Other People's Heroes (The Heroes of Siegel City) Read Online Free

concentration. Finally my eyes were beginning to hurt and I was ready to throw the blasted thing just to get it to move. I didn’t listen to the whistling outside, paid no attention to the crescendo of a human body hurtling through the air at supersonic speeds. I paid no heed at all to the fact that it was getting louder and louder and I was feeling stronger and stronger.
    Two things then happened at once. The first is that the whistling got so loud, so intense that Flambeaux must have flown directly past my window. I could hear this, even though I was paying no attention to it.
    The second thing that happened was, as the whistle reached its loudest point, a massive burst of flame erupted from my eyes and charred off the top of my desk. My concentration broke immediately -- in part because the flames were threatening to burn my face off -- and I fell back in my chair.
    The fire alarm went off just as I flopped out of my cubicle shouting incoherent syllables with the intent of alerting people to the situation. “Fire! Gha! Cubie! Fire!” were my exact words. Fortunately, between this and the four-foot wall of flames that was roaring behind me, Sheila was able to translate the message.
    She grabbed the fire extinguisher and rushed into my cubicle. There was a spitting sound and the light was replaced by smoke. Sheila came back out and shoved the extinguisher in my hands.
    “Some hero,” she chuckled. Crisis averted, the rest of the staff was returning to work. This sort of thing happened far too often around here.
    “How did Flambeaux blast you like that? The window is still closed,” Sheila said.
    I dropped my voice and leaned into her. “It wasn’t Flambeaux. Sheila, it was me.”
    “Josh...”
    “No, come on, I s wear . I was trying to move that damn quarter again and... the quarter!” I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into my slightly-used work area. The top of my desk was black and burnt, except in the center. There, puddled on the desk, were the molten remains of twenty-five American cents.
    “You see that ?”
    “Okay, Josh, this is going too far. Maybe you should see the company counselor--”
    “Dammit!” I grabbed her by the arm again and tugged her into the stairwell, hitting the steps and going straight for the roof.
    “Josh, what are you doing? Let go!”
    “I’m proving my point! I know I’ve got something going on!”
    When we made it to the roof we could see Flambeaux smoldering at the top of Barks Plaza across the street. Deep Six’s partners in the Spectacle Six had arrived, and he was getting a lift from the robot called V3OL.
    “Look! I’ll bet I can send up a flare.” I thrust my hand towards the air and started thinking hot, heat, fire, flame ... even mad and angry when nothing else worked.
    “Josh, you look like an idiot.”
    “Did Edison look like an idiot when he invented the light bulb? The Wright Brothers? Eins teeeaaaaaiiiigh!”
    The scream wasn’t of pain, but of shock -- my hand was rocketing away into the air. I didn’t go with it, mind you, I stayed right there on the roof. Nor did the hand separate itself from my body. Instead, my arm stretched out to a length of at least twenty feet. The flesh hung in the gap like overstretched taffy.
    When I realized what was happening, I shouted even louder, falling back into Sheila’s arms. She didn’t catch me, though. Instead I puddled through her fingers into a gooey mess on the roof.
    “Josh! Josh, what’s going on? JOSH! ”
    Taking a deep breath (and feeling my lungs inflate like balloons) I tried to imagine myself whole again, 44-inch waist and all. I thought of myself as solid as human as complete.
    And when I managed to stop panicking, I felt my body pull itself back together, and I was me again.
    “Oh God, Josh, what the hell was that?”
    “I don’t know what’s going on, Sheila. I don’t. I--”
    As I rambled, a purple-gloved hand stretched up onto the roof, pulling behind it an overly-long individual,