Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots (2 page)

All these reasons and more played heavily in Velma Martinez’s decision
not
to become a professional superheroine. Anyway, the dental plan was lousy, retirement was non-existent, and the paparazzi were flat-out diabolical. After spending seven years as part of The Super Patriots, Inc.’s stable of child heroes, Velma had been happy to walk away, quietly hanging up her tights and her rabbit-eared headband as she slipped into obscurity. The identities of child superheroes were protected under federal law, and she’d never been flashy enough, or wacky enough, or even—as honesty demanded she admit—pretty enough for anyone to bother tracking her down.

When they wrote the inevitable history of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division, she doubted that “Velveteen,” known in her civilian life as Velma Martinez, would rate so much as a footnote. That was a-okay with her. Been there, lived that life, worn that spandex, and moved on.

All she had to do was keep telling herself that. Every morning, for the rest of her life.

Not that “moved on” was looking all that much better than supervillains and spandex just at the moment. Velma pulled her car to a stop in the lot in front of the Isley General Store, unfolding her road map of Northern California and subjecting it to the latest in a succession of baleful glares. The map did not respond by helpfully restructuring itself. The map didn’t respond by doing anything of any use at all. Finally, with a deep and irritated sigh, she crumpled it into a ball, tossed it onto the passenger seat, and clambered out of the car.

There was a painting of a cheerful cartoon crawfish in the store window, accompanied by a sign proclaiming “Isley Crawfish Festival—Fishin’, Food, and Family Fun!” In Velma’s admittedly limited experience, “family fun” usually meant “Mama cries herself to sleep after Daddy passes out drunk, and Velma and the teddy bears clean the whole place before morning.” Not exactly what you’d call “fabulously functional.” More like “fantastically fucked-up.” And then Velma got too tired to control her powers during a class field trip to the museum, and things got even worse, fucked-up times fifty.

It turns out the management of The Super Patriots, Inc. will pay a lot for legal guardianship of budding superheroes, especially ones as easy to market and family-friendly as Velma. It also turned out that Velma’s family had never been as attached to her as she thought they were. One little accident and she’d suddenly found herself a ward of the company, wearing a costume designed by Marketing and standing on a stage in front of what seemed like millions of people, trying not to vomit.

Fucked-up times five
thousand
.

Velma shook herself, shrugging off the memories of those bitter, by-gone days, and stepped into the Arctic, air-conditioned chill of the Isley General Store.

*

“Well? Have you seen The Great Injustice?”

Clattering, clacking, and the sound of hundreds upon hundreds of tiny, hard-shelled legs tapping against the riverbank gravel.

“Have you seen The Terrible Mockery?”

More clacking, angry now, as if hundreds of serrated claws were snapping open and closed in mute and passionate fury.

“Have you seen The Horrific Preparations?”

The clacking rose in volume, seeming almost to echo off the peaceful shores of the Sacramento River. Any innocent river-rat who’d happened to wander along at that moment would almost certainly have sworn off all controlled substances, from marijuana to caffeine, just to make sure they’d never see a scene like that again. The normally pebble-gray banks of the river were red and brown with the bodies of hundreds of crawfish, all waving their claws in obvious rage. If they’d had tiny pitchforks and tiny torches, they would have looked prepared to storm a tiny castle.

At the center of their crustacean congress stood a tall, almost regal figure with his hands folded out of sight behind his back, his pointed chin jutting forward to present his finely-pointed black goatee to his appreciative audience. He cut a striking figure. Almost striking enough to overcome the fact that nobody really looks all that menacing when they’re wearing a giant lobster suit.

Almost. Not quite.

“My brethren and. . . sistren. . . tonight we bring the horror that is the Isley Crawfish Festival to an end! Tonight we march upon the biped bastards, and we teach them the true might of the crustacean empire! Tonight, we strike with all the speed and fury of a claw closing around its intended prey!” The clacking and clattering of the crawfish was becoming deafening. A manic grin splitting his face, the man in the lobster suit raised the enormous claws that had replaced his hands, and shouted, “TONIGHT WE TEACH THEM THE TERRIBLE PRICE OF BUTTER SAUCE! TONIGHT, MY BRETHREN AND SISTREN, TONIGHT THEY FACE—THE CLAW!!!”

Evil laughter and the clacking of crawfish claws echoed out across the Sacramento River, scaring several ducks, a stray cat, and a large bullfrog that had just been minding its own business.

The hour for crustacean vengeance was drawing nigh.

*

“Look,” said Velma for what felt like the ninety-first time, schooling her tone to one of calm friendliness. No, sir, no anger management issues
here.
No irrational desire to take unhelpful clerks and pitch them into the river
here
. No-siree-Bob. “I just need to know how to get from here to Portland. I’m supposed to be at a job interview tomorrow, and if I don’t get back on the road soon, I’m not going to have time to get a good night’s sleep.” With the state of her résumé, she needed all the help that she could get.

“Well, missy, I don’t rightly know how you ended up in Isley—”

Neither do I
, Velma thought spitefully.

“—but you’ve picked the right night to fetch up! Why, this is the opening night of our world-famous Crawfish Festival, and you wouldn’t want to miss a party like that one, would you? Pretty little thing like you, you’d be the belle of our ball!”

“Heh,” said Velma, fighting back the urge to punch the old geezer square in the dentures. “It’s tempting, but—”

“An’ of course, if you come to the Festival, you can talk to the Chief of Police about getting your car back. Why, he’d probably be happy to. . .”

Velma was already accelerating toward the door at a speed that would have seriously impressed the speedsters back in The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division, most of whom had never seen her move at anything faster than an irritated trot. The clerk shook his head as the door slammed shut behind her, setting the bell jingling madly.

“Now
there’s
a girl in painful need of some crawfish fritters,” he opined, to his empty store.

*

Despite arriving on the scene while her car was still in the process of being hooked to the tow truck, Velma had had no luck whatsoever in convincing the Chief of Police that he should just give it back to her. Finally—and disturbingly—he’d agreed to let her off without a ticket and return her car without impound fees . . . if she was willing to wait until after the Crawfish Festival. The town’s passion for their little party bordered on pathological, and would have been starting to unnerve her even if it
hadn’t
taken away her car. Still, no car, no Portland; no Portland, no job interview; no job interview, no gainful employment, and another damn year of temp jobs and excuses. She was tired of temp jobs and excuses, especially since failure to pay her annual bribes to the parents was way too likely to result in the “accidental” revelation of her former line of work to six or seven of the finest reporters the tabloids had to offer.

Nuh-uh. A little festival was a small price to pay to avoid the spandex set. And at least Isley was too small to rank a resident superhero. Velma sat on a bench in the town center, watching the little booths going up, and tried not to dwell.

It wasn’t easy.

As the hours ticked by and the smell of crawfish fritters began to drift across the river, it became downright hard.

After a horde of small children thundered through, dousing her pants with genuine Isley Crawfish Punch—which she could only pray didn’t contain any genuine Isley crawfish—it became impossible.

“That is
it
,” Velma snarled, surging to her feet. “I came, I stayed, now they can give me back my car and I can
go
.” She turned, intending to stalk off and find the Chief of Police, and nearly walked straight into a tall, almost regal man wearing what looked like a full-body lobster suit. He froze. So did she. For a moment, the two of them just stood there, staring at one another.

Finally, in a tone that couldn’t decide between “delight” and “irritation,” Velma asked, “David? David Mickelstein?”

The lobster-man’s antennae twitched. They were the only crustacean trait in an otherwise human face, making their motion seem even more out of place. “Velma?”

“Oh, wow! You were just about the
last
person I expected to find here!” said Velma. (The actual last person was, of course, Sparkle Bright, the former leader of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division, and the girl Velma had voted privately most likely to drive people to supervillainy, just so they could become Sparkle Bright’s archnemesis and squash her like the annoying insect that she was.) “I thought you were still fighting crime on the rivers with the Mississippi Queen. Vacation?”

“Something like that,” said David “The Claw” Mickelstein, rubbing the back of his neck with one claw. “What are you doing here?”

“Car got towed, waiting to get it back.” Velma smiled. “Gosh, you haven’t changed a bit. You’re still the same nice Jewish boy genetically combined with a giant crustacean by his scientist father in a vain effort to save him from the inexplicable genetic wasting disease.” The habit of recapping in conversation was hard to break, especially when dealing with other superheroes. “What have you been up to?”

“Oh. This and that. Stuff. You know. Figuring out what I want to do with myself. You?”

“Just temping. Secretarial work, mostly.”

David looked increasingly uncomfortable. “Look, Vel, I know we haven’t really seen each other in a long time, but would it be okay if you, I don’t know, went to Starbucks for the next two hours?”

“Are you asking me out?”

“No, I’m asking you to leave.”

Velma blinked at him. “You’re . . . what?”

Screams erupted from the booths nearest to the river.

David sighed.

*

Wave after wave of angry crustaceans poured up out of the Sacramento and swarmed through the Isley commons, clacking their claws and attacking anyone foolish enough to have worn sandals to an outdoor summer festival. There were a great many targets to be found. The screams increased, ringing through the night until they almost drowned out the constant susurration of the menacing crawfish now threatening to overrun the town.

“Sorry about this,” said The Claw, and conked his former teammate on the head with one mighty chitinous claw before running off to join his crawfish army in their revolution.

*

Velma Martinez had always possessed a wide variety of positive attributes. Good knees, good vision, good teeth. . . and a very, very hard head. Picking herself up off the grass, she cast a furious glare after her former teammate—now clearly turned supervillain—as he went running off toward his little army of crawfish minions.

Velma Martinez had always possessed a wide variety of negative attributes. Among them, her temper. Pledges about “retiring from the business” and “not using your powers for anything more obvious than sending teddy bears to the kitchen for a refill” were entirely forgotten in the wake of getting bonked on the head. For the first time in six years, Velma was ready to get her Velveteen on.

*

Twelve years ago
. . .

“This is just a fascinating hero name we’ve picked for you, Velma,” said the man from Marketing, smiling benevolently over his clipboard. Velma squashed the urge to send her Barbie to scratch the eyes out of his smug face. “And why do you think we chose that name for you?”

“‘Cause I bring toys to life, and they said that ‘The Puppeteer’ and ‘Bride of Chucky’ had negative connotations,” she said.

The man from Marketing laughed. “No, silly! You bring toys to life with
love
.”

That was the exact moment when Velma knew that the man from Marketing was an idiot.

*

The Isley Crawfish Festival, like small town festivals everywhere, had invested in a small midway with toys and games for the kiddies to win. Sadly, none of the kiddies at this year’s festival had been given the opportunity to win so much as a stuffed bunny before the untimely invasion of the crawfish minions. Even more sadly, many of them would be denied the pleasure of soft toys for several years after their parents saw those same toys sprout teeth, fangs, and independent motion, climb down from the prize shelves, and wade gleefully into the fray.

“KICK THEIR ASSES!” shrieked Velveteen, who, after a long day of driving, detours, and idiots, was glad to finally have something to smash.

“DO YOU OPPOSE ME?!” demanded The Claw.

“Oh,
David
.” Velveteen sighed, and slapped her palms together over her head. “Grow up.”

And that’s when the bear-shaped bouncy castle kicked his ass.

*

The ruins of the hundred and sixty-third annual Isley Crawfish Festival glimmered in the first light of the morning as the Isley Chief of Police dropped Velma’s car keys into her hand. “Ah. . . sorry about this,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “The tank of gas and the road provisions are worth it. And the promise that no one will ever,
ever
know what happened here. Because if one person breathes so much as a word. . .”

The Chief went satisfyingly pale. Velma smiled.

“Great party,” she said, and turned to head for her car. Along the way, she scooped up one last discarded stuffed bunny from the gutter, tucking it under her arm.

Just in case.

*

“Hello? Yes, this is the Marketing Department. Really? Are you quite certain? Excellent. Send your proof right over. Yes, the bounty still applies. Thank you. Yes, we’ll be in touch.”