Corpies (Super Powereds Spinoff Book 1) (34 page)

Deadlift set Titan carefully back down and walked back to rejoin the others. Next to speak was the shifter, a thickly built young man with a freshly shaven head. When he spoke, his voice was friendlier than Titan was expecting, lots of energy and pep, despite their dire circumstances.

“My name is Kaiju, and as you can probably guess from the costume, I’m a shifter. If you’ve seen video or pictures of us, I’m the fourteen-foot-tall dark red one. I can shift if you need me to, but I’m not the quickest, so it will take a bit for me to get in and out of form.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ve seen your shifted form already,” Titan said. He had indeed taken note of the massive, scaly creature shown with the Wild Bucks during the footage he’d found. Shifter had been obvious, but it was still impressive. The bigger a form someone shifted into, the longer the process took. For this kid to have made it through the HCP he must have been impressively quick on the shifting draw.

“That just leaves me,” said the woman in the red and silver costume.  “My name is Juiced, and there’s really no way to tell you anything about my power without giving away the whole kit and caboodle. Let’s just say I’m a strong woman.” Juiced had the vague remains of an accent that Titan placed as from somewhere in the northeastern United States. Maine, if he was guessing.

She reached down to the floor and picked up a water bottle that had escaped Titan’s notice before. Twisting off the cap, she gulped down several swigs of the beverage, and as she did her body changed visibly. Her already well-defined HCP-grad muscles swelled and she grew at least an inch and a half taller. The gaps in her costume suddenly made much more sense, as it became clear that her movement would have been rapidly hindered by constricting fabric in those spots. Juiced lowered the bottle from her lips, and Titan noted that she hadn’t even drunk a quarter of what was inside.

“I’m a metabolic converter. When I drink a certain liquid I get stronger, tougher, bigger, and can even heal faster. Diminishing returns kick in, of course, and pretty quickly at that, but I can still get powerful enough to hold my own.”

Titan nodded and watched as Juiced set the bottle down. She had pointedly avoided mentioning what was inside of it, and he made certain not to ask. The Hero had already given away much of her secret out of formality; there was no way he would be so rude as to try and uncover the part she clearly kept under strict guard.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Titan said. “All of you. It’s clear that you have some interesting abilities, and from the fact that you’re HCP graduates, I’m certain you know how to use them. That said, I’m not here just for fun and socialization. Given what you’ve been through in the past weeks, I’m sure you’re all keenly aware of the situation, but I’m going to say it anyway, because harsh truths need to be met head on if you’re going to conquer them.” Titan paused for a moment, and made certain to look every Hero there, Topsy included, directly in the eye.

“The Wild Bucks are on the verge of being dissolved, and I’m not sure that anything can stop it from happening.”

64.

“I’ll be honest, that’s a little less optimistic than we were hoping for,” Deadlift said, filling the silence that had descended after Titan’s declaration. “Don’t get me wrong: we all know we’ve screwed up. But the team members deemed responsible for that were handled by the DVA. We just want to make a fresh start and put that behind us.”

“There is no such place as behind you, no such thing as a fresh start.” As he spoke, Titan felt old, his years weighing down those massive shoulders in a way that not even hundreds of pounds could. “Even if you could purge the record, change your mask, begin with an all new identity, the mistakes you’ve made will still carry on with you. No one else might know they’re there, but you will. And the more that get heaped on, the heavier each one becomes. Your team’s mistake caused hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in property damage, and that’s something the DVA won’t likely ever let you forget. But more importantly, it cost nine people their lives, and that’s something
you
should never let yourselves forget.”

Juiced began to speak hurriedly, words tumbling over themselves to get free of her mouth. “We were cleared-”

“Maybe you didn’t make the big mistakes, but those two who got held accountable were your teammates, people you put your trust in,” Titan said, interrupting her for both of their sakes. Talks like this were hard enough when everyone was receptive. Odds were that if she got the chance to dig into a position, it would make her more stubborn and unlikely to listen, and they had to hear this if they ever wanted to rise above it. “Sometimes innocent people get hurt in what we do. It’s inevitable, because if we don’t step in then a lot more would be affected, but it doesn’t change the responsibility we bear for those actions.”

“I. . . I thought it was eight.” Kaiju was staring at the ground, and Titan could make out the slight glisten of tears through the sides of the eyeholes in his mask. His voice, only moments ago full of life and humor, sounded beaten.

“Eight at the scene,” Titan said, lowering his own voice by several degrees. “A ninth killed himself when he heard what happened to his wife. The DVA didn’t tell you about it because it wasn’t directly linked to your actions, though I think we all know better than that.”

“Titan. . .” Topsy was staring hard at his friend, clearly struggling between protecting his team and having them hear the truth. He was invested in these kids and obviously didn’t want to see them get broken by one bad call. At the same time, he had to know that what Titan was doing was necessary. Casualties were part of the job for any Hero. If one didn’t find a way to deal with it, they’d be buried under the guilt, and if they never acknowledged it. . . well, that was how the true monsters were made.

“There is no fresh start,” Titan repeated. “Not in that perfect world where no one knew about your mistakes and especially not in this one where your entire team’s reputation has been run through the shitter. The other Heroes don’t trust you; they think you’re all half-cocked liabilities, and not without good reason. That’s not even mentioning the DVA, who are probably only looking for one screw up to pull the rest of your certifications.”

“So. . . that’s it? Topsy brought you all the way over here to tell us that no matter what we do, we’re fucked?” Deadlift asked.

“No. Topsy brought me over to lay down the harsh truth in a way that no one who is close to you ever could. You want to keep going in the Hero world, want to work with people who don’t trust you and a public that hates you? Then you need to go in with your eyes wide open. Don’t waste time thinking about forgiveness or redemption; those are fairy tales we use to make the world more palatable for children. What you’re walking back into is going to be shit. Shit so deep you’ll have to fight to keep from choking on it. There is no light at the end of the tunnel; there is no undoing what’s been done. If you hope for something other than the shit, then the shit becomes unbearable.”

“Then why would we go back in?” Juiced asked. Of the three, only her tone remained unchanged. Titan had a feeling she was more personally vested in what had gone down than the others, at least in her innocence at the scene.

He prepared to tell her why, but Kaiju beat him to the punch.

“Because we can still help people.” Kaiju raised his head, making the guilty tears in his eyes all the more apparent. There was nothing wrong with crying over lives lost. Heaven only knew how many times Titan had broken down in his early years when he heard how many people he’d been too late to protect. Titan didn’t judge Kaiju for crying, but he decided he liked the kid based on the fact that he lifted his head. Of them all, Kaiju seemed to feel the guilt the strongest, and he wasn’t letting it stop him.

“We can still do what we spent so many years training for,” he continued. “It doesn’t matter if no one trusts or likes us, we can still make a difference. And we should, because even if Titan is right about there being no such thing as redemption, I still want to end my life saving more lives than I cost. Maybe that’s selfish or stupid, but right now it’s not something that I can say I’ve done and I hate myself for that.”

Another fog of silence fell upon them as Kaiju’s words faded, and once again it was Deadlift who ultimately broke it. “If we press on, we do it knowing that things will be awful, and that we’ll be a single fuck up away from being out on our asses. But we can press on. Is that what you wanted us to understand?”

“It’s a start,” Titan replied. “Logistically, you lot need to work like hell on your training to make sure you minimize casualties and damages. Getting rid of your problematic members will likely go a long way toward making that better. Training is important, it’s vital, but all the effort in the world wouldn’t make a difference if you didn’t have a firm grasp on what was waiting for you outside these walls.”

“Thank you,” Kaiju said, a bit of the former life returning to his voice as he unashamedly wiped his eyes. Titan couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that whatever link Topsy had to this team was through Kaiju. The kid had the sort of aura that made people want to help him.

“I have a question,” Juiced said. For the first time, she seemed quieter, less certain in her words. “And I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. I’m not trying to turn the tables or invalidate what you told us; I just want to understand a bit better.”

Titan nodded, and Juiced continued. “Have you ever. . . made a mistake? Maybe not as big as ours was, but. . . you know.”

“Three hundred and forty seven people.” Titan said. His voice didn’t waver or soften, because this wasn’t a thought that suddenly sprang to mind at her question. That number was with him every day, in everything he did. There was no change as Titan talked about his number, because the usual Titan was always thinking about it, in some form or another.

“That’s how many people I wasn’t strong enough, or fast enough, or smart enough, or sometimes even ruthless enough, to save. I have a list with all their names on it. Some of those were from dumb mistakes I made; some I still look back and can’t think of any way that I could have saved them. It doesn’t matter why it happened, though. At the end of the day I fell short and people died. That’s why you train, that’s why you push forward, that’s why you always have to be better. So that the next time you go out, just maybe you can come home without having to write another name on that goddamned list.”

65.

“You came down on them hard.” Topsy pulled a beer from the mini-fridge in his room, then grabbed a second and offered it to Owen.

“No one out there is going to be gentle with them. Better they face what’s ahead with one foot already in their ass so they don’t forget what’s waiting for them.” Owen accepted the beer and sat in one of Topsy’s old chairs. He was pretty sure it was one that been around at the Gentle Hammers’ base so long ago, and now it had made the trip to Topsy's sparse quarters with the Wild Bucks. “Besides, they’ve got you for the kid gloves.”

“I think I may have used those too much.” Topsy fell into his own chair, a more recent acquisition that almost would have looked at home in the penthouse. “Maybe if I’d been a bit sterner things wouldn’t have gone the way they did.”

“None of that,” Owen said. “All we can do is guide the young ones. Set a good example. Teach them what we learned through our own mistakes. How much they take from it is on them. You’re no more accountable for their fuck-ups than the older Heroes we got advice from were for ours.”

Topsy snorted and shook his head. “The one I remember the most was them telling us we shouldn’t try to form a group out of just physically-gifted Supers. Said we needed a little variety if we wanted to be of any use at all.”

“Well, that was different. They were dipshits.” Owen took a swig of his beer to punctuate the point. He keenly recalled all the older Heroes saying a team needed diverse skill sets to be of any use at all. Even back then, he knew they were wrong. There was something to be said for specialization, and a team full of coordinated heavy-hitters would be useful in all kinds of situations. History had proven him right in the end, though the many teams that tried, and failed, to emulate their strategy also showed that conventional wisdom hadn’t been entirely off base. Specialty teams were doable, they just weren’t easy.

“Maybe so, but part of me wishes I’d given these kids the same advice instead of agreeing to coach them.”

“Topsy, if you hadn’t helped them who knows how much worse things would be? They might all be stripped of their certification, or up on trial for gross negligence. I’m sure you helped, though I do wish you’d tell me why you were doing it. There’s no way this team can afford you.”

“That obvious, am I?” Topsy sighed, but it was clear he’d known from the beginning that Owen would figure it out. Unlike many idiotic criminals, Topsy knew better than to judge a man’s brains by the size of his muscles. “Deadlift is the nephew of a Hero who interned under me. He was a good man; we even teamed up on several occasions after his internship was over. Poor guy passed about two years back.”

“Died in the field?” Owen asked.

“Cancer. Still burns my ass that we’ve got people who can turn mushed bones whole, but we have to lose good people to disease.”

“We’ve all got limits, Topsy. The healers are no different.”