With the lights and TV on, Nightshadow knew Lethe had to be home, but he wasn’t downstairs. Quickly and quietly, Nightshadow stalked upstairs to the second floor and down a short hallway. The door to a small bedroom hung open. On the wall, a black-and-white poster depicting Einstein with E=MC2 printed across the bottom hung above a small bed with a quilt spread over it. Across from it on a short sofa, Lethe lay motionlessly. His arms and legs draped over the cushions and shock had paled his weathered, wrinkled face. Veins showed in his bulging, lightless eyes. A messy, sticky gray substance foamed out of his mouth and nostrils.
Though he was clearly dead, Lethe’s body was still warm, meaning he had only died minutes ago. Offhand, Nightshadow guessed the cause of death to be suffocation or poisoning by whatever substance was leaking out of his orifices. Pinching a bit of it, Nightshadow planted the sample in a small plastic bag he took out of his utility belt and held it up to the light.
Yes, it did resemble webbing.
After securing the sample in a utility belt pouch, Nightshadow searched the room for any other clues, but found nothing. There were no marks, fingerprints, signs of a struggle, or any indication other than the webbing that anyone else had even been here. He’d have to check the rest of the house, but doubted he’d find anything.
The killer must have completely surprised and overwhelmed Lethe, not that the old man could have put up much of a fight. The killer had to have been damn fast too, given his window of opportunity seemed to have been the timeframe between Hyperman finding Lethe here and then dropping Nightshadow off thirteen minutes later. It took three minutes for someone to suffocate, and brain death occurred at the six-minute mark. So it had taken the killer only seven minutes to sneak off without leaving a trace behind him, and Nightshadow doubted he could catch up to him, not with the speed at which he obviously moved. Not many people could sneak around with Hyperman scanning the area, either. That kind of stealth and speed, plus the webbing, narrowed the list of suspects down considerably. Nightshadow didn’t want to believe it though. He hoped this was some kind of frame up and that the Spider-Specter wasn’t responsible.
Nightshadow glanced down at Lethe’s white-haired, heavy-hipped body and wondered if he should even feel sorry for the retired super-criminal who had violated so many people’s memories. Nonetheless, he reached down and closed Lethe’s eyes.
Chapter 5: ON HIGH
Hyperman sat at home with his computer nestled on his lap and stared at a blank computer screen. The balcony doors swung open and a caressingly warm wind ghosted in. Blimps and biplanes darted around in a gorgeous blue sky. His hyper-vision showed him boat races in the bay and an amusement park crowding around the Ferris wheel at the docks. Parades filled the streets below with revelers blowing horns and toasting drinks. People piled onto their balconies and rooftops, cracking open beers and firing up their grills.
Lindsey left him message after message on his new phone, begging him to come out and play for Founder’s Day, the city’s official spring kick-off. He kept putting her off, claiming he had some work to catch up on first. However, he’d finished up all his web design projects for the month well ahead of schedule. He’d also finally beaten back the Subterranean invasion after days of underground fighting followed by tense negotiations. After all that, he definitely thought he deserved a holiday, but he’d promised himself he’d finally start banging out this novel.
Yet, now that he was sitting here, primed and ready to write, nothing came to him. No stories, characters, or situations or anything. He drew a massive blank, and his mind and hyper-senses drifted. He saw smiling piss-happy drunks throwing Frisbees and playing ball everywhere, heard music from all the concerts in the parks, and even tasted the fizzle from every opened beer.
Two pages! Come on! He only wanted to write two pages! They didn’t even have to be good. They just needed to be a start. Still, even after trying to concentrate, he had nothing. The minutes toiled agonizingly on. Every now and then, he’d write a few lines, but almost immediately erase them. The words sounded hollow and clunky. The characters never came to life. The dialogue seemed forced and clichéd. With his hyper-speed, he could have written entire libraries of work by now, but nothing he’d typed out pleased him enough to keep on the page, which drove him mad with frustration. He’d seen and done incredible things all across the universe. He’d traveled through time and fought gods, demons, and monsters. How could he not have anything to write about?
Abruptly, his ears caught a cry for help from across the country in Sunda City. Well, he couldn’t ignore an emergency and that blank page would still be waiting for him when he got back. He had no choice but to spring into action. He jumped up and dove out the window into the sky. Minutes later, he arrived in the Pacific Northwest to smack around Armor Lord, who’d taken an electronics company hostage to repair his futuristic weapons.
Returning home, Hyperman dropped back down onto his couch and grabbed up his laptop to write. Inspiration still refused to spark into a roaring flame. He shifted about uneasily on his seat for a bit, and his hyper-senses meandered far south. Down in Saint Talisman, explosions rang out at an oil platform just off the city’s coast in the Gulf of Mexico. He blasted down there to get everyone to safety and put the fires out. Just as he was about to sit back down at home again, his hyper-vision showed a green-gilled, shark-mouthed Atlantean leading a tidal wave toward the city of Longport just up the coast. Hyperman met him with a powerful uppercut to the jaw. The tidal wave crashed back into the ocean, and the undersea terrorist sank down beneath the watery depths. Sea Devil’s submarine, which had already been in pursuit, then caught him in a net and dragged him off to a barnacle-walled prison. With his hyper-hearing, Hyperman heard Sea Devil thanking him for the help.
Before returning home, Hyperman flew across the world, scanning and listening for trouble. Nothing seemed to require his particular attention. Other superheroes working alongside law enforcement were easily handling all the petty theft and super-crime he sighted.
He thought about checking in with Nightshadow on Lethe’s murder the other night. The news had come as a shock, though Night had filled him in the best he could. To think, Hyperman had been right there! Maybe only minutes before the murder. But he hadn’t seen anyone. He hadn’t known anything was going on. He couldn’t blame himself though. Even he made mistakes, and despite his abilities, he might not have been able to do much to help anyway. Whoever had done this quite clearly had skills that might have frustrated even his hyper-powers.
Night and S.I.L.E.N.T. were tracking down the murderer and would call him in once they had something. He sorely wanted to help, but he was no detective. He could scan for the most up-to-the-minute data and tell if someone was lying due to their pulse and heart rate, but lacked the instincts to pick apart just the right details and put everything together to solve a case. However, Night was on it. He’d get results. So, for the meantime, Hyperman had to wait and stop whatever other crises occurred.
He also had a novel to write. He thought doing so would impress Lindsey. Plus, he’d always wanted to challenge himself by writing one. Obviously, in terms of quantity, he could out-produce anyone. When it came to quality though, he found himself on the same playing field as everybody else, which he admittedly hated.
Reluctantly, Hyperman dumped himself back down in front of his computer, not even bothering to change out of his superhero outfit. The blank white page stared at him, demanding to be filled. He gazed back into that white abyss and sighed. After drumming his fingers against his thigh, he had an idea. He tried writing about all the super-heroic feats he’d just performed, but had trouble describing everything. His hyper-vision saw the world in all spectrums of light, magnetic fields, and auras, even piercing down to subatomic levels if he wanted. However, he couldn’t condense any of that into words for a common person to understand. Instead, it all sounded like poetic gibberish a teenager on LSD doodled in his school notebooks.
Shaking his head, he erased every word. How did Lindsey make writing look so easy? She could blitz out twenty pages like it was nothing. If only those cultists could see him now. Would they still think he was God Almighty? Well, yes, they probably would. They’d just say every shitty line of his prose was lyrically divine and rapturous.
He pitied those poor kids from a few weeks ago, pulling their pathetic little stunt on the rooftop with the globe. Now they were locked up, medicated, and maybe even sedated, while everyone else in the city was out enjoying the holiday. He wondered if he’d tried hard enough to talk sense into them and if he could still do something more. He and Nightshadow had failed those reaper children and had yet to find any more of them. He didn’t want to fail these kids too.
Yet, here he was, complaining to himself about not being able to write when those kids were really suffering. So what if he wasn’t good at one thing? He had so much more to offer, and those kids needed him.
The novel could wait for when he had a great, wonderful idea that deserved his time and attention. However, he couldn’t just sit and stare at a blank page when he could be helping someone. Besides, he was just making himself more and more frustrated, trying to force out a novel that just wasn’t happening. It’d come to him when it was ready, if it ever did. If it didn’t, that was no great loss. Right now though, he could be making a difference in a few young lives and that was a far better investment of his time. Thus, he leaped out the window and soared across the city, streaking silver and blue for everyone to see.
***
Lovedorf Behavioral Healthcare Center loomed like a purplish-black bruise on the New Daedalus skyline. On the twelfth floor in her room, the girl cultist fidgeted about on her bed, fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube. She wore a red woolen sweater and baggy blue jeans. Her thick dark hair swept down from her head and shrouded her pale, nimble face. While thinner from her hospital stay and with her features having become noticeably pale, even without makeup, she looked beguiling.
Dull white paint coated the walls of her room. A curtain hung down, hiding the empty bed across from hers and dividing the room. On the wall, a marker board hung, dictating which nurses were on shift for this floor and what anti-psychotics the girl was taking. Hyperman levitated up to her window. He’d already checked on the other two cultists, but they were kept in isolated wards and seemed far too drugged up to talk. Hopefully, there’d come a far better time for them to chat. That left only the girl.
He tapped on the window, and she looked up. The Rubik’s Cube spilled out of her hands. She scrambled out of bed and collapsed down to the floor, bowing her head and folding her hands together in prayer.
“
Savior!” she cried.
Hyperman rolled his eyes and motioned for her to open the window. She stared, wide-eyed, gape-mouthed, and, apparently, paralyzed. Sighing, he forced the window open with a slight push and glided in. When his boots touched down, she gasped.
“
Lord of the Sky and Universe!” she said, averting her gaze. “I’m unworthy!”
“
Please, can…can you just look at me?” Hyperman asked.
Hesitantly, she peered up.
“
See?” he said. “You’re not bursting into flames. You’re not going mad or blind. You can look at me just like anyone else. I’m no better or different.”
Slowly, she nodded. “Then…then you’ve forgiven me, oh Heaven-In-One?”
“
You don’t need my forgiveness, and call me Hyperman, please.”
“
Yes, Lord Hyperman.”
He sighed, feeling a hyper-headache coming on.
“
Have a seat,” he said. “Please?”
Unsurprisingly, she obeyed, nestling down onto her bed and folding her hands into her lap. She gazed up at him, looking both attentive and fawning. His hyper-vision showed her brain soaking up serotonin, giving her a feeling of religious ecstasy merely due to his presence. She was high off her beliefs! Well, he’d figured having this talk would be hard.
He scooped the Rubik’s Cube up off the floor and, without thinking about it, solved it. After he set it down on a table, he dragged a chair over from the corner. He sat down on it backwards and draped his arms over the back of the chair. He looked at the girl.
“
We need to talk,” he said.
***
“
Stacy,” Hyperman said, “I’ve been keeping tabs on you. Your parents are worried. You lost your job at the shoe store, and you dropped out of school when you’re only a few credits short of graduating with that art history degree. It’s all because of this cult you fell in with. Because of…because of me.”
“
If you desire, I’ll finish school and get another job,” she said. “I’ll do whatever’s necessary to better serve you, Lord.”