I wondered why it was that ordinary chores tuckered me out, but that when I engaged in megaheroic activities, I seemed to have boundless energy. It couldn’t have been the costume, because the first time my Ms. Megaton Man megapowers broke out—when I saved Preston’s and Trent’s lives from that toppling stack of firewood—I was only wearing shorts and a tank top in my bare feet. I also pondered how it could be that my half-sister wanted to be a costumed crimefighter, and poured all her enthusiasm and discipline into training for it, while I had megapowers I’d never asked for at all, and hardly knew what they were good for except flying back and forth between Detroit and Ann Arbor, or up to Troy.
One big reason for the Y+Thems to move from the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City to the old Teen Idols facility in Troy was Benjamin Franklin Phloog, who was already a year old. Beatrice “Kiddo” Bryson’s illegitimate son had already caused serious destruction in the residence and basement community center of the church—the church the Y+Thems were supposed to be keeping an eye on—and it was only a matter of time before the megapowered toddler would start ripping out the woodwork and stained glass in the historic sanctuary itself. And, as Kav “Tempy” Kleinfelter pointed out, the love child of the Original Golden Age Megaton Man wasn’t even in his “terrible twos” yet.
The funny thing was that Simon Phloog, son of the Bronze Age Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl—the latter of Meltdown ancestry—was in his second year already, but showed no sign of megapowered misbehavior. In fact, he was a lovely, docile child, perhaps because of the procedure performed on him in the hospital by “Dr. Quimby”—Professor Rex Q. Rigid, the boy’s legal parent at the time. What that mysterious procedure had been, no one was really quite certain, but Simon, who had flown around the hospital room in his diapers—I had seen it with my own eyes—never again showed any propensity for megapowered toddler antics. In fact, Stella had noticed Simon’s vision had become so feeble she had already taken him to an optometrist and had him fitted for glasses, and he wasn’t even three.
I wondered if Megaton children could manifest megapowers in infancy but then have those powers go into remission, or whether some kind of intervention like Dr. Quimby’s procedure was always necessary.
More to the point, I wondered what kind of toddler I had been, given that my father was the Silver Age Megaton Man. There had never been the slightest mention in my family that I had ever caused any trouble as a baby, or manifested any extraordinary abilities as an infant. But Mama had kept the identity of my real father a secret from me for all these years. For all I knew, if I had exhibited any megapowered propensities, and they had gone into remission by themselves, my mama might have been inclined to keep those incidents a secret from me, too.
Yet, it seemed unlikely that I had ever demonstrated any such powers. I had always been a scrawny, bookish kid, even sickly. I lacked the coordination for the simplest sports such as kick-ball, and for years was shorter than every other kid in my class. It was only in college—and only after I had moved into the house with Pammy and Stella, and later when Trent joined us—that I experienced a belated growth spurt of a whopping two-and-half inches in about eighteen months. Even so, I wasn’t an Amazon. But at least I was now the same height as Avie, who since twelve had always been bigger than me.
I recalled a remark Kozmik Kat had made in Avie’s Pacer as we drove home from Detroit: “Radiation always makes me shed.” He had been sitting in the back seat next to Clyde, my father, in his civilian form. Had Koz just been joking, or did my biological father really exude a level of radiation Koz could detect, even if Clyde wasn’t in his Silver Age Megaton Man form? Did Trent or Stella—or both—exude a similar radiation, and was that what triggered my growth spurt, and set the stage for my later breakout as Ms. Megaton Man?
These were the kinds of things I was thinking about as I cleaned the toilet bowl, perspiration forming on my brow.
As I said, I had never shown the least bit of athletic propensity or physical strength of any sort, on the playground or in the gym or anywhere, growing up. The moment I caught that stack of toppling firewood, saving the lives of Trent and Preston, had been a moment of stress; it was a split-second, do-or-die decision in which I discovered my latent megapowers. Since then, I never had much reason to call upon them, except to fly to distant destinations, as I said. I never felt rippling with power in most other everyday situations, and even common things like moving my furniture from dorm to house or apartment to apartment was enough to wind me and tire me out.
I had long since noticed that the only time my megastrength ever seemed to manifested itself was when I was stressed, or angry. I had beaten the snot out of the Human Meltdown over the Bay of New York, after he assaulted my sister. But that was only because I’d been mad. I’d also tossed around some heavy weights in the back yard of the Ann Street house, but that was only because I was showing off for Samson “Body by Nuke” McSampson. I’d also slugged a few robots at Megatonic University and easily shattered them, but that was because they were threatening my friends, and at one point I thought they had slain my sister. I wondered if I could summon my megastrength otherwise, in moments in which I was not stressed or anxious or angry, or showing off for some guy.
At any rate, it wasn’t like I could race through unpleasant chores at mega-speed or whatever.
I was glad I had made it through cleaning the bathroom without expending too much energy. I flushed the fizzing blue bubbles of the toilet bowl cleaner and rinsed on my scrub brushes and sponges, and wiped off the sink and bathtub. Now to just run a mop over the floor…
Suddenly, I heard a blood-curdling scream from the basement. I dropped my sponge and ran down the steps without touching any of them with my feet.
When I landed in the basement, I saw Avie sitting on the bench, calmly adjusting her weight gloves.
“What the hell was that?” I cried.
“You mean my Warhound Whistleroar?” she said.
“Your what?!”
She reproduced the sound she had made, a combination of an ear-splitting shriek, a bad imitation of Carol Burnett’s Tarzan yell, and a steam whistle.
“Good Lord,” I said. “What are you making that sound for?”
“I’m rehearsing my trademark battle cry,” said Avie. “Chas thinks the Wondrous Warhound should have a trademark battle cry. He likes drawing it as a sound effect in his comics. I have to practice using my diaphragm or I’ll wreck my vocal chords.”
I pulled off the rubber gloves I was wearing for cleaning and tossed them on the steps, and wiped the sweat off my face with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “I suppose if Chas drew the Wondrous Warhound jumping off the Ambassador Bridge, you’d jump off, too.”
I was referring to a vacation Bible school teacher we both knew who had committed suicide that way, and Avie knew it, too.
“Don’t be silly,” said Avie. “The Wondrous Warhound doesn’t fly. She just leaps from building to building, over alleys and stuff.”
“Leaping over alleys sound dangerous enough,” I said.
“Oh, I’m not going to act out any of those antics myself,” said Avie. “I’ve decided I’m going to be the Wondrous Warhound only so far as to promote Chas’s comic book. He was making great progress on it over the holidays, but since school’s back in session, it’s slowed to a crawl. So, he’s planning on dropping out of art school to finish it. He feels like it’s a waste of his time, drawing marker layouts for hypothetical automobile ads.”
“I suppose artists, if they’re sufficiently talented, really didn’t need art school degrees,” I said. I was relieved to hear that my civilian sister wasn’t quite so serious about becoming a costumed crime fighter. “So, this is more or less going to be just an artistic stunt, then?” I asked, hopefully.
“If I were to fight crime, at least I come by it honestly,” said Avie. “Megaheroics runs in the family. You’re a megahero, and so is Alice—at least Alice Too. She may not directly be my mama, but she’s what mama could have been.”
“But Avie, I don’t even know why I’m a megahero, or if I want to be one,” I said. “That’s what makes me different from the Y+Thems, or the Mod Puma, or Rubber Brother. They wanted this for themselves, they volunteered. They trained for it.”
“Is that why you turned down the Troy+Thems?” asked Avie.
“I haven’t turned them down, exactly.”
Avie stood up from the bench of her weight machine and went over the laundry area of our basement, where the bodysuit my grandma made for Avie was drip-drying on a hanger. She stroked it.
“You like your costume, don’t you?” asked Avie. “I like mine, although Grandma Seedy hasn’t finished the accessories yet. That’s what I’m drawn to—the drama, the theatrics of it. I’m working up a performance art piece based on the Wondrous Warhound for my Advanced Interpretive Dance Studio.”
“Yeah, I like the costume,” I said. “But I don’t feel a calling, even now—even knowing who my real father was.”
I took Avie’s place on the bench in front of the weight machine and took the bar in my hands. I pulled down on the weights. I could barely budge it. “Wow, you’re already up to eighty pounds,” I said. I adjusted the pin in the stack of weights, but could barely do one rep at forty before giving up. “See what I mean?”
“What is that supposed to prove?” said Avie. “I’ve been working out for a couple weeks; I’m building up my level of resistance.”
“I’m a weakling,” I said. “When I’m not Ms. Megaton Man, I’m just an ordinary civilian. I don’t need any capsules like Clyde to change back and forth from identity to identity.”
I sat up on the bench. Avie sat down next to me.
“Maybe your heart’s not in it,” she said, putting her arm around me. “Or maybe you just need some motivation.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt, Avie.”
“Why are you so afraid?”
“I never told you this, but I watched you die, Avie. I saw it, with my own eyes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“At Megatonic University,” I said. “I watched you die down there.”
“You’re not making any sense,” said Avie. “You must have had a bad dream or something. The only time I was there was with you, when you boxed with Clyde. The only robot was that Contraptoid thing, which you smash to pieces.”
“It was the time before,” I said. “Remember last fall? I went down to the underground laboratory with the Phantom Jungle Girl, Rubber Brother, and Dana to rescue Audrey and Wilton. There was a legion of killer robots chasing us down the corridor as we made our getaway. You had come down after me, and got shot in the crossfire. You died in my arms, Avie.”
Tears were streaming down my face.
“I didn’t go down after you,” said Avie. “I couldn’t, remember? I was up on Main Street by the van; Kozmik Kat held on to me and would let me go.”
“No, but you wanted to,” I said. “In another dimension, another reality, Kozmik Kat must not have been there to hold you back. Don’t you see, Avie? My Ms. Megaton Man visor—it shows me glimpses of alternate dimensions, sometimes. And that time, it showed me…you got yourself killed, Avie, trying to save me. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Avie looked at me in horror, realizing what I was saying. I must have been crying by this point, because I could feel Avie wiping tears from my cheeks.
“So, that’s why you’ve been acting so weird,” she said. “And here I thought you were being just my overprotective big sister, trying to keep me from having any fun. But Sissy, whatever you saw didn’t happen in this reality, don’t you see? You still have me to bother you.”
“But I want to make sure I always have you to bother me,” I said, putting my arms around her.
She patted me on the back and took my hands. “Look, if it means that much to you, the Wondrous Warhound will remain only a fictitious megahero.” Avie stood up and twirled around in her workout leotard. “Look at me! I’ve already lost nearly ten pounds. And training with Alice Too and these weights have strengthened my core.”
“You’ve been sneaking back to Ann Arbor behind my back?”
“Just one or two trips,” said Avie. “Not to the underground lab—I get claustrophobic. But she and Dana and I go jogging and work out in the field house.”
I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my ratty hoodie and sniffed. “That’s great Avie. You’re looking really good.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I promise I won’t get into any tangles with killer robots,” she said. “And I doubt the Troy+Thems will, either.”
Later, I realized that while Avie had declared the Wondrous Warhound would remain more or less a hobby, she hadn’t exactly promised me she wouldn’t join the Troy+Thems.
For my part, I wasn’t trying to be coy or aloof about the Troy+Thems’ offer. But I did want to keep my status with the team intentionally ambiguous. I just didn’t feel in my gut that it was my destiny to join megahero team quite yet.
Admittedly, this feeling was largely based on that mysteriously changeable photograph I had glimpsed at the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute when I visited Doctor Messiah at the Wardell Hotel and Apartments. That framed image had an almost dreamlike quality about, at first showing me in my Ms. Megaton Man uniform among a group of megaheroes, almost like a class photo. Some of them I knew, but others were complete strangers to me. What was really weird was how I appeared in the photograph: it wasn’t like looking at myself now, in a mirror. Something about my hair, my facial expression, even my body weight seemed slightly off—I seemed more filled out, more mature, more experienced, like how I imagined I might look five years later. But not as I looked then, in 1984.
Of course, the other weird thing about the picture was that it had changed, almost before my eyes. The second time I looked at it, the personnel had changed slightly, and I wasn’t even in the group. The hairstyles and more youthful appearance of some of the people gave me the distinct impression it had been taken in the late seventies. But more on that later.
Whether this glimpse was merely an hallucination or a revelation of the shape of things to come, either way it didn’t preclude me from joining the Troy+Thems. Yet I felt I could neither commit to joining the team or decline the offer outright; I simply postponed making up my mind.
I had the excuse of being consumed with my last undergraduate semester of college. Besides, the new headquarters in Troy wasn’t going to be ready for the team to move in for several more weeks.
In the meantime, I did let Soren list me as an affiliate megahero on the roster. The only regular members were him, as Sabersnag; Kav, also known as Tempy; and Kiddo. I’m not sure exactly what “affiliate megahero” meant, but I understood it as being something less than an auxiliary member, which was the honorary status accorded to both the Phantom Jungle Girl and Rubber Brother, who only agreed to drop in part-time. And, although my half-sister Avie promised she me wasn’t going to fight any killer robots, she hadn’t explicitly declined to become the Troy+Thems’ new “mascot-in-training,” an even more amorphous title.
It was Avie’s dubious status that complicated my own relationship with the group and probably motivated me to remain more involved with it than I cared to be. I didn’t want to forbid Avie from becoming a costume crimefighter outright, simply because I’d had a vision of her being killed by robots; I knew from experience she was stubborn enough to work around me anyway. But I did want to keep tabs on the Troy+Thems, if only to make sure Avie was as safe as possible.
One bleak February afternoon, I had an appointment with Tempy at his storefront beauty salon to touch up my burgundy hair. His shop was in a strip of storefronts on Cass Avenue, next to a print shop and a dusty used textbook shop, a block north of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City, where he still lived. When I got there, he and two of his beauticians were finishing up with three customers. So, I sat and read an old copy of The Fifth Wheel, the locally-produced underground techno-anarchist newspaper. It was some essay about how language was the enemy of ideas and ideas were the enemy of thought, which went way over my head.
Tempy was done with his customer first, so I plopped myself down into the empty barber’s chair and he started touching up my roots. As he did so, the beauticians finished with their customers, and they left. While he waited for the dye to set, Tempy swept up the floor and otherwise got ready to close the salon for the day.
We’d hardly spoken since I’d arrived; now, we were alone. Since I was facing the mirror, I could see his drawn face. His eyes looked tired. I felt like we could discuss megahero business now, privately.
“So, how’s the big move going?” I asked.
He paused in his sweeping “Slower than we’d like,” he said. “Slower that Pastor Enoch would like—the church council can’t wait to get us Youthful Permutations out of that residence.”
I was a bit surprised to hear that. “I thought the ICHHL technicians would be done up in Troy by now,” I said.
“Getting a megahero headquarters ready is a bit more complicated than you’d think,” said Tempy, stifling a yawn. “They have finished updating the wiring of the main work area, at least,” he said. That was the big, open-plan floor I had seen when I visited. “Now, they’re mostly working on the floors below, which will have dormitory facilities, a kitchen, a gymnasium, and so on.”
“I bet it will be nice when it’s finished, Kav,” I said, encouragingly.
“Oh, it will be gorgeous,” said Tempy. “Way better than that hell-hole those slum lords Rex Rigid and Bad Guy provided us at the Old Navy Yard. ICHHL’s doing things first class—your grandmother knows how to take care of megaheroes. Jasper and I have been going up to Troy nights and weekends to inspect all that lab equipment and devise a layout that will make the best use of that space—that’s why I’m so sleepy. Believe it or not, Rubber Brother and I are the most technically inclined in our group.” He scrunched up his face. “Why do megahero headquarters always have to have fully-equipped, state-of-the-art scientific laboratories?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe to process crime scene evidence, or figure out new technologies and gizmos to defeat evildoers.”
“Anyway, those Teen Idols were none too scientifically inclined, being mythological heroes, from the looks of things. Seems the only piece of modern technology they had any use for was that Dimensional Portal you saw. The computer banks and other stuff have hardly been used. But Jasper and I have been rigorously testing all of it, all the same—every single circuit. Jasper thinks we should keep it on hand, that it might come in handy.”
“It shouldn’t do any harm,” I said. “Just as long as you’re not planning to manufacture any killer robots—that’s all I care about.”
“Oh, Lord no,” said Tempy, setting aside his broom. “After Jasper leaves for New York, none of us are even going to touch that stuff—I know I won’t. I refuse to do anything more mechanically complicated than wind a watch, as a Youthful Permutation.”
“You never know,” I said. “The Troy+Thems might recruit some brainy tech person at some point.”
“You mean like that scientist-hero you admire,” said Tempy.
“Winifred Wertz,” I reminded him. “Gargantuella. She was head scientist of the Devengers back in the day—yet another megahero who hasn’t been seen in this dimension for years.”
Tempy set aside his broom and inspected my roots. “We’re almost ready to rinse,” he confirmed. “But isn’t that strange, though—all those missing megaheroes? Your father all those years, Alice2, the Teen Idols, the Golden Age Megaton Man, Gargantuella. You never know who might pop back up or when. I’ll tell you the truth, I’d just as soon junk all that equipment—including the Dimensional Portal. It gives me a migraine.”
“I’ll be happy to help you,” I volunteered. “I’m none too sanguine about my sister hanging around a mad scientist’s laboratory, not after what I saw at Megatonic University. But what about Kiddo? She seems to have her heart set on the Original Golden Age Megaton Man returning to her someday, perhaps through that very portal.”
“Poor thing,” said Tempy. “She has Stockholm syndrome.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s when you fall in love with your abuser,” said Tempy.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe she loved him. She’s not exactly a child, you now. She seems pretty streetwise for her years. Maybe they call it puppy love, but sometimes those kinds of May-September relationships work out. Anyway, I could help you sneak that stuff to the curb, if you want.”
Tempy frowned and motioned to me to get up out of my seat and move an adjustable chair by the sink. Leaning me back, he rinsed off my hair. Then, he pulled me and began toweling me off. Then we moved back to the other chair.
“No, we probably can’t get rid of that damn portal, much as I’d like to,” he said. Clearly, he had been mulling it over. He swung me around to the mirror and preparing to blow-dry my hair. “But you could still help us.”
“How?”
Tempy leaned in and whispered into my ear, even though we were the only two in the shop.
“Perhaps Ms. Megaton Man could come up one day this week and move all that scientific furniture around—it’s awfully heavy.” He stood up and resumed speaking at a normal volume. “It would help speed up our move-in considerably. Who knows? Maybe we could sneak one or two of those outdated computer banks to the curb while Jasper isn’t looking.”
Next: Double Negative
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| The Mod Puma promises to train Avie James in a dreamy comic strip sequence. |
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