Jason, aka Prime, began to stir awake and looked groggily around the room. Someone was arguing, and someone else was yelling. Something about money…

  He knew he wasn’t at home. The floor was hard, not like the bed he’d enjoyed in his childhood, and his parents had rarely argued in the kind of voices he heard on either side of him right now. Further, money hadn’t ever been an issue in his house growing up, and so these folks couldn’t have been his parents.

  There was a weird smell in the air-or maybe it was just in his nostrils. And he was thirsty. His throat and tongue were dry and wanted water. What had-

  Henry. His voice. The rich kid with a ton of entitlement issues was yelling into the comlink again.

  “Can’t you understand the gravity of the situation? I’m pinned down here, Prime is down, and this lady is increasing her demands by the minute! I need backup!”

  “Well, you’re not gonna get it, bucko!” the Streak’s voice, tinged by laughter and mirth, crackled through the radio. “You made yer Dark-bed here, and you’re gonna have to lie in it! Give her some o’that money you’re always throwing around and then get yer ass offa the base, like Jason said to-”

  “Jason is down! Didn’t you hear me? And quit using our secret I.D. names! That lady is-”

  “Aw, Henry, put a sock in it, willya? Everybody knows our IDs already, thanks to that reporter from the Enquirer you were messing around with. Yeah, we all knew about that, but Jason said to let it ride for some stupid reason. Now, you get yourself out of this, since you’re always telling us how ‘I am the Darkness’ you are, and all that crap. TIme to prove it, ‘cause our bylaws don’t let us come to help out nd risk our own necks unless you’re a helpless civvie. Which you’re not. G’bye.”

  Click.

  #

  Robby drove his rental car carefully through the streets of the city. He’d gotten insurance, and he hadn’t been in any real kind of accident since he’d been in his early 20s, but he still liked to be careful.

  He’d called Bea at home to make sure she was alright; he’d been ready to talk her through another anxiety attack if need be, but it looked like this wasn’t going to be necessary.

  He glanced at the sheet of paper where he’d scribbled the address of the Homestead base. Not likely they’d just let him walk in, but if Jane was there, then it was a little more than likely that someone from Bea’s old crew might be there, too. At the very least, he could…

  “Who’d you think you’re kidding?” he said, looking at himself in the rearview mirror. “There’s a part of you that’s always wanted to get back on that horse and ride through downtown traffic again.” Eyes back on the road, he continued speaking out loud, as if there were another person in the car.

  Robert Hampton hadn’t been raised in the most privileged of circumstances. Not exactly. His father had been the groundskeeper for an insanely wealthy family in the Northeast, and he’d been raised in a modest apartment with him and his mother above one of the garages on the grounds of the family.

  The apartment wasn’t tiny, and the view was beautiful; where many boys his age grew up seeing apartment buildings and dirty alleyways, Robby had grown up seeing rolling hills of green, blue skies and horses running in the midst of driftwood fences. He’d grown up helping his father and being home-schooled by his mother, long before public schools had gone completely downhill and homeschooling had become something of a necessity for many parents concerned about either academics, values, or keeping their kids from turing into junkies before they finished middle school. And where many of his peers had still been stuck in ‘See Jane Run/Run, Jane, run!,’ he’d been reading and seeing his mom and dad read and act out scenes from Romeo and Juliet [gross! Kissing!], A Midsummer Night’s Dream [funny as all hell, especially when Robby got to hear his straightlaced dad say the word ‘ass’ over and over again], and Robby’s all-time favorite, the rousing Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Henry the Fifth.

  Friends had come from Church, family was always home for dinner, and his folks rarely fought. It had been a decent life. And when he’d turned seventeen he’d enlisted in the Army for a four year hitch, and seen some action in World War Two.

  Once he’d returned Stateside, though, things seemed different. His father had seen it, and rather than have mom up every night saying rosaries for his safety for another three years Rooby had found himself encouraged to enroll in a short course that was the precursor to the modern idea of a police academy. In eight weeks he’d hit the streets as a uniformed patrolman, first walking the beat and then assigned to a squad car.

  Driving and making a turn, he smiled to himself as he remembered the day that had almost sealed him as a superhero in the eyes of the press and the city; as they were trying to chase down a purse snatcher who was first running and then had jumped into an accomplice’s car, Robby had seen a horse standing near a parade float. The parade had just ended, and Robby, seized by the kind of near-stupid inspiration that only a boy in his early 20s could have, leaped onto the white beast after giving the requisite one-line statement about requisitioning a civilian vehicle.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  The purse snatcher and his driver accomplice, stuck in the same traffic jam that had tied up Robby’s driver partner. Robby had ridden both miscreants down and drawn his pistol on them, getting them to exit their vehicle and lean against the car until backup had arrived.

  He hadn’t gotten any official citation, but the picture in the paper of him riding the horse was too good for any editor who wanted to sell papers to resist. It had gone national, and Robby had been a minor celebrity for a few weeks, while the other cops at the station house had called him names like Sir Lancelot, King Arthur and The Champion.

  And, after those few weeks were done, Robby had gotten himself a motorcycle.

  Painting the trim white had been his own idea. Inside, he knew he was looking for the horse again; a motorcycle was less maintenance and didn’t eat quite so much, though he had enough close calls in the first week of driving that he understood why the insurance rates were so high.

  After swing shift was done and Robby went home to his little apartment, he’d get on his bike and drive through the city. He took to wearing a helmet long before it was the law for a biker to do so. T took a while for him to admit, even to himself, that he was doing it because it reminded him of the stories he’d read about knights suiting up for for battle. The pale leather jacket [he looked; white leather didn’t exist anywhere that he looked] was part of it as well; all of it went into the new persona he’d crafted for himself as The Champion.

  Ironically, though he took his bike into the worst neighborhoods he could find, he had a genuinely hard time finding opportunities to fight crime. Most of the time he would chase away kids trying to break into shops or cars, and interrupt the occasional mugging or a date gone seriously wrong.

  Until the bank robbery.

  It was dusk and the alarm went off, sounding loudly enough that everyone for several city blocks could hear it. Robby had sped his bike fast as possible to the scene, just in time to see a gang of toughs dressed in identical black masks and jackets running into a car.

  Robby had ridden his bike, gunning the engine and reaching out with his arm to clothesline the last bad guy in the line of crooks. The remaining four sped off, and Robby had given pursuit.

  Robby had gotten the license plate number and doubled back to the mook he’d knocked down, cuffing him and leaving him for the cops to find. Robby had hightailed it out of the area, not wanting to hear another round of jokes from his fellow officers.

  But there had been a ton of pictures and the papers had gone wild; the tip he’d given the FBI of the license plate checked out, and the black-clad gang had been dubbed ‘The Black Knights,’ all of whom had been caught by The Champion.

  Robby had found it funny, and began riding down bad guys on his bike when he had the chance. On another occasion, he’d tossed off a line of Shakespeare from Henry the 5th, and it had made the papers as well. Soon some eighteen year old comic book writer or artist had begun making him into a comic book figure, giving him a white horse and a lance to ride down the city streets, even putting him in a full suit of armor.

  He’d ridden in on a white horse at some promotional events after that, and after one of them, he’d had the good fortune to interrupt a robbery by a member of the newest group of costumed robbers to hit the scene. In a freak accident, he’d ended up tumbling off of the horse he’d been riding back from the event, right into the group of thieves. He caught only one of them, but luckily for him it was the prettiest of the bunch, the one they called Queen Bee.

  She’d tried to jolt Robby with her ‘stinger’ wand, but any cop worth his salt knew how to disarm a petty thief untrained in hand-to-hand fighting. He’d put the cuffs on her, held her under arrest until a few cop cars had come along and...couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  Later, when she’d turned state’s evidence against her crew, she’d shown up on his doorstep dressed in a mink coat and an evening gown, and asked to take him out to dinner. Six months later they were married, and the comic books had an even bigger field day.

  A year later, he’d been formally invited to be part of the intelligence community. By then there were so many new guys hitting the streets with costumes and crazy names that he and Bea had managed to slip under the collective radar of the popular culture, and live a normal life raising their daughter.

  And now? Now he and her were retirees. She had anxiety issues which he’d learned to live with and help manage, and he usually liked being a grandfather.

  But today? He looked at some folks like the ‘baby heroes’ as his generation called them, and saw a number of twenty-something and early thirty-something kids who were playing games and living out comic-book fantasies, rather than actually doing the work of being cops. Prime was an exception, but even he acted a little foolish now and again. And if you were foolish enough to get Robby talking about the trend for teenagers with powers getting recruited by the government or other groups to form independent ‘crime-fighting’ clubs? You’d be sitting for the next hour hearing Robby complain about the recipe for disaster that was going to be.

  But now? Now he was driving, headed out to see just what Bea’s old crew were up to. He really had never under her fear of them seeking revenge; they’d never committed a violent act against anyone in their career, save freezing The One solid, and maybe the time that Mitch had zapped some semi-psycho's legs off by accident.

  Still, something in him was itching to check this whole thing out. Something inside said this was something he should see, do something about. He’d had that voice, analogous to the ‘little man’ Ernest Borgnine had talked about in the movie Double Indemnity, something inside that said this needed to be done.

  So here he was, lying to his wife and taking a little trip, in a car the same color as his bike and horse in the comic books. Likely there’d be nothing at all, and he’d be turned away from the baby-heroes’ HQ, and…

  He’d just rounded the corner as a long line of vehicles began to drive through the front gate. Something had happened, he could tell even at this distance, from the stressed out look on the young security guard’s face and the lurching advances the cars were making onto the property.

  Robby thought carefully, wondering just how far he could spin his past credentials into a set of current credibilities…

  #

  TO BE CONTINUED....