The editor shuffled the thin pile of papers before him, picked them up, and started to read.
He'd burn through a page of material about every minute or so, and would silently shuffle it to the back of the pile.
Every third page or so, there was an unimpressed "hmph", or two.
Harry Hembock, a short, guant, bug eyed mantis of a man with a crippling overbite, and strange oversized black greasy pompadoure leaned forward in nervous aniticipation.
He thought he saw the editor seeing him seeing him, so he craned his head as if he'd been taking in the whole room, and the editor had just caught him in the movement of looking at....the clock, yeah, the clock.
Now, the certificates on the wall, the uninteresting gold leafed books on the bookcase, then back down to the floor, at his own red rubber Superman boots.
After a time, the editor finished, and sat the thin stack on the desk and said "..oh..huh that's it huh?".
"Um yeah,....for now...what, you wanted more or...?".
"Um no,..that's alright it's just...aaanyway, um, yeah, these are interesting..but um..yeah".
"You didn't like 'em", Harry stated rather than asked, as he visibly deflated.
"Oh, they're okay, it's not that I didn't like them, it's just...I dunno, kinda unoriginal".
"Unoriginal?".
"Well yeah, first of all, your guy, he's called Harry Hembock, I mean, there's already Harry Potter. Two Harry's, we could get sued".
"But he's ME. I've been called Harry long before that little magic nerd came along".
'Um, yeah, anyway, there's also the matter of the artwork. It's very um...unprofessional. I mean, look at this, it's all drawn in ball point pen".
"I like the ballpoint. It's what I'm used to. I tried one of those pen brushes that this art teacher guy told me, and it was all melty and awful. I know working artists use I dunno, some fancy rich pen or something, but I figured...y'know, nowadays with computers, and scanners and..y'know, you could print whatever anyone made".
"Um...yeah, we might make those accomidations for some NAME artist, if he wanted to make an experimental project, but..".
"Alright, fine, I'll learn to use a fancy pen...what kind? Wait, lemme write this down..you got a post-it?".
"...anyway, back to the unoriginal point, your guy, he's not um,...the traditional superhero..".
"Well, no, but you guys publish books with violence and sexy stuff. Kids are hip today. They watch the Fear Factor, and the...".
"Well, that's just it, even if we put it under our adults label, there's still the matter of that your guy essentially acts like Bender from Futurama put in a blender with Quagmire from Family Guy".
"But dammit, he's ME! I was around before them!".
"Well, Elisha Gray got to the telephone first, but who's name is one the patent? Eh? Y'know?".
"But dammit, they're fake.., and I'm REAL! These adventures really happened to me!"
Harry let out a sigh
"You're not gonna publish my stuff are you?".
"Um, no. But it's okay stuff, really, maybe you could shop it around to some underground..".
"Save it".
Harry got up from his seat, and took his cartoons back.
"I mean, just because it's not what we're looking for,...I mean, I know some people...".
"Save it", Harry said again, and left.
Harry shuffled out to the parking lot, muttering curses under his breath.
"So, how did it go?", asked the lime green Volkswagan beetle in the second row.
Harry cast it a sneer that clearly said "what do YOU think?".
"Not good eh? Ah, well, you said it, it was a long shot anyway", replied the car with a sort of "whatever", smirk on it's hood as it popped open it's door.
Harry climbed in, and sat his drawings on the passenger's seat.
The door closed after him.
The Hembug, as Harry called it/him, had been animated and sentient ever since it had been bitten by a radioactive human back in the early 90's.
Now, it/he was his Hembock-mobile/sidekick.
"So, what do we do for cash now?", Hembug asked, while starting up, and gliding out of the parking spot.
"Damned'f'I know", Harry grumbled, arms crossed over his chest, hands conspicuously not on the wheel.
"Strip club?", Hembug asked.
"Yer goddamned right", Harry answered.
Harry awoke from his reoccuring memory nightmare of being brutally rejected from the Legion Of Liberty.
The dressing down from Mr. Starshine was bad enough, but then the sadistic roasting that focused on his sexual prowess from Ms. Electrode, and then the swirly from The Swirly were just over the top.
As was usual, his subconscious spared him not the slightest detail.
Not a frame was skipped.
And of course, a hangover was waiting for him in awake land.
As was a cloud of his own fart gas.
Harry tried to fan it away, but it hung in space like a time frozen swarm of bees.
"Shit, now I'm all the way awake", moaned Harry.
Harry crawled out of bed, and did a bowl legged zombie hobble to the bathroom, and gazed with disgust at his stubbled greasy face.
He looked down at the toothbrush and razor, contemplated them awhile, and finally said aloud "eh, fuck it", and hobbled out to the kitchen.
He grabbed an apple from the counter, and bit out a hunk to get the slim jim flavored morning scum out of his mouth.
He looked out the window, and saw the neighbor's kids blowing up yet another Harry Hembock action figure with firecrackers.
It was always the Harry figure.
Harry had long ago gloomily accepted his was the Ugnaut, or Lobot of the collection.
Ah well, at least that meant another 60 cent check was coming.
The gift that kept on giving.
Harry grumbled, and hobbled to the other side of the house, hoping the view would be better.
It was Steve Torrent, the fat bald beer guzzler next door, waddling over to his next door neighbor Susan's to "pay the rent".
"Christ, I hate this town", grumbled Harry.
And with that, he plunked into the battered duct tape covered recliner, and fired up the TV.
After waiting about 20 seconds for the crappy TV's picture tube to heat up, Harry was finally greeted by the image of a guy in a labcoat pointing to a box labeled "POB", and making a retarded caveman growling noise with his tongue hanging out.
"Meh, I still like it better than anything the Ad Council comes up with", muttered Harry.
Just then, the news cut in with an emergency report.
Buildings were aflame, people were running, and screaming, and crying, and covered in blood and soot, and a huge guy in some sort of mechanical armor was hovering 70 feet in the air unleashing the devestation from laser turrets in his gloves and eyepieces.
"Meh, Legion'll handle it", Harry muttered.
Then, they showed a clip of 40 minutes ago.
The robot suit guy's chest opened up, and gave off green energy rings that passed over the gathered Legion Of Liberty. As the rings passed around them, their powers seemed to snap off at light switch speed, and they all simultaneously got the same stupid look of shock on their faces. Anyone who had been flying dropped like an anvil, and anyone who wasn't also invulnerable, or who's invulnerability was tied to a mental effort sustained energy rather than molecular density likely splattered in that next second.
Of course, Harry knew who was who, and he winced when he heard the thuds.
After that, the robotman pretty much picked everyone else off like cardboard ducks.
"Ah, shit", Harry groaned.
"Alright, alright, I guess I'd better be there", we whined, as if he'd been asked to give a least loved relative a ride out to the airport.
He jogged to his bedroom, and opened his dresser drawers in turn.
"Ah, shit, nothing clean!".
So, he ran to the bathroom, and dug around in the hamper.
He picked up a pair of sweatpants and sniffed.
Wet beachsand, cat urine, and beef stew.
He took another pair and sniffed.
Just cat urine.
"Fine, alright", he said, and threw them on.
He repeated the process with the sweatshirts, and had his costume essentially essembled.
He put a couple puffs of Gold-Bond powder into his boots, and threw those on, then ran to the kitchen, and rubbed himself down with perfume samples, and finally, he was out the door.
"No time to explain, villain, thataway", Harry summarized in shorthand to Hembug as he ran towards him, pointing towards the innards of town.
Hembug popped the door open and closed it in his perfected rythm to let Harry hop in at maximum speed, and then took off towards the city the nanosecond the door sealed shut and locked.
Hembug tooled along at a steady 120 mph out of a possible 300, dodging abandoned cars along the way with the reflexes of a video game prodigy.
"So, we headed straight there, or you wanna make any stops first?", he asked Harry casually.
"Yeah, turn off left up ahead, there's a Wal-Mart. They're the closest place I can think of that's got both a hardware and electronics department. Something I gotta get first", Harry replied with equal casualness, as if he simply needed to pick up some onions for a stew he was going to make for visiting in-laws.
Hembug made the turn, and eventually they came up apon, and then pulled into the Wal-Mart.
Hembug pulled up to the front entrance, and let Harry out.
Harry grabbed a shopping basket on the way in, gave the greeter a nod of bland acknowledgement, and then briskly jogged to hardware, and grabbed a soldering iron, tin snips, a spool of solder, a spool of copper wire, a car battery, and a hammer, with as clear a plan of where it all was as if the aisles were a part of his house.
Then, without pausing for the slightest beat, he ran to electronics.
He deftly weaved around a 3 year old girl in floral print tight pants who was dancing in a circle in the CD section, unapologeticly hip checked a fat woman's cart out of the way that was about to take a corner and cut him off, and made his way to the wall of TVs.
He pulled out the hammer, and used the claw end as an improvised box cutter to open up a 25" console, then, dragged it out from the box, hurled away the styrofoam, and began to beat open the back of the unit to get at the guts.
A flurry of "what the hell"s and "omigawd!"s bagan to sputter form the other shoppers.
Harry continued his procedure undeterred.
"Excuse me sir!", a surly clerk said walking up to him.
Harry turned, wacked the guy on the head with the hammer laying him out cold, and like a robot, continued his work.
A woman screamed, and a child started crying. Probably the dancing toddler
Harry knew he had to speed this up.
He found the circuit board he needed, and used the tin snips to liberate it by cutting away both the connecting wires, and the nuggets of board that the support screws were fastened to.
He then turned, and liberated and battered open another TV of the same model, and repeated the procedure, but with even more deranged robotic speed and precision.
He tossed the two circuits into his shopping basket, and jogged over to the stereo equipment.
He didn't have to dodge toddlers and fat people this time, as people were pretty much giving him a wide berth.
He picked up a watermelon sized oval boom box, felt it's weight, nodded, hefted it over his head, and slammed it down on the floor, smashing it to smithereens.
He then gave it's remains a couple careful extra stomps to liberate some desired parts, and then began plucking out the needed bits as quickly as if they were supposed to be there scattered about in their current position, and he had long ago memorized their location.
Then, he dug out a speaker, wrenched it's plastic covering off, leaving it naked, snipped away it's wires, and tossed it in the basket with the rest.
Another surly young clerk suddenly tried to tackle him.
Beefy blonde kid, looked like he played football.
Harry dodged back as if he'd perfectly predicted he'd be there, whammed him in the gut with the butt of the hammer, looped his arm around overhead, and brought it down on the kid's sternum, sucking out all his breath, then gave his arm another arc, and brought it down on the kid's head.
He didn't knock out, but he did collapse to the floor bawling and cursing.
Harry shook his head and sighed.
He opened his mouth as if he was about to make an apology, or a justification, but he heard muffled thunderclaps outside, stopped, shrugged, smirked, and walked off.
He speed walked to the cafeteria, poured out the contents of his shopping basket onto the nearest empty table, and his hands began to fly.
He jury rigged the soldering iron to the car battery, unwound the soldering wire, and began to solder the circuits and radio parts into a science fiction sandwich at David Blain shuffling cards speeds.
The parts of the mystery device flew together perfectly and with such precision, one would think the final machine had already existed, been stolen from him, and the parts scattered about the electronics department, and not the other way around.
Or, more precisely, like a film of the device's dismantling were being played in high speed reverse.
Finally, the device tumbled together into something solid and coherant like the picture in a completed puzzle, and Harry spliced the whole deal onto the car battery, and tied the whole thing together with some leftover wire.
Altogether, the final assembly had taken aporoximately 4 minutes.
Not a drop of solder had been spilled, and no leftover parts remained.
Harry nodded with dull satisfaction.
Harry plunked his created gizmo into his shopping basket, and walked quickly right through the checkout without stopping.
"SIR!!!", the cashier shouted angrily.
"Debit", Harry muttered under his breath, and kept walking, picking up his pace.
The cashier tilted her head for a good 20 seconds in confusion, and started hollering some more as she saw him making it towards the exit, but he'd already made it out the door, and didn't hear the rest, nor did he wish to.
Hembug, who had been circling the parking lot, pulled right up to the entrance as Harry cleared the concrete pillars.
Harry took out the gizmo, tossed away the shopping basket, hopped in, and Hembug took off.
"All set?", Hembug asked.
"Yeah, think so", Harry replied calmly, as if he'd just done something as ordinary as picking up those onions for that aformentioned and theoretical stew.
"To the villian?", Hembug asked.
"Of course", Harry answered.
As the Wal-Mart faded in the rear view, the dull thunderclaps became louder and crisper.
The point of no return had come.
The next thunderclap was accompanied by a blinding green flicker against the wall of a soot stained building.
"Showtime", Harry said.
Hembug screeched to a stop, and Harry dove out with his device under his arm, and made out on foot.
Luckily, when Harry had pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot, he had remembered to turn on his belt buckle transponder.
The transponder which was imbedded in the belt buckle which was mounted on the belt that he kept stored in the glove compartment for when he'd forgot to grab the one in the house.
It was an exact duplicate of the one in the house, a simple black vinyl number with a nondescript black circle for a buckle that turned like a dial to turn the transponder on and off.
What the transponder did was two things.
One, it scrambled all the security devices he passed by along the way, including and especially the cameras.
Second, it activated any emergency "cleanup", technology in the vicinity.
In this case, the Harry Hembock action figures in the toy department.
Apon activation, they activated their own internal transponders so as not to be recorded, triangulated the position of Harry's transponder, and set to work.
First, they fired thin red laser beams from their eyes that cut away their blister packs, then switched to blue tractor beams that pushed the blisters off, and/or pushed away any intervening figures if they were deeper on the hook.
About seven in all responded to the call.
Then, with shape recognition software, they locked onto the faces of any witnesses to this, and zapped them with green neuralization rays that scrambled their memories for the previous and following two hours for a combined four hours of memory slack.
Then, with internal anti-gravs, they flew to Harry's location, memory zapping anyone who saw them along the way.
They made it to the electronics department just as Harry was leaving.
They proceeeded to memory wipe all the witnesses, and by determining injury, by determining pain and/or fear, via subtle voice recognition, they homed in on the two bonked clerks and sweeped them several times with orange healing rays.
Then, once mended, they gave them a memory wipe.
As the witnesses and victims were repaired and wiped, three of the Harry figures used red lasers to dissolve and evaporate the shattered TVs and boombox.
Then, with electronics taken care of, they followed the projected path of Harry's escape, memory wiping all the intervening witnesses as they went along.
Then, finally, they stopped outside in the parking lot, where Harry had switched off his transponder.
Their duty complete, they sattelite uplinked to the Wal-Mart home office computers, filled out an insurance form for the lost and stolen merchandise, and filled out an order for replacements to it, and themselves, then self destructed by aiming their disintgration beams on each other.
Which occured just as Harry pulled into the city to face his foe.
Harry turned a corner, and there he was, floating in the sky.
The mandroid from the news, his back turned, preoccupied with laser blasting an already fairly wrecked hospital.
"HEY!!! ASSHOLE!!! HEAH!!", Harry shouted to get his attention.
It worked. The killer did a heel swivel on an invisible floor, and glided threateningly towards him.
"I!! Am Tektan Democulus!! And you wi...", started the villain through an electronicly warbled and amplified voice filter.
"Didn't ask, and don't give a shit!!", Harry cut in.
And with that, he fired up his gadget by clipping an unplugged wire into place with licked fingers.
He got a jolt that made his hand recoil, but he recovered quickly.
The air hummed, and Tektan Democulus hurled to the ground.
He splayed out face down, and stayed glued to the spot.
"Reversed your circuits, shithead, even your grav plates", Harry said with a smirk.
"Aw no!! Aw no!! Not like this!! Aw christ no!!", Tektan screamed with a now unfiltered whiney dweeb voice that sounded not so much like a Tektan, but a Lenny, or a Terence.
The gizmo began to shake in Harry's hand, so he let go.
As he released it, it flew to Tektan, and stuck to his back.
As it contacted his back plate, the hum in the air magnified, and a feedback like dry ice on metal began to screech from Tektan's armor.
Tektan's pleas began to become more frantic, if that were possible, and finally, he shrieked like a woman, and all sound from him ended with a sudden horrible gurgle/gag as the armor slammed inward a sickening four inches all around with a wet crunchy splurch.
Harry looked away with a grimace, and marched to a safe distance as the armor slowly continued to crumple in like a soda can, until finally, the grav plates in the suit touched each other, and set up a fatal harmonic with the gizmo's field, which set off a quantum explosion, and vaporized Tektan and the gizmo in a bright purple flash, leaving nothing but a faintly smoldering impressed singemark in the ground.
"Shit, shoulda grabbed his mask off'f him for proof", Harry mumbled.
He stood a couple extra seconds in contemplation, then shrugged, and headed back to Hembug.
He climbed into the driver's seat, and simply said "home".
The editor sat the thin stack on the desk and said "..oh..huh that's it huh?".
"Um yeah,....for now...I mean, I'm just supposed to do a sample few pages for the proposal, right...?".
"Um no,..that's alright it's just...aaanyway, um, yeah, these are interesting..but um..yeah".
"You didn't like 'em", Harry stated rather than asked, as he visibly deflated.
"Erm....no, it's terrible....sorry".
"....ah....", Harry choked, not expecting such a blunt reply.
"I mean, the protagonist is weak, it doesn't hold the reader's interest, it's stale, the dialogue is stilted, I mean, I could go on, but I think even you know what terrible is".
"No, no, I get you", Harry said, holding up a mask of composure.
"Also, you had no breakdown sheet, or any of the other...look, this is just totally unproffessional. I won't even call it a submission. You might as well have come in with the thing written in crayon, it's just terrible. You've wasted my time, get out".
"Yes sir. ...erm, can I have those back?".
"No. Also, you're ugly, and you smell".
"You're not the first to say so. Well, goodbye", Harry said glumly as he shuffled out of the office in a stupor.
Posted on Oct 2, 2005, 6:48 PM from IP address 24.53.125.85