What’s not to like in this book? An all male cast filled with one dimensional stereotypes. A major failing of the Bechdel test. A serial killer sub-plot that goes nowhere. An evil house that does nothing. A story about evil where the only person who dies is a suicide, and that’s on page one. A story about a ghost where the ghost who finally shows up just wants to have sex…but “off screen,” of course. Wouldn’t want anything to actually happen in this book, would we?

In a book of dull and offensive characters, only Mark Underhill stands out as a decently memorable person. His uncle is a “famous writer,” which means he needs no other personality traits, ever. His father Phillip is a walking steroetype of a racist and msyogonist who can’t stop thinking of himself longer than five minutes. There’s the stereotypical tough talking cop, the plot device super-private detective friend, in case Tim the famous writer needs an answer without actually performing any investigative work, the over confident but really stupid rich white male serial killer in his thirties, Mark’s best buddy Jimbo, and Jimbo’s equally annoying drunk dad, Jackie.

There are only two female characters who have more than a scene or two of dialogue, one of whom commits suicide, Mark’s mother. She rarely talks in the flashbacks, and her presence in the book, even in flashbacks, serves no useful purpose. The other female bit character, Jimbo’s mother, serves as a sex symbol for Mark, and a sidekick for grilling Jimbo with Tim. She coos and says nice things to Mark, and then when Tim needs Jimbo too talk, she wags her finger sternly and repeats the same lines over and over: “Now Jim, you tell Mr. Underhill everything you know!” But otherwise she stays barefoot and in the kitchen like a good little woman. There is also supposed to be a female ghost, but she is only mentioned in passing…having sex with one of the guys.

So Mark is the only reason to keep reading, simply because he’s the only one presented with any personality and no negative stereotypes. In a book of assholes, he’s the only who who doesn’t stink. But that’s really not saying much, and the story frequently proposes that Mark is a super-genius fifteen-year-old, and every cop who ever dealt with the house of a prior serial killer was retarded. And blind. And so is the current generation of cops as well. I frequently found myself snorting, rolling my eyes, or yelling “bullshit” at the sheer lack of logic in most every scene.

And the narration, oho ome-o my-o, what attempts at narrative emotions that pluck pluck pluck at the heart but fail to stir the organ itself. (And seriously, what did this guy’s editor have against commas?) Like the sentence above, the narration FREQUENTLY tries over and over to be artsy, and instead it sucks up what little tension the book has left.

But then it never had much tension to begin with because nothing happens. What did happen is all narrated in the past tense in clinical terms. It’s split between a third person narrator and Tim the famous writer’s dull journal entries, and this whole story is relayed in such a jumbled way that there is never a sense of danger or dread.

The conclusion is a snoozer that frankly makes no sense. The killer claims to have been emulating The Dark Man to scare Mark, but that does not explain how he appeared in front of a cop and disappeared twice. The killer never mentions this either, so it feels like a loose thread that didn’t get snipped out in editing.

This book was dull dull dull with a narrator oh me oh my who was oh-so-gosh darned irritating that I very much long to strangle him with typewriter ribbon. The only reasons I stuck with this story are that I liked Mark and I kept thinking “Any minute now, this is going to get scary.” It never did. This book was a major disappointment. I give it 1 star, and I would not recommend it to anyone.

I had a massive hangover the next day when I finally woke up. The commissioner had paid the bounty for all of the Sugar Gliders, along with a bonus for Dale’s “sculpture.” You may think I’m joking, but the museum sealed the body in preserving enzymes, and it became a part of the regular display the same day.

Yeah, that’s how weird City is.

The museum even asked Dale to make another statue…using City’s illustrious mayor. Of course, that may have to do with his cutting their funding that year.

Needless to say, we turned down their generous offer.

Anyway, we went to this one little cantina that’s a known dive for the city’s villains, and let me tell you, that place was empty the second we walked in. We had to hunt down the bartender and band to drag them back in, but the night went pretty smoothly after that.

We drank a lot. The guys took turns dancing with me, though Simon was the only one whispering compliments about how beautiful I was. He even kissed me once, and I might have pushed him away if I hadn’t been so drunk by that point.

It certainly wasn’t a kiss from a little boy. His tongue flitted over mine, but his lips crushed my mouth, conveying an urgency and need that stole my breath.

But thankfully nothing else happened, as we all took separate cabs home. Wally and Dale were too drunk to fly, so we had to have the bartender send for a cab company.

An hour later, we had them call the cab company again to assure them that they wouldn’t get robbed when they came to pick us up from the bad side of town.

My cab ride was free. The cabby’s daughter was the little girl that Dale had rescued in the pizza parlor, and I was promised free fare for life, along with the rest of “The Normals.”

Yep, that’s the name the reporters gave us. We were being portrayed as the common folk who were working to make a better future for the city. I found that especially ironic after considering that we had all been bad people, with the exception of Dale.

Even he had a few dark spots on his record already.

Wally was much better at being a hero than he was at being a henchman, and Simon was getting famous by being one of the good guys when no one even knew he existed as a villain. Finally, there was me, who no one seemed to recognize as Icee.

At least the papers never brought that fact up. Maybe they just knew better than to provoke me.

I’m getting away from my story.

I woke up with the worst hangover I’d had in months, and I was almost crying on the kitchen counter while I waited for my coffee pot to brew enough for one cup.

I heard a very soft knocking on my front door and opened it to find Dale in dark glasses. I might have been upset with him for showing up before three thirty, but I couldn’t shout without killing myself.

I asked, “What do you want?”

Dale was thankfully soft voiced that morning. “I know you don’t like me coming over this early, but I was going to visit a friend of mine, and I wanted you to meet her.”

Nodding, I waved him inside and shut the door, walking back into the kitchen. “I thought you said you didn’t have any friends beside me.”

“Su told me that she’d only be my friend if I promised not to tell anyone about her,” Dale explained. “I’ve never told anybody, but I figured you were hurting as much as I was this morning, and she can fix that.”

We had some coffee before I got dressed and let Dale fly me to a little pastel blue house on the south side of the city. A small white sign on the lawn had the words So Su Mi – Massage Therapy written in blue marker. The letters has an Asian design to them, but there was also something simplistic and child-like about the sign.

Dale walked up the three steps to the front door, knocking lightly before he went back to rubbing his temples to appease the beast thrashing around in his head.

Su opened the door, a short Korean woman that I was standing almost level with. She was kind of cute, but her eyes were spaced a bit too far apart, and the outer corners of her slanted eyes seemed wrong, like they were canted at the wrong angle.

Her white T-shirt said So Su Mi, Licensed Massage Artist. That gave me a momentary pause, but I filed it way for later as Dale and I walked into Su’s house.

Dale smiled at her questioning expression and gestured to me. “Su, this is my friend Terry, and she needs your help in getting rid of a hangover.”

Su looked at me for a moment with what looked like jealousy, but she smiled a moment later at Dale, her eyes sparkling. “Sweetie, you made a friend? That’s wonderful! I told you that you could do it, didn’t I?”

There was something wrong with her voice, though I couldn’t put my finger on it at first.

“Yeah,” Dale said and put his hands in his pockets, his cheeks flushing as Su put her arms around him and hugged him tightly.

Dale had her take care of me first, and I was led to a little room with a padded table. It had a hole on one end that Su had me rest my face in. Under the hole was a small silver tray, and I smelled lilacs a moment after she put a crystal bowl on the tray.

“Scented oils?” I asked.

“Aromatherapy,” Su replied, beginning to rub my neck with her tiny fingers. “The scent relaxes the brain and aids in improving circulation.”

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

“What is it?” Su asked.

“How did you meet Dale?”

Su laughed softly, continuing to knead my neck and shoulders. “He came in after he’d been pushed off a bridge by a local gang. His back was twisted up bad, worse than his healing factor could deal with, and I helped him get back on his feet. He’s been coming over ever since then.”

“So why are you his friend?”

“Actually I’m his girlfriend, but he won’t call me that. He once told me that he was afraid that he’d screw up and lose me if he did,” Su said, and I laughed. “What’s funny about that?”

“Dale is dumb as a post.” I said and chuckled. “I like being his friend, but I can’t imagine having sex with him.”

“Dale isn’t always dumb, Terry. He’s got schizophrenia, and that dumb little boy is one of three personalities running around in his head. The dumb Dale is his dominant personality, a defense mechanism he developed to protect the real Dale from harm. You haven’t noticed that sometimes he seems smarter and more menacing than usual?”

“Well yeah, I guess I have,” I said. “But I figured that he was just paying attention then.”

I wanted to look at Su, but I was face planted and stuck watching a bowl of water with swirly bits of oil and steam.

The whole conversation had a dreamlike quality.

“No, that’s Jody, Dale’s other personality,” Su said. “I would have been scared of him, but it was Jody who sought me out for the pain in his back. The other personalities weren’t able to cope with the pain. Because I helped him, Jody has always been kind to me.”

“What’s the real Dale like?” I asked.

“He’s very sweet, but he doesn’t come out very often without medication,” Su said.

I could tell that she was sad by the tone of her voice.

“It isn’t fair, because the drugs make it impossible for him to function. He can’t sleep or deal with people, and he isn’t able to make love to me. I would rather take Dale as a crazy person than the shell he becomes after the drugs begin to work.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you decided to have sex with him.”

“I decided it would be okay after I realized that he’s as close to the perfect man as I’m ever going to get,” Su said.

I giggle-snorted. “Just how do you figure that?”

“He’s dumb and he knows it, so he never tries to act superior to me. He’s handsome without the ego to ruin it, and he keeps his mouth shut about us. In my opinion, that alone makes him worth his weight in gold. As I said, he’s as close to perfect as I’ll ever find.”

“At least you can get him to be quiet,” I joked. “I wish I knew how to do that.”

“Bribe him.” Su giggled. “When he used to come over to talk, I could give him comics to make him sit and listen to me. Now I don’t have to. He listens to me without any bribes, but I suppose I still am bribing him. I’m the only girl willing to have sex with him.”

And then all the little slurs and lisps finally added up. Su had some mild form of mental retardation. I realized that Dale was probably also a great find for her because he would never look down on her.

Su couldn’t have that many problems, as she owned her own place and ran her own business. But I saw how this also allowed her to be reclusive. Her work came to her. Dale did too, and she never had to leave her home.

I thought that I could just be guessing, so I tested my observations by asking, “You don’t get out very often, do you?”

“No, normal people make me nervous. It’s like they don’t know how to act around us.”

“Us?” I asked.

“People like Dale and me, I mean,” Su clarified. Her hand moved down my back, feeling almost painful before the knots in my muscles relaxed. “People finally make the connections and realize I have problems, and then they talk to me like I’m stupid. I get mad, and then people act like I’m too stupid to understand the rules of society. Then the police get called, and someone starts looking for my handler. Because obviously, I must be too simple to live by myself.”

Her voice slowly filled with more bitterness, but I never felt it in her touch. She remained focused on her job even as she explained how normal people could be jerks while thinking they were being nice at the same time.

I sighed. “And so if people knew Dale was your boyfriend, they’d snoop in your relationship because they don’t think you’re smart enough for sex.”

“Yes, exactly.” Su heaved an exasperated sigh, and she squeezed a muscle in my side harder than before. I felt no pain, but she released me and said, “Sorry.”

“I’m a bit tougher than that,” I said.

“If you need me to be more firm, say so.” Su went back to work for a minutes, and then she broke the silence. “Dale doesn’t visit me very often. He hasn’t been by in a couple of months, and I’d like to spend some time alone with him, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “I can take a cab home here in a few minutes.”

Su let go of my neck, smiling at me as I got up from the table. “How do you feel now?”

“Great. My headache is gone and my vision isn’t blurry anymore. How much do I owe you?”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you? I’m wouldn’t take your money now,” Su said.

“Why not?” I asked.

Su smiled at me. “Any friend of Dale’s is a friend of mine, and I don’t charge friends for massages.”

I got up and called a cab, explaining to Dale that I would be at the lab with Morgan and Wally that night. I suggested that he might try finding Simon if he felt like going out on patrol, then I went outside to wait for my cab. I was surprised when Su jogged out to follow me to the cab

I noticed her expression was worried as I opened the door and turned around. “What’s wrong?”

Well, it’s just—I know Dale has a healing factor, but I don’t want to see him get hurt.”

“We gave him something that makes him invulnerable now, so you won’t have to worry about patching him up anymore,” I said.

Su didn’t look assured. I put my hand on her shoulder and smiled. “I’ll tell you what. If we get into something that I think will hurt Dale, I’ll send him here. Would that work?” She gave a small nod. “You really love him, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“You shouldn’t worry so much,” I said. “Dale is a good hero.”

Su nodded. “I know. I’ve been reading the paper and laughing over him getting all of this attention, but I found it hard to believe that you would think of Dale as a friend.”

I laughed with her. “That makes us even. You can’t believe we’re Dale’s friends, and I guarantee you the guys wouldn’t believe this.”

I grinned, holding up my hand when Su pouted. “If they knew about this. They won’t unless Dale tells them himself.” I turned to step into the cab. “Remind Dale to check in with—”

“I will. I know my man,” Su cut me off. Her smile widened as she waved and went back to her house. She stopped at the door and turned around. I’m trusting you to stay true to your word, she said, though her lips didn’t move.

I kept laughing to myself, confusing the driver by not explaining my giggling fits.

While the thought of Dale having a telepathic girlfriend was amusing, it was also a source of great relief. Dale really did just want to be my friend, so I didn’t have to worry about any awkward moments with him where I’d end up having to turn him down.

This of course sent my thoughts right back over to David, and I felt even happier knowing that I might be able to call him that night to tell him that I found a cure for my nanites being self-programmed. We could have a normal life together, and I would never have to leave him again.

This is my first Gina Ranalli story, but it won’t be the last. Suicide Girls in the Afterlife is a fascinating and fast paced look at the tragic afterlife of Pogue, a young woman who supposedly commits suicide under fairly bizarre circumstances and arrives in the afterlife during “renovations.”

Put up in a hotel, Pogue teams up with another suicidal arrival named Katina, and soon they are trying to stage a revolution in the afterlife to protest the random and arbitrary rules. Most of this behavior seems to be heading somewhere completely different, and once the reader realizes what’s really happening at the end, the beginning takes on a whole new meaning.

A brilliant story with interesting characters and a unique interpretation of the afterlife, I give Suicide Girls in the Afterlife 4 stars and recommend it to all fans of bizarro fiction. You can find the ebook at Smashwords for only $1.99

Simon waved to everyone before leading me by the hand out of the bank. No one waved back. They were still too stunned by Simon’s performance to do anything but stand and stare.

How strange we must have looked as we made our exit. Me, a rather bland looking girl who appeared twelve, walking hand in hand with a boy who seemed nine or ten at best, and even then he would have to be called a runt. We were both dressed in plain clothes, and neither of us looked the least bit threatening.

I got over my shock only a few steps out of the bank. What Simon had done was strange, sure. But I was so used to strange events that this didn’t have the power to render me speechless.

Thus we were only a half a block away when I started laughing. “You didn’t need my help at all. You just wanted an audience.”

Simon’s eyes twinkled with merry glee as he nodded. “It seemed like a fair trade for the line dancing seminar you held at Petey Pest’s Pizza.” Chuckling with a wickedness that seemed wrong for his voice and his body, he added, “I haven’t seen anything that funny since Lil’ Joe’s record release party.”

This revelation was somewhat more surprising, and I stopped to gape at him.

I’d been at the party, but I hadn’t seen him there.

The reason Joe’s party was funny was that he hired the Chunkendale’s dancers. Trust me, five fat male strippers dancing to bad rap music is hilarious after two kamikazes. The guys danced pretty good, actually, but the song…no, you just had to be there, I guess.

But I hadn’t seen Simon there at all.

“Where did you sit?” I said.

“In the rafters.” Simon’s smile became embarrassed. “I hadn’t been invited, like you. But then you were always so popular with the boys for having loose…purse strings.”

My eyes narrowed, a warning that he was pushing his luck. “But I don’t remember you being a super villain, Or even a villain.”

Simon nodded. “I guess my crimes never caught anyone’s attention when I got to City because I didn’t go for big stuff like you and your brother.”

“Which villain were you?”

“I wasn’t. I was just an antique furniture thief. People always attributed my crimes to the supernatural, like poltergeists and ghosts. After all, a little boy stealing antique furniture makes no sense to an adult, but they will accept the idea that the ghost of a boy stole their chair, so they didn’t report it to the police.”

Looking despondent, Simon let out a sigh that seemed to deflate his shoulders into a slouch. “I never even got to meet Miracle Man during my career. My antiques business was booming and no one suspected a thing for ten years. I’m retiring from crime unchallenged, as it were.”

“Men.” I snorted, and then raised my free hand to pat his arm with a playful slap. “You get away from crimes without problems, and then whine how it should have gone wrong so that you could be tested.”

“Yeah, I know,” Simon agreed, his shoulders rising as fast as his mouth returned to a smile. “I’ve given up on crime a few months back, but I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. Then you came back into town, and I remembered you from that party. You made a few rescues here and there, so I was pretty sure you’d decided to become a hero. So I hoped I could team up with you.”

“You’re becoming a hero so you can work with me?”

“Sure. I’ve got my nest egg accounts built up enough to live off the interest, so I figure maybe I could afford to right wrongs with you.”

My smile fell. “Simon, I’m only going to patrol for a little while. Once Morgan finds a cure for me, I’m going home to Idaho. I’ve got a good life with a good family that’s just waiting for me to come back.”

“I know, but I’d like to be your friend until you leave,” Simon said. “Who knows? You might even think of writing a letter to me once you get back into your nice life. Maybe you might even visit me, and we can laugh about how you made me into a hero.”

Hearing the hopeful tone of his voice, I felt bad for mentioning my plans to leave after the Summer. “If I find a cure, I’ll be returning to City to go to college.” My smile returned as I squeezed his hand. “If you just want a friend, and not backup you don’t really need, you can come and bug me anytime.”

“There you are,” Wally said from above us. He landed and smiled at Simon and I holding hands. “Are you ready to go on patrol yet, or should I let you finish your date?”

Exaggerating my role, I pointed to the burned hole in my shirt and said, “I just helped Simon take out the Blazers when they tried to rob the bank. Technically, we’re patrolling incognito right now.”

I waved to Dale, who was still hovering in the sky. “Are you going to come down here and pick me up, or are we patrolling on foot?”

Dale landed behind me to close his arms around my waist. He tilted back, and then we floated up into the sky.

We’d been patrolling for a few minutes when Dale laughed. He shrugged when I looked at him. “I was just thinking about how cool it is to be in a league of heroes that all use their real names. None of us has a fancy title, and none of us have a silly costume. But we’re still making the front page of the paper.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet it’s bugging Chet that we stole his spotlight,” Wally said.

“No, he isn’t doing this for fame,” I said and smiled. “Chet is a good hero, and I never saw that when I was a villain. Chet saves the city everyday for Vicky. She is his reason for going on in a game that never ends. Dad would never have gotten Chet back into the game without Vicky.”

Dale’s expression was troubled at this revelation. “I shouldn’t have called him names then.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“It’s not important,” Dale said dismissively.

I wanted to ask him about it, but we heard the alarm go off at the City Museum. We flew three blocks and veered left onto Miracle Lane to find the police outside in full force. I was impressed, even knowing the City Police had their main precinct only a block away.

But while the cops were out in full force, no one moved from behind their cars. The reason for this seemed obvious once I spotted the crumpled bodies, every head covered in a giant ball of rock candy.

All kidding aside, the sugar coating really did help to take the sting out of their deaths. We couldn’t see their faces, so the bodies looked more like toys with pinkish-white or brownish-grey globes for heads.

They were like Copsie-Tootsie-Pops. How many licks would it take to reach the gooey cop center?

The police commissioner spotted us as soon as we landed, and he jogged a zigzagging path toward us. Waving with his hand in a gesture for us to get down, the commissioner screamed when a glob of sugar slammed the pavement, barely missing his fingertips.

He made his zigzagging even more wild, and all four of the following sniper shots from the busted window missed.

The police couldn’t fire back. Doing so would destroy millions of dollars worth of priceless art. Even the SWAT team had to restrain their urges to storm the place with guns blazing.

The commissioner dove over the hood of the SWAT SUV we’d stepped behind, slid on his chest, and somersaulted onto his ass with his back against the driver’s side front wheel.

For an older guy, he was surprisingly nimble.

He looked at me, and then frowned. “Uh…heroes?”

“That’s the general plan,” I said.

The commissioner’s expression was immediately relieved. “Thank goodness. We tripped the alarm hoping you would be the ones to show up. We’ve been pinned down like this for almost an hour.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking over the hood toward the steps of the museum.

“The Sugar Gliders have taken over the museum. They’ve killed at least two dozen people inside, and they’re methodically vandalizing all of the art with their sugar rays.”

Dale said, “What, like a gun that shoots sugar?”

“It’s a valve mounted on their bracelets. If you see them raise their arms, either start diving or make peace with your maker.”

“I should be so lucky,” I said.

The commissioner scowled at me. “That’s a rather morbid thing to say.”

“It’s part of my shtick,” I said, casting a stern glare at Dale and Wally when they both stifled snickers. “So, you want our help in arresting them?”

The police commissioner shrugged. “If they survive, just drag them out here,” he suggested in a conspiratorial tone of voice. “They’ll only get out of jail or a escape again. If you should ‘accidentally’ kill one or two of them, we can look the other way.”

“My reputation isn’t that bad, is it?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, it is. In fact, until right now, I wasn’t sure if we could define you as a hero or a villain.”

“Because of my fight with Miracle Man, right?”

The commissioner nodded. “That was part of it, sure. When you destroyed the Payton building in that fight with Miracle Man, we chalked the lawyers and telemarketers up to community service, hence time served for the other victims. We put the rest down as friendly fire.”

“Told you,” Wally quipped before waving to the commissioner to go on.

Irritated by the commissioner’s apparent moral flexibility, I asked, “How do people like you get elected?”

“Bribes, mostly.” The commissioner shrugged. “Anyway, Miracle Man’s testimony cleared you of any charges when he explained that he’d misread the situation when he’d arrived in the alley a few hours before you fought him at the Judgment Day monument.”

The commissioner sighed, looking very tired. “I’ll be honest with you. We’ve got thirty A-class heroes in this city, but we’ve got thousands of criminals. That’s because ‘the game’ attracts heroes who fight crime without killing anyone. Heroes like Miracle Man are good for our citizens, as they are role models—”

The commissioner stared at us when we all started to snicker. He shook his head before pressing on. “You represent a rogue element, heroes who could put fear into the villains again. If you kill a few of the villains, maybe some of the others would move out of town.”

“You’re allowing me to practice capitol punishment?” I asked, admittedly quite surprised.

“Yes. Furthermore, I would be willing to allow you to collect on the Sugar Glider’s bounty. It does say dead or alive for the reward, but I would honestly prefer dead.”

Nodding, I began to walk up the stairs to the museum’s front door. I raised my hand and formed a wall of ice to fill in the missing windows. The ice was much thicker and harder than the missing glass had been, so for the time being, the sniper couldn’t reach us.

“Boys, we’ve just been ‘double-ohed.’ Spare the art, but we’ve got carte blanche with the Sugar Gliders.” I looked at Dale, sighing when I saw his confused scowl. “You have permission to use your grappling hook,” I clarified, and he laughed and rubbed his hands together.

Good lord, we were so in the wrong line of work.

When Dale stopped laughing, I said, “Go in there and get freaky with it.”

“Wow!” Dale gushed. “I’m going to make abstract art!”

Walking into the main lobby of the museum, I went to the security station and pushed the dead security guard off the intercom panel to grab the sticky microphone. His sugar coating had a crack, and what was oozing out probably wasn’t strawberry syrup.

Flicking on the intercom, I said, “Hey Sugar Gliders, this is Terry Donalds. The guys and I have been given permission by the police to kill all of you, so I’ll give you one chance to line up and surrender in the main lobby before we come in after you. You have three minutes.”

I shut off the intercom and dropped the bloody microphone.

Turning away from the reception desk, I noticed that Dale had already walked into the first corridor of displays. He was staring at a golf club in a display case, and I went over to him, tapping his shoulder.

“This is a signed first edition Rosy Palmer golf club,” Dale said with a tone that sounded almost reverent.

I said, “And?”

“She used this nine iron in ten master’s competitions. My grandma used to bring me here to show me this every week. It was like this was her… um…” He trailed off, looking at me for help.

“Altar?” I offered.

“Yeah, that’s it. Grandma was a golf nut, and she was pretty good. But she never went on the professional tours because she said that she had to take care of me,” Dale said in a quiet voice. “She told me she would play golf after I grew up.”

“What happened to her?”

“You don’t want to know,” Dale said.

I laid my hand on his arm. “It’s okay to tell me.”

Dale frowned. “A super villain killed her.”

“Who?”

Dale shook his head. “I don’t know. I came home from school…” He leaned his head to one side as his eyes glazed. “They robbed us because of my mom’s jewelry collection, but the police thought my grandma must have tried to fight with them. I was the one to find her, or what was left of her. They use some kind of acid on her. Most of her body was a smoking puddle on the floor.”

This wasn’t the same person I was used to talking to. I could tell by the lower, more adult tone of his voice, and by the older, more weary expression he wore.

“Dale, I’m sorry.”

He shrugged and smiled at me faintly. “It’s the reason I wanted to become a hero, even if I am messed up.”

I looked down, unable to deal with the pain in his gaze. “We’re all a little messed up.”

Wally tapped my shoulder. “Time’s up.”

“Split up, and have fun,” I said. Swallowing my discomfort, I turned to frown at Dale when he grabbed my wrist. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah. I was thinking about an idea I had. I wanted to use this golf club for something, but you said to spare the art. I was wondering if I could make one tiny exception.”

“Swing away Dale,” I said and smiled at his goofy grin.

Only moments before he had seemed so serious, and now that was lost somewhere in the back of his head.

I moved to the elevator while Dale and Wally took the stairs. I looked at Simon as he got onto the elevator with me.

“Yes?” Simon asked.

“You aren’t going to run off and slaughter wantonly?”

“No, you’ll come up with a better plan,” Simon said.

The elevator door opened, and I heard the sound of fabric rippling down one of the halls to my left as I stepped into the third floor lobby. I smiled as the sound of someone screaming echoed from the stairwell leading down to the second floor.

Looking at Simon, I laughed. “Just another day at the office.”

“Here they come,” Simon observed, pointing to four of the Sugar Gliders flapping as fast as they could to get away from Wally.

They entered the circular room and flapped around, looking for a way to escape. Wally had blocked the stairs, so the gang decided to attack us to get to the elevator. I guess they thought fighting two kids would be easier than one muscle bound man.

Simon lifted my hand a second before the Sugar Gliders pounced us. “Shoot now,” he instructed.

I did, and the Sugar Gliders fell into a perfect line just as my ice blast caught them, locking all four in a large icicle.

“Oh, I see,” I said when I finally got what he meant by a better plan.

“I thought that was your old name,” Simon commented.

“No, I meant—never mind,” I said and started back toward the elevator. “Come on, let’s go find Dale.”

We found him on the second floor in the modern sculptures. He was sitting on a bench in the classic thinking pose, looking thoughtfully at the dead costumed villain crumpled in front of him.

The poor guy had his ass in the air with the golf club stuck in handle first. Both of his candy making bracelets bore signs of damage, and blood leaked from the edges on either side.

Dale must have broken the bracelets with the nine iron, and then the metal head had lodged in the villain’s head. Left with only the shaft, Dale had violated the corpse with a somewhat artistic statement.

As I sat on the bench beside Dale, I noticed that the villain’s eyes had been replaced by golf balls, both bearing Rosy Palmer’s signature.

“I was thinking of calling it ‘hole in one on the back nine,’” Dale said, turning to see what we thought.

“It’s definitely an impressionistic piece,” Wally observed.

“The symbolism of the victories of women’s rights over elitist men is very strong,” Simon said.

I snorted. “I just think it’s funny that he has a shaft bearing the name Rosy Palmer shoved up his ass.”

“That’s really what I was going for,” Dale admitted.

“Should we take him out with the others, or leave him here?” Wally asked.

“Leave him,” I decided with an evil laugh. “If the commissioner backs down on his offer for the bounty, we can always submit this for a grant from the city as starving artists.”

Let’s start simple with the most basic advice any beginning writer gets in their quest to become better: “write what you know.”

Over the last few years, I’ve seen this four word sentence everywhere. The first time I’d heard it was from my aunt Brenda. If anyone can be directly credited for my love of reading and writing, it’s her. And when I was a wee thing of fifteen, I’d asked my aunt what would help me become a better writer. Brenda said, “The most important rule you always have to remember is ‘write what you know.”

I was a smart-ass even then, and my exact response was, “Yeah, right! I can’t write what I know, or I’d be arrested!”

To which my aunt replied, “That’s what fiction is for.”

Let’s pause here to consider two things. First of all, I wasn’t joking, even if I was being sarcastic. At fourteen, I was burdened by so many crimes that my just forming conscience couldn’t keep up with my past. Writing what I knew would have involved making a long list of “true crime” confessions, mostly involving petty theft or sex crimes. Some of my confession could also potentially send other family and friends to jail. So it is not in mine or their best interests to write a tell-all autobiography. (And a collective sigh of relief rises from my blog reading family members.)

By the way, I didn’t stop being a criminal just because I grew a conscience. That happened in stages and took close to a decade for my conscience to overcome my insanity. But my roundabout point is, this is why I’ve often written about criminals and “anti-heroes.” I’m partly writing what I know by describing characters like me, or like my friends. If I tried to write a good guy who had a normal life, I’d be pulling shit out of my ass.

But the second point that bears pointing out is, my aunt acknowledged that my past wasn’t open for…truthful interpretation. I could write what I knew, but I would always need to doctor it up with other creative details. Characters could have parts of me or people I knew  in their makeup, but they couldn’t be too close to the truth. I could make myself vulnerable through my characters, but there had to be limits in place. There had to be filters to dilute the truth to a more tolerable level, both for me, and for the readers.

I’ve avoided covering some topics because I didn’t want people to think I was romanticizing or promoting certain…lifestyles. I’ve made no secret that I was sexually active at a young age, and that I was sexually promiscuous. But I’ve never written a young character who was completely like me, because I didn’t want to deal with the fallout such a character would create.

I’ve come close to the truth in rough drafts, but in subsequent edits, I’ve watered down the impact of my characters. Time and again this has raised in me a conflict. On one side, my aunt declares “Write what you know!” On the other a teenage version of me perpetually snorts and says, “I can’t do that without getting sued or arrested!”

When it comes to young characters, readers of my work often complain, “these kids act older than their proper ages.” That’s where I’m coming close to the truth. That’s where I’m showing you what it was like to be me. But I’ve edited out a lot in subsequent revisions to avoid saying too much about myself. I don’t want to offend people, so I cut out some of the scenes that I feel are too graphic or that come across as romanticizing my past.

Still, from time to time, I think about that simple advice: “write what you know.”

What do I know?

I know what it’s like to live a double life, and even a triple life. While I’ve never felt shame at my past, I have avoided writing about my sexuality as it developed. Because really, my blunt and simplistic writing style would make the truth come out sounding all wrong.

This week, the muse proposed writing a story about a couple of kids who are secretly married. She wants me to graphically detail every aspect of their two year relationship, and she wants me to base this story off of my past. She wants me to be graphic and pervasive, showing all of the sex, and all of the “boring parts” as well.

The story could never be published. Any story with sexually active minors is pretty much a guaranteed no in this day and age. Even something as tame as Lolita would be rejected if proposed as a new book today. This would be bad enough if the story only had this one fatal flaw, but this new story also deals with the more dull moments of the kids’ lives. There is no huge conflict to sort out, because their relationship is the story. Their double lives, and the double lives of their parents, are the story.

I’m not deluded. I know that a story like this would cause offense if I published it, even if I self-published it. There shouldn’t even be a reason to write it, because nobody wants to know what kind of life I had as a kid. And yet, even if I can’t publish it or show it to anyone, I keep writing this story.

At times I feel guilty for what I’m writing because a scene is too graphic, or because the characters are doing some activity too similar to a real event from my past. But then I remind myself that this story can be written and put away. Yes, it would be the most honest story I’ve ever written.

But it would also disturb most everyone who read it. It wouldn’t help people understand what it’s like to grow up faster than other kids. It wouldn’t create a platform for people to talk about early sexuality, and it wouldn’t get people to open up to each other about their sexuality.

So I shouldn’t write it. But I am because the muse wants to write what we know, even if it could never sell.

And this is perhaps the saddest thought I’ve had while pondering this topic: once I write this “sick” story about two kids having a regular sex life, I can get back to healthy, marketable stories about people being mutilated and tortured. When we live in a world where graphic violence is more culturally acceptable than an honest assessment of sexuality, in my opinion our priorities as a people are messed up. But then, I am crazy. So what do I know?

In any case, I’ll finish this one story, and then I’ll hide it in my trunk, never to sell it unless I get rich and need a way to commit career suicide. I’ll go back to writing dark fantasy stories that hint at the truth, but never approach reality without many filters to protect the readers from me.

Write what you know; it seems like such simple advice. Maybe one day, I’ll remove all the filters and take that advice to heart.

Above Ground is vaguely like Alice in Wonderland in reverse. Instead of Alice falling down a hole, Lilith emerges from the caves that humanity has been living in after an unknown cataclysmic event sends everyone scrambling away from the surface world like house cats avoiding a long overdue bath.

The surface world now belongs to the affected (or the infected if you ask a human), people who have been tainted in various ways, resulting in mutations. Lilith is traveling to the surface with a human tour group to see a “parade of the affected,” at a local theater. But early on, a sabotaged sideshow requires Lilith to flee for her life with the help of a werewolf and part-time sideshow performer named Silver.

What follows are the calamities during Lilith’s first few days above ground. Lilith can’t seem to get it through her head that she can’t get home, and so most of the trip, she is constantly second guessing herself and whether she can trust the werewolf pack escorting her.

Given the extreme circumstances, I found Lilith’s behavior to be consistent and realistic. However, this did not stop me from occasionally smacking my forehead and groaning, “Oy.” Not because she does something dumb or thinks it, but because she makes the same choices over and over even knowing she’s about to make a mistake. If not for the kindness of strangers, this is the type of woman who might trip head-first into trouble every single time. Which is both highly entertaining, and also just a bit annoying. It’s like a guilty pleasure, like scratching that fresh mosquito bite even though you know you’re supposed to leave it alone.

But the conclusion brings down my enjoyment of the book slightly for being anticlimactic. Once the ending is revealed, the reasons for the pack acting so distant do make sense. The reason for the wolves’ interest in Lilith is more of a financial investment than any sense of kinship, and once Lilith is delivered to her goal, no one even bothers to say good-bye. Silver reveals that he will eventually need to see Lilith again, but only so she can lift her spell and let him go back to his own life. Beyond that, he would apparently rather have nothing to do with her. As would all the wolves. It’s…bitter, with nothing sweet to balance it out.

Obviously there isn’t much chemistry between any of the characters, so this brisk brush-off is not unexpected or unrealistic. Lilith’s journey is interesting, and the characters and locations kept my interest from beginning to end. This is a story that takes place mostly in Lilith’s mind, so we’re treated to both her interest and her fear of this alien world. But we’re also never allowed to roam too far because Lilith’s is an unreliable tour guide who’s guessing at the thoughts and motives of others. And she guesses wrong a lot.

This series of unfortunate events makes for a very entertaining story, and when a sequel is available, I’ll be looking forward to reading it too. I give Above Ground Book One: The Affected 4.5 stars, and I’d recommend it for fans of dark fantasy or weird apocalypse stories.

I went to Wally’s shop as soon as I woke up and changed clothes. I didn’t bother with showering since the hole in my side would make it into a task too complex for my liking.

I was hoping I could get some news on my nanites while I picked up extra cans of healing spray. My open wounds ached, and I had trouble just walking because I was still only breathing with one lung.

Despite my poor condition, Wally took me to breakfast first. I ate four eggs and half a dozen sausage patties like I was starving, and we talked about the fight the night before, and about the odd appearance of a boulder in the rock pile. We could think of no logical answers for how it got there, so we pushed the matter aside for another time and went to the lab.

I knew Morgan wouldn’t have any answers for me just yet, but I still felt nervous as Wally and I rode the elevator down to the lab.

The chomps greeted us at the door, and Fluffy nuzzled me affectionately, putting some of his body weight on me and straining my wounds.

I noticed that Fluffy seemed smaller than he had been on my last visit. But more than that, his body was much lighter than I would have expected. He certainly hadn’t felt so light last time. It was like he was now just a furry balloon.

After comparing him to the other chomp I frowned at Wally. “Fluffy is smaller and lighter than normal.”

“How did you know that was Fluffy?” Wally asked.

“I don’t know, he just seems more friendly than, uh…” I trailed off, realizing that I never got the other chomp’s name.

“Mitsy, and that’s how I tell them apart too. I just didn’t expect you to pick up on it so quickly,” Wally said and shrugged. “The size thing is supposedly part of their normal cycle according to Morgan. That’s what he told me when I noticed it, but he didn’t explain why they could change size. My guess is, they get bigger to be monsters—”

“Or smaller to become a disease.” I muttered.

“No, I’m sure they can’t get that small without splitting up,” Wally said. “I don’t think that’s coded in their DNA.”

“It isn’t, but they can split up and form separate entities,” Morgan said as he walked to the elevator. “Wally told me about the fight.” Both his eyes slitted in a pained grimace. “Those wounds look terrible.”

Snorting, I said, “They don’t feel too good either.”

“I believe I have a way to heal those wounds faster than a healing spray could. Your nanites shut down early last night, and we’ve been working on the programming non-stop since then. Based on our studies, I think we can inject some nanites with a modified program that can repair the damage in a few seconds. The spray would take a day, but the speed will have the trade-off that you experience a moment or two of extreme pain.”

“Morgan, I had the skin stripped off my chest yesterday,” I declared. “I think I can handle a little pain.”

Yes, I am an idiot.

“Then come over here to the table and lie down,” Morgan instructed and waved to one of the chomps. “Go ahead, Fluffy.”

I lay on the table, and the chomp draped his tentacles over me. “I sssorry,” he hissed before driving the point of every one of his tentacles into my body.

I thought that was what Morgan meant by extreme pain, but it occurred to me how wrong I was just a split second later.

If you could find a giant meat grinder and magically survive two passes through it, you might get half an idea of what this felt like.

I didn’t pass out during the grueling two seconds before the pain was replaced by a low throb. Within a minute, even that minor ache was gone, and Fluffy untangled himself and let me get up.

I took a deep breath, happily noting that I was using two lungs again. “Okay, so what just happened?”

“Fluffy injected blank nanites, and the pain you felt came from them activating and developing roles as cells in your body. What I’ve found is that your body is composed of synthetic material, or approximations of living tissue. To put it bluntly, you were dead too long for the revival to work properly.

“With Wally, the nanites had living tissue to use for examples, but your machines had to rewrite their code to produce approximations for you. It explains why your nanites behave differently. I modified the system AI prior to your revival so your nanites could reprogram themselves if a task was outside their normal parameters. You fell way outside of normal parameters, so your nanites are radically different than anything we’ve ever come across in the wild.”

I blinked at him, comprehending nothing. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Nanites can change according to their environment. If you think of nanites as a virus that mutate and change over time, your nanites can provide new areas of study as the machines reinvent their own code,” Morgan explained. “So your ‘wild’ nanites are nothing more than a strain of variant coding.”

“How much of my problem is related to this variant programming?”

“Most of it, but I believe we can perform a change of part of your coding. The aging process was seen as unnecessary by your machines, so they didn’t provide any model of aging for your body. We can try to set up a program to modify you to your approximate age and use a variant nanites strain to set up a permanent aging model.”

He spun on his thing leg to look at Mitsy when she hissed in what seemed like a derisive manner.

I ignored the chomp as my head wrapped around what Morgan was telling me. “You can make me age normally from now on?” I asked.

“I think so. We can send in a new set of nanites to supplant your current set and allow you to age normally.”

I started crying. I couldn’t help it. “How soon?” I whispered.

“Between myself and the chomps, we can whip up a new batch of nanites by tomorrow night,” Morgan said.

I started blubbering at his answer, and I fell against Wally, who held me without teasing or cajoling. My heart was fluttering, and I felt no shame at crying in front of everyone. I was going to be cured, and nothing else mattered.

My shoulders lighter with my burdens lifted from them, I left the lab minutes later, and Wally took off to go on patrol. I wandered around the city with a goofy grin, waving at anyone who looked at me and smiled back.

I got so happy that I even started whistling.

“You seem fairly chipper today,” Simon observed from behind me.

“I may be cured as early as tomorrow night,” I explained and grinned at him as he fell into step beside me.

“Good for you. Will a little rain on your parade be okay, or should I go away?” Simon joked.

“Let it pour, Simon,” I confirmed in a cheerful tone of voice.

“The Blazers are robbing the bank up the street, and I was wondering if you’d be my backup. I just need you to do one tiny thing and then I can handle the rest.”

“Who could resist an offer like that?” I asked and nodded. “Okay, what do I get to do?”

“See that red van in front of the bank?” Simon asked and pointed down the street, several blocks ahead of us.

“The suspicious looking conversion job with the spoiler?” I asked, as there were in fact three red vans in front of the bank.

The Blazers have a habit of splitting up to confuse the cops as to who has the money. Simon shook his head, pointing to a rust red Volkswagen van with a peace symbol on the back window. “The other two are empty, but there’s a wheel man in that van. I think that’s which one the money is going in. If you filled the tires with ice, then froze them to the pavement—”

“Then he couldn’t get away and wouldn’t know until it was too late,” I interrupted him and nodded as I went to work. “It’s done, so what do I do now?”

“You come inside and watch me work,” Simon said and smiled wickedly.

“Are you sure you want to take on the entire gang your self?”

“I won’t be. The drivers will be outside, making it a four on one fight. That’s not really fair to them, but I let you have all the fun at the pizza parlor. Now it’s my turn to show you some unorthodox tactics.”

“This could be fun,” I mused.

Simon bowed as he held open the door for me.

“You have no idea,” Simon said glibly. His expression changed, and suddenly he looked like a goofy kid who just heard a good dirty joke. He grinned and began to skip in circles around me while he fished a dollar out his hip pocket. “Oh boy, Sis, I got a whole dollar! I’m filthy rich, right?”

“If you say so,” I remarked in a bored manner, slipping into the role easily enough. Of course, a moment later, I was forced to drop the role when I got shot. I glanced down at a laser singed hole in my in my shirt then looked up at the ski-masked robber.

“Totally did not see that coming,” Simon said.

“But a laser doesn’t work on me,” I said.

The robber stumbled back on his ass in surprise.

I was going to hit him with a hailstone to knock him out, but before I could get a pea-sized piece of ice formed, Simon drew a heavy red velvet curtain around me.

The curtain had most certainly not been there before, but when I opened it to ask Simon what was going on, he had vanished. I stepped around the red fabric column to find him standing behind the counter.

He activated the intercom system and jumped onto the counter, his voice booming out loudly in a way that seemed impossible for the kind of cheap lobby speakers mounted in the ceiling.

“Ignore the girl behind the curtain!” he roared, causing everyone to stumble, robbers and hostages alike. “I am the great and powerful—oh shit!”

Simon ducked as all four of the Blazers fired at him. Dropping off the counter, he reappeared on a desk on the opposite side of the room. “No kewpie dolls for you bozos!” he yelled, his arms pinwheeling a moment later when a laser pierced his chest.

“Simon!” I shouted before it occurred to me that for someone who was shot, he was hamming it up quite a bit.

“Aiee, he got me!” Simon squealed and fell backwards off the desk. He appeared in front of the robber who had shot him, shoving a cigar in his mouth and lighting it. “That was some nice shooting there, ace,” he said while shaking the robber’s hand.

A second later the cigar exploded, obscuring both of them in a cloud of thick white smoke. The robber was flat on his back when it cleared, and Simon was all the way across the lobby, kicking a metal bench behind the remaining three robbers. It hit the backs of their legs, forcing all of them to sit down hard.

Simon was in front of them a moment later, shaking a set of pompoms.

I’d like to take a moment to apologize for my poor writing skills now. This may not make sense to you at this point, but it didn’t make any sense then either.

The bench that the robbers were sitting on looked nothing like the wooden variety all around the lobby of the bank. Simon was getting these things from somewhere, but I didn’t see how.

I was watching him closely when the pompoms popped into his hands, but I saw no way to explain what he was doing.

“Simon—” I began to object.

“Hush, I’m almost done,” Simon chided and grinned at the robbers. “Go Simon, go!” He chanted and the robbers fell in with him a second later.

He led them through two chants before one of the robbers noticed a fine column of dust falling from the ceiling. He leapt out of the way just as a safe hit the bench.

Dropping the pompoms, Simon snapped his fingers. “Damn! I wanted to get all of you with one shot.”

Falling in extreme slow motion, the pompoms dissolved before they hit the floor.

“What the hell are you?” the remaining Blazer yelled in a terrified voice and began firing wildly.

Simon vanished, but the gunner kept firing until he emptied the battery pack on his laser rifle. How he managed to miss everyone is beyond me, but he spun around when the gun chirped a signal that the battery was depleted, finding Simon right behind him.

There was an impish grin on Simon’s face, and he looked up at the robber, causing the poor fool to shake visibly.

Simon said, “Hey, have you ever tasted nut butter?”

“N-no,” the robber stammered, and then screamed when Simon drove his kneecap into the Blazer’s balls.

Even I cringed, but Simon tapped the guy’s shoulder, grinning wider. “So how did it taste?”

“Like shit,” the robber whimpered.

“Hmmm, I guess I hit your colon by mistake. Let me try that again,” Simon suggested and drew back his knee.

“No please, I surrender!” the robber begged.

“Bright boy,” Simon noted before he drew back his hands. A mallet appeared in his grasp, and he hit the Blazer on the side of his head, knocking him out cold.

Simon dropped the mallet, which evaporated before it hit the ground, just like the pompoms.

He walked over to me and asked, “So, what did you think? Was I too over the top?”

“How did you do that?” I asked, confused by what I’d seen.

Simon waved a hand dismissively at me. “It’s too complicated to explain without a mile long chalk board and a calculator. My powers are, shall we say, unique?”

Still stunned by what I’d seen, I looked back where two of the Blazers had been crushed by the vault, and I was confounded even further by the four robbers lined neatly side by side. The vault was missing, as was the hole in the ceiling that it made.

This lead me to think that there never was a real vault, since the two Blazers would have resembled a spilled jar of spaghetti sauce if it had been. Simon just chuckled and shook his head when I mentioned this.

“Wait, if that was a real vault, where did you get it from? From this bank?” I commented in an agitated voice.

“You think this bank would use an ancient Acme safe?” Simon replied and smiled. “It was a real vault, but I didn’t get it from anywhere around here.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense, Simon. If that was a real vault, how did those two survive? For that matter where did the vault and the hole in the ceiling go?” I asked.

“Terry, I could stand here all day and try to explain how my powers work, but you still wouldn’t understand. It really is easier if you just accept it and move on. To pose this as a question, why can you breathe in absolute zero air when air isn’t supposed to move at absolute zero?”

I tried to think of an explanation before I nodded, giving up. “Okay, I’ll file this under things that make me go ‘huh.’”

Simon’s laughter was warm as he offered me his hand. “You might get the hang of this after all. Come on, let’s go before your friends in the press show up.”

It took us forever to get to the pizza parlor because we let Dale pick the place he wanted to go. We also let him take the lead, so of course we got to there about a half an hour after we left Wally’s shop.

Still fuming over being teased, I was silent for most of the trip. Wally and Dale spent that time discussing the better vegetable to go on pizza: pepperoni or chocolate chips.

To be honest, Dale did most of the talking while Wally stared with an expression of morbid fascination.

My mood improved once I’d had a few slices of pizza, and I was even smiling when Dale pleaded for permission to go play games.

He took off and Wally chuckled, shaking his head at me. “Okay, you like him for what reason?”

“Look at him, Wally. He’s nothing more than a little kid. How could you dislike him?” I gestured at Dale as he belly flopped into the ball cage, causing several kids to squeal laughter. “This is the only reward he’ll ever need for being a hero.”

“He did kill that robber rather gruesomely.”

“The day before that, I helped kill eighty people,” I said in a low voice. “Dale knew he screwed up yesterday, but can you fault anything he did on that bus?”

“No. Dale was a hero today,” Wally conceded.

“Okay, you told me he’d make a good sidekick, so why don’t you adopt him when I go back to Idaho?”

“We’ll see,” Wally said. “First we need to see how he reacts in a real fight with—” Wally’s head spun as the wall behind the ball cage caved in with a bright burst of light.

I looked around a second later, and when the dust settled I saw four men floating just outside the hole. The ball cage was buried, and I couldn’t tell if Dale was all right or not.

Before I get into the details of the next few minutes, let me tell you about the four men. I could describe one to you and I’d still be describing all of them at the same time. Only one had any distinguishable difference, and that was his thin black mustache and goatee. I guess that made him their leader.

Dressed in black bodysuits with no insignia, they all had short black hair and brown eyes. Their faces were all alike, too bland to be handsome or ugly. Their boring square looking heads sat on square, symmetrically perfect bodies that suggested a cloning lab was at work rather than nature’s kitchen.

The goateed leader floated inside while his eyes moved around the parlor. “We are looking for Terry Donalds.”

“Ideas?” Wally muttered.

“Not a clue, so play it by ear,” I whispered back before raising my hand and waving at the clone floating over the rubble of the back wall. “Hey, I’m the girl you’re looking for.”

The other three drifted inside as I turned around on the bench, remaining seated as thee four clones landed in front of me. I leaned on the table propping my forearms on it in what I hoped would look like a casual pose.

The leader sneered at me. “You’re Terry Donalds?”

“I just said I am. Who might you be?”

“We’re the East End Boys,” the leader said.

“Ah,” I said. I was buying time for Dale to dig his way out of the rubble, so I smiled at the head clone. “Shouldn’t you be bothering the—?”

“Please, don’t say it,” the leader said. “Everyone does, like it’s some original line we haven’t heard before.”

“Then maybe you should change your team’s name,” I suggested.

“No, that would be bad for our comic book,” one of the other clones noted.

The leader pointed to that clone first. “That’s TJ, and I’m JJ. This guy over here is JT, and he’s VD”

“You should have named him TT to keep the pattern going,” a little boy said from the far end of the bench.

I turned to frown at him, but not to discourage him. I was thinking, Where the hell did he come from?

He got up and moved down to sit beside me. He smiled and winked at me as JJ’s jaw flapped open and shut with no sound coming out.

“I love your costume,” he whispered to me, causing me to giggle. “No, I’m serious. You look really good for your first night out as a hero.”

I looked at the boy more closely, noting a light of maturity in his emerald eyes that belied his body’s age. His hair was dark brown and wavy, and he had it parted in the middle so the ends barely covered the tops of his ears. He wore the back in a short pony tail that fell to the collar of his faded denim shirt.

Under it he wore a black T-shirt with the slogan You’ve got issues? Big deal. I’ve got subscriptions.

The boy leaned over and patted my chin back up to close my mouth.

Almost too stunned to think, I asked, “How did you know that this was my first night as a hero?”

“I’ve been listening to you and Wally for over thirty minutes now, so I thought I might take the chance introduce myself, and maybe get your phone—”

“Hello?” JJ yelled. “I’m the bad guy who came crashing through the door. She’s the person I’m supposed to be hunting, so what part are you supposed to be playing?”

“Oh, um… perhaps I could be the comic book fan that has every one of your comic books?” the boy said

JJ smirked. “If you were, you’d know that VD’s name used to be TT before he got herpes from his ex-girlfriend.”

“Uh, dude…that wasn’t in the comic,” the boy muttered.

“Not to mention that you just gave us way more information than we really needed,” Wally added with a note of disgust. “Or wanted.”

“Which probably explains why it wasn’t in the book,” I said and frowned at JJ. “You guys seem like some really nice clones, so I was hoping maybe you could just tell me why you’re here or leave quietly.”

“They won’t leave,” the boy said. “They’re going to shoot you in a few minutes.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Yeah, why are we going to kill her?” JJ asked.

“I have no idea why, but I didn’t say you would kill her.” The boy’s smirk spread when JJ growled. “I said you would shoot her, but she’s going to hurt all four of you very badly after that. If I thought you could actually kill her, I’d jump in to save her. I don’t have to, because she can handle you by herself.”

I was intrigued by his confidence in me, and by the strange vibe he was exuding. Appearances aside, this was no little boy, but a man trapped in a child’s body, just like me.

JJ was now red in the face as he asked, “Just what makes you so sure?”

“Let’s just say I’m short-sighted and leave it at that,” the boy said, and then grinned. I caught the reason for his grin and held a perfect poker face. “Oh by the way JJ, you may want to duck.” He pointed back behind the clone leader.

“I’m not fall—” JJ’s rude comment knocked out of his mouth by the boulder that Dale had flung at the back of his head.

No, not a piece of rubble. A big honking boulder that had no business being in that rock pile to begin with.

The man-boy rolled one way and I went the other as the table was crushed by the boulder. JJ’s head was still under the massive rock, and the rest of his body was crushed when the boulder rolled back onto him.

“You broke this girl’s arm!” Dale shouted, pointing to the whimpering girl cradled in his right arm.

I should mention that Dale chucked that huge boulder one-handed.

When Dale stepped away from the rubble, I could see that the other kids were crawling outside through a tunnel that he’d made in the pile.

I wanted to tell him that he’d done good by taking care of the kids before getting into the fight, but a moment later, Dale ruined the mood by opening his mouth.

“Hey wait, where did that boulder come from?”

The other clones started firing on me, and I flipped back to avoid their white energy blasts. They were firing these bolts from their hands, and where the attack struck, a smoldering hole was left.

I decided Dale or Wally could test what effect they had.

Wally found out a second later when a stray shot aimed for me hit him in the chest. He flew back a few feet from the resulting explosion, and then streaked forward to get into a sparring match with one of the clones. Dale soon grabbed another after evacuating the parlor, and it was almost a fair fight. Almost.

For one thing, nothing seemed to work on the clones. I broke the limbs of…well, I couldn’t figure out which clone I had, but I broke his arm and felt it healing just a second later.

I tried freezing them, by the way. I just know some of you smart aleck’s out there will say “Why didn’t she just freeze them?”

Because it didn’t work. This was mainly because I was doing it wrong.

The boulder exploded, sending dust everywhere and stinging my body with a thousand tiny scratches. I turned to see JJ hovering above the ruined table with the same stupid sneer on his face.

Behind him, I saw Dale get a nasty throat punch on the clone he was fighting, and he used the momentary reprieve to reach for his utility belt.

“Dale, use the—” I yelled.

“Bolos, I know,” Dale said and fired, catching JJ around his arms. “See? Bolos,” he said proudly before JJ tugged the cable apart easily.

Looking at their smoldering remains, I shook my head. “No, I actually wanted the grappling hook this time.”

“Oh,” Dale said, grunting as he got hit from behind.

“Okay, you’ve had your fun, so now it’s—” JJ started to say before he was hit by three other clones at the same time. Wally had flung two at their leader, and Dale had tossed the other one.

When they all connected, I sealed them in a block of ice. I spun around to frown at the boy. “That won’t work, will it?”

“No, but you could zero out the room and they would stop moving,” he said. “Your partners would be protected by their collars, but you would need to push them out of the room, since they won’t be able to move on their own.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“Try it and find out.”

The ice block exploded in a wet mist, and JJ sent huge blasts at Wally and Dale. Both were followed to the walls by a clone. JJ then fired a blast at the boy, but it went right through him.

“How did—?” I said before catching an energy blast in the side of my chest. I dodged the next two, but I was back to fighting one on two odds, and the hole in my side also included a lung. I kind of need that to breathe, so working off of one lung had me huffing just seconds later.

“What do you think of this?” JJ asked and fired a bolt.

Though I tried to dodge it, the blast still took a chunk out of my thigh and I went down fast.

“I was hoping you had something in a smaller size,” I quipped through gritted teeth.

“I thought you said she was going to hurt us?” JJ challenged.

The man-boy laughed evilly. No, I mean serious super villain laughter, the kind of muah-ha-ha that puts fear in normal people.

“She will,” he said, still confident despite my gaping wounds. “I didn’t say how many times you shot her either, now did I? You won’t get another shot.”

“Really?” JJ asked and fired off a bolt.

It traveled less than an inch from his fingers before it began to slow down. The energy bolt came to a stop altogether as I plunged the temperature to absolute zero. I got up slowly and hobbled over to Dale, pulling him down from the air and dragging him to the hole in the side of the building.

I stuck my head out to verify that I had successfully contained the area that my power was working in. I had, so I chucked Dale outside.

“Stay out here. I’ll be right back,” I said, and then limped over to Wally.

The boy was smiling at me while he followed my progress.

I pushed Wally outside and gestured at the crowd. “Keep everyone back until I come out.”

Not waiting for a confirmation, I went back inside and sat down to consider my options. As long as I kept the room frozen, the clone-cicles wouldn’t be able to do anything. Out of curiosity, I got up and walked over to JJ, shoving him into his own energy blast. It didn’t explode, but it did carve a hole in his chest.

Inside, he had a glowing yellow light instead of blood and organs.

I understood why they could heal so quickly, and I knew that JJ’s wound would close the moment the room temperature rose to the point where normal matter could move again.

I looked at the hole in the chest, and it occurred to me that clones wasn’t the right term. They were constructs, and their shell was meant to contain their energy. What I needed was a way to overload the energy inside to destroy the shell.

So with a plan in mind, I began dragging the non-goateed clones up to a counter before I located the two most important pieces to my plan. I found the pizza cutter first, then I found an extension cord in the back of the kitchen.

Using the cutter to slice off the plug before I stripped the insulation on one end, I twisted the wires together into a sharp spike.

I set that aside and smiled at Simon before I began tugging each one of the clone’s tights down. I got the three of them lined up perfectly with their goodies lying on the table, and I used the cutter to make three mushroom caps in two seconds.

It was pretty easy, given that they were all the same length.

I dragged JJ over to a table and bent him over just a little before I shoved the spiked wire into the hole in his chest. Just to make sure it wouldn’t slip out, I looped the cable around his neck and knotted it securely. Then I tugged his tights down as well and began lining his team up behind him.

I looked at the man-boy, who was shaking his head. His shoulders were shaking too, and if any sound could have traveled, I would have heard him laughing.

Finding an outlet, I plugged in the cord and raised the temperature of the room. As soon as it came up enough for the electrical current to flow, all four of the East End Boys started dancing to the electric boogaloo before exploding like fireworks on a strip fuse.

“That—”

I cut the man-boy off by laughing weakly.

No, I mean really weakly because I did it with only one lung.

“I’ll grant you that it was highly unorthodox, but it did work, right?”

“Sure, but you could have done the same thing by tossing the cord in a pool of water and pushing them into it.”

“You told me to zero out the room. Where was I supposed to find a pool of water at—say, what is your name?”

“Just call me Simon.”

“No last name?” I asked.

“I’d rather not explain it,” he said.

“You don’t have to explain it, just tell me.”

“I probably will. My full name is Simonellia Thaddeus Oppenheimer.”

I grinned at him. “Damn, Simon. Your parents hated you, didn’t they?”

“Sometimes it seems that way,” he agreed and pointed to a reporter who scuffled in over the rubble. “Come on, your public awaits.”

“Miss Donalds, Vicky Atkins’ report suggested that you subdued a bomber while your partner cleared the hostages from the bus. Is the report correct?”

“Subdued?” I asked, then nodded. “Sure, that sounds like an accurate statement.”

Another reporter began to crawl up the rubble as we were leaving. I guess the scout didn’t die, so the rest of the pests were running to converge on their target. “Miss Donalds, is—”

I lost the rest of what was said as dozen of other reporters started to shout at me. “One at a time people, please.”

“Miss Donald’s, is this the full team, or will you be choosing any other heroes to join you?”

“Look, we weren’t trying to fight bad guys tonight. We don’t have a team yet, so there is nothing to talk about. We were eating pizza until we were attacked. We were just defending ourselves, Chet, so you can stay home.”

I nodded at the reporters. “There, print that in your story.” I limped over to Wally and Dale. “Grab Simon and let’s get back to my apartment fast.”

“You’re hoping to get away without Double M finding us,” Wally teased.

“Damned skippy I am. Now shut up and grab Simon so we can split.” I looked at Simon, who was grinning. “What?”

“He’s standing right behind you,” Simon said.

“You know, one night without you would be fine by me,” I said, not turning around to look at him.

“I showed up to see if you needed any backup,” Chet said. “But you took care of everything yourself. So then I hung around to congratulate you on a good job…I’m sorry you think I’m a jerk.”

I turned then, but of course he was gone already. Dale came to me and picked me up to carry me to my apartment.

Part of me felt bad for telling Chet off. But I didn’t want him hanging around like he had to protect me. I told myself that it was for the best, but that didn’t make the twinge of guilt go away.

Back in my apartment, I was never so happy to see those plain white walls with my comfy white recliner. I sat down and waved to everybody else to take seats on the couch.

Simon looked at the furniture, then at the carpet. He shook his head and laughed, looking at me. “This is a pun, white?”

“Just a little one, but it’s all white, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Oh, I suppose for white now anyway.”

“Are you quite sure it’s all—?”

“Okay, we got the joke,” Wally grumbled.

“What joke?” Dale asked.

“The white joke, which is apparently offending Wally,” I said. “What’s wrong Wally? If we toss around a few white jokes, you think someone might get offended? I think it’s offended you. Just look at you. Why, you’re almost whi—”

“Okay, that is quite—”

“All white?” Dale asked, sending Simon and I into bursts of laughter.

“Not you too.” Wally whined wearily.

Oh, I’m so sorry about that…well no, not really.

Simon looked down at my wounds. “You aren’t bleeding.”

“Yeah, I’ve already begun to heal from those blasts, and I can get a healing spray to handle the rest of the damage tomorrow. Those guys could actually kill me with their energy attacks, so I should look them up when I’m one hundred,” I said, and then smiled. “Oh wait, now they’re dead.”

“No, they’re still alive,” Simon said.

“So what is their story then, are they clones of some kind?”

“Of some kind is a good start. They’re a loose collection of nanites and pure energy, all of them acting under the will of their creators. Or, that’s the real joke about them. The four were all built in separate labs by different corporations, yet they all ended up with the same person. The corporations scrapped the projects, but all four clones escaped. Each went to a different city, and each one met their match against a hero. JJ, the clone that lived here, made a deal with the others to serve under his creator as a team in an effort to defeat Miracle Man. They have failed each time, but they seem stuck on that plan. Rather, they did until tonight. Is there any reason you can think of that they would have for attacking you?”

“Not a…” I thought of Dustin and nodded. “Okay, I’ve got one very big clue that I won’t discuss tonight.” I made a mental note to hunt down Dustin, and then smiled at Simon. “For now, I’d like you to explain how you knew those guys were going to shoot me. For that matter, why didn’t JJ’s blast or the cold affect you?”

“I don’t fully function on this plane of existence. This is complicated to explain, but the real me lives about three minutes in the future. I can make that version of me do things and that’s how I knew the clones would shoot you. I didn’t know what would happen until a minute later, but once I saw your plan unfolding, I let mine go.”

I frowned as my face drew into a thoughtful expression. “But if you don’t really exist here, how did you ride home with us?”

“Well, I…damn, I had a halfway decent theory going there and you had to wreck it,” Simon said. “It took me fifteen years to come up with that explanation, and you ruined it with one question.”

“Wait, how old are you?”

“I’ll be thirty-five in August,” Simon replied.

I gaped at him, unable to hide my shock. “You’re older than me?”

“I’d say so, given your reaction. I don’t age normally, so I’ve got an estimate that I’ll look like an adult when I’m a hundred and forty or so.”

“You do think you’ll eventually die?”

“Well yes, I suppose I will in another three or four hundred years,” Simon remarked sarcastically.

“Lucky you.”

Simon snorted. “Are you always this morbid?”

This caused Wally and Dale to snigger.

I got up and pointed at the door. “All right, it’s time for everybody to go home. Don’t come back until tomorrow,” I ordered, marching them to the door. “Dale, good job on saving the kids tonight.”

I patted his shoulder.

“The girl who broke her arm kissed my cheek before we left,” Dale said in a soft voice. “That felt kind of nice.”

I smiled at him. “Nicer than getting your picture in the paper two days in a row?”

“Yeah,” Dale said. “I’d trade every picture in town for another kiss like that.”

“I think you’re going to be a great hero, Dale. Good night,” I said and closed the door.

I went back to my recliner and sat down, debating whether my wounds hurt bad enough to warrant a deeper sleep using my closet door when I heard a knock.

Figuring one of the guys was swinging back around to say something else, I opened the door. Glancing down at the cognac bottle in Dustin’s hand, I looked back up and sighed at him. “So is this you’re idea of a peace offering?”

“You’re correct in assuming that the attack by the East End Boys was my doing. But then you can’t really be angry with me for doing what you suggested. I would have liked to warn you—”

“But I lost your phone in an explosion,” I said and nodded as I took the cognac bottle with one hand and waved him inside with the other.

I opened the bottle and took a long drink, sighing with relief before regarding Dustin with suspicion. “How did you know that alcohol dulls pain for me?”

“I have…good ears. I’ve heard a great many things about you. Your life was cursed, and you finally got a quiet life in Idaho. But now you are here in the city, and you’ve led your team into it’s first fight tonight. You have said you don’t want to play the game, and I know you believed it. But now you do, so why is that?”

“You probably know that already,” I said and took another drink from the bottle.

“I want to hear it from you, just to see if you can be honest with yourself.”

“I have a death wish.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You say you do, and on some level you even believe it, but you didn’t give in to those feelings tonight when you knew those men could destroy you completely. You chose the saner path of self-preservation.”

“Yeah, I guess I did,” I conceded.

“I recommend you stick with it and drop this silly superhero notion before someone kills you.”

“Someone like you?” I asked, bristling quickly.

“No, I respect your former career,” Dustin said. “But the East End Boys will come after you again. After you’ve dealt with them, you’ll still need to take care of their leader, Countessa Vera Evel.”

“Good grief, why do so many people hate their children so much?” I asked, and then waved a hand at Dustin. “Never mind. Thank you for the liquor, and for sending a gang of crazed clones to attack me. Um, thank you for the phone, and I’m sorry I blew it up.”

“It’s all right. You have another one in your pocket.”

“How?” I asked, feeling quite certain that he wasn’t bluffing.

“It’s a secret technique that I learned as a kid.” Dustin smiled. It faded, and his eyes darted to my front door. “Answer that, but I was never here.”

“Answer what?” I asked, jumping when someone knocked on my door. I spun to look at the door, then glanced back to find that Dustin had vanished. Somewhat unnerved by the absurdity of the encounter, I went to the door and opened it.

“No. Not right now, please?” I whimpered.

Scowling with obvious fury, Vicky shoved her way past me with Chet in tow. “This won’t take long.”

I cringed at the tone of her voice, shutting the door slowly. “Chet already apologized for stalking me, so what else is there to discuss?”

“How about a quote from the City Globe?” Vicky asked. “Why did you say ‘Stay home, Chet’?”

She had me too. I had the whole lecture coming because I broke one of the cardinal rules of the game. You never use a hero’s real name when dealing with the press. The comic books don’t even use the real names, so I was making a terrible mistake, possibly jeopardizing Vicky’s life.

I could have argued that no one knew who I was talking about, but I let Vicky vent and nodded my head at the right points.

“You may think that pouting routine works on everybody, but if you screw up like this again, I promise Leona will be down here in four seconds to straighten you out.”

My head snapped up as I stared at her with confusion. “You called my parents?”

“That’s what you don’t understand, Terry. Duggan called us and told us to watch out for you after he saw the news report on the gas station robbery that you stopped. He didn’t want us to say we were checking up on you for him, but Chet hasn’t been stalking you. He’s respecting your dad’s wishes. It’s one thing to badger Chet for it, but another thing entirely to say something as stupid as this.”

I scowled at her. “Then why did you play stupid about me before?”

Chet sighed. “Your dad told us to act like we didn’t know anything.”

“Of course,” I said. “Okay, I am sorry for what I said to the reporters. I won’t make any excuses. I screwed up, and I shouldn’t have used Chet’s real name. I also was overreacting to him hanging around.”

“I won’t do it anymore,” Chet said.

“No, I realize that we’re going to run into each other, and I’m sorry for losing my temper,” I said and smiled weakly. “Dad told me to fly free, so it would have been nice if he’d told me that he sent you to look after me. I don’t need looking after.”

“Are you sure about that?” Vicky asked as her eyes dropped to stare at my wounds.

“You’re kidding, right?” I asked. “This is nothing compared to how I felt after the bomb blew up in my face. To kill me, the East End Boys would have to…” I trailed off as a stray thought occurred to me.

“Would have to, what?” Vicky asked.

“They would have to break out a microscope to destroy my every last cell, or else I would return to full strength,” I finished, pushing the thought aside. “I did beat the entire group with only the most minimal help from my friends, and all I’ve got to show for it is this stupid bottle of liquor and a warning that they’ll be back.”

“How did you get—?”

Not wanting to make trouble for Dustin, I cut Chet off. “Look, I’ve got two holes in my side, along with a burning need to drain this bottle and sleep off most of this pain. I am truly sorry for screwing with both of you, but please get out of my apartment now. I will call you soon to kiss your asses again, because I really have been a bitch.” I went to the door and opened it for them. “I’m sorry about that, and I promise I’ll behave myself the next time we meet.”

Now relaxed and calm, Vicky turned at the door and smirked at me. “Nice place, by the way. It’s very…Caucasian.”

I smiled. “Good night, Vicky.” Glancing around her, I added, “Good night, Chet.”

I shut the door, but heaving a sigh, I stood by it just to see if anyone else would show up.

When no one did I limped to my room and drained a third of the bottle quickly before I sat down on my bed, and cursed myself under my breath.

Chet didn’t deserve my abuse, but it was hard to respect a guy who had never arrested me for any of my crimes. I was supposed to treat him as a friend of the family just because my dad had gotten into his pants?

If this sounds unfair of me, keep in mind that I was angry and I was drunk. At the time, Chet and Vicky were just one more problem that I didn’t want to deal with. The list of problems kept building, and all I wanted to do was run home and forget the whole thing ever happened.

Instead I drank myself to sleep and dreamed my usual morbid dreams. Like the one where I was taking a hot bath while my boyfriend washed my back for me.

Yep, I’m a pretty sick girl.

After posting her review of The Sole Survivors’ Club on quillsandzebras, A.M. Harte wrote to ask me for a brief interview about the book. It’s just a few questions, but I had fun answering them and explaining the stories behind the story. Also I reveal something about Carl, the elevator “accident magnet.” ^_^

Check out the interview here.

The first two reviews for The Sole Survivors’ Club have come in, and both are favorable! Huzzah!

Over on Goodreads, Becka has posted this 4 star review.

And just a few hours ago quillsandzebras posted this 3.5 star review on her blog.

The Sole Survivors’ Club is only $1.99, and it’s available in many different e-book formats. Why not wander over to my site and check it out? Or you can visit Amazon, Mobipocket, or Smashwords to pick up a copy and start reading right away!