The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 151

Chapter 151: 151 | The Gospel of Gerald

A hero cleans his own messes.

That thought landed somewhere between my chest and my stomach as I pulled the Range Rover into the parking lot of Consolidated Hardware on Sixth Street, a two-story concrete building that looked like it had been standing since before Aspects existed and would probably still be standing after whatever came next. The signage was faded yellow on brown, the kind of color combination that communicated we sell things that work and have never once considered hiring a graphic designer. I liked it immediately.

The real reason I was here at seven-oh-four in the morning instead of calling Dale back and eating the six thousand dollar bill was simpler than any heroic philosophy. The man I was before this body, before this System, before Diane and Sloane and the whole insane architecture of my current existence, would have chewed his own arm off before paying someone six grand to fix two holes that he could learn to fix himself. That wasn’t Lukas Belmont talking. That was me. The original me. The guy who grew up in government housing and learned to unclog his own toilet at eleven because the maintenance request line had a three-week backlog and his bathroom was starting to smell like a war crime.

Six thousand dollars. For drywall.

Over my dead body.

The automatic doors wheezed open and the smell hit me first. Sawdust and metal and that particular chemical sweetness that comes from fifty different types of adhesive sitting on shelves in close proximity. The store was cavernous, with aisles stretching back far enough that the fluorescent lighting created a haze near the ceiling. This early on a Saturday, the place was mostly empty. A woman in paint-stained overalls examined color swatches near the entrance. A skinny teenager in a store vest restocked something on a shelf with the enthusiasm of someone counting down the minutes until his shift ended.

And behind the main counter, leaning on his elbows and reading a newspaper with actual paper pages like some kind of relic from a history museum, stood the largest man I had ever seen who was not actively trying to kill something.

The guy was enormous. Not tall, exactly, though he was at least six-four. The enormity was all width. His shoulders looked like someone had installed a second set of shoulders on top of the first ones and then added a third layer for structural reinforcement. His arms were thick enough that the store polo he wore had surrendered any pretense of containing his biceps, the sleeves rolled up past elbows that were bigger than my thighs. Dark brown skin covered in a light fuzz of hair that, combined with his heavy brow ridge and the way his jaw jutted forward, gave him the unmistakable silhouette of something that had evolved to rip bark off trees and wasn’t embarrassed about it.

Branded. Had to be. The kind of Branded-type whose Aspect had decided that baseline human was a suggestion rather than a requirement and had rewritten his biology accordingly.

He looked up when I approached. His eyes were a warm amber brown, surprisingly gentle for a face that could have been carved into the side of a mountain, and the name tag pinned to his straining polo read GERALD.

"Morning," I said. "I need to fix two holes in a gym wall and ceiling. One’s about the size of a basketball. The other’s where a chain mount ripped out of a ceiling beam. Also I’ve never done this before."

Gerald folded his newspaper with the slow care of someone who had all the time in the world and wasn’t about to let an eighteen-year-old’s emergency change that. He set it on the counter and regarded me.

"Aspect damage?"

"Something like that."

"Hm." Gerald reached under the counter and produced a clipboard with a pre-printed checklist. "Been getting a lot of that this time of year. Kids coming up on academy enrollment. Testing their powers in rooms that weren’t built for it. Had a boy in here last Tuesday who melted through his garage floor. Acid secretion. His mama was not pleased."

"I can imagine."

"How big’s the wall crater?"

"Basketball. Maybe a little bigger. It went through the drywall and I could see the studs behind it."

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