Rise of Heroes Read online

  The rest of the train remained on the tracks, and I thought I could see another figure leaping—leaping!—from the old Banner Warehouse rooftop across the street and onto the train tracks, just behind the last car, which had been derailed. Its torn end poked off to the side, but thankfully it wasn’t dislodged far enough to endanger both it and the rest of the train. The figure was moving it back on the rails and pushing it forward to safety.

  My jaw had long dropped to the ground. “Holy cow,” I breathed as I strained to watch what was happening above. “What’s that?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “What?” I blinked and turned to the person who’d just addressed me. “Oh.”

  “I asked if you were all right.”

  He was a vision from head to foot. Strong, angular, dark features, his body sculpted by Olympian gods. If he wasn’t born this way, he probably was an obsessive-compulsive gym-bot. He had a cleft in his chin. Jesus Henry Christ on a cracker, he had a cleft in his chin. It was so pronounced that he could sideline as a letter-holder if he wanted.

  He wore a bodysuit in a green shade so dark that one could mistake it for black unless the light touched it at certain angles. He also wore a cape in the same color. That certainly cleared up a few mysteries. I stared, and I didn’t care. I wondered if, rather than have his costume already made for him, he simply stood naked before his personal tailor and had all that bottle-green spandex sewn on him, given his bulk and the mind-blowing physics required for it to get inside such a tight getup. His hair reminded me of Edwardian Cambridge undergraduates, but that might have been because I’d recently developed a fanboy obsession with E.M. Forster’s Maurice—thank you, Internet! He had the coy-yet-windswept intellectual look down. I wondered what brand of mousse he used.

  “I’m fine, yeah,” I stammered once I dislodged my tongue from my throat. It was sure a good thing that I hadn’t been aware of how beautiful this man was when he caught me; otherwise, I’d have developed a boner while nearly plastered to his body, and it would have been embarrassing. Then again, he might not have felt it, anyway. It’d likely take nothing short of an aroused horse for him to feel something poking against his marble-like wall of muscles.

  He only gave me a cursory glance, which seriously broke my heart. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure, and can we do that again on our first date?” was the answer I wanted to give, but I ended up saying, “I’m sure, thanks.”

  He nodded, gave me a final once-over with zero emotion anywhere, and turned his attention to the other passengers, who either stood or sat on the ground, wide-eyed and gaping at him. They were all fine, they said in halting speech. Then, in the midst of wailing sirens, falling debris, and shaken and bruised victims, he flew up to join the other flying guy above and busied himself with the damaged train.

  Within seconds, an army of police cars screeched to a halt nearby. Helicopters appeared above, and I exchanged stunned glances with the others. When I looked away to scan the immediate vicinity, I caught sight of something familiar lying on the ground a few feet away, mixed in with all kinds of debris.

  It was my poor book, half burned and missing a good chunk of the first half of its contents. Was it a metaphor for my life’s suckage levels? Nah, it was just a book that was all used and torn—oh, hell, why not? Yeah. Hell, yeah, it was total metaphor for my life’s suckage levels.

  The wiener gorge was forgotten. I was held up by the police for an obscenely long time for questioning before being let go. How I managed to find my way home was a mystery I never fully solved since I seriously didn’t want to call home and have someone pick me up. Only Liz was around when I got home. She saw me drag myself through the door, but before she could say anything, I hurried up the stairs to my room and quickly took a shower and changed. She didn’t ask any questions, but I knew she had a few percolating in that Satan-born college sophomore brain of hers.

  I said nothing about my adventures that evening and went about my homework and chores in a daze. Even Mom’s nagging over the garbage that I forgot to dump that morning didn’t faze me. As far as I was concerned, my world had just experienced a pretty epic shift, and after scribbling another heart-wrenching haiku in my journal followed by lights out, I thought about my new idol, making sure that his face was the last thing I saw before I finally drifted off.

  Chapter 3

  Vintage City was all abuzz with the events of the previous day. From a dreary, sooty, acid rain-drenched metropolis no one would care to visit, we suddenly turned into a dreary, sooty, acid rain-drenched battleground between the forces of good and evil. No, really.

  “This is unbelievable,” Dad said as he frowned over the morning paper while Mom refilled his coffee mug.

  “I hope we’re not being invaded,” Liz piped up with a mouthful of cereal. I really didn’t know where my sister got her table manners. “I know those two flying guys helped out, but how can we trust them, for sure? Maybe they rigged everything!”

  I snorted. “What for? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I smell a conspiracy theory here,” Mom said as she took her place at the table. “We can’t really know for sure, Liz, but I’d rather give them the benefit of the doubt. Why on earth would they set things up? How could they profit?”

  “Yeah, really. It isn’t as though the city’s filthy rich or anything,” I appended, and Mom nodded.

  “I don’t know. Something tells me they’re bad news.”

  “I know for a fact that they’re not.” Well, that was a pretty bold thing to say, and I didn’t catch myself until it was too late. I looked around. At least Dad didn’t seem to be listening in on the conversation. He continued to read his paper, his brows deeply furrowed, his mouth moving silently as he carried on, absorbed.

  “And how would you know that?”

  I shrugged and met Liz’s gaze steadily. “Instinct.” What epic bull. According to Dad, the police had confirmed it had been sabotage—that the last car’s link to the rest of the train had been weakened, and sticks of explosives had been responsible for the devastation of the aerial tracks. It had been either blind luck or the criminal dude’s incompetence that the explosives had gone off after the last car had rattled past it.

  The second idea freaked me a bit. A bumbling, idiot-y criminal could wreak way greater havoc by accident.

  Liz seemed to know it was bull, and she laughed (after she swallowed her food, thankfully). “Whatever, Eric, whatever,” she said before drinking her orange juice. “I’ll bet you, though, that if anything like the train incident happens again, we’ll see those two guys at the scene, rescuing people and making a grand show of things.”

  “That’s really lame. They never showed off yesterday.”

  “And how do you know that?” Liz paused, her eyes narrowing. “Eric, you’re not telling us something, are you? Were you there yesterday?”

  Damn. Mom and Dad stared at me now, both looking very, very surprised in that parental surprised kind of way that, well, parents had. Pretty hard to describe, but it was there. Unfortunately my brain worked too slowly that morning, and I was still fishing around for something to say when Liz pounced.

  “You were there!” she cried. “And you never told us last night! No wonder you looked like hell!”

  “It was a shitty day in school.”

  “Eric,” Dad warned.

  “Sorry. All right, I was there. Satisfied?” I went on with a summary of my adventures, leaving nothing out but the sudden and explosive attraction I felt toward my caped hottie rescuer.

  My family had long known I was gay, and though in the end—once the dust settled from the surprise that followed my coming out, that is—they were pretty cool with it, I was sure they wouldn’t take to the idea of a romance between their son and some bizarre flying man as well as I’d have liked them to. They might be a reasonable bunch, but I knew my family had their limits, and I wasn’t ready to test those limits yet.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Mom b
lurted out, throwing her hands up. “No more trains for you and anyone else in this household. Take the bus. I don’t care if slugs on Valium outpace those things, just take them!”

  “Mom, buses could be the next ones to be sabotaged.”

  “Well, what do you want? We can’t be held hostage by terrorists!” She glowered at me from where she sat, digging her fork into the skinny and rather dry-looking sausages on her plate. “Take the bus, Eric, and don’t argue.”

  “If public transport freaks you out, you can always walk,” Liz piped up. “You can pick up as much grime as you can before you reach school. Make a fashion statement. Start a new Goth trend.”

  “I’m not Goth. I’m being sixteen.”

  “Oh, jeez.”

  “Anyway, a building or crane or even a plane can be sabotaged, and I’ll be crushed by falling debris—brains and entrails all over the sidewalk. Way cool.”

  “God, you’re morbid.”

  “It’s genetic, and you’re a late bloomer.”

  * * * *

  Public transportation didn’t freak me out as much as my family believed. I was only speculating, but as always, no one understood. I told no one in school about what had happened to me the previous day—only that I hadn’t been able to make it to the wiener gorge because the train had got blown up. My silence saved me quite a bit of grief, for sure, since no one talked about anything but the Flying Men Incident all day long. All the adolescent synaptic action nearly brought the entire school down with its crazy-ass crackling. If only Liz were there; she could’ve believed herself dead and in heaven, what with all the conspiracy theories that students were hatching. The most popular one—and most plausible, I guess—was the one about the Department of Antiquaries hiring a couple of super-aliens to rip the city apart in order to create an even greater atmosphere of Gothicism, one along the lines of abbey ruins all over Europe. I had to look that one up online when I realized there was more than one meaning to “gothic.”

  “You missed the book,” Peter said as we wasted time in the library. It was the only place for us to hang out when it rained, and we were too broke for a burger or two at one of the fast food joints across the street. Apparently Peter left his money at home, so he was kinda sorta broke. “Are you still interested in checking it out?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He pulled the book out of his backpack and handed it to me with a shy little smile. “You’re into heavy stuff like Hesse, so maybe this is too simplistic for you.”

  “How can you be so sure? I’ve never read war poetry before. Anyway, I can never figure out what Hesse’s trying to say in his stories, though I’m sure it’s something like ‘life’s a bitch, and then you die.’ I’m sampling other stuff now.”

  To be fair, I tried to get into Hesse because my favorite English teacher, Miss Blundstone, challenged me into reading more advanced fiction after seeing my passion for literature when I was fifteen. So I picked Hesse because I wanted to show off. Turned out to be kind of a bad decision in the end because, like I said, I seriously had no fucking idea what his books were about.

  Had she not succumbed to cancer, she’d have still been my unofficial mentor. I owed her a lot and, God, I missed her. Biting off more than I could chew was my way of honoring her memory, it looked like. I felt like an idiot when I gave up on Hesse, but seeing how Jules Verne’s books were classics, I felt that my switch to Victorian sci-fi/adventure/fantasy stuff would be forgiven. Besides, I found that I liked them way more.

  “I guess. I don’t know. You can borrow it. I’m halfway through the book, but you can have it for a while.”

  I glanced at Peter and noted his stiff, fidgety figure across the table as he stared at the book in my hands. His shoulders were pulled up rather high—like to his ears—and he visibly winced.

  “You okay, Peter?”

  “What? Yeah, I am.”

  “Hey, if you need to take a leak or something, it’s cool. I’m not keeping you.”

  “No, no, I’m fine!” He laughed, suddenly coloring. “Sorry, am I squirming again?”

  I nodded, but catching sight of another fleeting look of pain or nervousness on his face made me hold myself back.

  Peter was the anxious type. I always blamed his family for forcing him into a situation of secrecy and denial with their crazy, sky-high standards. He wasn’t a drop-dead gorgeous boy, but he was still attractive. I’d never talked to his parents, but I’d seen them at a tolerable distance, which was probably where they preferred to keep me. He inherited his English dad’s coloring and height and his Japanese mom’s eyes, hair, and cheekbones. He also inherited his parents’ scientific brains, which bummed him out because his natural bent was artistic, and he excelled in everything else. I’d always thought him appealing in more understated ways, but he seemed uncomfortable with praise and had a ready rebuttal on his lips whenever someone—me included—would dare say something good about his appearance.

  “Hey, you look nice and fresh this morning!” would always be countered with, “I just took a shower. It must be the new soap.” “Man, I wish I didn’t have acne problems. You’re lucky!” would be voided with, “I’ve got scars from chicken pox all over my back. Can’t get rid of those, unlike zits.” “Your haircut looks good on you!” would be brushed off with, “The barber had a good day.”

  After a while, we all learned not to praise him. It was sad.

  He also tended to hide under layers of clothing, but I’d seen him in just a t-shirt, and he was pretty built. Not like a jock, but trimmer and just as firm. He took tennis lessons, he told me, practically every day. He’d been doing them for at least a couple of months now. I always thought of it as a bit over-the-top—even obsessive-compulsive—considering Peter’s notable lack of interest in athletics.

  Holding my tongue, I skimmed through the book’s introduction and flipped to a random page and verse somewhere in the middle: But the old man would no so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

  I glanced up and met his gaze. “Thanks,” I breathed. “I’d love to read the rest.”

  Peter heaved a sigh of relief and slumped against his chair. He smiled—no, grinned—one of his rare, huge, irrepressible grins and nodded. “I’m sure you’ll like them. I actually thought of you when I bought it.”

  “My sister said I’m morbid.”

  His grin widened even more. “Case closed.”

  “I’m starving. You got time today? We can have something sweet and murderous at my home. It’s free.”

  The grin faded, settled into a small, wan smile. Peter shook his head. “Thanks, but not today.”

  “Oh. Tennis practice or something?”

  He hesitated and scratched the back of his head, grimacing a little. “No, not that. I just can’t, Eric. Not today.”

  I didn’t push him, even though the air between us just reverberated with tension. He shrugged helplessly and looked back down at the book that lay open before him—and which he’d never given any attention to since he’d brought it out. As he lost himself in his reading, I slowly realized I sat, tensed and uncomfortable, on my chair as well. I shook off the feeling with a soft, irritated snort, stretched my arms above me as I yawned, and slumped back, feeling loose-limbed and mellow.

  I suppose I grew more annoyed with Peter’s parents. The anxiety in their son was really catching. I also wondered if Peter’s older brother—whom I never met and whom Peter was always reluctant to talk about—suffered from the same pressure. Wouldn’t be surprised if he did and he were on his way to being president of the country.

  Chapter 4

  About a week after the train incident, reports of street criminals getting caught by one or both of those flying men began to infiltrate the local news.

  On Monday, a purse snatcher ran into an alley with his spoils, only to find himself hoisted up by his grubby shirt and jacket. According to reports, the little douchebag was taken and flown over to the nearest patrolling cop car and dumped uncerem
oniously in front of it.

  The thug was too frightened to do anything more than cower, and the cops were too stunned to demand answers.

  “I believe this gentleman’s yours, Officer,” the bizarre flying man reportedly said, even pointing at the woman’s purse that was just snatched. Then he flew off before anyone could utter a word.

  His physical description matched my rescuer: dark features, incredible physique, unbelievable strength. Oh, how my lonely evenings drifted along in awesome waves, my imagination filled with what’s-his-name in all kinds of dangerous adventures with me. My hormones fired up, it certainly didn’t take much time for me to catch on, and I looked forward to reading the newspaper and watching the local news every day, hoping to see more reports on my idol. He’d yet to be identified, but after the fourth lowlife was cornered and hauled off to the police, everyone began to relax, convinced Bizarre Flying Man was on the side of justice.

  “The conspiracy’s so blatant, it hurts my brain reading about it,” Liz sniffed.

  “Then don’t read,” I said. “Easy enough, no?”

  “That would be giving up. I want to figure them out and do something about it.”

  I stared at her, frowning. “And what can you do? Gnaw their ankles ‘til they confess? You’d be smashed to a pulp before you could even lift a finger. Their ankles might be made of granite, for all we know.”

  “There’s such a thing as going through the proper channels. Duh.”

  I’d rather not know what those proper channels were, considering how many supervisors and political figures had been kicked out of office because of corruption for as long as I could remember. Really, one couldn’t help but remember, what with Dad going on a total rampage every time he read the politics section of the newspaper.

  On Thursday, it was a carjacker. That same evening, an attempted robbery at Mr. Li’s Asian market was foiled. On Friday, it was a small gang of kids who were defacing the founder’s statue in the main square. The following day, it was a couple of drunk drivers attempting a drag race.