Chapter 1 of Reluctant Hero

Martha, aged more by crap circumstance than her actual years, raised her ratty sign higher as the traffic slowed for the red light. Her sign used to say Will Work for Food, but that saying stank, and she’d dropped that old, battered phrase inked out on that old, battered cardboard. Now her sign, written in black block letters that grew smaller and smaller as her space ran out, read Anything Will Help. God Bless. You always added the God Bless; it made people feel guilty if they didn’t give you jack.

Even with some undiscovered power trapped inside her, she was one of the freesteaders—without means, a car, a home, a future. Scanning the drivers with her failing eyes, her gaze grasped for anyone to look at her. The light switched green; the cars sped by. Her grubby shoes squeaked as she shuffled to her backpack, stashed behind a nearby bush, to pull out some water. The plastic bottle crackled as she brought it to her lips. The weather had been dry, sparing her from rotting socks, but the shoes had a definite odor that even turned the rats away.

All these milk-fed cows, driving by in their sleek electric cars, they probably never had to wear rotted shoes. She wanted to rattle them, show them what rotted shoes was like—that would be a nice superpower, pushing her world on others. If only it would manifest. Her eyes were unnaturally pale, tagging her as having the Seed, and therefore she had to have a power. Too bad she had no clue what it was. It certainly wasn’t the superpower of having daisy fresh feet.

These bling-bling peacocks didn’t even glance her direction, to see her eyes. Maybe she was invisible and didn’t know it. That could be her secret Seeded special ability. Her magic. A load o’ cock and bull, really. All the other freesteaders saw and talked at her just fine; only the one-percenters wouldn’t piss on her if she was engulfed in flames.

Martha muttered to herself, scratching where her invisispec’s arm pressed into her left temple. The arms of the VR-glasses were much tighter than the old sunglasses she used to wear and always dug into her face. Another car zipped by. The specs reported the make and model and how much it cost new.

That could be her power. Invisible to those with money.

All the potential of the universe and no idea how to flip on the switch.

She’d tried all the tricks folks yammered about to make one’s power manifest. Usually, it was all about putting yourself under stress, like near-death experiences. Martha lived on the streets of Portland. Near-death experiences were a daily occurrence, and she still couldn’t fly or make her skin turn to steel or burp lilac scent. Nothing.

Rush hour traffic oozed by at the clogged intersection she’d staked out in front of the empty gas station at the off-ramp. An old, rusty heap, still fueled by gas, backfired, letting loose a black fart of acrid smoke. Martha ducked behind the light post while she coughed up the heavy, burnt lungful, scanning the sky for drones. Two of the air spies zipped by. Maybe police drones, or those for traffic. None swooped down to harass the puker. Or her.

A sedan slowed to a silent stop beside her, pulling her thoughts back to the reason she stood at the stoplight that early evening: money to buy shoes and food. The window lowered and a middle-aged dude handed her a five. A five. Just a five?

“Thank you so much,” she said in that self-deprecating tone all the freesteaders offered these bastards.

The bastard nodded, not even smiling, and rolled the window up as he sped up to pass through the intersection.

By the end of rush hour, Martha’s pocket sung to the amount of forty-seven dollars. A spit in the pot for her shoe fund. She used to make more. Get a twenty here and there. Someone had tossed her a pack of cigs, though, so she puffed one out as she wandered to the bus stop and back to the Portland waterfront.

A ring of space surrounded Martha as she climbed on the bus and paid the fare with coins, one coin at a time. Nobody said anything to her face, but the hems and haws and teenage-dramatic sighs were certainly aimed her way. Screw ’em! The man behind her swiped his phone over the reader, paying his fare. The bus was half full after the 6 p.m. surge, most with their invisispecs down, tuning out the world. Her eyes flicked to the camera mounted above the windshield before she planted herself onto a seat with a woman—student type, earbuds in, specs down, mitted hand twitching as she accessed her specs, hints of music slipping out. The woman’s nose scrunched, and she leaned away from Martha. Internally, Martha crowed. The snobby bitch deserved a snoot pounded by rotting shoes.

Several girls were nattering on behind Martha, talking about the latest Seeded media whoring. Not that all Seeded were attention slaves—Martha certainly wasn’t—but their TV shows and their magazines and their prizefighting and their online feeds were all about them them them.

“And the government is pushing for the Certification of the hero groups. Won’t that be awesome if Portland gets a Certified hero group?” one teen blathered.

“Who do you think it’ll be?” another asked, then started belting out a song about touching herself, causing the other girls to giggle.

If they didn’t watch it, some of the men would want to touch them, flaunting themselves like that. Martha looked around, glared at the bastards not specced in who watched the girls. Filthy lechers. One met her eyes, his own going wide, and and then found the floor damned captivating. She captured his image on her spec. If she’d had a good power, she’d take a knife to ’im. Right in his nads. Thinking bad bad thoughts about little girls. Sick fucks.

The girl’s solo ended and another of the girls, voice authoritative in the ways Martha remembered from her own girlhood, said, “I think it will be the Bullet. Check the Saturday line-up on the SW1 feed. He was promoting Certification. Says it will give their group validation and direction on where they are most needed.”

One snorted, while another mooned on about how fine Bullet was. Martha sneered to herself. As if. Like the second most powerful Seeded in America would want to be a Certified guardian.

“The Bullet’s in New Orleans, what would he want with Portland?”

“Well, Portland’s a hub, like New Orleans. Why not Portland?”

“Nah, it will probably be someone local. Maybe that cop. Geier.”

“He’s lame, doesn’t even have a cool name.”

“He talks about it all the time. Did you check his feed? Protecting Portland with his group. What’re they called again?”

Martha knew. O.G.R.E., or something like that. Like a big monster. John Geier talked a lot, walked the streets of Portland on and off duty. Talked to people like Martha. He wasn’t a bad sort, for the fuzz. Not like some of them other pigs who harassed the freesteaders, kicking in their tents, throwing dirt on their sleeping bags. Evicting them from public property. It’s public, for God’s sake! They had a right to set up tents there.

According to John Geier’s lip service, he didn’t like the drones, either.

What Portland needed protecting from was itself.

Martha climbed off the bus, leaving the nattering girls behind with one final glare at the letch and walked towards the waterfront where her friends camped under the Steel Bridge. She’d tucked her money deep into her shoe, under the stinky insole that was disintegrating into little pieces of foam and rubber. She’d go to the Mission later and get a meal. Hoped salt wasn’t the main flavoring tonight.

At the bridge, traffic lined up tail to nose along Naito. Camps had been tossed and garbage strewn everywhere: all signs the cops and the city road warriors had come through and rounded up the freesteaders. Her quick scan didn’t see any pigs on patrol, but it was probably better to leave. She didn’t fancy an ass search. Time to hit the backup location: the Firehouse.

Overhead, a drone buzzed by. Martha shadowed her face with her hair. People disappeared from the streets out here. She didn’t wanna get pegged by any of those spies.

One had to be careful going into the Firehouse because the Ghost haunted the upper level. A bit of a crazy—crazier than most of the other freesteaders. A kid, under twenty certainly. He talked to himself and had a tingle for dead things. Found out every time any of them kicked it and ran off to fiddle with the corpse. He set her skin crawling.

That, and his eyes were totally white. No pupil. No iris. Nothing but white.

Same with the rest of him. Albino or something.

Still the place was dry and usually safe. Martha just had to make sure she came at it from the north side and avoid the watch dogs: cops, drones, and pushers. On alert with her head kept down, she rushed along the street, keeping to the darker side versus the side lit by streetlamps. The smell of piss and burning garbage mingled in the cooling air. She stepped over trash, dog shit, and legs, and around groups of people talking, sharing a smoke and other, more rancid things.

“Martha, hey baby. Wanna join us?” Greg, another freesteader, tapped the breast pocket of his thick flannel jacket. Martha shook her head. She wanted no part of that kind of fun. Last three years, that poison spread across Portland’s freesteader population like a plague. Meth was as shitty as a half-full Chinese food takeout box sitting out for a week. Matoro, out of Japan they said, was that box in the sun, under a heat lamp, with a wad of spit from the local infectious disease center. It tore a person apart. Beat down freewill. Took it away. Left you a zombie. Since it didn’t make the user violent, nobody cared. She was sure some jackass government agent brought it to the streets. On purpose. Drugs were all legal here. She remembered when they weren’t. Before, you got rounded up for using, now they just let you wallow in your own piss. They handed out mind-drugs at the Betterment Stations, why not brain friers on the streets? All needful things. For some, Matoro took away the cravings for other drugs, took away their mental teeters, but it took away their choices, too. Their desires. It took the person away.

Martha offered Greg the bird. “Not interested in lala land, Greg. Toss it in the river.” She left the losers and rounded a corner, still looking over her shoulder at Greg and his friends, when she bumped into someone.

The someone, a man, sneered at her like he’d just stepped in shit. Bastard. Then his normie eyes locked onto hers, and his lips twitched into a not-so-friendly smile. Instinct honed from street living pecked at Martha’s brain, causing a shiver to squirm up her spine. That smile was dangerous. Predatory. From a normie, when she had the Seed. “Sorry,” she muttered, ducking around him, making herself small to rush away.

Run. Run, her instincts roared.

The man grabbed her, spun her to face him. Slowly, slip by slip, his smile grew. “Pale eyes, I see.”

She bared her teeth. “Yeah, and you better let go, or I’ll show you how to ride a hockey stick, long side up.”

The man laughed, a purely mean sound. “I think not.”

A tiny voice told Martha that she’d had a good run, but now, with the hard gaze of the man before her, she knew she’d hit the end. She pulled. Yanked her arm, but her strength could never match a man’s. He wound up his fist. Ducking her head, she tried to protect herself. A strike pounded her back, then her head. Smacked into her face.

The end swooped down on her as her body hit the ground.