Hero (13 page)

"I don't know," I said. "Probably some simple drills to see how our powers work. I wouldn't worry about it too much." But that kind of anxiety was catchy. I didn't like think¬ing about it.

"I heard someone in the last group was wheeled out on a stretcher." Polar Pete wheezed and took a hit off the inhaler attached to the belt around his parka.

I was determined to appear brave when that door opened and revealed whatever dangerous scenario they had cooked up for us. I relaxed and breathed deeply through my nose and stared at the door.

"Nice tie." Miss Scarlett shoved past me to the front of the line. "Very heroic."

Our group of wannabes held our breath as Sooz collected the waivers and pressed a button on the wall. The door slowly began to lift, like a fancy stainless steel version of an automatic garage door.

"C'mon, guys, let's do it!" Mighty Mite piped from the floor in a tiny voice that sounded like he'd just taken a few hits off a helium balloon.

At the last minute, I stepped in front of Miss Scarlett. No way was I letting her push me to the back of the bus.

Our muscles tensed as the door opened all the way. The stainless steel floor and walls of the room slowly faded away, and the next thing we knew we were standing right in the heart of the city. Typhoon Timmy dodged a taxi cab as it zoomed past us. Other tryout groups turned and looked in our direction. The League had assembled us all together for the last big test. I saw Ruth, the old woman from the waiting room, massaging her knee by a hot dog stand. She bought a foot-long.

"Okay, guys, listen up." Golden Boy suddenly appeared in front of us. "Here's the scenario: Sergeant Psycho has taken over the city and induced a widespread hallucination of mass hysteria. There's panic in the streets."

"No problem." Vicious Violet grinned and sharpened her fangs with a manhole. "I'll calm them down."

"We'll be watching you from the console room." Golden Boy pointed to a window high above at the far end of the room. "You will be graded on ability and teamwork, and your primary goal is to ensure the safety of the crowds."

We looked up to the control room and saw the League sitting at their judges' table. Miss Scarlett winked at them. Uberman waved back.

"Oh, and one more thing." Golden Boy turned to us before he left. "Sergeant Psycho and his Super Soldiers have hidden a dirty bomb somewhere near the traffic square. You have five

minutes before it explodes and takes everyone with it."

"Five minutes!" gasped Mighty Mite.   ,

"And counting." Golden Boy looked at his watch and dis¬appeared in a gold flash.

Good thing they're starting with the small stuff. What do they do for real training exercises if you make the team? Thwart thermonuclear war? Discover a cure for cancer?

Ruth sidled up to me and nudged me in the ribs. "Piece of cake," she said through a bite of hot dog.

"Help me, help me, help me!" A legion of tourists ran screaming past us and knocked over innocent bystanders in their path.

"We'll take care of this." Typhoon Timmy puffed up his chest and nodded at Polar Pete. Pete raised his hand and a giant wall of ice surrounded most of the stampeding tourists. Timmy summoned a whirlwind to scoop out ot harm's way a group of young visitors who were waiting in an endless line for half-price tickets to Rent.

Another stampede of out-of-towners ran past a building under construction and knocked over the scaffolding, which sent the construction workers tumbling from above. Chemical King and a group of others took to the sky and caught them. Still others engaged various Super Soldiers in combat. Miss Scarlett bent her knees, ready to leap up and join the battle in the sky.

"You know, I've got this really bad hangnail," she said to me and sucked on her pinky finger. "Maybe you could help me with it after I'm done with the real fighting."

And then she was airborne.

I looked up at the console room and saw the Spectrum and Warrior Woman nod at each other and then scribble down something. I wanted to jump in and join the fray and make a difference. I needed to make an impression, fast.

I looked over and saw Ruth pop the last bit of hot dog in her mouth. Three overfed tourist kids ran by squealing like pigs.

"Aren't you going to do anything?" I asked.

Ruth looked up at me and dabbed at a glob of mustard on the corner of her mouth.

"Don't get your knickers in a twist, kid. They're just holograms." She swallowed the bite. "First thing you gotta do is find that Psycho guy and take him out. Then find the bomb, and we all go home early." She finished wiping the mustard off her face with a napkin.

I ran into the crowd and waved my arms wildly and shouted for the flying heroes to come down. I yelled that we needed to find Sergeant Psycho and cut off the hysteria from the source, but no one would listen. So much for teamwork.

"Four minutes!" I shouted. "We only have four minutes left!"

No one bothered to come down from the sky. Each hero was busy doing his or her best to rescue any person from harm, or kick the ass of whatever Super Soldier they could get their hands on, like whoever had the most saves or knockouts at the end of the battle would win the game. A whole lot of good that would do us when the city blew up.

I turned back to Ruth.

"How are we supposed to find this guy?"

Ruth struck a match off the bottom of her shoe and lit acigarette. "You heal things, right?"

I nodded my head and waved for her, to hurry up with wherever she was going with this.

"Well." She took a long drag. "Then you must be able to see what needs healing. Just look for the highest concentration of people who aren't right in the head."

Why didn't I think of that? I took a deep breath, massaged my temples for effect—just in case the League was watching me—and squinted at all the panicked people in the streets. Sure enough, if I concentrated, I could see an oily blackness swirling around in their heads where their brains were supposed to be. My eyes scanned the crowd and I saw smatterings of people with the black brain goo running away from us and getting corralled in small groups of twos and threes by some of the wannabe heroes.

My eyes made their way to the center of the square, and I saw more and more people with the blackness in their heads. The largest concentration of swirling blackness appeared in a throng of people standing around a fountain. There must have been hundreds of them, and they were noting, their brains submerged in oily darkness. The source of the blackness, the largest concentration of dark matter, was crystal clear to me.

I pointed to the fountain.

"He's over there!"

There in front of the giant statue in the middle of the fountain of Ares, god of war, stood Sergeant Psycho. He cradled his helmet under his arm in emulation of the statue behind him while he commanded his troops in battle. He had one of those crazy gleams in his eye, the kind where the tops of the pupils don't reach the eyelids. He was safe, blanketed from us by the

rioting masses infected by his insanity.

"What next?" I asked.

"Look for what seems out of place." Ruth's attention drifted for a moment to another street vendor. "Do you smell French fries?"

I stared closer. There was something off about the statue. Not off as in how strange it is for a major city of a family values—country to have a fountain with a giant statue of a naked pagan war god at its center, but something else.

The stone was a pale grayish beige, the same light-color khaki you see in the preppy clothes stores, so I thought it was strange that some graffiti artist had gone to all the trouble of painting the helmet black.

"Ruth, the bomb, it's in the helmet on the statue!"

Ruth picked through a tub of fries and plucked the burned ones out.

"What do we do now?" I shouted at Ruth. "We're running out of time."

She calmly held three fingers in the air, then two fingers, then one, then . . .

WHUMP!

It was the guy from the waiting room who'd had all the sneezing fits and nosebleeds. A Super Soldier had casually tossed him aside from the fray.

"Sorry." He sniffled and wiped his nose with his sleeve.

"Quick, what do you do?" I asked.

"Uh." He sniffled again. "I make people sick."

Ruth and I shared a look.

"What's your name?"

"Larry, Typhoid Larry."

"Larry, I'm Thom, and this is Ruth. Nice to meet you." I shook his hand and helped him up. He seemed surprised that I would touch him. Ruth held up her hands and wriggled her fingers like she was saying Nice to meet you, Larry, but keep your germs to yourself.

"Larry, I need you to take out everyone around that fountain for me, especially that crazy guy in the middle. Can you do that?"

He grinned. "I can do that."

He walked to the edge of the crowd and his body began to shake and he broke into a sweat. He pressed his lips together and his cheeks began to puff out like a bullfrog. Then he doubled over, grabbed his stomach, retched, and threw up on the shoulder of one of the crazed rioters.

This caused the rioters to begin dropping, one by one, to their knees and throwing up on each other. They dropped in a chain reaction, like a coil of projectile-vomit dominoes toppling each other over, until finally, at the top of the crowd, Sergeant Psycho's knees buckled and he went down in a pool of his own vomit.

I jumped over the convulsing bodies to the center of the fountain and climbed the statue. I glanced at my watch; we only had twenty seconds left. My hands began to heat up, and I felt drawn to touch the bomb inside the helmet.

"Thom!" Ruth sidestepped a puddle of throw-up. "I'm not sure you should touch that thing."

"We only have ten seconds left!"

I looked around at all the heroes engaged in combat or res¬cues, then glanced over at the control booth. Each member of the League was leaning forward and watching expectantly to see what I'd do next. I saw Uberman bite his lip with concern, and at that moment I wanted to impress him more than anything in the world.

My hands were scalding hot now, begging me to place them on the cool, smooth sides of the helmet. I set my palms down on the bomb and I could immediately feel the energy course through them.

Suddenly the lights of the city flickered like strobe lights. The crowds of people began to digitize, like when you get dirt on your DVD and the scene pauses and the images become pix-elated. I smelled burned plastic and saw a trickle of smoke rising from my hands. Then I heard a sickening whir, and the entire hologram of the city, people and all, faded away. Whhhhhhhhrrrrzzzzzzt.

The next thing I knew we were enveloped in darkness.

"Thorn?" I heard Ruth ask, but I couldn't tell from which direction.

Suddenly the floorboards ignited and exploded, revealing machinery on fire underneath. The tryout heroes screamed and dodged the flames and shrapnel. An emergency siren howled, and I blacked out.

"You short-circuited the entire S.T.A." The Spectrum wrapped a bandage around my forearm, where a stray piece of shrapnel had grazed me.

"I short-circuited your what?" I asked.

"You burned out the whole Simulated Training Area," Warrior Woman said. "You're lucky no one was hurt."

"If Silver Bullet and I hadn't been able to extinguish the fire with our superspeed, I hate to think what might have happened," Golden Boy chimed in. He dropped an empty fire-extinguisher next to my foot, and it landed on the floor with a clang.

Silver Bullet pinched the space above his nose between his eyes as if a migraine were coming on. "This is going to take months to rebuild."

I sat up and saw the entire group of tryouts surrounding me in what remained of the burned-out room. I tugged at the bandage on my arm.

"You're fine, it's just a scratch," the Spectrum assured me.'

I wasn't fine, though. I was more humiliated than I'd ever been in my entire life. I could have been stark naked and I wouldn't have felt any worse. It wasn't only the hundred young wannabe heroes who stared at me like I was the world's big¬gest loser, but each member of the League was there, too, Uberman included. I tried to make eye contact with him, but he dodged it.

"Okay, people, let's go!" He shouted and clapped his hands once. "Free refreshments in the commissary!"

Miss Scarlett nudged past me.

"Nice going, Supergirl."

None of the other candidates would even look at me as they filed out of the room.

Ruth helped me up.

"Went a little overboard there on the whole save-the-day thing, don't you think." She lit a cigarette and offered me one. I waved it away.

"Still." She sucked in a long drag. "Didn't see anyone else stopping that bomb from going off. Did you?"

I thought about it and she was right. I wanted to say thanks, but my mouth was dry, the corners caked with white, the result of too many nerves.

"Here, I've got some diabetic candy in my purse somewhere." She offered me a hard candy, and I unwrapped it and popped it in my mouth. It tasted like stale butterscotch. "Let's go to the commissary." She put her arm around my shoulders and led me off.

I saw we were going to pass Uberman, who was standing at the door, and I wanted to tell Ruth that we should go another way or wait a minute or two, but I didn't want her to pick up on the fact that I was avoiding him. The woman was pretty damn intuitive, and I knew she'd put two and two together.

"Thom."

Just before we got to the door, I turned around and saw Larry.

"Not now, Larry." I turned back toward Uberman. Soon I was going to pass by him close enough to smell the peppermint on his breath.

"But, Thom—"

I turned around exasperated. "What?"

"I've been trying to tell you I was happy you shook my hand; people usually don't like to touch me."

"Why's that?"

I felt an uncontrollable urge bubble up in my stomach, and

the next thing I knew I'd thrown up right in front of Uberman.

*  *  *

The refreshments they served were worse than the kind we got in school whenever they had to throw together some lame recep¬tion for parents night. I took a halfhearted bite of a cookie to get the taste of throw-up out of my mouth and chucked it in a wastebasket when I couldn't figure out if it was peanut butter or gingerbread. Ruth took a sip of her Kool-Aid and handed me a Dixie cup.