And Puma’s death, while unplanned, had been a bonus. Only Puma and my father had known the truth about Nicholas Haste’s father. For possession of that knowledge alone they deserved to die.
Doctor Julia Angle was good to her word. She worked tirelessly to save victims of the mayhem. Neither Redhawk nor I hit the level of injury that required her services, so we never saw her when we reported to the hospital. Later, however, L’Angyle did repair Greg’s ankle. He, after all, had to appear as the Mayor, and Redhawk hadn’t been the one who’d talked her husband into heading into battle again. That’s why, a week hence, as we gathered again at City Hall for a Reconciliation Ceremony, the stitches in my hand itched fiercely and she smiled smugly whenever I scratched.
All of us were arrayed there, heroes new and old. Colonel Constitution III was still in a wheelchair, which his grandfather–also in costume–pushed. On that dais, which had been built in the middle of the stairs and festooned with the patriotic bunting usually reserved for the Fourth of July, the other older heroes joined the mayor and his wife. Jimmy Nimura, using a set of his sister’s rings, appeared as Redhawk. Nighthaunt stood next to him–being Tony Ramoso giving his best portrayal of a hero ever, and utterly unaware of the irony surrounding that role. Golden Guardian rounded out the old guard.
The youngsters, including Coyote, Puma, Vixen, Gravilass, Gravé, Blue Ninja and the survivors of C4 II flanked the dais on the right side, while the police and their bag-pipers held the other wing. The Russians, with Red Angel in the middle, stood below the dais.
Selene, Grant, Julia and I had front row seats behind a police cordon. Grant and I had actually camped out the night before to get them. The ladies brought breakfast and joined us. The four of us could have been up there, too, but where? We weren’t really the old guard and weren’t youngsters.
The bag-pipers finished a mournful dirge and Mayor Greylan stepped to the podium. The press had fully bought the story that Greylan had secured himself in a bunker in City Hall and had been directing the defense from there. The mayor had even called upon heroes like Golden Guardian and Nighthaunt to come out of retirement to help, and had given permission to Blue Ninja to hijack the Murdoch system and put out his message.
The citizenry cheered. Greg basked for a moment, then turned and opened his arms to encompass the heroes. The cheers redoubled. Greg completed the turn, taking in the people packing the square, then gestured, tamping the volume down.
“Citizens of Capital City, we have come through a great ordeal. A madman came to our city and studied it carefully. More deadly than Belle Geste, more intelligent than Doctor Sinisterion, Mr. Big watched us and found our weakness. We had allowed ourselves, through our profound respect for the heroes arrayed on these steps, to embrace crime as part of our lives. We had established rules that made it acceptable. This permitted us to ignore an epidemic which, like a flu, was one tiny mutation away from becoming virulent. And deadly. We gave it a safe harbor. We gave it time. That mutation developed.
“And it would have destroyed us save for the valiant efforts of those who live among us, hidden from view. I don’t just mean our Superfriends, but all of you. I’m talking about eight-year old Marianne Henderson who went door to door in her apartment house, waking people and getting them out after she smelled smoke. I’m talking about Frankie and Tim Mazolla, who stopped looters from breaking into the Sung bakery over on 41st. And I’m talking about Mrs. Gladys Lovette, ninety-one years old, who pulled a wounded policeman off the street and bound up his wounds with skills she learned as a nurse in the Viet Nam War. Each one of these people is a hero.”
Greg looked down at his notes, then just closed the folder and spoke from the heart. “We all wonder if we have it inside to be a hero. Yes, I’m surrounded by very special people. By dint of birth or invention or hard work and training, they’ve each forged an identity that we recognize as heroic. But all that training, all that native skill, would mean nothing, if they didn’t have the conviction in their hearts that they could make a difference. And they have that conviction. They act on it.
“And the simple truth of the matter is that we all do. Being a hero is just making a difference. A positive difference. You help somebody out. You make a run to the grocery, you help them hang a picture, you get a cat out of tree. That might be nothing to you, but, to them, it’s the world. It may be easy not to make the effort, but making it isn’t that hard. Being committed to making it can be, but making a difference is so big a reward that it’s more than worth it.”
He looked out and just for a moment, our gazes touched. “Our city is at a crossroads. This is a clash of civilizations. One civilization believes in remaining quiet, looking out for themselves, avoiding any effort save one for which they are rewarded. These people are small and bitter. They will die friendless, unloved and unlamented. Ultimately they will be forgotten.
“The competing civilization is one that cares for others. It offers help where needed and, more importantly, looks for that need. It volunteers without expecting recompense. It knows that when the world is made better for one person, it becomes better for all people. It lives by the golden rule, treating others as they want to be treated themselves.”
He opened his hands again. “We are at a point where we get to choose. We can be a dark and cold city of bitter people, or a shining golden city which leads by example for the rest of the world. The choice will be yours and, by the actions you have all taken recently, I would say the choice has already been made.”
The crowd cheered loudly and inarticulately until a chant of “four more years,” began to fill the square. Greg blushed, then cued the leader of the bag-pipers who started playing Amazing Grace and quieted the crowd.
Once the music finished, medals were handed out and pictures taken. The four of us watched, being proud parents and all. I counted Coyote and Puma as mine, too, until I saw Kim’s parents pose for a picture with him, and Diana’s grandmother embrace her. I mean, I still considered them family and, one more time, was reminded of what I’d missed.
Eventually the crowd thinned. Julia and Selene got ahead of us. I glanced at Grant, picking up the thread of a conversation we’d had during the night. “So, is your coming trip to Africa to resume travel writing, or are you and Julia…?”
He sighed. “She pointed out that my willingness to train heroes–and my martial arts dominance over them–were simply ways of me telling myself I could still be a hero without ever having to put myself on the line again.”
I patted him on the back. “It’s a bitch being married to a smart woman, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, and a doctor at that. It was my fear of getting hurt again that she couldn’t stand to be around. It turned me into someone I wasn’t. I wasn’t the man with whom she’d fallen in love. While she wasn’t happy about my going off as Karate King, she’s seen that it closed the last wound.”
“So you two will try again?”
“She says she never stopped loving me.”
“And you?”
“I love her now more than ever.”
Terry Veck came out of a doorway and joined us as we strolled. “You like the speech?”
I nodded. “Hit the right notes. Hopeful. Upbeat. Empowering and inclusive. Could be the start of a revolution.”
Grant nodded. “I think some people took the message to heart.”
Terry smiled. “And some didn’t.”
“Positive thinking, Terry.”
“I am thinking positively, Grant.” He produced a cigar and lit it. “And what I’m thinking is this. One night a week, we get together. A few of us old guys. For old time sake.”
Grant half-smiled. “Boy’s night out?”
I nodded toward the women in front of us. “They’ll never believe we’re playing poker.”
Terry blew a smoke ring. “You gonna believe they’re getting together for quilting-bees and Tupperware parties?”
I laughed. “Good point.”
“You called it. Th
is could be the start of a revolution.” Terry nodded solemnly. “Every revolution needs some good revolutionaries.”
Karate King frowned. “My wife will kill me.”
Golden Guardian laughed. “Technically she’ll just refuse to put you back together again.”
“Okay, if I’m in town. Maybe.”
“How about you?” Terry jabbed that cigar toward me. “Hasn’t retirement driven you nuts yet?”
“Can we call it a P-crud therapy session?”
“Yeah, oh yeah.” His smile broadened. “It’ll definitely fix what ails you.”
I smiled.
About the Author
Michael A. Stackpole is a New York Times bestselling author of over forty novels. He is best known for his work in the Star Wars ™ universe, including such novels as Rogue Squadron and I, Jedi. In Hero Years… I’m Dead is his first Digital-Original novel. You can find out more about Mike and his work at his website: Stormwolf.com.
Behind The Scenes
(The Making Of In Hero Years… I’m Dead)
If there is one question authors get asked the most—aside from, “Are you really the author?”—it’s “Where do you get your ideas?” This generally comes coupled with a declaration that the questioner just can’t imagine ever putting a book together. When it doesn’t, the question comes from folks who want to write. They ask because they want to reassure themselves that they’re doing things the right way.
Books and stories tend to be an accretion of ideas. That’s certainly true with In Hero Years...I’m Dead. What follows is an attempt to map out what I pulled together where. It’s specifically not a declaration of “the right way” to do things, it’s just a chronicle of one way to do them. The process was remarkable and fun, since I did things I’d not done before. I’m pretty sure that duplicating how this novel came together would be impossible for anyone, including me, but there are bits and pieces of the experience that have been folded back into my subsequent writing.
This project, in many ways, started with the title. The title, in turn, was born out of a personal experience. I was with my brother’s family on a visit to Flagstaff, Arizona. We were having dinner in a restaurant and I was telling my niece, Faith, how to figure ages in dog years. At the time, she was 70 years old in dog years.
She, very innocently, looked up at me and asked, “How old are you in dog years?”
I replied, “In dog years, I’m dead.” Glib and funny, the remark stuck with me and got shelved for later use.
In September 2006 I attended DragonCon. I recall entering the room with all of the podcasting programming. I’d been podcasting pretty much since the start, just like all the other podcasters in the room, but I was decidedly older than they were. I’d stepped to the side and just saw all these younger folks talking enthusiastically about this shared passion for podcasting. I got a sense—a feeling—of an older hero being in the same position. And the joke came back to me as “In hero years, I’m dead.”
That sense is not unusual. It’s a glimmer into a character that’s been percolating in the back of my mind. A psychiatrist would suggest I was viewing my own sense of mortality, and that I was feeling the contrast of being involved in something with younger folks, but being acutely aware that I was skewing the mean age to the high side. That’s a convenient explanation for that sort of thing, but I’ve learned it’s really something else. Because characters are the means through which writers and readers enter a story, getting a sense for a character is really my trying on mood and attitude. It’s akin to an actor getting “in character.” I recognize this as my subconscious mind’s way of telling me that story elements are coming together.
I couldn’t do anything with the story at that point because I was finishing up The New World for Bantam Books. In March of 2007 they decided they didn’t want to work with me anymore, so I scrambled around for work that would pay bills. I did a number of short jobs, including writing the script for a Lara Croft, Tomb Raider animated short to celebrate the property’s tenth anniversary. (Yes, my first produced script starred Minnie Driver… or her voice, anyway.)
A subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting was behind the short films. They brought me in to the San Diego Comicon in 2007. It wasn’t the first time I’d gone, but I’d not been recently and the show had become huge. When I wasn’t doing autographings at the Turner booth, or at the Bantam booth, I wandered around a lot. In my wanderings I came to a portion of the floor where comic artists manned table after table, selling old pages, issues of comics and offering to do sketches. While the lines for picking up swag from TV shows like Heroes were long, this artist ghetto was practically empty. What made it seem worse was the number of old-time artists upon whose work the entire industry was built. They had no customers and almost no one recognized them or their work.
That image stuck with me and inspired the Hall of Fame sequence. That sequence was really the first thing I locked in on for the book. It gave me a point to aim for.
A number of other background experiences and elements came into play. I’d been a Batman fan since I started reading comics. For a Champions roleplaying game I created the character Revenant. He was Batmanesque, with a dash of The Shadow tossed in. From The Shadow pulps I pulled the idea of his having a string of secret identities. I liked the idea of him being a human with a bag of tricks—hence the term Felix. Having a variety of secret identities meant he probably didn’t have Bruce Wayne money, which worked just fine.
I would have loved to have been able to do a Revenant comic, but all my attempts fizzled back in the 1980s. However, in the middle of that decade, Ken St. Andre ran a play-by-mail roleplaying game called Crossover Earth. The concept was simple. Players would run both a hero and a villain. Villains would draw up caper plans in two versions. The overt version would detail the caper. The covert version would include other stuff the villain hoped to get if the hero failed to stop the caper.
Ken would send the overt plan to a hero. The hero player would write up a short story explaining how the hero stopped the villain’s plan. If Ken liked the story, it became canon. If he didn’t like the story, he sent the story off to the villain and let the villain take a crack at writing up the incident. Ken would then pick the better of the two stories to become canon. Then, once a month, Ken would publish all the stories in a big fanzine and each player, after reading through the accounts, would be asked to rank the heroes and villains from 1-25.
Many players were using characters from commercial comics universes, like Captain America, Moon Knight and Batman. Bruce Harlick played and used his character Marksman from the Champions rules. I ran Revenant, but wasn’t terribly active in the first two cycles. I was over at Ken’s house as he was tabulating the votes from the second round and he commented that Captain American and Moon Knight were so far ahead of everyone in the points race, that no one could ever catch them.
I’ve never seen a gauntlet tossed down that I didn’t itch to pick up.
And so I did. Over the next seven months I ground out a bunch of Revenant stories. Bruce and I did some crossover work, linking a couple of tales. The Captain America player dropped out, so Moon Knight was my big competition. He tried to organize heroes into a Justice League and invited Revenant. Revenant refused, making it very well known that he thought Moon Knight (as played) was a Fascist. (That was deliberately hyperbolic. The player is a nice guy, and was just having fun with the role.) And the Revenant stories took some peculiar twists and turns. At one point Revenant was rated on both the Hero and Villain scales.
In the very last rating period, Revenant overtook Moon Knight and won the first year’s worth of the game.
While that was fun, I was left with a whole pile of superhero fiction that I really couldn’t do anything with. The experience had been good for me, however, because it taught me to write fast. I also had a lot of fun with the stories, which was good. Just prior to the game starting I’d gotten a pretty brutal rejection of a story that I thought had sold to an antholo
gy. It kind of set me back on my heels, and the Crossover Earth writing was an end-around disappointment.
In 1987 I sent the Revenant stories off to my then agent, Ricia Mainhardt. She didn’t know what to do with them. About a year later, in conjunction with John Varley, She sold Ace on an anthology called Superheroes. I got invited to write a Revenant story. I made a couple of false starts. I figured a Revenant story should be dark, nasty and tied up in this mythos of shifting identities. Which mean that all the stories I turned out were too idiosyncratic to stand on their own.
A number of years before that I’d purchased a white paper on product development. What it suggested was simple. If you want a new product, take any existing product and turn it inside-out, upside-down or swap black for white. I know, kinda New-Agey mumbo-jumbo there. What it means is that you should challenge all preconceptions, so that’s what I did.
Revenant stories are dark, so I wrote a funny story.
Revenant works alone. In this tale, not only was there a Justice League type group, but Revenant gets a six year old boy as a side kick.
Revenant stories are serious. This story was serious, too, but had some parody elements. I used a number of stereotypical heroes. This story, in fact, was the first appearance of Colonel Constitution, complete with secret identity.
The story, Peer Review, was a lot of fun to write, and is still one of my most favorite stories.
Another aspect of the Revenant mythos was the idea that he might pass the mantle on to others. I also established one of his secret identities as that of an occultist named Damon Crowley. When Game Designers Workshop asked me to write Dark Conspiracy novels for them, and I needed someone who would be aware of other dimensions and magical stuff, I brought Damon over into that universe. He’s never referred to as Revenant in those books, but all the other names he goes by point right to that identity.
And, in those books, he works with a man called Coyote. I’ve always liked the idea of a hero named Coyote because coyotes are survivors. I once heard that coyotes are the only animals with a bounty on them who have expanded their range. I don’t know if that’s true, but I like the idea. On my morning walks to Starbucks I see coyotes often enough. Thank goodness they’re as terrified of me as I am of them. I usually spot them when they’re slipping away through the shadows.