Big Superhero Action by Raymond Embrack Page A

put you beyond our reach. Through the OGD the OSD can strike anywhere in the world.”

19
    T he song restarted.
    I…
    I will be king…
    Rock Hero held the position of an air biker like the sky was his chopper. He held air handlebars, flew above the wheelchair mountain in a long arc. The name
Heroes Man
was out,
Rock Hero
was in. That was step one of the upgrade. Step two was the costume. Bowie’s black leather jacket from the Heroes album cover, Jim Morrison’s black leather pants. This would do until he had a unique design for a costume with mask and cape.
    The stench of exposed human organs hit him first. Down below, a massive crowd had formed around a street curb. He followed the crowd to its formation around a pool of blood, a bloody and mostly split open human body with exposed organs atop the hood of a parked car, The Corpus performing surgery with only his hands. The grossed-out fled the ring of onlookers like petals separating from a sunflower.
    At the edge of the crowd he recognized two amateurs, JKM and the Halo. Toward the center they were swimming through the ring of humans, JKM creating the path, the Halo following.
    Rock Hero kept flying. If he got The Corpus to sign up for AXIS…. Opportunistic thinking like that would put him on the superhero map. He was a rising young super with a dream. But he also refused to ever be part of a crowd. Not happening.
    He made a note. Rock Hero wasn’t yet getting the dangerous AXIS assignments. Rock Hero was too lightweight, lacked the specialty in violence. Step three: add violence skills to his power of flight. Rock Hero flattened like the chopper was impossibly low, riding one inch above the road, arched his back, held the handlebars elbows out.
    He flew over the city orphanage where the counselors dressed like the nurses in old movies. The kids were happy to be there. Most of them had been cured of things. Some of them had been blind. Now they could see. Others had been retarded. Now they could write computer programs. Burn victims now with perfectly restored skin. People brought their sick children to the Kinner & Membert Medical Center. More than one of the children wound up at the city orphanage. Duff had been left there in 2001. He had been cured of Down’s Syndrome and everything before ten was the same blur as his infancy.
    Restart.
    I…
    I will be king…
    By now he didn’t hear the song, it had blended into the background of his functions like his heartbeat. The orphanage passed below, more streets, more rooftops, all stretching to the horizons, an ocean of generic grey buildings, most of them unoccupied. From the sky you noticed the city was almost color-coded. Blocks of city had grey buildings, blocks were in red brick, blocks came in blue brick, there were blocks of tan and beige.
    In a tan section of the city Teenage Cleopatra occupied a four-story temple made ornate by the graffiti covering every inch of the surface. The graffiti was Ancient Egyptian themed, a fusion of Cheops and hip-hop. Rock Hero took down the volume, made a soft landing on the roof.
    The security system was robotic, costumed dog-headed Pyramid guards armed with AK-47 assault rifles. The robots were old and noisy, painted in chipped tomb-like colors. They took him prisoner, took him into the building, escorted him between tattooed walls across tattooed floor. Some of it graffiti, some of it wall art. Some of the wall drawings were mock 1950s-era comic book covers titled
Teenage Cleopatra
. They had Frank Robbins-style artwork and depicted her as a black haired bombshell, a teenage Bettie Page. Then there wall art “recreating” 1970s-era
Teenage Cleopatra
paperbacks painted by Frank Frazetta.
    They led him to a darkened room of white stucco walls bisected by a black screen. From top to bottom the screen was lined with polka dots of open space. Teenage Cleopatra’s superpower was seduction. Her superpower: anyone exposed to the sight of her became physically addicted to her