Don’t Mess With Mama

Just before the TV exploded, two jolly news anchors were chucking about the new hero in town. They showed video taken when the glowing figure flew right up to the news helicopter and asked for directions.

“He needs a Thomas Guide,” the male anchor said with a big smile.

“Where would he put it?” the female anchor asked with a smirk.

Before they could say anything more, the picture tube on the old TV burst with a bright light and a loud sound that was a combination of breaking glass and a dull thump. Marcus heard his mother cry out.

Reactions honed in parts of the world that most Americans had never heard of made Marcus hit the floor. He could only see on the edges of his vision. The bright flash of the TV tube was still embedded in his retinas. He crawled towards his mother’s old threadbare armchair.

“Get down, Mama,” he said.

Marcus reached for his Glock 17, then cursed when he realized he wasn’t wearing it. Mama made him hang his shoulder holster by the front door before he came in.

His vision clearing, Marcus rose to his knees and saw that his mother was sitting as solidly in her chair as if nothing had happened.

“I told you to get down, Mama,” he said.

“I ain’t crawling on no dirty floor,” she said. “And I heard you cussin’, don’t think I didn’t.”

Marcus rose to his feet. “It was them.” He slid along the wall and stood up by the front door. He retrieved his Glock from the hanging holster. He took a quick look out at the dark street.

They were gone. When Marcus had parked his car, a group of gang bangers were hanging out in front of the next house. The street where his mother lived had been quiet for a few years, but the presence of this group showed that the gangs were back.

A gang truce had lowered the murder rate for over a decade, but the neighborhood he grew up in, where his mother lived, was still a dangerous one. The increasing conflict between black and Hispanic gangs was stirring up even more trouble.

Now the street, poorly lit by a few street lamps, was empty. Somebody must have taken some shots at the group and made them run off. One of those shots had ended up in his mother’s television.

Marcus confirmed this when he found that one of the small panes of glass in the door was broken. That was where the bullet entered the house. He turned to see the path that it took to the smashed and smoking television. Six inches to the left and he would have been calling an ambulance. The bullet had passed right next to his mother’s armchair.

Marcus Slater fought to remain calm. He had been through wars big and small and never worried much about his own life. He had survived growing up in an neighborhood where young men often died before they were twenty.

He could even understand the gang bangers and knew why they did what they did. He had once been one of them.

That didn’t mean he would let them mess with his Mama.

She came up behind Marcus and put her hand on his shoulder. Marcus said, “Mama, I know you said you don’t want to move, but...”

Mrs. Slater smiled and shook her head. “This is my home, child. No gang is going to run me off. And I won’t take charity from little Randy, though he is a nice boy.”

That’s what she always said. Marcus had been trying to get her to move for years. He couldn’t convince her that “little Randy” paid enough for Marcus to get her a nice condo or even a new house on his salary alone.

If he couldn’t get Mama to move, he would have to get the gang to do so. Calling the police was bad idea, though. He remembered an afternoon when he was ten or eleven. Marcus and his Mama were carrying groceries onto the porch when the pop-pop of shots came from down the block. They saw a young man, a kid really, maybe sixteen, racing down the middle of the street. He stopped and threw a gun into the storm sewer right across from the Slater house, then kept running.

A uniformed police officer, a sweaty white man, came to the door the next day. He asked if they had seen anything. Two people were killed, he said. Mama offered him a glass of cold water, but said they were still at the grocery store when it happened. Everyone in the neighborhood knew you didn’t tell anything to the police. Gangs don’t like witnesses.

It was still true. Marcus couldn’t protect Mama all the time.

“You can buy me a new TV for my birthday,” Mama said.

“Your birthday is three months away.” Marcus said.

“Hmm. You expect me to miss “General Hospital” for three whole months?”

“No, Mama. I’ll get you one tomorrow.”

He needed a way to make them move without letting them know who he was. Then his mind flashed to the glowing, flying hero on the TV. Marcus didn’t have much respect for the flashy super types who made all the headlines while normal people did the real, everyday good in the world. He did have respect for one man, who became a hero by abandoning costumed crime-fighting in favor of being a father.

“I’ll take that old TV out to the back yard,” Marcus said. “Then I gotta go.” He had an idea that just might work.

*****

They were back the next night, in the same place. From where Marcus hovered in the flying car he could see the light was on in his mother’s living room. He realized that he had forgotten to get her a new TV. It had been a busy day.

The gang bangers leaned on parked cars and stood near the light from a street lamp. There were seven of them, though there might be more in the dark where he couldn’t see them. Visibility through the eye slits in the helmet wasn’t as good as Marcus would have liked. That would have to improved.

No, this was a one shot deal. He wasn’t going to become Knighthawk, the superhero who never was. He was just going to scare the gang away from his mother’s block, then put the suit and the flying car back under the tarp in the corner of Randall’s warehouse where he had found them.

They looked just like the group that Marcus used to hang out with. Violence and selling drugs were just a small part of gang life. Most of it was hanging out with your brothers and bragging about the bitches you hit. There was laughter and a feeling of being part of something important.

He didn’t want to hurt these boys, he just wanted them to move on.

Marcus maneuvered the car until it was just above the streetlight. The car was amazingly silent. The gang members didn’t look up. They didn’t notice anything until a metal ladder unfolded with its lower end about six feet off the ground. Before they could react to that, Knighthawk was among them.

Marcus picked up the closest gang banger, a tall scrawny kid, and threw him at another one a few feet away. They both fell. Then he punched another one in the chest and knocked him down.

Two guns came out and Marcus grabbed one of them and yanked it out of its owner’s hand. The other was further away and Marcus raised his left arm. He pressed the button within his glove that made a bullet proof shield rapidly unfold from the left forearm. The shot was loud, and the first bullet hit the shield with a clang.

Marcus ran towards the shooter and took one more bullet on the shield and a third on his thigh, where despite the the bullet proof material of the suit it hurt like hell. Marcus unsheathed the sword with his right hand. It was really an electronic stunner that put out a crackling blue electric field. Marcus swiped it at the shooter, who went rigid with shock and then fell.

It was over fast. Several of the boys had run at the first sight of him. The two he had thrown together were standing up, but not making any moves to fight. They were the only ones still there.

“Stay off this block,” Marcus told them through the speaker that made his voice sound mechanical, unhuman. “Take your boy with you.”

The two helped the stunned gang banger up and all three of them moved away as fast as they could.

Not a bad night’s work, Marcus thought. They’ll just think it was some new costume in town and never think he had anything to do with the residents of the block. He might have to come back one or two more times, but pretty soon they would get the idea and gather somewhere else.

He grabbed the bottom of the ladder and signaled it to pull him up. It was a little harder to clamber back into the driver’s seat than he expected. The suit was bulky and harder to move in than he would have liked. It didn’t matter, his career as Knighthawk was going to be very short.

Flying in the car was fun, though. He stayed above the lights of the city but too low for the many news and police helicopters that always hovered above L.A. to notice him. The car was dead black and didn’t reflect much light. It would be very hard for anyone to see.

As he flew over the intersection of Vernon and King Ave., Marcus saw the taco stand where he and his homeys had often eaten. Home of the Garbage Burrito, the sign said. He used to eat those things two or three times a week.

A buzzing sound started and then got louder. Marcus looked around. Could there be an insect inside the car? He waved his hand. The sound became louder still. Then it became very loud as something hit the car, hard.

The crunch of metal on metal combined with the loud buzzing was disorienting, but Marcus had been in many fire fights and he knew how to suppress panic and do what needed to be done. He turned the car and hit the accelerator. The car flew higher and faster, but one of the engines made a noise that wasn’t good.

Looking at the video screen that showed the rear view, Marcus saw a man, or he thought it was a man. The shape was obscured by buzzing wings of some sort. The figure flew after him, and was gaining.

Marcus put the car into a dive and the strange figure followed. He/it could maneuver very well, probably better than the car. He didn’t think Randall had conceived that the car would ever be involved in an aerial chase.

He lost sight of the flying buzzing thing and then the car was hit again, from below. A light and a warning buzzer started on the dash. One of the engines was out.

Marcus had no plans to tangle with some super type, whether this was an actual flying man or a robot or whatever. He didn’t know if this was related to his rousting the gang members or a random attack by some baddy trying to prove himself. It couldn’t be the former, street gangs and supers didn’t mix.

Abandoning any attempt at stealth, Marcus turned on all the car’s lights. The flying man buzzed through the headlights. Definitely a man, Marcus was sure he saw a face. The costume was a garish green and yellow, and he had some kind of harness strapped on. He That made it likely that the wings were mechanical, not part of him.

Marcus was not a pilot, but he tried to apply his skills in defensive driving to avoid the buzzing man. The guy was faster than the car, though, and more maneuverable. He proved it by smashing into the underside of the car again.

Two more engine failure lights went on. How many engines are there, Marcus thought. Not enough to keep the car aloft. All he could do was steer it a little, trying to get away from the lights of the major streets.

The buzzing man flew around and around the car, like a runner doing victory laps. Marcus had to choose a crash site, and managed to hit the roof of what looked like an industrial building.

The roof gave in when the car hit and Marcus felt an enormous pain in his right leg as he crashed into the top floor of an abandoned loft. Bricks and pieces of wood rained down on top of the car.

Randall wasn’t going to be happy. You can’t get insurance on a flying superhero car.

Marcus knew that he had to move before the buzzing man found him. The sound of those insect-like wings had faded away so maybe he didn’t see where the car had crashed. He would find it soon, not too many buildings had fresh holes in their roofs.

The canopy only partially opened when Marcus pressed the button. It was blocked by debris. He pulled himself up and out of the car, landing in an undignified heap on the brick-strewn floor of the loft. When he tried to stand, his right leg screamed at him to stop doing that.

A faint buzzing could be heard. Marcus stood again, putting all his weight on his left leg. The buzzing became louder, sounding like it was circling the area. Marcus hopped towards the closest door.

He got through the door just before the buzzing filled his ears and the green and yellow costumed man landed right next to the crashed car. Marcus could see him through a crack in the wall. His wings were clearly strapped on, part of his harness. They were metal blades of some sort that vibrated when he flew. The buzzing stopped as he landed.

He would certainly start looking for Marcus as soon as he realized no one was in the car. That didn’t take long, he turned and looked around the room. Marcus moved down the hallway away from the door, trying to be as quiet as possible.

As a former special ops soldier, now a professional bodyguard, Marcus had kept at least one firearm in reach for most of his adult life. His friend Randall’s romantic notions about superheroes not carrying guns had not convinced him to stop that practice. He pulled his Glock from one of the many pockets on the Knighthawk suit.

Marcus positioned himself in another doorway near the end of the hallway. He had to take the Knighthawk gauntlets off to get a good grip on his pistol. His trigger finger wouldn’t fit through the trigger guard with the metallic glove on.

Marcus waited for the buzzing man to come through the door, his pistol raised to fire as soon as he had a clear shot.

The clatter of helicopter blades suddenly came from the roofless loft and the buzzing man’s wings started up. Then it sounded like something heavy fell on the floor, and the wings changed their sound, as if they had been damaged. Were there two people in the loft now?

Marcus frowned. What was happening in there?

The door burst open and the buzzing man came stumbling through. Marcus held his fire when he saw the man’s harness was gone and he looked dazed. He was a young white guy with light brown hair. Marcus had never seen him before or heard of a flying man with buzzing wings.

Marcus stepped out into the hallway and the formerly buzzing man saw him. His eyes behind a pair of goggles widened in surprise, as if seeing the impossible.

“You can’t be here...and there...” he said.

Marcus pocketed his pistol and smiled. Instead of shooting the young man or even using the Knighthawk sword, he gave the man an old fashioned right hook to the jaw. The green and yellow figure collapsed to the floor.

Knighthawk stepped through the door from the loft. “Hello, Knighthawk,” he said in the robotic voice from the speaker.

Knighthawk hopped on his good leg and smiled as his friend Randall, who was wearing an older version of the suit, came forward to help support him. “Hello, Knighthawk,” he said.

As Randall helped him down the hall towards the helicopter that was hovering over the loft, he said, “Your Mama called. She was worried, you never brought her a new TV today. I said you were probably just busy. But she said, ‘My Marcus never breaks a promise. He must be in trouble.’”

“And when you saw the suit and the car were gone, you started looking for me.”

“It wasn’t hard. There’s a GPS tracking device in the suit.”

Marcus nodded. “Sorry about borrowing your stuff.”

“No problem. Just ask next time, ok?”

“Aight, my brutha, you got it. Now take me to a hospital.”



Power vs Power and all related characters are © and ™ 2007 Robin Reed.
Metahuman Press is © and ™ 2005-2007 Nick Ahlhelm.