-top exaggeration of my South Carolina accent. “You’re one to talk, Gomer Pyle. You’re the hick pot literally calling the sophisticated kettle black. Ironic, not to mention racist. I prefer Melanin American over ‘black guy.’ Anyway, I take back what I said before. You’re not Gomer. You’re more like Lucy Ricardo. This is the kind of harebrained scheme she’d come up with. Next you’ll suggest we break into the Tropicana Club so you can sneak into Ricky’s act.”
“No one’s got a gun to your head—”
“Yet,” Isaac interjected. “No one’s got a gun to my head yet. Just wait until Mad Dog gets home. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to rectify that.”
“What I was going to say before I was rudely interrupted was that you can always back out and go home. When you get there, maybe watch some modern television shows so your references aren’t so dated. While you’re bringing yourself up to date on contemporary pop culture, I’ll take care of Antonio by myself.”
“You’re chock-full of both bad ideas and bad taste today, aren’t you? Most modern shows are rubbish. Classic TV is the best TV. As for me leaving you here by yourself, you can forget that. You might need backup who’ll save you from your own bad ideas. I said I’ll help, so I’ll help. I’m no welsher. Besides, even though this is a horrifically bad idea, at least we’re here for a good cause. Your heart’s in the right place. Apparently, you believe that the ends justify the means. I must’ve also been sick the day they taught that at the Academy.”
“If only you had contracted a permanent case of laryngitis,” I said. Isaac ignored me as if I hadn’t spoken.
“On the plus side, if this thing does go sideways, I’ll be on the scene so I can be the first to say ‘I told you so.’ Also, someone needs to be around to bail you out of jail.”
“If this goes south, you’ll likely go to jail with me. You’re an accessory before, during, and after the fact.”
“Darn it, I hadn’t even thought of that.” I faintly saw his head shake again. “You see what you’ve done to me, Lucy? Your bad planning and shaky grasp of the law have rubbed off on me.”
I grinned. Isaac would likely be making jokes on his deathbed. “If I’m Lucy, you know that means you’re Ethel Mertz, right?”
“That’s the one part of these shenanigans that makes me happy. There are far worse people to be. Ethel was kinda hot. I’ve got a thing for mature white women in frumpy dresses and comfortable shoes.”
“Sometimes I think you overshare. Other times—like now—I’m sure of it.”
It was well after 2 a.m. Despite my ongoing banter with Isaac, I felt myself getting drowsy, like weights had been attached to my eyelids and they were slowly getting heavier. I fought the temptation to close them. If Isaac was right that this was a bad idea, a worse idea would be for Mad Dog to come home and find me curled up asleep on his couch.
I stood up from the large couch I had been on with Isaac. I was stiff from sitting for so long. I stretched. My shoulders popped. It sounded like a cap pistol being fired in the stillness of the dark apartment. We had been waiting for Antonio to arrive for over two hours. My movement stirred the otherwise still air. I got a fresh nauseating whiff of rotten seafood and decaying Chinese takeout. I had grown so accustomed to the stench of Antonio’s overflowing kitchen trash can that I could barely smell it anymore except when I moved around.
In addition to the trash can being in dire need of emptying, clothes and other of Antonio’s belongings were strewn sloppily all around the apartment. Apparently, he was so busy beating up his girlfriend and terrorizing people for the mob that he was an indifferent housekeeper. Contrary to what the Book of Proverbs said about idle hands, Antonio’s busy hands were just as much of the Devil’s workshop.
Isaac was in the middle of yammering about how I was his sidekick when my powers alerted me that someone was outside the apartment’s door. He said, “You’re the Ron Weasley to my Harry Potter, the Hodor to my Bran Stark, the Chewbacca to my Han Solo, the—”
“You’ll be the Abel to my Cain if you don’t pipe down,” I hissed. “Someone’s outside.”
I focused on the presence on the other side of the door. My hands burned a little, as they always did when I exerted my powers. My powers had developed a lot since they had first manifested years ago. They were like a muscle—the more I used them, the stronger they grew. One thing I was now capable of doing was to emit a pulse of telekinetic energy that allowed me to map out my surroundings. It was like the echolocation some bats used to hunt in the dark, only my powers were tactile rather than sound-based like bats’ echolocation was. If it weren’t for the fact DC Comics would sue me into poverty, I’d change my name to Batman.
I sensed a large man on the other side of the door slide a key into the lock. “He’s coming in,” I whispered. Isaac got off the couch and stood near me.
The lock turned. The door opened. Light flooded in from the hallway, making me squint. The light framed a tall, broad man wearing dark pants and an untucked white button-down
shirt. His shaved white head was slightly conical. It reminded me of a hollow-point bullet.
Antonio’s huge body filled the doorway like he was a giant entering a dollhouse. He was even bigger than he had appeared in the pictures my Astor City Times co-worker Hannah Kim had shown me. Looking at him, I had no doubt Antonio was good at his job as a mob enforcer. If I didn’t have superpowers and a guy Antonio’s size showed up to demand the vig on money I’d borrowed from a mobbed-up loan shark, I’d poop my pants and hand over my last dollar so fast it would make George Washington’s head spin. Even with superpowers, facing a guy Antonio’s size made my sphincter tighten a little.
Antonio stepped inside. He apparently didn’t see me and Isaac concealed in the shadows of the room. His keys jangled as he threw them into a bowl on a table by the door. Antonio turned his back partly to us to flip on the lights. I blinked away the abrupt brightness.
Now that I could see him clearly, Antonio’s belly swelled out a bit, rounding out the fabric of the shirt above his pants. Though he clearly was overweight, the tightness of his shirt across his barrel-chest indicated there was a lot of muscle underneath the fat. My farming father would have described Antonio as “hard fat.” I knew farmers back in South Carolina like Antonio, men who were very strong thanks to lives of physical labor, but who ate what they wanted when they wanted, so they carried a lot of extra weight around. Theirs was a functional strength. They weren’t vain gym rats who weighed their food, flexed at themselves admiringly in the mirror, and fretted about sculpting the perfect abs.
I had spent most of my life in terror of guys who looked like Antonio. I guess old habits die hard because I felt a sudden surge of fear as I stared at Antonio. A guy like me trying to scare a big guy like Antonio was like a mouse trying to scare a water buffalo.
Then I realized how silly I was being. I swallowed my fright. I wasn’t a naive, rail thin farm boy anymore. I was a licensed Hero. I had faced people far worse than a beefy non-Meta like Antonio. So what if he looked like he grabbed smaller guys like me and picked his teeth with us? If he tried to pick his teeth with me, I could knock them out of his mouth and make a necklace out of them.
As soon as I felt a surge of confidence brought on by my internal pep talk, I tried to tamp it down. The last time I was overconfident, I had just foiled a bank robbery in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown and had nearly gotten my swelled head blown off after a hot blonde snuck a bomb into my clothes. Despite having superpowers, maybe it was smart to also have a healthy amount of fear.
Then again, Kinetic: The Man With Plenty Of Fear was a less-than-heroic title for a superhero comic book. Perhaps it was why no one had bought the rights to my life story.
Antonio turned toward us. His beady, piggish eyes widened in surprise when he spotted me and Isaac. I used my powers to slam the door shut. I turned the deadbolt. I hoped the click of the lock was ominous to Antonio’s ears.
“Welcome home,” I greeted Antonio with a cocky smile on my face, and an irrepressible flutter of fear in my heart. I’d said the words with casual confidence, as if I lay in wait for guys named Mad Dog every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Experienced Heroes like Amazing Man and Athena—the senior drill instructor at the Academy—always seemed completely unflappable, as if they would greet Armageddon’s Final Trump calmly and with a slight smile of anticipation. I tried to channel my inner Athena. Minus the boobs.
I had to give Antonio credit: it only took a split second for the deer in headlights look to fade from his face. The ski masks we had on made it obvious Isaac and I weren’t here to sell Avon. Antonio reached under his shirt, moving faster than I would have thought possible for a big man. Then he froze with his hand inside of his shirt. He didn’t move a millimeter further, as if he were a movie someone had hit the pause button on.
Antonio was doing his best statue impersonation due to me. Thanks to my echolocation abilities, I had already run my mind over Antonio’s big body—yuck, by the way—and determined he had a holstered pistol hanging from his belt that was concealed from view by his untucked shirt. I had stopped him with my powers before he could reach it. Though Antonio struggled mightily against my hold on him, he couldn’t move a muscle. I could barely feel his struggling. He was no match for my powers. I’d used them to pick up and fling tons before. Me immobilizing Antonio was akin to a man holding a grasshopper in place. The grasshopper didn’t stand a chance.
With Antonio still frozen in place by my telekinesis, I pulled his gun free of its holster with my powers. Antonio also had a long folding knife in his front right pocket. I pulled the knife out too. I flung the knife across the room, where it hit the wall with a clatter. It fell to the floor.
As for the gun, I lifted it into the air with my powers. I held it in front of Antonio’s unmoving eyes. He had no choice but to stare down the barrel.
“We came here to have a friendly chat with our new chum Antonio here,” I said to Isaac, “and the first thing he does is try to pull a gun on us. What do you suppose Miss Manners would say if she heard about this?”
“She’d say it was outrageous. She’d also say we should chastise Antonio for his rudeness by shooting him with his own gun,” Isaac said. We had an argument before Antonio’s arrival about which of us would get to play bad cop, and which would be forced to be play good cop. We had compromised and agreed to play bad cop-bad cop.
“Maybe we will shoot him,” I agreed. Running over the contours of the gun with my powers told me it was a Smith and Wesson nine millimeter with a thumb safety mounted on the side. I made a great show of slowly turning the gun in midair so Antonio could clearly see the side of it. I flicked off the safety inches away from Antonio’s eyes. I turned the gun so he once again stared down its barrel. “Whether our boy Antonio comes down with an acute case of lead poisoning all depends on if he does exactly what we tell him.
“So, here’s the thing Antonio: We hear through the grapevine that you like to beat up your girlfriend Hannah Kim. Sometimes you rape her, too, when she’s not in the mood to sleep with you. Since my friend and I both frown on domestic violence, we thought we’d swing by and express our displeasure. And by displeasure, I mean that we’re pretty pissed. And when we get pissed, we tend to do things like shoot woman beaters and rapists in head.”
“After we break their bones and beat them black and blue,” Isaac interjected.
“Right. After we break bones and beat them black and blue. I almost forgot.”
“How could you? It’s the best part.” Isaac smiled a smile at Antonio that was a combination of gleeful and ominous. If I hadn’t known Isaac as I did, I’d have thought that breaking people’s bones was how he liked to spend his weekends at the beach.
Antonio’s bald head was now mottled red, either due to frustration at not being able to move, anxiety, fear, or all the above. His body struggled in vain to free itself. Antonio’s small, close-set eyes were wild-looking as they stared down his gun’s barrel. If a feral pig was injected with a boatload of steroids and started walking upright, I imagined it would look a lot like Antonio.
I said to him, “For some mysterious reason that boggles the mind, Hannah is in love with you despite how you treat her. If she knew we were here, she’d probably step between you and the gun pointed at your ugly face. But, unfortunately for you, she’s not here. The only people here are you—a walking argument for abortion if there ever was one—and two pissed off guys with Metahuman powers. Our powers are why there’s a gun floating in front of your face. They are also how we broke in here without leaving a trace.
“Despite being pissed, we’re reasonable men. As such, we’re going to offer you a deal. You’re going to call Hannah today. You’re going to break up with her. Tell her you found someone else. Tell her your job busting shopkeepers’ kneecaps keeps you too busy to have a girlfriend. Tell her you’ve realized you’re gay and that you’re moving to a tropical island to do some dick diving. I don’t care what you tell her so long as you end things with he
r. Then, you’ll never see her or get into touch with her again.
“In exchange for you doing that, we won’t break every bone in your body, beat you to a pulp, and then shoot you in the head with your own gun.” I of course had no intention of doing all that—I was a Hero after all, not a hoodlum like Antonio—but he didn’t need to know that my threats were hollow. He just had to believe that they were not. “As I said before, we’re Metas. Pretty powerful ones at that. That means there isn’t any place on the planet where you can run where we won’t find you and end you if you don’t cut off all contact with Hannah.
“So, which is it going to be, Antonio?” I asked. “Break up with Hannah and live, or refuse and die a painful death?” Isaac cracked his knuckles ominously, which I thought was a nice touch. The cracking sounded like fireworks in the enclosed area.
Antonio didn’t say anything.
“Speak up, we haven’t got all night,” I said sharply. I twisted the gun and slugged Antonio on the temple with the butt of it. I hit him hard enough that it would really hurt, but not too hard. Despite this guy being a piece of crap, I wasn’t trying to kill him.
I brought the gun back down to point the barrel at Antonio’s face. Blood began to stream down from the gash I had opened at Antonio’s temple. It dripped into his left eye. Antonio did not blink it away, which I thought was odd.
Oh! In my fervor to come across as a vicious thug who’d kill as readily as swat a fly, I’d forgotten I had Antonio’s body completely frozen. He couldn’t speak even if he wanted to. Feeling like a complete doofus, I released my powers’ hold, but only on Antonio’s head. He blinked furiously and shook his head as if he were awakening from a dream.
“Well?” I said, trying to keep my embarrassment for my oversight out of my voice. I couldn’t imagine that an actual violent thug would sound abashed. If Antonio and I hadn’t been on opposing teams, I’d have asked him to find out for sure.
Omega Superhero Box Set Page 48
