Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story (6 page)

Colbie nods, appreciative of the advice, but she stops pretending that there’s a question she needs to have answered.

Jason sees it, but makes her bring it to him. Colbie hops off the chair and doesn’t raise the question. She asks about training techniques and why Jason uses police batons instead of guns and then they have dinner, which leads Jason to telling the young girl a whole host of stories about Winton, Francis’ old butler, deceased two years now. Colbie asks about Francis’ wife, but Jason politely shuts her down, only going so far as to admit, “It was hard on him and hard on me. I’ll never really know if she didn’t know she was married to Rapscallion or just didn’t want to admit it.”

After dinner, they retreat to the game room, where they play pool amidst a sea of arcade games and pinball machines. After Jason wins three games of High-Low, Colbie puts the stick on the table and asks the question that they both knew was eventually going to be asked.

“So,” she asks nervously, “I’ve got to know. Am I living with a guy who fucks little kids or not?”

20

“Listen to me very closely, Colbie,” Jason says, pausing until she meets his eye. “Francis Flack never put his dick in me and anyone who tells you different is a fucking liar. I swear to fucking God about that. He has his faults, but nutting on little boys isn’t one of them.”

21

“How is she?” Becca asks on the phone.

Jason sighs. He recognizes he’s been sighing a lot lately and he hates himself for it. Being a superhero is something he sees as something that should be more fun than not. He understands Francis and the other old timers hate this attitude in the newer heroes, hate how Jason and the others are willing to commodify what they do. Rapscallion never took three-quarters of a million dollars a year to protect San Francisco, but then, he was a billionaire venture capitalist who didn’t need the money.

Francis got into the superhero game because it offered an intoxicating life. He liked helping people. He liked going to strange, alien worlds and back in time, and if that came with some fame, fortune, and fornication, all the better.

“Well?”

“She’s a lot like me at fifteen, I suppose,” he admits. “She’s suspicious of the opportunity Francis is giving her but if anyone is qualified to get into this life, it’s her. Colbie is a bit of a loaded weapon, just ready to be pointed and shot at the appropriate target.”

He is overselling her, and he knows it. He suspects Becca knows it, too, but she seems to understand that he is the hero and she is the assistant and there are times the assistant just needs to keep her mouth shut so the hero can work through whatever bullshit he’s spewing.

God damn Francis …

22

He doesn’t even try to sleep.

Jason wanders the halls of Flack Mansion all night, remembering and reliving the past four years, from the night he was first brought inside the walls by Francis’ wife, Sandra, to the time the Fishermen Fantoms breached the perimeter security and he had to find a way to defeat them without Francis’ help and without giving away his superhero identity to Ladina Whatever Her Last Name Was, to the night just a few months earlier when he’d told Francis —

“Jason,” a familiar voice that’s not supposed to be here says from the stairs below him, “it’s been a long time.”

Jason looks down to see Rapscallion standing there in his classic white and red uniform and black domino mask with the white “R” between the eye holes.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says. A range of emotions rage inside of him; the night had already been difficult enough but he never doubted that Francis would stay true to his word and stay away. To see his mentor here after he promised he wouldn’t be … Jason does not know how to respond and so he responds in the manner accustomed to by men and women who wear bright costumes and capes and masks.

He attacks.

Jason roars in anger, leaping down the large staircase to deliver a kick straight to Rapscallion’s face.

The boot connects and …

Rapscallion is gone as quickly as he had arrived. Jason’s body continues its angry descent through the air, and he lands hard on the marble stairs, twisting an ankle as he goes tumbling down to the floor below.

23

Jason sits in the basement, in the heart of Francis Flack’s multi-billion dollar investment in being a superhero, and watches news footage of Rapscallion fighting the Tormented Ten alongside Killer Dolphin and Catamount Girl.

“I can’t believe it,” he mumbles.

“Ten minutes ago you couldn’t believe Mr. Flack was here,” Colbie reminds him, “and now you can’t believe he wasn’t here. Which is it?”

24

“No, it’s definitely live,” Becca assures him. “I’m watching it, too. Ten bucks says Killer Dolphin is a grad student.”

“Why?”

“With a name that pretentious, what else could she be?”

25

“You’re leaving?” Colbie asks from the doorway of the room Jason was going to sleep in. “You just got here, like, four hours ago.”

“Lots of ghosts here,” Jason says, putting clothes back in his gym bag, “and I don’t mean whatever it was I just saw.” His ankle is throbbing from his fall, and because he doesn’t know if he should rest it or get it treated, he wants to get to the Revolutionaries’ HQ and get it treated.

“Is this because Francis gave me your old room?” she asks. “I told him —”

Jason is noticeably irritated and doesn’t try to hide it. “I’ve got to get to the moon. There’s bigger problems in Vegas than a Rapscallion hologram wanting to have a heart-to-heart.”

“Is that what that was?” she asks.

Jason shrugs. “YNM,” he says. “Yes. No. Maybe. He’s got a computer program that’ll throw holograms around that he had installed to help keep his identity a secret. You know, there will be a fundraiser here, featuring Rapscallion as the main star, and he’ll shoot pictures of himself off in corners or walking down hallways just to make everyone think Francis Flack and Rapscallion aren't the same person.”

“That seems … excessive.”

“That’s the ‘60s,” Jason says, “and that’s who Francis always wanted Rapscallion to be like, instead of his grittier contemporaries.”

Colbie shakes her head, looks at Jason, then down the hall, then back in the room to Jason, who’s zipping up his bag. “So … you think it’s safe? There’s no —”

Jason picks up his bag just to shove it back down on the bed. “This is the life,” he snaps. He’s going to be way harder than he needs to be on her, and he convinces himself he’s doing this for her good instead of his. “You’ll never be 100% sure you’re safe, even in here. I’m sure Francis wouldn’t have left you alone, no matter what he said. I bet he’s called in favors and has the Revo satellites trained on the mansion. Or he’s got the Unsleeper keeping an eye out.”

“Or he figured you’d protect me.”

Jason blinks and feels instantly stupid for not thinking of that earlier. “God, that would be so like him,” he admits. He looks her up and down, sees the kid part of her shining through and wants to stay and help keep her safe almost as much as he wants to stick it to Francis for his passive-aggressive bullshit.

“Well,” Colbie asks, taking control of the conversation, “before you go … should I keep doing this?”

Jason takes in a deep breath to sigh, but refuses to let it come out in such a theatrical manner. “Look, kid,” he says, deciding a little bit of honesty is what this fifteen-year old girl needs, “understand this: being a superhero isn’t some cozy, idealistic pursuit anymore. Maybe it was in the 60’s and maybe Francis is trying to emulate that, but for the most part, do you know what being a superhero is like? It’s a job … a J-O-B job. If you take up this life, all your doing is trading a future sitting behind a desk for a future beating people up. And getting beaten up. You’re going to get hurt. You are. Physically and emotionally. Look, let me show you something,” he offers, leading her out of the room and into an office down the hall. “Over here,” he says, stopping at an old filing cabinet, “are the medical files.”

Jason pulls open the top drawer, where Francis keeps the files about himself. He motions to the hundreds of files inside the drawer. “Read these. They go back to 1981, when Francis made his debut. They’re the hidden story of all his triumphs and tragedies. Broken bones, concussions, alien viruses, torn muscles, psych evals …”

He shakes his head. “I want to be honest with you, Colbie, which I know is probably the wrong thing to be with a 15-year old kid, but I want you to know what’s coming in your future if you put on a costume. Most of the capes from the ‘40s went in with noble aspirations and came out darkened by what they saw in the war. The idealistic heroes of the ‘60s were passé by the end of the decade, as the reality about what a fucked up world we’re living in hit home. The ‘70s heroes? Most of them are dead or drug addicts.”

Jason thinks of his own affinity for drugs and offers a clarification. “And I don’t just mean cocaine and heroin, either, but painkillers and other big pharma drugs.” He closes his eyes and wants to be anywhere but here, yet he thinks he owes Colbie something because if it wasn’t for his decision to leave, then there would be no reason for Colbie to even have this life as an option.

“The whole super community runs on twenty-year cycles, give or take,” he says, putting on as professional a tone as he can muster. “The noble ‘40s, the idealistic ‘60s, the grim ‘80s, and the reality double zeroes.”

“Aughts.”

“What-the-fuck-ever,” he grumbles. “The in-between decades are where things got confusing, where the generational shifts start happening, and that always causes tension. There’s always going to be tension between a hero and their sidekick, and it was made worse with me and Francis because he was already an older hero by the time he started in with me. He first put on his costume in ’81, but I wasn’t even adopted until ‘94 and didn’t know the guy making me do chores was Rapscallion for another couple years.”

“Until Sandra died.”

“Yes!” Jason snaps, and then calms himself. “Until after fake mom died. It was during an attack. The Ten Demons. But you know this,” he sighs, sitting on top of the room’s desk. “What you may not know is that during that attack I was hurt. Bad. Bad enough to be put into a coma.” Jason meets her gaze. “He injected me with a prototype of his performance steroid to wake me up and keep me alive. It was still a couple years before I put on a costume, though, so you probably shouldn’t expect to be in the field before —”

“The first of the year,” Colbie says, hugging herself. “I’ll be ready in six months.”

Jason shakes his head. He doesn’t know whether to knock her down or build her up and then decides to do neither. It’s Francis he needs to have the talk with, to take his anger out on, and not some 15-year old girl.

“If you’re going to do this life,” he finally says, “then embrace it. Francis always wanted to keep me contained and maybe that’s why I’ve already bolted this place,” he says, motioning around to the mansion. “He’s going to fill your head with the old ways — the need for secret IDs, why you shouldn’t get romantically involved with anyone outside the life, all that jazz — but I’m telling you this, kid: Embrace it. All of it. If some super hot alien warrior wants to take you around the universe in more ways than one, do it.”

“Ew.”

“Let Francis shape your abilities,” he says, standing back up and wincing on his twisted ankle, “but don’t let him program the rest of you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that even if you manage to get out alive, you
’
ll probably be emotionally fucked,” he says
.
“You’re a girl,” he says, putting a finger in her chest. “There will be men who try to rape you.”

“Don’t be gross.”

“Don’t be a kid.”

“I am a kid!”

“Not once you put a costume on and go out there in the big bad world to try to stop big bad people from doing big bad things,” he says. “Life’s unfair to women. That might not be just, but that’s a fact. If I get caught by, I don’t know, Miss Terry, and she ties me up and wants to force herself on me, let’s be honest, most people aren’t going to see what the big deal is. But it’s not just the capes who might try something with you. You’re a kid and you’re a girl so even the biggest piece of lowlife gang banger is going to think he’s tougher than you.”

“I didn’t think —”

“You’re going to fuck up somewhere along the line, too, and that’s going to be way worse than waking up tied to a chair in Murdermatologist’s office with your tits out and a camera pointed at you. How many people are you willing to let be dead because of you, because that’s gonna happen. It happens to all of us. I saved 27 school kids and one bus driver from drowning in a school bus over in Bossun Lake. Two kids didn’t make it. Do you think I spend more time thinking about the 27 or the two?”

Colbie mumbles, “I didn’t know.”

“These are the things we live with that no one else can help us get through. You can see a shrink, of course, but they don’t know. Not even Therapist Z, who used to be a damn hero. The dead ones stay with you. All the time.”

“How do you cope?” she asks.