MY NAME IS... Well, I'm not going to tell you my real name. What's the point of having a secret identity if you blurt it out all over the place? My superhero name was Thunder. This was back in the days when I had superhuman powers.
It's weird talking about this now, after all this time. When we superhumans lost our abilities it came as a bit of a shock to all of us. Especially for me, because I was in the air over Iceland at the time. I was about eighty meters up, moving pretty fast.
The Shark and his gang had just pulled off a pretty big heist, and as soon as they heard I was after them, The Shark ordered his men to slow me down while he made a run for it. I don't know why the bad guys always did that. I'd rounded up The Shark's men and was after the man himself when—bam!—suddenly my powers were gone and I was falling like a lead potato.
I was lucky: I landed in a lake. Nearly broke my neck when I hit the water and nearly drowned trying to get out. I'd never learned to swim, you see. Didn't need to. I could fly. Why would I ever need to swim?
I've learned to swim since, of course.
The Shark got away. Never heard a word about him again. I can only hope that when his powers vanished he found himself in a similar position.
So this story that I'm going to tell you... It might ramble a bit but that's because I'm really not used to talking about these things. You don't know what it was like, holding onto these secrets for over a decade.
No, before you ask, I didn't know Titan's real identity, nor Energy's. I had no idea who Quantum was. I met Paragon once or twice, didn't really get to talk to him. But I knew Apex. Knew him well. They're the Big Five, the ones everyone wants to know about. Like they were the best of us or something. Max Dalton—excuse me while I spit in disgust—was and still is a self-obsessed jerk with an ego the size of Texas. The way his publicity people work, you'd think that Dalton was the only effective superhero in the business and the rest of us were working for him.
But I'm not here to talk about Titan and his gang or the Daltons, not really. I'm here to tell you about The Footsoldiers.
I doubt you've heard of us, but that's not surprising because we never made the name public. It was kind of a joke name, a dig at Dalton's own High Command. See what I mean about his ego? He chose a name for his superhero team that deliberately gave the impression they were in charge.
Most of the time there was were four of us in the Footsoldiers. Myself, Apex, Hesperus, and Thalamus. Now and then Impervia and Octavian worked with us. Once, Josh Dalton worked on a kidnapping case with us because he'd split from the High Command after a fight with his brother. He was all right. Smart kid. Always in the shadow of his siblings, though.
But Octavian was the most frequent of the team's casual members. You might not remember him. Strange guy. Styled himself after the Roman emperor for some reason we could never figure out. Dressed like him too. Toga, laurel-leaf crown, sandals. His powers were pretty basic: Flight, energy rays from his eyes, a good left cross. Useful in a fight, but that was about it.
One funny thing about Octavian before I go on: he only showed up for a couple of days every three weeks, and it was always at night. He never said why this was, but he implied that it was something to do with "the phases of the moon." It was Thalamus who figured it out: Octavian was married and his wife didn't know he was a superhuman. Every three weeks she had to go out of town on a business trip, and Octavian would grab the sheets off the bed to make his "costume." And he could only do it at night because they lived in his mother's house and he had to wait until she was asleep.
It was shortly after we solved that kidnapping case that this story starts.
I didn't like the way Apex was running things. But then I didn't like much about him. I mean, the rest of us knew each other's real identities, but Apex never even removed his helmet. And you couldn't see any part of him under his armor.
Like Paragon, I guess. But at least with Paragon you got the sense that there was a real guy under it all. With Apex, there were times when I wondered if maybe he was a robot.
Even without visible features it was pretty obvious to anyone who cared to take notice that Apex was a strange-looking guy. He was short, not much taller than Hesperus. And he was stocky. Not exactly overweight—hard to tell through all the body-armor—but he was kinda chunky.
And that voice of his. Perfectly clipped British accent. But a very fake one, you know? Like a guy doing an impression of a newsreader on the BBC World Service.
Apex and Thalamus got on like a house on fire. A really strange boring house, that is. It was probably because neither of them had any social skills. They'd known each other for years and as far as we could tell they didn't have any other friends.
Thalamus, now... I've got to say, I kind of liked him. Sure, he was puny and ugly and sometimes if you asked him a question he'd answer with more detail than you really wanted. Like, one time I asked him what he'd done the previous weekend and he started telling me. "I woke up at a little after seven-seventeen on Saturday morning and got out of bed and walked the eight steps to the bathroom. The door was closed so I opened it before I went in. I closed the door after me but I didn't lock it because I live alone so the likelihood of someone unexpectedly walking in is less than one in fifty-one thousand." And so on. I stopped him when he started telling me exactly how many corn flakes he'd had for breakfast.
I used to drive him crazy by asking him stuff like, "Hey, Thalamus. What time was it yesterday?"
Hesperus was a little odd too, but in a good way. I'd known her since we were teenagers. We grew up in the same town and pretty much discovered our powers together. Most of us in the superhero community had secret identities, but Hesperus kept hers very private. Around people she didn't know—or just people she didn't like—she often came across as quite cold and abrupt, all business and no fun. Among her friends she was smart and funny and bubbly, with a grin that was amazingly infectious and made you feel good to be alive. She laughed at silly jokes and would become embarrassed when you told her that her hair looked nice.
She wore hand-made armor and carried a sword and an ax, and it didn't bother her in the least when Thalamus pointed out that the Greek god Hesperus was a traditionally considered to be a man. She counter-argued that Hesperus was an early name for the planet Venus, which is associated with women. That shut him up.
I could tell you of at least a dozen instances when some bad guy just assumed she'd be a pushover. That was not a mistake anyone made twice.
I remember the time Slaughter tried to kidnap her. Forget Ragnarök: Slaughter was easily the most vicious excuse for a human being I've ever met. She was like Genghis Khan crossed with Vlad the Impaler, only worse. Seriously. One time she killed a guy for looking at her. According to the news reports, she was walking through the city wearing a purple and red costume. Who's not going to look? But she spotted his guy staring at her, and she stopped and punched her fist right through his neck.
So she kidnapped Hesperus. Swooped down out of the sky and grabbed her, dragged her into the air. And Hesperus didn't even struggle. Didn't even say a word until Slaughter had taken her to her hideout, an abandoned house on the outskirts of Seattle.
Slaughter cuffed Hesperus' hands and feet, blindfolded her, and threw her down the cellar stairs.
Hesperus was out of the cuffs before she even hit the ground. She was back up the stairs even as Slaughter was closing the door. She smashed her way through and proceeded to beat the living snot out of Slaughter. I think it was the first time that anyone had managed to lay a decent punch on her.
Of course, Slaughter was out of prison within a week. But she never again tried to take on Hesperus without someone backing her up.