We Could Be Heroes Read online

  Two small smoke bombs that she’d been palming did the rest, instantly obscuring her position.

  The bombs were pretty self-explanatory. Throw them, and they create smoke, lots of it too, a thick, black coal-like smoke that the light couldn’t penetrate.

  The smoke gave Zoe the cover that she needed, and before the two men knew it, both of them were lying in a pile on the ground, cut the fuck up, bleeding and wheezing.

  My God, was Zoe Goa Ramone proud of herself.

  She did not always whoop ass when she went out on her patrols. Oftentimes, she just gathered intel, or tried to do something only to have to get away quickly before she got her ass handed to her.

  And even in that moment, as she had on a few other occasions, she thought of sending Sam a mental message telling him that she’d done it, that she’d done the work of an actual exemplar, a hero.

  He would be stoked to hear it, even though he didn’t have any power aside from his strong sense of smell, or so he claimed.

  Sam did seem to always understand and interpret Zoe’s moods correctly, but she figured that was because he was a good guy, well, aside from the fact that other women liked him for some reason, and that the two just clashed too much.

  That had been their problem, they had some crazy wonderful sex, I’m talking some X-rated shit here that was pleasing for both sides. But there always seemed to be some tension between them when they weren’t humping, a line of argument always present.

  As much as Zoe would hate to admit it now, it had been her idea for them to go their separate ways. And now she wanted him back, yet Sam wanted to keep their ways separate.

  Or at least that was what she thought.

  She actually hadn’t reached out to him to try to see if he wanted to mend things, so there was no telling if that was how he actually felt, but maybe it was better that way.

  “Yeah, I did it,” Zoe told herself, forgetting about Sam as she said their favorite verbal affirmation aloud. “I am a badass…”

  “Don’t move!”

  Zoe whipped around to see a Centralia police officer, an exemplar, his eyes glowing red as he scanned through the smoke. “Spotted, eleven o’clock,” he told someone off to his right, and in that moment, Zoe felt herself being pushed forward, onto her knees, where she was cuffed, and hauled to her feet by an incredible force.

  “I’ve got her,” a female officer said, the woman now standing behind Zoe as she led her out of the smoke. “You’re under arrest for impersonating an exemplar,” the speedy woman started to say.

  “You’re arresting me? How about arrest those two guys who tried to assault some woman?”

  “We don’t see a woman around here,” the male police officer said, the redness in his eyes wavering. “No guys either.”

  “They hit me too,” Zoe said, turning her shoulder to him so he could see what she hoped was a bruise.

  “Sure they did,” the female officer said. “We’ll get details back at the station, but for now, you are under arrest.”

  Chapter Three: Not Quite a Conjugal Visit

  (Don’t you just love reunions?)

  It was love at like three hundredth sight. There was no telling how many times Sam Meeko and Zoe Goa Ramone had seen each other before the start of this twisted tale, because really, how often does someone keep track of how many times they’ve seen someone else, especially when they were dating?

  And it wasn’t really love, it was more like shock once they locked eyes in cells across from one another.

  Apparently, it had been a pretty busy night in Centralia, so the fuzz were keeping low-level offenders, male and female, in a room with two holding cells.

  What could possibly go wrong, right?

  There was a lot of catcalling (especially when everyone saw Zoe Goa Ramone aka the sort of famous cosplayer know as Tiger Lily aka hotbody in the wannabe superhero outfit come into the room) by some shitty dudes in Sam’s cell, and jealous looks from some trashy broads in Zoe’s cell who had been brought in for public intoxication.

  A super fat, trolley-sized police officer with weird warts and a puffy red face occasionally told everyone to quiet down.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Zoe asked.

  She really missed me, Sam thought, inhaling her essence.

  It was like someone had taken all his sinus problems and congestion away, and shoved two giant tubes up each nostril allowing Sam to smell any and everything in his vicinity, gather data from it, and understand intricate details about its life.

  He had been mouth-breathing for the last ten minutes, but seeing Zoe had made him forget all about his control breathing, the non-exemplar who very well might be an exemplar with his newfound power, unable to fathom how she came to be in the exact same cell as him.

  And he understood why she would be here, probably because she was impersonating an exemplar, but he was still unable to fathom the odds of her actually being in the same holding cell as him, especially when the women and men were generally separated.

  Talk about a kawinkidink.

  Sam didn’t even use the word ‘kawinkidink’ because it wasn’t a term that anyone had ever heard of in Centralia, but if he had known the definition, he would most assuredly have agreed that this was a lucky, chance occurrence.

  The woman in the cage before him, the one who brained his fucks out more times than he could count, hadn’t spoken to him in over a year.

  And he really didn’t know why; Sam thought that they had been getting along just fine. Sure, there had been a few fights, but what couple didn’t have fights?

  No, there was something seriously wrong with what happened between them, and now he could sense that she actually missed him, that she had fingered herself earlier thinking about him, that the dark-haired girl with fake tiger ears had a soft spot for one Samuel Meeko, and of all places to explore these feelings…

  “I got arrested,” Sam finally told her.

  “It took you one minute to tell me that? Of course you got arrested! I got arrested too, both of us are arrested. How did it take you one minute to formulate that thought? Why did you get arrested?” she asked, her large chest heaving up and down.

  “Lots on my mind,” he finally said, reverting back to mouth-breathing.

  “You still didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’m not proud of it. I got caught impersonating, let’s just say that…”

  “Duh. Same here, but there have to be more details than that.” Zoe was scared, Sam could smell it on her, and the fear chemicals mixed with her surprise at seeing him was affecting her breathing in some way.

  “Yeah, sorry,” Sam said through the bars, reminding himself to breathe through his mouth, especially after one of the shitty dudes behind him belched.

  “Stop talking to each other, inmates,” the fat prison guard said before he returned to his gossip magazine on Centralian exemplars.

  “I got arrested for doing something up north…” Sam finally said.

  “What did you do?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “You aren’t going to like it.”

  “What the hell did you do, Sam?” she asked, her voice rising.

  “Look, it doesn’t matter. Well, I guess it does matter, but I was impersonating an exemplar, okay? Probably the same reason you’re in here, right?”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right,” Zoe said, her dark eyes dropping.

  “You guys got busted for impersonating exemplars too?” a woman asked, stepping up next to Zoe. She was lean and fit, dressed in clothing that guys usually wore, yet she was cute too, a tomboy of sorts, in a pair of tight suspenders and a loose-fitting shirt that revealed some cleavage.

  “I’m Helena, by the way,” the woman said. She wore a brown cap, gray hair jutting out the back and tied into two tight ponytails.

  “Hi, Helena, nice to meet you,” Sam said.

  Zoe’s eyes narrowed on Sam. “I thought you were talking to me, not her.”

  “Is there any
reason I can’t talk to both of you?” Sam asked.

  Zoe and Helena exchanged glances. Finally, Zoe shrugged. “I guess that’s okay, it’s not like we can go anywhere to be in private.”

  “I only came up to talk to you two because I heard someone mention something about impersonating an exemplar. That’s why I’m in here too,” Helena said, tipping her hat to Sam.

  “Okay, so looks like we’re all in for the same thing,” said Sam.

  “What are the chances of that?” Helena asked.

  “Does it matter?” asked Zoe.

  “I’m going to blow!” a man behind Sam shouted out, pressing his hands to his stomach.

  “Please, no…” Zoe watched in horror as the man stripped his pants off and aimed his puckered asshole at the chubby prison guard.

  Sam tried to get to the opposite side of the cell, his fingers pinched on his nose just in time for the inmate’s bowel explosion, but he was too late to avoid the ass-splosion.

  Sam tried not to breathe anything in, holding his breath as an alarm went off, as the fat guard choked, calling for backup.

  It wasn’t pretty, but the prisoner’s scatological act at least cleared everyone out of the room, Sam, Helena, and Zoe were quickly led into an interrogation room.

  And all this happened pretty quickly too.

  One moment the man was aiming his hairy sphincter at the chubby prison guard, the next moment he was blowing it out the other end, and a couple moments after that, more prison guards rushed in wearing riot gear and wielding batons.

  But the important matter remained: Sam, tomboy Helena, and Zoe were separated from the pack.

  “I can finally breathe,” Sam said, sucking in big gulps of air through his mouth, his hands on his knees.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Zoe asked, slugging him.

  “Aside from the fact that someone just shit everywhere?” Helena asked. “He seems fine to me.”

  “No, we have a history,” Zoe told her coldly. “And there’s something different about him, about the way he looks.”

  Helena shrugged. “He looks the same to me as he did back in the cell.”

  “I can’t believe I have to have this conversation with you,” Zoe told the woman. “I hardly even know you.”

  “Well you should know me, or at least, you should know of my family. Helena Knight, sole heiress of the Knight Corporation,” Helena said, offering her hand to Zoe, whose jaw had just dropped open. When Zoe didn’t take her hand, Helena took off her hat, her gray hair falling out, Zoe’s mouth dropping even further as she recalled seeing her picture in one of the tabloids.

  “Why…why are you in here?”

  “Same reason you are,” said Helena, “I thought we already went over that.”

  “Don’t you have some fancy-ass lawyers or something you could get to break you out of here?”

  Helena’s smile cracked. “There are some things I’d prefer my family not know about.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Sam said, and in that instant, with a single whiff, Sam knew the two would have a future together. He didn’t know what this future would entail, but he could tell that Helena Knight was attracted to him in some way.

  He could also tell by the way that Zoe was glaring at them that this may be an issue.

  “It’s my nose,” Sam told the two. “I can smell everything, like I said back there. Everything. I hit my nose when they arrested me, and it’s like a door opened up into everyone’s life. My sense of smell is through the roof… ”

  “Stop bullshitting us, Sam,” Zoe started to say.

  “Okay then, Mister Sniff Test, tell me something about me,” said Helena Knight, lifting the back of her hand to him. “Let’s see if you get it right.”

  “Are you sure?” Sam asked, his nostrils flaring.

  “I’d like to see this newfound ability of yours, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll try my best,” and with that, Sam brought her hand to his nose.

  Chapter Four: Birds of a Feather

  (A chapter about what Sam Meeko sensed when he focused on Helena’s enticing scent.)

  Helena Knight liked dressing like a stylish metrosexual, well, if Centralia had metrosexuals. Her normal get-up involved a dress shirt, loose in the front, tucked into a pair of high-waisted slacks, tight around the rear, her ankles exposed, cute ballet slippers.

  Think sexy tomboy here.

  Helena was fit now, but she hadn’t always been that way.

  When she was a kid, Helena was mad chunky, and she never thought she’d grow out of it. Hell, her parents didn’t think she’d grow out of it either, but then puberty came like an airstrike, and boom, the heiress known as Helena Knight became tall, lean, and limber. And that was before her breasts grew in size, distracting a few of her father’s perverted rich buddies (don’t worry, nothing happened between them, this isn’t that type of story).

  And then there was the reason she was in the slammer, something Sam’s sniffer also picked up.

  True to her word back in the shared cell, Helena Knight had been caught impersonating an exemplar.

  However, Helena had taken it to an extent that an amateur like Sam could have never fathomed.

  How she convinced a group of shady-ass Centralian businessmen that she could protect their goods during an illegal smuggling operation with the Southern Alliance, was beyond anything Sam could have pulled off.

  And to be clear, she hadn’t used her family’s vast connections to make this happen either.

  Helena had done it all while wearing a superhero mask, convincing them that she was a telepath, and turning their smuggled goods in to the police, where she was promptly arrested for impersonating an exemplar.

  Even stranger to Sam was the thought that came once he finished his big whiff of her hand.

  She’s attracted to me?

  And rather than blurt out all this psychobabble, rather than get another punch to the gut like he got from the female police officer fond of sticking things in her poop chute, Sam chose his next words carefully. “You are like us,” he said, pretty much summing up everything he had just sensed.

  “Like you two?” Helena asked as she lowered her hand.

  “I fail to see where this is going, Sam,” Zoe said coldly, probably noticing by now that there was a new lady in town, and that there had been a glint behind Sam’s eyes as he looked Helena over.

  “She got busted for impersonating an exemplar too,” Sam explained.

  “Yeah, duh, that’s why they separated us from the pack. And she already told us that. How is this related to your nose again?” asked Zoe.

  “Do you need another smell?” Helena asked as she tilted her head in his direction, letting him get a huge whiff of her hair.

  Sam’s mind swirled as Helena’s life story came to life for a second time.

  Not only did he see the chubby preteen, but he also saw her reading a ton of books; starting up a spiritual practice through a martial art known as combat dance, and the hours upon hours she’d put into her practice; how her family’s vast wealth weighed on her and how she wanted to carve her own path in life; Helena’s desire to be something more, something that just allowed her to get by without causing too much attention, and how this desire conflicted with a future for her that had already been arranged as head of the Knight Corporation.

  It was a lot to take in.

  And there was more of it too, but it came at Sam so fast that he had to sit down, pinch his nose for a moment, lean his head back and keep his eyes shut, trying to filter through some of the memories he’d picked up.

  And all that was on top of her actual scent, which was somewhere between citrus and frangipani, crisp, but clean, a scent for a person who needed to put on a show at all times.

  “You are soooooo full of shit,” Zoe said, a smile on her face.

  Sam open his eyes and looked at her, his left nostril slightly twitching as he realized that she was flirting with him in her tough style.

  “Want
proof?”

  “I’ve been asking for proof for like five minutes now…”

  “Here we go. Helena Knight, twenty-two, used to be fat until she hit puberty; lost her virginity when she was seventeen; went to business school; was using fake telepathic powers to help smuggle crap from the Southern Alliance and then turned on the smugglers to help law enforcement and was arrested for impersonating a super. Sound about right?”

  Helena gasped, her gray eyes widening. “You’re an actual telepath?”

  “No, I’m not a telepath, at least not in the traditional sense. That’s what I’m trying to tell you both here, something has happened with my nose. My point is, I don’t think I’m a non-exemplar anymore,” Sam told Helena, but his last sentence was aimed at Zoe. “How could I know all that without a superpower?”

  The black-haired woman in a tiger ears headband took a step back from Sam, eyeing him suspiciously. “I don’t know what you’re up to, Sam, but I still don’t believe it yet.”

  “What other proof do you want? I just told you all this crap about a complete stranger.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense. How did your powers suddenly reactivate? I don’t have powers, you don’t have powers,” Zoe said, pointing to Helena, “and Sam, you most definitely don’t have powers. Not that you don’t have other things that make you a good person, I’m just saying, powers don’t suddenly activate.”

  The door opened and a Centralian police officer stepped into the room, a muscular guy with his sleeves rolled up. “All right, all three of you have been processed, and are free to go,” he said, handing each of them a stack of papers.

  “Free to go?” Zoe asked, looking to Helena.

  “Not my doing,” Helena said.

  “Fill this out, and bring it to your first Heroes Anonymous meeting,” said the police officer. “Since you three are repeat offenders, if you get caught impersonating exemplars one more time, it’ll come with a mandatory prison sentence and community service. Third strike laws are in full effect here.”