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  Hodge spun to face the mouth of the alley, getting into his fighter’s stance. Thomas stood next to him, fists held high.

  They both relaxed when they caught the glint of light shining off the badge of the officer’s uniform shirt.

  “The kid was in trouble, officer. I lent a hand.”

  The cop looked Hodge over, “What are you supposed to be, some kind of a hero?”

  Hodge tore the mask from his face. He smoothed his mustache with his thumb and index finger, and flashed his most charming smile, “No, but I play one on the radio.”

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  EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

  Dave Ring

  They call me “beautiful.”

  They call me “darling” and “sweet mama” and “cocksucker.” They call me “hey faggot.” They all call me “baby.” They call me “redbone, what’s your name?” They call me “wanna put those fat lips on this fat dick?”

  They call me “bitch where you going?”

  When people look at me, they don’t see me. They see what they want. Whatever they most desire.

  I cross a room and eyes follow me. They latch on to a body that I don’t actually wear, that I don’t possess. Sometimes I try to figure out what they see. Is it a firm, tight ass straining against skinny jeans? Muscular forearms, dusted with fine red hairs? A svelte-hipped tawny back?

  Of course, enough of them tell me. Especially some small-dicked insecure assholes with time on their hands and a superiority complex. Since they see what they truly desire, no matter how uncomfortable it makes them, sometimes I don’t hear lewd come ons, I hear threats. From the man who can’t own that he’s drawn to a trans woman, who’d never dream he’d feel that way about a woman that wasn’t white, that wasn’t his wife—the kind of man that wants to smash my face in because the sight of me made his dick fill up with blood.

  My own body is unremarkable. Sometimes I’ll stand in front of the mirror in my underwear. And just look.

  I don’t mind it.

  But there’s nothing to see.

  * * *

  I drew close to Roundhouse as if by accident and drew my finger against her back in a prearranged signal: point of interest, seven o’clock.

  I stepped away, bent down to tie my shoe. I saw Roundhouse observing the woman standing just to her left. Forty-something, but strong-looking. Sunglasses, even though we’re underground. An architect’s tube worn over her shoulder. More than that, she didn’t react the way everyone else does when they see me. Something I noticed.

  And she had a gun. It made a recognizable bump against her jean jacket.

  The train arrived, we all got on. I sat four seats away from her, Roundhouse giving me a warning glare when I tried to sit closer.

  * * *

  I work with a team. We don’t wear costumes or anything. But we’re all strange in our own ways. Atari is the genius. Roundhouse is the muscle. Beretta is the artillery.

  My codename is Beautiful.

  I’m the honeypot. I stroll up to the front desk, the security guard, the CEO. I do what I do. I transfix. And even if I show up on cameras, no one remembers seeing that mousy person on the surveillance. They remember the vixen, the stud—or, sickeningly, the precocious underage child. Usually when I’m called names, or treated like shit, I just get out of the way. But there is nothing more satisfying than breaking the nose of a pedophile who thinks that he’s wooing a child. And then unbreaking it and breaking it again. Atari had to yank me out of there, that time. I remember the look on her face, incredulous over the computer mainframe she’d just stolen from the power plant. But I couldn’t even explain, it was so revolting.

  I’m not just a pretty face. I learned how to fend for myself. You have to, when you deal with as much crap as I do.

  * * *

  The woman doesn’t fidget. She has her arm held so that no one will bump against her gun. I start to obsess over what’s inside the tube.

  “Do you have the time, sir?” the girl on my other side asks, short skirt hugging the tops of her bronzed thighs. I glance at my watch, tell her, then pointedly stand to look at the station map. She clears her throat a time or two like she might say more, but she doesn’t. I can feel eight or nine other pairs of eyes boring into me.

  Not Shades though. Not a glance.

  * * *

  I slept with Beretta a handful of times. He has an interesting body, lean as fuck, all wiry hair and scar tissue. I remember the first time. He knows what I do, and what I am. Of course he does. And I could see his hands hesitating as they touched me, as if he might shatter the illusion. But somehow it’s unbreakable. I guess it doesn’t just fool eyes, it fools minds too.

  I wasn’t going to ask him. I told myself not to. But eventually I couldn’t help myself.

  He wouldn’t describe it—me—what he saw. But he drew me a little sketch of how he saw me. Proud, wide nose. Long braids. A strong brow. She was beautiful—I was beautiful. Of course I was.

  But she wasn’t really me.

  I shouldn’t have asked.

  * * *

  We ride the train to the end of the line. The crowds thin, but Shades remains. Roundhouse is starting to get apprehensive. When the doors open, I’m right there, walking through them first. Sure, maybe Roundhouse should have been on point. But plenty of hired muscle has been undone by the ass they most desire.

  My phone buzzes, a text from Atari: hey bravo, we’re not alone, Extron must have hired a rival team. you’ll need to hurry to the site.

  I knew something was up. Shades must be an agent.

  The corridor is practically empty. I stop at the metro map and start to turn to catch Roundhouse’s eye, but instead my head smashes into the glass covering the map and Shades has got me against the wall.

  She pulls my hand free and holds it to the side. “Tell her to back off,” she says, and behind my back I gesture the hand signal for “go ahead, I got this.” I knew there was no time; Roundhouse had to meet Atari at the checkpoint. I was just an ace in the hole.

  “Who do you work for?” Shades asks roughly, breath hot on my cheek, but I drop all my weight to the ground and knock her feet out from beneath her. We tumble for a moment. She probably used to be more limber, because twice I notice she makes an aggressive move, well-practiced, but one that she can’t quite deliver on. In the tussle, her shades fall off and I see her eyes, irises covered by milky cataracts. Makes sense.

  I think she would have had the better of me, but she’s fighting too careful. “Why should I tell you?” I flip her over; she arches her body to protect the tube, her body against mine. She’s trembling something fierce, holding herself up, face caught in a grim sneer of determination.

  She’s protecting whatever is in the tube. I use that, try to knock her around. It almost feels like a fair fight. I start thinking about how I’m going to brag about it to Roundhouse.

  Then, maybe in response to some signal that I couldn’t see or hear, she lets herself fall back down and crush the architect’s cylinder so she can fling me over her. I sprawled hard against the tile.

  She knocks the wind out of me. “Well, Bravo, tell your friend that you’re too late. We’ve already transmitted the data.”

  Somehow she’d intercepted my text message? I tried to piece it together as she ran away. When I showed the contents of the cylinder to Atari, she said it was a relay system, but one that shouldn’t have worked. Somehow Shades had powered it—with an external power source.

  Which didn’t make sense unless you accounted for all manner of unusual people, like someone that can produce desire in anyone that looks at them. Still, it was beyond the imagination of most.

  But, there was one thing. I know I didn’t imagine her erection against my thigh.

  * * *

  Atari recruited me over Skype.

  Through the protective bubble wrap of technology, I’m just me. Not “whatever you most desire.” Sometimes when I need to be spoken to like a normal human being, I go into group
video chat rooms, and just talk. It’s nice to be treated like nobody.

  But considering what she was recruiting me for, it wasn’t a great show of my talents. So of course we had to meet in person.

  When she finally laid eyes on me, Atari flinched. I swear I saw the whites of her eyes. But she didn’t say anything.

  Six months later, we’d done a few jobs together. I finally asked her what she saw when she looked at me.

  “My dead wife,” she said.

  * * *

  The next time I saw Network—that’s what they call her—I was busting her out of jail (nobody calls her Shades but me). It’s not like she was innocent, but we needed her for a job.

  “Why hello there, Bravo,” she said while I choked out the guard. “This is a nice surprise.”

  At first I convinced myself that I’d never really felt like I was seen until I spent time with someone who was blind. But after awhile I think I had to acknowledge that Shades had another idea of me inside her head too, it just wasn’t built on the bones of a desire I instilled through preternatural chemistry.

  Before we broke up, I heard Shades ask Atari what I looked like. “Not, you know, in person. But in photographs or whatever.”

  Atari was silent for a minute. Then offered up, “She has small eyes? Brown, maybe. Some freckles.”

  * * *

  There was this one guy we knew called Nails. Wasn’t too flashy of a guy, his thing was that you couldn’t shake him. Couldn’t make him cry, couldn’t make him talk. I mean, he bled like anybody else. But, you know, he was tough as.

  I went to him after me and Shades split. I wanted him to teach me how to be not beautiful. To just be myself. I thought he was the mountain and I was Moses. But it didn’t work. It was just torture for both of us.

  I could wring longing from a stone. And from Nails too.

  Let’s just say that someone accustomed to feeling nothing doesn’t take kindly to whatever feeling they get when they see me.

  * * *

  Roundhouse was the one who taught me how to throw a punch.

  How to connect with knuckles instead of the long flats of your fingers. She always taught me to go for their liver, or their ribs. Avoid the hard bones of the face.

  Catcalling shitheads taught me to go for the throat. They called me “baby come suck this.” And I just walked away.

  Not anymore. Now I call them “worthless.” Or “not this time.” I call them “smears of blood and crying fucks hunched over on the sidewalk.” I say it over my shoulder while they beg for their gods and their mothers.

  And I don’t look back.

  * * *

  When Shades left me, I thought I’d be devastated.

  And I was, at first. I had to walk through the rain, almost a mile. I didn’t want to get in a cab. Didn’t want to deal with some dude who got hard watching the hottest person he’d ever seen crying into their hair.

  It felt trite but true. I know that’s like some hipster shit. But it was real for me.

  I was into it.

  It felt good to have a basic girlfriend problem like the rest of you motherfuckers.

  When I put her back in jail a couple months later, I stopped her the old-fashioned way. With a high kick to the solar plexus. She didn’t take it personal though, she knew how it worked.

  Last thing she said to me?

  “Bravo, Beautiful. Bravo.”

  Return to Contents

  DUM DUM

  Leod D. Fitz

  “Today is Monday, March 14, 2014, Three forty seven pm. I’m at Norwood Special Penitentiary—”

  “I know all dat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I know where we is. And what time it is.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “But dere’s nobody else here?”

  “I’m making notes. This session is being recorded.”

  “Oh! When is it gonna be on TV?”

  “What?”

  “When’s it gonna be on TV? Sammy likes me to tell him when I’m going to be on TV so he can record it.”

  “It’s not . . . this isn’t for television. It’s a recording for your trial.”

  “Oh.”

  “Uh, where was I? Oh, Norwood Special Penitentiary for enhanced criminals. Please state your name.”

  “Dum Dum.”

  “Your given name.”

  “My what?”

  “What does your mother call you?”

  “Momma calls me Dum Dum.”

  “. . .”

  “Well she does!”

  “All right, let’s try this again, what’s your proper name?”

  “Oh, dat! Dillinger Dallas Woods.”

  “Please list any aliases you might have.”

  “A-Lee-ess-iz?”

  “Any other names people call you.”

  “Like Dum Dum?”

  “Yes, now would be the time for that.”

  “Oh. Okay. Um. Dum Dum. Hey stupid. Big lug. Bone head. Um.”

  “All right I think we get the idea. Do you have any aliases . . . are there any names that people call you that aren’t insults?”

  “Well . . . Sammy calls me Big D. An’ sometimes people call me Double D. An’ Big Guy. Stuff like dat.”

  “All right, that’s good enough. Mr. Woods is an enhanced, as well as being a homo sapiens extremis. Characterized by increased height, weight and strength. Height is listed as nine foot nine inches.”

  “Nine and a half.”

  “What?”

  “Nine foot, nine and a half inches. Sammy measured me.”

  “Uh, sure. Nine foot, nine and a half inches. Weight is listed at eight hundred and seventy three pounds. I seem to be missing your strength index?”

  “Oh yeah. I was gonna get one of dose, but dey were, like, two hundred and twenty four dollars and ninety nine cents, and I never had dat much all at once. Sammy tole me I could get it if I saved up a little at a time, he even got me a big, pink piggy bank, an’ every week when I got my paycheck I put some money into it an’ Sammy an’ me wrote down how much I’d put in, an’ I broke open da piggy bank an’ I went down dere when I had two hundred and twenty eight dollars, an’ I was gonna get it done, but den da lady at da desk said it was gonna cost . . . um . . . I think . . . two hundred and seventy one dollars an’ a whole buncha cents. I tole her, I said, it says on da sign dat it’s two hundred and twenty four dollars an’ ninety nine cents. But she said dat dere was taxes and fees and stuff. I said dat isn’t fair, on account of ‘cause I saved and saved fer, like months and months, an’ she said dat if I didn’t have da money I should stop wastin’ her time—”

  “Right, that’s fine. No strength index recorded.”

  “Is dat bad? Are dey gonna be mad at me?”

  “It’s unusual, but it’s not, strictly speaking, bad.”

  “Okay. ‘Cause I tried ta get some jobs fer big important people, an’ dey all said dat dey only hired you if you had a strength index score, but I never got one.”

  “It’s fine!”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “What? No, I’m not mad at you, I just have a lot of questions to get through. I need shorter answers.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, hell, I lost my place again.”

  “Um.”

  “What?”

  “Can you not say dat word?”

  “What word?”

  “That . . . um, dat ‘h’ word?”

  “Hell?”

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  “Oh boy. Look, Mr. Woods—”

  “Call me Dum Dum.”

  “Yeah . . . right. Look, the thing is, you’re going to be spending quite a bit of time in prison, now. You understand that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So . . . you know you’re going to hear a lot worse words than ‘hell,’ right?”

  “Yeah, but dey’re in prison ‘cause dey’re bad people. Bad people are gonna swear, but dat doesn’t mean you sh
ould too. Dat’s what Sammy says.”

  “I . . . do you . . . I’ll . . . try to do better. Oh, look, there’s no IQ listed either. I don’t suppose you ever had an IQ test that you remember?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Of course not. All right, let’s just move on, shall we? Only powers listed are super strength and invulnerability. Do you have any other abilities?”

  “Um, I think so. Barry said I have a . . . a . . . a laymen . . . cypress . . . resentment.”

  “A what?”

  “A lament cyclist re—“

  “Do you know what the ability does?”

  “Oh! Yeah! Barry said dat nobody could get inside of my head. An’ den Mr. Bitter said dat it made sense on account a’ ‘cause my brain had ta be as thick as my skull. Den Barry made Mr. Bitter go into da other room because he was bein’ a pest.”

  “Couldn’t get into . . . Oh, I see. A latent psychic resistance.”

  “Dat’s it! Dat’s what he called it!”

  “Okay. There are a few more things to fill out here but I think I can take care of them myself. Now we can get started on the interview. As I understand it all of this started in a special, class four holding facility in Colorado Springs?”

  “All of what?”

  “Your association with the criminal organization known as Revolt.”

  “Oh! Yeah! ‘Cause dat was where I met Tommy.”

  “For the record, Mr. Woods is referring to Thomas Emanuel Roaker. Long time member of Revolt, and class five speedster with a broken back. Tell me about that first meeting.”

  “Okay. He was gettin’ made fun of by dese guys. Dey said he was a double useless . . . um, they called him a bad word. Da one dat starts wit’ an ‘n.’ I don’t have ta say it, do I?”