Abe’s reminiscing came to a progressive close as he finished the tenth simulation, letting Rogers take a fourth beer before cutting the man off. He could understand the compulsion, considering the severity of the information being displayed before them, over and over again. According to Hoff’s numbers, when processed through Aberdeen Tyrannus’s computer systems, the entire planet would be flooded within four to seven years.
“The ice caps,” Rogers muttered, shaking his head. “I’ve heard all kinds of stuff on the web, but this is just too much. I mean, what can we do?”
“I have a solution, actually,” Abe said. “Well, I had one. Do you remember the Freeze Ray I invented back in ’84?”
“Yeah, I remember it. That was one of the first devices I helped you with,” Rogers replied.
“Well, Captain Righteous turned it over to the military after he kicked the living shit out of me and had me hauled off to yet another prison,” said Abe. “If I can convince them of the seriousness of the problem, the need to use it, we can put this right in just a few days’ time. It won’t fix global warming, but it’ll work as a stop-gap solution until someone can figure out how to put things right more permanently.”
“How are you going to even get in touch with them, though,” Rogers asked.
“Well,” said Abe with a toothy smile. “Thankfully, I still have a direct access video phone to HAC’s headquarters. I just send a signal, and someone will eventually get in front of the camera and talk to me. I have to check in with them once a month as it is, to let them see that I’m still being a good boy, as it were.”
“You’ve been good?”
“No,” said Abe. He started putting several commands into the computer system, and he and Rogers found themselves looking at video feeds of a nearby operations compound. “I have a teleporter through that green door,” he said, pointing over his shoulder to a green metal door on the opposite side of the small lab. “It’s connected to a pad on the main level of the compound.”
“It looks old,” Rogers noted.
“Yes, because it is. I had it constructed back in ’87, parallel to my main facility in Brazil. When I made my escape that year, I just focused on the Brazil base and left this one alone, in the event I should ever need it as a backup or hideout. Not even HAC knows about this one,” he said. “Rogers, are you up to working for me again?”
“Always, Abe,” said the engineer, putting one companionable hand on the older man’s shoulder. Though he was wearing his traditional lab coat and slacks, Aberdeen Tyrannus looked older than his seventy-eight years. He didn’t look like the once-powerful supervillain Dr. Tyrant, a man whose very name sent tremors of fear through everyday civilians. He just looked like a tired old scientist. Rogers empathized with him; as he got older, he found himself feeling less and less effective in his field, less welcome among his peers. It was an inevitable fact of getting older, he supposed. He couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like for Abe.
The field of supervillains had shrunk, as well as that of superheroes, since the early 1990’s. World government organizations, including law enforcement and military bodies, had held numerous conventions and conferences on the subject. It had been widely agreed that heroes needed to be overseen and managed, and that supervillains needed to be faced with not just heroes, but elite military and police forces, without mercy. From 1990 to 1997, twenty-six supervillains were killed in battle with heroes and black ops squads. Four of those villains had been apprehended and then summarily executed in custody at secret prisons the world over.
Only a handful of villains in that time were granted the mercy of being placed into detention on a semi-permanent basis. Minions, henchmen, and engineers were usually detained in those secret prison facilities, often for an indefinite period of time. Rogers himself had always evaded capture, thanks to Abe giving his top staff quick and easy means of escape, even if it meant he himself would risk apprehension.
For a man who called himself Dr. Tyrant, Rogers thought, Aberdeen Tyrannus actually wasn’t so bad a man. Just, well, diabolical. And a little crazy, back in the day, yes, there was that. Now, though, he let his hand rest on Abe’s shoulder, a small reassurance that he would indeed be there for the aged villain.
“Well,” said Abe, pulling in a long breath and letting it out in an exhausted-sounding sigh, “you should take the chance to get yourself acquainted with the compound. Unless, that is, you want to head home and make some arrangements first.”
“That’d be best right now,” said Rogers, pulling away from Abe to grab his backpack. “I’m going to leave this other gear bag here, I’ll just be hauling this stuff over to that other compound anyhow. That okay?”
“By all means, my good man,” said Abe. He rose from his chair, stretched, and rubbed at his lower back. “I’m going to get some Bengay rubbed in here, then try to get hold of the folks at HAC. I’ll tell you what, Calvin, I think we’re getting too old for this shit.” Rogers snickered, bade good-bye to Abe, then headed up the stairs to the main house. When Abe saw Rogers pull away on a monitor in his central console, he walked to the stairs and headed up to the bathroom in his house.
He applied the muscle rub, groaning the entire time he worked it into his lower back. If he had thought about it, he could have one of the medical drones from the hidden command compound come and take care of such things for him. He didn’t want to depend on a machine, however, to take care of himself. If he didn’t take care of himself, he would become entirely dependent upon such things, and that dependence would be used against him by his minders.
Such was the nature not only of politics, but of life in general. Give your enemies an inch, they’ll take a yard.
With his back starting to feel better, Aberdeen Tyrannus went into his bedroom to get changed into slightly more formal attire. He wanted to look his best when he addressed the HAC representative. If he looked sloppy in front of the camera, he might be written off by whoever he spoke with, and he couldn’t afford to have that happen.
“Well, the world itself can’t afford it,” he observed aloud. “Not unless we can figure out how to live in a real life ‘Waterworld’.”
Albert Weller had been working as an aide to Representative Bantor for five years. He hadn’t enjoyed all of the work, but he didn’t know how to do anything else at this juncture. If he wanted to find work outside of the political machine, it would have to be as either a legal secretary, a paralegal, or some form of corporate administrative assistant, jobs he found he no longer had any interest in.
After all, once you’ve worked in Washington for long enough, you might come out the other side too cynical to want to work anywhere else. Such was Weller’s problem. The only aspect of his job that he didn’t look at with a roll of the eyes was his occasional work with the Hero Action Committee. As the current acting head of the United States’ division of HAC, Congressman Bantor had an office dedicated entirely to HAC policies and activities. Weller visited and worked at this office once a week, taking care of filing and putting together summary reports for the various members of the organization who didn’t have their own personnel working in the headquarters.
Sitting in a luxurious rolling desk chair behind an impressive cherry wood desk which dominated Bantor’s office, Weller cocked his head to one side when he heard a high, tinny beeping. He looked around the magnificently appointed chamber, eyes roving over furniture and decorative pieces that likely cost more than a month of his wages. Finally, he saw a blinking green light on a tall armoire against the wall opposite the desk.
Weller adjusted his tie as he walked across the room, a nervous habit he’d picked up from Bantor himself. The congressman had a host of eccentric little tics, and five years spent working next to someone could cause a little rubbing off of habits, he supposed. He stood before the armoire, realizing that he’d never once opened it. Nor had he ever opened the long black hope chest in the nearby corner of the room. With a shrug of his shoulders, Albert Weller grabbed the door handles and pulled the armoire open.
Before him stood an enormous monitor with various buttons along the paneling on each side. At the top of the monitor rested some kind of camera and microphone. The screen flickered then, and all at once Weller found himself looking at an unfamiliar older gentleman, a man in his mid-to-late 70’s. The gentleman was dressed in a white lab coat over a blue button shirt and beige slacks, large horn-rimmed glasses perched precariously on the end of a long, beak-like nose. Wild grey hair stood in tufts around his head.
“Ahem,” said the man on the monitor, hands folded behind his back. “Are you the current reporting officer for check-ins, young man?” Weller looked around, startled. The image and audio quality made him almost feel as though the man were in the room with him. “Young man?”
“Oh, um, no, sorry. That would be Mr. Devereux. Should I go get him?” The old man sighed and shook his head, slumping in exasperation.
“I should imagine so, yes. I’ll wait.” Weller nodded, then ducked out into the hallway. He called out for Devereux, a walking brick wall in a dark blue suit who Weller had always assumed was just a thug brought in for security purposes. He would have remained outside of the room, but Devereux, scowling like a demon, pulled him into the room by the shoulder and told him to shut the door. “Ah, Mr. Devereux, good to see you again,” said the man on the monitor.
“Aberdeen, you’re not scheduled to make a check-in for another week and a half,” the larger man said, his voice rumbling like a rolling thunder. “I don’t like it when you do things like this. Makes me nervous.”
“You’ve got every reason to be nervous, Devereux,” Abe said solemnly. “I want to speak with the entire board. That includes your current director, this Bantor fellow.”
“What are you thinking? You only check-in with me, or whatever field officer is here. You don’t need to be talking to anyone else.”
“You will get them all together, Mr. Devereux,” the older gentleman said in a harsh rasp, a tone that drew Weller’s attention to the screen once again. Whoever this Aberdeen was, he exuded authority, power, competence. There came in his stance and eyes a look that commanded respect. It was a look that Weller knew well, for he’d seen it in his own father’s face all of his childhood.
“No,” Devereux snapped, taking a step towards the door.
“I have drones, Devereux,” the old man said, a statement which, while meaning nothing to Weller, must have carried heavy significance. Devereux was back in front of the monitor, and the usual brute strength that usually defined his presence in a room suddenly appeared to wilt.
“When do you want them gathered by,” Devereux said, and Weller heard a trace of dread in the big man’s voice. He’d never heard anyone in the HAC building sounding so, well, ‘fragile’ was the only word that came to mind.
“Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock my time,” said the old man in the lab coat. “Tell them Dr. Tyrant does not abide tardiness. Over and out.” And just like that, the video feed went blank as the old man reached forward, shutting off the device from his end. The room fell silent, Devereux standing as still as a statue, Weller’s heart thumping hard in his chest. He knew the name Dr. Tyrant. From everything he’d read in the files and heard over the years, Dr. Tyrant had once been among the most feared supervillains in all of the world, certainly the most volatile American-born, non-powered villain the nation had ever birthed.
And apparently, he was up to something after years of silence.
Years of scratching the right backs had paid off for Representative Erin Bantor of Virginia. A scrawny, rat-like little man, Bantor was often referred to by his critics and detractors as a ‘bespectacled little fink’. Despite is dour unpopularity around the nation, his backwards views on social issues well suited the residents of his district, a point which had kept him in his seat in the House of Representatives through a grueling election cycle and two equally difficult re-elections. While most folks around the country were shouting ‘revolution, revolution’ on the streets and at rallies and protests, the folks of his district were likely yelling ‘evolution, we want our thumbs!’
Bantor knew this well enough. The real horror of it all was, unlike most of his contemporaries, he believed whole-heartedly in every single measure he voted in favor of or drafted himself. Erin Bantor believed, in his core, that homosexuals were deviant creatures, and that they should be punished by not only the Lord God, but by the good people of the United States of America, greatest country in the Free World. He believed the same of people of color, but that was no longer an acceptable position to take in the mainstream, so he kept that to himself.
Well, for the most part.
Yes, Erin Bantor was a good, God-fearing, pure white-skinned, red-blooded, flag-saluting American man. A young-Earth creationist, social conservative, and fiscal conservative, Erin Bantor found himself one of the favored members of the Republican party at all times. He held to all of the values of the hard-right voters of the party, yet knew how to keep himself quiet when he needed to, to appease the moderate and liberal members. He may have found himself the butt of many, many political jokes, particularly on the liberal blogosphere, but Bantor didn’t give a tin shit about that.
He was the head of HAC, and that was all that mattered. He’d volunteered to join the HAC committee only a month after his election. There had been three empty seats available, and due to his enthusiasm, he’d been made vice-director after only a year. After his re-election, his fellow HAC members held a vote, and with the blessing of the lead chairperson at that time, Senator Alex Ross, he was declared lead chairman of the Hero Action Committee.
Bantor sat in a plush rolling desk chair in his D.C. office, a picture of his wife set next to his computer monitor. In the top left drawer of his desk he kept his lone vice, a bottle of Johnny Walker Red scotch and a crystal tumbler that had cost him five-hundred dollars. It had once been owned by Prince Charles, according to the auctioneers he’d purchased it from. Whether or not this was true didn’t much matter to him; everybody else believed it, and what others perceived was what mattered.
Such was the nature of not only politics, but life itself. He understood this better than most people from his home state of Virginia. He cracked his back by putting his hands in the middle of his back and stretching, then rolled his head around in a slow circle, cracking his neck. He eyeballed the clock on his desk. Eleven o’clock. He figured it might be all right to have a shot now. After all, he reasoned, it was noon or later in at least two-thirds of the United States. If it was good enough for Uncle Sam, then by gum, it was good enough for him!
Bantor had the glass up to his lips when the phone rang. He set the glass down right away, took up the phone. Surely it was a sign from God that he shouldn’t be drinking yet, yes. He offered an unseen smile to whoever was calling. “Erin Bantor, this is my direct line. Who’s this?”
“It’s George Devereux, sir,” said the man on the other end of the line. “We have a situation. Code fourteen, sir.” Bantor immediately sat ramrod straight, his mind racing through the list of villains on the check-in list with HAC. Sixteen villains, each and every one of them a potential threat to national security on a scale that no terrorist group could claim anymore. Of those sixteen, twelve of them were superhuman in some way. Of those twelve, eight were on tight security lockdowns, and two had become patients in dementia care wards at nursing homes.
The four non-powered villains on the list struck him as little or no real threat. The greatest of those villains had once been Dr. Tyrant, and if Bantor wanted to be entirely honest with himself, only two of the superhuman villains on the HAC check-in list could compare to Tyrant at the height of his criminal career. Tyrannus, however, wasn’t due to check-in that day. Bantor suspected that Burnout, a pyrokinetic who had been apprehended by HAC special forces units two years earlier, was the cause of the code fourteen.
In HAC parlance, a ‘code fourteen’ indicated a serious threat of reactivation of a check-in parolee of the organization. Since joining HAC, Erin Bantor had only seen two villains go code fourteen; The Crimson Hook, and O.M.S.W.A.T. The former villain had ceased taking his medication, and fell back into his pattern of obsessive behavior of gathering curved, bladed weapons and attacking law enforcement officers. He’d been gunned down by a handful of Ohio State Troopers trained in sniper tactics. As for the latter, a genetically altered man who could shape his limbs and fingers into weapons, operating them all simultaneously and in multiple directions, that particular villain robbed twelve banks in San Francisco before the superhero Aqua Angel used his command of water to wrap O.M.S.W.A.T. in a bubble of ocean water and force it into the villain’s lungs.
HAC’s protocols strictly stated that lethal force was not necessary, but that it could be used without the same prohibitions as would be faced when dealing with other villains. After all, the committee reasoned, the check-in parolees had already been extended the mercy of being apprehended alive, and not being placed into indefinite detention at a secret penitentiary.
“Okay, Devereux. Before you and I start contacting the others, who was it? Who’s the code fourteen?”
“Tyrannus, sir,” said the agent. “He says he has drones, Mr. Bantor.”
“Of course he says that, Devereux,” Bantor replied with a wave of his hand to the empty office. “But he’s lying. We’ve been keeping a tight watch on him ever since his release. If he’d been working on anything, we’d know about it. How did you find out about this, anyhow?”
“He called in, sir, before his scheduled check-in. Said he needed to speak to the HAC board. Tyrannus was rather curt with me. I think he’s serious.” Bantor sighed, pinching his temples and shaking his head.
“Do you have any idea how hard it’s going to be to get hold of all of them at this hour,” Bantor asked.
“I’ve already got six of them coming this afternoon. Tyrannus wants to address the committee at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, his time. The only two I couldn’t get hold of were Senator Potts and General Farat, sir.”
“That’s impressive work, Devereux. I have both of those gentlemen on direct lines from here, so that’s not a problem. Make the necessary provisions,” Bantor said. “And don’t worry about suppression teams, Devereux. I have something else in mind.” Bantor didn’t wait for Devereux to reply, gently setting the phone down in the cradle to cut the connection. He ran a hand through his slicked-back hair, slowly breathing in and out to calm himself.
He hadn’t been lying to Devereux about being able to get in touch with the Senator and General. He had them both on his cell phone contacts list, their private cellular phone lines, so he was able to simply put together a brief text message to send them both simultaneously. He waited a few moments, and his own cell phone vibrated twice. He flipped it open, confirmed that both HAC members had agreed to be at the meeting, and set the cell phone back in his inner overcoat pocket.
There had been no lie in telling the agent that he had an idea in mind with regards to dealing with Tyrannus. Erin Bantor took up the snifter of scotch, tossed back the drink, and prepared to make a phone call of his own. He didn’t look forward to it, but knowing the file on Dr. Tyrant as well as he did, there seemed few other logical choices.
He placed a call to a man by the name of Lester Collins.
At sixty-eight years of age, Lester struck everyone he came across as no older than perhaps his late 40’s, early 50’s. Standing 6’6”, with a musculature fit for a professional athlete in the late stage of their prime, nobody would be blamed for assuming him far younger than his years. He knew he was getting slower, however, weaker. Not by any amount that an outsider would notice, no, but the man himself knew what was happening. For five years now he’d felt the effects of the Ultra-Soldier experiments waning, ever so slightly.
He could still lift a fully-equipped SUV over his head, but he could no longer hold it for more than a couple of minutes. He couldn’t run with that much weight anymore, not unless he was extremely cautious, something he’d proven to himself a month earlier. While trying to run across one of the fields on his sprawling private estate grounds with his pickup truck in hands, the weight had shifted, and his fingers had been unable to crunch the metal of the roof for a tighter hold. The truck had tipped back and fallen behind him with a creak and groan of metal.
Captain Righteous was getting rusty.
He still possessed superhuman speed, but his step had slowed down some. His groundskeeper, Theodore, helped Lester train daily by driving up and down a long access road that cut through the middle of the property, maintaining a speed of around sixty miles per hour. Up until a month before his sixty-eighth birthday, he’d been able to stay abreast of Theo’s Ranger pickup truck. However, since then, the groundskeeper had been forced to slow down to fifty-two miles per hour, a fact he’d been shamed into admitting when the once-superhero asked him bluntly if he’d slowed down.
Lester Collins could still do more than any other normal, average human being. He was still an Ultra-Soldier, the only successful survivor of the program. “Well, first survivor,” he corrected himself aloud. Collins was, at the moment, doing some stretches to keep himself limber. While the chemicals used in the Ultra-Soldier program had given him superhuman strength, speed, and sensory intake, his agility and overall durability was still subject to the ravages of both age and laziness. If he didn’t maintain himself, he could end up the world’s strongest man with a hernia, and that would be a self-contained paradox large enough to swallow his entire psyche.
He supposed there were worse things he could be contending with. While his groundskeeper was three years younger than him, the man had the wear and tear on his body that made him look like he had thirty years on Collins. Years of smoking, intense manual labor for most of his working years, and a diet that made Lester wonder how the man hadn’t suffered a heart attack already.
Few things made him feel as fortunate in recent memory as the fact that Theo was still around, still helping. It wasn’t that the man once known the world over as Captain Righteous could not tend to his property or the interior of his home, no. However, having Theo around to take care of such things freed up a considerable amount of time, which allowed Lester to spend more time reading, going to classes, watching documentaries, and exploring as many academic pursuits as he could.
After the superhero work started to dry up for him, with most HAC activities being tended to by younger, super-powered heroes and his own desire to reduce his influence in that world rising, Lester Collins discovered that the Ultra-Soldier program had done for his mind what it had done for his body. He had already wondered about this aspect of the upgrade the program imbued upon him, but before his first major break from HAC activities, few opportunities presented themselves to test his wits.
Finally, he simply sat himself down in a library one afternoon, a stack of encyclopedias arranged on the table next to him. He would spend five minutes reading from each one, a random entry, and at the end of his reading, he would write in a notebook everything that he could remember.
As it turned out, he remembered everything. Every word, every graph, every picture, the tiniest details, remained vivid in his mind. Writing all of that information down only seemed to reinforce it for him.
The next step was to enroll himself in college, which HAC was more than happy to pay for. In four years, he earned two degrees, one in chemical engineering and one in biological sciences. Once he learned a concept, theory, or law, he seemed able to make a large number of logical connections without further prodding.
Unfortunately, Lester’s retention of information wasn’t perfect. While he could memorize all sorts of information and use the scientific process with a high degree of accuracy and skill, he seemed to come up against a wall after a certain point, a mental barrier that would not allow him to remember anything more. After months of considering this dilemma, he finally sought out the council of a fellow superhero, The Mind Master, who informed him that with the use of a special form of meditation, Lester could clear his mind of knowledge that he no longer needed, retaining only key points of a subject so that he could recover them later.
As a result of this discovery, Lester Collins now knew the basics of a tremendous number of topics. He had kept his entire education of chemistry and biology, as he personally felt he owed it to himself to retain the information that had earned him his college degrees. His own personal memories, experiences, and perceptions seemed exempt from this strange mental limitation, so conversations of the past could be accessed at any time to help him maintain the illusion of being intellectually normal.
He wasn’t, but Lester Collins had learned a long time ago that appearances, in most aspects of life, were everything.
He finished his stretches, and thought about what he’d muttered to himself a few moments before. The Ultra-Soldier experiments had been reactivated three years ago, despite Collins’s numerous objections. The Hero Action Committee had been kind enough to inform him of the program’s renewal, he supposed, but the new director, Erin Bantor, had been all-too-certain of its guaranteed efficacy.
The first year had been spent mostly studying Captain Righteous’s old medical records and reports. Lester himself had cooperated easily enough, going through numerous rigorous tests to allow HAC’s current crop of scientists the opportunity to study new data with current technology. All of this resulted in a new iteration of the Ultra-Soldier serum being concocted and tested on volunteers from various special forces units throughout the United States military.
Of the twelve volunteers, one for each month, nine had died in the first three hours after infusion of the serum, one died the following morning, and two had few notable changes, but had utterly lost their minds to a complete delirium. Nobody seemed able to figure out what exactly went wrong in each case, other than the fact that those men who died all seemed to have perished from some sort of heart failure.
More fine-tuning had been done to the serum, and after another six months of tinkering with the formula, another batch of volunteers was brought forth. Once more, twelve volunteers, six male, six female. The first three males, Lester recalled, had slipped into comas, their bodies enhanced slightly in terms of muscle mass, but no other enhancements noticeable in their vegetative states. The first two women died almost immediately after receiving their injections; their lungs burst inside of their chests.
And then, seemingly miraculously, one of the male volunteers survived the injection, the transformation, and the four days following the serum’s administration. He performed all of the same kinds of tests as Captain Righteous had, once upon a time. The new Ultra-Soldier had undergone an intense series of combat simulations and mock missions next. While Lester had seen none of these for himself, he knew that the reports he was allowed to read, though heavily redacted, told a tale he knew meant his era had truly come to an end.
This new Ultra-Soldier exceeded every expectation, and performed at higher levels of capacity than Captain Righteous ever had. While Lester Collins had been first measured as being able to lift two-and-a-half tons overhead with both arms, the unnamed Ultra-Soldier could lift four tons overhead. Captain Righteous’s initial ground speed tests clocked him at sixty-two miles per hour; the new soldier clocked in at seventy-six miles per hour.
The Ultra-Soldier of the modern age was even more deserving of the title of Captain Righteous than Lester Collins, it would seem. Yet they had not stripped Lester of his title. No, instead, HAC opted to give their new designer hero a title that implied in and of itself dominance over the superhero of the before-time.
The new Ultra-Soldier’s name was ‘Major Patriot’. His title claimed him as outranking the old stand-by hero, a fact that did not escape Lester’s attention. It was HAC’s way of telling him to prepare for final decommissioning. While he hadn’t been used as a HAC agent in over twelve years, there had not as yet been any official announcement of his deactivation from the list of active superheroes that the agency could tap.
His exercises finished for the afternoon, Lester headed to the shower, then into the living room he spent the majority of his time in when actually inside of the house. The décor screamed 1950’s, an era that the Captain would happily have gone back to. He’d been a teenager then, with no worries about what he was going to do with his life, because back then, he’d known exactly what he wanted to be; a soldier.
What kind of soldier he would become, he hadn’t known then. He had been innocent, filled with patriotic wonder. The sense of pride and passion he held for his nation hadn’t been brushed back or faded then. Lester Collins held that communist Russia was the great seat of evil back then, that the socialists and Marxists had to be fought against, and vigorously. The young patriot who had no love for the hippies of the mid-to-late 1960’s, who by Vietnam was a superhero by the name of Captain Righteous, whose reputation had already begun to burgeon.
As the phone began to ring and vibrate on the end table next to his favored La-Z-Boy black leather recliner, Lester thought to himself, Gods, I really didn’t know any better, did I? Was I really blind for so long? When did I start to question the status quo? But he knew the answer to that question already. In 1985, during a speech on the idea of the ‘Fair Share’ tax bracket policies of the federal government at the time, President Ronald Reagan had been told by the Chairman of Merrill Lynch, Donald Regan, to ‘hurry it up’. Captain Righteous had been in plainclothes among the crowd, providing security detail, during the speech. While most folks attending the speech and watching it from home hadn’t immediately noticed what had happened, the Captain’s eyes locked on Regan and his President, the man he was supposed to be serving first and foremost as a soldier.
When he finally realized that corporate powers had usurped all control in the free world, Captain Righteous had gone on a two month sabbatical. Nobody knew where he’d gone, or what he’d done during that time. Nobody except the Captain himself. He smiled wryly as he picked up the phone, thinking back to those two months. He hit ‘talk’, then put the phone to his ear.
“Lester Collins here,” he said, calm and smooth.
“Mr. Collins, this is Erin Bantor, head of the Hero Action Committee,” came the wheezy, whiny voice through the phone. “I know this is last-minute notice, but we need you to be at HAC headquarters at ten in the morning tomorrow. We have a bit of a situation, or rather, we might. We want you to be on standby, just in case.”
“Forgive me for being rude, but don’t you have a new trooper for the job? I expected that the next time I heard from you people, you’d be officially retiring me,” Collins said, flapping his hand absently, as though Bantor were in the room with him to be dismissed by the gesture. “Did the kid lose his mind or something? Get killed on his first mission?”
“Major Patriot has been on several covert operations already, though I will confess, none involving supervillains,” Bantor said quickly. “But I called you, Captain, because we may well have a situation involving an old nemesis of yours. Actually, your arch-nemesis.” Collins straightened in his chair. “Dr. Tyrant has demanded a video conference with HAC in the morning. Depending on what is said during the conference, we may want you to be on standby to be deployed against him.”
“I understand, but sir, do you really suspect he’s up to something? The man is in his seventies now. The last I’d heard, he was working with a conservatory group, wasn’t he?”
“They say that true evil never rests, Captain Righteous,” Bantor said in a tone that reminded Lester of all the anti-communist propaganda films he’d seen throughout his adolescence. Dear God, this man is a fanatic, he thought. If he didn’t run in Virginia, he wouldn’t have made it to Washington. Well, maybe he would have, if he ran in one of the Carolinas. They love their fundies.
“With all due respect, sir, I’ll come to headquarters, but I’m not packing for an extended visit. I suspect this won’t turn out to be any major threat.” He snickered aloud. “Who knows, maybe he has dementia and thinks you’re all his family, wants to see the grandkids he doesn’t have.” Silence filled the line, and for a moment, he thought Bantor had hung up on him.
“I don’t think that’s either very funny, Captain, or tasteful,” Bantor said, his tone deadpan. “My grandfather developed dementia before he passed a few years ago.” Lester cleared his throat, suddenly feeling awkward, but remembered a moment later that Bantor was a politician, prone to saying whatever needed to be said in order to get what he wanted. He made a quick mental note to look up Bantor’s family history when he had the chance, later on.
“My apologies, Congressman. I’ll be at the headquarters by midnight, sir. You can always rely on Captain Righteous.”
“I thank you, Captain, and your country thanks you.” Bantor disconnected the call, leaving Lester Collins with a cramping in his guts. Men like Bantor rubbed him the wrong way. He suspected that beneath the man’s rigid adherence to conservative values, there lurked a monster that thrived on all of the vices and perversions that men such as he publicly railed against.
He wouldn’t be amazed to find out that Bantor kept a collection of torture porn stashed away somewhere private. Lester said no such thing to the members of HAC, merely going forward with whatever conversation he was forced to have with them on occasion. Thinking about his dislike and distrust of Erin Bantor, and indeed, of the entire agency in the modern era, Lester Collins started packing a bag and readying himself to go forth as Captain Righteous one more time.