Caped Read online

  “Sorry about Vanguard,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Fury said. “You know, I took her up, gave her back to the sun. I can’t handle it out of the atmosphere for more than a few minutes, but I flew out there and went as hard as I could toward the sun and let her go. I hope she makes it.”

  “You shouldn’t have trashed the chopper,” Paramount said. He was slurring his speech from the booze and Percocet.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Fury yelled. “They killed my sister. I didn’t wake up with the plan to kill cops. I just wanted to go out there and do some goddamn good for a change.”

  “Well, you sure fucked that up then, didn’t you?” Paramount stood up, and I edged toward the door.

  “Hey, I didn’t start it. It was the fucking—” and he stopped short. “The fucking . . .”

  “The fucking what?” Paramount said. “Finish the god-damned sentence.”

  “It was the fucking . . . humans,” Fury said, and then he broke down and started sobbing. Paramount and I sat there and watched him cry. There wasn’t anything else to say about it. After a while he got up.

  “You know, her name was Margaret, but I always called her Peg,” he said. “She hated that.”

  He flew off.

  We never saw him again.

  * * *

  We agreed to lay low and see how it shook out. Two weeks later I had seen the gun camera footage from the EXIT Apache a thousand times. Unless they were holding something back, they didn’t have video on Razor Jane, Paramount, or myself. Our names weren’t showing up in the paper and no one knocked on my door. I got hold of Jane through a hidden board she had set up on an onion router—the same kind of anonymous proxy system used by terrorists and child pornography rings. She was done. She left a lot of blood at the scene so they had her DNA. If she got picked up for anything else they’d match it. EXIT would never forget and she assumed that they’d kill us all for being involved, no matter what the law said. I wasn’t as convinced. I asked if she wanted to meet in real life, like normal people, and she said no.

  * * *

  That night I went back out on patrol. I was on a rooftop near the corner of Carnival and Albemarle looking across tightly packed tenements towards the Midtown skyscrapers when I saw him the second time. It was a good spot, sheltered beneath a rotting water tank, scanning with night vision, looking for ordinary crimes committed by ordinary perps. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to take on the big-time metas, but I could at least drive some of the scum off of the street. I thought I had been pretty stealthy, but I heard a voice behind me, quiet and thoughtful.

  “Find what you’re looking for?”

  It was the Harlequin, sitting on the roof of a bulkhead access. I switched the safety off on my stun gloves. His suit and gear were expensive. Way out of my league. He had deep pockets or connections.

  “You here to arrest me?”

  He cocked his head as if thinking about it and then smirked. “Why would I want to do that? You’re a superhero aren’t you?”

  I didn’t know how sarcastic he was being and didn’t know how to answer that anyway.

  “No? No matter. Why don’t you meet me on the roof of The Club 40 at around four. I think I know someone you’d like to meet.”

  He did a handstand off of the side of the building and was gone.

  * * *

  He was dancing on the roof of The Club 40 later that night, surrounded by tatterdemalions of various ages, all of them young. The music pulsed and throbbed through the roof, some sort of house techno mix, and if anyone at street level knew they were there they gave no hint of it. I assumed he noticed me long before he reacted, but after about fifteen minutes he beckoned and walked away from the dance floor within the ductwork. At the edge of the roof, on the side facing the Wasteland to the south he stood with a woman. A girl more like it. I doubt she had reached voting age, but however many years she’d had so far had been hard ones.

  “Your Majesty, I present to you Nocturnum,” he said. “Nocturnum, this is the Queen of the Angels.”

  I looked at the kids on the roof. Angels. Street kids who lived on roof tops in the wastes. Abandoned and forgotten except by one another. A boy, maybe ten, was hiding behind her skirts.

  “Tell this man what you saw,” she said.

  “I saw a dark man, who came from the sky, and there was another with him. He was thin and cloaked in smoke and was all twisted like bed springs after a fire. The dark man flew away and the other turned into fog and drifted away. There,” he said and pointed across the urban blight.

  “Thank you, poppet,” Harlequin said. “You were very brave.”

  And then he bowed farewell to the Queen and walked to look out at the wastes in the direction the boy had pointed. In the faint light of false dawn, the blue in his suit matched perfectly the blue in his eyes.

  “Do you want to find him?” he asked.

  “Chemos? Yeah.”

  He took my team from me. Took Jane. I knew it was our mistake to try and take them down, but he’s the one who stabbed her in the back.

  “There’s no record of who he is,” he said. “But he was first seen in Europe around 1920.”

  And it hit me, what he was trying to show me. It wasn’t a vintage costume. It was what he was wearing when some sort of chemical attack in the war triggered his metagene and transformed him. The blasted landscape of the Wasteland, ruined buildings, piles of rubble, pools of stagnant water. A no man’s land within the city. If Chemos thought he was still in some trench at the Somme or Ypres, where would he go to ground? Someplace that looked like home. I stared out at the landscape and eventually I realized that the Harlequin was gone again.

  * * *

  It took a few days but deep in the Wasteland, in an area where the bulldozers had made progress in clearing building before the funding was cut off, I found it. Between piles of brick and debris, sticking up from the ruin like the city’s last beacon of hope, the remains of L'église St. Colette. The shell of a French Catholic parish, remnants of stained glass in the windows, and even some strings of rusted barbed wire pulled across the approaches between the piles of rubble. It had to be the place. He must have stolen the wire from some fence or construction site and arranged it there, like he’d done a hundred years ago. I waited until dark and was rewarded by the faint glimmer of candlelight within. I kept hidden until after midnight, scanning the area carefully for movement, but there was none. I made my way cautiously from my lookout spot down to the church.

  The roof was gone, and the pews within mostly smashed for firewood. The walls were covered with graffiti and soot. It looked like a bomb had gone off long ago. It was empty but for a few candles at the altar, and small votives at the shrine to St. Colette. I moved down the center cautiously, knowing he would be there somewhere in the flickering shadows. Shuffling, half deaf and blind in the sweaty confines of a stolen USMC MOPP suit, rotating slowly down the aisle like flotsam on a benighted tide. Shadows took shape in my imagination as my heart hammered at my chest.

  He emerged out of a dark corner of the nave, coalesced into existence ahead of me, a frail and twisted shape set about by drifting fog. As I approached he stood and gazed at me like I was a distorted mirror image from another place and time and slowly straightened. Before the altar he stood at attention and saluted me, stiffly and painfully erect as if I were an officer inspecting the troops.

  I raised my .45 and fired a hollow-point through his eye. He fell and sublimated away into horrid vapors, leaving only the bloody trench knife on the stone floor at my feet.

  I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t worked.

  I never had any backup plan.

  Return to Contents

  I AM HATHOR

  Jason Henry Evans & Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Three o’clock in the afternoon and I’m at work at the Department of Children and Family services. I’m tapping my fingernails on my desk, looking at my calendar, thinking I’ll have to be a superwoman to get
everything done this afternoon.

  I have to get to Target, where I’ll buy a sixty-dollar video game as a birthday present for my son’s friend. Sixty dollars for a game? The child will probably play it twice and forget about it. But Langston says it’s all the rage, and the mother did spend that much on my son’s last birthday present.

  Then I’ll have to suffer crosstown traffic to pick up Langston from football practice and more traffic after that to get him to the birthday party. (Lord, did I remind him to shower after football practice? At fourteen, he has more stink than sense.) Did I mention I also have to pick up my daughter, Cheri, from ballet, then go shopping and fix dinner for her and my oldest, Omar? I’m the living stereotype of a middle-class, middle-aged woman. This is not all of who I am, though. I’m so much more. If only I didn’t have to hide it.

  My husband Marcus would’ve helped, but he was in Ft. Collins working on a new building for the university. He’s a general contractor, but looking to get on with a big construction firm.

  As a social worker, I can leave the office early, saying I have a home visit, but lying is not in my nature, other than my whole secret identity thing.

  Speaking of secret identities. “Hey, Tanisha.” My boss Randy points at a stack of comic books on my desk. “I didn’t know you liked Defenders of L.A. comics? Is that the first appearance of Dr. Cerebrus?” The grin on my boss’s face is positively unnerving.

  “I guess,” I say quickly. “I bought them for my son Langston. You know, I’m a little old for comic books.” I hope Randy buys it. The last thing I need is to be pals with a geeky thirty year old.

  “Oh, okay. If he ever wants to sell some, let me know. I’d love to take a few of these off his hands.”

  I smile blandly. When he leaves, I shove all the comics into my handbag. Why do I have comic books? Research. They don’t have manuals on superheroing.

  A year ago, my husband took me to a swanky cocktail party at the Museum of Nature & Science. He told me at the last minute, which he always does. Then he told me it was a costume ball. I hate costumes.

  We fought for the next hour. But he said this was a chance to get in good with some executives at a construction company that was hiring. I was—I am—a dutiful wife and I wanted to support him. But that costume was awful. It was white lycra and hugged all of my curves. That would have been all right if I was twenty-four or even thirty-four, but I was forty-seven and never got rid of the baby weight from having Cheri eight years earlier. I took turns feeling embarrassed, then unattractive, then completely ridiculous.

  The night would’ve been horrible—if not for Ignacia. Her husband and mine worked together, and Omar was friends with her oldest boy. Ignacia and I drank champagne after champagne. We made fun of people and gossiped a bit and got on like a pair of outlaws.

  The whole museum was open that night for the fundraiser. Ignacia wore a vampire gown and extravagant make-up. She and I were on our fifth or sixth champagne, walking through one of the smaller exhibits when the power went out. We stumbled around in the dark, eventually tripping on the floor, dropping our plastic glasses of champagne. Ignacia tried to get up first, but fell on top of me. We laughed, but only for a minute. Then she kissed me.

  It was sweet, and gentle. In a moment, it was over. Emergency lights flickered on, and I saw such passion in Ignacia’s dark eyes. This time, I kissed her, lips soft, tongues even softer, mouth wet. Electricity zipped and zinged through every cell in my body. I don’t know how long we were there, but I’d never be the same. The lights eventually came on. We both got up and tried to make ourselves presentable. We said nothing for the rest of the night.

  Now I’m no prude. I have three kids, eighteen, fourteen, and eight, and children kill prudishness. I’ve been married for eighteen years and Marcus is an imaginative man. But even before all that, I’d experimented. Ignacia was not the first woman I kissed, but I’d never felt the electricity with the others, not like I did with her. When my husband and I got home, I was excited beyond relief. I took it out on him, and he didn’t seem to mind. I didn’t feel guilty. It was just kissing, and like I said, I’m not a prude.

  It probably should’ve ended there, but it didn’t. Not at all.

  But that’s ancient history. I have a full afternoon ahead of me, finishing up my work and getting ready to be super mom.

  I’m shutting down my computer when the boss shouts, “Hey! Check out the 9News live-feed. We have an actual supervillain in Denver, right now!”

  My heart drops into the pit of my stomach like a crab-cake into old grease. Estelle, my cube-mate, turns up her speakers to blast the broadcast. “The Brick, who broke out of Federal Custody four days ago has taken hostages at the Denver Mint. He’s been on a rampage for the last twenty minutes demanding the engraving plates the U.S. Government uses to make bills.”

  “Um, does the Denver Mint do that?” Estelle asks. “You know, print bills?”

  “No, only coins” Randy says. “I wonder if Hathor will show up to stop him.”

  “That’s the plan,” I whisper. I get out while no one is looking. I’m in the parking garage when my phone rings. Ignacia.

  “Tanisha, do you know what’s going on at the Mint?”

  “Yeah, baby, I do. I’m gonna try and make it over to you ASAP.”

  I can’t stop The Brick, not until I see Ignacia. But she works on Colorado Boulevard and I’m on Sante Fe Drive. I do what any superhero would do—I break the speed limit and hope I don’t get caught.

  The main streets are full of traffic, so I take side streets. Denver can be a beautiful city if you know where to look. Fifties-style apartment complexes, turn of the century brownstones, they all blur by as I do fifty in one residential neighborhood after another.

  The Brick is all over the radio. He hasn’t killed anyone. Yet.

  Fighting traffic, I fall back into the past to the first day I realized, for whatever reason, I had super powers.

  Three days after Ignacia and I kissed, I was walking to my car from a court hearing, another tragedy of messed-up kids and messed-up parenting. The streets were crazy with speeding drivers, all trying to get their Friday night going. Some had started their weekend early. A woman, paying more attention to her phone than her life, stepped into the street. The car streaking toward her didn’t slow.

  The next moments were a blur. I remember running. I remember getting between her and the car. I put out a hand, like I could stop a Chevy with a push. Instead of the car killing me, I killed the car. It curled up around me like a tight metal dress. The driver stumbled out and puked on the asphalt. To keep up appearances, I fell against the woman I’d saved and we both hit the ground. People ran over to help us up. My blouse was torn, as were my slacks, but I didn’t have a scratch on me. People said I was lucky. People said I had an angel on my shoulder. But I knew it wasn’t an angel. No, that was my first day as Hathor.

  The next few weeks I tried to figure out what happened. I took care of Marcus and our beautiful children. I was cooking dinner one night when my oldest came home shocked. “I just talked to David Nunez. His dad is moving out of his house. They’re getting a divorce!”

  “What?” I cried.

  My son explained everything. Ignacia’s husband was having an affair. I called Ignacia immediately but got no answer, so I drove over to the Nunez’s house. When I knocked on the door, I noticed it was open. I called Ignacia, but only heard whimpering. I went inside. It felt like a tomb—quiet and still except for weeping.

  I found Ignacia in the living room curled up on the couch. I sat and held her.

  “That bastard,” she said in a thick voice. “He left me for that gringa puta.”

  “Ignacia, honey. Where are your kids?”

  “He wants David and Sabrina. Mihijos!”

  “Where’s David, sweetheart?”

  “In his room, por que?”

  I went upstairs. David stared out his bedroom window, not moving, thinking way too much.

  “David, g
et your sister, take your mother’s car and go to my house. Pack a bag, sweetie, all right? I’ll stay here with your mom.”

  David nodded.

  That evening, I held Ignacia’s hand when I wasn’t pouring tequila. She cried for the first two hours. Then she started to laugh. Around midnight I got her upstairs, got her to change her clothes and put her to bed. I called my husband and told him I wanted to stay with her. He agreed. So I spent the night. That was the first and last time Ignacia and I made love. That was when I realized my gifts were tied to her. The next day, I could fly.

  Maybe what I did with Ignacia was adultery, but at the time, it didn’t feel like it. It felt like a kindness, both for her and for me. Later, though, I swore I couldn’t cheat on my husband like that. Our vows went deep, but a little kissing, a little touching, for the greater good? Maybe that was okay.

  The radio snaps me back to the present. “The Brick has just thrown a police squad car into a SWAT van. Authorities are powerless to stop him.”

  I go another five blocks—getting closer to the hospital where Ignacia works. I need Ignacia. She’s my battery.

  I pull into the hospital parking lot. There, ten feet away, is Ignacia. She runs over, “Traffic bad?” she gets into the car.

  “Yeah.” My heart climbs into my throat. Our eyes meet for an instant, and then we kiss.

  We kiss and kiss. Her hands unbutton my blouse and dive into my bra. My hands explore her, too. Every touch, every kiss, makes me grow stronger.

  “No, Ignacia.” I pull away from her mouth, kissing, licking my neck. Ignacia moans in frustration.

  “Why?”

  “You know why. I – I can’t. Besides, we have a monster on the loose. I’m strong enough.”