by Erin Halfelven

3.2 The Hero Biz

I had to get up and walk around the room. The idea of being shot at did not appeal to me. And yet, after our training this afternoon, I felt confident that I could avoid being hit by anyone using merely human reflexes to aim. I wouldn't be there when the bullet arrived; it was a skill I knew I could learn.

And I had a very odd reaction to this; I almost felt I couldn't wait to get out there and go up against some bad guy with a gun. Normally, I'm not that crazy. I walked to the window and looked out on the Santa Ana mountains. We were so close to them here that the two highest peaks did not have their characteristic Saddleback shape. The world looks different when you change perspective, I thought.

"Somebody could get lucky," Kevin was saying. "A lucky shot, a bad ricochet."

"It happens," said Gumpy Steve. "That's what healing factor is for. And it won't even leave a scar."

Kevin laughed. We exchanged looks, knowing it wouldn't be as easy as Steve made it sound, but feeling more than a bit of excitement. Supermovies had recently become all the rage after decades of cheesy scripts and worse special effects. Big money features like The First Protector and Spider-Man, featuring both real and imaginary metas, filled the theaters and home video screens. And the minds of kids and teen-agers who could hope to discover that they, too, were super.

And Kevin and I were. What's more, we were part of one of the first families of old-time Mystery Men. We were born to be metahuman. It had to be exhilarating and it was.

I glanced down at my chest and sighed. I seemed to be paying a higher price than Kevin but how many guys my age might have said at some time, "I'd give my left nut to have super-powers." I had to smile at that. I'd given both of them, and not willingly either. But it might, it just might be only temporary. And I really did have superpowers. I smiled at my own reaction.

I took a seat at the table again and Kevin passed me a fruit juice. We were talking shop, the family business, being super. What a concept, as some comic used to say.

Still smiling, I waved at Gumpy. "You talked about weapons like pistols and rifles, maybe grenades. What if someone uses artillery, or a bomb or something?"

The old man shrugged. "I've survived worse. Thermite. Lava. Liquid nitrogen. Mustard gas. I got caught on the edge of a nuclear explosion once. Wouldn't recommend it." He grinned slowly.

"We're like cockroaches, you're saying?" I suggested.

Kevin snorted, and we all grinned. Welcome to the family, Señor Cucaracha.

"Not as good an image for P.R. But we are hard to kill," said Steve, still grinning but shaking his head, too. "And here's the thing, when it's the two of you together, you are harder to hurt, harder to kill. You heal faster, recover faster, move faster. You're stronger and you can borrow from each other. You have more energy; you're like a battery."

Kevin grinned again. "I must be the positive end because Darla is sure negative."

"Yuk, yuk," I said. I put my hand on my currently flat forehead. "It's like the feelers, the dealie-bobbers, we can each know what the other is doing and about to do. We'll know when the other needs help?"

Steve nodded. "I wanted you to learn that in the training today. And I wanted the… the playing field level for the two of you, so you had to co-operate more to go up against me. In a regular fight, against someone else, Kevin would be stronger and would naturally be the point man, carrying the fight to the enemy." He gestured at Kevin.

He turned to me. "Where you would be holding back, most of the time. Looking for openings to exploit, watching Kevin's back, making an aerial attack when you learn to fly, supplying healing energy to Kevin so he can take more punishment."

"But…." The damned thing was, that was how Kevin and I had behaved in fights in school, for years, leaving out the super-powers. In fact, that's how we had fought Gumpy, earlier. Karen went for the head and face, frontal assault, while I had tried to trip the old giant and hit him in vulnerable spots he couldn't cover while fighting Karen off. I sipped my juice. "But why do I have to be a girl to do this battery thing?" I asked.

Steve shrugged. "I really don't know. You'd have to ask the Lords of the Rings."

Kevin snorted then opened his mouth.

"Stop," I interrupted. "You don't want to make a hobbit of that kind of joke."

"You mean, you're Sauron those literary references?" he got out quickly.

"Ow," said Gumpy. "Did I ever tell you about meeting the Professor himself?" he added quickly, probably to short-circuit our wordplay.

"What?" Kevin and I said at the same time. "Professor Tolkien?" I asked.

He nodded. "It was during that trip I made to London just before the war; we had some documents we needed translated. Turned out they were in some Turkmen dialect, written in Cyrillic script. Tolkien was part of the Linguistic and Cryptographic Support for M.I.6. Worked with a crew of Oxford and Cambridge big forehead guys. Seemed like a nice fellow but he wasn't at all famous back then."

Kevin and I exchanged looks again. "I guess you've met a lot of famous people, Unk?" Kevin asked.

Steve snorted. "Sure. Joe Stalin for one; a right bastard as Winston Churchill called him to me once. Winnie was a vulgar fellow when he was in the mood. Shared a shuttle flight with Eleanor Roosevelt after FDR croaked it." He frowned. "I even shook hands with Senator Aidan Overman and his sidekick Joe McCarthy, another pair of bastards."

He waved a hand. "But those are just politicians. I was in Company O with The Volunteer and all that lot, Judge Hammer, The Selkie, El Faro, Proteus. Good guys, I guess you could call them. I fought Dyna-Mann when he was Hitler's fair-haired boy before he switched sides. Damian the Lemurian is the bastard who left me on that atoll with a French atomic bomb test. Leadbone, Nemo, Dr. Styxx. My old gal pal, Ruth Lester, what a twist she was."

Sometimes Gumpy used words in ways no one did anymore, but I got the drift, as he might have said himself.

"It's not like it used to be," he said, a bit sadly. "In the 30s the gangs tried to take over the country. Prohibition had been good to them and they got strong. Then the Depression came along, and government got weak. The gangs had money and manpower and… well, they nearly took over the country. You could feel good about fighting the gangs." He shook his head and looked into his coffee cup.

"Then the war came along and there was always someone to fight all through the 40s. All the time, the plain old mystery men like I used to be got scarcer and the true metahumans started showing up. Guys who could fly, or run faster than automobiles, bounce off bullets with glowing forcefields or shoot lightning bolts out of their eyes. The Golden Passage happened in 1938," the first near approach to Earth of Prometheus in modern times, "and we kept feeling it for another six or eight years. Metahumans popping out of the woodwork." He sighed.

"When the war ended, and everyone was more or less on the same side again for awhile…. 'Cept the Russians were Communist and the Chinese went that way but there was no trouble with them until later. But what we found out was that while we was busy making war on one another, the metarays from Prometheus had affected animals, plants, too; hell, even some rocks. Not to mention people in places no one ever heard of."

We didn't say anything. This guy had lived through things we had only read about.

"Prometheus was out beyond Jupiter but stuff kept happening on Earth. Nowadays, they call it the First Dark Passage. It's like the metarays get focussed by Jupiter's gravity or something. And what happened here was monsters. The thing they called the Vor fell on Yokohama from out of space somewhere. Grizzly bears the size of locomotives in Canada. Giant snakes in Africa and South America. Ants as big as cars in Australia." He smiled. "No relation."

We laughed.

"And we had the first real metacriminals. Terrorists like Damian setting up his own country in the South Pacific. Lemuria, he got that out of a book somewhere. He'd fought the Japanese with us in WWII but afterwards…. And the… the three-wheeled son-of-a-biscuit is still alive!" He paused and sipped more coffee. "Well, so am I. With less to show for it. Just you two and your families left where he has a whole country full of mermaids and mermen and a seat in the UN."

He looked at us. "Where was I?"

"Metacriminals," I said.

He nodded. "Guys like Dr. Styxx bringing people back to life to make an army for him. Leadbone trying to transmute people's skeletons to gold. The Twelve Sinners. Starcatcher. The Dangermen. Madame Fatale. Shadojak. Things got messed up. Then Senator Overman and his pals made it a federal offense to use metapowers in committing crimes." He shook his head again. "Bastard meant well but that didn't work out the way he wanted it to."

He waved a hand, "Then here comes Prometheus back in 1955, the Silver Passage. The supergroups start getting organized 'cause governments want to have a handle on us. The Protectors in LA. The Olympians in Seattle. The Volunteers in Memphis. The Allies in Chicago. The Blue Stars in D.C. More supergroups in New York than you can count. And new baddies like that psychopath Dr. Bellerophon, the Othermen, aliens, mutants, cyborgs, ghosts, people claiming to be gods."

He stared at the wall for a minute. "I had a point I was trying to make…."

"It's different now," said Kevin.

"Mm-hm," said Gumpy. "You bet it is. Little jackscratch wars all over the place. The Russians are our friends except when they aren't. The Chinese are selling us everything from telephones to toilet seats. Government supergroups like the Blue Stars all over the country. Stainless Ed running for Congress." He grinned at that thought. "Good ol' Ed, hard-headed sonoffa, all he wanted was to be a Sheriff's Deputy. They should never have fired him."

I waved that away. Ed Simms was one of the Steelmen, a group of metas with bodies of living steel. For years, he led the LA Super Squad until he got fired in a political scandal. The story was in all the superzines, not to mention most of the mundane press, too. "How are things different, Gumpy? How is this going to affect us?"

"In my day, well, at the beginning, you worked with or around the authorities. Half the people didn't even believe in your existence which left you free to do a lot of stuff you probably couldn't get away with today. What I'm saying is that sooner or later, we've got to get you recognized with one of the supergroups." He sighed.

"Which group, Unk? The Protectors?" Kevin couldn't hide his excitement.

I rolled my eyes. "You just want to go to Hollywood and see that fifty-foot phallus from the inside."

"It's a… a what?" Gumpy stared at me. "What did you call it?" He laughed. "We used to be a lot ruder about it, we called it the Big Blue Dick." We all laughed but I could feel my face turning red.

"She's studying to be a feminist," said Kevin, metaphorically poking me in the tenderest spot he could find.

I just glared at him.

"No, I thought the Protectors might be a bit overwhelming for a couple of newbies. They've got more than a hundred members and half of them live in the tower, at least part-time. No, there's a supergroup right here in Orange County, the Cometeers."

Kevin jumped in, "Aren't they the guys who got turned into mermaids by Damian during the Fimbulwetter War?" He looked at me slyly."You'll have something in common with them, Darla."