The Avenger Chronicles is Here!

Last year I wrote a short story for Moonstone Books' The Avenger Chronicles, an anthology starring the 1930-1940s pulp character. The book is out and I share space with a batch of talented writers, including Will Murray, Ron Goulart, C.J. Henderson and others. Here's how it starts:

The Avenger Chronicles: THE CLOUD OF DOOM

© respective copyright holders

“So, you think you’re a tough guy, eh?”

The tall, lanky man in the yellow checkered vest and straw boater planted himself in front of the approaching couple, jabbing a finger at the man and blocking their way along the Coney Island’s Boardwalk.

The male half of the duo, dressed in a pearl gray summer weight suit and matching fedora pulled low on his brow, peered up at the taller obstacle, his eyes hidden behind round-framed dark glasses. He was of average size, no more than five feet eight inches tall and one hundred and sixty pounds, but something about the man’s dark stare chilled the humid July air around the suddenly unsmiling Boardwalk barker.

“Excuse me?” the gray man said.

The barker swallowed and stepped back, trying to regain his smile, but fear kept it sliding from his lips.

“The bell,” the barker stammered, no longer shouting for the benefit of the crowd that surged around them. He held up the large wooden mallet that had been dangling at his side. “Ring the bell ... win a Kewpie doll. For, for the little lady.”

The “little lady” in question, a small, delicate young woman in a yellow flower print sun dress and wide brimmed bonnet to shield her porcelain complexion from the rays of the sun, tugged discreetly at the man’s arm. “Yes, Richard, why don’t you win me a Kewpie doll.”

Richard turned the black, endless stare of his sunglasses on her. “I wasn’t aware you needed one,” he said.

“I don’t, but you’ve obviously made this poor man very uncomfortable, so the least you can do is ring his bell,” she said. Then, in a whisper meant only for his ears, “Relax. Remember why you’re here.”

Richard looked at her for several seconds, than reached into his pocket for a quarter, which he flipped to the startled barker, who dropped the mallet to catch the coin. Before the well-worn handle could touch the ground, Richard had it in hand and, as effortlessly as waving farewell, he swung it against the padded wooden lever that sent a hard rubber ball racing up the eleven-foot length of cable, past the crudely painted summations and artistic representations of levels of strength, from “90-lb. Weakling” to “Hercules!!!”, to slam into the waiting bell with a resounding clang that brought an “oooh” and a smattering of applause from onlookers, then gasps as the force of its momentum drove the ball under the copper bell and jammed there.

The barker looked at Richard, his mouth moving but making no sound. In the distance, the sputtering engine of a slow-moving biplane towing an advertising banner through the thick, hot air thumped dully off the water. Closer by, a train of rollercoaster cars thundered by on the Cyclone and from it came a girl’s scream of terrified delight.

“I believe there was mention of a Kewpie doll,” Richard inquired, handing the barker his mallet.

As they walked from the still speechless barker, a cheap little celluloid cherubic Kewpie tucked under her arm, the woman said to Richard, “That was entirely mean. He was just doing his job. Some people have been known to come to Coney Island for fun, you know.”

“I was doing a public service, Nellie,” he said. “One look at that rickety contraption and I could see it was only a few good wallops away from collapsing and injuring someone. I gave him a hundred dollars and made him promise to replace it.”

“Oh,” Nellie said and smiled. “Yes, of course. I should have known.”

Richard didn’t smile back at her. He couldn’t. Beneath the shade of his hat and mask of his glasses, she could see the flesh of his face, so pale as to make her own peaches and cream complexion seem almost ruddy. She had long accepted the dead white immobility of his face, a result of the unimaginable trauma he suffered when his beloved wife Alice and their young daughter Alicia were murdered by gangsters. Nellie and the others who worked for this man’s Justice, Inc. could read his mood by his body language and voice, just one of the many small adjustments they all made when they joined their destinies with the man the newspapers called “The Avenger,” but who they knew as Richard Henry Benson.

His voice when he spoke was warm. “I appreciate your coming along, Nellie. I realize this must be awkward for you.”

“Awkward? Why on earth would you think that”

Richard lifted one shoulder and let it settle back in place, as close a sign of hesitation as he ever made. “We’re business associates. This is a personal matter. I just thought you might be uncomfortable...”

Nellie sighed, “Dear Richard, after how many years together, you still don’t understand, do you?”

But he was no longer listening. His chin had gone up and his gaze had shifted elsewhere. Nellie tried to see what he saw, but all she saw were revelers. Men, women, and children, clustered in all possible combinations and groupings, some in street clothes, many more in bathing suits, all in motion, pausing only long enough to loudly and merrily sample some amusement or Boardwalk delicacy. She couldn’t begin to guess how many were jammed onto the Boardwalk, beach and surrounding streets, but they had to number in the hundreds of thousands. And still more were coming by the minute, spilling out of the subway cars screeching into the elevated Stillwell Avenue station, by car, by bus and by packed trolleys that hissed south along Brooklyn’s major arteries, all culminating here, on a tiny spit of land jutting into the Atlantic Ocean.

It was the Fourth of July, 1941 and, until about thirty seconds ago, Coney Island seemed absolutely the best and most American place in all the world to be celebrating that.

Brightly buzzing neon and countless blinking, flashing light bulbs fought for attention with miles of red, white, and blue bunting flapping atop every arcade, game, attraction, and come-on joint along the Boardwalk. The air was thick with sound and smell, the roar of those countless voices muffled under the ceaseless thunder of the Atlantic surf. Nellie could smell sea and sand, sizzling hot dogs, diesel exhaust, roasting corn, and cotton candy. A pair of biplanes made lazy circles over the beach, one towing a banner extolling beachgoers to drink an ice cold Pepsi-Cola, the other to freshen their breath with new Julep cigarettes.

What she couldn’t see was anything amiss.

“Male Caucasian, blond, in his shirt sleeves, at eleven o’clock,” Benson said.

And then she had him, a tall, muscled man in his late-thirties, wearing a worn, grease-stained blue workman’s shirt with rolled up sleeves, dungarees, and steel-toed boots, striding away from a hot dog vendor, taking a big bite from one with everything.

500 Words A Day, Part Deux

The Same Old Story, she is written, being read by several friends for consistency and suckishness (my wife’s already read it; not to keep you in suspense, she loved it). It’s also out to an agent of my acquaintance for consideration. I need to leave it alone for a little while longer, then go take it out again and look at the manuscript with a fresh eye. It may take a little while; I’ve been suffering from withdrawal symptoms ever since I finished it. I’d grown accustomed to spending my idle time thinking about the story and how to tell it, looking forward to getting back to Max, Mick, Shelly and the rest for the next 500 words.

I need something new to obsess over so I can cleanse my mental palate of the book I just finished. That would be Supertown, U.S.A., something that’s been around so long, I’m actually embarrassed it hasn’t been long, long done.

Our story so far: 14-year old Wally Crenshaw lives in Crumbly-by-the-Sea, New Jersey, a seaside town to which you can’t get from wherever you might happen to be. Wally wants nothing more than to become one of the superheroes that inhabit his world; he wears a costume under his clothes in case he ever runs into an opportunity to have a secret origin of his own. Charlie Harris, aka The Knave, a non-super-powered hero (a la Batman), has come to take up residence in Crumbly in the house his aunt left him, wanting nothing more than to forget about being a costumed hero—it hurt and he wasn’t very good at it—and he figured the best way to start is by disappearing into out-of-the-way Crumbly. But when he opens the door to his new home, his ex-comrade from the Justice Brigade, William W. Williams, Jr., the obsessive, half-crazy and dimwitted Mr. Justice is waiting there to drag him back to civilization and his responsibilities as a hero. Charlie tells him to go screw, leaving them at a stalemate. It being late in the day, Mr. Justice asks if he can spend the night. Meanwhile, Wally is positive something to do with superheroes is going on inside that house. He's just entirely wrong about what that something is…

SUPERTOWN, U.S.A.

© Paul Kupperberg

Charlie Harris stepped out onto the back porch of his late aunt’s house. Correction. Onto the back porch of his house. He owned it, free and clear. He put his coffee mug down on the railing, which promptly collapsed under the weight.

“Guess it needs a little work, though,” he murmured.

Well, what if it did? He was retired from the supers biz. Now he could be plain old Charlie Harris, free lance writer on the supers for the National Mask and other publications...and with a newly signed, fairly sweet contract for a series of books about those ex-colleagues remaining in the supers biz. He had all the time in the world to patch up the old place.

Even with Mr. Justice camped out on the sofa in the parlor, finishing up the last of half a dozen frozen dinners Charlie had picked up earlier along with a few other dining necessities from the grocery store on Main Street, Charlie was feeling strangely at peace. He thought it was strange because Charlie couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this way. As a kid, he was always butting heads with his father. As a grown up, he was constantly worried about somebody uncovering his secret identity, or about the next fight he was going to get into and hurt by. On top of that, there was the continual aggravation of trying to have a real life when you never knew what death-defying adventure you would have to take off on with the Brigade, usually in the middle of a date, or while he was supposed to be working. How tough was it to meet a magazine deadline when you were fighting mole men at the center of the Earth the day your article was due? It was a miracle he kept getting assignments — although, the inside scoops he got being (secretly!) a member of the supers community probably made up for his lack of punctuality.

But that was his old life. Gentleman writer, resident of quaint Crumbly-by-the-Sea, that was the new.

“Charlie!” Mr. Justice called from inside.

Charlie sighed and closed his eyes. “Yes, Willie?”

“Did you get anything for dessert?”

Tomorrow morning, he told himself. He’ll be gone in the morning...! And, out loud, he said, in a tone of voice usually reserved for conversations with six-year olds, “Who wants cupcakes and milk?”

Mr. Justice said, “Oh, boy!”

* * *

Wally Crenshaw, Benny Sachem, and Brenda Cunningham gathered at the north end of Kane Street, watching the dirty gray car parked down the street.

“See,” Wally said. “The Accelerator’s car is still here.”

“Wow,” Benny said with a snicker, “it’s the actual Acceleratormobile!”

Brenda poked Benny in the ribs with her elbow, “Cut it out, Benny. How do you know it’s not?”

Benny glanced at his girlfriend, then at Wally. “Am I the only one here who hasn’t gone, like, insane?”

“Probably,” Wally said. He took the folded wanted poster from the pocket of his shorts and held it out to Benny. “But all I want to do is see if the guy in this picture’s the same as the guy who belongs to that car.”

Benny opened the poster and looked at it. Brenda peeked over his shoulder. “New York license plates, gray car.”

“Two for two,” said Wally.

“Unless it just happens to be a gray car from New York,” said Benny.

“Work with us here, Benny,” Brenda said.

Wally started to walk down the quiet street. “Come on,” he whispered to his friends.

“Where?” Benny asked.

“That’s not working with us, Sachem,” Brenda said and yanked on Benny’s arm to get him moving.

“C’mon, Brenda,” Benny pleaded. “Don’t tell me you believe any of this stuff.”

Brenda shrugged and said, softly so Wally couldn’t hear, “No, I don’t. But Wally does. And if it’s important to him, then as his friends it’s important we believe with him. Okay?”

Benny nodded. “Okay. But I still get to make fun of him. If I don’t make fun of him, he’ll think I’m putting him on.”

Even as he walked a half dozen paces ahead of his friends, Wally was formulating a plan of action. They couldn’t just walk up and ring the doorbell. If it was the Accelerator and he was hiding out here in town, he might...well, accelerate them. They needed a distraction, something to draw whoever was in that house outside where Wally could get a good look at him. He wished he had some firecrackers on him. Setting off a string of firecrackers on the front porch would sure get him out in a hurry. Or a siren! Boy, a nice loud siren would sure do the trick.

“So, got a plan, Whiz Kid?” Brenda asked.

Wally shook his head. “Not unless you’ve got a siren in your pocket.”

Benny rolled his eyes. “Oh, brother,” he said, and ignored Brenda’s withering look.

“We just need to get a look at the guy,” Wally muttered.

The slow walking trio had come up alongside the dirt splattered gray car at the curb outside the old Wicker house. Brenda glanced at it, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “We could,” she said, slowly, “just knock on the door.”

“We could,” Wally said, his eyes practically bugging out of his head, “if we wanted to get all accelerated!”

“He’s not going to accelerate some kid,” Brenda said. “Whatever that is,” and went skipping up the sidewalk and then turned up the front walk to 254 Kane Street.

“Brenda!” Wally hissed.

“Don’t!” Benny called.

Brenda ignored them both, pausing only briefly to look back and throw them a sweet smile just before she rapped her knuckles on the weather beaten front door. Wally and Benny, in a sudden fit of not knowing what to do with themselves, almost collided with one another three times before charging around to the street side of the gray car and ducking down in hiding just as the front door swung open.

Charlie Harris, the chocolate frosting from a cupcake on his face, looked at Brenda and smiled. “Hello,” he said.

“Hi, mister,” she said. “I saw your car out there and wanted to know if you wanted it washed. Only five dollars.”

Charlie glanced at the car, wondering why there were the tops of two heads bobbing around behind it. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “It’s not my car. Belongs to someone visiting me.”

“Does he want it washed?”

“I doubt it,” Charlie said. “Sorry. But, hey, you want a cupcake? I’ve got plenty.”

Brenda said, “I don’t think so, thank you. So, could you ask your friend?”

Charlie took a bite from his cupcake. “What’s your name?”

“Brenda,” she said, then quickly added, “My dad’s the sheriff.”

He smiled, and watched the two heads hiding behind Willie’s car as he said, “And a fine, dedicated lawman he is, I’m sure. My name’s Charlie Harris. I just moved to town.”

Brenda tried to peek around Charlie and catch a glimpse of his houseguest as she said, “Did your friend drive you here?”

“No,” Charlie said. “Well, look, it’s been nice meeting you. I’ll see you and your friends around, okay?”

“Sure,” she said, slowly, shifting her feet so she could get a better view inside the house. “So, welcome to Crumbly, I guess.”

Charlie made to close the door, but Brenda held her ground. She smiled sweetly and waved her fingers in farewell, but wouldn’t budge. Charlie was forced to close the door, gently, in her face. “Weird kids in this town,” he said with a sad shake of his head.

500 Words A Day: This Just In

A couple of weeks back, I decided to pick up the manuscript of a mystery novel I had started some time back but which has sat for years untouched. I had about 21,000 words written and I reasoned if I wrote an easy 500 words a day on the book (on top of my ongoing paying writing), I'd have a completed novel in two to three months. In the first 16 days of this program, I've written 17,830 words, or about 1,115 words a day. Here's the most recent several hundred:

THE SAME OLD STORY

THE SAME OLD STORY © Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 14/ PORKY PUPPY, THE WORLD’S FATTEST DOG

Mick was waiting for me in front of the precinct when the radio car deposited me downtown thirty-five minutes later. Without a word, the cops left me at the curb. Just as silent, Mick held out his hand, palm up.

I fished the packet of pass books from my breast pocket and placed it in his hand.

Sgt. O’Connor sighed at me like a disappointed mother, shook his head, and turned and marched inside.

“I’ll assume this means I’m dismissed?” I called after the closing door. I took his silence as acquiescence and turned and walked away. He was right, of course. I had no right hanging on to those pass books as long as I did. If someone else had pulled that, Mick would have popped him on an obstruction charge. I got disapproval which was, in some ways, worse.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Shelly. I couldn’t get the faces of Etta Konigsberg and Rena Schindler out of my head and their sadness out of my thoughts.

If Shelly is guilty, I told myself, she’s responsible for their grief. That deserves punishment, doesn’t it? No matter what she looked like. How she smelled and the way she felt against me.

That was picture I was trying to block from my mind. Last night. That was the moment that could override any suspicion and all reason. What the hell was it about her that made this so difficult? I’ve been with women before...but none like her. There was something sad about Shelly that got under my skin and I just couldn’t shake.

“Shit,” I said, out loud I suppose, because the man I was passing on the street stopped and gave me a look. I was so tired of everybody’s sadness, but I was deep inside it now and didn’t know how to shake it.

I headed for Hale’s. I could start trying there.

# # #

After my third shot of whiskey, I took a dime off the bar and walked it over to the payphone in the rear. It was six-thirty by my watch. Plenty of time for Shelly to make believe she had just gotten home from a job she hadn’t gone in to today. I dialed her number and listened to it ring.

No answer.

Maybe she was pretending to still be stuck on the subway.

I retrieved my coin and returned it to the puddle of damp change in front of my seat at the bar.

“Another one?” Raymond said, coming over and nodding at my empty shot glass.

“Keep ‘em coming,” I said.

He reached around and found the right bottle without even looking and refilled my glass. He set the bottle down on the bar.

“You don’t usually drink like this, leastways not by yo’self,” he said.

“It’s been a crappy week, Raymond.” I downed the shot and, while I followed it with a slug of beer as a chaser, he poured me another without being asked.

“Mind if I do some’a that bartender bullshit that al’ays pisses me off when I’m trying to get a good drunk going?”

“We all appreciate the wisdom of your silence,” I said. “But by all means. Advise away.”

“This look like a woman’s involved.”

“She is.”

“Makin’ you think thoughts you don’t like thinkin’. Do stuff you wouldn’t normally be doin’.”

“I’m impressed with your powers of deduction, Raymond.” And I was, in a way that four shots of whiskey and two beers can make even the corniest parlor trick seem impressive.

“That the easy part, man,” he said. “Wouldn’t be depressed if some dame didn’t have you all twisted around. Thing is, what should you do about it?”

“She’s gorgeous, Raymond.”

“Ain’t they always. Just makes it harder to do the right thing.”

“Which is?” I asked, like Dorothy waiting for the Wizard to deliver the answer to all her problems.

“The right thing,” Raymond said. Then he moved down the bar to refill someone else’s beer.

Getting Down to the Last Bits of a Book I'll Probably Never Write

I've run a couple of pieces from a Superman novel (here and here) that I started playing around with, mostly just to get the words down on paper. Here's some more:

SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME

Superman and all related elements © 2008 DC Comics
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 1/ Smallville (Continued)

When the first calls came in, Doug Parker was only wishing he were home in bed.

Chief Parker yawned loudly in the dark silence of the police cruiser and scrubbed vigorously at his face with both hands. It was late, he knew, but he was afraid to check his watch to find exactly how late. Douglas Parker was no night owl, not by any stretch of the imagination, and even if he were, Smallville would not be the place anyone with any common sense would prowl looking for action. Of any sort. The old joke about the town that rolled up its sidewalks at sundown had probably originally been told about Smallville.

Smallville, dead set in the heart of Kansas, was just a small town supporting a larger surrounding farming community, nothing but miles and miles of neatly arranged and carefully tended fields of corn, wheat and soy, worked by farm families who were asleep in bed just behind the sun every night and awake ahead of the following dawn. Parker remembered dragging himself out of bed at 4:00 a.m. to do his chores before school, swearing to himself then and there that no matter what else he might do with his life, being a farmer was forever off the list. But he had gone from his parents house to the army – also known for its perverse need to rise at a ridiculously early hour – and then came home to take a swing shift job at the old Electro-Flo battery factory in neighboring Grady before signing up with the Taylor County Sheriff’s Department, which in those days still included the Smallville patrol district under its jurisdiction. By then, his body had become locked into its own cycle and Parker was, farmer or not, unable to keep his eyes open for the last half hour of most early evening television programs.

Usually, this wasn’t a problem. His wife would shake him gently awake at the end of the show and he would grumble his good-night, kiss her, and shuffle off to bed, closing his eyes for eight, solid hours of sleep before they popped open again at 5 a.m. ahead of the alarm clock. Being a cop in Smallville, even the chief of police – the sheriff had spun the Smallville department off as a separate entity twenty-some years back, while Parker was still a patrolman – did not require many late nights. In fact, this was the first one he could recall having to pull since that spate of vandalism six years ago last Christmas. The truth was, hardly anything of importance ever happened in Smallville. Police work consisted largely of traffic control, mediating minor squabbles between neighbors, and searching for lost livestock. Any real crimes – that is, actual infractions of the penal code – were few and far between, mostly domestic disputes, problems with a few of the boys a bit too fond of drink, petty thefts and, sometimes, pranks gone out of control by the local kids, too bored by life in Smallville not to get into trouble.

By those standards, Parker thought, yawning again and reflexively peeking at the glowing dial of his watch before remembering he hadn’t wanted to know, he currently had a veritable crime wave on his hands. And it was too late now to pretend any longer. It was 11:07 a.m. Oh, lord, was that all? He should drink some more of the coffee Lizzie had made for him, good and strong brewed in the old percolator and poured boiling hot into a tall thermos. But while it might wake him up, it would just go right to his kidneys and then what was he supposed to do? He was in the middle of a stake-out. He couldn’t leave the car to seek out a bathroom. You were better off sticking to water on a stake-out. It didn’t run through you quite so quick. On the other hand, it didn’t keep you awake either.

Parker grinned. He wondered if cops in big cities went through the same kind of nonsense in their heads at times like this, or did they have actual crimes and investigations to occupy their thoughts?

Strike that, he thought. He had actual crimes of his own this time. Practically a crime wave, by Smallville standards. Over the past two weeks, four local businesses had been robbed, beginning with Hanson’s Hardware Store, followed the next night with a burglary at Doc Swenson’s pharmacy, then Jonathan Kent’s general story, and, a week later, a return visit to Doc’s and, just last night, Bud’s Service Station was hit. The inventory of stolen items read like a list from a scavenger hunt, including electrical wire, PVC pipe. sheets of aluminum, hand tools of various uses, a variety of medicines and chemicals that could not, as far as Doc could ascertain, be mixed to create anything lethal or hallucinogenic, large quantities of baking soda and laundry powder, and all manner of automotive parts and accessories. The locks were all expertly picked, nothing except the stolen goods disturbed and, oddest of all, any cash left overnight in the registers or, in one case, in plain sight on the counter, was untouched.

Sounded to the Chief like someone was collecting the makings of a junkyard, but it all added up to more than a thousand dollars worth of goods and that was a lot of larceny. More than he felt comfortable sharing his home with. As unaccustomed as he was to having to deal with serious crime, he always managed to deal with it when he had to and, for all his bitching about the late hour and having to pee, he actually loved this stuff. Oh, not too much and not too often, at least not anymore, but why else did he wear a badge? To sit behind a desk, to direct traffic around road construction crews? So he’d do a little investigating, flex his creaky policeman’s muscle, identify the thief and break a major crime wave.

“Earn your pay for a change,” he muttered at the windshield.

The radio crackled in answer and the big, tough cop jumped and shouted “Jeez Louise!” in surprise.

“You awake out there, Chief?” Della Cronkite, night operator, insomniac, and volunteer off-duty hours police dispatcher asked.

Parker grabbed the hand-mike from the clip, “I’m awake, Della,” he said quickly, so she wouldn’t think he had, in fact, been asleep. “What’s up?”

“Got a bunch of calls,” she said. “From the MacDoughals, the Birminghams, the Connelleys, the…”

He keyed the mike to cut her off. “Della,” he called, overriding her before she could waste precious moments on a digression. “What did they call about?”

“Something in the sky, Chief. South of town, out by the McClintock place. They all say it’s all glowing and has been hovering in the sky for five, ten minutes now.”

Parker turned the key and fired up the big police cruiser’s engine, slamming it quickly into gear.

“What took them so long to report it?”

“That’s my fault. Every time I went for the radio, the telephone would ring again and I had to answer it.”

He pressed down on the gas and shot from his parking space hidden behind the bushes surrounding the cannon on Smallville Square.

“Now, doggone it, Della, how many time do I have to tell you? The radio comes first, okay? Folks will wait a few more rings, but it’s important you get information to me first thing.”

“Well, now, they all sounded so scared, I couldn’t…”

“It’s okay, Della. I’m going to sign off now. I’ll call in as soon as I reach the scene. Over and out.”

“You be careful out there, Chief.”

The radio went dead and Parker dropped the handset on the seat next to him.

Lights in the sky.

Not exactly the crime in progress he had been hoping for, but at least it was something to break the monotony. He received, on average, eight or ten such reports every year, although they usually proved to be lightning or a reflection on a window or windshield, or too much whiskey and an overactive imagination. Although there had been that one instance, thirteen, fourteen years back, when dozens of people in several states had seen something.

500 Words A Day: An Update

On August 16, I decided to return to The Same Old Story, a novel I had started a while ago on which I had written about 21,000 words. The book is a mystery, set in the early 1950s and features a pulp and comic book writer who is the son of a late and legendary N.Y.P.D. homicide cop who solves crimes on the side. The plan is to continue working on The Same Old Story simultaneously with my paying assignments, shooting for a manageable 500 words a day on the novel in addition to whatever else I happen to be working on for a check. In the seven days since I started this program, I've written a 12-page comic book script for The Simpsons comics, researched and plotted a 4,400 word Phantom story, wrote two-thirds of another project (this one's also on spec but it's a specialty book that I think has legs), and pitched ideas for my second Superman young reader chapter book to the publisher...all while adding 6,125 words to The Same Old Story, averaging 875 words a day.

At this rate, I'll have a finished novel no later than Thanksgiving.

There's something to be said for this slow-and-steady thing. Here's some of what I've written in the last couple of days:

THE SAME OLD STORY

THE SAME OLD STORY © Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 9/ FIRST DATES
...

“Besides, why hurt Moe?” she asked. She looked away, staring at some memory I couldn’t see. “He was harmless.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Well enough, I suppose,” she said and smiled fondly. “We worked in that same damned little cubbyhole of an office together for six years. It’s hard to have secrets under those circumstances.”

“Do you think Moe did?”

Shelly blinked at me over the rim of her cup. “Do I think Moe did what?”

“Have any secrets?”

“Oh, good lord, no,” she laughed. “Morris Schindler was as easy to read as an open book and twice as pale as its pages.”

“So no secret gambling?”

“No. Moe, blanched at the thought of flipping a dime to see which one of us paid for coffee.”

“Booze? Dope?”

“Straight as an arrow.”

“How about Bob?”

Shelly blinked at my sudden change in direction. “Konigsberg?”

I nodded and gave her time to answer while I sipped the bitter little cup of espresso.

“Bob was a lot of things, but he didn’t drink. Not even socially. He couldn’t tolerate alcohol, for medical reasons.”

“And yet he had a small amount of it in his system when he died.”

Shelly Davis shook her head` and said, “That’s not possible. He was on medication. He never touched the stuff. Besides, I was with him, at some chop suey joint, about an hour before he,” and she paused, swallowing hard and revealing the briefest moment of sorrow, “about an hour before he died. I’ll confess to having had a few shots myself.” She laughed self-consciously and hid her face in her cappuccino until she could regain her composure. “It was very stressful, Max. Bob couldn’t accept that I had ended it and he kept looking for ways for me to forgive him and get back together.”

“That wasn’t an option?”

“No, not at all. I don’t know what ever possessed me to take up with him in the first place.” She lighted a new cigarette and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “I guess it was because he was witty.”

“Witty?” I smiled.

“Hmm, yes,” she said around her cigarette. “Debonair. Worldly. He said things I didn’t understand. Deep.”

Now I laughed. “I’m sorry. I know he’s dead, but…”

She held up her hand like a traffic cop. “Please, I know. It hit me after a while, once the intoxicating effects of the Bay Rum aftershave and aged Scotch wore off. He wasn’t deep. He was just sad.”

“He was crazy, Shelly.”

“Because he was so sad. He couldn’t always live with his own thoughts. And me,” she said, drawing on her smoke and watching the tip burn red. “I couldn’t live with him.”

“Any chance he took a drink later, after you last saw him?”

“It’s possible, I just don’t think it’s likely. He’s not a drinker. He’s never liked alcohol or been able to drink, so he didn’t immediately think to reach for the bottle when he was unhappy or scared. It wasn’t how he was conditioned, you know?”

“How was he conditioned?”

“To go off on rants. Sometimes funny, sometimes crazy. To find fault with everyone else and set them straight on their shortcomings. To find a conspiracy everywhere he looked, including an international anti-Semitic organization’s connection to a busy restaurant that was unable to seat us for half an hour.”

“Paranoid?”

“Sometimes. Mostly, though, he was fine. Just full of himself and his superiority, which would have driven me off eventually, anyway.” She looked me in the eyes. “I can tolerate assaults to my self-esteem for a while. Bob used up his allotment of abuse faster than most, that’s all.”

Shelly flicked some ash into the ashtray and leaned back, half closing her eyes and looked, all of a sudden, soft and vulnerable, like a dream. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping very well, I guess. I know it’s ridiculous, but I almost feel like a target, pinned to a fence. There are a bunch of us, lined up in neat little rows, right alongside each other, and bang, the target to my left gets hit, and bang, the target right below me takes a bull’s eye, and bang, the one to my right….” Her eyes popped open wide and she sat back up. “Am I crazy to think that I may be next?”

“You’d be crazy not to act as though you might be,” I said.

“What do people think of me, Max?” she asked, out of the blue.

“What people?”

“The…” she said and made a vague, all-encompassing gesture. “You know, people. The gang.”

“I wasn’t aware you had a gang,” I said with a dubious shake of my head.

“I don’t. You do. So? What do they say about me? Older woman who keeps to herself? Office tramp?”

“Probably something in between those two. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about you.”

“But you do spend some time. Everyone at Blue Chip knew I was seeing Bob, didn’t they?”

“Apparently I was the only one who didn’t.”

She favored me with the flash of a smile. “Aren’t you sweet. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Bob told everyone about us himself. That bastard liked to brag about his conquests, real and imagined.”

I looked at her with an inquisitor’s raised eyebrow. “That sounds cryptic,” I said.

“His medication,” she said with a shrug. “It often interfered with certain otherwise...normal functions. He wasn’t quite all the man he liked to brag he was. Mostly he was after someone to decorate his arm and listen adoringly to him ramble on.”

I started to signal the waitress for another round but Shelly shook her head. Instead, I stole one of Shelly’s Old Golds. Everything she told me seemed to make sense, but nothing suggested any reason for both these men to be dead. Maybe just having Shelly Davis in common was dangerous, but I’d take that chance.

There was a reason I hadn’t told Uncle Mick I was off to meet one of the principles in his double-murder investigation for coffee, but I’ll be damned if I had it figured out yet. A tiny little voice was shouting somewhere deep in my head not to trust her, that she wasn’t the woman she was making herself out to be. I didn’t want to listen, though. Maybe I’d never pursued Shelly, kept our relationship friendly, but this wasn’t a woman you wanted as a friend, not once you saw past the mask she wore at the office. Of course, I always knew she was beautiful and I understood why she made the men over fifty sigh and the ones under trip all over themselves opening doors for her. I suppose since I’d never given her a signal, she’s never turned on the switch with me.

But now she had. And I still had not given her a signal. I could assume my familiarity with Detective Sergeant Michael O’Connor had been a motivating factor. Or maybe she was just tired of going home with jackasses and jerks like Bob Konigsberg and was looking to take a chance on a nice guy like me for a change. Whatever her reasons, I wanted to believe her and, for tonight, at least, I would.

“I live just a few blocks from here,” she said, starting to gather up her cigarettes and lighter. “If you still want that second cup of coffee, I have an espresso pot.”

“I don’t need any more coffee.”

“I still live just a few blocks away,” she said and looked at me in a way that made the back of my neck feel warm.

Even though she lived close by, we took a taxi anyway. We didn’t talk about murder any more that night.

Come Fly With Me

The first chapter of a young adult adventure book in a military setting, kind of a Tom Clancy for the kids:

R.A.P.I.D. FORCE

© Paul Kupperberg

Chapter One/ Wiesbaden, Germany

Airman Sean Jordan was on a night time training exercise in the densely wooded forest between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt when his new orders came through. Loaded down with almost fifty pounds of protective gear and equipment, the 18-year old E2 was about to lunge from the HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter as part of the advance squad sent in to survey and establish a forward area refueling point (FARP) for his group. The chopper had been on the ground twenty-five seconds already, its rotors slicing the cool night air, ready to take to the sky again at a moment’s notice, while the first five men had unloaded, scrambling themselves and their equipment to cover. Sean was the last man out, his M-16 locked and loaded while his eyes swept the LZ on the lookout for bad guys.

The goal was to have the chopper back in the air inside of 45 seconds. Sean intended to be out the door and waving it away in less than that. Every second the massive black machine was motionless on the ground was another opportunity to attract enemy fire. And even though the worst that could happen in a training exercise like this one was to be “killed” by the laser-sight on an opponent’s weapon triggering a sensor on the helicopter or his bulletproof Kevlar combat vest, the blond airman did not like to lose.

Losing meant failure and the fact that Sean Jordan was merely a passenger on the Hawk instead of her pilot meant he had failed enough already.

“We’re clear,” crackled the voice of one of his team mates’s in his helmet’s radio headset.

“Roger that,” Sean replied and took a step toward the hatch before a hand clamped down on his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.

“Not so fast, airman,” Senior Master Sergeant Rasmussen said. Though the sergeant was right behind him in the chopper, it would have been impossible to hear the older man over the thunderous noise of its beating rotors without the radio headsets they all wore to communicate in the field.

The internal countdown in Sean’s head told him they had been on the ground for going on forty seconds. “What, master sergeant?” he snapped, impatient to be on the ground to his own time-table.

“New orders, airman,” the craggy-faced black man said. “You got a plane to catch back at the base.”

The young Air Force enlisted man was confused. “But we’re in the middle of an exercise, master sergeant.”

“You’re not, not anymore,” Rasmussen smiled. “Dispatch just radioed. Your packet’s come through. You got your transfer, kid.” Then, to the chopper pilot, he said, “Take her up.”

Airman Sean Jordan watched the dark ground fall quickly away from him through the hatch in stunned disbelief.

Over his helmet radio, Sean one of the men he was leaving behind at the LZ asked, “Where you off to, dude?”

As the big machine surged forward at over 150 miles per hour, Airman Sean Jordan stepped back from the crash of air sweeping by the Hawk’s hatch and smiled.

“The big show, bud,” he laughed. “See you guys around!”

* * *

Wiesbaden Air Force Base, Wiesbaden, Germany:

Sean had just twenty minutes to race back to his billet, shower, jump into a clean basic daily uniform (BDU), pack his gear, and hitch a ride back to the flight line.

“We got you deadheading on a Herc leaving at 02300 for Wheeler-Sack, flying light,” the 2nd lieutenant who had met Sean at the chopper pad with the airman’s orders had told him. “You’ll fly commercial the rest of the way to Nellis, reporting no later than 0900 day after, local.” Sean had saluted as he mentally translated the lieutenant’s air force jargon into English: he would be riding an empty C-130 Hercules cargo plane that was returning empty to the States. It was leaving at 11:30 that night for Wheeler-Sack Air Force Base, Fort Drum, in Watertown, New York. From there, Sean would fly a commercial airliner to Los Vegas, Nevada, where he was to report to his new duty at Nellis Air Force Base by 9:00 A.M., local time, the day after tomorrow.

Sean couldn’t believe his luck. The young airman had joined the Air Force with every intention of becoming a pilot. He had assumed that he had a lock on flight training—he was already a flyer, having taken lessons starting when he was 14-years old, soloing in single-engine craft since he was 16. His father and brother were both active duty U.S.A.F. pilots, his grandfather a retired three-star general and Korean War ace. If anyone had ever been born to fly, it was Sean Jordan.

Except, it turned out, he wasn’t, at least not for the Air Force.

While he had the family history, the reflexes, and the skill, what he didn’t have were the eyes for the job. A routine eye exam during his physical work-up for flight training revealed that Sean suffered from a mild form of something called “night blindness.” The docs explained that his vision, though 20/20 in daylight and under well-lighted conditions at night, was inadequate in blackout conditions, like those he would experience on night combat missions. His eyes just didn’t adjust quickly enough or well enough to the dark for it to be safe for him to fly.

What good was it to be in the Air Force if you couldn’t fly? With his grandfather, father, and brother all decorated combat pilots, he felt like the Air Force was the family business, a proud and elite firm that he wanted, desperately, to join. But while those who came before him were the executives, the guys on the front lines who made the business tick, he wasn’t qualified for anything more than a job as the janitor, part of the ground crew that cleaned up after the men who did the real work. Heartbroken by this turn of events, Sean had considered running out his enlistment and giving up on a military career. But his grandfather had sat him down and set him straight: flying may have seemed to Sean like the one and only glamor job in the Air Force, but there were more ways to serve heroically and with distinction than from the pilot’s seat of a fighter.

“Matter of fact,” his grandfather had chuckled, “compared to the fellows on the ground, the pilot’s got it pretty easy, flying over where most of the shooting’s taking place.”

Sean knew that wasn’t so. Pilots were constantly at risk from anti-aircraft fire, from surface-to-air-missiles, and attack by other aircraft. But he got the message, especially when grandpop started telling him stories about the Air Force special forces units, the men the pilots ferried in to hot zones to engage in ground combat or handle missions that couldn’t be dealt with from the air.

That was all Sean needed to hear. Maybe he couldn’t be a pilot, but that didn’t mean the only jobs left for him were ground crew or maintenance. He asked his grandfather what the best and toughest Air Force combat special forces unit was and the old man answered without hesitation, “R.A.P.I.D. Force, airman. Reconnaissance Air Patrol and Immediate Deployment! There’s not a dirty job you can think of that those boys would back away from.”

Sean had his papers in for R.A.P.I.D. before the end of the next day and now, six months later, he had orders in hand and was on his way to join up with that very unit.

Sean showed his orders to the loadmaster at the tail ramp of the C-130 and hustled up into the belly of the massive aircraft. It was, he noted, one of the new C-130J-30s, almost 35 meters long by 3 meters high of cargo space with a nearly 40 meter wingspan supporting four Rolls-Royce AE2100DS turboprop engines that delivered 4,700 horsepower. This baby had it all, including an advanced two-pilot flight station with fully integrated digital avionics, color multifunctional liquid crystal displays and head-up displays, state-of-the-art navigation systems with global positioning system, fully integrated defensive systems, digital moving map display, and an enhanced cargo-handling system. Fully loaded she could carry about 75,000 kilograms, or 164,000 pounds of cargo at a speed of around 360 kilometers an hour. If her cargo were human beings, she was big enough to handle 128 combat troops or 92 paratroopers.

There wouldn’t be anything like that many aboard tonight, he noticed. A single pallet of seats had been bolted to the deck, offering seating for six, maximum. There was only one other man aboard, already buckled into his seat. He could only see the back of the man’s head, brown-haired flecked with silver, probably an officer, Sean guessed as he stowed his gear in the webbing along the side of the bulkhead.

The man must have heard Sean behind him and turned his head. It was an officer, and Sean didn’t need to see the man’s brass to know he was in the presence of one-star, a brigadier general. Sean snapped to attention and threw a salute.

“General,” he said smartly.

“Airman Jordan,” the general said with a smile as he returned the salute. “How are you, son?”

Sean stayed at attention and said, “I’m fine, dad. How are you?”

Avast, Hardys!

In 2002, I heard the publishers of the Hardy Boy mysteries were open to pitches, so I wrote the following chapter (along with an outline for the rest of the story) and pitched. Timing, of course, is everything, and the editor I was pitching to left the publisher shortly thereafter. Her replacement came in with a group of her own writers, denying me my chance to write under the ‘Franklin W. Dixon’ pseudonym.

THE MYSTERY OF THE TREASURE HUNT KILLER

The Hardy Boys © Simon and Schuster Inc.
THE MYSTERY OF THE TREASURE HUNT KILLER © Paul Kupperberg

Chapter one/ The Hunt
Frank Hardy knew he was in trouble.

He could hear footsteps pounding the ground behind him in the woods, slowly but definitely gaining ground. Unlike Frank, whoever was on his tail didn’t keep tripping and stumbling in the dark over every rock and branch on the trail. His pursuer either knew these woods way better than did Frank, or had a flashlight whose dying batteries weren’t dimming it to uselessness.

Either way, Frank realized the situation wasn’t good.

Granted, he had grown up playing in these woods outside of Bayport and knew them about as well as any kid in town. But in daylight. Or walking, not racing blindly ahead on a moonless October night.

Being chased.

Don’t forget the being chased part, Frank reminded himself, then caught his foot in an exposed tree root. He windmilled his arms wildly to stay upright, but he could tell gravity was going to win. He flew forward and, with a muffled shout, hit the ground. His slowly dying flashlight spun from his hands and tumbled through the air before bouncing off a tree and finally winking out.

The footsteps drew closer. Frank snarled at his own clumsiness, working too quickly to free his foot.

Not good, he thought, not good at all!

The bobbing beam of a flashlight bounced off the surrounding trees. The snap and crackle of breaking sticks and autumn dry foliage under his pursuer’s feet grew louder. But Frank’s foot was wedged tight in the forked root and there was no way he was ever going to get free in time.

He was just going to have to face what was coming and take it like a man!

“Oh, man, that looks like it’s gotta hurt!” Joe Hardy, Frank’s younger brother, came jogging from the darkness between trees, slowing at the sight of Frank caught in the beam of his flashlight. “You okay?”

Frank grinned sheepishly. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt or anything. It’s just jammed in there pretty tight. Can you give me a hand?”

“Sure thing,” Joe said with a smile. He picked up his pace and ran past his startled brother. “On the way back.”

“Hey!” The dark haired Hardy called after Joe. “What ever happened to playing fair?”

Joe’s voice came back to him through the darkness, “To quote the master, ‘All’s fair in love and scavenger hunts.’ Later, bro.”

“Oh, sure,” Frank hollered after him into the woods. “Throw my own words back at me, why don’t you?”

The sound of Joe’s laughter, growing fainter and farther away, was all Frank heard.

Of course, Joe was right. Ever since entering Bayport High, Frank Hardy had established himself as the reigning king of the annual October scavenger hunt. For three years running, Frank and his team had easily won Hunt Night, usually with a comfortable lead. But last year, Joe’s team had made a strong second place showing. The only reason Frank had won was because of his secret weapon: Mrs. Beverly Owens.

Frank bent to the task of freeing his trapped foot, smiling. He had to hand it to the Bayport High teachers, whose list of items for the hunt was always truly inventive. But, Joe, like his brother, was a detective. The locating of hidden or unusual items was right up his alley.

And so, judging from the direction Joe was headed, was discovering the identity of Frank’s secret weapon.

Frank had thought he was, as usual, being way clever in safeguarding his secret. Some of the other teams liked to put someone on Frank’s tail and try to second-guess his destination. Keeping in contact by cell phone, these spies would send their teammates on end runs around Frank, hoping to beat him to the next item on the list.

Losing them was easy, ducking out of the car when it stopped for a red light or doubling back on his pursuers. And, frankly, most of his classmates didn’t know the first thing about tailing a suspect. Frank, on the other hand, had experience shadowing real bad guys.

As had Joe.

Oh, well, Frank thought. At least if he wasn’t going to win the scavenger hunt, the victory would stay in the family.

Frank wiggled his foot. Win or lose, he didn’t intend to stay out here all night. It took a few minutes, but he was finally able to slide his foot from his sneaker, which gave him just enough clearance to pull himself free. He retrieved his sneaker and, hopping on one foot, tugged it back on.

He checked his watch. Joe didn’t have that big a lead on him. And, Mrs. Owens wasn’t necessarily going to hand his kid brother whatever he wanted, at least not right off the bat. After all, it was Frank who had been coming on Hunt Night to her old mansion with its incredible store of artifacts, props, and gadgets in its endless rooms and cavernous attic and basement on the far side of these woods. He also visited with her whenever he could during the rest of the year. She was a lonely old woman, long ago widowed and, for reasons she never revealed, abandoned by her family. But Mrs. Owens was always cheerful and full of interesting stories about Bayport in the “olden days,” as she liked to call them.

And she loved scavenger hunts, revealing with some pride that her team had won the Bayport High hunt in 1929. She took positively childish delight in being Frank’s “secret weapon” in his string of victories.

His secret weapon.

Frank smiled and, moving as fast as he safely could, resumed his trek through the dark forest.

“Sorry, Joe,” he said out loud. “You may get to her first tonight, but Mrs. Owens is mine!”

* * *

Frank was huffing and puffing by the time he reached the edge of the woods. Without benefit of adequate light, the trip had taken twice as long as it should and had gotten him whipped across the face by more branches than he could count.

Still, he reminded himself, no pain, no gain. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to walk back the way he came. His teammates—having made the circuit of town to gather whatever they could from their share of the list—should even now be waiting on Old Warwick Road for his call to pick him up when he was finished at Mrs. Owens’ house.

What were those items he needed again? He ran through the list in his mind, it being too dark to read the photocopied inventory he carried in his pocket.

A portrait of a sailor. A dressmaker’s dummy. A polo mallet and helmet. A top hat. A spittoon. A stethoscope. A theater ticket stub. An example of taxidermy. And half a dozen other items Frank was certain he had seen during previous visits to Mrs. Owens’ house. He knew from past experience that there were plenty of surprises buried in the dusty corners of that old house. He would phone Callie Shaw as soon as he reached Mrs. Owens’ place and find out what was still needed.

But, first things first.

Joe was a good ten minutes ahead of him. Mrs. Owens might have just sent him—sweetly and politely, Frank was sure—on his way. On the other hand, Frank knew his brother was capable of turning on the charm and might, just might, have talked his way into the treasure trove of scavenger hunt items. Not that he believed Mrs. Owens would betray their friendship. But he knew better than to underestimate his brother.

Frank came through the last of the trees, at the rear of Mrs. Owens property. The old house, a rambling blend of 19th Century architectural styles, topped with turrets and lined with terraces, was about one hundred yards from the woods. Frank would have to go to his right, to the kitchen entrance where Mrs. Owens always waited for him on Hunt Night with hot cocoa and oatmeal raison cookies to re-energize him before he continued on his way.

But as soon as he started across the lawn, Frank knew something was wrong. Every light in the huge old house was on, and, from around front, came the sound of too many voices and the static crackle of radios.

And, more ominously, red lights splashed a slow, regular beat across the front of the house and the surrounding property.

The scavenger hunt forgotten, Frank raced to the house. As soon as he rounded the front, his worst fears were realized. Dr. Merlis’ familiar blue vintage Mustang was pulled neatly into the parking area just off the crushed stone circular driveway. Next to the Mustang was Con Riley’s police cruiser, it’s roof light flashing red and white, alternating with the flashing lights of the ambulance pulled to a stop directly before the front door to the house.

Frank slowed to a walk as he came up alongside his brother on the driveway.

“Joe? What happened?”

Joe turned. One look at his face told Frank the whole story, even before he said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “Mrs. Owens is dead.”

More of a Book I’ll Probably Never Write

On July 22 I posted the Prologue to a Superman novel that I started playing with last October for no other reason than I had the idea and needed to get it out of my system. After a lifetime as a commercial writer, it’s unusual for me to work on something featuring someone else’s intellectual property without there being a paycheck waiting for me on the other end, but, as I wrote when I ran the first part of this, it was a creative itch I needed to scratch.

SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME

Superman and all related elements © 2008 DC Comics
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 1/ Smallville

The blinking halo of light swept across the night sky between McClintock’s farm and the woods that billowed from the edge of town south of Maple Street. The glow sailed against the star crusted October darkness like curiosity in a realm of unfamiliar sensations. It made no sound but would hover in the area for a full ten minutes while the first telephone calls were made to the police. No one bothered dialing up the police station; they called straight on to Doug Parker’s house. At this hour, nearly 11:00 p.m., City Center and all its offices would be locked up tight and everyone, including Chief Parker and the town’s three other police officers, would be home, likely asleep.

Well, a mysterious light in the sky, everyone would agree, was ample excuse to disturb the chief at home.

But there, down in the broad field that Mr. McClintock used for grazing, the halo could be heard as a dry papery snap and the muffled laughter of adolescence.

“Give it more string,” Clark Kent said in a loud whisper as they ran, their way lighted by the shimmering glow sailing a hundred feet above their heads.

“Keep it down, willya,” Lex Luthor said with a laugh in his voice. “This is supposed to be a secret mission.”

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Clark said, turning his eyes to the apparition overhead as light danced on the lenses of his horn-rim glasses.

Lex tugged at the lightweight tungsten wire stretching from the spool in his hands, carefully guiding the kite at the other end into a slow loop in the night air. A battery in the spool sent a small current up the wire that activated a phosphorous compound painted on the kite; a touch of a copper strip turned the current on and off. On. Off. On. Off.

“Yeah,” he said with a grin. He had come up with the compound in the small and undersupplied laboratory in the corner of the family’s cramped garage for just this reason. “They’re gonna freak out for sure.”

“Yeah,” Clark agreed, almost breathless, his eyes following the glowing kite with the intensity of someone willing himself to remain earthbound and not follow it into the air.

“Shh, both of you!” Lana Lang whispered. “I don’t think a U.F.O. is supposed to sound like two boys chatting.” Then she erupted in a fresh peal of giggles, clapping her hands over her own mouth to stifle the sound.

“Uh-huh, it’d sound more like that, I’m sure,” Clark said with a roll of his eyes. He looked at his watch. “Seven minutes, Lex.”

“Plenty of time, pal, plenty of time,” Lex said with studied casualness and an easy grin.

Clark grinned back and, shoulder to shoulder with Lana, watched one of his other best friends pull probably the best prank he could ever remember being pulled in Smallville. It was a perfect late October night, crisp, a hint of wood smoke in the air, a week before Halloween because, Lex explained, who expects to be pranked the week before? Clark couldn’t argue with the red head’s logic. He never could, not since the very first day Lex Luthor appeared in the doorway of Smallville Elementary School’s fifth grade class, a glowering mid-term transfer from Metropolis, torn from his rough and tumble urban world and dropped in the middle of a somnambulistic farming community.

Clark had felt sorry for the new kid and made sure to introduce himself during lunch. By the end of afternoon recess, they were fast friends. By that weekend, Lex had joined Clark’s tiny clique, which also included Lana and Pete Ross, and the quartet had been intact since, Lex sliding easily and naturally into the role as leader of the pack. Clark didn’t mind. Lex was smart ... actually, Clark was smart. Lex Luthor was a genius, one of those rare kids so scarily smart that educators have to throw away all the definitions and expectations and get out of his way. In a big city like Metropolis, a kid like Lex would be in special classes, skipping over grades and acing advanced placement tests.

In the Smallville school system, the best the teachers could do was let him follow his own interests and inclinations, especially since he had turned in all the homework and mandatory and extra credit assignments for the entire year on the morning of his second day of class. Clark, who could have done the same thing if his parents only allowed him to actually do the things he was capable of doing, knew how smart that made someone like Lex, who was, as far as Clark could tell, different but not in the same way he was. It didn’t take much longer for Clark to see that as smart as he was, and he never forgot anything that he read, saw, or heard, Lex was smarter. Lots. Not because of what he knew, but because of what he could do with what he knew. The best Clark could compare their styles, he took information and filed it away in a neat and orderly fashion in his memory like facts jotted on countless individual, alphabetized index cards. Lex’s brain took all those orderly index cards and flung them in the air, letting them mix and match however they happened to fall while he searched through them for commonalities and patterns, finding truth and inspiration by processing and ordering chaos.

Lana dug her elbow into his ribs. “Hey!” she snapped. “Time?”

He blinked, knowing he had been doing it again, that thing ma called his “thousand yard stare.” He could gaze off, eyes fixed on nothing while his mind wandered and his thoughts became lost. Pa said it was natural enough for a boy of fourteen; ma was worried he’d get so lost he’d cross the street without looking both ways. The thought made Clark shake his head. She wasn’t worried he would be hurt, but that someone else might be and, even worse, when he wasn’t injured, that his secret would come out. The truth was the worst thing his parents could imagine. They thought if anyone knew, “they” would come and take Clark away from them. As if anyone could make him do anything he didn’t want to do. But ma and pa wouldn’t think that way. If someone from the government knocked on the door, he wanted to believe pa would fight them for him, but he wasn’t sure. They didn’t come more law-abiding than Jonathan and Martha Kent. Clark knew for a fact that his father’s general store was an all cash business, yet his father reported every cent on his income taxes and was known to go to the homes of customers whom he had accidentally short-changed to repay the difference when he discovered the error.

Pa had been in the army, too, and Clark was pretty sure it would the military who came to get him. Some colonel or general yelling in his face, pa might just wind up saluting and handing Clark over, even though he knew, though they never said as much, that images of cells and chains and dissection tables flashed through both his parents’ minds whenever they thought of someone learning the truth.

Clark, on the other hand, could imagine only freedom.

“Nine minutes and fifteen seconds,” Clark said.

“Two more minutes,” Lex said. “Then I’ll cut it loose. The direction the wind’s blowing, the kite probably won’t come down until it’s out of the state.”

“The mystery of the Smallville U.F.O.,” Lana intoned in a serious voice. “This time around, everybody’s going to see it.” She punctuated her announcement with a giggle.

“Don’t you mean someone besides your father?” Even as the words left his mouth, Clark regretted them.

But Lana just shrugged. Since a third grade schoolmate had seen a story in the newspaper that mentioned Professor Lang’s sighting, she had grown accustomed to this particular line of ridicule. “You know daddy wasn’t the only one saw it. Bunch of folks in Grady reported it, and there was that pilot who also saw something.”

And ma and pa, Clark thought. And himself, too, although he hadn’t actually seen the U.F.O. He had been inside it. But none of them ever dared report what they knew. That was part of the truth that was the Kent family secret.

“Besides, this isn’t about daddy. This is just for fun.”

Clark and Lex exchanged grins and rolled their eyes. Then Clark checked his watch and announced, “Eleven minutes.”

Lex flicked open a pocket knife and with a smile, said, “Six.”

Clark said, “Five.”

Lana said, “Four.”

“Three. Two. One,” they said in unison and Lex flicked the blade through the tungsten wire. “Blast off!”

The wind holding the glowing kite aloft grabbed the freed chemically treated fabric and hurled it even higher, a vague, luminescence in the night that quickly flickered and died out, leaving the sky empty of any light but that of the stars.

The friends watched it go, smiling, proud of themselves, then Clark said, in an urgent whisper, “The Chief’s coming up the road.”

They didn’t hear a thing, but Lana and Lex didn’t question Clark’s warning. He was always hearing approaching cars and yelling parents before anyone else. Lex joked that his extraordinary hearing was probably nature’s way of compensating for his being half-blind.

“You know the plan,” Lex said, extending his hand out before him. “We split up, sneak home, and never speak of this to anyone!”

Lana stacked her hand on top of his and Clark slapped his atop hers. Then, with giant smiles and barely suppressed giggles, they melted into the night.

By the time Chief Parker’s car rolled slowly by, playing his searchlight across Mr. McClintock’s field, they were, one by one, making their way through the deserted, shadowed streets of town, each to slip back through unlatched window or cellar door and into bed, where their parents, those that cared, had left them hours earlier.

It’s Still the Same Old Story…

An excerpt from a work in progress, Same Old Story, a murder mystery set in the early 1950s world of the comic book business. Guy Dooley and the narrator, Max Wiser, are writers who have just learned the several of the publishers they write for are going under and have hit the streets in search of new work. Here, they run into one of their more successful colleagues. I love the Pincus the ribbon salesman joke beyond all rational explanation:

THE SAME OLD STORY

©2008 Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 3/ REAL CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Deciding that being only half-drunk after receiving the news from Murray was worse than being sober, Guy was desperate for coffee. We stopped at the Automat on 44th Street, feeding enough nickels into the slots for a couple of cups of joe and a matching set of doughnuts.

Guy was lighting a cigarette when Robert Konigsberg sauntered up to the table. Tall and handsome in a rugged Robert Taylor sort of way, Bob had been an editor at National before leaving to write freelance. He was, for all intents and purposes, the top writer at the top company, responsible for a large chunk of their super-hero and romance lines. And he knew exactly where he stood in the pecking order, too. In a brushed camel hair coat and always freshly blocked Homburg, a bright and natty ascot as a dashing alternative to a tie, Bob was a fashion-plate, a teller of self-aggrandizing tall tales, a playboy, an often surprisingly good and creative writer, and a certified lunatic. There were too many Bob Konigsberg stories to tell, but the least bizarre of his traits included his habit, while writing during his lunch hours when he was still on staff, of suddenly leaping up on his desk, brandishing an umbrella or cane as a sword and sprouting ersatz Shakespearean dialogue at the top of his lungs, then calmly climbing back down to his seat and resuming his typing. His office mates thought he was eccentric. The head-shrinkers at a psychiatric facility in Valley Stream thought he was a danger to himself or others. Twice. Once for sixty days, then again for five months.

He was, by all reports, not currently crazy, making me wonder how crazy you had to be to qualify for crazy. I thought the guy was a fruitcake, but at least he was nuts in a way that made him interesting.

“Gentlemen,” he sniffed at us in his bored, affected nasal tone. “What’s the good word?”

“Down here on earth,” said Dooley, ”or up there on Olympus where you reside?”

“Jealousy of his betters aside,” Bob said, directing his question to me, “what’s his problem?”

“Pincus,” said Dooley, suddenly and apropos of nothing at all, “was the best ribbon salesman in New York. You ever hear this one, Bob? About Pincus, the ribbon salesman?”

Bob sighed theatrically. Konigsberg had several talents, but humor wasn’t one of them. The man was incapable of understanding funny in any form but the dry, smile provoking bon mot, which only he thought was humorous to begin with. Laughter was unknown to that sad, dark heart of his. So Guy liked to tell him jokes.

“He sold Woolworth’s, Gimbels, B. Altman’s, everywhere. But he could never sell to Macy’s. The ribbon buyer refused to change ribbon suppliers, but Pincus kept badgering him until, finally, one day, the buyer says, ‘Pincus, I'm in a bind. I need a piece of ribbon exactly two and six-sixteenths inches wide, of the exact red of a perfect sunset, with a texture like a baby’s behind, and as long as from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis. I need it tomorrow by noon. Find it for me and from now on, I’ll buy all my ribbon from you.’ Pincus agrees to the terms and off he goes.”

Bob tapped his foot on the Automat’s scarred linoleum floor, waiting with undisguised impatience.

“The next day, at exactly noon, the phone in the buyer’s office rings and it’s Pincus. ‘I got your ribbon,’ he says. ‘Meet me outside.’ So outside the buyer goes and there’s Pincus...with ten big trucks full of ribbon! ‘Pincus,’ the buyer says, ‘the width is dead-on, the color is absolutely perfect, the texture so soft you could cry. But, Pincus, I said I wanted a piece only as long as from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis!’

“’So?’ says Pincus. ‘The tip of my penis is back in Poland!’”

I laughed. Bob didn’t.

“You were saying?” Bob prompted me, as though Guy hadn’t spoken.

“Worldwide Distribution’s gone down the tubes and they’re taking Blue Chip and Feature, that we know of, with them,” I said.

Bob blinked. He stepped back. “When,” he said, “when did this happen?”

“Today. This afternoon,” I said. “You okay, Bob?”

I don’t think he heard me, just nodded out of reflex.

“Don’t set sail for Cloud Cuckoo-land on us now, Bob,” Guy said. “Remember, the guys you work own their own distribution company. They’re the only ones don’t have to worry.”

“Were you doing anything for one of them?” I knew Konigsberg drew a nice salary writing exclusively for National, but I’d also heard the rumors that he wrote secretly, under a variety of pseudonyms, for other publishers.

“Hmm?” Bob shook his head and focused his gaze on me once again. He managed a smile, but it never quite reached his eyes. “Actually, between you, me, and the lamppost,” he said, nodding in Guy’s direction, “I did provide some unsigned material on the side for some of their adventure and romance titles. Adventures Beneath the Earth, My Strangest Journey, Young and in Love, First Dates and so forth.” He waved his hand. “Strictly for income my wife was unaware of, a little extra cash to keep a certain someone in the style to which I’ve made her accustomed.”

Guy drained his coffee and rose to go after a refill. “Oh, Bob, you dog,” he said, deadpan, and left.

Bob shot his cuff and checked his wristwatch, making sure I got a gander at the gold band and jeweled face. “Well,” he said. “Speaking of which, I’d best be off. Don’t want to keep the lady waiting.”

I didn’t ask if he meant his wife or his girlfriend. I just said good-bye and returned to my doughnut.

Knowing that guys like Konigsberg would sail right through the current troubles with little more than an interruption in the quality of their adultery made me feel even worse for guys like me and Dooley. His kids could go hungry, I might have to live off my widowed mother or get a real job...but Bob Konigsberg might not be able to pay the rent on his floozy’s apartment.

At the moment, I couldn’t imagine a reason I could ever feel sorry for either Konigsberg or his floozy.

That would change soon enough.

Prologue to a Book I'll Probably Never Write

Every now and then, I'll start writing...something. An opening line will pop into my head, a concept, sometimes even a whole book or story and I'll start typing, just to get it out of my head and onto the page. I may have no where to go with it, no hope of selling it, but I'll write it anyway. It's an itch that has to be scratched.

I write a lot of media tie-ins, books and stories based on existing properties from other media, mostly from the pages of comic books. I enjoy the challenge of taking a world usually presented in words and pictures and telling its story in words alone. Something about the process removes a large part of the suspension of disbelief a reader needs to bring to reading a comic book story, no matter how well done it is; words are words, but line drawings on a page take the story a step or two away from reality and make it that much more difficult to believe.

This was one of those itches. It's the prologue for a Superman novel, inspired in part by the literary qualities of Tom DeHaven's excellent IT'S SUPERMAN (Chronicle Books, 2005). I started playing around with it in October 2007:

SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME

Superman and all related elements © 2008 DC Comics
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg

prologue/at the end of time

He was no stranger to loneliness.

His was a life begun in exile, a family destroyed, a child thrust into a world in which he never truly belonged, try as he might. A stranger in a strange land, made all the worse that it was a land populated by beings who looked so much like him but were not, finally, like him at all.

He was steel.

They were bone China, fragile translucent shells containing lives that broke so easily, wore out too soon.

Still he tried being one of them. Lived among them, loved them. Some of his foes tried exploiting that love, always a mistake, but others just mocked him. They, who were connected to humanity rejected the very bonds he would have given up everything to enjoy.

For all his brilliance, he never really did understand them.

Nor they him. They saw in him abilities far beyond their comprehension and did what humans have done since developing cognizance: they deified him and all those like him. Instinct gave them no choice but to put him on a pedestal above them...or fear him. They did that, too, he was convinced of that. But once they saw he meant them no harm, was in fact, benevolent, they recognized the wisdom of dampening their fear and doing nothing to antagonize him or his ilk. It was all so complicated, exhausting. Heartbreaking. It was, he could admit to himself now, here, at the end of time, the reason he chose, finally, to go. All the public pronouncements about his work being done on Earth, leaving mankind to guide its own destiny into the future, intergalactic age...

He still missed them, though he seldom thought of them anymore.

But when he did...

The images summoned by his mind’s eye made him smile. He forgot nothing, of course. Every moment of his life was stored somewhere, just waiting to be retrieved by any outside stimuli or, sometimes, when he was thinking of nothing at all, when he would just turn off his thoughts and drift, without care to time or destination, through endless nowheres, they would come up like some random shuffle of songs on the jukebox in Doc Parson’s soda fountain. Pete knew how to drop in the nickels and punch the keys in just the right combination to make the old contraption, its colored lights flickering as bubbles percolated lethargically through the plastic tubing on its weathered face, play a mélange of bits and pieces of songs on its dual-turntables that never failed to crack them up, Sinatra mixing with Hendrix fading into Pat Boone, jumping suddenly into Ozzie or the Who, and Pete would grab the nearest girl, usually Lana, and they would dance, trying to keep up with the music and laughing so hard as they breathlessly sang out the words, or at least something close to them...

No.

That was a road he didn’t dare follow, not again. And surely not now. He had trod it before, past the endless, eternal sea of faces and memories, smells and sounds, the curse of perfection, at least where his memory was concerned, and found only sorrow and, at times, madness waiting at the other end. He would see...

Lana, on a perfect summer’s day in childhood, a day not long after the one in which he remembered realizing that she wasn’t just the kid down the road, a classmate and pal, but had, somehow, without his realizing it, become a…female. They had been playing softball all morning in the field out back from Mr. Snyder’s barn and she was laughing at something Pete said as they piled into the dim, cool interior of Doc’s on Main Street for something cold and sweet to quench their thirsts. Her startling red hair was tied back with a yellow ribbon in a ponytail and she wore white shorts, dirty white Converse high-tops and a gray Smallville High t-shirt that was plastered to her back with sweat stains from their hours under the Kansas sun.

He was holding the door for everyone else and as Lana filed by, filling his nostrils with her clean, sweaty, vanilla and jasmine and god only knew what combination of hormones and pheromones scent, she turned her laughing face and green eyes to him and winked and he felt his knees buckle, the more-than-pals feeling awakening with a scream. It made the breath catch in his chest and his heart to pound so loud and so hard that he thought the whole town could hear it. Later, years later, when their lives, intersecting circles that came into contact all too infrequently and often for all the wrong reasons, had reached the safety and comfort of platonic intimacy, she confessed that she too had found it difficult to breath when he was around and isn’t it funny that both of them, feeling as they did, needing only to reach out their hands to one another across the Formica tabletop at Doc Parson’s to touch happiness, could never find even that one-inch of courage to accept what they both knew was true.

Neither of them ever made the leap.

And later...later it would be too late.

...but for just an instant, a sigh of déjà vu, eternity was a summer day and a winking emerald eye...

And of such insignificant increments and fleeting moments are lives altered and histories rewritten.

Not that it mattered any longer. Doc and the jukebox were long gone.

As was Smallville. And Lana and all the women who followed her, though none had ever meant quite what the freckled face redhead had. Still, he remembered their names. Every one of them.

Everything was gone, gone so long that time had finally begun to run out, even for him. Had he ever really expected to outlive the universe? Maybe, once, before he learned all there was to learn and, among that knowledge, the certainty that all of time and all of space and the myriad, diverse threads that twisted around each other to weave the vast tapestry of the multiverse were linked. Time dribbled away to nothingness in everywhere, every universe calved from the same mother lode of energy, at the same time. He had long ago worked out the physics of the universe’s birth; knowing that, it was easy enough to calculate the antithetical event.

Yet still he wondered about that last instant, when all time and space was gone but for the last tick of the cosmic clock. The singularity would be unimaginable – the entirety of the cosmos compressed into a single space – time/space elongating as it approached this ultimate black hole. Would it continue stretching on into infinity, the distance to the event horizon decreasing by half, then half again. And again, dividing ad infinitum, forever forestalling the end? Nonsense science, he knew, but enough to make him think to ride time’s final instant into oblivion and see. Or join with the seething mass of heat and energy that would, when conditions were right and the cycle began anew, explode into new existence. But of course he wouldn’t. He still had much to do before he considered oblivion, labors that begin, paradoxically, when time ends.

Paradoxes and ironies. Love, hate, happiness, sorrow. All irrelevant now that there was no one left but him to appreciate or experience...anything. If a tear falls in a forest and no one is there to feel its pain, does a heart still break?

He allowed himself a small smile. As he always suspected: Sarcasm was the last thing in the universe to fall.

The last second came, but before memory was undone and all hope crushed under the weight of the universe, Lex Luthor shifted and was gone, back to when there was a future to look toward...

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