Chapter Seven

Hero's Call: Chapter Seven

   “Check mate, Cap.”

Harold Johnson had a severe case of Alzheimer’s with a little bit of dementia thrown in. Most days he could barely function, but when he could, he loved a good game of checkers with Captain Amazing. The Captain couldn’t ever figure out if Harold just wasn’t sure what was going on or if he was actually seeing a game of chess going on in front of him. He moved the checker pieces like they were knights or rooks, and Captain Amazing typically just played along. He really just didn’t have the heart to tell old Harold that he’d gone bonkers.

“Good game, Harry,” Captain Amazing said, and started resetting the pieces. “Want another game?”

“Sure, Cap,” Harold replied. The Captain knew Harold knew who he was, but he called everyone Cap, so Captain Amazing was never sure if Harold actually knew he was talking directly to him or not.

It was one in the morning, well past curfew. The nurses and orderlies knew Captain Amazing didn’t sleep well, and didn’t bother trying to make him obey curfew. Harry, on the other hand, didn’t get as much leeway. For having so many problems, he was quite the escape artist. Captain Amazing knew he was Special Forces in the military for years which accounted for his predilection for going on ‘covert ops’ to the common room at night. Most nights, The Captain was happy for the company.

Captain Amazing reset the pieces and they began the game anew. Harold began by moving one of his red pieces up two spaces. The Captain moved one of his pieces diagonally at random. Harold didn’t say anything, because in his own head another game entirely was playing out. Harold moved the piece that would be the knight up four and diagonally three.

“Check,” he said with a smile. The Captain responded by taking one of his pieces from the back row, jumped the piece in front of it, and took Harold’s piece. Harold grunted with dissatisfaction. After another minute or two of completely illegal moves Harold claimed another checkmate. The Captain tried to out play him once, but he never knew exactly what piece his opponent saw as his king until he’d won, so it was impossible.

The Captain stood up from the table, pushed his chair in, and said, “I think I’m going to hit the sack, Harry.”

“Okay, Cap,” Harold replied without looking at Captain Amazing. He started to set the pieces up again and play a game against himself. Captain Amazing was sure it would be a clash of the titans.

Captain Amazing walked slowly back to his room. The Hero Gene prevented any kind of sickness or disease, but it sure as hell didn’t stop the effects of old age. For the Captain, it was hell getting old. It was even worse when he’d lead the kind of life he had. It was depressing for him to think he could barely move on his own when he used to be able to lift a tank and crush it like a soda can and had on a few occasions. Time was the one thing no one could out run.  Not even someone as fast as Captain Amazing.

His room looked lonelier than usual at night. It was uninviting, and it was one of the reasons he found it so hard to sleep. He did what he could to make the room his own, but nothing helped enough. One of the biggest reasons he lost sleep, though, was his increasing inability to keep himself from pissing the bed. He was up just about every hour on the hour taking a leak.

There was a bottle of sleep aides on the nightstand. Captain Amazing hated sleeping pills. They made him feel powerless. He didn’t like feeling like he didn’t have control over something so simple. That night, however, he just didn’t feel like fighting. He took the bottle off the table and popped off the lid. He dumped two little blue pills into his hand and tossed them lazily into his mouth.

Captain Amazing felt the effects almost immediately. He pulled the covers of his bed back and got in with a few pops and cracks from his joints. The mattress was lumpy and uncomfortable, but what could he really expect from a government-funded facility. Within two minutes of his head hitting the pillow, Captain Amazing drifted to sleep.

 

Captain Amazing was flying over New York, but not like he normally did. He didn’t have arms, just wings. Enormous eagle wings. The sensation was bizarre. Before, flying was such a fluid movement; he barely had to move. Now it was jerky and unstable. The act of flapping his wings was such a rudimentary process.

It was nighttime. The lights of the city below him were like a sea of stars. He could hear ambulance sirens tearing through the night. The sound of gunshots echoed through the concrete jungle. There was a tidal wave of crimes going on beneath him, but he couldn’t bring himself to go down and help. He tried. Beads of sweat broke out on his brow from the effort he was putting forth, but the wings refused to obey. They just flapped slowly as if they weren’t attached to anything at all.

After several minutes of flying, the wings brought him into a slow descent. He was pointed toward the ocean. Slowly, he dropped towards the shore. There was a small abandoned building out over the water. At least it appeared to be abandoned at first. He was high up still, but now he could make out small flashes of light pouring out of the windows at random intervals illuminating the water.

He landed silently on the roof of the building. He was hoping the wings would disappear when he landed, but no such luck. They hung lifelessly by his side. He walked to the edge of the roof and dropped down onto the small walkway that surrounded the building. He stuck to the shadows, but he didn’t think it was necessary. There didn’t appear to be any guards. He peeked cautiously into a nearby window.

Inside, he could see that the light was coming from sparks flying in every direction. The building looked like any one of the thousands of secret Villain hideouts he’d destroyed over the years, but with one exception. There was something in the middle of the room. It was shaped like a man, but black. Blacker than the night sky. Blacker than anything he’d ever seen before, and it was growing. It was subtle, but every so often he could see it grow slightly in size. He had no idea how much time had passed. It could have been three hours since he landed if it was three minutes.

He couldn’t see exactly what the mass was working on, so he decided to sneak inside and get a closer look. The door opened with a deafening creak in the silence, but the shape seemed to take no notice. It wasn’t even moving. The sparks just seemed to appear from nowhere. There were no tools or machinery anywhere in sight. He stepped closer…and closer…and closer. He was within arm’s reach of the shape. He reached out to touch the mass and the lights went off.

When they came back on, he was alone. He stepped towards the table to see what the mass was working on but there was nothing there. It was just an empty table. The next instant a bolt of pain shot through his body. He could feel a pair of icy hands grip around his wings and pull. The pain was all-consuming as the wings that replaced his arms were torn from his body. He turned, blood pouring down his sides, to see the black shape of a man standing in front of him. The dark man smiled, and his teeth shone like stars against the blackness. He bent down and whispered something in Captain Amazing’s ear in a language he’d never heard before. He stood back up, put his hands around Captain Amazing’s head, and just before the dark man broke his neck…

 

…he woke up.

Those damn pills gave Captain Amazing the worst dreams. Admittedly, that was the worst one yet. He might even have called it an omen if he believed in that kind of thing. The Captain’s old friend Mesmero would be delighted to hear about that dream. He always had a weird obsession with Doomsday prophecies. Is that what it was? He thought to himself. He’d never experienced one, but he imagined that was a close as he’d ever get.

Light was pouring through The Captain’s bedroom window. He’d slept through what was left of the night. He pushed back the covers to find that he’d pissed himself in the night. He assumed that it was just his weak bladder and not fear of a nightmare that had caused it. He was a bit too old to be wetting the bed because of a dream. He decided he wasn’t taking those pills any more.

He stood up and walked to the dresser on the opposite side of the room. He pulled out a clean pair of pants and change into them. The clock on the wall read five minutes before six. Just enough time to get downstairs for the news.

The common room was starting to fill up. It was always like that. When he hit a certain age, Captain Amazing found he had nothing to do, but there was an overwhelming urge to wake up at the crack of dawn to make sure he had plenty of time to do it. The couch was full, so he just stood behind it, being one of the few people in the retirement home that could still stand for an entire news broadcast without passing out from the pain. Captain Amazing wasn’t sure at what age it happened exactly, but eventually he had become obsessed with the news. It was important in his Hero days, but only to see reports of Villains and where he had to go to stop them. Now it had become his main focus during the day. He woke up early to see the morning news, and the thought of the evening news kept him awake and alive through the remainder of the day.

Captain Amazing liked the anchorwoman they had on the news. She was a nice looking brunette with a smile that could charm a policeman out of his gun if she had a mind to. She had a soothing voice that made even the worst news seem like small potatoes. That morning she was wearing a navy blue blazer with a read blouse. Buckland was too small to have its own local news station, so they watched Cleveland’s top morning news show.

“Good morning, Cleveland,” she said in her perfect non-regional diction, “I’m Sandi Bennington, and this is Morning News on 9. Our top story this morning comes from the small town of Buckland where mere hours ago a teenage boy was pulled from the wreckage of a neighborhood home. The boy was sent to a local hospital in critical condition. Local police have yet to comment, but footage of the scene…” the screen cut to footage of the house in question. Where the front of the house should have been was a gaping hole. It looked like a dump truck had driven into the family’s living room. “…suggest an automobile accident of some kind. There were no eyewitnesses on the scene at the time of the incident and the family is currently on vacation. As of now, it is unknown if the boy will recover from the incident.”

The screen cut back to the anchor and she moved onto to another story about some political protest happening in Cleveland.

Captain Amazing cursed inwardly. They never spent enough time discussing the real news for his liking. No one had witnessed what happened. No one could tell just by looking at it what had slammed a kid through the side of house like that. The cops weren’t going to be saying anything anytime soon because they would be just as perplexed as everyone else. Only Captain Amazing knew what had really happened, and he hadn’t even been there. It had been a long time since something like that had happened; long enough that people weren’t used to seeing destruction like that. It was clearly an accident, he was certain of that. Even the worst Villain Captain Amazing had encountered wasn’t Evil enough to harm a kid, even a teenager. No, this was something different, something good. Captain Amazing couldn’t help but smile when he thought about it. The old days were coming back.

A Hero was on the rise.