Peter Clines: Ex-Heroes

I hate to admit it, but I started one of those fires that was on the news. Not the big one that threatened the Observatory, but one of the small ones that followed it. Lifting rocks bigger than me wasn’t too much effort. If I got my leverage right, I could get most cars off the ground. I got the Hyundai over my head twice. This was the kind of stuff distracting me. Thinking about picking up boulders and coughing like a flamethrower. This was running through my head every day at work, at each meal and when I stretched out on my cheap-ass futon at night. It distracted me enough I tripped and fell down the stairs one morning. Or at least, most people would’ve fallen. I coasted across the stairwell and floated to the floor. Once I was sure no one else was in the hall, I threw myself down the next three flights. Each time there was a weird little buzz, sort of a twist between my shoulders, and I felt light. I’d drift down and land with a tap of my feet on the floor. Flight was sort of the last straw, in a good way. Maybe I’d read too many comic books as a kid or watched too many superhero movies as an adult. I don’t know. Could be I was just stupid enough to think this had happened to someone like me, in a city like this, for a reason. That one man could change things. I spent another three weeks up in the Hollywood Hills. I snuck into Runyon Canyon at night and threw myself off hills and cliffs. There’s a bench at the very top of the dog path that turned out to be a great launch point. There are some great ones out in Malibu, too, like all those rocks at the end of Zuma Beach. I just needed to watch out for night surfers. It’s not real flight like Superman or the guy from Heroes . It’s more like a hang glider, I think, where you have lift but no actual propulsion.

I can soar pretty far and pretty fast thanks to my enhanced muscles, but I always come down. A few crashes confirmed I was a lot tougher, too. My skin, my bones, even my hair. I wouldn’t say invulnerable, but at the time I felt safe thinking ‘bulletproof.’ I spent one weekend trying to break my skin with sewing needles, an X-Acto knife, and even a cordless drill. Heck, the stove burner cooled off in my hand while I watched it. The last detail was the costume. The ski suit from Sports Chalet was already silk-screened to look like red scales, and the gauntlets and boots were all black. The mask was two or three different things from Party City mashed together, enough so I wouldn’t be looking at a copyright lawsuit. I had to reinforce the Halloween cape with the folding arms from a pair of umbrellas, which worked pretty well all things considered. The idea was to increase my hang time, as it were. Not all of us own a multibilliondollar company with an R&D lab in the basement, y’know. My first night out was June 17, 2008. A Tuesday. At this point it had been over half a year since the Incident. No news coverage in three months. It’d be tough for anyone to link my new identity to it. I took the whole mess up to the roof of my apartment in a duffel bag. Didn’t want to risk any of my neighbors seeing me. I changed in the shadow of the elevator tower and hid the bag behind one of the air vents.

I’d never wear this costume under a shirt and a pair of jeans, that’s for sure. From the roof of that old building you could see all of Los Angeles. Griffith Park Observatory. The Hollywood sign. Downtown.

Century City. Wilshire Center. And the pit my section of town had become. I didn’t have to turn my head to see three or four cans worth of graffiti and gang signs spread across the sidewalk. XV3’s. Seventeens. All fighting over an area where people just wanted to live in peace. I remember my heart was pounding, and a dozen things were running through my head. Bulletproof was still just an idea at that point, and I knew enough about guns from GTA to know all firearms are not created equal. Hell, looking back on it, an AK-47 wouldn’t’ve been unrealistic to run into. After ten minutes of telling myself how stupid this was, how ridiculous I looked, and that I was probably heading out to my death, I got a running start and jumped off the roof. I focused and felt the small twist between my shoulders. The cape caught the wind and the umbrella arms snapped open. And I was flying. I crossed Beverly and Oakwood, sailed over the hill, and landed on the roof of a laundromat on Melrose, just past Normandie, six blocks north of my starting point. As far as I could tell, no one had seen me. I launched myself back into the air, and this time I kicked off a phone pole when I started to lose momentum, flying right over the 101 freeway. I leaned on the cape and swung back toward Hollywood. I played around like this for an hour, figuring out my limits, when I heard the scream. Sounded like a woman. It took me a minute to get turned around, then another to get high enough so I could see the area. There were three guys chasing her down one of the smaller streets. Well, not even chasing. Running alongside and teasing her. One of them kept grabbing at her, and she kept shaking him off. Even from sixty feet up, I could see she was scared and running blind. I pulled the cape in tight, went into a dive, and let the wind pull it open at the last minute to swing me around. I stumbled a bit on the landing, but they were all so startled at me dropping out of the sky none of them noticed. One of the guys swore in Spanish. So did the girl. While I’d been flying I’d been thinking up clever catchphrases and opening lines, but now my mind was blank. At that point, though, I’d been psyching myself up for almost a month. I just started walking toward them without thinking. I think I blurted out “Leave her alone,” without even trying to disguise my voice. The words weren’t even out of my mouth before two of them had pulled out pistols. They fired two or three shots each. The girl screamed. So did I. It goes without saying getting shot hurts. Not as bad as it could’ve been—it was like getting punched, where there’s pain but you already know on some level there’s no serious damage. I staggered a bit, but I didn’t fall. They swore some more. The one without a pistol cracked and ran. One of the others emptied his gun into me. It stung like hell but now I was braced for it. I didn’t move this time, and the bullets pattered on the ground at my feet. The third guy seemed to be in shock. I took in a deep breath, tried to relax my tongue, and felt that scratch in the back of my throat. Another breath swelled my chest and I tasted the faint sizzle of chemicals mixing. I let it all out. It was the biggest flame I’d ever made, and to this day I still think one of the most impressive. A good fifteen feet of golden, burning air lit up the entire street, hitting the ground right between the last two men. Not even men. Teenagers. Kids in green bandannas who were screaming like little children as the cuffs of their jeans caught fire. I coughed once as my lungs hit empty and burped up a little softball of flames with some black smoke. They ran. The girl was staring at me and whispering prayers over and over again. She was barely out of her teens. I think I freaked her out just as much as the other guys did. I debated chasing the bad guys or trying to calm her down, but in the time it took me to decide either one became a lost cause. Then I spent another few seconds deciding if I should say something or go for the dark and silent persona. So many things I hadn’t thought out. In the end, as the last of the flames hissed out on the pavement, I gave her a smile and a nod and hurled myself upward. A quick push off a lamppost gave me some extra “ooomph” and I flew into the night. Less than three seconds and I was a hundred feet up. I glanced down and saw her still standing there in the middle of the street. She just stared up in amazement. I spread the cape, caught a faint breeze, and started gliding away. And then her shout echoed up to me. “ Thank you!!! ” And that’s how I became the Mighty Dragon.