A short story written in first person from a character who thinks way too highly of himself in such ways that create horrible situations. He is also a 'super' hero. Yeah, I know if youve seen my other story I recycled the name, but I just used it as a stock name. Enjoy
Hammer and the Coalition of Bad Guys
I had been following a lead that I deciphered in ‘The Franklin Furter.’ My enemies had people working for that paper, which was the main reason it liked to slander my name so often. The message was hidden in an article about the time I torched a day-care that was housing The Terrible Toddler, one of my most clever opponents. By writing down every fifth word in the article, I received this message:
“Hammer bad guy meeting at secret building puppy nine tonight.”
I was pretty sure I was at the right building. It was in the picture in the paper next to the ashen day-care. My black hoodie, black pants, black shoes, black bandana, and black cape concealed my identity beyond all doubt. I had become Franklin City’s premier superhero, The Hammer. It did not help that the building I was hiding against was white, or that I was on ground level, or that there was still a crowd gathered around the remains of the day-care that was right next to my location. “There he is,” I turned toward the noise to see a police officer pointing directly at me, “that’s the guy who burned the children!”
I responded to this outrageous claim by defending my legendary honor, “I saved you all! Terrible Toddler was in there, plotting to flood Franklin City in teat milk!”
“My little boy was in there too!” screamed a random, teary-eyed woman.
“Well,” I started, using my powers of persuasion to come up with an ingenious excuse for the pointless murder of her son, “better him than you.”
With that comment, a crowd of angry men and women of all economic and social backgrounds began charging at me. I deducted that each of them was under the influence of a mind ray, no doubt developed by the scientific brain of Dr. Smart, another of my arch-rivals, to defend their secret meeting place.
With only moments at my disposal, I surveyed the area. Seeing no way out of a fight, I began pummeling the members of the mob. I was quickly overpowered by their strength, probably a side-effect of the mind ray. It was only after being knocked to the ground and having my face stomped in by an African American woman of tremendous girth that an electric impulse filled my body. The feeling reminded me of my undersea battle with that slipperiest of crooks, Electric Eel. I then saw a police officer glaring angrily into my eyes before a long, black object enveloped my view and I went blank.
I woke up in the back of a police car. “What happened?” I asked the officers in the front seat.
“Shut up, son,” the officer in the passenger seat responded, “its scum like you that make me wanna vomit all over my mother’s grave!”
“Oh,” I said, still dazed.
Our destination, the Franklin Penitentiary, came into view. I began to get excited. “The mayor must want to reward me for defeating all those mind slaves!” I shared with the officers.
I was lead down a bare hallway and into a room with a camera and many orange jumpsuits. I began to sense something was awry when I noticed that my wrists were bound by cold, steel cuffs. The officers tore my black clothes off and helped me put on one of their orange suits so that I could pose in a cool outfit for my picture. They took two photos of me holding a paper with a number on it, which I could only assume was the number of bad guys I had lain waste to in my impressive career.
After my shoot, I was taken into a wing of the jail called the ‘Freaks Ward.’ Upon entering, I saw each of my enemies behind iron bars. “No!” I screamed, my struggling stopped by the policemen who must have been this evil team’s henchmen in disguise.
“Finally,” a voice from my left chimed, “that guy is so annoying.”
It was Dr. Smart! “Honestly, it was bound to happen eventually,” this time it came from a deeper voice that I immediately recognized as The Dark Lord’s.
I was then thrown into an occupied cell. My face hit the chilled concrete ground as I heard the cell door shut and lock behind me. “Don’t try anything stupid,” said one of the corrupted men who threw me in, “we keep you weirdoes in here with ion beams.”
My pulse hastened as I realized the situation. Franklin Penitentiary must have been taken over by The Coalition of Bad Guys and used as their new base. They were going to kill me. I gathered myself up from the ground and saw something curled up in a shadowy corner. “Oh no,” I thought to myself, “this must be some sort of hellspawn creature from the deepest pits of the netherworld, summoned here by The Dark Lord to kill me!”
The light flickered on hard, and I saw not a beast, but a man. That man, upon further investigation that the faulty light bulb allowed, was none other than The Terrible Toddler. “Impossible,” I shouted, stirring up movement collectively among the cells, “I killed you in that day-care fire!”
“Dumbass,” The Terrible Toddler responded, walking into plain view.
The Terrible Toddler was a man who never aged a day. He had plans to destroy Franklin City on multiple occasions using giant toys as weapons of mass destruction. I, of course, stopped him every time.
“Why have you brought me here, Terrible Toddler?” I asked with a trembling voice.
“My names not The Terrible Toddler, I don’t even know where you got that,” he responded, with a vibrating voice, “I’m The Maniacal Midget. I’m a midget, not a toddler!”
I heard someone chuckling from within the cell across from mine. “Who are you? Some new villain who wants to slit my throat?” I asked the scrawny, bearded man who I did not recognize.
“Electric Eel,” he responded.
“Oh yeah, I remember! I sent you to jail after besting you in our underwater duel!”
“No, I’m the guy who got his ass handed to him by Solarman after I threw you in my bathtub and tossed a hairdryer in.”
“Oh, I could’ve sworn you shot me a couple of times with your lightning ray.”
“Nah, I had to save battery power for Solarman. It was easy enough to just tell you to get in the tub.”
“Oh, well, I didn’t recognize you without the mask.”
“Hey, hey,” The Terrible Toddler interrupted my conversation with Electric Eel hastily, “weren’t you thrown in here for burning a day-care and then beating up random civilians or something?”
“You know exactly why you brought me here!” I yelled at Terrible Toddler, “to get revenge on me for throwing you all in jail!”
“How could we do that? We’re all in jail right now, and so are you!” the cackling voice of Dr. Smart penetrated the entire hallway.
“And you didn’t put us here either, each one of us has defeated you like, seven times at least. One guy claims that you paid him off to make him stop punching your face in!” this voice came from The Dark Lord, “each and every one of us was beaten by Solarman and his sidekick, Plasmaboy.”
I stood in my cell, shocked. The villains’ lies were obvious. I was pretty sure that I could beat up Solarman with my pinky finger. Before I could respond to their trickery, the white double-doors of the freaks ward flung open. Two men, looking as if they belonged in a corporate building, walked in wearing matching suits. “Which one of you freaks calls yourself,” the man on the left paused as he read off of his paper, “The Hammer?”
Each of the villains pointed at me. The two men walked to me and halted. They were separated from me physically by bars, yet mentally by many degrees of mind power. I could see that the man on the right was equipped with a 12-gauge shotgun. The man on the left went off again, still reading from a white sheet of paper, “The Hammer, out of all the murderers, rapists, crooks, freaks, and psychopaths in the great city of Franklin, the state has determined you to be the greatest threat to life in a two hundred mile radius.”
The man on the right lifted his shotgun and aimed it at my face. Laughter erupted among the evildoers. “You will now be,” the man’s sentence was interrupted as the ceiling of the hallway collapsed in the wake of a gigantic metal foot that belonged to an equally gigantic metal monster.
I looked up at the robot to see two flaming figures alight in the sky, circling around it and shooting balls of flame at its exposed regions. I saw the robot’s arm stretch downward to pick up Dr. Smart. I could see the doctor climb into the palm of his grand creation. Soon after he became enshrouded, the walls containing myself and all of my enemies crumbled to the ground as a result of being shot into oblivion by laser-fire. I guessed their motive to be ganging up on me in a fight, so I fled into the grassy field surrounding the fortress.
After running a great five yards, a steaming body fell in front of me. It was Solarman! “Help… need… sunlight…” he moaned pathetically.
Without wasting a breath, I kicked him in the groin and ran off into the forest. I hoped he would die so I could round up all the villains again. In addition to that, I was pretty sure at the time that Solarman was having a sexual relationship with Plasmaboy, who also deserved to die.
The next night, I sat in my apartment. An article about the previous night’s jailbreak caught my attention as the perfect piece to hide a message in. This time taking away every sixth word, I discovered another message.
“Dr. Smart waiting cemetery Solarman.”
The message said, inarguably, that Solarman had teamed up with Dr. Smart to kill me in the cemetery! I knew that the original text of the article, proclaiming that Solarman had been torn into five pieces by a giant robot, was a huge lie! I once again donned my black suit, which I had to buy anew, and set out into the darkest corners of Franklin City.
