Vigilantism 101

The following is the opening chapter to my Ascension Epoch (read more about that here) novel, After Dark, a Young Adult superhero adventure.

After Dark is a tale of youthful indiscretions in the pursuit of justice. Reversing the usual order of things, an impetuous teenager (Sebastian Pereira, aka Torrent) decides to become a vigilante and only afterwards discovers that he has superpowers. Then things get dangerous. Like all Ascension Epoch books, this one is CC-BY-SA, so feel free to reshare and remix.

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My name is Sebastian Pereira, and ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a superhero.

When I was five, I was at the bank with my aunt when a couple of creeps robbed the place. She tried to cover my eyes as the Target beat the hell out of them, but I saw it all, and I never forgot it.

At first, everyone thought it was cute when I’d tell them I was going to be a vigilante when I grew up. But when I kept saying that into my teens, people started to get worried. My priest mocked me, and the preceptors told me I was being silly. My parents wagged their fingers, their voices full of disapproval: “Sebastian, they’re as bad as the crooks they go after! Don’t you know how often they get killed?”

But they were all hypocrites. I heard them gush about the Sentinel. I noticed that look of envy whenever they saw someone zipping across the sky under their own power. I remembered how Aunt Carol got all weak-kneed and doe-eyed when the Target winked at her. And I went on imagining myself beating up bank robbers like the Flame did, or pulling babies out of burning buildings like Web Wonder (before he became a monster, anyway).

But I knew they were right about one thing: it was a tough gig to get into without special powers, and I didn’t have any. Nobody in my family was a talent either—at least so far as anyone would tell me. Sure, there were lots of non-talent vigilantes, and famous mystery men who worked for the patrol services, but doing it that way was even harder, almost equivalent to getting a pro sports contract. Eventually I faced reality and started thinking about what I could really do—but I never totally put it out of my mind.

Then, when I was 15, puberty gave me something besides acne and a fear of tight shorts.

A woman at the train station left her notebook on the bench next to me. I tried to return it to her, but when I picked it up, I started to see and hear and even smell things that I knew weren’t coming from anywhere in the station. Disconnected memories of thoughts I’d never had buzzed around my skull. It was like living in stereo, one part of me in the terminal, another part of me hitching a ride inside this lady’s brain.

I dropped the notebook back on the bench and those memories went away; when I picked it up again, they came back.

Psychometry is telepathy’s homely sister that nobody ever asks to the dance. Instead of reading other people’s minds, you pick up the psychic residue they leave on other objects, which usually isn’t anything at all unless its associated with something really traumatic (like a murder weapon) or impressed on it by the sheer psychic weight of lots of people (like a public bathroom—yick). The former can be overwhelming while the latter is just a big non-linear jumble of sights and feelings you can’t make sense of.

Yeah. I wanted to roll two 10-sided dice and pick a new power from the list, but it doesn’t work that way.

Even worse, my psychometry was pretty low grade (Talent Level 3, speaking clinically), so I was only able to consistently pick up the really strong signals and the rest was a crapshoot. The cute lab tech at Pitt’s Reich Center said this was a blessing. She told me about some big-time sensitives she’d met who had to wear gloves all the time, and a particularly bad case, shrouded in a perpetual bubble of psychic white noise, who wouldn’t communicate with his family anymore.

It wasn’t much comfort. I can’t tell you how aggravating it was to think that I’d won the talent lottery only to manifest a lame power. I was a dud, a spoon-bender, unable even to provoke real curiosity. I was that loser at the bar who tried to impress chicks by wiggling his ears or telling them he’s only 6 years old because he was born on February 29th.

For a while, the limit of my ambitions were to fondle towels from the girls’ locker room or contact-snooping on strangers at restaurants. But then I got tired of the cheap voyeurism and attempts to live vicariously through utterly boring people. I said to myself: “You know what? Most people don’t even get psychometry. Why not use the gift? Why not be a superhero after all?”

I went back to lifting and started running. I read biographies of the greats. Body and mind were harnessed for my true purpose.

But then I started to doubt myself. What if everyone was right? What if I got killed? Was I completely crazy?

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It was the second week of February and pitchers and catchers were reporting to Spring Training down in sunny Texas and Florida. Back in the Pittsburgh, on the other hand, it was still cold as Hell if Hell got cold, so our first practices were indoors. In a corner of the St. Bonaventure gymnasium, two of my friends and I played pepper to shake out the cobwebs.

The baseball, a survivor from last year and now more a brownish yellow than white, skipped erratically off the laminated hardwood and flew toward my hip at an awkward angle. I shifted down and swept the glove across my body, snatching the ball with a leathery pop, then side-lobbed the ball back toward the batter.

Alex Shepherd’s forearms, thick as a knotted rope, rippled with every compact swing as he drove the ball back at us. Alex was taller than me and more athletic but not as good-looking; he had had his nose broken one time too many in boxing matches.

“Take it—yow!—easy!” Ben, Alex’s younger brother, grimaced as the ball rocketed off his hip. He rubbed the tender spot and shot a dirty look over his shoulder as he trotted off to get the ball.

“Yeah man, we’re only twenty feet away,” I said. “Haven’t you ever played pepper before?”

“We tried once,” Alex answered, slanting the aluminum bat over his shoulder. “Then the groundskeeper yelled at us, ‘Can’t you delinquents read?’ he said. There was this big ‘No Pepper’ sign painted on the wall.”

“If pepper is outlawed, only outlaws will play pepper.” I took a minute to wipe away the hair plastered to my sweaty forehead and then told them, apropos of nothing, “I’ve decided to become a vigilante.”

The Shepherd brothers looked at me blankly, the tangential remark seeming to have disabled conscious thought.
I needed a reality check from people I could trust. Alex had been my best friend for years, and Ben was solid enough. At least they weren’t automatic scoffers like everyone else, so if they really thought it was a stupid idea, I’d drop it and forget about it once and for all.

I nodded thoughtfully and added, with a practiced nonchalance, “What do you think about the name Doom Specter?”

Alex and Ben looked at each other and smiled.

“Sweet idea!” Ben exclaimed.

Alex high-fived me. “Yeah, man, good name.”

I knew they’d understand.

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That very night, I donned my first crude costume: an old hooded sweatshirt, rip-stop pants, and a wool ski mask that was far too hot for the weather and made my nose itch. I left my house by my bedroom window—not because I had to, but because it was more dramatic. I had a can of pepper spray and my pop’s old brass knuckles for punishing thugs, plus a bundle of zip ties to tie them up when I finished. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but that night I couldn’t care less. Somewhere out on those dark streets lurked thieves and murderers, arsonists and rapists, and tonight they were prey for the Doom Specter.

Well, the prey were pretty safe, wherever they were.

I had the vague idea that walking a beat around my neighborhood would be enough, and if not, then psychometry would fill in the gaps. It was a laughably stupid idea. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had so much as keyed a car on my block.

So I tuned into the police scanners with my mobi, and sure enough started to hear about burglaries and shootings, usually on the other side of the city.

The next weekend, I patrolled on my bike and wore down both my legs and the electric motor trying to react to distant reports of crime. If I was lucky, I’d arrive just in time to see one of the Troubleshooter wagons drive off. A couple times, even the worthless city cops beat me to the scene. Talk about humiliation.

Once, there was a fire call only twelve blocks away. It was late and I’d already run down the battery, but I pedaled furiously, uphill the whole way. I was three blocks away, panting and sweating, when the fire trucks passed me.

It was discouraging, but I wasn’t defeated. I thought that if Doom Specter couldn’t save the day, maybe he could solve a few mysteries. Disappearances, impossible robberies, cases the patrol companies and private detectives had given up on. I could be the next Sherlock Holmes or, more appropriately, the next Carnacki.

Unfortunately, a lot of people were strangely reticent about talking to a guy in a ski mask. Added to that, my ESP was unreliable. The psychic detective angle wasn’t panning out either.

Three weeks into it, I was really frustrated. I was spoiling for a fight and so I found one: three punks
spraying graffiti onto the walls of an old glass factory. Now, this building was a burned-out husk, and in retrospect a few more dirty limericks and flaming penises might have even improved the look of the place, but I tell you right then I just didn’t care. I threaded my fingers through the brass knuckles and leaped out of the bush, screaming at the top of my lungs: “Run for your lives, scumbags!”

I went right for the biggest one, throwing hands and feet, knees and elbows. Glass broke, bricks flew, blood sprayed. There were three of them and only one of me, and my psychometry sure as hell wasn’t going to even the score…

But something else did.

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I didn’t recognize the face whose glassy eyes, half-occulted behind puffy and purple sockets, stared through me. I blinked twice and reached fumblingly for the light switch, already squinting in anticipation of the bright glare of the lightbulbs. The light rinsed away the violet shadows that made the face seem so much older, more hollow, and pale than the one I expected to see.

I saw the familiar, soft inflection point of my cheek beneath the ragged laceration that ran from my left eye to the hinge of my jaw, and I could see that the profoundly arching frown really was my mouth, beneath the lumpy abrasions and dried brown blood that camouflaged it. My distant stare sharpened at this recognition of my own battered face in the bathroom mirror, and at once the pain sharpened along with it. My sweaty hands clamped around the edge of the sink as my head slumped queasily forward. Strings of bloody saliva, dark and syrupy, trickled from my lips.

I probed the tender interior of my mouth with my tongue, testing whether any of my teeth were loose, carefully avoiding the bloody hole that my rattling molars had torn inside my cheek. I’d already done this at least five times since I pulled myself off the pavement, using the same aluminum pipe I’d been beaten with as a crutch. Finally satisfied that an emergency trip to the dentist needn’t be added to my list of concerns, I turned on the faucet and let the cascade of cold water wash over the nape of my neck.

“Jesus, you’re leaking blood on the towels! If my mom were here, she’d flip out.” Alex said.

I felt guilty about using his bathroom as a dispensary, but his house was a half mile closer than mine, and I wasn’t entirely confident I’d make it all the way back home on my own. Plus, there was the dimly remembered fact that his parents were gone somewhere, a second honeymoon in Cuba or something. With my father’s insomnia, not to mention my sister’s nosiness, I would’ve had almost no chance of cleaning myself up without being noticed at my own house.

“Swallow a couple of these when you’re done,” Alex said, rattling a small bottle of Ibuprofen next to my ear. When I didn’t answer, he manually curled my fingers around the bottle.

“You can still see straight, can’t you? Does anything feel broken?” he asked, tearing open a bag of cotton balls to wet with hydrogen peroxide.

I turned my head toward him in answer to the first question, and then grimaced in pain as the streaming water found a paper-thin cut in my scalp that I hadn’t noticed before.

“Knee’s worse than anything,” I said. “Landed on it when I fell.”

“I have ice packs you can take with you. What’s that stuff all over your pants?”

“Paint.” I lifted my head out of the water and looked myself over again. ‘You’re going to need a lot of ice,’ I thought, remembering that this was how my sister Olivia looked after getting stung by a wasp, right before her eyes swelled completely shut.

“Paint?” Alex’s eyebrows went up. “They threw paint on you?”

I shook my head, which knocked off my equilibrium and set my vision spinning. I had to grab hold of the sink to steady myself again. Alex grabbed my shoulder and urged me to sit down before I fell over and spilled the rest of my skull all over his parents’ newly remodeled bathroom.

“No. It was me,” I told him as I slumped down onto the toilet. “I blew up their spray cans—one of them in the guy's hands. I blew them up with my mind. Just by thinking about it. They ran like hell!”

I massaged my split knuckles as I reminisced. “It was something else, man. A real spectacle.”

“Yow, that’s an ugly cut. It might need stitching,” Alex remarked. He must have thought I was delirious.

I sat quiet for a moment and just smiled. “I think,” my voice quavered with excitement, “I think I have a real talent now.”

“I think you’ve been hit in the head and you’re babbling.”

“Oh yeah?” I cocked my head toward the running faucet and the water stopped.

“Holy shit,” Alex muttered. “Did you do that?”

My smile bloomed into an exuberant, bloody-toothed grin. I let the water flow again.

I’d gotten to reroll the dice, and this time I picked a winner. “Next time, it’ll be different,” I said.

“Next time?”

You might have looked at me and said, “Listen buddy, you just got your ass handed to you over something really stupid”, and you’d be right. But that was irrelevant. I was on the right track; the big man upstairs was looking out for me, rooting for me. I just needed a little more: more resources, more gear, more preparation. Most of all I needed reinforcements.

“Yeah. Next time,” I said. “I could use someone to watch my back, though.”

Alex thought it over. “Yeah. Sure, why not?”

“Really?”

“I’ve actually been thinking about it for a while. Besides, you obviously need somebody who can fight. I even thought of a killer name: The Mysterious X!”

I blinked. “Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you think that’s a good name?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Never mind. But now that you mention it, I think it’s time I retired Doom Spectre. It never felt quite right, and now I have a talent that suggests some good names—”

“Water Wizard,” Alex offered.

I snorted. “You’re terrible at this.”

“Well, then what?”

“Torrent.”