Caped Page 11
He makes a show of taking me in from head to foot. “Boy, what are you, twenty-two? Twenty-three?”
It’s true. I look far younger than my age, and faced with my metro-styled haircut and whisker-less cheeks, he could be forgiven for thinking that I was the latest reject off some reality television program instead of a serious filmmaker. Or what I really am. I smile. My smile sheds even more years. “Twenty-four,” I lie.
“You were eight when I faced the AquaMagus.”
I double check his math. “That’s right.”
“To you, that’s who I’ll always be.” He taps his cigarette. Ashes fall to the floor. “Maybe that isn’t a bad thing. To be remembered. ‘Cause you know what I am, now?”
“What?”
“Forgotten. Do you know what it’s been like the past fifteen-odd years?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out. With you and a dozen other former supers—”
“Find out?” A thought seems to cross his face. His eyes sharpen. “What’s my name, boy? My real name. Do you even know? Who am I?”
Charles Lindon Kelley, III. Born in 2037 in the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to parents Charles and Abigail Kelley. Youngest child of four, the only super in the family, and only surviving child of a fire that claimed the family home. Father dead at fourteen. Mother wasting away at Westing General Hospital of an unknown illness. Scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on standardized collegiate placement exams. Never attended university. Flame generating werehorse. Former Civil Hero of Easton, Harrisburg, and, later, Allentown, Pennsylvania. Disinterested libertarian. Crossword puzzle solver. Model train enthusiast. Left-handed.
“Charles . . .” I check my notes, flipping back and forth between pages as if I can’t find the answer to his simple question. I can feel his disgust without having to look at him. “Charles Kennedy?”
He chuckles. Shakes his head. “Kennedy. Yeah, let’s go with that.” He looks out the window again. “The eight-year-old-you would have known.”
“But you did kill the AquaMagus.”
“I did.”
“And that’s worth remembering. That story’s got to get you a free round of drinks in Cement City.”
“Worst thing I ever did.”
“Why would you say that?”
He gets a thoughtful look on his face. He scrubs out his cigarette before drawing another and placing the wrong end in his mouth. His lips close momentarily, then open again, releasing a billow of smoke. The cigarette glows, orange and ashen, now lit, where it had been in his mouth. He reverses the cigarette in his hand.
“Ever hear of the Romulus Proposition?”
Of course, I have, but these are his roots, spreading. A delicate hand harvests the crop. “Um . . .” I trail off, checking my notes, again. “That has something to do with opposites, doesn’t it?”
“Something like that,” he says. “There’s a fundamental balance in the universe. Power in, power out. Equal and opposite. Get it?”
“Sure,” I say, making certain my tone is anything but.
He exhales, long and slow, like he is only now realizing the depths of my ignorance. “Nature acts in balance. Light casts shadow. Evaporation brings rain. It’s the same with forces. I push on the wall, and the wall pushes back. Everything in balance.” He waits as if for a response.
“Sure, I’ve heard that.”
“The conservation of mass and energy. The laws of thermodynamics. Hell, Newton’s laws of motion. All of it’s the same.”
“The same. Yeah.”
“Well, we’re no different.” He gets more animated as he goes on. “Someone is born with the ability to run fast; someone else is born with a body that will do well to jog. Someone is born with the capacity for higher math; another is born who will struggle with making change. For every strength, a weakness. For most of us, the effect is diffuse. Practically unnoticeable.”
“For most of us?”
“Supers are different. For us, the effect is more concentrated. Our strengths, our weaknesses, mirrored—reversed—in another. All of it in one.” He’s silent a time, pulling at his cigarette.
Someone else might have been surprised that this scruffy-faced, chain-smoking, former hero would know about the advanced theoretical concepts driving modern research into supers. Not me. Not with knowing he scored in the ninety-ninth percentile. Not with having monitored his reading habits over the past fifteen years.
“Your moralities, too?” I ask. “Are they reversed?”
“Could be.” He shrugs. “Could be this is all guesswork and excuses for taking the long way down the universe’s toilet.”
“But you think the AquaMagus was your balance? Your . . . your opposite?”
“That’s what the Romulus Proposition says. The universe can handle losing one of you. It’s been doing that since day one. What it can’t handle—what’s dangerous for you—is if you take out your opposite yourself. Take direct action against the thing that is balancing you. Do that, and the whole thing spins out of control. All the universe can do then is cast you aside. Slough you off. Start again.”
“You took out the AquaMagus, and so the universe sent you Titan Blue?”
“Made me obsolete.” He lights one of the food coupons into flame between his fingers. Watches it burn. “Something like that.” Suddenly he lays the coupon on the table and taps at it with his hand as if to put out the fire. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
His phone rings, tinny and brittle like the apartment around it. It takes until the third ring before it registers with him. “Excuse me.”
He leaves the ember of the coupon, still red and glowing, on the table, and crosses the room to retrieve the phone from the wall near the refrigerator. Though he takes the handset to the far corner of the apartment and speaks softly, I can still hear his side of the conversation.
“This is,” he says. “Who is this?” A pause. “Gill’s assistant? Why isn’t Gill calling me, himself?” Another pause. “Well, look, I’ll take whatever work you’ve got for me—” He listens as the other person talks, his face growing darker with each passing moment. “Intercoastal Barge? What did they lose?” Pause. “Underwater? How far down?” Pause. The phone comes away from his ear. He leans his forehead against the speaker and breathes, long and slow. Back to his ear. “Hon’, I’m Neighpalm. Neighpalm. What part of ‘fire-horse’ sounds like I’m suited to underwater work?” Pause. “I don’t care what you tell them. Tell them I’d like to help them, but, you know. Chemistry. And tell Gill that he can find me work that’s suited to what I do, or I’ll find myself another agent.” He slams the handset back on the receiver.
I quietly train the camera back on the place where he’d been sitting. Hope he didn’t notice me filming him. Even if it’s only for me, watching these former, vaunted supers break should be recorded. Every crack. Every fissure. Until the last, explosive release.
“Sorry,” he says, a small smile finding his face. It lingers only until he’s sat down again.
“Work?”
“If you call it that.”
“What do you call it?”
He considers that. “Work would be regular. And it would have to be something you can do. That?” He shakes his head at the phone. “Third call this month. First was zero-G vacuum work. Then there was some bullshit about cryogenics. Now, underwater retrieval.”
“None of which you’re suited for.”
“Not one goddamn bit of it.”
“Maybe that’s all your agent can get for you,” I say. “With Titan Blue in place, there’s just less work to go around.” Which is why Neighpalm finds himself in this position in the first place. It never hurts to link those two ideas again. Keep the connection fresh in Neighpalm’s mind.
“I used to be someone Gill called,” Neighpalm says. “If I called in, they found him and got him on the line. And they apologized for making we wait. Now?” He spreads his hands and settles back into his chair.
/> “You’re less important?”
Those words settle on his shoulders like hundred pound weights. He lights another cigarette, stuffing the tip in his mouth.
“Have you thought about moving?” I ask. “Titan Blue is . . . impressive. But he’s not omnipotent. He must have his limits. There have to be places you can go—”
“My mom’s sick,” Neighpalm says. “At Westing General. Dying, they say.”
I adjust the camera to zoom in on his face. The lens captures a tear break from his eye, only to flash to steam on his cheek.
“Tell me about that.”
He stares at his cigarette. “Dying? It’s shit. The living shit.”
I give him a long space to say more, but he keeps his silence. “What is she dying of?”
He smiles like we’ve finally gotten to the punchline of this great long joke. “That’s the kicker. They don’t know.”
“They don’t—”
“Not one clue. The whole lot of those doctors. Not a damn clue what’s killing her.”
“That’s got to be tough,” I say.
He grunts something indecipherable. Then he swipes his face and takes a sharp breath. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
I zoom the camera out. It’s time to reset. Things are moving along nicely. It shouldn’t be long now. First, to bring him back around. Check on those roots. “Let’s talk about what it was like after you killed the AquaMagus.”
“You mean when things went to hell.” His gaze goes distant and he rubs his thumb and middle finger together like an idle gesture. Flames lick up between the fingers. “I was the real thing, then. Civil Hero of Allentown. Cement City. We did good work. Cut the crime rate in half my first year. Then, one day, there’s a call. Hostage situation. Multiple gunmen, multiple hostages. No one knows the particulars. No one knows anything. Everyone is terrified they won’t be able to save the hostages. I’m terrified. Everyone is looking to me, and I’m scared shitless.” He shakes his head.
“What happened?”
“A wind.” He waggles his fingers through the air, leaving little wisps of flame trailing behind.
“A wind?”
“A wind. And the gunmen are suddenly there, right in front of us, on their knees, disarmed, with their hands bound behind them. Seven of them.”
“Titan Blue.”
“Standing there with the biggest shit-eating grin you ever saw.”
“Super speed,” I prompt.
“And strength. And telekinesis. Flight. Pass-through vision. I mean, I’ve seen supers. I’ve seen Tier 1 supers—not that many, but a few. But, this guy. There couldn’t have been two or three like him on the planet.”
There aren’t. Not anymore. I know.
“He was impressive,” I say.
“Like a damn Greek god. And the locals, they’re eating it up. Before you know it, though, he’s gone. He had another situation to take care of.” He leans forward. Raises an eyebrow. “A hundred miles away.” He brings his cigarette to his lips before realizing it’s burned itself out. He tosses it to the side. “You could see what was coming. A few more times of him swooping in like some sort of ghost, rescuing people, catching criminals before we even knew a crime had been committed, and the dominoes began to fall. Philly, New York, D.C.—D.C. was a killer. It signaled a shift for the whole country. And, then, one day, there was another call.”
“Allentown let you go,” I say.
“Cement City no longer needed my services,” he says, mimicking the sound of whoever had delivered that call. “Titan Blue had secured a national contract for the whole of the northeast.”
“No more room for you.”
“No more room for any of us. Prism, in Scranton. Brightcold in Newark. Halo, in Albany.”
“And you resented him for that?”
“Damn straight, I did,” Neighpalm snaps. “We all did.”
I know. I’ve already visited a dozen of them.
“I had a house,” he goes on, his voice hardening with each word. “A wife. Two kids. A mortgage.”
“He took that all away.”
Neighpalm holds his hand out, palm up. It bursts into flame. “Set a torch to it, and watched it blow away.”
“You hate him.”
“Hate is for the guy who robs your house,” he says. “For the guy who takes your house away? Who takes your family away? Leaves you with a sick mother, without the money to find her better doctors, better treatment, to figure out what the hell is wrong? That man, I want to tear out his spine. I want to burn out his eyes. I want to pry off his fingernails. That man, I want to hurt.”
He breathes heavy, his nostrils flaring, sending puffs of smoke floating above his head.
I give him a moment with his anger. “And you think it’s because you took out your opposite? Because you killed the AquaMagus?”
He nods.
“Do you think Titan Blue has an opposite?” I ask. “Someone exactly suited to foil his profound abilities?”
Neighpalm seems to consider this. “I hope so. Whoever he is, that man would be my new best friend.”
“Really?”
“Really. Someone who could take on Titan Blue? Finish him, maybe?” He chuckles, shaking his head. “Wouldn’t that be something to see? Won’t happen though.”
“No? Why?”
“Because the big guy’s opposite would have to be smart. Obscenely smart. He’d know better than to take Titan Blue out on his own and doom himself to—” He glances around his apartment. “—this.”
“How would he do it, then?”
Neighpalm stares out his window. The sun has dropped nearly beneath the horizon. Shadow covers more than half of Neighpalm’s face. “Depends. He’d be slow, but not in the way you’d think. He’d plan. Strategize. Stay in the shadows. Manipulate others into doing it for him. And he’d be patient.”
“How patient?”
“This guy, it’d be like he was playing nine-dimensional chess two months before you even knew there was a game to be played. He’s the kind of guy who’d tell you a joke in January, knowing you wouldn’t understand the punchline until November. You wouldn’t see him coming.”
“But, if that’s true, then there has to be a way to kill him, right?” I ask. “I mean, isn’t that the logical outcome of the Proposition? That someone other than Titan Blue’s opposite could kill him?”
His eyes turn dark and suspicious. “What are you saying?”
“Just that you could take your revenge. If you wanted to.”
“If only I could,” he says, the desire thick in his voice.
“Nothing is stopping you.”
“Except an off-the-charts Tier 1 with super-speed.”
“Some people would say that at least trying is better than this,” I say, gesturing around us. “The same apartment. The same bill collectors. The same day, over and over.” I pause for the space of a moment, waiting for the call I know will be coming. Speak again only after his phone rings. “You might be surprised what help the universe gives you.”
He seems confused for a moment before getting up to answer the phone. Again, he withdraws to the far corner of his apartment. Again, I can still hear his side of the conversation. Not that I need to. I know the conversation he’s having, just as I know who’s on the other end of the line. Just as I knew she would call tonight.
“Charles?”
“Prism?” he asks. “Is that you?”
“It’s me.”
“I hadn’t—I didn’t—I don’t know what to say.”
“Then shut up and listen. There’s a few of us that have been talking. We want our old jobs back.”
“A few?”
“You’d make thirteen. We think we know how. Meet us for coffee? Hear us out?”
I promise Neighpalm, as he scoops up his jacket and heads for the door, that I’ll let myself out and lock up after I’ve packed my camera equipment. I’m not sure he hears me before the door closes and I’m left alone in his apartment. br />
I push the button on the camera to stop recording. Begin coiling the cables and placing them into cases. Taken by a good mood, I whistle as I work.
Some people think getting others to do what you want is hard. But they’re thinking about the problem all wrong. Too . . . flat. Too two dimensional. You don’t try to convince someone to do what you want. You convince them that what they want to do is, really, what you want them to do. Then they’ll go to their graves trying to get it done. For some, like Prism, it was simply a matter of connecting the dots, helping her see the logical links standing between where she was and where she wanted to be. For Brightcold and a few of the others, it took well-placed reminders of the life they’d left behind. Specially arranged posters in the subway. Advertisements on their favorite radio stations calling them to greatness—followed by public service announcements from Titan Blue.
And then there was Neighpalm, who needed every bright spot in his life torn away, every precious thing subverted, until he had only bad options for moving forward, and Prism’s call the best among them.
I maneuvered, cajoled, and, in at least one instance, blackmailed the fine public servants of most of the larger northeast cities, convincing them it made undeniable fiscal sense, in light of Titan Blue’s abilities, to cancel their local Civil Hero contracts and license coverage from the federal government. I spent a fortune quietly buying the business away from Neighpalm’s agent, Gill. Still more on places like Intercoastal Barge, insinuating myself into leadership positions where I could create the ill-suited jobs that I, as Gill, could turn around and offer to Neighpalm. But the move that proved most necessary to cracking Neighpalm’s tough, super shell, was his mother. It took years of patience to infiltrate Westing General with someone willing to poison the woman.
I smile, turn off the light, then quietly let myself out of Neighpalm’s apartment.
And now, it’s done. All switches engaged. All levers thrown. Soon, Titan Blue will fall, and I will ascend.
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AND INTRODUCING THE SCARLET SCRAPPER
Leonard Apa
Frank Hodge felt embarrassed even looking at the damned thing. He didn’t agree to this. He would never have agreed to it. The suit hung on a hanger on the hook attached to the back of a bathroom stall’s door. It wasn’t a bad suit necessarily—just a cheap black suit with a deep red shirt and even deeper red tie. But the problem was it ripped off another radio superhero, The Shadow. Why would Hodge agree to this? Who knew? The Shadow knows. What a laugh.