Hero Stalker

Part One

I’d put some distance between me and my boss, but it wouldn’t last long.

 “Gloria!” Valerie shouted from across the atrium. The mayor, who’d been talking about his mother’s death from pancreatic cancer, looked up from the teleprompter to glare at her.

I held up my hands. Sorry, boss, but what do you want me to do? The hospital atrium was twice the size of a basketball court. Journalists, doctors, and cancer patients filled the rows of seats that cut me off from Valerie. More spectators peered down from the twenty-six stories of balconies ringing the atrium. Lots of them were filming the mayor on their phones. I couldn’t cross over without making a scene—a fact I’d counted on when I’d dashed to the bathroom before the speech began.

I’d underestimated Valerie’s capacity to care about other people. Again.

“Gloria!” Valerie shouted again. She stood six feet tall if you counted her blond beehive, and she presided over her trays of sushi like an eagle over her nest. The purple bag securing Needles, her bichon frise, sat securely on her shoulder. This time, half the crowd turned in their seats to stare at her. Then she pointed at me, and the crowd had someone new to stare at.

I wanted to telescope down into my wobbly thrift-store high heels.

“As I was saying,” Mayor Hollis continued, the light pouring through the atrium’s glass walls turning his sunburned face as orange as my chipped nail polish, “there’s a lot of reasons I’m proud to dedicate the Hollis Center for Oncology at Bayton’s own world-class research hospital, Our Lady’s Will . . .”

Valerie glared at me, her beady eyes staring down her sharp, thin nose. I had no other choice. Muttering “Sorry,” over and over, I pushed my way through the row of chairs, ducking past cameras and avoiding eye contact with the cancer patients. A redheaded woman in a lab coat shot me a dirty look. Each click of my heels on the polished floor rang like thunder.

“What is it?” I said when I reached her side, as quietly as I could. Needles yipped.

“Speak up, Gloria. Don’t be so subservient.” If her voice had been any higher, she could have cracked all twenty-six stories of windows and sent the giant metal mobile dangling over the atrium crashing down. “Go to the car and get the camera. I need photos of the mayor eating my sushi.”

“On my way.” I limped off towards the doors. Valerie owned Sushi Queen, Bayton’s largest not-really-Japanese restaurant chain. My love of anime had compelled me to accept a job offer there back in school, and I still didn’t have the guts (okay, the other job offer) I’d need to leave.

 “Stand up straight!” she yelled at my back. A nerve flared in my foot.

Valerie’s hot pink Lamborghini sat in a handicapped space in the front row of the hospital’s gigantic parking lot. She’d left Darryl Sanderson, her nephew, behind with the keys, so he could move it if a cop showed up. Darryl had his muddy Nikes propped up on the dashboard. Hip-hop pounded from the car’s speakers. Valerie’s thousand dollar camera sat shotgun. It had mud stuck to the lens cap. And the car door was locked.

Darryl grinned at me from the other side of the glass. “Valerie sent me!” I shouted.

He pointed at the radio, pointed at his ears, and shrugged. Sorry, can’t hear you over the music.

“I need the camera!” I pointed at it. “Camera!”

He rolled down the window a fraction of an inch. Cool wisps of air escaped into the August heat. “How you doing, baby?”

“Let me in.” The distant rumble of thunder made me glance up at the sky. Gray clouds had gathered above the hospital. A classic Virginia summer storm was on its way. “Darryl, it’s going to rain. Give me the camera so I can go back inside and do my job.”

“What’s the rush, sweetheart? Pop in here. I’ve got a YouTube video you might want to see.”

“I’m not watching porn with you.”

“You don’t want to see the video manifesto of Bayton’s newest supervillain?” He held up his iPhone. Paused on screen was a figure in a ridiculous pointy metal helmet.

He had me. “Five minutes.”

As far as manifestos went, the supervillain who called himself Harpy had done a decent job. There’d been a nice line thrown in there about how our poor were dogs and our rich were pigs, and his computer-generated voice had been eerily flat as he announced his intentions to shatter our faith in the government, the Centurions, and humanity.

Still, he couldn’t beat the classic villains of my childhood: Gorillath, who’d stomped six city blocks into rubble, or Harbinger, who’d dumped hallucinogens into the water mains. Dark Justice had stopped them both. He’d been Bayton’s most famous Centurion, with his iconic all-black costume and gadgets. Ever since the day he’d saved me from bullies sixteen years ago, I’d dreamed of donning a mask and delivering a little old-fashioned justice via my fists.

“This Harpy guy does a nice job of promoting himself.” Darryl scratched a zit on his chin. “Already got a million hits and it’s barely been up a week.”

“How’d you find it?”

“This chick I met at a psi-bar showed me. I go there every week. They fucking love me.” The skin of his fingers bubbled and rippled, morphing into fleshy penis shapes.

“Bet they do.” A one in five thousand shot any given person has the psi-positive mutation, and it’s wasted on him. Controlling the shape of his fingers wasn’t nearly a strong enough power to qualify him for the Centurions, but he worked it into all his pick-up lines nevertheless. If I hadn’t known him since high school, the sleaze might have worked on me, but every time I looked at him I saw the fourteen-year-old who’d spent hours playing Call of Duty with my little brother.

“I’ll take you there some time and buy you a drink. You could be so sexy if you gave a crap, you know? You’ve got nice curves, but you dress like my forth grade teacher. I’m surprised you don’t keep pencils in your bun.” His hand moved from the gear shift towards my hair. Time to go.

“Aren’t you still dating that blond woman from D.C.?” I opened the car door, clutching the camera to my chest. “Megan, right?”

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to date a black girl, too.” He waggled his penis fingers. “A little vanilla, a little chocolate.”

Slam! I shut the door in his face and limped back towards into the hospital as quickly as I could. Heat filled my face. The little voice saying why not me bubbled up again.

  See, the mutation became active around age sixteen. I was twenty-two. There’s big difference between being a teenage girl who dreams of being a Centurion and a grown woman mildly obsessed with them. I spent half my spare time tracking rumors about them across the Internet. My last date had bailed on me after I’d mentioned my action figure collection and my mom had thrown out the homemade costume I’d worn to BayCon. I’d channeled my dream about serving the greater good into keeping Valerie’s worst impulses in check, and I succeeded almost two times out of ten.