Authors: Ernie Lindsey
K
immie’s in a wheelchair
, and, as usual, she doesn’t want me to push her.
“I can do it,” she insists, “and if you try again, I’m really going to kick your ass once I’m out of this thing.”
We’re walking down a small pier in Phuket, Thailand, where I’m in hiding until the superheroes who are pissed at me believe that I’m really and truly dead, or someone finally convinces them that my intentions were for the greater good.
A small, sun-browned girl chases a beach ball in front of us. Kimmie squeaks to a stop. She’s making an excellent recovery, the doctors say, and if all goes well, she’ll be resurrecting again as a new superhero within a couple of weeks.
I ask, “Have you given any more thought to what your new name will be?”
“Not yet. Any ideas?”
“Is The Cripple already taken?”
“Jerk,” she says, but she can’t hide her grin.
“How about Hot Wheels?”
“Getting warmer.”
It’s been good between us the past few weeks, and I can’t help but wonder what it’s going to be like once she’s back on her feet. Obviously, Daddy Oilbucks could afford the finest nursing care on the planet if she wanted it. No, I’m here because Kimmie “suggests” that I owe her my life, and nursing her is retribution. The truth is, I kinda want to be here…just don’t tell her that. I’m not sure I can take much more of her lording it over me.
We’re connecting on a personal level, and I’m enjoying the fact that I don’t have to fall in love with any woman who smiles at me.
I do owe her my life, kinda. She was trying to protect me. After three years of wanting to bury me, she stepped in front of a gun barrel for my sake.
You know how in movies, you always see people jumping in front of someone else to save their lives? Total bullcrap. It’s one of the all-time biggest fallacies in movies. Human beings, superhero or not, are unable to move quickly enough to block a bullet.
Unless the timing just happens to be perfect, which it was. Kimmie took two bullets to the chest for me. One bounced off a rib, cut through the rest of her flesh without hitting any major organs, and then lodged itself in my hip. She wasn’t so lucky on the other one. It ricocheted around inside, nicked a few things, and then damaged her spine enough to paralyze her from the waist down. She’s strong, though, and to her benefit, she’s been juicing her genetics with hyper-stem-cell injections for the past twenty years.
It won’t be long now before she’s kicking ass again. Her official pardon from President Palmer was announced last week, and she’s promised me that there’ll be no more backroom dealings with the Chinese. The thrill of fighting crime is more of an adrenaline rush than getting away with criminal activities, she says, and I’m glad she’s finally learning that.
We come to a set of benches on the pier, and Kimmie asks if we can stop for a moment. “My hands are getting raw.”
“I told you to wear those little fingerless gloves I got you.”
“And mess up this tan? Are you nuts?”
“I know, I know.”
She leans her head back, soaking up the sun, and I admire her long neck and those perfect breasts. You put her on the cover of a comic book along with all those other spandex-wearing ladies, she’d fit right in. She’s bravely chosen to wear a white bikini.
Lately, showing off those war wounds in her chest are like a badge of honor, but the bullet holes have healed nicely, and the scars aren’t as deep pink as they used to be.
I keep insisting that it causes people to ask too many questions, that we put Bart Alonzo in a morgue for nothing, and people will discover that I’m still alive. I tell her that I don’t want the secret to get out yet, not until I’m ready, and the only thing she says is, “You’re just jealous that they’re staring at my boobs.”
She’s right, but that’s not my point.
Bart woke up in the morgue drawer a couple of days after our epic battle, and I had Sam escort him back to the Maldives. I think he’s happier there anyway, and now that Sam set him up with a dark-skinned island girl, and I gave him my yacht and ample funds to retire on, he’s living the good life. He swears he done working as my
doppelganger
but deep down, I think he has fun with it when I come calling. Some people like that element of danger.
Sam has been back in the States after visiting his family, and insists that he’s ready to fully become Beast Machine. There’s the matter of properly hooking up his armor, but he’s close.
I look up from admiring Kimmie’s recovering physique, past her and about fifty yards down the pier. “Don’t look,” I say, “but he’s still there.”
And what does Kimmie do? She immediately looks and waves flirtatiously at the DPS agent, wearing bike shorts and a helmet, who’s been trailing us for the past week.
He turns away, but not before shaking his head and smiling.
Deke and Lisa say that it’s for our protection, that they want to keep us safe because we have work to do when we’re ready. When I remind them that even though we’re in hiding, we’re still
technically
superheroes and can take care of ourselves, Deke chuckles and insists that the guy will only hover, nothing more.
I also remind him that they had a SALCON double agent among their ranks, and had no idea, and that I’m not entirely comfortable with another DPS goon being so close. “Don’t worry,” Deke had said, “I vetted him personally.”
To which I’d replied, “Oh, just like you did with Charlene?”
He didn’t have anything to say to that. He asked me to trust them.
I do, because he’s General Justice, after all, but I’m relying more on my instincts than Deke’s investigative skills. So far, Dork Shorts hasn’t set off any alarm whistles.
Kimmie lifts her head and asks me to rub some suntan oil on her shoulders. Her repertoire of injections eats cancer like candy, which is why she has no trouble coating herself in what amounts to vegetable oil when she’s in the sun.
I slather the gooey stuff on and massage her at the same time.
She says, “I know you told me already, but I was wasted on painkillers. What was up with that Charlene chick anyway? You had a crush on her, right?”
“Now who’s jealous?”
“No, I mean, if you had a crush on her, how’d you not pick up on something weird? Wait, never mind. I guess that answers my own question. You weren’t thinking with the right brain.”
“Exactly.”
“Then how’d she end up in the support group thing? It seems like it would’ve been hard enough for her to work her way into DPS as an elite agent,
as an undercover SALCON agent
, then into your assassin group as a highly trained killer. How’d she pull all that off?”
“The same way that Deke managed to do it to SALCON and The Minion. You get good at telling lies. And it doesn’t hurt to have a connection like George Silver who’s playing both sides as well.”
“I guess so. Sheesh.” She glances out at the ocean, then over her shoulder at me. “When does his trial start?”
“Six more months, at least, from what Deke says. Now that DPS has been thrust into the national spotlight, especially with that shithead Don Donner, they have to play by more rules. They can’t sneak around in the shadows and pull everybody’s puppet strings. Deke says they’re lucky that Palmer let them stay on, but that’s a thin-ice thing. He told me yesterday that Palmer wants him to head up the department now that General Justice is back, but he said no.”
“Really? Why?”
“He’s happier swinging his war-gavel than pushing papers. Feels too good to be behind the mask again, so they’ll probably promote Lisa.”
“She’ll be great at it.”
“Yeah.” The plan, according to Deke and Lisa, is to pull all the members of SASS, the ones who want to keep that line of work going, underneath the umbrella of Direct Protection Services, considering the fact that Eric Landers, Joe Gaylord, and Conner Carson are all gone, God rest their souls. Plenty of bad guys remaining hidden under the masks of truth and justice, so for people like Tara and Mara, Don Weiss, and Mike and Eleanor, there’s plenty of jobs left to keep them all busy for a long, long time. The rumor is, Ptera-Jackal, the new head of SALCON, is encouraging it. He’s got a lot of cleaning up to do as well if he wants to get that cesspool filtered out.
Kimmie says, “I’d rather you work for her when you go back.”
“If. If I go back. And besides, who says I’m
going
back?”
She raises her sunglasses and gives me a look that suggests I know exactly who says I’m going back.
“What? I’m having fun with you, playing invisible.”
“Leo, really? You and I both know that there are hundreds of supers out there who don’t know the truth yet. You’re a traitor to them. The good ones want to kill you for betraying our kind, and the bad ones want to get rid of you for exposing their charade. And don’t get me started on the supervillains, or that bastard Don Donner, because they’ve seen your face. Everywhere you go, you’re a dead man, at least until some of this gets straightened out.”
“That’s why we pretended to kill off Bart Alonzo.”
“
Pffft
. That was for the media. For the public. Our kind know. Trust me, they know.”
“But I’m—”
“You know what your dad would’ve said.”
“Phil or Bio-Dad?”
“Phil, goofball.”
“He’d probably say, ‘You’re already an idiot, son, don’t prove their point for them.’”
Phil. Damn it. The funeral was emotional. Mom cried. I knew she would. So did I.
“Precisely,” Kimmie says. “Get it through that thick skull, honey. You are
not
Patriotman anymore. You’re not Leo Craft, either. Those guys are dead and gone, and we’re going to sweep the floors clean, invisibly, until it’s time for you to resurrect. Got me?”
I nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.”
“Can I ask one more question?” I slide my hands down the front of her chest, between her Breasts of Perfection, which are the best superhero weapons of all, if you ask me, and then I gently caress her bullet scars. They’re a constant reminder of what she did for me. I’ve been shot dozens of times and always begin healing on impact so there’s no question I could’ve survived Charlene’s last-ditch attempt before Lisa returned fire, but the mere fact that Kimmie was trying to protect me warms my heart in a place that I’d thought had grown dark. Sure, there were crushes and puppy love, and my inability to say hello to a woman without planning a divorce, but there was a spot Kimmie would always occupy, and now there’s light in there again.
She chuckles and shakes her head. “The answer is no.”
“No what? You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”
“I don’t want to get married again, Leo. Not for a while. Let’s see how this goes.”
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask.”
Yes it was. That’s exactly what I was going to ask.
Pathetically, I add, “I was gonna ask if you wanted some ice cream.”
Kimmie uses her hands to roll away from me. She spins the wheelchair around and says, sarcastically, “You’re such a horrible liar when you don’t have a mask on.”
She has a point. Given all the insanity over the past month, it’s a wonder my trust issues haven’t grown deeper roots, because whether you’re a superhero or not, we all hide behind masks and tell the world what it wants to hear. When the masks come off, that’s when you really see who is underneath. Hero and villain alike.
Or, in the case of Deke Carter, someone who you think is a real bastard can throw on a mask and become a superhero.
So yeah, I guess what I’m trying to say is, be careful who you idolize, but don’t be afraid to give somebody else a chance. We’re either hiding behind something on purpose, or we need to hide behind something to
have
a purpose.
Don’t judge a hero by his mask, or some shit like that.
Patriotman, over and out.
S
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