I look. He’s in the bank with us.

It’s not the Airman; it’s worse.

It’s The One.

He’s wearing his bright green suit with the yellow gloves, belt, cape and boots and the bright, yellow, stylized number ‘1’ on his chest. His hair is still perfectly coiffed, those damned, perfect blond waves never, ever got mussed up, even after he touched down after flying supersonic speeds to get wherever he was going. He was the only cape in town whose comic-book persona truly didn’t live up to him, rather than vice-versa.

And of all the crimes taking place in America at that moment, he had to bust ours.

Shit.

His arms are crossed, and his face has the patient, straight look of a father with a coiled belt in his hand who’s caught his kid with a hand in the cookie jar.

Shit. Shit on toast.

He looks in a mood to punch someone through a wall, or stuff them in a car and pitch the damn auto all the way to whatever planet he says he was originally from.

“Drop the guns,” he says, without inflexion or any real emotion. “Then drop the bags and get on your knees with your hands in the air, or you’re going to regret it for the next month as you lie in your hospital beds.”

His voice has no more concern than a soda jerk asking ‘what’s yours, lady?’ We were going to comply or he was going to hurt us.

And that made me mad. Madder’n I’d remembered feeling in a while. Sure, we scared folks. And sure, there were some gangs and villains that’d kill people. But we’d never hurt anybody. No one. We took money, that was it. The capes, though? They hurt folks like us alla time, putting us in the hospital over and over again, and then in jail where the seriously bad guys lived and beat us up again, sometimes killed us, too.

Made me mad. I was ready to tell him so right then and there before he started beating on us, when little Mitch of all people, Mr. scared-of-his-own-frozen-shadow, pulled the rabbit out’ve the hat that saved us that day.

Mitch drew on The One. Mitch. He was holding a bag of money in his hands and his gun was in the other, and he pointed it at the most famous cape on the freakin’ planet.

The One knew what came next, and started the usual part of the script.

What was supposed to happen was a bullet or ray or something else was supposed to try and blast him, bounce harmlessly off his perfectly sculpted chest, and then The One got to beat the snot out’ve poor little Mitch, tossing off a one-liner or two. Later, the whole event would be immortalized and made into something it totally wasn’t in the comic book of the week. Skinny, scared little Mitch would be turned into some musclebound, snarling force of pure evil, while The One would lose the bored expression he had on his face right now, the artist exchanging it for a beaming, toothy grin as he dispensed pure justice on the poor sap.

Didn’t happen this time, though.

The One may have been the greatest cape on the planet, but he hadn’t done his homework. Mitch’s Winterbeam hit him with the frosty strength of a liquid-nitrogen tidal wave. The poor sap had just enough time for a surprised look before his whole body got turned into a great big popsicle, his famous big blue eyes now solid iced-over orbs of milk-white. His skin was a light blue all over, icicles dripping silently and unmovingly from his mouth.

The One’s frozen body hit the ground like a slab of frozen meat.

Everyone was quiet. Three whole seconds of silence. A car horn blared outside.

“I . . . I killed . . .” Mitch’s voice began to whimper like a little kid looking for mommy at the fair.

Then he started to turn up the volume.

“I KILLED HIM!” he screamed, then screamed over and over.

Jane looked at all of us. “Everybody outside, in the car, now!” Somehow we all heard her over Mitch’s screams. The guy was acting like he’d just seen the boogeyman jump out of his closet, and he couldn’t stop.

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Jane holstered one of her pistols by her left hip. Still training her right-gun on the people flattened on the floor, she walked up to Mitch. She tried talking him down for about two or three words until she saw it wasn’t gonna do any good. Then she hauled off back, her free left hand making a fist, and plowed him a good, solid haymaker in the jaw.

We all froze on our way to the door. We’d seen Jane punch capes and guards and cops. I’ve no doubt that she could’ve laid out poor Mitch on the ground and sent him into La-La land if she’d wanted to. She was a farm girl and a carny, remember? She wasn’t a muscle-bound female wonder like Big Bertha, but she was wiry and feisty as any woman I’ve known, before or since.

Mitch, silenced, stared at her through his white stocking mask. His fedora’d been knocked askew.

“MOVE!” Jane screamed, grabbing his hand and pulling him after her. She leaped over The One’s frozen body, and Mitch fair tripped over it trying to keep up with her.

Outside. We’d been inside maybe three minutes, tops. Bee was in the car, the engine revving and the horn honking. Dangit, woman! Don’t draw attention to- well, look how we were dressed. I decided to leave that one to Jane, if she wanted to give us a dressing down after.

We piled in the front and back seat, bags of money in our laps as Bee stomped on the gas and we leapt into the street, cars honking at us, speeding by and forgetting us as soon as we were out of sight. Still no cops; Miguel was doing his own distraction uptown, trying to draw as many black-and-blues away from the bank as he could with a smoke bomb lobbed on the floor of the stock exchange. The man could go in and out without anyone knowing what happened. Shame how we had to-

Nope. No regrets. Can’t do that now. Had to stay focused. Sweating so much now my cheapass eyemask is slipping off my face.

“We’re dead… we’re dead… we’re all dead…” Mitch is rocking back and forth, tears flowing from his eyes in big dark patches on the cheeks of his white stocking mask. Jane’s already ripped her eyemask mask off and is trying to calm him down, talking to him like I saw a rancher talk once to a spooked horse.

“Mitch? Mitch? Listen to me, Mitch. He’s back there, you’re here. He can’t hurt you, Mitch. We’re safe now. But you gotta stop crying and get with it. You understand, Mitch?”

Mitch takes a breath. “Don’t you see? I killed The One, Jane. Even if he doesn’t come after me, every fucking cape from here to Kookamunga is going to be after us. After me, looking to be the guy who pasted the guy who pasted The One. You get it? You see? Every cape is gonna be gunning for us. Any idiot who can make a mask and carry a pistol is gonna be gunning for us. Every one!”

“This is quite possible, young Mitchel,” says Monty, “but consider the other side of the coin. If you did indeed expunge The One from the ranks of the living, it is also very possible that many of the costumed vigilante community will be too intimidated by us and our exploits to make a coordinated assault on our persons.”

“You think they’re gonna be scared of us?”

“I see it as a distinct possibility. Further, we will be able to command much better cooperation from our marks in banks, jewelry stores, and so on. The people will know that they cannot hope to stall and wait for their heroes, not when the Cadre of Crime faces them!”

I feel a tickle at my ankle. I look down. A tentacle has reached out from Monty’s body in its seat and is wrapping itself snug around me.

“Plus,” says Jake, “if we play this right, we can soak the funnybook guys for a pile of dough, They make us look better and give us a bigger cut of the dough, or the gang that put The One himself on ice- hey, that fits double, don’t it? You put him on ice, Snowy! We’ll tell the comic book guys to fork it over or we’ll hafta pay you a little visit! We can get rich just sittin’ at home, collecting the checks!”

Another tentacle sprang out of Jake’s red turban, twisting itself around my wrist. I don’t flinch, hardly move. It almost feels good, really. I look down again; Mitch is still babbling, trying to fix his hat while a blue tentacle wraps around me, encasing my torso in an icy grip.

“Guys,” I say in as casual a voice as I can muster, “You’re, ah, squishing me here. Guys?” No one answers. Mitch and Jane are making out passionately next to me. I’ll never have as big a ‘what’n hell?’ moment for the rest of my life as I will when I walk into one of the storerooms and see the jumpy nerd and the tough-leather cowgirl swappin’ spit. I mean, really? Really?

…and now I was in the office, staring. Couldn’t think of anything to say at they stared at me. Tried to walk out but there were too many hallways. Doors didn’t open. Dead ends. Fewer choices the longer I stayed in the game. Fewer turns to take, no doors in the walls at all . . .no gonna scream, not gonna scream . . .

I inhaled a deep breath and woke up. I was in my borrowed bed with a couple of blankets covering me.

What the hell?

I swept my legs over and remembered where I was before my feet touched the floor. I stood up and stretched- Dear God in heaven, that wasn’t gonna get old for a long, long time. Just standing, walking, flexing my fingers, all of it. All of it. And all of it without pain, not an ounce.

I left the room I’d been given and walked down the hall to the bathroom. I took a piss, then a crap, and then cleaned up… sorry for the description, but remember? Remember how I used to need help for this part? Now there wasn’t the least bit of difficulty or discomfort. I kept thinking about asking Meagan, my old nurse, out for that egg creme. Then I’d remember how even though I looked half my age now, half my age was still nearly twice hers. Still, a man can dream…

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TO BE CONTINUED...