Superhero Worship

by Rod Drake

Milo loved it when his company transferred him to Neon City, the superhero capital of the world, where colorful, costumed crime-fighters battled kooky super-villains; Milo saw it as the luckiest transfer ever while his co-workers viewed it as a dead-end move. Hardly a day when by that Milo didn’t see one of the superheroes in action; Komet Kid streaking overhead or the Dark Sentinel roaring down main street in his Sentinel-mobile or Dr. Maximum chasing the Mad Magpie across the rooftops of midtown. Most of the town looked upon this ongoing super-brawl as dangerous, the newspapers decrying the continual threat to life and property from these out-of-control Olympian-scale grudge matches – but Milo didn’t see it that way at all. He was an enthralled spectator, fascinated by the super-powered exploits happening right in front of him; what a great bunch of guys these superheroes were. One Saturday afternoon, while Milo was watching a Neon Nukes baseball game on TV, he felt his nine-story building shake, and rushing to the window, he saw a 100-foot evil robot duking it out with Captain Cybernetika, a real contest of super-powered metal giants just a block away. The evil robot took a titanic blow and stumbled down the street, less than 50 feet away from Milo’s enthusiastic window view; this was so cool, he thought, to be so close to the action, when Captain Cybernetika landed a roundhouse punch that knocked the robot solidly into Milo ’s building, crushing it into a pile of bricks, dust and rubble.

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Rod Drake, whose full catalog is here, lives, observes, thinks and writes in the neon capital known as Las Vegas. Check out his longer stories in Flashes of Speculation, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward, MicroHorror, and AcmeShorts.