Don’t All Wear Capes

Almost my whole life, I’ve wanted to be a superhero. Ever since I saw my first one. I was fifteen, it was the county fair, and I’d just about learnt everything I could possibly know about tractors. At a county fair, if you’re bored of tractors, you’ve pretty much run the gamut of potential excitement. Unless you’re looking to purchase seeds or sheep, which I wasn’t, then you might as well go home. I decided to head to the main arena in the hope of catching the canine agility.

When I arrived at the arena I was surprised by the crowds. Waves of people pulsing with their need to get to the front. This felt excessive for a dog show. I tugged the sleeve of the man in front of me. He turned with ferocity, worried someone would try and take his spot.

“What’s going on?” I asked. The man relaxed. Clearly, one look at me told him I wouldn’t be forcing my way past anyone.

“A superhero, kid. One of the new ones. He’s doing a strength display or something. You might as well give up though. I can’t see over this crowd and I’ve got more than a foot on you.”

I was already gone, though. What I lack in physical power, I make up for in being able to find my way through gaps. Others might describe it as being worryingly skinny. I simple regard myself as the right size for the gaps.

By the time I had squirmed my way to the front, I was damp with sweat. The dank scent of the people around was testament to the heat produced by so many people in so tight a space,and the sun, shining for once on a public holiday, intensified it into an oven of men’s sweat and women’s perfume. I hoped it was worth it.

The arena was roughly twenty meters square, hemmed in by hay bales and plastic tape. At the centre was a man, large but not excessively so, doing arm stretching exercises and eyeing the squat dark shape in front of him. It was, unsurprisingly, a tractor engine, the kind you might use a block and tackle to lift. The man was evidently preparing to lift it with his bare hands.

The crowd hushed. I wondered what all the fuss was about. I’d seen strongmen before. Men in leotards, at the circus, lifting elephants and bending iron bars with their bare hand. I’d been excited for all of five minutes until I’d found out about the tricks. Read how you could fool the audience with sleight of hand and hidden ropes.

I was just about to dismiss this man as another charlatan when a small disturbance broke the crowd. Someone had pushed, too hard, too long, until the person he had been pushing pushed back. You can’t have just a two-man showing match within that number of people. Now everyone was shoving and punches were starting to be thrown.

The man in the arena turned away from the tractor engine and began to run. Fast. So fast. It was like stop motion, so quickly did he move from position to position. I blinked, he was ten meters away, I blinked, he was reaching into the crowd. With the final blink, he was holding a small boy aloft, a terrified wide-eyed creature with blood on the side of his face where feet had trampled him. Then the man stalked back to the center of the arena, still clutching the child, while behind him the fight sputtered out as people woke up to the embarrassment of what they had almost done.

I studied the heroes after that. Looked them up on the internet, read books, found out who they were and where they had come from.

The first hero had appeared almost out of nowhere. A construction worker, Pawel Kowalski, putting up scaffolding by a roadside when one of the supports had collapsed. Twenty tons of steel and wood toppling onto a road full of innocent people, unaware of the dent about to be put in their day. Pawel caught it. Caught the scaffolding by a single pole and held the whole thing, muscles straining and eyes popping, until a crane could be brought and the scaffolding made safe.

After that, it was as though the world had been waiting to tell others what they could do. Speedsters, acrobats, strongmen, tacticians. Nothing incredible. No mental powers, or laser eyes, or bolts of lightning from the fingers. The world would still have to wait for a man who could fly. Normal abilities though, they abounded but punched up to the max. Most of them hadn’t realised they were anything special until they realised others couldn’t do what they could do. Or at least, that’s what they said at first.

My Dad discovered my collection of superhero comics when I was seventeen. I don’t know how he hadn’t noticed, hadn’t seen what I’d been doing in all my hours on the internet, and scouring malls for back issues. Perhaps because he never noticed me except when he did.

He noticed me know. It might as well have been porn for the reaction. I could barely defend myself, the blows rained down so fast.

“No son of mine,” he was yelling. It was hard to make it out. I let him work it out of his system, while I turned occasionally to spit blood and snot onto the hardwood floor.

Eventually, he calmed down enough for me to work out what I’d done wrong this time. He told me, as he cradled me in his arms, telling me how sorry he was, telling me how he only did it for my own good.

“It’s all a lie,” he crooned as we rocked back and forth together. “They want you to think you can achieve anything, but its all a lie. Those people weren’t found. They were made.”

“Made where,” I wanted to ask. I didn’t dare.

Later, I did my research. All of the superheroes, everyone with abilities had been created in a lab. Some great government project. It was unclear how they’d done it. Some sources said radiation, others electricity. Most sources agreed on one thing though. Not everyone had survived.

It took me years to piece together all of the information. More often than not, the trail went cold. It was harder now. The heroes were all government-sponsored. That meant classified. Whereas before, I could track down information with Wikipedia and Google, nowadays they all gave me back the same sanitized details. A simple bio with name, details of their powers, areas of operations. The names. Oh, the names. Everyone had a superhero name now. I guess it had started in the media as a joke. Now it was part of the PR. Captain Britain, Power Girl, Flower of Scotland. We even had a Miss Idaho. My hero, the one I had seen at the fair all those years ago, went by the name of Farmer Dan. Or at least, he did until he retired. Now he was plain old Simon Hollister, wiling away his time on forty-acre plot down near Truro.

That last bit wasn’t on the bio. There was a lot that wasn’t on the bio. As I say, though, I pieced it together.

I’d tried writing to him. Asking him how it all happened. About the experiments. He never replied.

That was why I was here. In a small warehouse unit outside Levington. I’d pieced it all together. The locations. The experiments. I’d placed maps on my apartment wall, tying together with pieces of string all the places where the heroes first emerged.

It all led back to here.

I was about to commit my first and only crime.

I figured it was worth it. If I could just… If I could join them. Maybe it would all…

The lock came off more easily than I had expected. It hadn’t all been superhero research online. It’s amazing how much you can find on the internet. I’d never actually had a chance to practice my breaking and entering skills live, as it were, though. Now I discovered the difficulty to be overrated.

The rollup door made more noise than I would have liked as I opened. A rattling scrape of metal against metal, unused pulleys screeching for oil.

I slipped inside. It took just a minute to locate the light switch. A minute feels a long time when you’re groping around in darkness, not even sure if the building will still have power.

When the lights came own, it was everything I had imagined. Old. Mostly covered in sheets. But there, in the centre, was the pool, metal hoops rising over it, multicoloured wires leading to steel orbs atop the hoops. In the video, they had arced great fizzing sparks between them. In the video I wasn’t supposed to see, of how the titans had been created.

I was just hauling a tarpaulin off a switchboard when a voice startled me from the shadows in the corner of the room.

“You came then?”

I peered into the darkness. I was so close. The pool was filled with algae but still active. The switchboard was alive with lights and power.

“I’d hoped you wouldn’t. When you wrote me, I couldn’t believe you’d tracked me down. Then, I realised I couldn’t believe no one else had.”

I ran my fingers over the switchboard, flicking active the ones I needed. The room began to thrum as small arcs of light began to race up and down the concentric circles surrounding the pool.

“It’s all a lie, you know. We weren’t created at all. We just were. Everyone’s different. Some of us have differences that we thought for a while made us special.”

I was so close now. There was a remote. A big metal box with a big red button that spooled out from the console on an umbilical wire. I took it and began to climb into the pool.

The figure stepped out of the shadows now. He looked alarmed. I remembered when he had covered the distance than now separated us it the less time than it took to trample an innocent child. He wasn’t Farmer Dan anymore though. He had got old.

“Don’t do this,” he insisted. “It won’t work. It won’t make you special. None of this is real. The government was worried people would try and copy us. They didn’t want to think just anyone can be a hero.”

I ignored him and strode to the middle of the pool, fetid water soaking into my jeans. I noticed bare wires trailing into the water. To be activated when I hit the button, I assumed. I wondered if it would hurt

“It’s not real,” said Dan. “None of this. It’s just a sound stage. It’s not going to make you special. We were never special.”

I paused, hand hovered over the button. I wondered if he was right.

“I don’t think it’s safe,” said Dan. “Look, I’ll come down to you. Just step out of the pool and we can talk about it.”

“Can you teach me?” I asked. “Can you teach me to be a hero? I could be your side-kick. Your protege.”

Dan sighed.

“It’s all a lie,” he repeated.

I hit the button.