Omega Superhero Box Set

by Darius Brasher

  “I had no idea. Honest.” I was breathing hard. “If Hannah knows, she didn’t tell me. My guess is that she doesn’t. She was so proud when she told me Antonio works for the mob. If she knew Antonio is a Meta on top of that, she’d probably shout it from the rooftops.”

  “Well, the cat’s certainly out of the bag now. Let’s go back upstairs and do some of that face-punching I mentioned. We need to make it quick, though. Mad Dog’s blasts probably woke up half the neighborhood. Surely someone’s called the police by now. We need to be long gone by the time they show up. I’m a black man wearing a ski mask in a white neighborhood in the middle of the night. They’ll shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Isaac was right. I had no interest in going to jail again. It hadn’t been much fun the first time. I had even less interest in the Guild finding out a Hero was illegally skulking around people’s apartments.

  I lifted us back up toward Antonio’s floor. I slowed as we approached the hole in the glass we had been ejected from. We cautiously peeked inside Antonio’s apartment. We didn’t want to want to rush in recklessly and get our asses handed to us again. Once spat at, twice shy.

  The only part that remained of the huge glass window we had been blasted through were jagged shards. They lined the perimeter of the hole like shark’s teeth. Inside, Antonio spoke animatedly on a cell phone to someone. My first thought was that he had called the police. My second thought called me an idiot. A guy like Antonio didn’t call the police; he had the police called about him. He was probably calling for reinforcements on the off chance his blasts hadn’t already taken care of us.

  Antonio looked up and spotted us. His eyes widened in surprise. His mouth began to open. There was a yellow glow between his parted lips.

  I had seen this movie before. I had no interest in the sequel.

  I rocketed through the gaping hole in the glass with my force field around me. I had the presence of mind to simultaneously drop Isaac inside the apartment.

  I hit Antonio like a battering ram right in his fat midsection. He grunted like a wild boar at the impact. The cell phone flew from his hand. I shot forward several feet with my head buried in Antonio’s stomach, like a fist that had punched rising bread dough. I slammed Antonio against the wall. His big body collided with it with a satisfying crash.

  I bounced back a bit from Antonio, landing on my feet. Antonio slumped off the wall and sank to his knees. He groaned weakly. His eyes were a little crossed. Despite having been rocked, he tried to stand up again. I hated to give the devil his due, but I had to admit Antonio was a tough bastard.

  I sealed Antonio’s mouth shut with my powers to avoid being blasted again. I could have immobilized his entire body as I had before, but I refused to hit a man who couldn’t defend himself, even a piece of crap like Antonio. I launched a back leg side kick into his ribs. Antonio fell to the side, catching himself with an outstretched arm before he hit the floor. With my force field still up to protect my hands, I swung a flurry of punches at Antonio’s head. Antonio’s arm slipped from under him. His upper body toppled heavily to the floor like a felled tree.

  Since Antonio was out of commission, I should have stopped there. I knew that, but didn’t. There was so much I had been frustrated by and mad about since coming to Astor City: I was mad at myself for stupidly getting caught off guard by Antonio being a Metahuman; frustrated by Hannah’s stubborn refusal to break up with Antonio; angry and hurt about Neha having rejected me; frustrated about not knowing what to do about the Hero Mechano, who was the main reason I had moved to Astor City; and dismayed about how big city life had taught me that the morality I had grown up believing in few others shared. These days, it seemed like black was white, and up was down. Nothing in my life was going as I had expected or hoped. There was so much I couldn’t do anything about, and so much I didn’t even know how to go about doing.

  I could do something about Antonio’s big fat pig face, though. So I did.

  Repeatedly.

  “Jesus, get off him,” I faintly heard Isaac say. I didn’t. My arms and shoulders felt loose and easy, like I had found my rhythm while hitting a speed bag.

  “I said get off him! You’re gonna kill him.”

  Arms grabbed me from behind, stopping me from punching more. I was roughly pulled to my feet. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had been on one knee, punching Antonio’s supine body over and over like my fists were pile drivers.

  As my bloodlust faded and the scales fell from my eyes, I saw that Antonio was barely moving. His fleshy face was busted up, more red than white now. It looked like a raw ribeye steak. Antonio’s blood dripped off the force fields surrounding my clenched fists. Crimson blood splatters on the carpet around Antonio’s head looked like a Rorschach test. I was glad there wasn’t a psychologist around to ask me what the splatters looked like. I would have been forced to admit they looked like I had gone way too far.

  Antonio writhed sluggishly on the floor, like a snuff film stuck in slow motion. His moans reminded me of a hospital patient’s whose pain meds had worn off.

  Mortified, I shrugged out of Isaac’s grasp. Shame stabbed me like a rusty knife. I tried to keep it out of my voice as I spoke to Antonio with a roughness I didn’t much feel anymore. My anger and frustration were draining out of me like dirty water out of an unplugged bathtub.

  “If you thought that was bad,” I said to him, “imagine what I’ll do to you if you lay a hand on Hannah again.” Antonio’s left eye swam red with blood. I wasn’t sure if it was from his scalp wound from earlier, or from the beating I had just given him. His remaining good eye looked up at me, partly unfocused, partly a dull basilisk stare of hate. “Break up with her, and do it today. After that, never speak to or see her again. Then, you better pray she has a nice long life and dies peacefully in her sleep. Because if she so much as skins her knee or gets a hangnail, I’ll assume you were responsible and come looking for you. What I did to you today will look like a kiss on the cheek compared to what I’ll do to you then.”

  I thought I heard the wail of police sirens wafting up from far below through the broken window.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Isaac said impatiently. He pulled insistently on my shoulder. The faint wail of police sirens, now louder than before, was not a figment of my imagination.

  “Remember what I said. Don’t make me have to come back,” I said to Antonio. He just stared up at me balefully through his one non-bloody eye. He didn’t answer. I still had his mouth sealed shut since I had no idea if he could still spit energy blasts at me even when hurt. Antonio let out a noise that was half grunt, half moan. I almost felt sorry for him. Then I remembered all the times I’d seen Hannah limping or wincing in pain. My pity for him died stillborn.

  Isaac and I rushed over to the opening in the window. A couple of police cars with their lights flashing were below, in front of the building. Unless it was the world’s biggest coincidence, they had been summoned to investigate all the noise coming from Antonio’s apartment. Lingering to have a chat with the cops about why two Heroes out of costume had illegally broken into a man’s apartment and beaten him bloody seemed a bad idea.

  I launched into the air, pulling Isaac along with me. As soon as I was high enough to avoid the tall buildings around us, I shot off toward the west. Toward home.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Isaac demanded angrily once we were safely away from Antonio’s apartment. He had to shout to be heard over the rushing wind. “The plan was to threaten to beat him to death, not to actually beat him to death.”

  I didn’t respond. I stared straight ahead into the murky night sky. Even though Antonio was a criminal, a bully, a woman beater, and a rapist, I had gone too far. I knew I was in the wrong.

  And yet, part of me was satisfied I had finally done something proactive after spending months frustrated and feeling impotent. Not only because of Hannah, but because of everything. That satisfied part of me didn’t care that I was in the wrong. />
  Later, when I’d cooled down some more, I wondered if my frustrations and my life in Astor City were turning me into as much of a thug and bully as Antonio was.

  4

  The afternoon after my encounter with Mad Dog, I dutifully waited with a small crowd of people at a crosswalk for the light to turn so we could cross Tennessee Avenue. So many races were represented in the throng, it was like standing in the middle of the United Nations building. I had just walked several blocks to here from the Tennessee Heights subway stop with my work messenger bag bouncing against my thigh, its long strap diagonally across my chest. Tennessee Heights was the suburban neighborhood in Astor City Isaac and I rented our house in.

  The people at the intersection with me looked simultaneously exhausted and relieved, the look of people who had spent all day slaving away in pursuit of someone else’s dreams. I imagined a similar look was on my face. I had just left work at the Astor City Times. My fellow rodents and I had been given a temporary reprieve from the rat race. It would resume tomorrow morning, long before we could grow to miss it.

  I walked to and from the subway during the work week because I did not have a car. I did not need one. Between walking, Astor City’s extensive public transportation system, cabs, and ride-sharing apps, I could get anywhere in the city I needed to go. In fact, I could get to most places in the city just using the subway. Except the northeastern quadrant of the city, which was by far the most affluent part. When the subway had been redesigned and rebuilt after an alien invasion had destroyed most of the city in the 1960s, the residents of the northeastern quadrant successfully lobbied to keep subway stops out of the northeast. They wanted to minimize public transportation there to keep the riffraff out. As a college dropout with a pronounced Southern accent and a low-paying, entry-level job, I had no illusions about the fact they would consider me part of that riffraff. I wondered if they would be so quick to call names if a supervillain attacked and they needed me to rescue them. It was hard to look down your nose at someone saving your life.

  When I needed to get somewhere in the city really quickly, I could always fly. Flying to and from work, though, would make it far too easy for someone to connect the Hero Kinetic to the riffraff Theodore Conley. Marvel and DC had taught me the key to maintaining a secret identity was to keep it a secret. And people said comic books did not teach you anything.

  While we all waited for the light at Tennessee Avenue to change, I turned a bit to gaze at Star Tower, the building I had left less than an hour ago. The UWant Building was next to it. Though they were downtown and miles away from where I stood, the silver-colored Star Tower and the emerald-colored UWant Building poked up out of the trees in the distance like erect phalluses. If my penis, erect or otherwise, were as green as the UWant Building, I’d consult a doctor; if it were big enough to tower over trees, I’d consult with a porn casting director.

  Despite having been in Astor City all these months, I still loved to look at the huge buildings. I hadn’t gotten used to their size. On the small farm I had grown up on, trees had been the only skyscrapers. Aiken, the small town closest to the farm, hadn’t had a building taller than three stories. Even Washington, D.C., the city I had served my Apprenticeship near, didn’t have any buildings taller than the Washington Monument, which was only 555 feet tall.

  The UWant Building made the Washington Monument look like a child’s toy. It was the tallest building in the entire country. Star Tower, where I worked, had been the undisputed king of downtown until the UWant Building’s completion over a decade ago. Star Tower had been built by a book publishing company with the help of state and federal funding. It had been the first piece of major construction in the city after the V’Loths destroyed Baltimore in 1966. In addition to the V’Loths mostly leveling the city, they killed hundreds of thousands of its residents. After the Hero Omega Man sacrificed himself to kill the V’Loth queen and end the alien invasion, Baltimore changed its name to Astor City as a symbolic “screw you” to the V’Loths. Their home world orbited a nearby star. “Astor” was a corruption of “aster,” the Greek word meaning star. I knew that because training to be a Hero had taught me more than merely how to throw a punch.

  When work on Star Tower finished a little under two years after it was started, the building had been the tallest in the United States. If naming Astor City after the word for star was saying “screw you” to the V’Loths, naming the country’s tallest building Star Tower and building it in the ruins of the city the V’Loths had destroyed was giving the V’Loths the middle finger.

  Now, the UWant Building was the country’s tallest. Its emerald color made it look like something out of the city of Oz. It had been built by UWant, the world’s dominant Internet search engine. If it wasn’t a sign of the times that a building built by an Internet company had eclipsed a building built by a book company and the government, I didn’t know what was.

  The rise of the Internet and the decline of traditional media were why I worked downtown in the Times’ annex in Star Tower instead of the Times’ headquarters on the outskirts of the city. The Star Tower annex housed the Times’ digital and social media platforms. Though you didn’t have to be psychic to foresee that the digital versions of the Times would soon overtake the paper version both from a popularity and revenue standpoint, the Times’ annex was still seen as the redheaded stepchild of the company by most of the graybeards who had worked at the Times longer than I’d been alive. Stan Langley, a longtime editor at the paper who had been transferred from headquarters and put in charge of us at the Times’ annex, was the only member of the Times’ old guard who didn’t treat us youngsters at the annex with utter contempt. Other than Mr. Langley, the graybeards seemed to view the Internet as a passing and quite distasteful fad that was likely responsible for the national debt, terrorism, and their erectile dysfunction.

  If they asked me, I could give them the addresses of some websites that could probably help them with that last part. As a healthy young man who hadn’t slept with anyone since Neha and I had our falling out before I moved to Astor City, I had more than just a passing familiarity with porn. The good little Catholic boy still living inside of me had been shocked by some of the things I had seen online, but apparently not shocked enough to stop me from seeing them.

  While I and my fellow rat race survivors waited for the light to change so we could cross Tennessee Avenue, two teens ambled past us into the busy intersection, talking loudly to one another as if they were miles rather than inches apart. One was white, the other Hispanic. The vulgar slang the guys used was English, but just barely. Their baggy jeans hung halfway down their butts, exposing their tight underwear. I wondered what kept the beltless jeans from falling to their ankles. I doubted it was modesty.

  Cars honked and slammed on their brakes with loud squeals as they avoided hitting the teens. Completely ignoring the cars who had the green light, the teens slowly swaggered across the road as if they had designed it, cleared it, paved it, and the city had named it after them.

  After the teens were out of their way, the cars proceeded through the intersection. No one rolled down his window to tell them to get out of the middle of the street. Life in Astor City had probably taught them that wasn’t a good idea. Just yesterday a guy driving through the part of Astor City known as Dog Cellar—which was the kind of bad neighborhood you’d expect it to be from its nickname—had stopped his car to tell three teens who were jaywalking to get out of the road. The three pulled the guy out of his car, beat him unconscious, took his car for a joyride, and then wrecked it. The news had said the guy was from out of town. That was unsurprising. Natives knew to avoid Dog Cellar if they could. They especially knew better than to challenge the young men of various races who aimlessly wandered the city like packs of feral dogs. I had dealt with my fair share of them when I patrolled the city at night as Kinetic. Their amoral opportunism and casual criminality was more than a little scary. And I had superpowers.

  Like the towering
buildings of downtown Astor City, seeing young men who seemed content with having nothing productive to do was not something I had gotten used to. The way I was raised, if you weren’t asleep or sick, you were supposed to be working, studying, or doing something else productive. Idleness was seen as shameful. If you didn’t have a job, you went door to door offering to cut people’s lawns, or walked up and down the road to pick up glass bottles and aluminum cans to redeem them for recycling money, or any number of other ways to make an honest buck. You did something.

  Then again, between working during the day and fighting crime at night, I was almost always exhausted. By contrast, the shiftless young men who wandered the city seemed well rested. Maybe they had a better handle on how to live life than I did. Perhaps one day I’d shelve my upbringing, pull my pants down to my thighs to give my junk some fresh air, and give those guys’ devil-may-care lifestyle a whirl. After all I’d been through since developing my powers, God knew I needed the rest.

  The ambling teens were almost across Tennessee Avenue now. Thanks to Heroic training that had long before now become reflex, I noticed that the sagging pants of the short Hispanic teen hung diagonally, a little lower on the right than on the left, as if the right pocket contained something heavy. Curiosity made me gently probe the inside of that pocket with my powers. My mental touch was met with hard steel and smooth wood made warm by the teen’s body heat. A small caliber pistol. Maryland had some of the toughest gun laws in the country. Even if the teen was older than he looked and was an adult, it was unlikely he had a license to carry. It was more likely the teen would one day wave his gun in the face of someone who was more scrupulous than he about following the state’s gun laws.

  Back at the Academy, Athena had tried to break me of the habit of moving my hands when I used my powers, but she had never been able to do so. Even now I needed to move my hands to use them. I lifted my hand, pretending like I was swatting away a fly. Instead, I unobtrusively used my powers to pull down the jeans of the Hispanic teen, pantsing him like I was a high school bully.