The Dark Avenger Begins - Chapter 4

The costume shops around the university had been rented out for weeks by the time Darin and I sprung into action, so I did the only thing that came naturally. I called my mommy.

"We do not have enough time for this," Darin said as we crossed the river over to the suburbs on Saturday morning. "How is your mom going to make two ninja costumes in an afternoon?"

"I have no idea," I confessed. "But she said she'd do it, and then we'll have ninja costumes."

"And be the dorkiest guys in DeVargas," Darin pointed out.

"We won that honor when we staged the complete light saber battle from 'Return of the Jedi' in the stairwell," I said. "I'm okay with that if you're okay with that."

"I have a Warf costume complete with synthetic forehead at my parents' house," he said. "I'm more than okay with dressing up like a ninja. And sticking it to Ivan."

We discussed the plan we formulated until we got to my mom's house. She lived in stuccoed one story ranch deep in the suburbs, the home she bought three weeks after my father's death. I was nine. I parked in the driveway and waved at Mrs. Mulch, the next-door neighbor, like I did every time I came home.

Mom was waiting for us in the living room with a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies. "There's coffee in the kitchen," she said as she hugged each of us. "I thought we'd work in the den."

"You really don't have to do this, Barbara," Darin said, taking a handful of cookies and going straight to the kitchen for his caffeine. "I mean, really."

"Don't worry," Mom called after him. "I don't have to, because I already did."

Darin came out of the kitchen, cup to his lips and eyebrows arranged upwards. "Eh?"

"I pieced together the basic costume after Peter called," Mom said affectionately. "Ninjas, right? For the Halloween mixer." She sighed and started down the hall towards her sewing room, chattering a mile of minute. "I shouldn't be surprised that Peter wants to go as a ninja. He's been martial arts mad since his daddy took him to his first karate class. And you know, I met Peter's father at the Halloween mixer my sophomore year. He was a pirate. I was a princess. It was absolutely magical. We fell in love that night, and we stayed in love right up until he died."

She turned around and hugged me impulsively. "I'm so glad you're going," she said. "Maybe you'll meet a nice girl. Now, try on your costume."

She handed Darin a hanger. He grinned at me and scurried off to the guest bath to change.
"So, where's Warren?" I asked while we waited. Warren was my mother's second husband, a man she'd met and married the year after I went to college. We'd never gotten along like gangbusters. Just after he married Mom, Warren expressed his opinion that I was a "no-good, arrogant bitch of a boy," while I preferred to call him a motherfucker.

"He's out playing golf," Mom said, fluttering her hand. I nodded and didn't press the issue. At nineteen, I would have made a couple of snide comments in his absence. Now, at twenty-two, it was beginning to dawn on me that my mother was lonely and enjoyed the company of Warren, because he made her...happy. And in theory, I wanted my mommy to be happy which meant, in practice, accepting the guy I hated. For my mom. Because she was happy.

Look, sometimes I don't get the emotional crap right off the bat.

"I'm glad you're still living on campus," Mom said suddenly. "I sleep at night knowing you're there. I don't know how I'm going to manage if you stay in the city after graduation."

"Ma, I'll be fine," I assured her tugging on my shirt cuff. "Living in the city proper isn't going to be that much different than living in DeVargas."

She shook her head. "As long as you're on campus, I know that they won't touch you. I don't have that guarantee when you graduate. You know, your father,"

"It'll be okay." I had to cut her off. It was okay to hear her talking about meeting Dad at some mixer thirty-five years ago, but I didn't want to talk about the battle that took him. I started babbling to cover my awkwardness. "Look, it's not like any of the new school villains would even honor that old code. I mean, you never know. Some whacked-out professor might try to ransom off the school, or some sorority girl might begin a reign of terror on Greek Row. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine."

She looked at me, her face falling into a pattern of worry lines. "You sound like him, too."

Darin picked that minute to pop out of the bathroom. "I'd say tah-dah, but ninjas do not advertise their whereabouts. Barbara, you knocked yourself out."

I do what I can," she said as I circled Darin to admire his costume. It was a perfect ninja getup: he was head-to-toe in black, with only his eyes exposed. He looked freaky. He looked stealthy. He didn't look like Darin at all. I nodded my approval.

Mom handed me my own hanger. "Now you, dear," she commanded.

I don't think I cut quite the same figure as Darin when I came out of the bathroom. For one, his outfit didn't have bunny ears. Or a pink pom-pom sewn on the seat of his pants. "Maaaaaaaaaa," I whined.

"Oh, indulge your mother," she said, not looking particularly concerned that she had dressed her only child as a ninja rabbit. "Your father was in a bunny suit when I met him."

I struggled to articulate my humiliation and frustration that our plan might not work, without tipping my hand that there was a plan, or that a plan was even needed. I settled on, "I can't go out in public as a rabbit, Ma!"

She traded an amused expression with Darin. He was eating it up with a spoon. "Of course you can," she said. "And you will, because your mother made you."

"And I'm not going to say anything against your mother, dude," Darin smirked. "Not after she made me this kickass ninja costume."

"Language, dear," Mother corrected gently.

I frowned at my expression in the mirror. It was a duplicate of Darin's costume, except for the ears. Long, flowing black ears with pale pink inserts. "You can shape your ears," she said proudly. "I modeled them on Bugs Bunny's ears." She tugged on the ears to demonstrate how I could make them stand straight up, or fall over my shoulders, or perch on my head in a V-shape.

"I think that's awesome," Darin said. "You're adorable."

"I'll slug you."

Mom snapped her fingers. "That reminds me," she said. She pulled out a pair of black boxing gloves. "Your paws!"

She hand them to me and I saw she had painted on pink pads. Paws, even if they were gloves, were where I drew the line. "Well, Ma," I said. "That's great. You really knocked yourself out."

She groaned at the pun. "I think that's your cue to leave," she said. After we changed into our street clothes, she ushered us to the front door and demanded we have a good time and meet nice, sweet girls looking for a little romance.

"With any luck," I promised her, kissing her on the cheek. I didn't finish the thought out loud: that'll never happen.

~*~*~*~

"You do realize," Darin started as we headed east across the river.

"That I can just take the ears off and she'll never know?" I finished. "Yeah. Already thought of that."

"Not that," he grinned. "She told me while you were changing back that she's got the ears like quadrupledly sewn into the headpiece, so that if you try to take them out, the whole thing will be ruined. Same with the tail."

I groaned. "It's like she still can't grasp the fact I'm almost twenty-three."

"You'll always be her little boy," Darin mocked, pinching my cheek. I pushed him and nearly caused a three-car pileup. "Anyway," he said when the surrounding drivers finished flipping me off. "You do realize how things have changed, right?"

"Whaddya mean?" I asked concentrating on traffic.

"When we were freshmen, we would have totally gone along with this party scenario," Darin frowned. "Hell, we would have been eager. Getting laid without the girl remembering, without having to be bothered by those pesky 'where is this going' conversations. But now?"

He looked out the window, and drummed an angry cadence against it.

"Now it's total sleaze." I said.

"Ivan's sleaze."

We got back to campus and dropped out costumes off at the suite before traipsing off to do a little recon work. The mixer was being held on Smith Plaza, a wide, bricked square between DCU's main library and the student union building, and when we got there, we split. Daring headed to the SUB while I went to the library under pretense of writing a paper, but really, we were checking the grounds.

From my third floor study carrel, I had an unencumbered view of the proceedings.  I noted how the edge of the plaza was lined in hay bales stacked two across and two deep. I counted sixteen propane heaters scattered through the plaza. I watched as Ivan circulated through the underclassmen conned into setting up, pointing where the DJ booth should go and where to set up the booze tables and flirting with girls hanging black and orange crepe paper.

"Whatcha got?" Darin asked when we hooked up an hour later.

"Good view of the layout, but I didn't see the cups or the drugs," I admitted. "You?"

"I found the cups," Darin grinned. "They're being stored in the basement of the SUB next to the computer lab. Our roommate was ordering some schmuck to 'take care of them.' "

"Meaning lace them?" I asked. Darin nodded. "Think we can stop them?"

"Do you think our roommate even looked at the schmuck?" Darin grinned. "I paid some freshman fifty bucks to sit there and nod while Ivan bossed him around. The drugs are in liquid form. Ivan's got them in makeshift pony kegs attached to regular kegs. The beer dispenser guys just have to keep an eye on gender."

"Guys get regular beer while the women get the tampered drinks," I finished.

Darin grinned. "Not any more."

"What did you do?" I asked. He continued to grin longer and harder and the answer struck me over the head. "You've already switched them out."

"The only thing the girls are going to be getting is salty beer," he nodded.

"Salty beer?"

"I couldn't find any sugar. And man, do you know how long it took me to empty and refill forty pony kegs? And nobody showed up. You'd think Ivan would be more careful with who was around his pharmacological experiment."

I stood up from my seat and stretched. "Well, I guess that's that," I said. "Ivan's avenged and I don't have to go out in public dressed as a bunny."

"Oh, you're still going out dressed like a bunny," Darin said. "We're nowhere near finished avenging him."


"Where've you two losers been?" Ivan called from the shared bathroom as we popped into the suite a few minutes later.

We didn't answer. I dumped my books in my room and Darin picked up the phone to order a pizza. It was imperative Ivan think we were staying home.

"I said, 'where've you two losers been?'" Ivan asked, coming out of the bathroom. He was dressed like a genie in shiny green and gold harem pants, curled toe shoes and a puffy turban. I smirked at his bare, puny chest. The temperature had gone into rapid decline since dusk; even with the propane heaters, Ivan was going to be cold and miserable.

"Had a paper," I shrugged as Darin hung up the phone. "Anyway, have fun at your party."

Ivan scoffed. "You're not coming. Why am I not surprised?" He followed us into Darin's room, where we sat down to start playing video games. Ivan leaned against the doorsill and began reeling off my faults: intimidated by women, even when it was a sure thing; arrogant; prissy; weak. "And I don't even get you, Darin," he said. "Why do you let this loser follow you around? Doesn't he cramp your social style? I mean, you've brought babes back here, but then they never stick around."

"Sauce 'em and toss 'em," Darin said without looking up. "I learned from the best."

"You guys should come," Ivan said without conviction. "It's going to be awesome."

"Date rape's not my thing," I said.

Ivan charged me; got right up in my face, grabbing me by the neck of my t-shirt. His face was tomato red and his beady brown eyes were burning with fury. His mouth twisted into a snarl, and he huffed once, twice, three times. "Someday, I'm going to get you," he said, before dropping me. "Fuckin' pansy." He stormed out of the suite, muttering under his breath.

"Dude," Darin said after thirty seconds. "Why didn't you just kung fu his ass right there?"

"Because," I said, feeling my identity shift. "Tonight he burns."

~*~*~*~

Despite the freezing weather, throngs of undergrads had filled Smith Plaza to capacity, clustering around the heaters and occasionally half-heartedly gyrating to the generic dance tracks. The Costume mixer of my mother's day, it wasn't.

We'd come in behind a quartet of giggling, slutty milkmaids, watching as they flashed their student IDs to the bouncers and received their arm bands. All of them were red.

"Wonder how many revisions have been made based on the trashiness of the outfit?" Darin mused as we stepped up to pay our ten bucks.

"More times than a freshman term paper," I quipped, sweating through my mask. I was positive the bouncer, a friend of Ivan's, was going to recognize us through the costumes and call our scam, even before we got into the party. I was terrified this would fail. Worse, I was scared it would work. Then what?

The bouncer didn't even glance at our bogus IDs, just handed us our two armbands and told us to have a good time with a wink and a smirk.

We meandered into the plaza, into the thick of our milling classmates. But I didn't see Ivan. "Do you see him?" I asked Darin.

"Not yet," he said, craning his neck. "But I'm certain the bastard will turn up shortly."

As if on cue, the crowd parted and I spotted him. He was walking two very cute blondes towards one of the beer tables. I tugged on Darin's sleeve and tilted my head in his direction. He spotted the quarry and nodded. "Now what?" he asked. "I mean, I know I'm the one who got you all stoked up to kick this guy's ass, but..."

"Just follow my lead," I said.

We split up and moved through the crowd towards Ivan. Nobody noticed. The party-goers were bunched up around the heaters, trying to stay warm. I circled around my suitemate, watched as he pressed tainted cups into the girls' hands and listened as he tried to cajole them into drinking. "C'mon, it's free and nobody's checking IDs," he oozed. "This is what college is all about."

"I don't like beer," the blonde on his left said.

"It tastes weird," the blonde on his right said, wrinkling her nose.

Ivan took a deep pull off his own cup. "I dunno," he said. "Tastes pretty good to me."

The blonde on the right took a tentative sip and then drenched a nearby hay bale with the contents of her cup. "That is not good beer," she said. "It tastes...salty."

Ivan watched in horror as the blonde on the left parroted her friend's action. "Ew. Salty beer."

I was behind him now; I saw that he was turning for the drinks table. Darin was off to the side. We doubled back and hovered on the edges of the drinks line. Ivan cut to the front. "Give me a red cup," he demanded from the guy manning the tap.

"Sir?" the guy asked, obviously surprised. Oh yeah, that guy was also going to need some avenging.

"Give me. A. Red cup." Ivan over-enunciated. "Now."

The guy shrugged and pulled him a red cup. Ivan took a sip, paused for a moment and then sprayed the guy with best spit-take I've seen outside of the movies. "SOMEONE'S FUCKED WITH THE BEER!"

"Well, of course, sir. Those were your orders," the guy said, patting his face dry with a bar towel.

"Not like that, you moron!" Ivan shouted. "I mean, someone's fucked with my fucking. The beer's contaminated."

The last sentence rippled through the surrounding crowd. "The beer's contaminated." "Oh my god, the beer's contaminated." "There's something wrong with the beer!" All around me, partygoers began pouring the contents of their cups into obliging hay bales. "The beer's contaminated."

This displeased Ivan. He snarled at the guy behind the table, wound up...

And took a punch right in the side of the head from a guy wearing bunny paw boxing gloves.

"Oh, and he goes down!" I shouted as he dropped to the bricks. I shook off a glove, grabbed him by the neck and pulled him up to his feet. "Did you really think you could get away with it?" I shouted as a group of Student Senate guys started approaching to defend their leader.

"Please don't hurt me," Ivan mewed. "Please don't hurt me." Real, hot tears streamed down the side of his face, and I'd only punched him once.

"Did you really think you could ruin the lives of hundreds of girls without getting caught?" I shouted. I threw him into his friends, knocking them over like dominoes.

"The beer was tampered with!" Darin shouted, pointing at Ivan. "He put drugs in the girls' cups so they'd be horny, but when they woke up in the morning, wouldn't have any memory of the night before."

The crowd started buzzing. "He put roofies in the beer?" "Roofies in the beer?" "Drugs in the beer?" "What's a roofie?" "There's tar paper in the beer?"

Ivan had struggled to his feet and was advancing on me. "You fucking pansy, I'm going to kick your ass," he vowed. He blindly took a swing with his right fist. I sidestepped it with a quick hop, and then kicked him in the knee with a sweeper, popped him in the solar plexus and stepped on his arm.

"You really think you can take me?" I asked in this weird, deep voice that didn't sound like Peter Coney at all. "Fuckin' punk like you?"

He tried to grab my leg with his free hand. I stepped off his arm and stomped on his nuts. He rolled over, howling with pain. I picked him up again. "You. Are. Scum. And it'd be a service to this university if I just kill you here."

He whimpered. I dropped him on the bricks again. "But instead, I'll let the university handle you."

I turned and started striding to the exit, and the crowd parted for me, but a girl shouted, "LOOK OUT!" and I turned to see the battered man get up off the ground, stagger to a propane heater, and push it into an alcohol-soaked bale of hay. It caught with a plume of red and smoke. I don't think he expected it to go that fast. He watched dumbly as spread to the surrounding bales.

We were in an inferno.

The students panicked, and the crowd stampeded for the only exit: the cattle chute-like entrance made out of the burning straw blocks. They would die like cattle if we didn't save them.

"Get these people out of here!" I shouted at my partner as I grabbed Ivan by the back of his ponytail. Darin nodded curtly and began pushing through the flames to open up an exit. A couple of other large jock types, who minutes ago were going to beat my ass, helped.  In seconds, they shouldered through an exit and began pushing people to safety.

"Listen to their screams," I commanded Ivan, still holding on by his hair and wrapping my other hand around his arm and locking it behind his back. "Listen to the people you've condemned to death."

He began coughing and kicking, trying to break free. "I didn't mean! You fucker, you ruined my fun!"

I didn't say anything. The smoke was thick. We had to get out of there if we wanted to live. I pushed him towards the improvised exit, but he struggled against me, trying to fight me. I slammed him over the head with my free fist and he went limp, and I dragged his sorry ass to safety.

Rescue workers were just arriving on the scene when I made it out, coughing and wheezing. I laid Ivan at the feet of a startled cop. "This guy started the fire," I said. "He said he did something to the beer. Get him some help, or he's going to die."

"Hey!" the cop shouted, but I had turned around and went back into the flames to pull as many people as I could. Darin was already there, pulling people through the embers.

"We've got to go!" I called at him.

"Follow me!" he shouted back. He went deep into the plaza and began pulling at a storm drain cover. I looked at the building flames nervously.

"These tanks are gonna blow!" I shouted.

He lifted the cover. "Let's go!"

I jumped into the darkness, and he followed, letting the cover blot us into nothingness. I landed on cold concrete and he landed on me a split second later. He pulled me to my feet and we scrambled through the black. Five or ten or a hundred seconds later, there was a muffled POW!  and the ground shook under my feet.

"The tanks went," Darin panted.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"Drainage system," he said. "If we go another 600 yards or so, we'll hit DeVargas, and we'll be home."

~*~*~*~

We were in the suite and in our street clothes when the cops turned up a couple of hours after the explosion. We answered their questions and assured them we were in the suite the entire time. "What's this about?" Darin asked.

They told us about the blaze and the blast and that our roommate was in critical condition at DCU Hospital, accused of starting the fire.

"I wouldn't put it past him," I said without having to lie.

"Dude's a psychopath," Darin agreed.

The cops thanked us for our time and left.

The fire was front-page news on the Morning Bulletin. Someone with a camera had caught me in mid-punch, ears back, glove extended and Ivan's distorted, contorted face turning towards the camera. There was even a tooth flying through the frame. The headline was "Fire at DCU Social" with the subhead reading "A New Hero Emerges?" The story outlined the details of the blaze, including the rumor Ivan had spiked the beer, and a description of a shadowy man in a bunny suit who took the villain down. You've got to love the press in this town. Everything is black and white to them.

A couple of days later, more cops turned up to search the suite. They carted away boxes upon boxes of his possessions for evidence. A notebook turned up (that may or may not have been authored by him, just saying) detailing his plans to spike the beer, and the university formally expelled him.

Free, Darin and I turned back to our studies and tried to focus on finishing the semester. Graduation loomed on the horizon for both of us. I would take an engineering job; Darin would take an engineering job. We'd sworn to give up these aspirations of playing hero.

But one day in the middle of November, I received a very package from my mother. Found it odd, since I'd been at her house the day before and she hadn't mentioned sending me anything. I ripped it open, wondering what I'd forgotten. Wrapped underneath layers of tissue paper was another bunny suit. Another ninja suit. And a note that said, in my mother's hand, simply "courage."