Vigilantes and Villains

By Karen Avizur

In this anthology of stories, explore a world where ordinary humans have extraordinary abilities, revealing the boundless potential of humanity. From the depths of despair to the heights of heroism, these stories illuminate the essence of humankind amidst the backdrop of superpowers, superheroes, and supervillains.

 

Journey alongside individuals who harness their newfound powers to protect the innocent, challenge the forces of darkness, and redefine the limits of possibility. Through riveting narratives that blend action, suspense, and heart, Vigilantes and Villains celebrates the resilience, courage, and compassion that define us all. Discover the greatness that lies within every human in this homage to the triumph of good over evil and the enduring power of humanity's spirit.

 

 

 

Stories originally posted on Reddit. At the Author's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karen Avizur
• Release date: May 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224676286

Karen Avizur

Karen Avizur grew up on Long Island, New York and ended up in Orlando, Florida, with stops in Connecticut, West Virginia, and Los Angeles along the way. She's been writing stories since she was twelve years old. In those early days, she discovered it was impossible to keep up with her thoughts by writing longhand, and ended up borrowing a 7-pound laptop from her dad, quickly honing her typing skills. After graduating film school, Karen moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a film editor for several years while also pursuing her writing. She now lives in Florida with her dogs Malcolm and Kaylee, and spends altogether too much time either scrolling through memes or with her nose in a book.

Book preview

Vigilantes and Villains

An Anthology

By Karen Avizur

Vigilantes and Villains: An Anthology

Copyright © 2024 by Karen Avizur All rights reserved.

First Edition: May 2024

Cover and Formatting:

Canva.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Thank you to Victoria Topper for proofreading this collection of stories.

Table of Contents

A Spark of Power

Arm Up

Best of Intentions

Chivalrous Villain

Destiny of a Super

Double Agent

The Epilogue

Faux Mute

Fire and Ash

Forgotten Memories

Henchmen

Nameless

Pills

Rebel

Stepping Outside the Box

Supermom

The Rescuer

The Rumor Mill

The World Went White

Villain Rehab

You Wrecked My Car

Speak No Evil

A Spark of Power

They say when you grow up, you become the person you needed when you were a kid. Whether or not that’s true, it’s the case with superpowers. Suffered through verbal abuse from an unstable parent? You can read thoughts, tiptoe around and avoid the landmines. Physical abuse? That’s a straightforward one most would guess; you get super-strength. Psychological abuse? You get mind control, to twist the person’s thoughts right back at them.

You need a special kind of trauma to get a superpower, which I feel is unfair. Not the trauma part in general. I feel like the fact that it needs to be special is unfair. There are tons of people out there asking the universe why they can’t have a power, why they aren’t able to fight back against the beatdown they’re getting.

But then you’ve got extra-special trauma, of course. Accidentally fall from a great height? You can fly. Get struck by lightning? You can control electricity. Almost freeze to death? If you can’t guess that one by now, you’re not paying attention.

Then there are Sparks. The stains on humanity. At least that’s what it feels like to me, and I’ve known I was a Spark since I was twelve. It’s really staggering, the way your ability to manifest any superpower can be incredible on the one hand and disgusting on the other. People complain about how we get to skip over the trauma, the terror, the horror, and we get the reward anyway. The main reason this happens, I think, is because the heroes have to wear their trauma on their sleeves, since there’s no keeping it a secret. It’s obvious when you learn their power. Then in walks me, not having gone through any wretched ordeal, and yet I have the best ability of them all: the one where I take my pick.

They don’t understand that we get the trauma. It’s just that it comes after, from the majority of humanity, and in the form of a combination of animosity and envy that results in a thick sludge of contempt. If they’re not careful, it drives us to a hatred that causes us to lash out at the world. Thirty percent of supervillains are Sparks. Thirty. You’d think people would learn to be more decent to us. To reign in their emotions enough that Sparks don’t get to use it as an origin story and have an excuse to go bad, but contempt is a hard thing to move past. If a Spark wants to make it as a hero, we can make it to the top of the mountain, but the mountain fights us the whole way up.

I’ve done pretty well so far. My best friend Mable would say it’s because of my incredible parents. That’s true, since being dealt a horrible hand in the parental department is a good way to build a foundation for a villain. But looking back, I just think a lot of it is luck that I never had anything happen during one of my missions that would have let the media have a field day. On the contrary, they’d actually started to make a habit of talking up my successes. It was pretty great, and so naturally I was constantly worried about it collapsing like a house of cards.

At this point the Guild has streamlined us, made a list of what Sparks can do and what we need to concentrate on mentally to do it. Today found me standing outside a suburban house as they went through that list. I’d been told that a family was inside, including a mom, dad, and three kids, and the dad was armed. The person who had picked me up from Guild headquarters hadn’t given me specifics, but they told me that the psychologist trying to talk him down wasn’t having much luck. Since the shades were all drawn, the police had turned on an infrared camera, but all it showed was that the five of them were in the basement. It didn’t leave much in terms of options.

When I walked into the control center tent, I was met with indifference. You wouldn’t know I was there to save the day if you’d seen everyone’s facial expressions, and yet, that’s what the plan was.

There had been a few plans offered as possibilities before the Chief of Police had called me, I’m sure. A person whose power was invisibility could get in there and disarm the dad. The problem was that they still needed to break down the front door to get inside. Also, the basement door might’ve been closed. Those are precious moments where the father could react, and all it would’ve taken was a twitchy trigger finger and someone would be dead. A hero with mind control could’ve gone in and convinced him to lay down his weapon, but mind control needs line of sight or verbal orders, so they’d have been shot before they got two words out.

The entire situation was a mess, with no easy solutions that would allow for a peaceful disarming, and we had to get creative. I’d been told to wear my anti-friction outfit and shoes because the plan was to use superspeed. There were two local superheroes with superspeed powers, but they were already occupied with situations that needed their skills. The driver who’d gotten me here also let me know that they’d wanted a mind reader on site to get a real read on the guy, but they were all spoken for too. It’s a big city, I guess.

It took a few minutes for me to be brought into the conversation, since they were discussing another aspect of the situation. We got the layout, spoke the chief of police, meeting my gaze before looking back down to the blueprints of the house. All we need is-

He was interrupted by gunfire.

As soon as I heard the first shot, I was immediately moving. It doesn’t take much to trigger my spark, and I’d done superspeed plenty of times before. A bullet can travel up to 3000 feet per second. It would take less than a second to pull the trigger again, so I was literally racing to stop the next bullet now. I pushed myself as hard as I could.

I ran out the through flaps of the tent, leaving them in midair behind me, focusing on balance and poise because tripping would be very bad for me at that speed. Running across the lawn and up to the front door, I kicked the door in, and as the door moved in what felt like slow-motion to my mind, I slipped inside. I’d gotten a good enough look at the blueprints that I was able to make my way to the basement door. Throwing it open, I rushed down the stairs.

At that point, there was a second crack of a bullet leaving the gun, and I saw the second bullet in the air, heading toward the mother’s chest. She’d already been hit once, I realized, that first bullet had hit her in the shoulder, and I’d gotten inside so fast that there wasn’t even much blood yet.

The bullet in mid-air was a problem.

Physics worked in a weird way in all aspects of superpowers, but it still worked. The bullet was going as fast as I was. What I needed to do was change the trajectory, but if I tried to pull the bullet out of the air, the energy that the bullet was putting out would be inflicted on me. And that was a lot of energy in a small package. So, I needed to get creative.

Darting to the father’s side, I pulled each of his fingers off of the gun’s grip, and let me tell you, I had no bad feelings when I heard them break. Then I moved his index finger outside the trigger guard and was able to pull the gun from his hand. After that, I turned back to the bullet that was in flight, raising the gun, aiming carefully from just inches away, and firing another bullet at it.

Waiting as both bullets moved gradually through the air, they collided, spinning off and away from their respective trajectories. I moved back, away from the father, and aimed the gun at him before allowing my body and mind to slide back to regular operating speed.

The first thing I heard was the bullet slamming into the wall of the basement, and the second was the father screaming in pain and collapsing to his knees, cradling his hand.

I’d been about to tell him to get down, so that just saved time.

The third thing I heard was the kids screaming. They were all on the couch, two younger ones on either side of a girl who looked about eight, curled up together. It took them a moment to comprehend what had happened. I spared a glance to the mother, who’d dropped to her knees, a hand hovering shakily over the wound in her shoulder.

EMTs will be here in no time, I told her, holding the gun on her husband. It’s okay. It’s over.

The kids didn’t seem to believe me, but the mother was looking from her husband to me, wide-eyed. What…what happened? she choked out.

I managed to be faster than a speeding bullet. Just the second one though, I said quietly. I heard a barrage of footsteps storming into the house. Can’t be faster than a bullet I already heard.

The woman slumped and her tearful eyes looked from me to her kids and back. Thank you, she whispered.

In that moment, every bad word and look I’d gotten recently about being a Spark vanished. That’s why I did this. To help people. The resentment that the public and other supers had for us? In moments like this, it just disappeared.

Arm Up

There’s a quote attributed to Einstein, God does not play dice with the universe. And maybe He doesn’t, but if not, the universe has a severe gambling problem God doesn’t know about.

It’s more of a scratch-off than a roll of the dice. Superpower distribution is around one in a hundred, but it feels pretty random when you get smacked in the face at sixteen with something that changes your life. Mine was ‘fictional object materialization’, because the government has to have a complex name for everything. It was awesome when I first got it, but that lasted about ten minutes.

Registration for your power is done at your local Superhero Guild headquarters. Everyone lines up on their sixteenth birthday in their gigantic lobby to get analyzed by their equipment. Unless you wake up and, for example, find yourself levitating above your bed. That brings you to the front of the line and you get the paperwork done first.

My experience was less than ideal. My parents sat off to the side in metal chairs reserved for guests while I entered the chamber, its appearance much like that of an airport security x-ray machine. The process was painless, some sort of scan, and I was expecting lasers to swipe up and down or something similarly exciting. But nothing along those lines happened.

What did happen was the analysis completed, turning the lights green, and my face lit up. A positive result? I was a superhero?

I jumped up and down with excitement, looking through the glass at my parents, who looked just as excited. The chamber doors opened and I rushed out to give them a hug. What do you think it is? I asked.

No idea, but I knew it, my mother told me. I felt it. You were someone special, you always were.

I later learned of another quote that applied to what came next: May you live in interesting times.

We were brought into the room to the left, which was a bit severe, if you ask me. It felt like an interrogation room, and after about ten minutes, I started to feel like maybe this wasn’t the room most people were shown to after their results came through. After half an hour, my knee was bouncing anxiously. Finally, the door opened, and two Guild agents came in, one