Chapter 4 – No Lamers, No AcroCops

“Come on, could we change the channel or something?” Digger asked.

“Leave it on,” Val said, enjoying Digger’s discomfort. “I like it.”

The four of them–Valkyrie Princess, Doctor Jolt, Digger, and the new hero, Thompson–were seated around a table in Digger’s favorite bar, the Traveler’s Tavern, where the TV mounted to the wall above the bar was currently showing a cartoon. An old man with gray hair sticking out at crazy angles and wearing a stained white lab coat cackled hysterically at his prisoner, a heroic figure in chains wearing a costume almost identical to Digger’s. Dinosaur skeletons loomed in the background all around them.

“And now Digger,” said the mad scientist on the screen, “you shall watch helplessly as I activate my Time Rejuvenator and unleash a horde of dinosaurs on downtown Bayside!”

“I can’t stand this show,” Digger said.

“Don’t be a spoilsport,” Val said. “You should consider yourself lucky to even have your own show.”

“I’m going to have my own show,” said the new guy, Flexo.

Onscreen, a huge white dog, a cartoonish cross between a husky and a mastiff, bounded into the room just as the mad scientist was reaching for the controls. The dog snatched one of the massive bones from the leg of the Tyrannosaurus skeleton, causing the entire structure to crash to the ground. As the scientist screamed in frustration, the dog began to dig into the floor, scooping up huge piles of dirt that buried the scientist up to the neck, immobilizing him.

“Oh, God,” Digger said.

Val grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “You’re so cute when you’re embarrassed.”

Digger tensed and met her eyes briefly before extricating his hand.

The dog wagged his tail and dropped the huge bone in the hole.

“Come on, Jill, put something else on,” Digger said.

“Why?” asked the bartender, Jill, as she set four beers on the table. She was pretty in a sturdy way, Val supposed. Early 30’s, curvy, and like Val herself, she was a redhead. “I like it. It’s funny.”

“Good job, Dig Dog,” the cartoon Digger onscreen was saying. “Now get me out of these chains.”

“That’s why,” Digger said, waving at the screen. “They make me look like an idiot and make that damn dog the hero. I hate that dog.”

“Because he makes you look stupid, or because he reminds you of the real Dig Dog?” asked Val.

“There was a real Dig-Dog?” asked Flexo.

Digger blushed. Val had missed seeing him blush. “There was a dog. And it dug. Long story.”

He looked older, Val thought. Not so much physically; like most supers, he’d barely aged at all in the almost 13 years she’d known him. He still wore the same basic costume: two-toned blue hooded sweatshirt and khaki pants tucked into scuffed brown boots with a big buccaneer flap folded over at the top. Cutouts in the sleeves of the shirt allowed the Driller Beam Generators grafted to his arms to protrude; the sleeves partially covered the extensive scar tissue where metal met flesh.

The Drillers, though, betrayed their true age. When she’d first met Digger, the blasters were covered with gleaming chrome. Now they were battered and pitted from thousands of deflected blows and bullets. The power units on his forearms still bore the scars of the decorative fins Digger had once welded there, and other spots bore blackened traces of later welded modifications, now long gone. The black rubber conduits across his wrists were old and cracked.

More than the Drillers, though, there was something changed about him that mere years couldn’t account for. Digger had always been a cynic, but he’d never been bitter. Now there was a hardness to him, a wall behind his eyes that made her wonder if maybe it wasn’t a mistake to try to bring him in. He wasn’t the same Digger she’d known.

He sipped at his beer. “So Val, tell me about this ‘mission from God.'”

“I can’t say much, because Curtis wants to make the formal pitch tomorrow,” Val said. “But it’s big, Mace. This is the kind of thing we wished we could have ten years ago.”

“Mace?” asked Flexo.

“Yeah, who’s Mace?” asked Jill.

“You mean…?” Val looked skeptically at Digger. “You haven’t told them your name? I didn’t think you went for the whole secret identity thing.”

“I don’t,” Digger said. “It’s not a secret. It’s just nobody’s business. You should know that better than anyone, Thr…”

Val clapped a hand over Digger’s mouth. “Don’t say that name. Only one man on Earth gets to call me by that name.”

Digger nodded and Val pulled her hand away. “So you’re still shacking up with the midget?” he asked.

Both Jill and Flexo let out cries of protest. “Digger!” Jill said.

“What?” Digger asked. “He is.”

“Angar’s not a midget, he’s a Dwarf,” Val said, unfazed by the old joke. “And we’re not shacking up. We’re married now, thank you very much.”

“Really? Congratulations,” Digger said. “But shouldn’t you be wearing a ring?”

She held up her hand to display her wedding band, but her finger was bare. “Shit, I took it off right before I picked up that police car.”

As she rummaged in the leather pouch tied at her waist, she heard Digger say, “I don’t know, guys. Teams aren’t really my thing anymore, you know?”

“Well, maybe if Digger turns you guys down…” Flexo Thompson started to say. That was the last thing Val needed to deal with. She found the ring and held it up without bothering to put it on first.

“Ha! Here it is!” She slipped the ring onto her finger.

“Jeez, Val, that’s huge,” Digger said. “How could Angar afford that on a baggage handler’s salary?”

“I’m pretty sure he mined the diamond himself,” Val said. “You’re not the only one who can dig, you know.”

“Well, as I was saying,” the Thompson boy started speaking again. Val sighed. Here it comes… “If Digger turns you guys down, would that leave an opening in your roster? Cause I might be interested in something like that, if the publicity was good, you know.”

“No,” Val said. “I’m sorry, but no. This is going to be an elite squad, with a very select membership. No offense, Mister Thompson.”

“Kosmatka.”

“What?” Val asked.

“My name’s Kosmatka, not Thompson,” Flexo said. “Thompson’s a name that the toy company came up with. For my character, you know, to give me an All-American flavor.”

Digger stifled a laugh as he doodled on the tabletop in the condensation from his beer. Val saw that he still had the same ever-present dirt embedded under his fingernails. Some of it might even have dated back to the days when they’d been teammates almost ten years ago, immune to any number of attempted washings. Weird, the things you got nostalgic over.

“Well, whatever your name is, we’re only recruiting big guns,” Val said.

“Big guns?” asked Jill as she showed up at the table bearing sandwiches in baskets lined with wax paper. She tilted her head at Digger. “Then what do you want with him?”

Val looked at Digger. “You let her talk about you this way?”

“She gives me beer. I let her talk about me however she wants.” Digger shrugged. “Besides, it’s a fair question.”

“Digger has proven himself time and again,” Doctor Jolt said. He placed one hand at each end of his sandwich. There was a brief crackle of power, and tiny wisps of smoke rose from the spots where his fingers had touched.

“Jeez, Doc, are you still electrocuting your food?” Digger asked.

Doctor Jolt’s face was impassive. “When you’ve seen as many intestinal parasites as I have, you learn to take no chances.”

“Wait a second,” said Flexo Thompson or Kosmatka or whatever his name was. “You mean you’re a real doctor? It’s not just a made-up hero thing?”

“He’s a vet,” Digger said. “And you’re talking about dogs. Of course, dogs have worms. They eat their own poop. Hell, they eat other animals’ poop.”

“Can we stop talking about poop?” Val asked, picking up a quarter of her club sandwich. “Trying to eat here.”

“Fine, I’m just saying,” Digger said. “Jill runs a nice place here. Trust me, no one in here eats their own poop.”

Doctor Jolt was silent for a moment. He looked down at his sandwich, then up at Digger, eyes inscrutable behind his goggles. “Prove it,” he said.

* * *

“Hello, John.”

The patient in room 421 was always surprised when the voice came in the night, the hoarse whisper that spoke through the vent. He rarely heard actual voices anymore. His mind crawled with them all day and all night, but his ears scarcely believed it when they got a turn.

“Hello, Voice.”

The Voice always called him “John,” as if he should still answer to that name. That had been his name before the visions and the voices that crowded out all other thoughts, but no one called him that anymore. The ones who worked here–the ones who slipped food or pills through the tiny slot at floor level so he could not touch them or meet their eyes–they never spoke to him directly. In their minds, they usually just called him “421” or “Nyberg”, but the word they most associated with him was “psycho.”

There had been another doctor in the early days who’d used a different word, before John had gotten bored with his questions and broke him: “psionic.” In his own mind, John had merged those two words–“psionic” and “psycho”–and dubbed himself “Psicho.”

They were afraid of him, he knew, those people outside the door, though they pretended not to be. Afraid of the things he heard and the things he saw and the things he said, but most of all, afraid of the things he could do.

Because Psicho’s mind couldn’t just hear, it could also speak. He had only to touch someone, or lock eyes with them, and he could share his visions of the days past and the days to come, the sky ripping open and the bowels of the earth vomiting up uncounted horrors, things so alien that your eyes refused to see them in their totality, things which crawled and twisted and refused to be the same thing when you looked at them twice. Things which hungered to rip and rend and destroy.

People rarely survived a glimpse at such horrors as Psicho wanted to show them, and those who did survive, weeping and broken, would do anything, anything, for him if only he promised never to share with them again. The second doctor had been one such, a sniveling wretch who had tried to help Psicho escape to freedom. But they had stopped him, shot him up with tranquilizers from behind, and when he awoke, he was in this room, cut off from other people. A third doctor had never come, and they started feeding him through the slot in the door. Sometimes, they put something in his food to make him sleep, and when he awoke, there were fresh linens on the bed and the cabinet in the bathroom was full of fresh rolls of toilet paper. He could not touch, could not lock eyes, could not share, and so had to suffer his pain alone.

The Voice that came in the night was something else entirely. It spoke through the vent in the ceiling, calling him “John,” and when Psicho tried to listen to its thoughts, he could not. Or rather, the stranger’s thoughts were so powerful that it was painful to try, like listening to a loudspeaker turned up too high, the sounds distorted by feedback and indecipherable.

“Tell me about your life before, John,” the Voice said. “What did you do?”

“You know what I did,” Psicho said, his mind fluttering at the periphery of the stranger’s like a moth, seeking a safe path in and finding none. “Why do you keep asking me the same thing every time?”

Psicho thought he knew, though. The Voice did not come often, but when it did, it always sounded depressed. Something was weighing on the stranger’s mind. What could disturb so powerful a creature, Psicho wondered, and what else might he do to cope with it? Perhaps the reports of disasters from around the world, earthquakes and avalanches and hurricanes, were all caused by the stranger working out his frustration. Perhaps he was the one warming the globe.

The Voice was silent for a long time. Psicho might have thought the stranger had departed, if he could not still sense the painful pulse of the stranger’s thoughts. Finally, the Voice said in its rasping whisper, “Because we two are the only ones who remember. Remember the way it really was. Sometimes I wish I could take it all back.”

A memory stirred in Psicho’s head, a voice and a mask and other things. Terrifying things with voices no human ear was meant to hear. He had to yank his mind away from the memory lest he begin screaming. “I was a lawyer,” he said. “Corporate law. Mergers, mostly. Back when nobody glowed inside. Back when no one could fly.”

“What was your favorite hobby when you were a kid?” the Voice asked.

“Fly,” Psicho murmured. “Fly. We’re all flies, aren’t we? All trapped by the man dressed like a spider.”

“It’s an ant,” the Voice said.

“A giant spider,” Psicho said. “A giant spider with a million glowing legs, and he has wrapped us all in his web. Only now he’s trapped here with us, isn’t he? Someday, the flies are going to crawl all over him and tear him to shreds.”

The stranger’s mind thrummed angrily, a wave of power that sent Psicho to his knees on the floor. “They can try,” the Voice said, still a whisper, but the vent rattled with the force of it. “Goodbye, John.”

“You know my name,” Psicho said. “Why don’t you ever tell me yours?”

“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” the Voice said.

“You say that every time,” Psicho said. “But if you were really sorry, you’d say it to my face. You’d look me in the eyes like a man.”

But by then, the Voice was gone, and the pulsing mind-noise with it.

Psicho sat on the floor and let the memories return. He saw the world in flames, crawling with the horrors of hell. Someday, he would share what he saw with the world. His chance would come soon now. He could see it approaching.