Footsoldiers: A Super Human Clash Special From Philomel Books by Michael Carroll

MY NAME IS . .  . Well, I’m not going to tell you my real name. What’s the point of having a secret identity if you blurt it out all over the place? My superhero name was Thunder. This was back in the days when I had superhuman powers.
    It’s weird talking about this now, after all this time. When we superhumans lost our abilities it came as a bit of a shock to all of us. Especially for me, because I was in the air over Iceland at the time. I was about eighty meters up, moving pretty fast.
    The Shark and his gang had just pulled off a pretty big heist, and as soon as they heard I was after them, The Shark ordered his men to slow me down while he made a run for it. I don’t know why the bad guys always did that. I’d rounded up The Shark’s men and was after the man himself when—bam!—suddenly my powers were gone and I was falling like a lead potato.
    I was lucky: I landed in a lake. Nearly broke my neck when I hit the water and nearly drowned trying to get out. I’d never learned to swim, you see. Didn’t need to. I could fly. Why would I ever need to swim?
    I’ve learned to swim since, of course.
    The Shark got away. Never heard a word about him again. I can only hope that when
his
powers vanished he found himself in a similar position.
    So this story that I’m going to tell you . . . It might ramble a bit but that’s because I’m really not used to talking about these things. You don’t know what it was like, holding on to these secrets for over a decade.
    No, before you ask, I didn’t know Titan’s real identity, nor Energy’s. I had no idea who Quantum was. I met Paragon once or twice, didn’t really get to talk to him. But I knew Apex. Knew him well. They’re the Big Five, the ones everyone wants to know about. Like they were the best of us or something. Max Dalton—excuse me while I spit in disgust—was and still is a self-obsessed jerk with an ego the size of Texas. The way his publicity people work, you’d think that Dalton was the only effective superhero in the business and the rest of us were working for him.
    But I’m not here to talk about Titan and his gang or the Daltons, not really. I’m here to tell you about the Footsoldiers.
    I doubt you’ve heard of us, but that’s not surprising because we never made the name public. It was kind of a joke name, a dig at Dalton’s own High Command. See what I mean about his ego? He chose a name for his superhero team that deliberately gave the impression they were in charge.
    Most of the time there were four of us in the Footsoldiers. Myself, Apex, Hesperus, and Thalamus. Now and then Impervia and Octavian worked with us. Once, Josh Dalton worked on a kidnapping case with us because he’d split from the High Command after a fight with his brother. He was all right. Smart kid. Always in the shadow of his siblings, though.
    But Octavian was the most frequent of the team’s casual members. You might not remember him. Strange guy. Styled himself after the Roman emperor for some reason we could never figure out. Dressed like him too. Toga, laurel-leaf crown, sandals. His powers were pretty basic: flight, energy rays from his eyes, a good left cross. Useful in a fight, but that was about it.
    One funny thing about Octavian before I go on: he only showed up for a couple of days every three weeks, and it was always at night. He never said why this was, but he implied that it was something to do with “the phases of the moon.” It was Thalamus who figured it out: Octavian was married and his wife didn’t know he was a superhuman. Every three weeks she had to go out of town on a business trip, and Octavian would grab the sheets off the bed to make his “costume.” And he could only do it at night because they lived in his mother’s house and he had to wait until she was asleep.
    It was shortly after we solved that