Corpies (Super Powereds Spinoff Book 1) (29 page)

“Really? You found a copy of a
Hero Team Battle Force 5
? Lenny swore to me that they’d stopped making new copies of it years ago.”

“Yeah, welcome to the age of the internet,” Hexcellent said, maneuvering her scarcely-clad character around the battlefield, blade still in hand as the avatar slashed away at Virtual Titan’s health bar. “Someone put up all the games forever ago, and people have been tossing on their own mods as well. It took me less than five minutes to get this baby hooked up.”

Owen just shook his head as he saw the pixelated version of himself go into an animated death swoon. It seemed Hexcellent was pretty good for having just downloaded the game: Titan was one of the boss characters. It had been specified in his contract.

“I’m going to bed,” he announced.

“Aw, don’t be like that. Grab a controller and show me if you can make your avatar kick as much ass as you did the other day.” Hexcellent held up a spare controller, and to his surprise, Owen walked over and picked it up. He’d never been much for arcade games, but right now doing anything besides marinating in his own thoughts seemed appealing.

“Awesome, now A is punch, B is kick. . .” Hexcellent continued explaining the controls to him, then gave Owen a few minutes to practice before they started their first battle. The two round match lasted less than thirty seconds.

“You are not great at this,” Hexcellent said, clicking the button to start a rematch.

“Give me a break, I literally just started playing.”

Hexcellent laughed softly, a sound more personal and delicate than the showy boisterous chuckles she put on when the crowd was around. “No, I’m actually kind of glad you suck. I was starting to wonder if there was anything you weren’t impossibly good at.”

“Trust me, I’m bad at loads of things,” Owen assured her.

“Really? Not from where I’m sitting. You stroll in here out of the past and proceed to pretty much kick ass at everything you do. You saved a girl on your first night here, and then went out of your way to make sure she was taken care of. You get a call about some incoming robots that took down a whole Hero team and you smash them to pieces. The minute you start dealing with the media again it’s all they can do to stop talking about you, and yesterday you took down the top Hero team in this whole fucking city. So far this is the first thing I’ve seen that you really blow at.” To illustrate the point, Hexcellent delivered a killing strike, finishing the first round of their rematch.

“Well, I’ve also managed to act like an ass when I first arrived and piss off our boss multiple times, not to mention alienate one or two members of the team. I’m clearly not great at this job.”

“Look, Zone’s stuff is his own. He’s not dumb; he understands that even if you’d played things a different way there’s no guarantee things would have been easier on his brother. He’s just pissed at how things went, and you’re the only tangible thing he can point at and blame. Sooner or later he’ll get over it. But who is the other person you think you’ve alienated?”

“Bubble Bubble seems largely indifferent to my presence,” Owen admitted.

“Oh, yeah, she is, but that’s true for all of us. B.B. isn’t exactly what you’d call a team player. She tries not to get attached; makes moving about easier on her. I tried a lot to connect with her when she first joined but she was having none of it. Now I mostly just trade insults with her. I like to think it’s affectionate, but even I’m not totally sure at this point.”

The digital version of Titan began his final death animation again as Hexcellent’s blade-wielder took him down. Before Owen could object, she’d clicked on the rematch button and a new battle was beginning.

“I guess it’s reassuring, in a way, to know that she at least acts the same toward everyone,” Owen said.

“Yup, total ice queen. Don’t let it get you down. For what it’s worth, I’m really glad you joined our team. It’s kind of neat, having a legendary Hero with us. Instead of just being the dorky corpies, we get to see what it’s like around the cool kids. Plus, you know, you aren’t so terrible as a person either.”

Owen smiled, attacking with his character and being summarily driven back by Hexcellent’s superior skills. “I think you’re easily the coolest kids I’ve dealt with since getting back. But honestly, if you ever wanted to go Hero, you’ve easily got enough power to get into the program.”

 “I appreciate it, but they don’t let people with my kind of criminal record in the HCP,” Hexcellent said. “Trust me, I tried every last one of them before I took this job.”

“Oh.” Owen had been wondering almost since he arrived why this powerful, courageous, tenacious young woman had opted for private response instead of trying to be a Hero. This made sense, though; having a criminal record was almost always an automatic rejection from the HCP. She would have needed someone to really take an interest in her to get offered a shot, and even then it still might not have happened. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“Relax, I know you meant it as a compliment,” Hexcellent assured him, killing his avatar for the sixth straight time and ending their third match. “When I was young I got caught up with the wrong crowd. A few years and a drug addiction later I finally hit rock bottom and decided to clean my life up, but it didn’t change what I’d done. There’s a price for fucking up that badly; my chances at an HCP career were a part of it.”

She held up her controller and glanced over to Owen. “Want to scamper off to bed, or are you itching for more of this sweet, sweet punishment?”

Owen regarded her for a moment, impressed by her maturity. Most people couldn’t own their demons like that. They had to push off what they’d done onto circumstances or others. She’d taken her responsibility without hesitation, and Owen found his respect for her growing yet again. It truly was a shame she’d taken a bad road; he thought the world would have benefited from Hexcellent the Hero.

“I’m down for a few more matches, but I’d like to switch characters first,” Owen said. “Between you and me, this Titan guy kind of sucks.”

54.

               After the battle with Elemental Fury, things in Brewster grew quiet. It was a peace that left Owen on edge, the sort of thing he never really trusted. Even so, the sudden arrival of chaos only took him off guard because it came while he was unconscious.

When the alarm yanked Owen forcefully from sleep, he very nearly destroyed the floor in his attempts to get out of bed. For a split second his muddled brain forgot every change that it had undergone in the last two decades. Instead of being roused to help with a rescue or cleanup effort, Owen’s head was screaming that he was in his old base and that they were under attack.

He slammed his feet through the carpet and into the concrete so hard that the force left nearly perfect footprints. It was only when he reached for his mask, which should be resting on the bedside stand, and found nothing more than a desk lamp and a picture, that Owen finally pulled himself out of the fugue and realized where he was. Years of training was good most of the time, but on occasion it outlived its usefulness.

As he pulled on his costume and tried to think of a way to hide the cracked floor lest Greene charge him for it, Galvanize’s voice came over the intercom system. Owen nearly didn’t recognize it, however, as the young leader’s voice was filled with something he’d never heard there before. Galvanize, the calm rock of their chaotic team, was doing all he could to fight back panic.

“This is an all hands situation, repeat, all hands. Anyone not downstairs in five minutes will be left behind, but will be expected to find their own way to the scene as soon as possible. The I-287 overpass in North Brewster was severely damaged in a fight between a criminal Super and Heroes. Current estimates put at least two hundred cars stranded in deteriorating positions with civilians blocked in by debris. The fight caused damage in several other areas as well, so resources are stretched thin. We are needed, people.
Now
.”

Owen took a deep breath, then slapped the rest of his costume on so quickly that he nearly ripped it in half twice. That overpass stretched across a large area of residential housing, which meant they needed to evacuate the people under it just as much as the ones on top of it. Depending on who else was there, they might be able to help prop the thing up, but with thin resources, odds were they had to race the clock.

Tearing out of his room as fast as he could go, Owen dashed down the hall, through the living room, and just made it to the elevator as Bubble Bubble saw him coming and held the door. He sprinted through it, barely stopping before he slammed into the back wall, and heard the oddly inappropriate gentle ding as the elevator began lowering them to the basement.

“We’re the last ones,” Bubble Bubble informed him. Unlike Galvanize, she had not lost her seemingly infinite amount of quiet composure.

“How do you know?”

“Hexcellent was up playing video games; I saw her paused screen when I left the living room. Galvanize would have gotten the word before any of us and therefore been prepping to go. As for Zone, he prides himself on his speed and reflexes. Losing to either of us would be a point of wounded honor for him.”

Owen nodded, watching as the red digital numbers ticked away, marking their descent. It struck him as curious that as much as Hexcellent seemed to think Bubble Bubble wasn’t interested in team, the red-haired young woman appeared to have a keen eye for details and a strong grasp of her teammates’ habits. At any other time, it would have been something he dug deeper on, but as the elevator slowed, all he could think of was the situation demanding their aid. It wouldn’t be until much later that Owen realized this marked the first occasion when he looked at the problem as a PEERS first and a Hero second.

Perhaps that was why it wasn’t until he’d leapt into the SUV and slammed his door shut that he finally remembered to touch his right ear and get a full assessment of the situation. Before he had the chance, however, Galvanize began to fill them in.

“There was an attempted murder roughly twenty-five minutes ago, over in North Brewster.” Galvanize’s foot didn’t leave the pedal as he spoke. The siren’s muffled roar could be heard overhead. “Some gang’s strongman was sent to take out a rival gang’s leader. We don’t know if the first gang was dumb, or just working off bad information, but their guy never stood a chance. The target was a fellow Super, an energy manipulator whose energy had highly corrosive properties.”

Owen winced inwardly. Energy manipulators were bad enough; those with talent could create all manner of constructs or obstacles to utilize. Some of the really gifted ones could even coat themselves in their energy, like a suit of armor. If the energy itself destroyed most matter it came into contact with that upped the destructive potential considerably. Just from knowing those two facts, Owen would estimate that sort of opponent to be a Demolition Class, minimum.

“The fight drew the right kind of attention, and a team of Heroes stepped in,” Galvanize continued. “I don’t know the details, but they were able to bring him down. Unfortunately, he doled out a lot of damage on his way to getting killed. Right now, every emergency service that can is scrambling to get the people to safety.”

“What about the Heroes who stopped this guy?” Zone asked. “Aren’t they helping?”

“The ones who can are currently containing and evacuating a section of the city he managed to partially cave in to the sewers,” Galvanize snapped. He paused for a moment, and Owen watched him carefully. The rise and fall of his chest betrayed the deep breaths he was taking, no doubt in an attempt to keep an even keel. “Some are getting healed; they’ll jump in wherever they can. We don’t have time to play jurisdiction jockeying right now. Once we get there, it’s going to be a madhouse. Follow my orders as best you can, but put protecting the civilians first above all else. Everyone clear?”

The vehicle’s passengers all nodded, too well-trained to try and talk over one another while their leader was giving direction. Galvanize appreciated them all the more for it. He pulled up to the boundaries of a massive traffic jam, the sun’s early morning rays glinting off the metal tops of seemingly countless stopped cars. They were going to need every bit of that discipline to pull of the sort of miracle they needed to.

“Good, then this is where we get out. Everyone, please do your best. Lives depend on it.”

55.

Titan had seen worse.

He’d come upon battlegrounds after Armageddon Class Supers were taken down. He’d seen entire streets run thick with blood and bodies, the latter often wearing masks that he recognized. He’d seen what happened when Heroes were too slow, when civilians were piled like kindling after a maniac’s rampage. He’d seen truly horrible things in his time as a Hero, the sort that woke him in a cold sweat some nights, desperately groping for someone nearby to remind him that it was going to be okay. As he surveyed the scene before him, he did so with a sense of perspective, and concluded that the situation was bad, but not horrible. Of course, all of that perspective just lit a fire in his gut, driving him to make sure this morning didn’t turn into another one that would live on for decades in his nightmares.

The overpass was badly damaged; part of it had been sheared off completely and several of the support columns were broken. Since it was a flyover that stretched across a residential area, bits of the debris had already come down and crushed several houses. Titan dearly hoped they’d been evacuated first, then immediately put it out of his mind. It was key to focus on the people he could still help, not dwell on the ones already lost. That was how he’d keep himself moving if things took a turn for the terrible.