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Heroes and Civilians. (excerpt)

She’ll pull up any minute now. She took a hard knock on that cornice, sure, but she’s been in worse scrapes than this. This is what she does for a living.

I drifted into Gamma City in search of work, like a lot of people do. At least, that’s what I told myself. If I was being honest I’d admit it was to get closer to her. I’m not always honest, though, am I? I’d lost count of the times I’d seen her on the news and on the front pages of magazines. Pulling bystanders from the wreckage of superbattles, catching cars that plummeted from bridges, deflecting bullets with her N-belt force-shield. It seemed like everyone in Gamma City had had their fates averted by her.

When I was nine my parents bought me her official action figure for Christmas. It was beautiful . A plastic superhero angel that stood almost six inches tall. She had a removable N-belt with a hologram sticker on the clasp, wings that you could spread out or tuck behind her back, and a flesh-coloured button at the nape of her neck. When you pressed it she would say one of the five catchphrases that were written on the side of the box. At lunch I had held it on my lap, pressing the button over and over, pretending that the doll was a walkie talkie and that she was using it to talk directly to me. Halfway through lunch my mother had confiscated it, but after I was excused from the table I retrieved her from the usual hiding place and took her into my room so that our conversation wouldn't be disturbed.

My apartment wasn’t anything special, just two rooms and a toilet. All I had brought with me fit inside one suitcase. The scrapbooks and videos became the feature of the living room. I put the life-size posters on the bedroom walls and the autographed photo from her fan club on the bedside table. I spent my first night in Gamma City sitting in front of the TV, watching the Sixty Minutes interview from a few years back. The one with the footage from the Lord Isotope incident. Every couple of minutes I’d look out the window just in case she happened to fly past.

I was nervous as I stood at the station. I must have checked my watch every thirty seconds. Eventually a breeze picked up, scattering papers and food wrappers. People began shouldering backpacks and tucking newspapers under their arms. I took a deep breath and counted to five. As I fell I turned my head to look at the driver’s face. I don’t even think he saw me. I stuck my arms out as though it might somehow save me. The next thing I knew I was rising up, over the train, over the platform. I tried to look behind myself so I could see her face, but she held me too tightly. We alighted outside the station and I turned to thank her, to finally deliver the speech I’d been practicing since the day I’d bought the plane ticket.

It wasn’t her. My rescuer was a six-foot-tall man wearing a blue and yellow costume and a royal blue cape. I’d never seen him before. He delivered a casual speech about staying behind the yellow line and how suicide wasn’t the answer before leaping into the air and flying away. I watched as he lost himself in the skyline, then walked slowly through the pedestrian tunnel to my platform, past graffiti that declared “RoboGirl is a hottie!”

In the weeks that followed I was caught halfway between the top of the Cambrian Building and the footpath by The Alchemist, helped out of a mangled taxi by Quark, freed from a locked bank vault by Animus and Anima, and had my would-be-mugger beaten up in front of me by a shifty looking guy in a red mask and a black combat jacket with an ‘X’ spray-painted between his shoulder blades. The one time I actually managed to get myself rescued by her, things happened so fast that I didn’t get a chance to talk to her. She set me down lightly on the roof of the building opposite and flew off without saying anything. All I had for company as I walked down the fire escape by myself was the memory of the smell of her sweat and the ozone from her force-shield, the memory of her strong arms around me.

The complete version of this story is available in Normal Service Will Resume, the second anthology of fast fictions by Cardigan Press, available at all good bookstores and also via mail-order from their web site (click here for a list of Australian stockists and a copy of the order form).