The Blue — Week #4

Prompt: As an incurable plague rages across the globe, an avid comic book collector uncovers a hidden family secret.

This was it. This was his time of reckoning.

It was do or die.

My heart clenched. This was my favorite part.

Clark Kent’s eyes burnt with fury. He —

Abruptly, the words were yanked away. I looked up to see Mom’s eyes alight with the same fire.

“There is a plague out there, and you sit here lost in a fantasy.” She spat out the last word. As though Jerry Siegel’s imagination was responsible for The Blue, a deadly bacteria that was currently eating its way through the world.

“Superman would be useful right about now,” I muttered under my breath.

Her eyes flashed. “Superman? You think he exists?” Her lips contorted in the ugliest of snarls. She rolled up the comic book; struck me once across my face. The pain stung the back of my eyelids.

“There are no such things as heroes, only villains.” Mom enunciated each word slowly, as though I were retarded. “Get that into your thick skull… Or I’m going to burn them all!”

“You wouldn’t! I spent all my allowance on them! They’re all I have!”

“Then you best leave them where they belong — high up on that shelf.”

And with a flick of her skirt, she was gone.

I slumped to the floor, my cheek stinging. A bruise was already forming.

I looked up at them. 180 books, all antique editions. Ever since I learned how to read, I’ve been collecting them. DC. Marvel. Archie. Everything in between. I was obsessed with comics.

For me, they were an escape. A very welcome one.

Ever since The Blue went on the loose, life on Earth has been a living hell. Crops died. Rivers dried. Entire industries and cities, plundered and pillaged and perished. Our family was lucky. Dad was on the team of scientists that was working on The Blue, so we had the privilege of being ensconced in The Bubble — a ‘safe zone’ filled with sterilized air and vaccinated people — to extend his life long enough for him to find a cure.

To Mom, however, ‘ensconced’ was just another word for ‘trapped’.

All her friends had died. All her favorite TV shows stopped airing. So as the days passed she grew into a crabby, spiteful lady, whose only pastime was nagging at her obsessive son.

“At least my favorite things won’t go away,” I whispered to myself, stroking the cover of my Superman comic book. “They don’t need cable or Internet.”

“Aye, they don’t.” An unfamiliar voice rang out from behind me.

I scrambled to my feet, swiping at the tears I hadn’t realized were forming in my eyes. “Who are you? How did you get into my house?”

The man smirked. I could only see his lips; the rest of his face was shrouded in black cloth. He was tall and well-built, almost like Superman. “I’m with the Secret Forces,” he said, alluding to the renegades that roamed around The Bubble. They were an elite team, sworn to unravel the mystery of The Blue’s proliferation. “All I had to do was walk in.”

“Where’s my mom?” I asked.

He laughed. “She won’t be bothering us for a bit.”

My blood ran cold. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing for you to worry about, little boy.” His voice turned sinister. “Now, show me where your father’s study room is, or you’re going to join her.”

“No!” I screamed, and flung the comic at his face. It hit him with a gratifying THWACK. His lips hardened into a thin line. He walked over; held me in a steel-tight grip.

“You will show it to me,” he growled.

Sobbing, I led him down the hallway. Dad had never let me into his study. I wondered what the Secret Forces were looking for in it.

The man tried the handle. It was locked.

With a loud grunt, he shoved his entire weight onto the door. It popped and swung open with a creak.

Both our jaws dropped at the same time. Inside, there was the whirring and buzzing of machinery; midnight blue microbes writhed in an unending row of petri dishes. The Blue.

“He’s… making them?” I whispered. “But why…?”

“We’ve suspected it for some time now,” the man replied, his voice grim. “The Blue didn’t start out as a flesh-eating pandemic. When scientists first created it, it was meant to consume the malignant cells in people’s bodies. It would have been the cure to cancer. They were going to be our heroes.”

My mind flashed to Superman then.

“But then, one of the scientists rebelled. He wanted the fame and glory all for himself. So he smuggled the bacteria out, and claimed it as his own. But The Blue did not fare too well out of a lab…”

“That’s how it got out of control,” I gasped, the realization dawning on me like a comic book climax. Everything started to make sense. Mom’s downward spiral. Dad’s prolonged absence. The Bubble.

It was him. Dad was the rouge scientist.

But one thing still didn’t make sense.

“If The Blue is so bad, then why is my father manufacturing more of them?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out.”

“Well, you won’t live to tell the tale.”

We whipped around to find a stone-faced Dad gripping a wild-eyed Mom.

“Alexander, explain yourself — ” The man’s sentence caught in his throat. Dad had nipped his way to the closest petri dish; yanked it open. The Blue inside squirmed in anticipation.

“You don’t want to do this,” the man warned.

“Oh, but I do,” Dad sneered, and looked me in the eye. “You see, Billy, there are no such things as heroes.”

In one swift move, he catapulted The Blue onto the man’s face. The flesh on his cheeks began disintegrating as soon as it made contact. He shrieked. Mom fainted. Dad smiled.

“Only villains.”