Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel Read Online Free Page A

days still called to him, she knew, the days of heroes and villains.
    “Lord, give me strength,” he muttered to himself, but a smile played at the corners of his eyes. “Come in and let me get changed.”
    She stubbed out her cigarette, wiped her boots carefully on the doormat, and followed him inside. The house was cluttered with books and pot plants. She liked that. It made it seem lived in. Gabby always kept everything clean and ordered. It drove her crazy.
    Solomon left her in the living room and disappeared down the hallway. She’d once made the mistake of sitting on the couch. A loose spring had sliced a hole in the thigh of her suit and left her needing a tetanus shot. So instead she stood and eyed the mementos scattered through the room.
    A floppy, wide-brimmed hemp hat had pride of place, mounted on the wall above the grated fireplace. One side of the hat was blackened and melted. Beneath it hung a small hatchet with a wooden handle, the blade chipped and nicked in a dozen places. A trio of front pages from old copies of the New Zealand Herald had been framed and fixed to the wall alongside, each showing the triumphant Wardens at the site of some crisis or other.
    Solomon had been one of the first generation Wardens, along with Battle Jack and Drillman. Ever since the bomb hit, New Zealand had always had more than its fair share of metas, so supergroups were always springing up. The Wardens modelled themselves after the groups springing up across America and Europe, but with a greater focus on integration with regular law enforcement.
    One of the newspaper clippings on the wall had a photo of Solomon looking bruised but smiling anyway, with a pair of giant black insects dead at his feet. NAGASAKI HORRORS CRUSHED , the headline proclaimed. That had been the group’s biggest fight, and it had taken place before Niobe’s time. The Wardens and the Maori crime-fighting group Te Taua had shipped out for Japan to push back the monsters. All those heroes—Grim, Madame Z, Battle Jack—they’d saved the world. And Solomon too, of course, but she didn’t know his real name then. To her and the rest of the world, he was simply the Carpenter.
    No one had predicted what the atomic bomb at Nagasaki might do to the fabric of our universe. When the black mantis-like creatures came crawling into our dimension seven years later, destroying everything in their path, there were a few red faces. It scared the hell out of Auckland and Warsaw. If a nuke could do that in Japan, it could do it anywhere. The rebuilding of old Auckland halted, and the construction of a new city a dozen miles south began in earnest. But Niobe and the other heroes remained in the Old City. Those were proud days. The heroes waited there, ready in case the Horrors returned. They waited for years. Until the world changed, and no one trusted superheroes to protect them anymore.
    “He’s going out, I suppose?” a woman’s voice came from the doorway.
    Niobe turned away from the old superhero memorabilia to find Kate watching her from just inside the doorway. Solomon’s wife clung to beauty even in her forties. Despite the late hour, her blonde bombshell hairstyle was perfect. She had her arms crossed over her nightgown, with a small silver cross around her neck. The look she gave Niobe was the one she’d come to expect, a kind of cold disapproval.
    Christ. Niobe had just wriggled out of one argument. She sure as hell didn’t want to wind up in another.
    “Yes,” Niobe said. With her goggles in place, Kate wouldn’t be able to see her eyes, and she was glad for that. Most people would be creeped out if they saw that Niobe’s eyes were charcoal black all the way across, but Kate wasn’t most people. The woman had a gaze that could crack rocks, even if she wasn’t a meta.
    The silence stretched between them. Niobe could never work out if Kate disliked her because she put Solomon in dangerous situations, or because she thought Niobe was shagging