Just Cause Universe 3: Day of the Destroyer Read online

  Day of the Destroyer

  A Just Cause Universe novel

  by Ian Thomas Healy

  Copyright 2013 Ian Thomas Healy

  Local Hero Press Edition

  Local Hero Press Edition – License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Local Hero Press and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover design by Jeff Hebert

  Books by Ian Thomas Healy

  The Just Cause Universe Novels

  Just Cause – Revised & Expanded Edition

  The Archmage

  Day of the Destroyer

  Deep Six (Fall 2013)

  Other Novels

  Blood on the Ice

  Hope and Undead Elvis

  Pariah's Moon

  Rooftops

  Starf*cker

  The Milkman: SuperSekrit Extra Cheesy Edition

  Troubleshooters: The Longest Joke Ever told

  Collections

  Tales of the Weird Wild West, Vol. 1

  The Bulletproof Badge

  Short Stories

  Just Cause Universe series

  Graceful Blur

  The Scent of Rose Petals

  The Steel Soldier's Gambit

  Just Cause 2012 Holiday Bundle Pack

  Weird Wild West series

  The Mighty Peculiar Incident at Muddy Creek

  Posse

  Professional MotorCombat series

  Last Year's Hero

  Rookie Sensation

  Harry Blaine series

  Bulletproof

  Young Guns

  Tuesday Night at Powerman's

  Standalone titles

  In His Majesty's Postal Service

  Bread and Circuses

  Footprints in the Butter

  Upon A Midnight Clear

  Dental Plan

  1001001

  Nonfiction

  Action! Writing Better Action Using Cinematic Techniques

  All titles and more available wherever books and ebooks are sold.

  Introduction: Making it Real

  When I was growing up, Spider-Man was my favorite hero. It wasn’t just because I’d seen him from my early days watching The Electric Company (ah, Spidey, how I remember you and your dialog balloons). And it wasn’t because of his awesome 1970s animated series (“…does whatever a spider can…”). It was because to me, Spider-Man was real.

  Oh, I knew he was a fictional character. But he didn’t come across as just a hero; there was always more to him than that. He had girl troubles (whether they were Gwen or M.J.). He had to deal with bullies, both at school (hey there, Flash) and, when he was older, at work (J.J.J., you sly dog). He had to have a day job, not as a cover for his secret identity but to pay the rent. There were times when he’d have doughnuts for dinner. And he experienced grief, whether it was the death of his beloved uncle, or of the girl he loved, or of a colleague: When Mar-Vell was dying of cancer in The Death of Captain Marvel, Spider-Man was overwhelmed and said that superheroes are supposed to go in battle, while taking down a villain or saving the world; they aren’t supposed to die from cancer.

  He was real.

  That’s what makes the most interesting—and the best—superheroes and supervillains: they have to be real. We have to be able to relate to them, not just understand them but sympathize with them. Under their masks, they should be people, just people—people we want to know better. Yes, these people have fantastic powers and use them to save (or possibly attempt to take over) the world. But despite the costumes, they’re just like you and me. They have dreams. And they have pain. That pain can take many shapes. It can be as subtle as temptation, or as blatant as a punishment. It can be the sting of unrequited love. It can be the horror of abuse. All of these things turn characters from two-dimensional notions of good and evil and transform them into characters with depth.

  And that’s what the heroes of Just Cause—and the villains they fight—bring to the table: depth. It’s their human flaws that make them real, and make them so much more than their parahuman powers—which, admittedly, are very cool. It’s what makes us want not just to be them but to hang out with them (whether or not it’s a Wednesday night). It’s what makes us root for them during the fight scenes, or when they’re trapped in a burning building. And it’s what makes us care about the bad guys too.

  Because let’s face it: it’s not as simple as good versus evil. The best stories never are.

  —Jackie Kessler, co-author of Black And White

  January, 2013

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  July 13, 1977, 9:00 AM

  Faith smiled as she awoke, despite the jangling alarm clock on her bedside table. She had been dreaming of Rick, his soft fur caressing her skin, a rumbling purr emanating from his thick chest. The clock drove away the last remnants of golden mane and liquid amber eyes from her mind, leaving only warm fuzzy feelings lingering inside her as she opened her eyes. The lion-faced superhero had starred in many of her dreams of late, and more often than not, she found herself watching him when they were together in headquarters, careful never to let anyone notice her attentiveness. Especially not Bobby.

  Bobby rolled over and mumbled something in his sleep before his snores filled the air once again. She watched the rise and fall of his chest beside her, smooth and hairless, unlike the wild-maned torso of her crush.

  Faith loved her husband, but he was so… tame.

  She and Bobby had been together since ’69, and the last exciting thing he’d done was to steal his father’s car so they could go to Woodstock together. Since then, he’d been a comfortable but mundane husband. Even his parahuman ability of enhanced hearing could never be considered the least bit flamboyant. They’d been married since ’72 and he was the only man she’d ever slept with. It made her feel both old-fashioned and at times, disappointed. At twenty-three, she wasn’t the oldest member of the Just Cause superhero team, but she’d been with them since she was sixteen—much longer than anyone else—and some days she felt like the only adult surrounded by petulant teens.

  She didn’t want to stay in bed any longer. Superheroes didn’t punch a time clock, but it bothered her to lounge around instead of being responsible. The least she could do would be to honor the heroic tradition set by her parents, the founders of Just Cause, and drag her sorry self into headquarters, at least to give the illusion that she was doing something to better the city and state of New York.

  The morning had already grown hot. New Yorkers could expect more triple-degree temperatures with no relief in sight, the radio announcer warned. Bobby h
ad been talking about installing central air conditioning in their brownstone, but until that actually came about, they slept in the miserable heat and humidity, windows open and fans fighting a losing battle against the merciless daytime sun and stagnant nighttime air.

  Faith took a fast shower, not bothering to wait for warm water. She soaped away the night sweat and the smell of Bobby on her skin. The metaphor wasn’t lost on her, as she remembered snippets of her dream, the feel of Rick’s claws gently pricking against her skin. She shivered, and not from the cool spray.

  Wrapped in one towel and another around her blonde hair, cut in the feathered style Farrah Fawcett had made famous, she headed for the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. Halfway down the short hall, she stopped to gaze upon the photo montage of her fellow heroes and friends. Her eyes lingered longest on the picture of Rick, dressed as Lionheart, mugging for the camera next to a real lion that day the team had gone to the circus. In comparison to the great cat, he looked much more human than feral, but the similarities were unmistakable. If King Richard from Disney’s furry-animal version of Robin Hood had been real, he’d have been the spitting image of Rick Lyons. Faith reached up to touch the picture.

  Bobby stirred in the bedroom and Faith drew her hand back in a guilty blur as if the picture had scalded her.

  She retreated into the kitchen. Although she had little skill in the art of cooking, she did lay in a supply of expensive African coffee. Bobby drank the stuff like it was water.

  Rick had likewise acquired a taste for it after Faith brought him some to try one day. Ever since then, she made a point to bring him fresh coffee when she could.

  While the coffee percolated, Faith returned to the bedroom to dress. She kept three complete costumes in rotation, so while one was at the Chinese laundry up the street, she still had a spare in case the one she wore got torn or dirty enough to necessitate a change. She pulled on the cropped crimson t-shirt with the yellow horse-head logo emblazoned across the front. Her mother had worn the same logo as Colt, one of the founders of Just Cause. Faith’s own take was far more revealing than her mother Judy had ever dared to be in the Forties and Fifties. Where her mother’s outfit had been demure and conservatively cut, Faith as Pony Girl was a symbol for the sexy, liberated women of modern times. Her low-cut red stretch-denim jeans with the yellow piping showed off her legs all the way down, as her mother liked to say.

  She debated whether or not it was too hot to leave her lightweight fringed leather jacket behind, but common sense won out. It wasn’t so much for protection from criminals, because there weren’t any who would dare take on a parahuman anymore. One slip-up at super-speed and she’d give herself a nasty case of road rash without the jacket to protect her. She pulled on her soft leather boots with the heavy steel-belted dual-ply radial soles. They were weighty, but her legs were fast and strong enough that it didn’t matter.

  She tucked her fingerless yellow gloves into her sash, shook out her hair, and rested her goggles on her forehead. The former were a quirky affectation and the latter a necessity, for nothing felt worse than to have a piece of road grit or a bug hit an eye at well over a hundred miles per hour. A quick check in the full-length closet door mirror and she was satisfied with her appearance. She wondered if Rick checked her out as much as she watched him.

  She turned around and found Bobby sitting up in bed, watching her.

  “Oh!” She jumped in spite of herself.

  He smiled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. You look great, babe.”

  “Thanks.” Faith’s heart pounded. After all the dreaming and then daydreaming about Rick, she now felt guilty, like she’d been caught stealing. “Was I too loud? I tried not to wake you.”

  He flicked one of his ears and grinned. “I can hear what they’re saying across the street, babe. Don’t worry about it. I’m used to the noise by now.”

  “Do you want me to wait for you?”

  “Nah, you’re already ready to hit the road. I’ll grab a bite and catch a cab into the city.”

  “Okay.” Faith turned to go.

  “Love you, babe,” said Bobby in a soft voice.

  Faith crossed the room to him. “I love you too,” she said, determined to mean it with all her heart. She kissed him, morning breath and all.

  She skipped to the kitchen and filled a thermos full of coffee, and then stepped out the door. In a couple steps, she accelerated to a nice and easy sixty miles per hour. She could have gone much faster, but Rick had asked her to keep her speeds down except on emergency calls. Drivers tended to panic when a pedestrian blew past them like a jet on two legs, even if those legs were as nice as hers.

  Faith hurried for Manhattan; she wanted Rick’s coffee to still be hot when she arrived.

  #

  “Boy, you best get your lazy butt out of that bed!”

  Thirteen-year-old Harlan Washington didn’t move. He laid in his bed in the Harlem tenement with his hands folded behind his head and stared up at the ceiling, not seeing the water stains in the old corkboard. Instead, he was inventing things in his mind. His teachers had called him creative, inattentive, and prone to daydreaming and that was why he was stuck in summer school for the second year in a row.

  He hated school. It was so boring, the way he had to learn bunches of facts and numbers and formulas and dates about stuff that didn’t make any difference to him. He’d rather be tinkering in his workshop. He could learn more in an hour in a mechanic’s garage than he could in a month in that school with the busted old ceiling fans and the crabby teachers who seemed to delight in humiliating him. The desk where he was supposed to do his homework in his room was cluttered with tools, pieces of Erector sets, and miscellaneous mechanical and electrical parts that he tinkered with instead of playing outside.

  He closed his eyes again, imagining a giant, like Mechagodzilla from the movies. He dreamed of seeing neighbor kids flee in terror before it instead of going out of their way to tease and belittle him because he was a little smaller, a little dirtier than the rest of them. In his mind, he rode within the behemoth, safe within its armor, surrounded by the switches and levers of control. It followed his directions to the letter, spreading forth destruction at his whim. Like a king surveying the destruction wrought by his armies, Harlan smiled.

  His mother flew into the room like a football linebacker. She was a large woman who worked two jobs to keep food on a table and a roof over the heads of Harlan and his two sisters, and she had no patience for layabouts like him. In one fell swoop, she closed a meaty hand around Harlan’s ankle and yanked him right off his mattress. “If I told you once, I told you a thousand times to get a move on.”

  “Ow, Momma.” Harlan rubbed his head where it had bounced off the floor.

  “Get your clothes on and come have breakfast before you leave.” His mother flounced out of the room.

  “Bitch,” Harlan muttered. He lay on the floor for a moment, trying to recapture the vision of gears and shafts he’d been imagining when he felt eyes on him. He turned to see Reggie staring at him. His younger sister wore her hair in two poofy pigtails on either side of her head. She held a dirty stuffed elephant clutched against her t-shirt.

  “What?” growled Harlan.

  “You done said a bad word. I’m gonna tell.” Reggie’s voice was full of glee as she skipped off toward the kitchen.

  Harlan said another forbidden word under his breath, and then threw on a clean t-shirt and some grubby jeans. He jammed his feet into his Keds without bothering to tie them and trotted into the kitchen where Reggie was regaling their mother with half-truths about Harlan’s language. Momma wasn’t really listening; instead, she was fawning over Irlene, much to Harlan’s disgust. Beautiful Irlene. Brilliant Irlene.

  Irlene the parahuman, who’d just become a member of Just Cause.

  If Harlan disliked his mother and tolerated Reggie, he detested his older sister Irlene. She was eighteen and could shrink herself and other objects or people down to ten
percent of their original size. Harlan still remembered the night in March when she’d announced to the family over the dinner table, tears streaming down her cheeks, that she had parahuman powers. Instead of being upset, Momma had been ecstatic. From then on, Irlene could do no wrong in her eyes. She’d flown about the apartment in her shrunken state and zapped dust bunnies down to the size of dust motes to Momma’s and Reggie’s great amusement. Harlan had looked on with disgust. He perpetually heard “why can’t you be more like Irlene?” from Momma and here was yet one more thing he could never aspire to.

  Momma and Irlene ignored Harlan as he slipped into his chair at the stained Formica table, and that was just fine with him. They were busy making last minute adjustments to the hero costume Momma had spent all week sewing in between her day job at the bakery and her evening job cleaning up a dentist’s office. Momma had described the colors as berry and dove, but to Harlan it was just a pink and gray bodysuit with a stylized I on the chest and a domino mask. Irlene had teased her hair into a large stylish afro and put on lipstick and face makeup.

  “I swear, you look as good as Pony Girl or that trollop Sundancer,” said Momma with conviction.

  “Oh, Momma, do you really think so?” Irlene floated into the air and twirled about.

  Harlan bent forward and shoveled cereal into his mouth, hoping the crackle of his corn flakes would drown out the coos of his mother and sisters.

  “I think you look real pretty, Leenie.” Reggie stuck her tongue out at Harlan.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” said Irlene. “What do you think, Harlan?”