Corpies (Super Powereds Spinoff Book 1) (31 page)

A bolt of gray energy hit Titan’s side, and he glanced up to see the culprit staring at him, eyes wide with surprise. Evidently, he’d been expecting a different result. Either these punks didn’t watch the news or they didn’t believe the hype. Those that survived sure as hell would from here on, though.

It was funny: all the money and time spent on PR by Heroes and their agents, yet nothing spread true fear in a Hero’s opponents like being in the middle of a Hero’s path of destruction.

Titan closed the gap to the blaster, knocking aside a pair of men in leather jackets who tried to take a swing at him. He reared back, ready to put the young man down, but a gust of wind made Titan suddenly aware of a hole in the side of costume where the energy had hit him. It was perfect erosion: no shredded cloth or scorched material. Titan let his battle-drunk brain work for a moment, remembering the original report he’d been given about a dead Super with corrosion energy, and noticing how this fellow had puffy circles around his eyes, as if he’d been crying. Supers weren’t inherently more likely to have Super children, but those in the same family often had somewhat similar abilities.

Instead of punching him in the head, which could potentially result in brain death even if he was only aiming for a knockout, Titan shattered the man’s legs, leaving him to howl in the street. Technically the kid could still use his powers, but without HCP-grade training, it was unlikely he’d be able to focus through the pain. If he did, then Titan would finish the job, but it felt wrong to kill someone who was acting out of grief more than anger. At least, not without giving them a chance.

The effortless defeat of their energy blaster seemed to have broken some of the criminals' spirit, as they now looked at Titan with a new sense of awe and dread. They’d clearly thought that he’d be taken down by one good shot. Faced with the reality of a Titan utterly uninjured by what was presumably their most powerful remaining offense, their willpower began to fracture and break. Several dashed away, running for the alley where the fight had started.

“Goddamnit! I just stepped out and I’ve got a fucking wave coming at me,” Zone panted frantically in Titan’s left ear, no longer bothering to whisper.

There was no time to think, no opportunity to concoct some cunning plan. The span of seconds it would take would likely mean the difference of life and death for Zone, to say nothing of the child in his care. Spinning in the direction of the runners, Titan could see Zone and a young girl in his arms, halfway emerged from under a pile of trash in the alley. In front of those two were five fleeing criminals, one of whom was the shifter in boar form. Zone was standing directly in their way. If the gang hit his teammate and the civilian, especially knowing Titan was at their backs, chances of casualties were high, if not completely certain.

Pressing his boot into the concrete so hard that cracks spiderwebbed out from under it, Titan pushed off in a charging leap. He stayed low: the goal this time wasn’t to get a better location, it was to play human bowling with himself as the ball. Arms spread out wide to catch all that he could, Titan hurtled through the air, slamming into four of the five would-be-escapees with such force that he could feel their bones break as he made contact. Just before he was about to come to a stop, he twisted in midair so that his back hit a nearby brick building before the four already-battered bodies clutched in his arms. Titan let them drop to the ground; now that they were gone, he had a more important target.

The shifter was still getting up from the ground where he’d thrown himself to avoid to Titan’s charge when the Hero stepped forward, putting himself firmly between Zone and the boar. A pair of piggy eyes darted back and forth, locking on Zone, or perhaps the child crying in his arms, and lingering there for a moment. Titan could practically see the wheels turning, trying to figure out if he could get there fast enough to take a hostage.

“Ah ah ah.” Titan wagged his finger in the air, drawing the boar’s gaze back to him. “You’ll never make it. And if you try, I’m going to be less gentle than I have been with your friends. A
lot
less gentle.”

“Maybe so,” the boar-man snorted. “But I bet one of us will make it.”

“You want to know one of the most important rules in battle, BeBop? Always be aware of your surroundings. And maybe you should have noticed that I’m no longer the only Hero on the scene.”

The pigman quickly turned around, barely getting a chance to see the new uniforms tearing through his fellow gang members and enemies before he felt a powerful hand grip him by the collarbone.

“Another good rule in battle: don’t take your eyes off the fucking enemy.”

Titan was quick with crippling the shifter, and luckily the criminal quickly passed out from the pain of his broken limbs. That attended to, Titan jogged back over to Zone and the young girl.

“You should be clear now. Get her to safety and then rendezvous with the team. I have to keep helping clean up here.”

“No problem,” Zone said, slightly readjusting his grip on the sobbing girl. “And thanks for the assist.”

“That’s what teammates do,” Titan replied, turning back to the fray still going on.

“Also, why the hell did you call that guy Bebop?”

“Didn’t watch many cartoons as a kid, I take it?” Titan shook his head and allowed himself a small laugh, despite the horror of the day so far. “I’ll explain when things are done.”

“Good enough for me.”

Zone darted off, racing through the alleyway and back toward what one could only hope would be safety. Unfortunately, unless someone else had shown up to unblock the bridge, that area was also a rapidly deteriorating situation waiting to turn into a tragedy.

Titan scanned the scene, noting that a Hero in blue shooting white fire and one who had shifted into a ten-foot-tall spiny creature had picked off most of the stragglers. As he looked, his eyes fell on a fallen, weeping form, and an idea surfaced in the sea of his thoughts.

“Dispatch, I need you to patch me in to a DVA representative. I may have a way to help our overpass situation, but I’m going to have to make some promises.”

58.

Titan crouched down by the young man with the shattered legs. This kid wasn’t the only one with such injuries dotting the fractured city street. The legs were the best place to go for, usually. It made it impossible to run away, crippled mobility, and put people in too much pain to focus enough to use their abilities. Titan had broken more legs than he could count in his years wearing the mask, and as such had become reasonably adept at gauging the severity of a wound just from looking at it.

“It’ll heal,” he said, drawing the young man’s attention to his presence. “Not well, mind you, but it will heal in the sense that you’ll have two legs. You might be able to get around without a wheelchair, if you don’t skimp on physical therapy, though your days of running marathons are pretty much a thing of the past.”

“Fuck you,” the criminal grunted from the ground.

“Now now, I’m not saying all this to be cruel. We’ve got a healer currently heading to this area to patch up people hurt in the overpass accident, the one your. . . I’m going to guess brother. . . caused.”

The criminal looked up from the concrete for the first time, his still-red eyes widening as he locked met Titan’s gaze. “How did you know?”

“The reports from the fight said the energy projector had a corrosive property. Your attack burned through my costume in less than a second, and these things are made of pretty sturdy material. It seemed like a reasonable guess that two men in the same gang with similar powers were related. Let me guess: you both got the same energy type, just one as a projector and one as a blaster.”

“My brother and I have. . .
had
the same energy.” His eyes darkened, and Titan could practically see the resolve building as he tried to gather up enough focus for another attack.

Titan reached down and flicked the young man on his earlobe.

“Ow!” The young man rubbed his ear, all focus scattered in the brief shock of pain.

“Listen. . . I’m sorry, I never got your name. I’m Titan, in case you missed it the first time.”

The greeting was met by a hard, sullen stare.

“Giving me your name isn’t going to get you any more in trouble than you already are, and it will make it easier for me to try and dig you some of the way out of this shit heap. I understand you’re upset about your brother, but you have to at least partly realize that this was something he brought upon himself. So you can lie here, be pissed, then go to jail and live with hobbled legs for the rest of your life, or you can hear me out and see if you might like what I’m selling before turning me down. You’ve already seen what’s behind door number two, why not at least take a peek behind number one?”

He kept on staring, and Titan shifted his weight, preparing to get up. As he moved a single word slipped out of the young criminal’s mouth. “Eli.”

“That’s progress,” Titan said. “Listen, Eli: right now there is a very rare, once in a lifetime opportunity sitting before you. We need to get people off that overpass as quickly as possible, and your power could make that happen. And we’re prepared to compensate you for it.”

Eli snorted. “My power can’t help anyone. All I do is destroy stuff.”

“Today that’s exactly what we need. The Super world is a funny place; you never know which ability will save the day. This time, it’s yours, so be grateful. Few people ever get the chance to really make a difference.”

“You want me to just forget about the fact that you all killed my brother, and that you broke my damn legs into pieces? You and all those Heroes can go fuck yourselves.”

Titan leaned back a touch, a feat that was actually quite impressive in his crouched position. “Honestly, I don’t blame you for that sentiment. If the tables were turned, I’d probably feel the same way. But there’s a flaw in your logic, Eli. Those people stuck out there aren’t Heroes. They’re just regular folks. Families going to work or school who got caught up in a battle of beings that exist on a scale they can’t even comprehend. Now when I look at all the bodies that were dropped around here, I don’t see any with big corroded holes in them. That tells me that you, Eli, are not a killer. Even when you shot at me, you went for the side, an attack that would injure but probably not kill. Maybe I’m wrong and you don’t mind letting dozens of innocent people die out of spite, but I don’t think I am. I don’t think you want all that blood on your hands. But make no mistake: if you do nothing and let people die, you will feel the weight of their loss for the rest of your life. Trust me.”

“It’s your job to help people, not mine,” Eli protested.

“It’s everyone’s job to help people. I just get to do it on a bigger scale. Today, so can you.”

Eli stayed silent for a long moment, before pushing himself up a few more inches. “You’ll fix my legs?”

“We’ll have to. You’re going to need your focus for what’s ahead,” Titan told him.

“What about jail?”

“Like I said, it’s pretty obvious you didn’t kill anyone, so that’s in your favor. I’ve already gotten word from the DVA that if you’re willing to pitch in on saving those people, they’re willing to be lenient on you. You may even be able to get on some sort of work release; there’s bound to be plenty of people who could use your abilities. And on top of all of that, I’ll personally speak on your behalf if your case goes to trial. I might not be the most popular Hero around anymore, but people tend to listen when we say someone isn’t beyond saving. So you tell me, Eli, are you too far gone?”

“N. . . no. I’ll take the deal. Patch me up then show me what you want destroyed.”

“Wonderful. Oh, and Eli, this probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: if you try and double-cross me or hurt anyone, I’ll break a lot more than your legs.”

“You’re right, it did go without saying,” Eli replied.

“Glad to hear. Dispatch, this is Titan. I need Fix-It brought to my location as soon as possible. We’ve got a way to get this situation under control.”

59.

               “Get everyone back from the debris,” Titan ordered into his comm. It had taken longer than he wanted to meet up with Fix-It then get back to the barrier of cars and concrete, but he’d finally arrived with a freshly-healed Eli in tow. The young man had borne the journey better than others that Titan had leapt around with before, though his skin was slightly blanched as Titan set him back onto solid ground.

“Heard,” Galvanize replied. “Pulling back as far as we can safely go. What’s the ETA on opening up a way out for us? Reports from below say they won’t be able to keep the overpass suspended much longer. Supers are pretty much the only things keeping us aloft right now.”

“If this works, then we should have a clear path in less than a minute. If not, I’m going to have to be sloppy in opening up a hole.”

“I’ll cross my fingers for Plan A,” Galvanize replied.

While they’d been talking, Eli had walked up and down the length of the barrier, assessing which places to target first. Titan kept a close eye on the kid, watching for any sign that he was thinking about running. Thankfully, Eli was either a man of his word or he was smart enough to know that Titan wouldn’t let him go; regardless, he made no movement to bolt. Instead, he turned back to the man who had beaten, crippled, and then helped fix him all in the span of less than half an hour.