DCU - Dial "H" for Hero #2: All Heroes' Eve

Fairfax, Maine had celebrated what would become the standardized Halloween holiday since 1925. Back in the day, it had made the wise transition from tolerating youths engaged in vandalism and arson, to promoting wholesome events the the entire town could enjoy. Through all the naysayers that disliked the macabre themes, the costumes and exchange of sweets persisted, and the community overall took pride in the festivities.

 

For the past five Halloweens, Roger had not known that sensation. Where Christmas or Thanksgiving could be spent indoors with close relatives, Halloween most certainly, intrinsically needed a touch of rebellion, a smidge of boldness.

 

For the past five Halloweens, no parade. Roger remembered he really liked it when he was younger; probably wouldn’t be the same anymore, but it was nevertheless a missing piece to the season.

 

For the past five Halloweens, fewer and fewer people felt like decorating their lawns and street corners. There were certainly taller fences around the lawns, though, and every few street corners there was a police officer. Fairfax, still contending with an influx of meta-human crime, would have its Halloween, in some shape or form. Roger stood by that same sentiment. In fact, the envelope, he felt, could be pushed a little more.

 

He leans off the Kings’ front gate as Chris finally hops out the door, checking his costume.

 

Roger inspects the ensemble. “From this, I’m getting… medieval C.H.U.D?”

 

Chris’ head jerks up from his last button. “Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster. He’s not medieval, he’s… one of those ‘-ian’ eras.”

 

“Still, you’re carrying a… sword.”

 

“The Creature definitely survived the Arctic at the end. And he was definitely smart enough to start using a weapon. He disliked guns, right? So.”

 

Roger scoffs. “Man, if you could go back and learn that the author said Frankenstein wields a sword in a potential sequel, I’d give you all my candy tonight.”

 

He glances over his shoulder, also back at the door. “You told your parents you’re staying at whose house?”

 

Chris winces. “‘Vic’s’.”

 

Roger does a double-take at his friend. “‘Vic’!?”

 

“Hey they asked me before I even had a name ready in my head, and it just sorta... Don’t worry Roger, they don’t even know Vicki, and won’t think about it twice.”

 

“Yeah… okay,” Roger groans. “We’ve got an hour and forty-five to get stocked. Then I get you and the others past ‘security’… Old guy on the end of my street still has a hole in his backyard fence, straight to the park. Then, the farm out to the east-“

 

“You’re eerily familiar with this,” Chris chuckles.

 

“Roger!”

 

The boys, almost onto the sidewalk, spin around at the sound of Mrs. King’s voice.

 

“Your parents can still make it over tonight? I’ve got more food than I know what to do with.” She smiles.

 

“Will-do Mrs. K, just as soon as my dad’s off work!”

 

She nods. “Chris, don’t stay out later than nine, and stay in Vic’s house until the morning.”

 

Roger sees Chris begin to protest, when Mrs. King adds on, “For your father, please.”

 

“Yes, Mom.”

 

She retreats inside and they resume their walk through the quietest streets Fairfax had seen on Halloween to date.

 

“My folks are really glad yours are back, Chris. I don’t think I knew, when we were little, how it was… that they lost good friends too…”

 

Chris’ eyes snap out of a glaze. “Mm.”

 

“How’s Gary? Does he remember any friends from here? You could’ve invited him along too, you know; it’d have gone cool with me.”

 

“Ha, no,” Chris says dismissively. “That bookworm doesn’t care about sneaking out, or having any adventures. Or candy. Imagine that. Thirteen, and doesn’t like candy.”

 

Glinda rounds a corner in front of them, and Chris points. “Ah, I get it… ‘cause, Glinda, and she’s a witch…”

 

“Hey guys! Isn’t this dress smart?” She fluffs some of the hair under the brim of her pointed hat. “I found a matching bag too!”

 

“That’s… rad,” Roger almost yawns. “Vicki was supposed to be be here with you. She’s your sleepover alibi.”

 

“Behind schedule,” Glinda hums. “Said she needed more time for an outfit and, I quote, she ‘could track down those two delinquents, and their secret hideout, blindfolded’, so she said go on ahead.”

 

“You’ll keep up with us? You’re not going to get all antsy?” Roger inquires.

 

“You’re not scaring me tonight, Roger Dunbar.”

 

“Sure, sure. But if you do get cold feet, just remember there’s no place like home, and click your heels.”

 

“That’s the strangest idiom you’ve ever come up with,” Glinda declares, waving her wand at him.

 

Roger once again becomes flustered. “It’s not an idi-“

 

“I’d actually just as soon wait for Vicki,” Chris interrupts. “We still have time to stay around her house and trick-or-treat, before we head off. You DID say we’d all stick together.”

 

Roger flips down the black mask that had been resting in his hair and points a finger at Chris. “‘I am ALtering the dealll.”

 

Chris fails to hide the growing dimples on his cheeks, and he nods. “Okay, I’ll give you that one.”

 

Glinda wrinkles her nose. “Why’d you make your voice all deep?”

 

“You have GOT to watch movies.”

 

***

 

“I’m already late, so it’s no big deal if I’m MORE late,” Vicki offers. “You change your mind?”

 

Frannie Nash keeps fiddling with the straps of her backpack. “Don’t have a costume.”

 

“The boys can shove their costumes. Just bring you. … they’re not a bad group.”

 

“I won’t have fun,” Frannie states. Her voice didn’t raise at all. It wasn’t even an argument.

 

Vicki sighs. “I wouldn’t force you to go. Just don’t want you to think I’m picking favorites.”

 

Frannie tucked in her neck. “You’re not, I know.”

 

They were just about to cover the last of the park’s turf and cross the street to Frannie’s house, and before the crosswalk went green, Vicki wanted to be sure things were squared away.

 

“Then that’s the end of it. I won’t bring that stuff up, okay? I trust you with your own judgements.”

 

“Thanks Vicki-“

 

Someone leaps straight through the shrub on Vicki’s right before the pair of girls reach the corner. She and the apparent prankster stumble onto their knees and palms in the sod, with a startled Frannie a split-second away from taking off.

 

“Why don’t you watch it, you-!“

 

Vicki sees him face-on just for a moment, as he was already pulling himself up without an apology nor an indication he had succeeded in some deliberate bit of tomfoolery. He was terrified. The boy she saw every recess, walking alone outside of school, had undeniable panic written into his features.

 

Frannie backs up as he stands and continues his flight by successfully vaulting a bench this time. “I… I have to go Vicki. See you…”

 

“Frannie…” Vicki starts. She blinks away the spinning in her head from the collision, and brushes off her sleeves as Frannie scurries the last stretch of her way home. Vicki scans for the boy again, inadvertently kicking something with a muddied high-top. His… sketch pad?

 

She recovers it, and finds herself flipping through heavily-worn pages. The same figure drawn over and over, but in various poses, each running into the next like a meticulous comic. Vicki catches herself.

 

“Stop being a busybody and go after him. He’s going to miss this.”

 

She’s stopped again from picking up his trail, but this time, for a very different reason. She can just make out a another face, situated between some trees that Frannie and she had passed before their encounter with the boy. It had the strangest quality to it; Vicki was looking directly at it, but felt as though its attributes were in a distant memory, hazy and indistinguishable. She shook her head and tried again to focus on whoever it was, but the same ambiguity suffocated her perception. Was the face… glowing? Was it attached to a body?

 

“Definitely time to go home,” Vicki affirmed to herself. “I’ll find the boy tomorrow.”

 

She dashed off of park property, purposely jaywalking in the hopes of getting one of the officers stationed all over to notice, in case the face was following her. But there was no one to be seen, anywhere. Not even lights in houses, despite the sun being on the horizon. At the top of her lungs Vicki hollered for anyone at all to come out, but to her ears, nothing but a whisper escaped her.

 

Now she ran without thinking. The two remaining blocks to her house flew by. Sheer fright kept her from devoting energy to anything but her legs. It was only once she was gripping the iron work on her home’s front gate that her thoughts caught up with her. What if the thing stopped chasing her and targeted Frannie instead? Was it even a good idea to go inside? This had to be a dream… except, she could remember the entire day…

 

Vicki swung open the gate, but the metal hinges didn’t creak like they had for years and years. The latch didn’t even feel right. She hurried past the trees whose branches were being tossed in a wind she failed to feel in her hair or jacket. She felt as though she were on the verge of nausea. Coming to a halt at her stoop, Vicki realized her neighbor’s dog was in its yard. She almost cried at the sight of something not out of place, until it turned its snout down between its forelegs and howled, long and plaintive. She’d never seen a dog do that, not in that way.

 

Her knuckles were gripped over the banister, bloodless and frigid. The face was off to the side of her yard, wavering, its specific characteristics still not discernible.

 

“You should find the boy,” it spoke to Vicki.

 

“What do you want?!” Vicki begged.

 

“Maybe he can help you,” was all it suggested.

 

“You’re doing this! Get away or-!”

 

“Find your friend and this can stop. I do not think you will be safe, otherwise.”

 

Vicki drew a breath, and dared two steps back towards the gate. The face made no move to intercept her. So she took off once more. She had to find him. Her mind was starved for something, anything normal.

 

***

 

Glinda takes a moment and again studies the imposing cornstalks encircling her and her friends. They shift as one and rustle in the breeze. There were no glimmering fangs or gnarled claws to be seen waiting impatiently within the wall of husks. She allows herself another exhale and returns to Roger and Chris, sorting their earnings for the night.

 

“Another cherry one, Chris. Trade me.”

 

“It’s your loss, but here,” Chris accepts, chucking a small packet from his own bucket.

 

“Not a loss at all,” Roger says, catching it. “Cherry ones always taste like the cough syrup.”

 

“What’s wrong with that?”

 

“You hurt me physically, Chris. But y’know what..?”

 

Roger passes two unwarranted candy bars towards Chris. The largest ones he had.

 

“Whoa, how’d I earn these?”

 

“For not being a square, even with a cop for a dad. Honestly I thought you might not sneak out here tonight.”

 

Chris rocks back and snorts. “Pshaw! I’ve been WAITING to do this kind of stuff again. It was no fun when we moved to the city. Hey Glinda, you should get one of these too.”

 

Glinda takes the candy. “Thanks… Roger, why did you think Chris wouldn’t come? Didn’t you say you both did this all the time when you were little?”

 

“He means specifically here. Because it’s a crim-” Chris begins with a mouthful of licorice, before Roger gives him a wide-eyed look.

 

“‘Because’..?” Glinda probes. “Because what? Roger…”

 

She watches the boy expectantly. Chris, between the two, pulls his wig down over his face.

 

“It’s nothing Glinda; inside-joke we have,” Roger brushes it off.

 

Glinda is unfazed.

 

Roger caves in. “It’s uh… may be, in a way, possibly, an off-limits zone? Right now?”

 

She continues drilling a hole through him with her eyes.

 

“Because of a shady investigation dealing with radiation?”

 

“WHAT?”

 

“That was really smooth, Chris,” Roger moans. “Really smooth.”

 

“You weren’t going to say anything before you lead me out to a creepy field that might be mutating us into sludge-monsters as we speak? Roger Dunbar I’m…”

 

“Glinda, chill! Chris’ dad was actually on the scene; he said no one there had any side-effects!”

 

Chris adds, “They didn’t find any, with the screening processes they used. There’s actual a few ways they didn’t try, Dad said-“

 

Roger’s face goes red. “Chris, I swear, you’re one syllable away from getting duct-taped… the next time I have some.”

 

“We should’ve gone back so long ago anyway!” Glinda protests. “I let you ditch Vicki, and then I find out… Oh, I want to leave!”

 

“If Vicki is still on her way here, then we can’t go now!” Roger reasons.

 

“Guys, I…” Chris perks up. “That was something out there I just heard…”

 

“Don’t you start!” Glinda sniffs. “You think it’s so funny, trying to razz me with dumb-“

 

“No, I’m REALLY serious. There shouldn’t be any caretakers out here.”

 

“… Would they have kept investigators out this late?” Roger asks, now in a hushed tone.

 

Glinda backs into to the adjacent barrier of corn. “I want to go now.”

 

Roger scoops up his helmet. “Yeah. Forget the candy.”

 

The three kids inch away, eyes locked on the thicket whence the noises are carrying. Glinda whips out a Polaroid camera from her robes as Roger and Chris come up alongside her.

 

“What are you doing with that?” Roger hisses.

 

“Maybe we can blind whoever it is, long enough for us to escape. I… I thought I would take pictures, mostly if Vicki got here, to show off…”

 

“You can’t share where we were at school, Glinda! If you brag about this, who knows which of your friends would blab-“

 

“I won’t NOW!” Glinda seethes, nearly giving away their position. “Why’d I have to choose you two to spend Halloween with? Of all the pea-brained…”

 

She trails off, and Chris lets out an unintentional squeak. Something bipedal, bullet-shaped and dripping lurches out of the greenery. It gives a caw like that of a sickly crow, and clumsily scoots one of the discarded containers of candy around with the entirety of its bulky upper-half.

 

“We… say… nothing,” Roger murmurs.

 

“Yep.”

 

“Mhm.”

 

The new arrival seems preoccupied with an Almond Joy; enough, to not to notice the trio, even when Roger’s lightsaber prop slips from his belt loop and lands noisily in a puddle. Glinda’s heart almost stops. Chris motions fervently.

 

“Maybe it can’t hear, c’mon…”

 

Just as the kids are mere feet from circling around to another row of crops, the clouds part slightly to reveal an ominous full moon. Glinda’s sequined clothes are illuminated a vivid sapphire, contrasting the murky landscape. What must have been the monster’s head wobbles upright, wrappers lodged in its lumpy skin. A string of slick globes lines its underbelly. At the top, two more are side by side; these ones luminescent and, without a doubt, lidded. The thing produces an unearthly trill, and hurls itself bodily after the reflection.

 

The kids scream at the charging abomination. Chris pushes Glinda and Roger ahead of him into the leaves, then sidesteps a rubbery appendage lashing through the vegetation. Glinda sees him cowering as the attacker rips away more of their means of cover. She tries to make herself pivot, but her knees lock.

 

“I can’t. I have to. I can’t. He’s going to get-“

 

The flailing beast slams the ground, settling Glinda’s dilemma for her as she is flung backward in a wave of wet earth. It spots her again, with the unobstructed moon still transforming her into a beacon. Glinda lays frozen in the muck, with the hideous shape tramping ever closer. A hundred thoughts try to enter her mind, only to be extinguished to making way for a hundred more. She didn’t remember what she last said to Vicki. The last thing she HAD said to her parents had been a lie. Did Roger know…

 

Roger was yards away, dust in his vision. Their eyes meet. Glinda’s internal shouts pounded in her head like the tide.

 

“He can’t leave. Please don’t. Please.”

 

But from her lips, different words sprung: “RUN! JUST RUN!”

 

Roger looks to Chris now, but his friend is sprawled out, breathing hoarsely with his arms tangled over his face. Glinda watches, dumbstruck, as Roger snags a shredded portion of Chris’ cape and flings it over the monster’s peaked scalp, then tries weighing down one of its squirming tentacles with his entire bodyweight, hanging from it like it were a jungle gym. All the while Roger yells like a madman, perhaps more astonished by his initiative than Glinda herself.

 

He only holds on for so long. The greenish brute hurls Roger up and into some yet-undisturbed stalks, which luckily cushion him enough to save him from landing directly on his neck. Before it can also remove its crude blindfold, one of the growths on its torso bursts. It squawks hellishly, turning too late to counter a limber figure’s flying kick in its side. Rescuer and beast impact the ground so hard that Glinda bounces back to her feet only due in part to her own power. The kids’ defender stands up, slapping away a tentacle and driving a knee into his foe. Glinda and Roger race to Chris’ side, trying to keep track of the fight at the same time.

 

Their relief is quickly dispelled. The man who intervened observes the kids through the hollow eyes of an angular mask. One hand tightens into a fist. The other points beyond the valley, back towards Fairfax’s residential area. An electronic roar reverberates from his slitted mouthpiece.

 

“Oorrrrrr elllssee… yooouuuu neexttt”

 

Glinda and Roger made the decision nonverbally. Even Chris, barely conscious, was able to find his bearings. They ran.

 

***

 

Vicki could feel her pulse in her ears. She had scoured the park, the outlying properties of Fairfax and was well into the “wilderness” by now. No indications of the boy having come this way, nor had there been anyone to help her. Whatever was following her, it had to be… concealing everyone from her, and vice versa. It could have been messing with the time too; Vicki felt she could have been searching for half a day, easily, except the sun had been setting all the while. She pauses. Immediately, she could tell the being with an indefinite form was upon her.

 

“You need to find him.”

 

“HOW,” Vicki said between gasps, “can I, if you’re changing everything? He could’ve been-“

 

“I am not altering your perceptions now; we are away from… distractors. Please, continue.”

 

Vicki remembers Glinda and the others. They would be out this way, if she was right in thinking that Roger was daring them to visit that laboratory… something about an incident had been on the news, days ago. If there were any chance of running into them on this path, Vicki knew she had to divert. As much as she wanted to see them again, not be alone… she couldn’t drag them into this.

 

“There’s nothing out this way. Not any place he could be hiding,” she lies.

 

“There must be,” it retorts. Vicki hears emotion this time. It’s growing irritated. “It”… sounded female.

 

Vicki could hardly stand it anymore. “If you know Fairfax why can’t YOU find him yourself?!”

 

“You. Will not. Be safe,” the voice reminds her.

 

“There’s… there’s an abandoned mine to the south!” Vicki recollects in a moment of clarity.

 

“Show me.”

 

The trek ensues. Now, Vicki does not feel as though she is in limbo; her exertions are actually tiring, and the air finally begins to cool. She nears the mine, ready to collapse, trying to ignore her blistering soles. She had thought for years that she might be the single person in Fairfax to know of this location, but if the boy had proven to be so elusive, it stood to reason he had also found such a place. If he wasn’t here… Vicki was prepared to challenge her captor to do their worst; her stamina was all but gone.

 

“Check the the left passage,” Vicki rasped, flopping an arm at the overgrown wooden frames nestled in a shallow hill. “The other one is caved in just a few yards in. … hey… Hey, are you there?”

 

There is not but a symphony of crickets to answer her. The world, for the first time in what may have been an eternity only to her, seemed tangible. No less sinister, however.

 

She is given no chance to call again. A wrist and a shoulder hoist her from under the arms straight up into a tree. Her stomach is further upset, her queasiness making her question what she sees: Athletic-looking boots with a sheen from accumulated dew, pounding up the trunk, are the means by which she is being whisked away. She and the gravity-defier tip onto a sturdy branch just at the apex of their jump. They steady one another on the small beam. It’s the boy.

 

“What in the NAME of-“

 

“How did you get here?” the boy demands sharply.

 

“You THREW me up here!” Vicki wails shakily.

 

“I did no such- I mean ‘here,’ as in, the mine!”

 

She reveals the boy’s dropped book and thrusts it at him. “Take this thing, and get me down! I don’t want anything else to do with you… you meta-maniacs!”

 

“You didn’t… you led someone else here?” He grabs her shoulder and looks over his own. The forest is… quiet. Expect for a soft, rhythmic whooshing, maybe of an owl. Also a metallic clatter of equal pitch.

 

The boy plunges off the vantage point instantly, covering Vicki’s mouth. The tree fragments like kindling above them. The boy lands light as a feather despite their velocity, and deposits Vicki in a dry gulley.

 

“Do NOT come out until I lose them again, or they get me and have left.”

 

“What?!”

 

He takes out his returned sketchpad and effortlessly outlines more figures in an action sequence. Vicki watches his hand become imperceptible as it flies over the page. Then he pockets it and front-flips back to the regular forest floor. Vicki clambers a short ways up the embankment only to duck again as clods of dirt, from another violent impact, rain down. The boy has confronted a giant of a man, who is reeling in a ball and chain from a newly-formed crater. The links each had the circumference of a football, and the weighted end, not much smaller than a disco ball. The villain hefts them back to him as if they were paper mâché.

 

“Enough dodgeball, kid. You didn’t make bail,” he rumbles through a latticed visor. The ends of the chain jostle at his heels.

 

Then “she” materializes between Vicki’s hiding spot and the boy. The face from before now belongs to a body, sinewy and swirling with the entire color spectrum. Her white hair behaves almost like the rays shooting off her skin. The boy doesn’t wait for them to get any closer; he dives at a medium-sized tree, and propels himself a second time off its bough, aiming for the man with the chain. The trunk snaps off from his kick and begins to fall on the shining woman, but she flicks two fingers at it, and it dissipates into a swarm of bats.

 

The boy has evaded yet another flailing chain, nimbly taking a few steps on it as its length rockets beneath him. He executes a roundhouse kick for the man’s head, but to Vicki’s shock, the villain doesn’t budge, and boy’s ankle twists. He flops unto a grass patch and screams; the blades have become real blades, courtesy of the woman. Vicki’s seen enough.

 

“Go to hell!” she bellows, pitching a rock from the ditch with her might. It cracks the woman on the spine, and at once she slumps to one knee. Vicki realizes that a piece of the woman has actually chipped off. The shard lay there, losing its multitude of hues.

 

“Glass…”

 

The large man scrambles to his accomplice’s side. Vicki equips another rock, when sirens can suddenly be discerned. She thought she might have even heard dogs. The man lifts up Vicki’s tormentor and starts to flee, which she resists.

 

“The boy has to be dealt with. And her, too” Vicki overhears her wheeze.

 

“He IS dealt with, and the girl’s left with the mess. We’re done here.”

 

He turns to Vicki briefly as he exits, repeating himself with a snarl. “We’re DONE here. I’m warning you now: Don’t get caught up in this.”

 

Vicki flips him off as he barrels away with the woman. She then crouches at the boy’s side. He’s clutching in vain at countless puncture wounds in his belly and ribs.

 

“Lie still. There’s a patrol coming, and they can help you.” In truth, Vicki didn’t know that. She had no idea how serious his injuries were.

 

The boy seems to only now be aware of the sirens, as well as blue and red flashes breaking through the leaves. He sits up and pitifully hugs her shoulder.

 

“It’s okay,” she reassures.

 

“I can’t afford to bet that they’re really police. And neither c-augh, can you,” he coughs.

 

“What?” She feels on her shoulder that he’s holding one torn-out sheet from his book. In the darkness she can just see there are two distinct figures drawn on it, not the same one over and over like before. They were falling.

 

“I haven’t done this before, so I’ll understand you wanting to kill me after.”

 

“What are you-“

 

He throws himself a short distance upward, then pulls Vicki with him straight through the ground.

Done