We Could Be Heroes 2

by Harmon Cooper

  An idea came to her.

  “Come with me,” she told Dinah, who obediently followed Ozella out of the study and up a spiral staircase to the second floor of the mansion.

  They entered the room where Helena kept all of her clothing and costumes. It reminded Ozella of an expensive boutique, some seating, two dressing rooms, and racks upon racks of clothing.

  “Power-up, on,” she said, and Dinah’s form solidified, her skin turning the same color as Ozella’s.

  “Let’s try to put some clothes on you, just for fun,” Ozella told the woman.

  Dinah nodded as Ozella moved to one of the racks, and began searching through the dresses.

  She eventually returned with a gothic loli dress that was lined with white frills.

  “Lift your arms up,” Ozella instructed. Dinah did as she was told, her arms rising into the air.

  Ozella brought the dress over her head and put it on her small frame. Dinah’s hands immediately moved to the fabric and smoothed it out, the woman looking up at Ozella with a curious smile on her face.

  Dinah ran her hand through her hair and pulled it back, quickly braiding it before stepping in front of one of the mirrors. She turned to the left and the right, admiring the dress. The ghost woman made a gesture to Ozella like it was too big and Ozella took the hint, helping her get out of the dress and hang it back on the rack.

  “You want to try something a little bit racier?” Ozella asked as she searched through the clothing on another rack, coming upon a fishnet leotard.

  Dinah nodded.

  Once she had the outfit off the rack, Ozella approached her again, helping the now tangible ghost woman get into the leotard, which hugged her body tightly.

  “That’s sexy,” Ozella said, stepping back, her hands on her waist.

  Dinah walked over to the mirror and turned again, looking over her shoulder at her reflection. Her ass wasn’t as large as Ozella’s, but it was definitely perky in the fishnet leotard.

  Smoothing her hands over the front of the fabric, Dinah approached Ozella, stopping just before her.

  “It looks good; do you want to try something else?” Ozella asked.

  Dinah lifted her arms, and placed them on Ozella’s shoulders.

  “Ummm…”

  Dinah bent forward like she was going to kiss Ozella but latched on to her neck instead. Pain spread through Ozella’s body.

  “What… Are you…?”

  It wasn’t three seconds later that Ozella passed out due to the pain, the shy statkeeper landing in front of one of the plush sofas in the room.

  That out of the way, Dinah turned toward the door.

  Chapter Twelve: Ghosted

  (No comment. Just read.)

  Sam Meeko felt the covers lift off his body, Helena’s hand wrapping around his penis.

  “Wow,” he whispered, his eyes still closed, and even though she had just woken him up, he could feel a growing erection bringing him from the brink of slumber. He relaxed further onto his back and spread his legs just a little, giving her more room to get comfortable.

  He felt her warm mouth on his member, his cock doubling in size almost instantly. Her soft mouth moved up and down, Sam letting her work on it for a moment, get into her groove.

  Morning head? Sam was living the best life of any life possible, according to him.

  Even as he continued to wake up, he recalled what had happened the previous night, the information they had uncovered from the Gangster-in-Chief, as well as what they planned to do with this info.

  Of course, he couldn’t focus on this for long, not once Helena started moving her head up and down even faster, her tongue getting into the action, Helena adding her hand into the rhythm, her thumb and pointer finger squeezing at the base of his penis.

  “Damn,” Sam whispered. He removed one of his hands from behind his head and brought it down onto Helena’s face, stroking her cheek, some of her long hair falling over his fingers.

  Long hair?

  Sam opened his eyes almost immediately to see Dinah sucking his dick, looking up at him, the fully fleshed woman wearing a tight fishnet outfit, Helena asleep to his right, curled away from Sam.

  He was just about to scream out when he…

  “Oh shit…” Sam whispered as he came, his mind equating the sudden shock with pleasure and letting his load go.

  “Uhhh… ”

  Dinah swallowed it all up, Sam shaking his head as he tried to quietly push her away. A whole host of contradictory emotions came to him as he finally was able to sit up, especially since he knew Helena would be up soon.

  But rather than say anything to wake her, Sam quietly got out of bed and reached his hand out to Dinah, who took it after wiping her lips with her arm.

  Sam tiptoed to Helena’s door, forgetting the fact that he was nude. He let himself out the hallway, still holding Dinah’s hand, and once he had Helena’s door shut, he placed both his hands on her shoulders.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” he whispered to her, seriousness painting across his hazel eyes.

  Dinah simply gave him a mischievous smile while licking her lips.

  “That was…” Sam’s nostrils flared and while he couldn’t get any scent from Dinah, he could smell his own semen, which triggered a whole slew of information he did not want to process at the moment. Taking a deep breath in through his mouth, he glared at Dinah for a moment before asking her, “Where’s Ozella?”

  Dinah nodded up, which Sam took to mean that she was upstairs.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered, dragging her down the hallway, Sam in his birthday suit, Dinah in her fishnet leotard. He hoped to high hell that he wouldn’t run into Zoe on the way, which would only make this more awkward.

  And like goddamn clockwork, Zoe’s door opened, the tiger girl just starting to turn to the gym when she caught glimpse of Sam and Dinah making their way to the stairwell.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Zoe asked, instantly upset with Sam, even though she didn’t know all the details. “And why are you the one that’s naked?”

  “It’s not what it looks like…” he told her as she approached, Zoe looking to his now shriveled member.

  Her eyes nearly doubled in size. “Holy shit, Sam!”

  “Zoe, let me explain…”

  Dinah silently giggled as she looked between Sam and Zoe.

  “I can’t believe you’re cheating on Helena,” Zoe said, but the tone of her voice didn’t indicate shock, it indicated surprise with mixed acceptance.

  “I didn’t cheat on Helena,” Sam said, his voice rising.

  “Well maybe you haven’t yet, but you are walking around naked with Dinah in fishnets. Did you dress her? How did you slip her past Ozella?”

  “Look, I woke up and she was giving me a blow job,” Sam hissed. “I thought it was Helena. End of story.”

  “Helena gives you morning blow jobs?” Zoe asked, a dark look coming across her face. “You never indicated that you wanted something like that…”

  “I don’t want something like that, but of course… Yes, who wouldn’t want something like that? Shit. That’s not the point I’m trying to make here! I thought it was Helena, so I kept my eyes closed as she did it, and then I opened my eyes…”

  “No,” Zoe started to laugh, her ears perking up. “No you didn’t.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was my brain, the shock, the pleasure, all of it hit me at once.”

  “You came, didn’t you?”

  Sam glanced away from his ex. “Yes, it’s not a big deal, it’s not like… It wasn’t intentional.”

  “I don’t see any cum on her,” Zoe said as she stepped around Dinah, checking her out. “But she does look good in fishnets.”

  “Fuck, fuck,” Sam said, starting to pace.

  “Wait, you came in her mouth?”

  “Why do you care?” Sam asked. “It wasn’t intentional!”

  Both of them looked to Dinah, who simply shrugged off the whole affair.


  “She is an evil, mischievous little whore, isn’t she? Even I rarely let you do that, not that I minded it so much…”

  Dinah took a step closer to Zoe, and the tiger girl backed away.

  “Watch your step, Ghosty…”

  “No, Dinah, don’t do anything to her,” Sam said.

  Dinah nodded, her head dropping just a little bit as she moved closer to Sam. “And how does Ozella fit into all this?” Zoe asked.

  “I was just about to find out when you opened your door.”

  “So to recap, you woke up getting some morning head, and you thought it was Helena, so you just kept your eyes closed and went with it, then you… How did you know it was Dinah?”

  “Her hair is longer; I touched her head.”

  “Whatever,” Zoe said, turning toward the stairwell. “You always liked to play with hair, didn’t you?”

  “No, I mean, I don’t know. It’s just where my hand went.”

  “Got it. You were heading upstairs, weren’t you?”

  “How did you know?”

  “We’re standing in front of the stairwell,” Zoe pointed out.

  “Right, let’s…”

  “Yes, let’s,” Zoe said as she moved up the stairs, her tail bouncing as she took each step.

  Naked-ass Sam followed closely behind her, Dinah closing out their little ragtag bunch.

  “Where’s Ozella?” Zoe asked Dinah. Dinah rolled her eyes at Zoe, looking to Sam for guidance.

  “Where’s Ozella?” Sam repeated.

  “Damn, I’m so sick of this ghosty bitch’s attitude,” Zoe said under her breath as Dinah led them to Helena’s costume room, where they found Ozella lying on the floor.

  “What the hell did you do to her?” Zoe asked, helping Ozella onto the sofa.

  Sam noticed that there was something a little different about the way Ozella was lying. She didn’t look like she had been sleeping; she looked like she’d fallen over, and he had seen Dinah do this to someone before by forcing injury onto them.

  “Dinah, heal her right now,” Sam started to say. “Wait, hold on…” He went for the nearest thing he could find, which happened to be a pink woman’s robe. “Okay, now do it.”

  Dinah reluctantly moved to Ozella and sat next to her, kissing her cheek. Ozella’s eyes started to flutter open.

  “Where…?” Ozella saw Sam’s silky pink robe and gave him a funny look. “Why are you wearing that?”

  “I was lying in my bed and Dinah woke me up,” Sam said, looking to Zoe with a tight grin. She nodded, ready to stick to the lie. “It was the first thing I could put on.”

  “Dinah?” Ozella glared at her counterpart. “You aren’t supposed to bother people, and you most definitely aren’t supposed to use your power on me!”

  Dinah started to move to the corner of the room, so no one could look at her. If she’d had a tail, it would have been tucked between her legs at this point.

  “Power-up, off,” Ozella said. Dinah’s form fizzled away, the fishnet clothing falling to the floor. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her. I just brought her up here to try on clothing and she attacked me and took off. Did she wake up Helena too?”

  “No,” Sam and Zoe said at the same time, exchanging nervous glances.

  Ozella shrugged. “I guess I will have to watch her more closely next time.”

  “Yeah, you probably should do that.” Sam awkwardly lifted his hand to scratch the back of his head, minding the part in his pink robes.

  Zoe turned toward the door. “Sam, let’s let Ozella rest for a minute, I’m sure she could use it. Besides, we both have some training we need to do.”

  “And I need to change clothing,” Sam said, once they were in the hallway.

  “Then again, pink is sort of your color.”

  “Shut up,” Sam said playfully as they took the stairs down to the main floor. “And remember—this stays between us.”

  Chapter Thirteen: Tea Date with a Sociopath

  (Just in case you started wondering what Dr. Hamza was up to in his spare time…)

  Dr. Hamza Grumio was up early sipping from a cup of tea, lemon slices in the warm beverage touching his lips with every sip. He sat on a stool in front of one of his work tables, looking at the tarp that covered his studio wall.

  The first repairman had been somewhat of an idiot, so he was calling in another, who was supposed to be there in a couple of hours. It would be nice to have his space back, and even though he had done quite a bit of work with what limited room he had, Dr. Hamza really wanted to spread out for a little bit, happy that the repairs were on the horizon.

  He heard struggling behind him coming from one of his holding cells, but he ignored it. Another sip of his tea, he wished he had put more honey in there. He was still seeing the molecular structure of everything he looked at, a ton of other information also coming to him.

  It was fascinating how his mind worked, and now that he was an exemplar, clearly a Class E, intelligence-based exemplar, this only made him more appreciative of his intellect. As for what type he was, he definitely wasn’t the type IV, like most intelligence-based exemplars.

  He wasn’t trying to flatter himself either, Dr. Hamza just knew that part of him was dangerous. It was who he was, and ever since he was a child, that dark side had always been a part of him.

  There had been years that Hamza had tried to push it back, to ‘live in the light,’ as his mother used to say, but in the end, he had to be himself. And he was glad to finally be honest, even if it alienated him, limited the number of friends he had, led to the separation from his wife.

  Sipping his tea, Dr. Hamza remembered his beautiful wife, a famous researcher who now worked at a university.

  What would his ex-wife think of him now? He had done something that Centralia and the other governments of his world had been trying to do since the start of the Western Plague.

  Like most governmental entities, they had settled for overwhelming force over understanding the epidemic, trying to gloss over things in the end, rather than pick them apart. That was what people like him were for, people who enjoyed breaking things down into their molecular components.

  Ironic, but it was something he’d always known to be true: an instant fix didn’t necessarily come with a sweeping gesture, sometimes it spawned from paying attention to the smaller details.

  And that was how he’d been able to do it, that was how he was able to create something that no Centralian had ever created before, just by paying attention to the minute details.

  Hamza wondered in that moment if his ex-wife would be impressed with what he had created. She did have a jealous streak when it came to their research, but he was sure she would find his discovery fascinating.

  Who would have thought that exemplar-based vampirism could be broken down in such a way? That the infection was really as simple as that.

  Three chemicals...

  Dr. Hamza finished his tea, listening as the wind beat against the tarp stretched over the hole in his wall. Centralia was always windy, something about the tall buildings creating corridors that multiplied the power of the wind.

  He had lived in several places in Centralia, from the south to the north, where it was warmer. There were spots in the city that didn’t have enormous buildings, which, rumor had it, had to do with the sheet rock beneath these districts, the soil not able to sustain buildings that were more than fifty stories tall, maybe even larger. Of course there were suburbs too, and urban blight, especially in the South.

  But it didn’t matter where you were in Centralia, it was likely windy.

  Dr. Hamza listened to that wind just a little longer, his eyes closed, information flashing before his eyes. He narrowed his focus on the sound of the wind, almost as if he were expecting it to say something to him.

  At some point, he decided he wanted to test his experiment again, so he set his mug down on the metal table and turned to one of his containment rooms.

  It was a miracle that the glas
s on the door of this room hadn’t been shattered in all the commotion that had happened in there, and he was glad this was the case, because what Dr. Hamza was trying to contain was a danger to the public at large.

  At least for now.

  He approached the glass door and tapped on it, the repairman from earlier lunging at him, baring his fangs as he tried to bash his head into the glass, veins pulsing on the sides of his neck.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Hamza told the infected man.

  It still amazed him that the brightest minds in his world had figured out that the infection was a bloodborne disease, that the original host, an exemplar from the West, simply gave some of his disease to whomever he bit. The man could turn them by giving them just the right amount. Or he could simply kill them, the original gaining power through their blood.

  There had been a ton of bad science regarding Western vampirism, and a bunch of ‘cures’ that never quite worked, but Dr. Hamza wasn’t interested in those falsities now. Nor was he interested in all the superstitions that had come out of the Western Plague, the war stories, the copycat events, the fashion, the rituals.

  What he was interested in stood before him, on the other side of the glass door, murder burning behind the infected man’s eyes.

  “And now, we take it away.”

  Hamza still needed to make more of the serum, the antivenom, but it wasn’t hard to make now that he had figured out how to recreate the infection. He pressed his finger on a button near the door, a hissing sound meeting his ears.

  A chemical sprayed into the room, the vampire twisting and crying out as soon as he took his first whiff of it.

  “There, there,” Dr. Hamza said, his hand now on the glass, watching the man slowly convulse.

  Soon, the repairman was himself again, which came with all the other disadvantages of being human. He had already soiled himself by the time he was back on his feet, beating his fist against the door, screaming for Dr. Hamza to let him out.

  “Please, please, Mister, I’m sorry! Whatever it was I did, I’m sorry! Let me out, please. Please!” he screamed until he was hoarse. “Please!”