Ex-Superheroes Read online

  EX-SUPERHEROES

  A Superhero Harem Series

  AJ Markam

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  Copyright © 2019 by A.J. Markam

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Also by AJ Markam

  Succubus Christmas Special

  (Short story)

  Succubus

  (Kindle and audiobook)

  Succubus 2: Hell To Pay

  (Kindle and audiobook)

  Succubus 3:

  The Good, The Bad, And The Crazy Stupid Hot

  (Kindle and audiobook)

  Succubus 4:

  Gnome Place Like Home

  (Kindle and audiobook)

  Succubus 5:

  Hardcore Dungeon Core

  Dead Man Gaming

  Zodiac: Operation Zodiac

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Also by AJ Markam

  Recommended

  1

  Being in prison sucks ass.

  Being in an underwater prison sucks more.

  But the absolute worst?

  Having your superpowers taken away from you.

  Name’s Hunter McNeil. Former Army Ranger. Then a superhero. Then a supervillain. At least, that’s what the United States government will tell you. I happen not to agree with them on that last one. I’d just call myself an ‘ex-superhero.’

  I was one year into a 50-year sentence with no chance of parole. Any crime committed with a superpower carried a 10x multiplier, thanks to the Superhuman Registration Act of 2052. So what a normal criminal might have gotten five years for, I got what amounted to a life sentence.

  I came in at 28 years old, so I’d be 78 when I got out.

  Actually, it was way more likely I’d be dead long before then.

  Why?

  Because they’d stuck me in Karkarin International Prison.

  Karkarin was God-knows-where in the Pacific Ocean, underneath God-knows-how-much water. Its location was a closely guarded secret, but there were whispers on the street that it was somewhere off the coast of Hawaii and a mile underwater. Nobody knew for sure, because nobody ever came back from Karkarin.

  The water wasn’t the worst part. The prison didn’t have any windows, so you had no way of knowing for sure, anyway. We could have been on top of a mountain or next to a garbage dump, for all the prisoners knew.

  I can tell you this, though: assuming that there’s a mile of water between you and your next breath of air did a pretty damn good job of deterring prison breaks.

  No, the worst part of Karkarin wasn’t being trapped deep in the ocean.

  It was who you were locked up with.

  Mass murderers. Serial killers. Terrorists. And your average, everyday assholes who’d only killed one or two people.

  Not to mention gang members, rapists, bank robbers, arsonists, human traffickers, and drug dealers.

  The lowest of the low. The scum of the earth. The most violent predators known to mankind.

  The one thing they all had in common?

  They had superpowers.

  Basically, Karkarin was Supermax for supervillains.

  I know what you’re thinking: Jesus, this Hunter guy must have done something fuckin’ awful to wind up in a place like that.

  Nope. I was a smuggler. That’s it. Not drugs, or people, or guns, or any other kind of weapon.

  Just Ephemera. The stuff that could turn an average Joe into Superman.

  Highly regulated. Extremely illegal – if you weren’t the US military, that is. And worth ten thousand times its weight in gold.

  I didn’t even do it for the money. Yeah, the money was great – but I did it for other reasons.

  The important thing was that I’d pissed off a hell of a lot of people at the top of the food chain. And when they finally caught me, they threw me in the sewers with the crocodiles and water moccasins, put a lock on the grate, and tossed away the key.

  There was no way I – or anyone else – was getting out of Karkarin alive.

  The courts knew it. The guards knew it. The other inmates knew it. I knew it.

  Karkarin was inescapable.

  So imagine my surprise when there was a jailbreak.

  Except it didn’t come from the inmates.

  No – it came from outside the prison, God-knows-how-many miles underneath the ocean.

  2

  The day started off like any other. I woke at 0530, before the lights turned on, and did my morning exercises in the dark. 200 regular pushups. 400 crunches. 300 squats. Two sets of 50 one-armed pushups. Shadowboxing to get my heartrate up. Stretching to stay limber.

  At 6 foot 2 and 230 pounds, I was in better shape than I had ever been, even back when I was a US Army Ranger. You had to be in Karkarin. Everybody might have had their powers shut off, but they were still vicious assholes.

  Murder was pretty common in here. Some of the inmates wanted to establish their place in the pecking order. Some were looking to repay grudges. And some of them were just itching to have a little fun.

  The guards didn’t even try to stop it. The way they saw it, we were doing society a favor. Like rats eating each other. Thinning a particularly nasty herd.

  Every so often a tough guy would come at me, and I’d have to rearrange his face. Break his nose, bust his jaw, curb-stomp his skull. That sort of thing. I didn’t enjoy it like some of my fellow inmates did, but if I had to choose between getting a shiv in the kidneys or making somebody a cripple for life, my kidneys were staying intact.

  I’d inevitably get a couple weeks in solitary, but that was the price of spending most of my life – such as it was – in relative peace. Nobody had fucked with me for two months, and I was intent on keeping the streak going.

  You might be asking yourself, If everybody has powers, why didn’t they use them?

  Because of the collars.

  There were two basic divisions of powers: mental and physical. ‘Physical’ meant shapeshifters, superhuman strength, regeneration and healing powers – basically anything that relied on your muscles or individual body cells. ‘Mental’ was everything else. Telepathy, telekinesis and all its cousins (pyrokinesis, aquakinesis, terrakinesis, aerokinesis, metallokinesis, and every other fuckin’ kind of kinesis), phasing, flying, superspeed, teleportation, invisibility, and ten thousand other abilities.

  Every inmate had a metal band around his neck that stopped the use of his powers. For the mental category, that meant an electromagnetic field that scram
bled the part of your brain that let you do what you do.

  For the physicals, the collars were tiny supercomputers that constantly scanned the wearers’ bodies and generated a massive electrical shock if they detected you even beginning to use your abilities. So if a shapeshifter deviated even a millimeter from his regular form, he was going to get damn near electrocuted (which sort of messes with your ability to turn into a wolf or a tiger or whatever the hell it was you turned into). If a superhumanly strong guy exerted more than X amount of physical force, he was going to get fried.

  Since the strong guys were theoretically the hardest to keep in check – after all, one quick punch could cave in somebody’s head like that – the ‘Shock’ was an instant death sentence. The only exception was if the collar and the prison’s computer surveillance system determined that the inmate was acting in self-defense, in which case the strong dude just got lightly toasted.

  It was a pretty good deterrent. Super-strong guys might have been the hardest to control in theory, but in practice, they were the easiest. None of them ever messed with anybody else because they didn’t want to die. Nobody else wanted a fist through the skull, so they never attacked the strong guys first. It worked out well for everybody.

  Well… as well as it could work out for a bunch of thugs all locked up in a tin can a mile under the ocean.

  The guys who could regenerate from physical damage, well… that was automatic and out of their control, like a heartbeat. There was no way to control their powers, so they basically got off scot-free. Plus they survived the occasional shiv, no worse for wear.

  Lucky bastards.

  Anyway, I’d do my morning exercises in the dark. When 0600 rolled around, the lights came on and the cell doors opened up, and I’d stroll on down to the chow hall for breakfast.

  When I say ‘stroll,’ I do mean walking leisurely, but I kept my guard up. I was on red alert any time I was out of my locked cell. There were a lot of bad dudes in Karkarin, and an attack could come from anywhere at any time. Could be an individual, or could be a potential gang hit.

  You had gangs the same way you did in any prison. The Aryan neo-Nazi assholes, the Mexican mafia, the Crips and Bloods, all that shit. Only thing was, you also had gangs based around superpowers, too.

  The physically altered fuckers were pretty tight-knit. The guys who looked like lizards, or werewolves, or who had extra appendages. We called them the Freak Squad.

  There was also a whole group of telekinetics and telepaths. Why the hell they all hung out together I have no idea, seeing as they couldn’t use their powers with their collars anyway. A telekinetic with a collar was no different from any other douchebag in a regular prison.

  Whatever. I kept tabs on anybody who might be looking to scuffle as I made my way to the chow hall.

  Karkarin was a massive cylinder three stories tall, all steel, concrete, and exposed pipes. The prison cells lined the outermost wall. That was probably so that in case of a hull breach, the guards could lock down the interior blast doors and the prisoners would all drown first.

  If you think I’m kidding, I’m not.

  Inside the center of the prison were the prison guards’ quarters, life support, surveillance, the chow hall, laundry, the infirmary, all that. It was a maze of different areas, most of it off-limits to prisoners.

  I ignored the parts I couldn’t access and made my way to the fine dining area.

  If you considered powdered eggs and grade-D beef ‘fine dining.’

  I grabbed a tray, got in line, and immediately saw Stu behind the counter. He was short and skinny with a huge grin, and probably my favorite on the prison staff. I’d made friends with all the guys behind the kitchen counter early on, and they gave me extra food on the sly. You need a lot of protein to keep 100 pounds of extra muscle on your bones. But Stu was always sunny no matter how shitty it was being a cafeteria grunt a mile underwater with a bunch of superpowered murderers and rapists.

  As soon as he saw me, his smile widened 50%. “Hey Hunter, how’s it hangin’?”

  “Low and to the left. How you doin’, Stu?”

  “Can’t complain, can’t complain.”

  “How many days you got left on your shift?”

  The prison staff – guards and support workers – all rotated four weeks on, one week off. It was hell living in an underwater tin can with no windows for weeks at a time, so they were sent topside every so often to preserve their sanity.

  The inmates’ sanity?

  Fuck the inmates.

  “I got 22 more days and a glorious arising,” Stu replied. “Till then, here I am in the happiest place on earth.”

  “Sucks to be you.”

  “It’s a livin’.”

  “How are your kids?”

  Stu had three of them. A seven-year-old boy, a five-year-old girl, and a newborn. I’d seen their pictures – cute kids. Made me a little regretful for all the bad choices I’d made in my life.

  “They’re good, they’re good. Susie’s already learning to read – she’s smart.”

  “Just like her mother,” I joked good-naturedly.

  “Yeah, but she’s got her daddy’s good looks,” Stu chuckled. “What’ll ya have?”

  I was about to answer when a metallic KRANG reverberated through the entire prison.

  I whipped around, and every muscle in my body tensed.

  That was not a sound I’d ever heard before.

  Suddenly all the lights shut off. The emergency lights came on, bathing everything in red. Looked like a goddamn massacre had painted everybody and everything in blood.

  “Prisoners, return to your cells immediately,” a voice spoke over the loudspeaker. “This is not a drill. Return to your cells immediately.”

  Right on cue, two dozen prison guards marched through the hallway outside the cafeteria. They were dressed in their armored riot gear, and carried plastic shields and cattle prods.

  Whatever the hell was going on, it was big.

  I looked back at Stu, whose eyes had gone big as saucers.

  “Get someplace safe,” I warned him. “This could get ugly.”

  He nodded. “You be careful, Hunter.”

  “Always am.”

  Me and the 20 other prisoners who were early risers set off back for our cells.

  We didn’t even get halfway there before the attack began.

  3

  The first thing I saw was a foot-high wave of water spilling over the third floor railings into the common area below.

  My first thought was, Oh shit.

  When I got up that morning, drowning hadn’t been on my ‘to do’ list.

  Second thought was, Wait – that’s not a lot of water if the hull got breached.

  The third thought didn’t even have time to form, because that’s when the energy beam blasted out of the shadows – a shaft of light crackling with electricity.

  The beam immediately took out the first two rows of guards on the first floor. Just fried them like marshmallows over a blast furnace.

  My fourth thought was, Oh SHIT.

  This isn’t a hull breach – this is a jailbreak.

  I immediately pulled back into the shadows and watched what unfolded, trying to determine if I could turn it to my advantage.

  Three guys emerged from whatever corridor they’d punched through. One white, one black, one Hispanic. Nothing remarkable about them, other than their powers. They wore black leather bodysuits, cut like something you’d see on a fighter pilot, but without the helmets. They didn’t even wear masks or balaclavas – obviously they didn’t give a fuck about who knew their identities, which was pretty brazen considering they were blasting their way into the most highly guarded prison of all time.

  The guards were fucked. They had shields and cattle prods – great for herding helpless prisoners in close proximity, but not exactly useful against superpowered enemies 40 feet away. They’d brought piss to a shit fight, and the shit was about to hit the fan.

  The
black guy raised one gloved hand. Suddenly there was a shimmering in the air and a high-pitched VRRREEEE sound, like a high-speed bullet train approaching a station.

  Down on the first floor, a guard’s head vaporized in a spray of red, and the two guys behind him got blasted to the floor.

  Sonic attack. Waves of sound energy that could liquify matter.

  Not good.

  The white guy raised his arms and suddenly all the guards still standing went in every direction like bowling pins.

  Telekinetic – standard issue blunt force attack. Nothing spectacular.

  But the guards weren’t superpowered, and they were taking it up the ass because of it.

  The inmates were freaking out. Screaming and yelling YEAH! and FUCK THE GUARDS!

  Me?

  I was very interested in where this was going.

  I took a quick inventory of what I’d seen in the last five seconds.

  Black guy – sonic attacks. White guy – telekinetic. So the Hispanic dude must have thrown the energy beam I’d seen earlier.

  The three guys split up. The white guy went right, the other two left.

  I tracked in the direction of the white guy. Although he was still over a hundred feet away, something looked familiar about him – maybe the way he slouched. Whatever it was, I wanted a closer look.

  I found the nearest stairwell and ran up it.

  When I reached the third floor, I saw the white guy coming towards me. He seemed to be scanning the cells like he was looking for someone.