Antonio stared at me with rage in his pig eyes. The blood on the side of his face made him look even more fearsome than he already did, which was plenty.
“I’ll rip your heads off and shit down your necks,” Antonio rasped in a voice that was surprisingly high for a man his size. It reminded me of Mike Tyson’s. “You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”
So much for scaring Antonio to death.
“Sure we do,” I said. “You work for the mob. But, your mobster friends aren’t here to protect you. Even if they were, we’d stomp them just like we’ll stomp you if you don’t do as you’re told. We’re Metas, remember? You don’t scare us.” We eat guys like you for breakfast, I almost added, but that sounded over-the-top cheesy, even to my inner critic.
Antonio opened his mouth again. This time, no bluster came out. Instead Antonio spat out something that looked like a yellow glowing marble. It grew exponentially in size as it shot from his mouth toward us.
It was more instinct and training than conscious thought that made me raise a force field around me and Isaac right before the glowing ball hit us. The ball exploded with an ear deafening boom when it slammed into my field.
It happened too fast for me to brace myself against the concussive force. Isaac and I were blasted backward, off our feet. We hit the back of Antonio’s couch as if we had been picked up and thrown there. The heavy couch toppled backward from the force of the impact. Isaac and I hit the vertical blinds that covered the floor-to-ceiling window, then the window itself. The blinds rattled like a nest of rattlesnakes. We bounced off the window and hit the floor below it with a bone-shaking thump. The couch fell on top of us. The upturned couch covered us like a tepee, swallowing us in near darkness. I felt like a well-shaken martini.
“Is now a good time to say I told you so?” Isaac gasped. I could barely hear him as my ears rang from the explosion.
Before I could respond, the couch exploded into smithereens.
Isaac and I were thrown backward once more. We hit the window again. This time, we collided so hard we smashed right through it.
With a crash and tinkle of breaking glass, we were flung into the cool night air outside.
The wind shrieked in our ears. We plunged toward the ground far below.
2
Isaac and I doing shooting star impersonations outside of Mad Dog’s tall apartment building could be directly traced to when I met his girlfriend Hannah Kim during my first day of work at the Astor City Times newspaper about six months ago.
I knew there was something amiss with Hannah the moment I laid eyes on her. Maybe it was because my Heroic training had made me good at reading people. Well okay, perhaps “good at reading people” was a stretch. After all, I was the guy who had almost gotten his head blown clean off by the bomb-smuggling hot blonde in Chinatown and who had just been caught flat-footed by the fact Mad Dog was a Meta. My ability to read people was certainly not at a Sherlock Holmes level. Heck, it probably wasn’t even at Dr. Watson’s level. Thanks to my Heroic training though, I certainly was better at reading people when I met Hannah than I had been when I lived on the farm. Back on the farm, I had been better at reading when sweet potatoes were ready to be dug up than I had been at reading people.
Maybe I knew something was amiss with Hannah because, as someone who had been pushed around and bullied a lot as a kid, I was hyperaware of the signs of it happening to someone else. Maybe it was the fact Hannah wore a skin-concealing, long-sleeved turtleneck when I met her even though it was warm outside and the Times’ offices weren’t cold. Maybe it was the fact I had volunteered at a dog shelter when I was in high school and had dealt with an abused Rottweiler there named Kiara. Kiara always had a slightly fearful look in her eyes, as if she suspected you’d haul off and hit her when her back was turned. I saw an echo of that same look in Hannah’s eyes as I shook hands with her during my tour of the Times’ offices.
Regardless of why I sensed something was amiss with Hannah when my Times supervisor introduced me to her, I did. An educated guess made me reach out with my left hand as my right one shook Hannah’s to grab her forearm, as if in an overly enthusiastic greeting. Hannah winced when I lightly squeezed her forearm. Since I certainly had not squeezed hard enough to hurt her, I didn’t need to be as smart as my estranged friend Neha Thakore, who under her code name Smoke had been the valedictorian of my Academy class, to deduce that Hanna’s long-sleeved sweater concealed some sort of injury.
As I had been sworn in as a licensed Hero the month before I met Hannah shortly after completing the Trials, the words of the Hero’s Oath had still been ringing in my ears:
No cave so dark,
No pit so deep,
Will hide evil from my arm’s sweep.
Those who sow darkness soon shall reap.
For in the pursuit of justice,
I will never sleep.
I didn’t need a graduate degree in poetry to interpret the words to mean I was sworn to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. My oath, plus a healthy dose of nosiness about what had caused the injury I had surmised was on her covered arm, made me try to befriend Hannah in my early days as an employee of the Times. I didn’t even have to go out of my way to do so as my job duties took me to the art department almost every day. Hannah worked there as a graphic artist. Despite my important sounding title of Assistant Staff Writer, as the newest hire in the paper’s editorial division and as someone who had exactly zero newspaper experience, I was in reality a gofer and errand boy who one day in the far distant future might be allowed to write something for publication if I kept my nose clean, demonstrated I could type without breaking the keyboard, and consistently got the reporters’ and editors’ lunch takeout orders right.
Anyway, I got to know Hannah in my daily visits to her department. At first, she thought I was trying to hit on her. Maybe I would have if I hadn’t still been messed up in the head from Neha rejecting me weeks before when I had told her I loved her. If I had hit on Hannah, I doubted anyone with eyes would have blamed me. Hannah was super cute, and just a few years older than I. She was of Korean descent, with light brown skin and straight glossy black hair worn long. She had rich, dark, and slightly troubled eyes that focused intently on you when you spoke as if you were the only person in the world. She had unmistakably feminine curves despite probably only weighing a hundred pounds dripping wet. She was also smart, having graduated with honors with an art degree from an Ivy League school before getting a job at the Times.
Hannah wore a blue and white striped hat that was in the style of the hats train conductors wore. She always had it on, even indoors and even if it clashed with the rest of her outfit.
“My boyfriend Antonio gave it to me,” she had said with pride when I had asked about it in one of my first trips to the art department. She emphasized the word boyfriend slightly, as if to say, “So don’t get any ideas.” Since I had been standing over where Hannah sat, I got a flash of a fresh bruise on her throat despite the long neck of her sweater. I had wondered at the time if Antonio had given her that bruise as well as the hat.
When I had persisted in talking to her in my subsequent trips to the art department despite knowing she had a boyfriend, I think Hannah mentally put me into the friend zone. Story of my life. She slowly opened up to me over the course of several conversations, both in the office and over lunch.
At first, she told me that the bruises and injuries she often came to work sporting were caused by her natural clumsiness. “Oh, I tripped and fell while running on the treadmill,” she said on one occasion. “I burned my hand ironing,” she said on another. Like clockwork, a day or two after Hannah came to work with a fresh injury, she’d show up wearing a brand-new necklace or a bracelet or flowers were sent to the office for her. I didn’t have to be a social worker specializing in abuse victims to know Hannah was lying to me and that the gifts she got were someone’s way of making things up to her. Not even the Three Stooges were as clumsy as Hannah pre
tended to be.
Hannah had finally confessed the true cause of her injuries after weeks of me asking about them. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you’re patient and listen more than you speak. Maybe I should have hung up my Hero’s cape and instead become a priest specializing in taking confessions. Thanks to my romantic overtures being rejected by Neha, I already had the celibacy part of priesthood down pat.
“Antonio doesn’t mean to hurt me. Sometimes I talk back and it makes him mad. It’s mostly my fault really,” Hannah had said when she finally confessed to me. Her train conductor’s hat had been accessorized with a swollen shut black eye that day. I wondered what gift Antonio would get her to make up for punching her in the eye. Maybe a gem encrusted eyepatch.
Once Hannah had let the abuse cat out of the bag, it was hard to get her to stop talking about it. She told me I was the only one she had told about what Antonio did to her. I think it was a relief to get what was happening to her off her chest. She told me all about Antonio and their time together, both good and bad. Though she danced around coming right out and admitting it, I was convinced that Antonio also sexually forced himself on Hannah when she wasn’t in the mood.
Hannah also told me what Antonio did for a living. He was an enforcer for the Esposito crime family. His street name was Mad Dog. Though I had only been in Astor City for a couple of months at the point Hannah told me this, I knew about the Esposito crime family thanks to my after-work crime-fighting efforts, both alone and alongside Myth. It would have been impossible to not know about the Espositos. Fighting crime in Astor City and not knowing about the Esposito crime family was like fighting global warming and not knowing about greenhouse gases. When it came to illegal activity in Astor City, blacks and Mexicans ran the drug trade, a Metahuman named Brass Knuckle ran the whores, and the Esposito crime family ran pretty much everything else. There was an uneasy balance of power among the various groups that would occasionally flare up into violence when one group or another overstepped its bounds into someone else’s territory.
Despite me urging Hannah to break up with Antonio and go to the police, she refused. “I don’t want to get him in trouble,” she had said. “Antonio loves me.” She always said his name worshipfully, like he was the Jesus Christ or something.
“Must be mighty hard to see that through one eye,” I said. If she heard me, she completely ignored me. Her uninjured slanted brown eye had shone almost maniacally.
“And I love him. We’re going to get married one day. He’s big and strong and tough and brave. Sure, he does things that aren’t exactly legal, but everyone’s got to make a living somehow. Besides, even if I went to the police, they wouldn’t do anything.” She had added with perverse pride, “Antonio tells the cops what to do, not the other way around.”
Women. Even with the help of superpowers, I still didn’t understand them. It baffled me that an educated, accomplished, and pretty woman like Hannah would be proud of dating an abusive gangster. Then again, if there was one thing my twenty years on the planet had taught me, it was that life wasn’t a movie where the nice guy wound up with the girl at the end. More often than not, the jerk walked away with the girl as he laughed and kicked sand in the nice guy’s face. Screenwriters who crafted movies where the nerdy guy with the heart of gold walks into the sunset arm-in-arm with the blonde cheerleader who has learned to appreciate the nerd’s true value were filthy liars. Or, maybe they were simply nerdy guys deluding themselves. Then again, maybe I was just jaded, bitter over what had happened between me and Neha.
If Hannah had told me when I first moved to Astor City that a gangster could tell cops what to do, I wouldn’t have believed her. The brief time I had spent fighting crime at night plus the local news I’d consumed as a part of my job had disabused me of the notion that all Astor City cops had the noble goal of serving and protecting. I’d learned that a lot of the cops here were essentially uniformed criminals with a badge and a license to kill. The problem was there was no easy way to tell the corrupt cops from the good ones. Life wasn’t an old western where the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black. And, even if I found a good cop and reported Antonio to him, he wouldn’t be able to do anything if Hannah wasn’t willing to press charges against Antonio.
So, me going to the police myself about Antonio’s abuse was out. Also out was confronting Antonio as the Hero Kinetic. Licensed Heroes were not vigilantes. Just as the police didn’t have the authority to do anything to Mad Dog without Hannah being willing to press charges, a Hero didn’t have the authority either. Real life was not a comic book where masked superheroes could go around punching lowlifes in the face willy-nilly. If I accosted Mad Dog as Kinetic without legal justification, he would be well within his rights to call the police on me and have me arrested. The Heroes’ Guild, the self-regulating body all Heroes belonged to, would be compelled to investigate my arrest, and would probably punish me for breaking the law. The Guild might even take my Hero’s license away. Pitbull, the chief proctor of the Trials whom I had pissed off during the Trials, also served on the Guild’s Executive Committee. He would be thrilled to have an excuse to rip my Hero’s cape off me.
On top of that, if I confronted Mad Dog as Kinetic after Hannah had confessed to her co-worker Theo that her boyfriend hit her, Hannah wouldn’t need her high-priced Ivy League degree to figure out that the masked Hero Kinetic and the only guy she had told about her boyfriend’s abuse were one and the same person. A secret identity was supposed to be kept a secret. If it wasn’t, it would be called a tell-everyone-and-their-mother identity.
So, as the Hero Kinetic, my hands were tied. If I were being a good little Hero, I’d simply shake my head at Hannah protecting her douchebag boyfriend and turn my attention to something I had the legal authority to do something about.
That’s exactly what I did for months. Then, one day Hannah had come to work with her arm in a sling, broken in two places. Her face was battered as well. She told everyone at the office that she had slipped and fallen down the stairs. She couldn’t look me in the eye when she tried to sell me on that lie too. She and I both knew what had really happened to her.
That incident had not only broken Hannah’s arm, but it was also the straw that broke the camel’s back. I knew I had to do something about Hannah’s abuse before Mad Dog injured her further or, worse, killed her. If I couldn’t do anything as the Hero Kinetic about Antonio, then by God I would do something about him as Theo.
Since I shared a rental house with Isaac and another roommate, Isaac had seen me preparing to go out to confront Antonio the night after Hannah had come to work with a broken arm. Isaac had wormed out of me what I planned to do to Antonio. At first, he had tried to talk me out of it. He had seen that my mind was made up. Though he still didn’t approve, here he was now with me, falling out of the night sky like a shooting star after being blasted out of Antonio’s apartment.
If a willingness to risk life and limb over something you had advised against wasn’t true friendship, I didn’t know what was.
3
Antonio blasting me and Isaac through his apartment window was not the first time I had been thrown through glass. You don’t get used to it. Then again, if you get to the point where you do get used to it, you probably need to re-evaluate your life choices.
Back when we were at the Academy, Athena had told us more times than I could remember that in an unexpected crisis, you rose or fell to the level of your training. That was why, as silly as it sounded, emergency preparedness experts advised people to practice dialing 911—when the poop hit the fan, you would have a hard time remembering your name, much less how to get into touch with the authorities. That was also why I had been drilled in the use of my powers so thoroughly that using them to save my bacon in an emergency was as automatic as ducking when a baseball was flung at your head.
Endless training was why I had instinctively raised my force field around me and Isaac when Antonio had spat his energy blast at us, or wha
tever in the heck it was. And, it was why I still had my force field erected around us when we had been flung through the thick glass of Antonio’s window. Otherwise we no doubt would have been sliced to ribbons by the breaking glass. Assuming Antonio’s energy blast hadn’t blown us to bloody bits before we even hit the window.
The city’s lights spun like a kaleidoscope around us as we fell down the side of Antonio’s apartment building. I felt like a James Bond martini: thoroughly shaken. But despite being rattled, thanks to my training and force field, I seemed to be uninjured. I was flustered, startled out of a year’s growth by the fact that Antonio was a Metahuman, and spinning ass over teakettle as we fell, but uninjured. Being unhurt would change all too soon if I didn’t shake off being shaken up.
Shake off being shaken up? Huh. One is not as eloquent as one might hope when one is plunging toward the ground like a duck full of buckshot.
Isaac tumbled in the air near me, close enough to spit on. The fact he hadn’t transformed into a flying mythological creature to save himself showed he was even more shaken up than I was. Preventing the ground from performing the world’s most violent cosmetic surgery on our bodies was obviously priority number one. Priority number two was to fly back up to Antonio’s place and kick his ass.
I used my powers to slow and then halt both of our descents. We were still several stories up from the ground. We hovered in the air a few feet from the face of Antonio’s building like two tethered helium balloons.
Isaac shook his head as if to clear it from cobwebs. He looked as unsettled as I felt.
“Tell me you didn’t know Mad Dog was a Meta,” he demanded. His voice was raspy. The wind whipped around, making it hard to hear him. “Because if you did know and neglected to share that niggling little detail, I’m going to punch you in the face as soon as I finish punching Mad Dog in his face.”
Omega Superhero Box Set Page 49
