Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots (3 page)

The man from Marketing hung up the phone, leaned back in his chair, and tapped the button for the intercom. “Heloise? Contact Retrieval, if you’d be so kind?

“It would appear to be rabbit season.”

VELVETEEN

vs.

The Midnight Coffee Society

A
FTER GETTING OUT OF
I
SLEY
, California—home of the Isley Crawfish Festival, the least helpful police department Velma had ever encountered, and oh, right, roughly ten thousand pissed-off crustaceans bent on getting vengeance for the years of oppression and butter sauce—the simple monotony of Interstate 5 had been something of a blessing. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of blacktop running straight the length of the West Coast, filled with drivers and roadkill and police speed traps and no crawfish. No crawfish at all.

Unfortunately, I-5 also ran straight through the some of the hottest regions of California. If Velma had been driving a car with little amenities like “air conditioning” and “recent maintenance,” everything still might have been okay. But she’d been paying the bulk of the proceeds from her low-paying jobs to her parents for years, and automobile upkeep had just fallen by the side of the metaphorical road. Which led, perhaps inevitably, to the car breaking down by the side of a much more literal road, leaving Velma to kick the wheels and swear at it like she expected it to make a difference.

It did not make a difference.

“Fucked-up times five
million
,” she muttered, when her (rather impressive) stock of expletives was finally exhausted.

One good Samaritan, a tow-truck ride, and a stop at the Red Bluff repair shop later, Velma was facing a two-thousand-dollar repair bill and another delay in getting to her increasingly delayed job interview in Portland, Oregon. The job interview that was supposed to save her from a life of temping and excuses . . . all assuming she could get there, of course. A trip that depended on somehow finding a way to pay a two thousand dollar repair bill when she was down to little more than the cash she needed for gas and convenience-store hot dogs.

Six years of waitressing, working retail, and crappy temp jobs had left Velma with something verging on a sixth sense where job openings were concerned. Not the most useless superpower on the market—not even the most useless superpower someone had tried to build a hero career on—but at the moment, that was all she had. One of the coffee shops she’d passed on the way to the mechanic had a “Help Wanted” sign in the window.

Begging. Pleading. Promises. And finally, she was set: she’d work at Andy’s Coffee Palace and sleep in the room behind the mechanic’s place until she’d paid off the cost of her repairs. Then she’d be free and clear and ready to grovel in Portland, far away from California, from Crawfish Festivals and engine trouble and The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division.

Two thousand dollars. That was all that stood between her and freedom.

*

Ask the average man on the street “what’s it like to be a superhero?”, and all you’re going to hear is how amazing it is. Superpowers. Everybody wants superpowers, right? The ability to fly, so that you never have to ride another public bus with shitty shocks. The ability to read minds, so you never have to worry about people lying to you. The ability to walk through walls, to move things with a thought, to teleport, to change shapes, to control plants—at last count, the federally recognized list of superpowers filled over a hundred pages, and of those powers, maybe half were unique. Only one hero had ever demonstrated the specific power to control lamps. Only one heroine had ever appeared with the power to force people to speak in actual word balloons. The big powers had hundreds of entries, the little powers, maybe one or two. There was even a section for theoretical powers, the ones that
should
exist but hadn’t been verifiably documented yet.

“Semi-autonomous animation of totemic representations of persons and animals, most specifically cloth figures, including minor transformation to grant access to species-appropriate weaponry” has been officially listed in the “animus powers” list under “unique.” For years, the entry contained no specific details as to the hero or heroine who originally displayed that power. This is entirely because the heroine who displayed it was under the age of eighteen when her powers were first identified, and did not choose to pursue a career in professional heroing when her majority arrived.

Because there’s a dark side to superheroing, a side that’s actually worse, in its own fucked-up little way, than finding loved ones stuffed into refrigerators and having costumed supervillains constantly trying to kill you. It’s the side where most heroes don’t actually do anything to wind up with superpowers. When Velma was first sold—pardon, “recruited”—to The Super Patriots, Inc. to become part of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division, she’d gone through the standard barrage of tests. The scientists determined that her powers were the result of cumulative mutation coming from both her parents, activated by exposure to a mysteriously irradiated stuffed bunny while she was home sick with the chickenpox. They figured the radiation from the television probably didn’t help.

Most people who aren’t born superheroes wind up with great powers and the attendant great responsibility because they met dying aliens, or found magic artifacts, or were exposed to some sort of toxic waste. Velma got hers from a child hood disease and a thrift store bunny rabbit with one eye missing. If anybody had ever wondered why she wasn’t as committed to the cause of justice as some of her teammates, they should really have taken a look at her crappy origin story.

*

Tying her garish green apron around her waist, Velma bared her teeth at the mirror in what was intended to be a cheery smile. That was instruction number seventeen in the helpful Employee Handbook provided to her by Cyndi, the general manager. Cyndi dotted the “i” in her name with a little heart. As far as Velma was concerned, that actually told her everything she would ever need to know about Cyndi. Still, this was the only job in town, and she was determined not to lose it over something as simple as refusing to smile when she was told to. Even if smiling was hurting her cheeks and likely to frighten customers.

“Ve-el-ma!” called Cyndi merrily from the front of the store. Cyndi did everything merrily. Cyndi probably vomited in a merry fashion, with cartoon birds helpfully holding her hair out of the splatter radius. (That was an unfair thought, and Velma scolded herself accordingly. The Princess was a very effective superheroine, and one of the nicest people she’d ever worked with during her own short career as Velveteen, in addition to being one of the few heroes to stick by her after she retired. Since the Princess’s powers largely manifested themselves as stereotypical icons of the “princessing world,” she was forever tied to cartoon birds in Velma’s mind. It was just that the cartoon birds in question were usually vultures.)

“Yeah, boss?” called Velma, turning away from the mirror.

“Come on, silly bunny! It’s time to meet your public!”

Shrugging away the thousand horrible memories that came with the word “bunny,” Velma gritted her teeth, forced her smile to stay in place, and turned to meet her fate.

*

There was a single table in the darkest corner of Andy’s Coffee Palace, an otherwise pleasantly well-lit haven for the caffeinated, the cool, and those who just wanted free wireless access. At the table, there were two chairs, each of which seemed to be located in its own pool of slightly darker shadow. And in those two chairs were two dark figures, both casting shadows twice as dark as they should have been, both jittering with the slow, constant vibration of people who have consumed far more coffee than the human body is really equipped to deal with.

“Everything moves toward r-r-r-readiness,” said the first of the two, voice dropped to an unnaturally low register that was probably meant to project an aura of menace. All it managed to project was the over-wired mania of a man who should really have logged off his MMORPG hours ago and given his body time to forgive him for the traumas of the day.

“Our G-G-Glorious Leader has confirmed that the final shipment will be arriving tonight, ready to b-b-b-brew and consume at the very stroke of midnight.” The second voice was almost an exact mirror of the first. Only the most careful of listeners would have been able to hear the stutter for what it really was: not a speech impediment, but the slight delay of a speaker unable to process the amount of data it was receiving at a realistic rate. A listener that careful might also have had the perception to see the way the hands of the speakers trembled as they reached for their coffee mugs, fingers blurring in and out of visibility as they forced themselves to slow enough for those brief moments of contact.

“And then—”

“—at last—”

“—we will have a sufficient quantity of the sacred fluid—”

“—to baptize this Godforsaken town in the sacred name of the bean and the brew and the beginning of all things!” The two spoke faster and faster as their words began to overlap, until the artificial deepness had been shed entirely, replaced by a chittering buzz that sounded almost like a coffee grinder going into full deployment.

One of the shop’s other patrons glanced over toward the table in the room’s darkest corner. The table where no one was willing to sit, since the air conditioning never seemed to reach into that corner—something about the air currents and the way the vents were configured—and the wireless didn’t really work. The table where cups would just spill for no reason anyone could see, where newspapers tore, where sugar packets disappeared at an unrealistic rate. Some of the coffee shop’s patrons said that the table was haunted, possibly by the spirit of the coffee shop’s missing owner, Andy. Andrew Patterson, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances immediately following the receipt of a rare new type of coffee bean from somewhere in Central America.

Unseen, the two dark figures at the darkest of the shop’s tables cast longing looks toward the brighter tables around them, their eyes lingering on the coffee cups they were unable to reach.

“Tonight,” they whispered, with a single voice consumed by longing.

*

After six minutes, fourteen seconds in Cyndi’s presence, Velma was starting to forget exactly why she had decided to quit the superhero business. Sure, the hours were crap, no amount of medical insurance would help you out after aliens from the seventh dimension removed your spine, and bulimia was such a part of the status quo that most superheroines were essentially supermodels in capes, but the pay was great. Merchandising alone could make a hero or heroine with a salable power a multimillionaire. Assuming they lived that long.

They certainly didn’t work minimum wage jobs for chirpy-voiced Barbie dolls who believed that Valley Girl culture was the ultimate expression of mankind’s development as a species.

“And I just want to, like, say how
totally
and like
awesomely
delighted we are to have you working here at Andy’s Coffee Palace, where we, like, revere the sacred bean in all its totally bitchin’ forms.”

And I don’t believe you just said “bitchin’,”
thought Velma, resisting the urge to puncture her eardrums with straws. “Well, I’m really grateful for the job,” she said carefully. “Although I didn’t realize this was a church. I’m not really a church-going kind of person.”

“Oh, like, don’t worry about it,” twinkled Cyndi. “We don’t require that you keep the faith before you’ve tasted your first cup of midnight coffee.”

Velma blinked. “I was kidding.”

“That’s okay. I’m not.”

The crazy just kept upping the ante in this town. Forcing her smile to stay in place, Velma said, “Midnight? I thought we closed at eleven.”

“Well, like, technically we do.” Velma breathed a silent sigh of relief, only to catch Cyndi’s next words and wish that she hadn’t dared to drop her guard that far: “It’s just that the local branch of the Midnight Bean Society rents the place every Wednesday, and they, like, really pay well, so it means we can keep offering free wireless access.” She gave Velma a pleading, doe-eyed look. “You can stay tonight, can’t you?”

“Well, I don’t think that I can—”

“You’ll be making double-overtime plus tips after you’ve been on the clock for eight hours.”

Velma nodded so firmly she was afraid her head might fall off. “I’m absolutely staying.”

*

Velma had worked in coffee shops before, and knew the basic routines the job required. Sure, the details changed from place to place, but except for that one New Age vegan coffee shop in Berkeley (which only served coffee brewed from cruelty-free beans), the big picture remained essentially the same. After an hour on the floor at Andy’s Coffee Palace, she could probably have done the job in her sleep. She tuned Cyndi out—as much as it was possible to tune out someone whose voice could probably have been used to cut glass—and just served coffee, cleared tables, and wished that she hadn’t broken her iPod a week before leaving the Bay Area.

“—ooOoooOoo!” squealed Cyndi. “My favorite show is starting!” Grabbing a remote control from beneath the counter, she clicked the coffee shop’s television into sudden, blaring life. A few patrons looked up, scowling, but settled once they saw the screen. Apparently, Cyndi’s tastes were well known to the regulars, and tolerated because of her place in the circle of coffee. Velma had her back to the screen, and while she heard the set click on, she didn’t see the channel, or realize what Cyndi was turning on.

And then the theme music flooded the room. The damnable, familiar theme music, with its bouncy major key and its easy-to-sing lyrics that burrowed into the brain like tapeworms. The theme that had haunted her dreams for years, and her nightmares for even longer. The theme that was like Pavlov’s bell for middle school students all over the country, causing them to turn and start begging their parents for the latest toys, clothes, and tie-in novels.