Stephen Kotowych
The happiest moment in eleven-year-old Ethan Whittaker’s life was when the men in bright yellow hazmat suits showed up at his school and hauled Trayden Bukowski away in zip-cuffs and a black hood.
The whole school evacuated to the back soccer field just like a fire drill. The hazmat men perp-walked Trayden to the armored ambulance past five hundred students and their teachers. Reaction among the children ranged from relief to jubilation. Trayden had terrorized most of them at some point, sometimes for years.
It was perfect.
Ethan’s happiness lasted forty-three seconds; right up until a black hood got pulled over his head, too.
* * *
“You sure this is the place?” Ethan adjusted the dish towel cape he wore safety-pinned around his neck. He and the others peered over the back cedar hedge of what was apparently Trayden Bukowski’s house. A swing set sat idle in the back corner of the yard, and the kidney-shaped pool was already winterized though it was only late September.
“I’m sure.” Amber inched closer to the hedge, but found herself thwarted by her pink tutu. “He chased me home from school one day and I ran past here. His dad came out yelling at him to get in the house for dinner. It’s the right place.”
Ethan forced himself to think of her as Squirrel. The gang had agreed to only use their aliases while out on their first mission. They were eager, too, after a month cooped up under house arrest. All five of them had been hauled away in the armored ambulances that day, same as Trayden.
From the moment the Ka-Pow! Plague was declared a pandemic their teachers had made them sit through hours of lectures from Public Health nurses, and they’d watched all the Health Canada videos on preventing its spread.
‘Wear gloves and don’t punch people,’ was the moral every time, and then the teachers handed out vinyl gloves. How hard was that?
Too hard for Trayden, it seemed. One day at recess he pulled off his gloves and started punching kids. After that it was all hazmat suits, black bags, and undisclosed locations.
Ethan spent two terrifying days in an isolation cell at a holding camp before his parents found him, and another week before the court order got him released back into their custody.
Now that they were heroes, Supers, all five, Ethan and the others weren’t going to let a Villain like Trayden go unpunished.
“You could fit my whole house into this one twice.” Captain Katie rose to tiptoes for a better view. She was dressed in a mishmash of sports equipment—hockey gloves, a catcher’s vest, a football helmet.
Smarty Pants was in his homemade mecha walker, its legs folded back to better hide behind the hedge. An alarm chirped on his dash, and he raised his welder’s goggles as he examined the readout. “I’m detecting movement within the structure.”
Within the structure? Ethan wondered. Who says that? Smarty Pants was a little odd, even before they all got infected.
At that moment the patio door opened and out stepped Trayden Bukowski. Fear and anger welled up within Ethan. He worked to push it back down inside, like he always did.
Unlike Ethan and the others, Trayden hadn’t put on a costume. He wore jeans and sneakers, and a zip up hoodie.
No gloves.
He looked aimless for a moment, picking up a stick off the patio stones only to send it whipping off into the neighbor’s yard.
Somewhere over the fence a dog yelped.
“Shouldn’t we wait until its dark?”
“Shut up, Moose,” Squirrel said. Two twins couldn’t be more different than Moose and Squirrel. He was short, stocky, and wore an old colander over his limp hair. She was tall and scrawny, with a head of wiry hair exploding from beneath a plastic Viking helmet.
“It’s just that in the comic books the heroes always seem to work at night, right?”
“You know mom won’t let us out after dark. It’s a school night.”
“They’re not going to let us back in school,” said Moose, pulling up slack in the stretchy yoga pants he’d borrowed from his mother’s closet. “Not now that we have powers. What if we start punching people and making loads of Villains? Besides, mom doesn’t know we’re here. We’re not supposed to leave the house. Right, Ethan?”
“No names, stupid,” Squirrel said.
“Sorry—Action Kid.”
Ethan crouched down behind the hedge. “Yeah, Moose. That’s what they said.” He scratched at his temple where the domino mask’s elastic band was starting to itch.
Ethan hadn’t understood everything that the Army man and the doctors said when releasing him into his parents’ custody, but they posted guards outside his house and told him he couldn’t leave until the government said so. ‘Strict quarantine’ they called it.
That was fine with Ethan. More time to play Minecraft.
But the urge to don a costume and do something—anything!—that involved helping people, was overwhelming. That was a change. A lot of things had changed since the fever.
His mother was crying a lot, for one.
She’d brought soup and flat ginger ale to Ethan’s room the night the fever finally broke, three weeks after Trayden punched him. She screamed and dropped the tray when she discovered Ethan in bed wearing the mask from last Halloween’s Lone Ranger costume. She was inconsolable after that.
His father spent days on the phone, screaming about civil rights and lawsuits.
The change in his friends was another.
He and Moose were close even before all this, and he was being normal for the moment. But Ethan had seen what he could do.
“What if I tear the shirt when I get big?” he’d asked Ethan on the way over, rubbing the hem of his T-shirt. “You think I’ll get in trouble?”
Ethan didn’t know Squirrel very well and he didn’t know what her powers were, but she looked angry, and in her pink ballet outfit and Viking helmet he knew he didn’t want to mess with her.
The virus turned Smarty Pants into a top-notch super scientist and gadget hero. That made sense: he’d always been the smart kid in class. Ethan didn’t know where Smarty Pants got the steel and hydraulics to build the mecha’s chicken-like robotic legs, or how he found what looked like a Gatling gun to bolt to one side, but he was pretty sure the open cockpit was built from a red Radio Flyer wagon and an Xbox controller.
Smarty Pants was also the one who coordinated the group’s escapes from isolation, hacking their ankle monitors, the CCTV feeds the guards used, and even overriding a Rogers Home Monitoring security system to make it happen. So as far as anyone knew, they were all still in their bedrooms, playing video games.
Captain Katie—Ethan’s stomach went all weird when he even thought about her. She sat in the next row and smelled like vanilla and was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. And now with her sports equipment and Louisville Slugger she looked totally badass.
He wanted to just, like, hang out with her all the time, even more than he wanted to hang out with Moose. They wouldn’t even have to play video games.
Except he kept freezing up whenever she said hello, and all her friends would giggle. Why did they travel in packs like that?
He felt himself going red just thinking about it and his stomach was going funny, too, so he tried putting her out of his mind. If only she wasn’t standing right next to him . . .
Trayden crouched and scooped a handful of gravel from between the patio stones. One by one he whipped them at the garden shed.
“Okay, so?” said Captain Katie. “Now what do we do?”
In the silence that followed, it was clear to Ethan that none of them had thought past this point. They were superheroes now and should do . . .what?
“You guys all suck,” she said.
“Shut up, Katie,” said Squirrel.
“Captain Katie.”
“Your secret identity needs work.”
“And yours is so great? Don’t you think it’s weird, picking that? Everybody knows that Trayden calls you ‘Squirrel Face.’“
“Shut up, Katie,” Squirrel said, and pinched her lips tight to hide buck teeth. “It’s so I never forget my arch-nemesis. And at least my secret identity doesn’t have my real name in it.”
“Yeah. Besides, Katie, I told you—girls can’t be Captain,” said Moose. “Can you think of any girl Captains from the comics?”
“Shut up, Moose,” said Katie and Squirrel in unison.
“Look, he did this to us,” Ethan said. “He took off his gloves. Let’s remember that.”
That quelled argument for the moment. Ethan didn’t remember this much fighting and disagreement before they got Ka-Powed! by Trayden. Maybe that was one of the side-effects?
The Ka-Pow! Plague wasn’t its real name, of course, but it was what everyone called a virus that turned you into a wannabe comic book character.
The index case was a microbiologist who survived the explosion of his laboratory caused by a meteorite strike. Not only had he walked away unscathed, but he soon began exhibiting a predilection for dressing up in costume and fighting crime.
At first the doctors thought it was some kind of mental break, PTSD from the accident. But then the powers started to manifest: super agility, endurance, and accelerated healing. He was the world’s first legitimate superhero, and an instant celebrity.
He even, presciently, called himself Patient Zero.
And as he pursued his crusade against petty crime, punching the odd mugger or purse snatcher, no one realized that his condition was contagious, a virus transmitted through high-velocity skin-to-skin contact. Whether alien in origin or a result of the confluence of calamity that day at the lab remained unclear, but there was no cure.
It spread like wildfire.
Telekinesis, x-ray vision, elastic limbs. The variations of powers were endless. And they weren’t all heroes, either. Just as many costumed villains appeared as did do-gooders.
The virus was oddly mercurial that way: when a Super punched someone they became a Villain, but when a Villain struck someone they became a Super. And so on, and so on.
A percentage of the population was immune, though still potential carriers. Some of the more enterprising amongst the infected ‘Nulls’ had even posted ads on Craigslist, offering to ‘gift’ people with a ‘power punch’ for the right price.
“Moose? What would the Danger Squad do right now?” asked Captain Katie.
“Oh sure,” protested Moose. “Now you’re interested in my comic books.”
“Okay—enough.” Squirrel stood. “Follow me.”
She balled her fists and a green nimbus of energy surrounded each. In a single fluid motion she hurled a ball of energy at the cedar hedge as if she were throwing a softball across the yard. There was a tremendous ka-thoom!, and in a flash a four-foot wide smoldering hole cut through the hedge. Moose and Squirrel dashed through, followed by Captain Katie and Smarty Pants, whose mecha went whirr-pop-clang as it chicken-stepped over the hedge. Ethan picked up his shield—an aluminum garbage can lid he’d painted with a crude maple leaf—and followed.
To Ethan’s amazement, after a moment’s surprise Trayden smirked and went right back to whipping rocks at the shed. He didn’t seem frightened by being surrounded, nor concerned in the slightest.
“Don’t move!” Squirrel’s hands crackled with energy. “We don’t know what his powers are yet,” she said to the group. “Don’t move until we say so!”
There was just something about the way Trayden carried himself that Ethan had never liked. A kind of cockiness mixed with brutality that Trayden displayed in spades as he gave them all a sidelong look, smug and dismissive.
“Yeah, you guys seem real scary.” Trayden reached down for another handful of rocks.
“I said don’t move!” screeched Squirrel. She hurled two balls of plasma which struck the lawn between Trayden and the garden shed, their impact kicking up great clods of turf. The crack of the explosions echoed throughout the neighbourhood.
That gave Trayden pause. He had a handful of pebbles, but he held onto them as he turned toward the group.
“Okay, Squirrel Face,” Trayden said. “What now? You guys going to beat me up?”
Squirrel wore a cold smirk that Ethan didn’t like at all.
“Yeah, let’s teach Trayden a lesson,” she said.
“What does that mean?” asked Katie, resting her Louisville Slugger on her shoulder.
“Let’s kick his ass,” said Moose, grinning and looking bigger than he had a moment before.
“Wait—what?” said Katie. “That’s not what the good guys do.”
“I must concur with Captain Katie,” said Smarty Pants, tugging the lapels of his lab coat. “I have no desire to behave like a common thug.”
“Oh, come on!” said Squirrel. “This is what superheroes do: we fight villains. What did you come here to do?”
Ethan, Captain Katie, and Smarty Pants looked at each other, realizing none of them had a good answer. Katie had asked before, and this is what the Danger Squad would do: pound the hell out of the villain before throwing him in prison.
Trayden had been especially hard on Squirrel and Moose over the years. Ethan understood now why she suggested this as their first mission. Revenge had been her intention all along.
“What do you think we should do, Action Kid?” asked Katie.
Ethan felt himself blush as she looked at him.
“I’m—I don’t know. I’m not sure. I feel like we’re supposed to do good, fight villains. Like in the comics. So . . . I don’t know. Maybe Squirrel’s right?”
Katie frowned and Trayden laughed.
“Oh, sorry Action Kid. Don’t think your girlfriend likes that answer.”
Girlfriend. He and Katie’s eyes met for an instant and both looked away as fast as they could.
Oh God. Ethan was red as a cherry, he was sure of it. Why couldn’t the plague have given him powers of invisibility?
“Shut up, Trayden,” said Katie.
“It doesn’t seem right,” said Smarty Pants. “Beating people up? Not very heroic.”
“Then why do all the superheroes spend so much time beating people up in the comics?” Moose pointed out.
It was hard to argue with either of them, Ethan thought. It didn’t seem very heroic, but if they were superheroes now and if this is the kind of thing that superheroes did, then . . .
“Moose,” Ethan asked, “you ever punch anybody before?”
“Well . . . No. Not exactly.”
“Punching the pickle doesn’t count!” Trayden laughed.
Moose grew more than a foot, gaining mass over his entire frame, and stretching his T-shirt to bursting.
“I may not have punched anyone before,” he said, his voice deeper and booming, “but I think I’d like to start.”
Moose now had close to two feet and probably more than a hundred pounds on Trayden, but to Ethan’s surprise the boy didn’t run, and didn’t seem like he was trying to figure a way out. He sized Moose up and down with a look of grim determination.
And he wasn’t using his powers.
“So what can you do?” Ethan demanded. “What’s your power?”
Trayden’s face flushed red. “Come over here and find out.”
Smarty Pants climbed down from his perch in the mecha and stood next to Ethan holding what looked like a modified TV remote control. Aiming it in Trayden’s direction, Smarty Pants ran it up and down in the air, scanning.
He scowled as he looked over the readout. Smarty Pants pointed the probe at Ethan and waved it up and down. It made sound like a Geiger counter crackling.
“See? It’s working. It’s telling me that you have superpowers, but . . .”
“What?” Ethan asked.
Smarty Pants opened his mouth to answer, but paused, distracted. “Is that . . . Are you wearing your underwear over top of your tights?”
Ethan straightened up and put his fists on his hips. “Is that your sister Jenny’s wagon you used?” He nodded at the mecha.
Smarty Pants looked hurt. “Well, I wasn’t going to use my own.”
“Guys!” said Katie. “What’s wrong with Trayden?”
A rock went pinging off the hull of Smarty Pants’ mecha. Captain Katie yelped in pain as another hit her in the shin. With a quick raise of his shield Ethan deflected a stone Trayden whipped right at his head.
“Quit it!” Katie said.
“There’s nothing wrong with me!” Trayden stalked toward her. “Come at me. Come on! Try it!”
Captain Katie raised her Louisville and looked ready to knock Trayden’s head clean off his shoulders.
Ethan was between them in a flash, floating six inches off the ground. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened. He’d meant to run but had sort of willed himself to be between them, and then he was . . . His powers were still so new. Super-strength and now flight. Would there be others?
“Sure you don’t want your girlfriend to do your fighting for you?” Trayden said.
“Shut up, Trayden,” Captain Katie and Ethan said in unison.
Trayden sucked his lips together, making kissy noises.
Ethan piked in the air and darted forward, slamming into Trayden shield-first, hurling them both to the ground. They tumbled across the grass in a tangle of thrashing limbs and grunting.
He felt Trayden’s hot breath as they tussled, felt the boy rolling with him. He’d expected Trayden to start raining down blows, anticipated the sharp stab of pain from rabbit punches to the kidneys. But none came, nor did Trayden use his powers. Counting his blessings, Ethan kept rolling until he was able to get the advantage and flip on top, straddling Trayden’s chest with his legs and pinning the boy’s arms with his knees.
They were both covered in grass and dirt, and Trayden had a smear of mud along the side of his face. Eyes locked, Trayden lay there, impassive, waiting for the inevitable. Ethan couldn’t understand: why wasn’t Trayden afraid? Their positions were reversed not so long ago, and Ethan could still recall the metallic tastes of blood and fear in the back of his throat.
It was the fear he was tired of. Tired of being picked on; tired of teachers who either wouldn’t believe him or who were powerless to stop bullies like Trayden.
No more bullies. Not anymore. He’d see to it, he decided in that instant.
Action Kid would watch the school hallways and classrooms, where kids called names, or passed notes, or whispered lies and rumors. He would patrol the school yards so recess would no longer be a terror to be survived. He would monitor the parks and the after school walks home, when bullies would appear and chase you, and where there wasn’t even the hope of a teacher who might break up the beating you’d earn when they caught you. He’d put an end to it all.
Wherever kids were picked on, Action Kid would be there.
He’d make the bullies pay. All of them. Starting with Trayden.
Action Kid grabbed the prone boy by the shirt front and pulled his head up off the ground. He balled his fist so tight he thought his fingers might break. Channeling into that fist all the years of helpless fear and impotent rage Trayden had inflicted on him, Action Kid cocked his arm back for one perfect punch. Trayden sneered.
“Ethan!”
He looked up. Captain Katie stood over them, a horrified look on her face. The rest of the group had stopped fighting and stood aghast. Even Moose and Squirrel looked shocked, confronted for the first time by the reality of their intentions.
Seeing them standing there was like a splash of cold water in Ethan’s face. The rage that possessed him broke and passed, like a fever. For a moment he’d been Action Kid, not Ethan. He’d been playing some kind of part, filling in his alias with expectation.
His arm was still in the air, frozen in mid-strike. Flushed with embarrassment he lowered his fist.
“Hit me!” Trayden squirmed underneath Ethan. “Do it! Come on, chickenshit!”
Ethan scrambled off Trayden, who hustled to his feet, too.
“Hit me!” Trayden demanded, shoving Ethan. Captain Katie started moving toward them, but Ethan waved her away. He kept both hands up, palms out, to show Trayden that he no longer meant him harm.
Why hadn’t Trayden used his power? Ethan wondered.
“Punch me. You chicken, huh? Punch me. You gonna let your girlfriend do it instead?” Trayden punctuated each phrase with another shove.
“What’s your power, Trayden?” Ethan asked, soft and low.
“Hit me and find out.”
Shove.
“What’s your power?” Ethan asked again.
“Shut up,” Trayden growled.
Shove.
“Tell me.”
“Shut up!” Trayden hit Ethan in the nose with a left jab.
It didn’t hurt nearly as much as Ethan remembered. The taste of the blood trickling down his throat no longer made him terrified. He could do this, he knew in that moment. He could be in command of Action Kid and not the other way around. He could restrain his power.
As he blinked tears from his eyes, Ethan was astonished to see tears in Trayden’s, too.
The group stood in a half circle behind Trayden, preventing escape. With Trayden’s punch each of them looked ready for a fight: Moose was twelve feet tall and half as wide again, his shirt shredded, and ball lightning danced around Squirrel’s hands. Captain Katie twirled her Louisville like a drum major’s baton, and the Gatling gun on Smarty Pants’ mecha was spun up and ready.
“It’s okay,” Ethan said to them, his eyes still locked with Trayden’s. He wiped blood from his nose with the back of the yellow dish gloves he wore. “He doesn’t have any powers.”
“What? How?” asked Squirrel, the balls of energy fading from her hands.
“But he did this to us,” said Captain Katie, waving at the group around her.
Realization washed over Smarty Pants’ face. “He’s a Null. That’s why I got no reading.”
“Shut up!” yelled Trayden. He was trying to hold it together, but was red in the face, all tears and running nose.
“So, wait . . .” Moose looked thoroughly confused.
“He can spread the Ka-Pow! Plague but he’s only a carrier,” said Smarty Pants, leaning over the edge of his cockpit. “He’ll never manifest superpowers or extraordinary abilities.”
“He’ll never be like us,” said Squirrel, with unmistakable relish.
Ethan didn’t care for her tone. “If you knew you were a Null, why did you want me to punch you?” he asked, partly to distract.
Trayden wiped his nose with his hand. “I thought if someone with powers hit me maybe I’d get them this time. That’s why I hit you guys. I knew if you were heroes you’d have to come after me, like in the comics.”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that,” said Smarty Pants. “You see, once the pathogen is introduced by the initial vector—”
“Wait!” Ethan interrupted. “Trayden, what do you mean ‘someone with powers’? What do you mean ‘get them this time’? Who hit you before? Another Null? Who gave you the Ka-Pow! Plague?”
“What the hell did you do to my hedge!”
The whole group turned as the angry figure of Mr. Bukowski stalked from the patio door.
“Aw, crap,” Squirrel muttered.
“Which one of you little shits did this?” he demanded, thrusting a finger at the hedge. “You have any idea how much this is going to cost me? I want your parent’s names. They’re going to pay for this, by God.” He stopped long enough to look up at Smarty Pants sitting in his mecha.
“What the hell is that thing?”
“Uhh . . .” Smarty Pants managed.
“Dad—”
“Shut up!” the man said through gritted teeth. “You and your idiot friends have wrecked my hedge. And look at this lawn! You know how long it took to get it looking this good?” He grabbed Trayden by the arm, and dragged him toward the house.
Ethan rocketed across the yard and smashed into Mr. Bukowski, knocking him flat on his face. Trayden staggered away from the impact.
When Mr. Bukowski rolled over he found Action Kid hovering above him, arms crossed.
“What the hell?”
“Your turn to shut up,” said Ethan.
“Don’t hurt him!” begged Trayden, which took Ethan aback. He considered his one-time arch-nemesis for a moment and then turned back to Mr. Bukowski.
“For your sake you’re lucky Trayden’s a Null, like you,” said Ethan. “Imagine a son with laser vision or one who could throw flames. Who would you hit then?”
“Listen, you little bastard—”
A dark shadow loomed over the both of them as Moose stepped close, blocking out the sun. He was gargantuan, bigger than Ethan had ever seen him, and he put the fear of God into Mr. Bukowski, that was clear. Smarty Pants’ chicken walker clanged to a halt behind them as the others gathered around.
“I’ll—I’ll call the police!” Mr. Bukowski protested.
“What do you think we’re going to do, dipshit?” Captain Katie said.
“Actually, I’ve already placed the call,” said Smarty Pants. “Hacked directly into patrol cars in the area. Faster than 911. I think I used the right police code for domestic violence. Though it might have been ‘attempted murder.’ Either way, the cops will be here soon.” He grinned.
Mr. Bukowski inched out from under the hovering Ethan and scrambled to his feet.
“Go to hell, kid!”
Ethan nodded. “Smarty Pants, light him up.”
Staccato bursts of fire rattled from the Gatling gun. A rainbow barrage of paintballs strafed Mr. Bukowski, their sharp sting sending him running, howling in pain. The salvo chased him back inside, splattering both him and the back of the Bukowski house with sticky globs of neon paint.
The first sounds of sirens reached them.
“Time to bounce,” said Moose, back to his regular size and draped in his ruined t-shirt. The group retreated back through the breach in the hedge.
“Don’t tell anyone at school, ‘kay?” Trayden said, as Ethan floated away.
Ethan huffed and turned back. “Now that we’re like this I don’t think they’re going to let us go back to school.”
Trayden shuffled in place.
“Don’t worry,” said Ethan. “We won’t tell anybody. You keep our secret identities, we’ll keep yours. But you’re going to leave all the other kids alone from now on, understand? We’ll be watching.”
Trayden nodded his head.
The sirens were close now.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going to happen with your dad, but . . .”
“I don’t want him to go to jail,” said Trayden.
Ethan nodded. “If he ever—If you need help . . . Action Kid will be there.”
As the police cruisers pulled up to the curb, Ethan shot into the sky and with a sonic boom disappeared beyond the clouds.