We all have a dark side. Mine’s just a little darker than most.
My name is Derek Merrelli, and like the rest of the world, I was glued to the TV the day the quake hit Los Angeles. There were major tremors in Sacramento, where I lived at the time, but the real horror show was to the south.
I was a kid at the time, so for me, it was just a great special effects display, as the City of Angles split off from the rest of the state and sank beneath the Pacific. It wasn’t until I was older that the gravity of the horrible tragedy really hit me. Millions lost their lives that day, and millions more lost everything else. Safely at home, I didn’t lose anything, but my life changed nevertheless.
My father is Gino Merrelli, of Merrelli Construction, the largest firm in Sacramento – and the most connected, if you know what I mean. When reconstruction began in what had once been LA and San Diego, companies from around the country descended on the state, all vying for their slice of the pie. Of course, the local companies had the best connections in Sacramento, so they got the sweetest deals. Merrelli Construction was at the top of the sweet deal list.
I didn’t see Dad much for the next year or so, as Mom, my brother, and I stayed in the capital. But as San Angeles, as the new city was called, began to take shape, and Merrelli Construction grew and expanded with it, Dad decided it was time to move the corporate headquarters – and the family – southward.
So I lived in a brand new penthouse high atop a brand new skyscraper, and I started attending a brand new private school. I wasn’t very happy to leave all my friends, but Dad had big plans for me and my brother, Gene. He wanted us in the family business, and I don’t mean just construction.
I guess on some level, I’d always known what sort of business Dad was really in, but I tried not to think about it. But last year, when I was 15, Dad tried to get me more involved, more interested. Now normally, he doesn’t do the really dirty jobs himself, but every once in a while, he takes a personal hand in matters.
This was just such a case. An electrical sub-contractor had somehow managed to cheat Dad out of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. An example had to be made, and Dad decided I needed to witness it. He thought it’d make a man of me. All it really did was make me puke up my socks.
It wasn’t at all like you see on TV. It was late at night, cold and damp on the rooftop of our building. The company helicopter was waiting to take Dad to a meeting at the state capital, and the electrician thought he was going along for the ride. Instead, Dad shot him point-blank, loaded him into the copter, and had the body dumped far out in the harbor. What I really remember most – what haunts me to this day – was the smell, that faint whiff of gunpowder and the overwhelming stench of boiling pennies.
Gene was there too, but he didn’t even flinch. He’s smart enough that he didn’t show it, but I know he was thrilled. He really is cut out to be a Made Man – huge, muscular, and just insensitive enough that he doesn’t mind hurting others. And even though he’s a jock (captain of the football team, of course), he’s also intelligent enough that he’ll be able to run the company someday without driving it into the ground.
That night, I decided that, whatever else I might end up doing, it wouldn’t be working with my father. Of course, I couldn’t come right out and tell him that. I was already a bit of a disappointment to him. I’m not very athletic, and I’ve never had even the slightest interest in sports. What I was really interested in was taking photos.
For my tenth birthday, my Uncle Sal had given me a digital camera – one that had fallen off the back of a truck, if you know what I mean. I must have filled six or seven memory cards that first week alone. Photography became my passion.
After the incident with the electrician, I couldn’t stand to be around any of Dad’s associates – I could barely stand to be around him. Problem was, I went to school with dozens of the sons of those associates, all being groomed as I was. It took some time, but I talked Dad into letting me switch to a public school.
Okay, so Mom did most of the work. Where Dad is concerned, she is a master of subtle manipulation. Her basic argument was that the only thing I was learning at St Catherine’s was how to be a pampered trust fund brat. Like I said, I’m not very athletic. Don’t get me wrong, I can take care of myself in a fight, if I have to. But so far, my life had been pretty sheltered. Sure, Gene bullied me from time to time (which is why I know how to fight, learning to defend myself against him), but he also made sure no one else ever bullied me. And that’s just the argument Mom used – if I was going to work for the company some day, I’d need to learn how to survive in the real world.
Public school really is a different world – but not that different. It’s just as cliquish, and those cliques are just as vicious. Jocks are the worst – they think they’re better than everyone else, just because they can run and jump and hit better than anyone else. Without Gene around to protect me, I’ve had a few run-ins with the muscle-heads. But like I said, I can take care of myself when the fists start to fly, so now most of the jocks leave me alone. Still, I didn’t really fit into any cliques, but I gravitated to the photography club. From there, it was a natural step to the school newspaper.
I figured I’d be snapping shots of the homecoming committee hanging crepe paper in the gym, but I was assigned to a reporter named Timo Ortega Lopez. He’s a year younger than me, but he already has the most coveted assignment on the paper: the superhero beat.
As far as I’m concerned, the longjohns crowd aren’t much better than the jocks – they think they’re better than everyone else, just because they can run and jump and throw trucks around with their pinkies. But the things they do almost always make it to the front page – which means my photos would be on the front page, too. Even better, Timo’s mother had the same beat on a real newspaper, so there was a slim chance one of my photos might land on the front page of the Register someday.
So even though superheroes aren’t my favorite people in the world, I was really looking forward to getting that one great shot of them in action. Unfortunately, for the first several months, the superheroes were refusing to cooperate and do their thing during the lunch hour, which is the only time we were allowed to leave campus to chase a story. So I spent a lot of time taking pictures of, you guessed it, the homecoming committee. Timo managed to get stories of the cape-and-tights crowd now and again, mostly on the weekends, when I wasn’t with him.
Our first off-campus assignment was to accompany the science club on a once-in-a-lifetime tour of the brand new, state-of-the-art McKinley Particle Accelerator, which makes the Large Hadron Collider look like a seventh grade science fair entry. Or so they told me – I wouldn’t know a quark from an atom bomb if they had flashing neon labels.
It was probably the most boring assignment in the history of journalism. Nothing but following a bunch of oooohing and aaaaahing science geeks down endless hallways filled with giant conduits. What was I supposed to take pictures of? Even if they did manage to make a black hole or a Big Bang, or whatever they were trying to do, the only photo I’d get would be of some guy in a lab coat, looking at a clipboard.
I still don’t know what really happened. Suddenly, there were alarms and flashing red lights. Physicists were running around, and somehow I was separated from Timo and the science club. There was a lot of activity around the big door to the “dark matter containment chamber,” so naturally, I took a shot of it. The last thing I remember seeing was Spectrum appearing out of nowhere, just as I snapped the pic.
Spectrum is one of the longjohns, but he’s not like all the others. For one thing, he’s a teenager, and maybe that’s why I blamed him for what happened. What right did a kid my age have playing superhero?
I blacked out and woke up hours later in my own bed. Of course, I thought it must have been a weird dream. Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
Or rather, I didn’t.
You know those movies where the vampire looks in the mirror, but there’s no reflection? It was a little like that, except I could faintly see my pale gray eyes. Everything else was just a blurry mass of shadows.
My first thought was, “Spectrum did this to me.” I didn’t know how or why, but I was sure it was his fault. Maybe he’d hit me with one of those blasts of light he likes to throw around. All that really mattered was that I was a shadowy wraith, and Spectrum was to blame.
Over the years, my dad’s tried to teach me many things, but first and foremost is that you never let a debt go unpaid. If you owe someone, you repay them. And if someone owes you, you make them repay you, one way or another. Oh yes, I was going to make Spectrum pay for what he’d done to me.
I didn’t have the chance to think about how, because when I turned, there he was! Spectrum was standing on the balcony outside my bedroom window. Somehow, he knew I’d survived his first attack, and he’d come to finish me off.
I reacted instinctively, flying through the window, as if the glass weren’t even there. I’m not sure what I was trying to do – tackle him, maybe? Instead, I felt myself wrapping around him, enveloping him in a cloud of utter darkness.
It must have startled him, because he tumbled backward over the railing, and the next thing I knew, we were falling toward the street, seventy stories below. We hadn’t fallen far, though, when we passed through the shadow of another building, and then….
And then we were on the helicopter bad atop the building. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d teleported us there. That’s where Dad had “taken care of” the electrician, and that’s where I wanted to take care of Spectrum.
So there we were. He was stunned from the impact, and I was just stunned. Not physically – I was still an insubstantial shadow, so I didn’t actually feel anything when we hit the rooftop. Maybe that’s why I recovered first.
Again, I acted on instinct. I wanted to smash Spectrum, to crush him like an insect, so I gathered the shadows around me into a big block of darkness and slammed it down at him. Thank goodness he snapped out of it in time to meet my attack with a blast of light. It shattered my shadow-box and knocked me back. Again, I blacked out.
When I came to a few minutes later, he was standing over my body – for I was solid once more, and every muscle in my body was screaming in pain. Of course, I knew just who to blame, and I sprang at him like a crazed madman.
I was no match for him now, and he pinned me to the helipad. “I don’t want to hurt you!” he said.
“Too bad, because I’m going to kill you.”
“You don’t want to do that, Derek,” Spectrum said. He had the nerve to call me by my name! “You don’t want to end up like your father.”
There are only two people who know that about me. One is my mother, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t disguising herself as a teenaged boy in tights. The other was my reporter friend, Timo. One day, while we were sitting around the office, waiting for something journalistic to happen, we were discussing our families. Turns out his grandfather and my dad did a little cross-border business together from time to time, and his own father was in jail. He didn’t want to grow up to be like his dad anymore than I did.
Could it be? Could my new arch-nemesis, the superhero who was trying to kill me, could he really be my only friend in San Angeles?
The truth is, he wasn’t trying to kill me after all. I was the only member of our little field trip who was still unaccounted for, and he’d been searching for me all night. He really is my best friend after all.
Once I’d calmed down, and we had a chance to talk, we discovered that I still had my shadow powers. I can turn into a pool of darkness at will, so long as I’m touching an actual shadow at the time I transform. I can teleport from one shadow to another, though only over very short distances. Best of all, I can create constructs of solid darkness to wield as melee weapons. Only very basic shapes right now, but I’m hoping to get better at it with practice.
It was Timo who suggested I become a superhero. You have to admire his cheerful optimism sometimes. One minute, I’m trying to murder him, and the next, he’s talking me into putting on a skintight costume and fighting crime like him.
And really, how could I refuse? It was his power that had shocked me back into solid form, saving me from an eternity as a living shadow. More importantly, he’d pulled me back from the brink of the abyss, stopping me from becoming a murderer. I owed him not just my life, but my soul as well.
And I never leave a debt unpaid.
