We Don't Need Another Hero

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

We Don’t Need Another Hero

Copyright © 2016 by Ashley MacLennan

ISBN: 978-1-939291-08-0

Edited by Sasha Knight

Cover by Kanaxa

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Sierra Dean. electronic publication: April 5, 2016

Dean, Sierra (2016-04-05). We Don’t Need Another Hero. Sierra Dean. Smashwords Edition.

We Don’t Need Another Hero

Sierra Dean

To Jason—

Exuberant. SPACEMAN! Disaster.

Also for Jon, who delights; Alexis, who has achieved greatness and inspires me to do the same; Willow, because you know what it is to know yourself; Jessica B because she is the embodiment of selfless friendship; Taryn, who shares my love of Steve McQueen; Caitlin, who makes me think I’m hilarious (right or wrong); and Chelsea who constantly amazes me with her greatness of heart.

And to Tracey, Tannis, Kristie and Tegan who all make me feel like a real writer on days when I wonder what I’m doing.

Prologue

Superheroes are people too.

Apollo, champion of the citizens of Gold Bay, was thinking about the fragility of human beings. He was contemplating the delicacy of dignity, and how easy it was to rob someone of their courage. That bravery, once crushed beneath a boot heel, might never return in the same way.

He was also thinking, Isn’t it funny how broken bones sound like snapping twigs when you crack them?

When his face collided with the edifice of city hall, breaking loose several red bricks and smearing others with a swath of his blood, Apollo started to think about much more basic things. Pain. Regret. Death.

He’d been defending this city against miscreants and would-be villains for over a decade. There had been thwarted bank robberies, upended kidnappings, and one severely misguided plot to assassinate the mayor, but in all those years Apollo had never doubted himself.

He was on the side of right, and right would always prevail.

The glory of victory was sweet ambrosia to him. Cheers and applause were all the dividends he needed to keep doing his job. To know people were safe gave him a sense of purpose.

He staggered to his feet, and there was no applause. His mask had been knocked askew by one punch—he couldn’t remember which, there had been too many—and one of his eyes was swollen shut. He could half-see the streets of downtown, but they were barren. Cars sat with their doors open. A hotdog vendor had left his cart in the middle of the sidewalk, and a bold pigeon was looting his supply of buns.

In the windows of the high-rises surrounding him, Apollo saw the faces of the citizens of Gold Bay. They crowded around the glass, their breath fogging up windows as they clamored for the best seat in the house. Everyone wanted to watch.

Each step he took down the wide cement stairs leading to city hall was agony. His neck hurt too much for him to bother looking back over his shoulder, but he knew what he’d see. The mayor and the police chief standing side by side in the big bay windows of the mayor’s office. They had the best seats in the house.

The tendons of Apollo’s legs were burning, screaming out every time he moved. His blood had been replaced with battery acid, and a full brass band had taken up shop next to the squad of jackhammers busy at work in his skull.

Blood trickled down his arm, leaving a spotty trail of red splashes on the concrete. His nose felt thick with clots, and he was forced to breathe out of his mouth. Every breath was a wheeze. His lungs were balloons with all the air let out.

Dignity. Courage. Bravery.

These were the things Apollo once thought of as his personal maxims. The core beliefs that led him to strap on his costume each morning, don a mask, and protect the city he loved. The city he thought loved him.

I think I’ve given you ample opportunity to die, Apollo. And yet you still stand. Why is that? The man known only as The Scourge stopped in the middle of the street. Although he was several blocks away, his voice carried across the distance. It was a low, gravelly growl capable of conveying its menace the whole way.

I... Apollo stumbled, his feet failing him. He crashed to his knees, and his bones rattled, like they’d been taken apart one by one and put back in all the wrong places. His body didn’t know how it was supposed to work anymore. I won’t let you win.

The Scourge laughed, and it sounded like how Apollo imagined Death would laugh. Pitiless and cruel, with an edge of mocking.

I’ve already won.

No, Apollo snarled. The word was short, but it felt like it was made of glass that had broken on the way out of his mouth. He spat, and the sidewalk brightened with his wet, ruby-red blood.

Superheroes bled, just like everyone else.

He got to his feet, but only one leg was doing what it ought to. The trip from city hall to his nemesis was the longest walk of his existence, and The Scourge did nothing to make it easier. The villain waited, a nasty smirk on his lips, the rest of his face covered in a black mask. His whole outfit was black, a black so dark he looked like a shadow sprung to life.

When Apollo finally reached him, The Scourge closed the distance and stood inches away from the once-mighty hero.

Do you have any last words for your people? He pointed to the towers of glass and metal overhead. The crown jewels of the city Apollo had once loved so dearly. The people whose eyes were wide and whose breaths were bated. The people he’d protected.

The people who did nothing but watch.

He saw a girl—she couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, still aglow with innocence—cowering behind a car. Her mother was holding her tight enough to crush her. Hair as bright as a fresh-minted penny glinted boldly in the sun.

The girl stared at him, her eyes full of tears, and he recognized her face. He had protected her for her whole life, and now he was failing her. Just like he’d failed them all.

No, Apollo didn’t have any last words. When The Scourge lifted him and hurled him off the side of an overpass, he fell without any farewells. There was no applause.

Superheroes die like people too.

Chapter One

Fifteen Years Later

Bex Beckett was going to kill someone.

She stared at the typewriter in front of her and the stack of stained, chicken-scratch notes Hurley had dumped on her desk, and her eyelid started to twitch.

Evidently when she’d been hired as a reporter by the San Diego Evening Tribune six months earlier, what they really meant was secretary. The only article she’d gotten a byline on in the last month was a rosy play-by-play of a big society wedding.

This was not her dream job.

This was not what she’d been hoping for during her four years at Sarah Lawrence studying journalism, or her three years in New York interning at the Times. She’d believed that by leaving Gold Bay—though that had been her mother’s decision more than her own—she might have a better go of things than if they’d stayed. Bex thought maybe the advantage afforded to her by moving on to safer cities might help her do some good for the place where she’d been born and raised.

Since the fall of Apollo, Gold Bay had become the most dangerous city in America. Those who could afford to leave did. Those who were forced to stay spent their time praying for one night of safety.

That was the story Bex wanted to cover. The rise and fall of a once-great city. She wanted to ask the question nagging everyone: was a thin red cape all that stood between law and anarchy?

It was a question no one seemed to want an answer to.

She’d pitched a dozen different versions of the story since being hired, and every single time her editor, Percy Pratchett, would smile, nod, and slip it to the bottom of his stack. Then she’d come back from lunch to find her desk covered with hours of busywork.

The message was clear: she was here to look pretty and type copy, not to be a hard-hitting journalist.

Joseph Pulitzer she was not.

Hammering the keys on her typewriter with vigorous strokes of contempt, she was halfway through transcribing a story about earthquake safety when the stench of bourbon wrinkled her nose.

Hurley. She didn’t bother to look up and continued typing as if he wasn’t there.

Rebecca, you got those notes I left you?

Bex didn’t need to look up to know he was chewing on the end of a fat cigar.

I did.

That’s swell, sweetheart. You think you can have the copy to me before three? I want to take off early. Meeting this sweet Dolly, and I don’t want to be late.

It didn’t take a reporter to do the arithmetic. He was leaving at three to meet a girl, and knowing Hurley he’d be meeting her at a bar. No respectable ladies met up with married men in the middle of the afternoon. Even if the woman didn’t know he was married—unlikely, given how hard it would be for him to get the wedding band off his fat mitt—the girl was either in school and too young, or out of school and out of work.

A dollar said he had an appointment with a prostitute.

Bex cast a sideways glance at the huge stack of notes on her desk and swallowed a caustic remark. There were dozens of things she’d love to say to Hurley, but his uncle happened to be Linus Hurley. As in Hurley Publishing.

As in owners of the San Diego Evening Tribune.

She bit her tongue and forced a fake grimace of a smile. Sure thing, Hurley. On your desk by three.

Thanks, peaches. You’re doing a bang-up job. He smacked her on the back, and she was grateful she was sitting down, otherwise he probably would have tried to get his hand lower.

He stubbed his cigar in an ashtray on her desk, red flecks of tobacco still burning and the too-sweet smell wafting up to assault her. She looked up long enough for him to wink at her, a gesture that might have been sweet from some of the other guys but only managed to make him all the more lecherous. Her morning coffee churned unpleasantly in her belly.

He walked away, as oblivious to her discomfort as he was to almost everything else that wasn’t his immediate pleasure. Bex waited until he was out of sight before letting a shudder of disgust roll over her.

She had no illusions about what it meant to be a woman in a mostly male office. There were a handful of reporters who treated her as a peer, but never an equal. It was understood that anything with a Rebecca Beckett byline on it would likely be little more than a fluff piece to fill column inches. She understood that, even if she didn’t like it. Most of the guys were pleasant enough to her, although they didn’t quite seem to know how to communicate with a female reporter, so they vacillated between treating her like a kid sister or inappropriately attempting to get her to date them.

Small things, like being called sweetie, were so normal to her daily routine they didn’t register anymore. But the next person who touched her bottom after a staff meeting was going to find himself at the receiving end of a slap.

Turning her focus back to the stack of notes Hurley had left her, she realized the paper clenched in her hand had begun to smoke.

Her immediate instinct was to yelp in surprise, but she swallowed the response, not wanting to draw any attention to herself. She dropped the paper on her desk and blew on it until the smoke had relented.

In the ashtray, the remains of the cigar smoldered, burned away to nothing. Remnants of flame licked at the side of the dish before dying away. She knew perfectly well the cigar hadn’t burned down so quickly on its own.

Dammit.

She’d gone weeks without an incident, and now one