4. The Return of John Cute

Previously on We’re Not in Edison City Anymore, Candystriper has made a definite turn towards recovery as the Malevolent Med-Student waits by her side! Somewhere else, Sam Superlative Jr. races towards a human colony on an alien world! Meanwhile, John Cute wakes up in the hospital! We rejoin his story in progress, but first, a commercial word!

The thing about antiheroes, or even superheroes running a little too close to the edge, is that once they start going over that edge, they can find it difficult to stop. Most people, for example, when brought to a hospital in bad or even moderately uncomfortable shape, will stay there until properly discharged by competent medical authorities. When John Cute woke up, however, and found himself in a hospital bed, he promptly lurched upright, punched a hole in the vital signs monitoring machine next to him, and bellowed over the alarm sounds for someone to come right the hell now and explain what the hell was going on.

Fortunately for him and the hospital’s equipment, a doctor was within shouting range and hurried to assist. “Sir!” he said, “Sir, if you can calm down and listen to me, please? I just need you to take a breath, okay?”

“You need-” John choked. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yeah,” the doctor said, without a blink. “Sure I do. You got yourself banged up in some damn fight or other and now like all you flying brick types you just know your healing powers have you all sewn up and you can fly away into the sunset good as new. Of course you could wait around and make sure your cells weren’t mutated by psionic infiltrative agents or that you weren’t inadvertently time-shifted or electromaligned or who knows what else; the human body is fragile enough as it is without adding in all the fun little new ways superpowers can mess it up. But no, no, you assume you’re invulnerable, so go on, fly right on out of here. We could use the space. Honestly, we could; this cloner guy, Ben Tuomi, got in a bad one about an hour ago, and he’s being bused in. Any chance you’re an organ donor, or can multiply yourself?”

John Cute could have smashed the doctor across the hallway, but he was technically a hero, and for once he was taken aback. “No,” he said. “I’ll be going now.”

Without another word he left the doctor behind and walked in a thoughtful way down towards the elevators and, eventually, out of the hospital and out on to the street. People shouted his name and waved, and he thought he heard a smattering of applause. It was less than the usual, and he should have paused to ask why, but he was distracted by a thought.

The doc had been right. Even if the Malevolent Med-Student had been able to figure out the thrudanium and make him immortal, superheroes and supervillains alike were getting all kinds of weird these days. Anything could happen. Heck, he’d seen a report over at the government on some guy calling himself Professor Cthulhu, and what kind of a weird name was that anyway? Still, though, the guy had stuff, you couldn’t deny that.

That triggered another thought. In people like John Cute, these sorts of thoughts lead to unfortunate conclusions. “You know what?” he mused to himself, ignoring the small crowd of supporters and the protester and the small argument breaking out between them. “I know what I need. I need to be a god.”

You couldn’t get that with thrudanium, he knew that much. He’d tried that route already; the Malevolent Med-Student was the only one who’d been able to do anything with the darn thing, and now the man was in the hospital hanging around waiting for his minion, whatever her name was. He could go after him but, no, it was too public. John Cute had spent years maintaining the balancing act between his off-the-books life and his public heroism, and he didn’t think tearing through a hospital full of civilians and/or other heroes would be so easy to hide.

Cute wasn’t what one might call a genius, not in the same way as, for instance, Meg Atomic or the Malevolent Med-Student, but even he could see the solution to a problem if it pushed itself in front of his nose and waved. “So I can’t get the guy who has the thrudanium, so I can’t get the thrudanium,” he said. “Okay. Where does the thrudanium come from in the first place? Can I go there?”

Like anyone else in the internet age he went to his phone, which gave him a short and unhelpful answer: the origin of thrudanium was classified under grounds of national security. Fortunately, however, John Cute knew a guy who knew a guy. More particularly, he knew Special Agent Peter A. Hawkins of the D.E.R.P. To his irritation, however, when he tried to call the man all he got was an irritatingly non-customized voicemail. After the beep, please leave your name and number and the agent whom you are calling will get back to you at a later time.

“Look,” John snarled, “It’s me, I want to know-”

beep

“Just call me, okay?”

He smashed the phone into splinters, a recurring hazard of super-strength and a nasty temper. It’d been getting worse lately. John wondered if he should started getting these things in bulk.

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Note: the psionic infiltrative agent is a hat-tip to

E.B. Howard

and her Radiance series: I forget the exact terminology for what they called the inky fluid stuff but the concept and execution was brilliant and diabolical, and also, yikes.