We Could Be Heroes 2

by Harmon Cooper

“Good, now get into this dumpster. It’s to your left.”

  “I’m not getting into the dumpster. Help!”

  “Scream again and I will really give you something to scream about,” Zoe threatened her. She waited for a moment to see if Sabrina would actually be stupid enough to cross her.

  “Fine,” Sabrina whimpered, “I’ll get in the dumpster.”

  “Good, get into the dumpster, and once you do, I’ll leave you alone.”

  Zoe backed away, and as she did, Sabrina started to move to her left, her hands out in front of her.

  As she had predicted, Sabrina saw light at the end of the alley and took off running, the model running just about as fast as her two feet could take her.

  Zoe didn’t chase Sabrina.

  She hadn’t actually expected the woman to get into the dumpster, although that would have been hilarious.

  But hopefully, Sabrina would leave her alone going forward.

  After making sure no one was coming to investigate Sabrina’s cry for help, Zoe used the very same dumpster as a platform to jump from, and from the dumpster she caught hold of the fire escape, climbing up it as she made her way to a rooftop.

  The buildings in this area weren’t as high as some of the buildings in central Centralia, and for a moment Zoe hung out on the rooftop of a five or six story building, just looking off at the blinking lights in the distance.

  Centralia really was a beautiful city, especially at night.

  Chapter Fifteen: Dumpster Pin-Up

  (Nothing like getting wasted with your ex.)

  Sam Meeko was hanging with Ozella Rose when Zoe got back to Helena’s mansion. They were in the study, Ozella trying to teach him how to play Kingdom Cards.

  Sam was hardly able to focus on what Ozella was telling him. For one, he was experiencing some indigestion, which stemmed from gorging himself earlier using the rest of his power-up to pack in the calories.

  He knew he shouldn’t have eaten so much earlier, but there had been a training session with Helena, then he had visited his family’s vineyard just to check in on his folks, followed by a long trolley trip back to Helena’s district, then a long conversation with Helena which mostly involved her venting about things happening at the Knight Corporation, and finally dinner.

  So he was hungry by the time supper rolled around.

  He was fine the first hour or two after dinner, and spent that time with Helena as she lay in his arms, the heiress eventually falling asleep.

  But then the bottom dropped out, literally, and Sam had to rush to his own bedroom to spend some time atop the porcelain throne.

  Eventually, he finished up, and at first, he thought he would just stay in his own bedroom, but with that sniffer of his, the mess he’d just made in the bathroom kept reaching his olfactory epithelium, forcing Sam into the study for refuge, where he naturally joined Ozella.

  “It’s a three-or-more-person game,” Ozella explained, for what felt like the sixth time. Dinah was sitting there as well, and Sam was barely able to make eye contact with the blue woman.

  He wanted to scrub the memory of what had happened that morning, and it was easier to do so by not making eye contact with her. He was glad Ozella didn’t know about this; he didn’t know how she would react if she found out that her ghostly look-alike was off giving BJs while Ozella was passed out.

  “You okay?” Sam asked Zoe as she entered the room, ignoring more discomfort in his abdomen.

  “I’ll leave you two to your little game. I’m going to bed.”

  “Wait,” Sam said, standing almost immediately. “Let’s hang out for a minute. Besides, this is a three-person game, right, Ozella?”

  “That’s right, and I don’t think Dinah will be able to play. But Zoe could play.”

  “No, Zoe could not play,” the tiger girl said. “Ozella, you are super cute and your nerdiness has already helped us a lot, but it probably won’t be enough for me to start playing card games with you.”

  “Okay,” Ozella said, her smile dropping a bit. “I guess I could read a little bit.”

  “I didn’t mean that to be so harsh, sorry.”

  “No worries,” Ozella said, turning to a stack of books. “I have some things I wanted to look at anyway. I just have to remember which book I read it in.”

  “Don’t stay up all night,” Sam reminded Ozella. “We’ve got plans tomorrow night, and I’m guessing we’ll be doing a lot of training during the day.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  Sam joined Zoe at the door, and together they made their way into the living room, and to the kitchen from there. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “Sure, I’ll have something to drink.”

  “Wine or water?”

  “Wine, but only if you are having wine.”

  Sam shrugged once he got to the kitchen, figuring it would be nice to chillax for a bit. “Sure, I’ll have a glass as well.”

  Sam figured Helena would have a wine collection, and even though he hadn’t spent much time looking around the kitchen, he quickly found a door that led down a spiral staircase into a basement wine cellar.

  “This is awesome,” he said aloud, hoping Zoe would hear him as he took in the basement. Not only were there racks and racks of wine, but the cellar was several degrees cooler than the rest of the house, downright chilly.

  All the light fixtures were crafted from sculpted iron made to look like roots, and there was a little nook down there as well.

  Sam made his way over to one of the leather sofas in the nook, taking off his shoes as he stepped onto a white fur rug, clearly an expensive piece. There were two other leather sofas, the same deep brown as mahogany.

  “This is awesome,” Zoe said as she caught up with Sam. “It looks like Helena has been holding out on us.”

  “Or she just doesn’t drink. I don’t think I’ve seen her drink. Have you?”

  “You have seen her more than I’ve seen her,” Zoe said, a hint of jealousy in her voice again. “Anyway, fuck it, let’s pick a bottle. Also, did you see the way Dinah was staring at you?”

  “How could I miss that?” Sam asked.

  “She totally has the hots for you.”

  “She’s a ghost,” Sam reminded her.

  “But she can become a real woman one hour per day, which might be pretty nice to date…” Zoe said as she selected a bottle of wine.

  She glanced around for a corkscrew but didn’t immediately see one. Her nail elongating, she used her claw to get the cork out as she brought the bottle back over to Sam.

  “That’s one way to do it,” Sam said, “and just to be clear, I’m not so interested in dating a ghost.”

  “But it has crossed your mind, right?” Zoe teased him as she made her way over to what she assumed was a cabinet full of wine glasses.

  “No, it has not.”

  “And who said anything about dating? Just think, Sam, one hour per day. It’s genius…”

  “Nah.”

  Zoe returned with two wine glasses, and placed them on a cedar coffee table infused with a vein of turquoise, commenting on it.

  Sam had seen furniture like this before, obviously created by an elementalist. But non-exemplars were in the business too, usually handling the more manual labor part of attaching legs or drawers to whatever the exemplars created.

  And selling them.

  Oddly enough, non-exemplars ran more businesses in Centralia than exemplars did.

  “A little more,” Zoe said as Sam filled her glass. He gave himself just around half the amount that he gave her.

  “That should do it for me.”

  He raised his glass and they clinked them together.

  “Cheers,” Zoe said almost as an afterthought, tasting the wine. “Oh my.” She looked at the bottle again, noting its age and the vineyard it came from.

  Showing his experience, Sam swirled the wine in his glass for a moment, his nostrils flaring as he took a whiff of the red liquid. Coming from a family that
ran a vineyard, one would think Sam was a wine expert. Alas, he was not, most of his youth spent adventuring outdoors, helping during the peak seasons and reading comic books, and never, absolutely never connoisseuring.

  “Well?” Zoe asked after he sat quietly for a moment, his eyes closed. “Any thoughts, my sommelier?”

  “Hardly. Where does it say the wine came from?”

  “From a farm in Northeast Centralia,” Zoe said, examining the bottle again. She sat down next to Sam, again careful not to put too much pressure on her tail.

  “The bottle is mislabeled,” he said with finality. “This is actually a blend of grapes, some from the region you mentioned, others grown in a lab in southern Centralia. It appears they had a low crop at the farm where they sourced most of their grapes, so they had to augment it with a lab grown variant. They spent a considerable sum running test batches to get the flavor right, yet the flavor is incorrect, I believe. I can smell the lab grown grape, it’s subtle, but it’s there.”

  “Impressive,” Zoe said, loosening up a bit. “You know, if this whole hero thing doesn’t work out, you can just become a food or wine critic.”

  “I would have to be able to eat to become a food critic, and apparently…” Sam drummed his fingers on his stomach for a moment. “Food and I aren’t really friends at the moment.”

  “Awww, did someone eat too much?” Zoe asked with a snicker.

  “Yes, I did. I have to be more careful. I specifically waited to the end of the day to activate my power-up, and used the entire hour to eat just about anything I could. And now I’m regretting it.”

  “As you should. You should pace yourself, Sam.”

  “I will, tomorrow, and I might need my power tomorrow night, so I’ll just take away my sense of smell for five or ten minutes and wolf down a quick snack.”

  “Yeah, I know that feeling,” Zoe said with a sigh. She took another sip of her wine, trying to smell the lab grown grapes but failing. “It’s like we have this hour to get everything done that we need to get done, and that’s it.”

  “Well, I didn’t really need to get anything done…”

  “I have this one hour to be myself, at a time when my career is growing, and Tiger Lily is more popular than she has ever been.”

  Sam hadn’t seen her most recent photoshoots, but for a while, especially after they broke up, he’d checked out every magazine she posed for.

  Maybe he’d checked them out too much...

  “And here I am, at the height of my career,” Zoe said, no longer looking in Sam’s direction. Instead she stared at the bookshelf in front of her, just past it, actually. “It’s just not fair. And I’m not trying to be a whiner here. I appreciate all the opportunities I’ve been given with this power… Aside from my face, it’s everything I have ever dreamed of. But I worked so hard for my career, ever since I was modeling children’s clothing.”

  “But the one hour a day, they’re working with that, right?”

  “They are,” she said. “And I think it has actually helped me, to some degree. It’s made me seem exclusive. As stupid as that sounds, but exclusivity is sort of becoming my thing. And I shit you not, I have gotten more gigs after going to the one hour a day schedule than I ever had before. And I have only been on the schedule for just a couple of days. I mean, this just happened, Ozella’s breakthrough. And I’m now booked for the next three weeks.”

  “What about tomorrow night? You aren’t booked then, are you?”

  “No, I’ve canceled my shoot for tomorrow. We will only have a limited amount of time to get information.”

  Sam nodded, finally taking his first sip of wine, the smell of alcohol infiltrating his nostrils even though he was mouth-breathing.

  Tomorrow night they would go to a party hosted by a guy whom the Gangster-in-Chief called Centralia’s “biggest pimp,” a man named David Nightshade.

  Sam wasn’t exactly keen on dressing up for the event, not in the way that his teammates had contrived. But they had taken a vote, and he wasn’t one to buck democracy.

  “Hopefully, we can get in and get out,” he finally said. “With Helena’s power, we should be able to find out all we need to know about Donovan, which is sort of becoming the least of our concerns.”

  “Tell me about it,” Zoe said as she finished her glass of wine and poured up another.

  Both of them were hyper aware of what the Gangster-in-Chief had revealed to them. Fang was planning to ship infected children to the Southern Alliance, with the clear goal of spreading the infection across the country—a crisis in the making.

  But first they would need to get to Donovan, and from Donovan they could put all the pieces of this puzzle together.

  Hopefully.

  Sam had this feeling that turning over more stones would create an even larger headache for them. And that was if they weren’t caught by Mister Fist and his team again, an entirely different concern, but one that Sam definitely appreciated.

  There were a lot of factors at play, but it would start with getting to Donovan and stopping the transportation of infected children to the Southern Alliance.

  “In other news, I almost kicked another model’s ass today and forced her to get into a dumpster,” Zoe said, almost as an afterthought.

  “Come again?”

  “I’m not proud of it, but this one bitch named Sabrina keeps giving me shit. Anyway, I’ve been trying to ignore it, but she cornered me when I was leaving and tried to slug me. FYI—I’ve set my watch to remind me at fifteen, ten, and five minutes until my transformation takes place,” Zoe said, showing him her watch. “So I didn’t have a lot of time to get out of there when she came for me. But I am proud of myself. I didn’t overreact, for once.”

  Sam looked at her funny for a moment.

  “In the end, I just made her kiss a brick wall,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t think she was too hurt.”

  “And that’s not overreacting?”

  “I don’t want anyone to see this,” Zoe said, waving her hand over the tiger side of her face. “And I was going to have her get into the dumpster just so I could leave without her seeing my tail. But she ran off, which was fine by me. Although, it would have been pretty funny to force her to get into the dumpster.”

  “You have a strange sense of humor,” Sam said.

  “What? You don’t find sexy models getting into trash cans kind of funny?”

  Sam considered this for a moment. “It sounds more like a fetish than a comedic situation to me.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a fetish or not,” Zoe said, finishing her glass of wine. “But if it isn’t, it could be.”

  “Please don’t start taking dumpster pin-ups…”

  Zoe laughed, her fists coming up so she could punch Sam in the shoulder. She stopped just in time, Sam already moving to block her attack.

  “You’re getting better,” Zoe said.

  “I just know that you hit hard, and that was before your transformation,” Sam reminded her.

  “Please, I never hit you.”

  “You were pretty rough a couple of times,” Sam said. “I think those were warranted, though.”

  “Makeup sex doesn’t count,” she said, swallowing hard. “Anyway, more wine.”

  “Yeah, but not too much more. I don’t want to be hungover tomorrow.”

  “You’ve hardly had a glass,” Zoe told him.

  “Okay, okay,” Sam said as he tilted his glass to her.

  Zoe filled his glass to the brim, and gave herself a partial fill up.

  “So… ”

  “So…” Zoe said.

  The two former lovers sat in silence, Sam wishing he hadn’t just made the conversation awkward. Or was it Zoe?

  “That’s a nice rug,” Zoe finally said.

  “It must be hard to keep clean, to keep it white.”

  “Oh, I think keeping stuff clean is the least of Helena’s concerns. If her lambskin rug gets dirty, she can just buy a new one,” Zoe said.

&nb
sp; “She’s not really that type, though. She’s humbler than that. I don’t think any of this stuff is hers, actually. I think it was just stuff that belonged to her family.”

  “True, she doesn’t really seem to have a decorative style, aside from the clothes she wears.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said.

  “Sexy tomboy or whatever.”

  “Yeah…”

  As much as this could have been a fade to black moment, Sam and Zoe grinding their nasties together and rekindling a seemingly lost connection with one another, it wasn’t.

  The two simply finished their glasses of wine, Zoe the first to stand and say she was going to retire to her bedroom.

  “Good idea,” said Sam as he followed her up the stairs.

  “And be sure to lock your door this time,” Zoe told him. “You don’t want to wake up to another morning blow job.”

  Chapter Sixteen: All in A Morning’s Work

  (Gym Rat Pat is at it again!)

  Helena Knight’s energy levels were low the next morning, but she knew that was nothing a little stretching couldn’t fix. She began with seated meditation, which wasn’t always part of her practice, but felt good for a day like today.

  There was a lot going on behind the scenes, something Helena didn’t bother the others with. Restructuring the Knight Corporation’s contractual business was as tedious as she’d imagined it would be, but her assistant Bryan seemed to have things under control, and she knew the board would eventually agree to it.

  It still bothered her that they had made connections with Fang in the first place, and now that Dick Moonstar was under her control, she would be able to get more info as it rose to the surface, starting with what she had recently learned. Apparently, Dick had leased a couple of his spare warehouses to Fang through DM Enterprises.

  Things would get interesting soon, but first Vigilante Justice would need to know Donovan’s location, which very well could be one of Dick’s places, but they had no way of knowing until they got confirmation later tonight.

  Zoe came in just about the time Helena finished stretching, the fur on the tiger girl’s face ruffled in a way that made Helena think she’d slept on the wrong side of her face.