Sam Anwangwe watched the reporter perched on top the aging Coca-Cola delivery truck bounce this way and that along with the rattling bottles. The sweaty American gripped the rails so tight that Sam laughed.
“It’s like being on a ship,” Sam said. “Surf with it, don’t fight it.”
But for the last ten miles, Brian Cooper had clung even tighter as the truck climbed and then slid down the other side of massive ruts in the dirt. When they finally reached Camp Mudima, Cooper hopped down and wobbled off down the dirt road.
Sam stayed back with the driver, Titus, nd began stacking cases on a rusted old handcart with wooden handles so polished from years of use it practically gleamed.
“What’s the American up to?” Titus asked as they both pulled the cart along the dirt road into the camp. Three hundred tents and two thousand Angolan refugees who’d crossed the border into Namibia as they waited for the fighting to resolve. Sam grunted as they got over the last hump before the dirt road became recently paved asphalt.
“He says there’s a supervillain hiding in the camp,” Sam grunted as they waved down one of the Peace Force guards by the check-in station, a rounded building made out of rammed earth and tires, then covered in a lime paste that gleamed white hot in the Zambian midday sun.
Once pointed in the right direction and having shown some ID, they wheeled the bottles into a cooled storage area back behind the camp’s commissary, under the direction of a tired looking senior cook who smelled like relish and peanuts in a crisp, red and white dress that whipped about just above her ankles like a cape.
“In Lusaka, maybe,” Titus said. “What would they want with the border? Besides, I told you already back at the bottle pick up, I know every one of the volunteers in Mudima. If there was some white man with powers here, I would know.”
Titus laughed again at the idea.
They both stretched their backs back outside in the sun, and Titus thanked Sam for the help and left to drive back toward the distribution center.
“Have an amazing day,” Sam called out to Titus as he walked back toward his truck. Sam smiled to himself as Titus started to whistle a cheerful pop tune they’d heard on the radio heading toward the camp.
Helping Titus on his delivery was, Sam thought, a small price to pay for a ride out in the bush. He absent-mindedly scratched at the long scar running up and down the center of his chest. It always itched in the sweaty heat.
The journalist, Cooper, had been looking to hire a local fixer who was going to take full advantage of the kid. In fact, Sam felt that the fixer Cooper had been about to hire would most likely take him thirty miles outside the city before robbing him and leaving him by the side of the road.
“Kaamba isn’t his real name,” Sam had shouted. “It’s John. John—“
The fixer took off, and Cooper, wearing that ridiculous khaki shirt with far too many pockets, shook Sam’s hand and thanked him.
“What you need to do,” Sam said, “is pay one of the Coca-Cola delivery drivers from the warehouse to ride along, or offer to help unload. They’ll be going anywhere you want.”
“Camp Mudima.”
Camp Mudima circled around Sam on the old tried but true spoke and hub layout perfected by Burning Man in the American Southwest, modified with some traditional Tanzanian fractal layouts that optimized the camp’s functions.
Sam wandered around the camp, just listening to the stories he heard. Growing up in Durham, he’d seen so many pictures of UN tents, dirt roads, and defeated people sitting near them as they wondered what their future held besides more uncertainty.
Mudima looked nothing at all like that. The family housing were all molded bubble structures right out of a bad science fiction film, and they gleamed with fresh whitewash or geometric colored shapes.
The young couple in the nearest one to the left fled Angola when rebels burned the nearest town down. Their farm had failed, the drought ravaging through a country that had been balanced on a knife’s edge as heavy weather roiled them. They’d been terrified of walking across the border, worried about their daughter’s persistent cough, and didn’t know what would come next.
For days they’d tried to evade border guards to get into Zambia. When they gave themselves up, hoping for some food, the same border guards they’d feared drove them to Mudima and waited until they were processed in and had been looked at.
“We didn’t have to fear them,” the father whispered to his wife as the guards left, stunned. They’d imagined tents and UN doctors, and being expected to leave the moment peace broke out.
“Of course not,” the processing officer told them. “Everyone here is a part of COMESA, there’s nothing illegal about crossing a border. Like the E.U.”
“Like the E.U.,” they had repeated.
“Here is your debit card. It starts you on food from the commissary. It’s at cost. There are jobs all across the camp; there’s a listing on the central board that refreshes every day. You said here on the form you can repair coils and winding?”
“Yes.”
“We could start you in the electronics repair facility. You do good work; you may go back to Angola with a hefty savings account in your MPesa. Do you have a phone? No, we’ll get you one. You’ll want it to keep up with the news.”
The family, stunned, had been ushered to their small home just last night. Today they had to enroll their daughter in pre-school after a camp doctor, herself Angolan, checked her over and gave her shots.
There hadn’t been a school within easy walking distance of their rural farm.
Sam heard a gleeful shout from near the edge of Mudima, interrupting any attempt on his part to find out more about the family.
The reporter, it seemed, had found his supervillain. Sam rushed down the road toward them.
***
“Do you mind if I…?” The pencil-thin man waved a bottle of beer in the air at them. “The brews they make here in the camp are good, but this is just a taste of home.”
He sat on an Adirondack-styled wooden chair made out of what looked like carpentry scraps from the camp’s workshop, cracked the top, and nodded at the reporter, and then Sam.
Sam smiled encouragingly.
Cooper took a small recorder with two angled microphones in the front and faced it at the supervillain, who said his name was Karl. The device looked like a pricey piece of equipment.
“So, you are Kevin—“
“Yes,” the supervillain said wearily. “I am Fuse. You found me. Well done, you.”
Sam looked at the reporter. Cooper’s smile could swallow a small animal.
For five years Cooper had been pre-writing obituaries for celebrities. He was the graduate of a renowned journalism school, top of his class. But in a dying field he’d not found the world-traveling adventure he’d imagined. Instead, he had a tiny apartment with a window that looked at someone’s window air-conditioner, a fridge not much larger than his head, and so much educational debt Cooper imagined he would never be able to climb any higher than his current lot in life.
But he had a story, he thought. While digging through photos of a celebrity doing some aid work, Cooper spotted a face that had terrified him as a child.
“Be a good boy,” his mom would whisper, “or I’ll call Phreaker and have him reprogram you into someone better.”
The idea terrified a young Cooper, who imagined himself stripped of free will, walking about like a robot because his mom had called a supervillain.
“You were Phreaker, the world’s most powerful supervillain,” Cooper said breathlessly. “You led the most dangerous team of powered people ever assembled. And during the Battle of Central Park you just walked away, and were never seen again. Now you’re here, in a camp, building houses?”
The most dangerous man in the world, Cooper told Sam right before they joined Karl in his hand-made hut. You’ll be sitting next to the most dangerous man in the world.
If that didn’t get him a better profile and job as a journalist, finding where Phreaker had gone into hiding, and why, then what would?
“I am here, in a camp, building things,” Karl said. “You’ve correctly figured out what I’m up to.”
Sam chuckled, but cut it off as Cooper glared at him.
“Who are you, again?” Karl asked.
Sam held up his hands. “I got Mr. Cooper out here. I’m his fixer. I’m very sorry, don’t mind me. Just imagine I’m not really even here.”
Karl nodded and turned back to Cooper, who moved on.
“What happened?” Cooper pressed. “What happened in that battle that convinced you to give it all up? A supervillain, turning their life toward service?”
“Villain,” Karl said, and rubbed the top of his beer. “That word. Do you know the etymology?”
“It’s French for peasant,” Sam said.
Karl turned his head to study Sam closely. “You—“
“I’m sorry,” Sam interrupted. “I did it again. Again, I’m not here, I won’t intrude again. Carry on.”
Karl slowly regathered his thoughts. “The word, it comes from the *villiens* who worked the land. The common people. Us. That’s how I became who I was.”
“The man who stole all the gold from—“ Cooper started.
“Yes,” Karl interrupted. “I did that. Yes. But name me a revolution where the victors didn’t cancel debts or give out land. Inequality has always been the fuel of sedition, all the way back in recorded history, when it was Babylonians chipping the accounts away on stone tablets.”
“Like a Robin Hood,” Cooper said.
“The system hated Robin Hood,” Karl snapped. “He stole from the rightful owners and winners. These heroes, running around getting their kicks off beating the shit out of some sad ass criminal stealing a necklace so his mom can get another round of antibiotics, that bondage-gear cloak-wearing asshole could be spending all that money they put into researching a new gadget for their tool belt into an early education program that takes ten times as many off the street.”
“So, you were going to give all that gold to the people?” Cooper asked.
“Fuck no.” Karl laughed and took a drink from the bottle. “I was going to sink into the depths of iniquity and pleasure. I wanted what I thought the world owed me.”
“So you *were* a villain.” Cooper had a small notebook out, and he scratched several lines out as he waited for an answer.
“I was broken.”
Sam leaned forward. There was something there, right on the edge of Karl’s body language. He wanted to steer the conversation there, but Karl started laughing. The sharp sound shattered the moment.
“None of that matters,” Karl said. “You want to know how I ended up here, and it wasn’t because of a realization or awakening. Nothing from my past will help you understand why I did this. What you need to know is all in the battle of Central Park.”
Fifteen superheroes facing off against twice as many supervillains. The devastation of one of New York’s most treasured and sacred places. Sam let himself melt into the background to give Karl the space he needed to keep talking to Cooper.
“What happened in the park, besides the defeat?” Cooper asked.
“They had a kid in the fight.” Karl shook his head. “Fifteen years old, still in high school, from Brooklyn. He took the subway to the fight after school, showed late but wearing a spandex jumpsuit with a big swirling spiral on it. Said he was the Whisper, or Mesmeri, something like that. All he had to do was whisper something into your ear, and you’d do it. And since the League let a child onto the battlefield, I plugged my ears with a set of plugs I got at a firing range so I could walk through the middle of the chaos and plunge my power glove into his chest to rip out his heart.”
Cooper winced, then looked clearly guilty at not keeping his reactions in check. The fabled, and often useless journalist instinct to remain neutral meant he had an obligation to keeping the most interesting parts out.
“Do you know what that little shit did as he lay dying with his head on my shoulder?” Karl asked.
Cooper did not know, and said as much, and Karl nodded, quite satisfied with our shock and outrage.
Karl lowered his voice. “He pulled out my earplugs.”
Both Sam and Cooper waited.
“And here I am,” Karl growled. He shook the remaining droplets of his beer out onto the wooden deck and tossed the bottle into a corroded, galvanized steel pail near the steps. One of the other bottles inside shattered, and Karl sighed heavily.
“He told you to come to Zambia?” Cooper finally pressed.
“After he … ” Karl looked over at a cooler by the edge of the deck, wrestled with some inner demon, then rested his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward. A penitent in a glaring sun. “I tried to lie to myself. I said fixing the broken system would do far more good than any direct actions I could take, I argued, but deep down, I didn’t believe it. Or it would have worked.”
The most dangerous man in the world, inventor, maniacal weapons master, the shadow that ended so many heroes’ lives, took a deep, tired breath as his shoulders slumped.
“It was a compulsion, deep down. Like the certainty you exist, and that you like ice cream, and that small kittens make you smile. I knew he planted it in me, whispered it into my ear, but I couldn’t fight it. The little shit had the last laugh. Because, no matter what, I know that I was told to go out into the world and concretely help more than I’ve hurt. And only when I’ve done enough to balance the pain I caused before, would I feel I could leave.”
Sam looked closely at Karl’s hands. The scarred palms and broken fingernails. The tremor of exhaustion. The thin musculature. Karl would work himself to the edge of physical failure, driven by that small whisper ever in the back of his head telling him to do more, more, more good.
“I think about that moment every day of my life,” Karl said. “If I had a power, I would have told my enemy to kill himself. End it. But it turned out that every super the kid fought now works for aid agencies, or runs halfway homes, or ended up retired to adopt an army of needy children.”
“How many did he do this to?” Cooper asked, the reporter’s gleam in his eye.
“Hundreds?” Karl shrugged. “I don’t know, he was a kid in some prep school, so he only had so many nights free to fight.”
“He took away their free will,” Cooper said.
“Don’t look at me like that.” Karl sat back and folded his arms. “Don’t feel sorry for me. It’s a good life, a simple life. I help where I’m allowed, I know my place in this world, I know what I have to do.”
“Do you really believe that?” Cooper asked. “Truly? Because Phreaker said he wanted to bring about a more equal society. You turned your back on all your thinking?”
Karl nodded. “Let’s be real here, how many dictators who promise to bring down inequality ever truly do it? I was arrogant to assume I could rebuild a system that complex through just my will, while the power tempted me. I know I’m doing more for the world here than I could have. Because if that was true, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
The interview continued as the sun slowly sank away and dusk crept into Mudima. A group of children playing soccer out in the carefully tended southern camp park mock-cursed the end of the play time, and their mothers yelled at them to come home, their whistles and calls bouncing off Mudima’s many bright walls.
Karl finally stood after telling stories of the old battles, and anecdotes about the many pieces of the world he’d seen, disasters he’d helped clean up after. The interview, clearly, was over.
“I’d like to come by and get a photograph tomorrow when the light is better,” Cooper said. “To go with the story.”
Karl looked around the camp, saw nobody out, and nodded. He leaned over the pail by the steps and pulled out the shattered bottle.
Before Sam could cry out, before Cooper’s eyes even widened in surprise, Karl struck like a cobra. The shattered blades of the bottle sunk deep into Cooper’s neck, and Karl swept the dying journalist off his feet.
Cooper struck the deck with a wet thud, and Karl held him down until he stopped moving.
“Fuck,” Karl said to the body in front of him. “Fuck. Why did you say that, kid. Why?”
He put a hand on Cooper’s chest, rocked back and forth for a good minute, and then stood up. He picked the body up easily. He’d had his skin stripped back and a robotic skeleton bonded to his bones twenty years ago so that he could compete with supers with powers. It once gave him super strength and speed, but time had run it down, and Karl moved jerkily down the path behind his house to a retaining wall.
Sam followed.
Karl dug out a shallow grave with a shovel leaning against a pile of bricks and gently lay Cooper down inside. He covered the body with dirt, and then walked over to mix some mortar.
“How long have you been standing there?” he asked, his back still to Sam.
Sam jumped in surprise. “You see me?”
“No. My eyes keep sliding away, like, there’s something there that I can’t ever imagine could be. It… comes from the same place.” Karl slapped mortar in place, and then placed a brick with a still bloody hand.
“Maybe you are just—“
“You said: imagine I’m not even here,” Karl said. “I remember that. But you didn’t leave. I just … did what you told me.”
The supervillain kept putting bricks in place and slapping mortar as he moved along the row.
“What are you, his son?” Karl finally asked.u
“No.”
“What are you doing here? Have you come to kill me for something I did, back then? It’s okay if you are. I understand.”
Sam watched Karl work and said nothing for a long while. Not until Karl finished the whole row and began to work his way back toward him.
“You should look at me, now,” Sam suggested.
Karl did, and then returned to the work at hand. “You’re not here to kill me, and you watched me bury that kid. What are you here for?”
“I came to release you,” Sam said.
It had taken so long to find him. Just like the others, they were all so good and staying off official notice.
Karl stopped, the trowel held an inch over the last layer. His hand trembled. “Who are you?” His voice broke at the end.
“I was a sickly kid,” Sam said. “Bad heart. Your punch, it ended his life, but it didn’t damage his heart. He was an organ donor. And when I woke up, the nurses did anything I asked. But that was their job, so I didn’t notice it. It wasn’t until I was getting wheeled out to go home and someone almost hit Father and me that I understood. My father yelled “asshole” at the driver, and I shouted “go fuck yourself.” And after he hit the brakes and jumped out of the car he…”
Sam shrugged.
“Why didn’t you stop me?”
“You were too fast, Phreaker. That skeleton of yours.”
Karl started placing bricks again.
“Cooper didn’t deserve that,” Karl said.
“No one does,” Sam said.
“You’re right.” Karl looked directly at Sam with large, pained eyes.
“I was going to free you, but then, you killed him, right in front of me. Even with that compulsion you’ve carried all this time, you still perverted the idea of balance in your own sick way.” Sam grimaced. “It’s not just whispers. I can see your memories. I can feel your story.”
“I thought I would lose the chance to keep helping if he exposed me. And I have to help. I can’t not do it.”
“The killing was a choice, Karl. It showed who you really are, how you want to solve problems. Karl, you must never harm another human being again.”
Karl nodded right away.
Sam thought back to an old novel in his father’s bookshelf. “And you can’t, through inaction, allow another human to be harmed.”
“I will not allow that,” Karl agreed.
“Good bye, Karl,” Sam said, and began to walk back up the path.
“He would have been proud of what you’re doing,” Karl said, not deviating from his bricklaying.
Sam left the supervillain moving another stack of bricks closer. But it didn’t matter how many walls he’d built, Sam thought, they would never equal the value of a life like poor Cooper.
Sam felt horrible that he’d laughed at him on the truck. He’d taken advantage of Cooper to help him find Karl. And Cooper had paid for that. He needed to find someone to hint that Cooper would be found in the retaining wall. He deserved to be sent home.
Sam looked at a small notebook he pulled from his back pocket. It read: Jillian Swells. Botswana?
He left Karl bloodying his hands on the brick, mechanically moving one at a time, trying to rebalance the scales of his life one brick at a time.
There would never be enough walls to make that happen.