It began with a surprise visit from Lancer at 11:00 PM one Thursday night, a visit that I’d been hoping for but was betting against happening. I wanted a behind-the-scenes look at the Street Angel Network, an underground system of contacts who helped out vetted superheroes with various degrees of expertise. Only those crime fighters who spent two tours on the street had a shot of being shown behind the curtain, and taught the two golden rules:

• Don’t break their trust.
• Don’t abuse their services.

I was thrilled for a peek at what most heroes would’ve killed to have, and I agreed that I would protect the names of the innocents, some of whom were risking jail time, disbarment, and revoked licenses for helping superheroes under the table.

***

Following my meetings with Raph and Lewit, Lancer introduced me to more codenamed Angels, from Gabriel whose van ferried crimefighters as a kind of Uber for superheroes, to Shofar, an old man who maintained multiple burn phones to both transmit messages between heroes and to act as a kind of 911 switchboard.

It was getting late by this point, near 3:00 AM on a Friday, and I was figuring our tour was winding down for the night. Like the city itself, however, the Street Angel Network apparently never slept and having insomnia was seen as a virtue.

The next stop was codenamed Uriel, and I met the opposite of the evening’s fare of blue collar men and women willing to help the heroes. Uriel came from money and culture, which I could see in the way he met me and how he spoke. His fingernails were clipped and short, his clothing casual without a thread out of place. His lair was a large loft filled with the type of forensics equipment I’d read about in my favorite detective comics.

Uriel was a one-man laboratory, with the hardware to handle forensic work that would make many a small police department green with envy. There was no autopsy equipment; otherwise, I saw an assortment of devices, both new and vintage, separated into the different arms of Forensic science. A central table contained the tools that the different disciplines shared including stereoscopic microscopes, comparative microscopes for trace and ballistics comparison, an electron microscope with X-Ray scanner for things like trace evidence and gunshot residue tests (and before you get the impression that I know the differences between them, I don’t—Urial was more than happy to detail his equipment and uses for me). His main computer was also hooked up to various databases including AFIS for fingerprints, and the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. I didn’t ask how he had access.

The firearms table had scales and balances while the serology table was covered in test tubes, a table-top storage fridge, a centrifuge, and test tubes. A chemistry table contained the most serious hardware with the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer while off to the side was an X-Ray machine near four bookcases stacked with books, studies, and reports. A framed black & white photo of Bernard Spilsbury, one of the fathers of modern forensic pathology, hung next to an earmarked poster for X-Files: The Truth is Out There. When Uriel caught me looking at them, he laughed and said: “Spilsbury and Mulder… they’re both stubborn and driven, like me.”

From an old bronze espresso maker, Uriel brewed a mean expresso for me, helping fight off the fatigue that was seeping in. We chatted over steaming cups, talking more freely than I had with any other angel. Uriel seemed pleased to have the attention, and I understood why. He toiled in privacy and helped capture many a criminal; it wasn’t attention he was looking for… just the opportunity to unburden some of his exploits.

“Not all crime fighters get a Batcave or have the know-how to analyze evidence, so… they come to me.”

When I asked him what the hardest part of the job was, he glanced at Lancer before laughing. I even thought I detected the hint of a smile on Lancer as well.

“This crime-fighter, who shall remain nameless, comes to me with trace evidence that he gathered from a murder—a stabbing of a junkie the cops didn’t care enough about. The evidence all points to one guy… let’s call him John Smith. I’ve got his DNA, his hair, his fingerprints everything. So I tell my crime fighter this, and he stammers out: ‘But I’m John Smith.’” Uriel chuckles. “Cross-contamination, that’s the hardest part. Most crime fighters can’t process a crime scene worth a damn and half of what I get is unusable. I try to teach them, I try to equip them,” says, nodding to the small satchels that I learn are simple evidence-gathering kits, “but most of them don’t bother carrying them around.” He smiles at Lancer. “Too much of a bulge I guess.”

Uriel explains that he probably learns more about the crime fighters themselves sometimes than he does about the crimes they’re investigating.

“Doesn’t that scare off superheroes?” I ask. “The chance you might figure out who they are?”

He nods and then looks over at Lancer. “That’s why I ask Lancer to wipe their identities from my head when I do find out something too personal.”

“You let him erase your memories?” I blurt out.

“Better that than some sociopath torturing me for the information. Besides, it’s what I signed on for.”

Up to this point, I’ve tried not to push for personal information, but the idea of letting someone root in my head terrifies the living hell out of me. It’s like voluntary Alzheimer’s, so I plow the course and ask. “You’ve obviously got money… so… what drives you to do this?”

He pauses a second, thinking about it. Then he tells me, “I was orphaned,” he says. “When I was 9, a mugger shot my mother and father right in front of me as we were leaving the opera.” He bursts out laughing a second later. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I don’t need Hell or tragedy or a crisis of faith to do something with my money and education. And I don’t need powers to do good either.”

Dawn’s approaching by the time we leave and the delivery trucks are already rumbling through New York, delivering the essentials for the morning rush. I’m ready to throw myself across the finish line, but Lancer tells me “one last angel.”

Trinity Cemetery and Mausoleum is the last active cemetery in Manhattan and certainly the last place I expected to find myself. Through the bare trees, I can see the cold Hudson and the flicker of headlights. Lancer steps inside one of the mausoleums, and we stand before an urn crypt, quietly looking at a name… a woman who died a decade ago. When I finally ask “was she a Street Angel?” my whispers echo and I feel like a thief in this place and in the fraternity of heroes I’ll never really be a part of.

“Grandma. She wasn’t the first person to help us, but… she organized them. She started the whole network thing. We kept her secret, tried to keep her safe.”

I did a quick calculation of her age… she lived for a respectable 84 years and yet I didn’t think that was the end of the story. Lancer was making a point, I could feel it, so I asked the question that needed to be asked to continue her tale.

“What happened?”

“We weren’t closing ranks like we should have, and word got around that Grandma was at the center of a network. I guess to the bad guys, she seemed like a chink in our armor… a goldmine of information.”

“Jesus,” was all I managed. I couldn’t imagine hurting an old person, but then he said one name… Vuko. I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know the name, but Lancer’s connections with Tango at the War College and with The Honor of The Samaritan Guard meant his knowledge ran to the military as well and there was a long and deep history with metas as government operatives. He continued.

“Vuko was KGB-Alfa. We’re talking Cold War era stuff here going back to the late 60s. Mid-70s, he breaks rank and resurfaces as a soldier of fortune in Angola, Lebanon, that sort of thing.”

When I wondered aloud if he was Akula, the breed of Russian metas working for the Bratva and for Russian millionaires that started appearing around the same time in the 70s, Lancer shrugged.

“Akula, no. He hates the Russians and they hate him back. There’s some bad blood there over what? I can’t say. He’s incredibly gifted with guns and he takes punishment like a prizefighter on PCP.”

Lancer went on to explain how someone must have hired Vuko to find Grandma and interrogate her, and that’s exactly what he did.

“He tortured and murdered two angels before he found her and went to work on her. Only… Grandma wasn’t given up anything. She was a tough bird, a vet, and she held out long enough for a couple of crime fighters to stumble across the other murders and beeline it to her. Vuko got away, but Grandma was badly wounded. She didn’t make it.”

We were both quiet a moment, and I realized Lancer was waiting for me to process the information, to piece it all together. Ever since that time, the crime fighters in the know would become highly protective of their angels, but then—why give me a tour unless…?

“You want to wipe my memory, don’t you?” I asked.

“I think their story needs to be told… we could use more help out there and people have to know the price.”

“But.”

“But, I need to erase some details so you don’t become a target for the authorities or the criminals. I need to erase locations and how to reach them, and I need to plant false intelligence, the kind of details that would lead criminals to me and other crime fighters instead of to the angels. I want criminals to know that if they go after the angels, I’m going to wipe the slate with their heads and mentally regress them to the point they popped out of the womb. And I will keep them in that state.”

It was an effective message, at least to me. Looking at Grandma’s name and remembering the people I met this evening, I understood the terrible risk of being a Street Angel. Was I scared of having Lancer tap into my thoughts and scramble them around a bit? Absolutely. Memories and mental acuity are at the core of how we define ourselves, so to surrender control over that terrified me. What if I wasn’t the same afterward? What if Lancer had inadvertently sabotaged something integral to me like my natural curiosity or my ability to write?

And yet, could I be responsible for someone’s death. I visualized sitting there, writing the obituary of a Street Angel I was responsible for killing one of them because I couldn’t withstand torture or interrogation. How would I even begin to apologize to someone or their loved ones? For the first time since this all started, I considered abandoning the article, partially out of fear of Lancer tooling around in my brain, and partially because I was afraid of that kind of responsibility.

Instead, I said, “Do it,” before I could reconsider.

***

To tell you all the truth, I feel almost nothing about the memories that were taken or altered. I’m not sure how Lancer’s powers work or why I was expecting cardboard cutouts in place of the real memories, but the missing moments of that Thursday night to Friday morning feel more like napping through bits of a movie I was watching. I remained grateful for the experience and I found it impossible to tell which memories had been tweaked or altered. So it’s with that sentiment that I say that my tour of the Street Angels Network is as true as my memory allows. Only the interview quotes themselves, which I wrote down, are from the moment of the moment.

Before Lancer floated away from my apartment window that early morning, however, I did manage to ask him, “Lancer… this Vuko guy you mentioned. Is he still out there?”

“I think so, but the guy’s tough. The last time I heard about him… he’d gone toe-to-toe with Bangarang about, oh, a year ago, and still managed to walk away.”

That was enough to send chills down my back.

When you first become a crime fighter, there’s a lot you don’t know. The first lesson is that it’s not a clubhouse out there; metahumans are either territorial about protecting their opportunities for fame and fortune, or they’re the diehard vets suspicious of your motives. Then there’s the stuff nobody tells you about, be it where to find functional outfits, how to protect your brand against marketing poachers, and how to communicate with the police.

One of the secrets to being a crime-fighter is what’s considered an industry secret shared only with those heroes who operate beyond a tour or two. It’s for metahumans who pursue heroism for selfless means, and not a shot at glory, and it’s passed on by word of mouth, as much an act of trust like learning someone’s secret identity as it is a rite of passage.

The Street Angels Network is the name of an underground system of contacts willing to help heroes under the table. Some are professionals whose jobs prevent them from helping metahumans without permission or for whatever ethical oaths they’ve sworn. Some are doctors and nurses, some still practicing and others striped of their license. Some are lawyers, or cops, or retired metas themselves. Some charge for the sake of supplies but most offer their services for free. The only rules for using the Street Angels Network is:

1. Don’t break their trust.
2. Don’t abuse their services.

My journey into the Street Angels Network began at 11:00 PM one Thursday night, when a rap at my window startled me. My apartment was three stories up. Lancer was hovering outside, arms crossed and a simple question on his mind. “You ready?” was all he said.

I’d been expecting this visit for a while, but I was still trying to crawl back into my own skin after that scare. I’d known Lancer for a while, now, but I had a hard time readingthe man. Throw his mental abilities into the mix, and I was genuinely scared of him. If he’d ever picked up on that in the time I’d known him, however, he never indicated.

I was about to be given a tour of the Street Angels Network; not all of it and even the Street Angels themselves didn’t know the full extent of their own loosely affiliated organization, but the caveat was all the same. I was to use false names, locations, and descriptions to protect the men and women dedicated to helping metahumans.

Lancer used a mental cloak to keep us hidden, and we wandered the streets like ghosts. It wasn’t that people didn’t see us per se, just that a subconscious urge made them ignore us like we were a pair of non-descript faces in the pages of Where’s Waldo. It was thus obfuscated that we arrived at our first stop. It looked like any other building, the apartment door short a coat of paint and the blare from a television set filtering across the floor.

The man who answered the door went by the codename of Raph, short for Raphael, the archangel of healing. I’d consistently see this Judeo-Christian-Islamic theme behind the Angels, for obvious reasons. Inside his apartment, Raph had a variety of triage kits, disinfectants, some pain-killers, puncture proof disposal bags, and a room he’d insulated against sound that could be converted to emergency care with a massage table for an operating table and a cot for recovering patients. It was surprisingly clean. Raph was polite but apprehensive, and it was only after Lancer insisted on him taking a swig from a bottle of liquid courage (which he also used as cheap antiseptic) that he finally warmed up a little to my questions.

“They didn’t let me practice medicine here,” he admitted, “so I had to find another job.”

After I asked him how he got into helping metahumans, he told me about working as a deliveryman when, one night, a customer pulled a knife on him. A metahuman he refused to name saved him, but got cut badly, and Raph treated his wounds and quickly developed a reputation among some crimefighters as a street doctor who would treat your injuries, no questions asked.

The “no questions asked” is the currency of the Street Angels Network; heroes need these contacts because they don’t trust official channels, while the Street Angels themselves have their own lives to protect. Raph himself could be arrested for practicing medicine without a license, but he calls himself “the middleman” between the heroes and the ERs. Although doctors in general protect their patients under Doctor/Patient confidentiality, they’re still required to report stabbings, shootings, and suspected signs of injuries due to power usage. Many heroes don’t want to be arrested on charges of non-cooperation.

“How do you safely dispose of all the medical waste?” I asked. Treating metahumans was a dangerous affair, and if I’d learned anything from interviewing Roadkill Inc., metahuman waste was called problematic residuals for a reason. More than one person had died from touched meta-contaminants.

“One of the street angels has access to a cremation furnace,” Lancer said. “We use it to get rid of various things.”

“Bodies?” I asked.

The room went quiet, but Lancer remained nonplussed. “Never. We don’t make the network an accessory to murder. But we do burn a drug dealer’s stash when we know he might walk, or a dangerous piece of tech that has no right being made or retro-engineered.”

Our next stop wasn’t any less homely… another non-descript apartment that could be found in any lower tax bracket. In these places, though, people proactively minded their own businesses, making it easier for Street Angels to operate. This time, we visited the home of a short woman who spoke in a low voice to avoid waking up someone in the next room. Whether it was her partner, a relative, or her children, I practiced the currency of the agreement and didn’t ask questions.

She called herself Lewit, and I was hard pressed to remember an angel of that name. Instead I asked, “So what do you do?” The woman’s smile was bright and encouraging, and she motioned for me to follow her. Her workroom was hidden and both Lancer and Lewit chuckled at what must have been my shocked expression. This ample woman, someone I would have expected to be a lawyer or bureaucrat by day, was an engineer. There were several worktables covered in various machine shop tools, or with electronic gadgets including hand tools, soldering tools, cables and wires, and circuit boards. The walls were covered in organized shelving units and drawers, and the empty spaces were filled with a high-end 3D printer, a gun drill, a button rifling machine, a reloading press, a pallet of coolant oil, boxes of cartridges, and so much more. I was looking at a goldmine of equipment here and Lewit must have sensed my thoughts because she simply said: “I have patrons.”

“Patrons” is a polite way of saying “junkrats,” a breed that encompasses crimefighters, glory hounds, and straight up collectors, mostly baseline humans who buy high tech devices from inventors strapped for cash or retiring from the life. My attention fixated on a wall display case above the door.

“Are those–?”

“Street Saint’s old power batons. I gave him an upgrade and he said thank you,” she said, nodding to the two weathered batons crossed and on display.

I never learned whether Lewit was a baseline human or metahuman but she helped crime fighters repair their gear. I sensed a military clip to her bearing and to the way she spoke; by the way she handled the equipment, I had no doubt she could shoot a weapon as easily as she could field strip and repair one. Many crime-fighters, especially the Charlie-class ones, often used gadget belts and various tools to help keep the streets safe. Lewit was the go-to saint for building, repairing, and outfitting those gadget-wielding crime fighters. She was a Jane-of-all-Trades when it came to equipment, mechanical and electronic, and she was even known to custom-build devices for her clients when she had the parts and thought the cause was good.

I wanted to spend more time speaking to Lewit, but she had an early morning and Lancer was eager to get moving. There were still more Street Angels to visit that night, and I was not about to waste my one shot to peek behind the curtain.

TO BE CONTINUED: PART II NEXT WEEK

On May 12^th, 2012, Sean Cavendish walked into the Marcoli wake to pay his respects. He kissed Lisa Marcoli, grieving widow of suspected hitman Giovanni Marcoli, shook hands with suspected underbosses, capos, and high ranking soldiers of the Tozzetti Crime Family, and then detonated his suicide bomb vest. At that exact moment, at 4:20 PM, Sean Cavendish also walked into the offices of Benito Tozzetti and shot both the suspected crime boss and his consiglieri and daughter, Emily Tozzetti, before being gunned down by Benito’s bodyguards.

How did Sean Cavendish get close enough to the Tozzetti Crime Family to behead its leaders? He’d been a member of their organization for the last seven years, moving up in the business as a trusted lieutenant and moneyman. How was he in two places at once? Well, until then, Sean Cavendish appeared to be a baseline human. After that, however, everyone discovered he was, in fact, a metahuman with the ability to create clones of himself. Rather than denying the allegations, Sean Cavendish embraced them and adopted the moniker of the “Narcissist,” a fitting name for a man known for his considerable ego.

What followed was a summer of confusion and speculation. The New York District Attorney’s office went after Sean Cavendish, expecting a slam dunk case, but Sean Cavendish’s legal team made short work of what they called “biased and unwarranted attacks against their client by anti-metahuman elements within the government.” Their main defense was that Sean Cavendish created autonomous clones who were responsible for their own actions. And as a result, the two clones who committed the murders were acting of their own accords. The desperate DA tried everything as their case unraveled. They tried to use Sean’s clones to testify against him. They said that Sean Cavendish was ultimately responsible for the actions of his creations since they were effectively him. They said his clones were following Sean’s orders, and then they claimed that Sean should never have created doubles of himself without understanding the full implications of his powers.

It all came down to one question, however. Who was ultimately responsible for murdering all those people? Sean Cavendish’s lawyers filled the jury with enough reasonable doubt that he was acquitted of all charges.

The DA’s office had been given one chance to stop Sean Cavendish from filling the void left behind by the Tozzetti Crime Family, and they failed. Instead, the Narcissist took over the remnants of Tozzetti interests as a one-man army, rebuilding the empire he helped shatter according to sources that have asked to remain anonymous. With his involvement in the finances of the mafia empire, he was rumored to know the location of every offshore account and safe house money drop, and he used that knowledge to fund the rise of his own empire.

In recent months, more rumors and allegations have surfaced that indicate that the Narcissist has created a downright hedonistic regime that makes the extravagances of bacchanalian Rome look tame by comparison. He’s been accused by several heroes including Malleus and Griffe of using his own clones as his private sex slaves and been instrumental in introducing the New York club circuit to a variety of new party drugs.

The Narcissist is a rarity in today’s landscape. If superheroes have a short shelf life on the Tour, then most would-be villains are nothing more than embers that live and die in the moment. It’s hardly surprising when most metas who adopt the cape want public adoration, and while heroes can play the anti-hero, a villain is still bad PR. And then there’s the fact that the world and the various governments have spent the last 70 years learning how to fight metas and the last 20 worrying about the worst possible scenario when a powerful meta adopts an unsanctioned philosophy.

Few villains last long against that kind of experience and training, so when a new threat emerges and stays the course, they are often more than the traditional comic book inspired bank robber or mad scientist. Be they the strange Bangarang whose powers and mysterious aims make him difficult to predict or apprehend, the water-wielding Mitgh who navigates inside non-extradition countries while running her criminal empire, or Khevtuul, the mysterious human trafficker in Southeast Asia known only by his name and shadow abilities.

There are more villains to be sure, but Narcissist is unique among his kind. He operates in plain sight and readily agrees to interviews and public appearances. He has built an empire on smart planning and through legal maneuvering using his clones as fall guys and alibis. If the authorities ever hope to build a case against him capable of hurting his criminal empire, it won’t likely be through any superhero battle, but the RICO Act, the same Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act that hurt the Gambino Crime Family, the Latin Kings street gang, and the Lucchese Crime Family. If there are any plans to bring the Narcissist’s empire down, however, there aren’t any indications it’ll happen anytime soon.

When I first met Gideon March, she looked like any six-year old. She wouldn’t make eye contact, instead looking at her feet like she’d found them for the first time as she kicked them back and forth on the sofa. You knew she was listening, though, by the way she smiled and looked at you out of the corners of her eyes. And sometimes, just sometimes, you’d catch a flicker of her power as her pupils narrowed into cat-like slits. I was told she could see pheromones, much like her mother Storm Tiger, and both friends and family were dreading the day her father’s explosive powers manifested. He isn’t called Volatile without reason.

Not all prodigies take after both parents, but many do. They are also the least understood and the best kept secret among the superhero community, perhaps more so than one’s own secret identity. Many heroes who are parents to prodigies are terrified of the public scrutiny their children might receive, or the threat posed by the metas they’ve arrested. Gideon March is no exception. While Gideon is famous thanks to the paparazzi who captured photos of her and her slitted eyes last year, both Storm Tiger and Volatile want their daughter to have a well-adjusted childhood.

The first official prodigy was Trevor Endicott, son of British WWII hero Hooded Crow and the German-born Gewrum who defected to the Allies in the middle of the war. Trevor inherited his mother’s shapeshifting abilities and reputedly went on to work for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) as a spy. There’s very little information about Trevor’s life except for some pieces in The Times about “the lad with superpowers.” The Times called him “a prodigy” and the name stuck for all powered offspring.

Because an active Crisis Gene (CG-1) is a recessive gene, a single metahuman parent will rarely pass on his or her abilities to their children. Both parents must be metahuman for a prodigy to be born and exhibit powers. At what age that child shows powers is another matter, and seems to range anywhere from five years to the onset of puberty. Beyond that, it’s unlikely the child of two metahumans will generate abilities, and it has happened that a prodigy develops no powers at all.

Unfortunately, there are so few prodigies out there and meta-parents are so protective of their children that there’s no studies to establish any sort of baseline. It also means that prodigies have become a goldmine of inaccuracies and conspiracy theorists. The most popular of the latter, and the most sexist and troubling in my opinion, is the belief that women who trigger are “artificially inseminated by multiple meta donors to act as superbaby factories to create as many metahumans as it takes to eventually replace humanity.” If you think this assertion just comes from the lunatic fringe, then you’d have to include Congressman Wheeler of Oregon and Chief Judge Madison of the Maryland Court of Appeals in that list. Not only have they unabashedly stated their beliefs on the matter, but they’ve gone so far as to suggest that metahumans can’t marry or have children for “the sanctity of the human gene pool.”

Other people worry about metahuman children for a simpler and perhaps more practical reason. The ability to control their powers, especially with the onset of puberty. Although never officially verified, there are stories within the industry of prodigies undergoing power fluxes and even power shifts during the hormonal turbulence of puberty. It’s no secret that some prodigies end up refining on their parent’s powers or pushing them further. Trevor Endicott was said to be able to take on different human appearances, while his mother was restricted to animal forms.

That said, many metahumans home-school their children and a few even use tutors with powers. Despite a wish to “normalize” their children, metahumans are afraid of accidents or their children getting into fights.

“Prodigy or not, they are still children,” Storm Tiger told me once. “They learn by making mistakes.” It’s those mistakes that terrify parents into thinking metahumans should never have children, and that thinking that forces powered parents to home-school their children.

Regardless, current estimates put the number of prodigies at around 45 worldwide and there rumors that some countries encourage metas to marry one another and have multiple children through incentives like stipends, homes, and state support. The world has yet to see, however, what happens when two prodigies marry and have children of their own. Will it be the beginning of superpowered dynasties? Will it distill power into more powerful metahumans? Nobody knows because as it stands now, we barely understand what being a prodigy actually means, much less what happens to their DNA when they’re steeped in powers from nearly the time of their foundation years.

You’ve probably seen their white and yellow vans driving around Manhattan following a metahuman ‘incident.’ That’s the industry’s polite term for when metahumans get involved in something messy. Roadkill Inc. isn’t a name that inspires confidence, Donna Bartlet will be the first to admit with a broad grin, but nobody can deny the fact that her company is at the top of a field she pioneered. If you ask around, however, most people couldn’t give you a straight answer as to who they are, why they’re there, and what they do. So, to answer all those questions, we decided to talk to Donna Bartlet herself and get the lowdown on Roadkill Inc., one of the most unusual and controversial meta-related enterprises out there.

HERO BEAT: Donna, tell us about Roadkill Inc.

BARTLET: Well, we’re a private hazmat team. When metas fight or save lives, you have a lot of what we call ‘residuals’ left behind. Radiation, toxic blood, resistant skin samples, indestructible hair, strange materials, exotic particles… all of that. We clean it up before some trophy seeker picks up something dangerous or someone’s pet eats it.

HERO BEAT: Isn’t that sort of thing supposed to be handled by the Environmental Protection Agency?

BARTLET: It depends on the mess. There’s a lot of inter-Federal handshaking, so the EPA might coordinate with the Department of Energy or the CDC or USAMRIID, but they mostly jump in when it affects a whole town or city or lands on Federal property. The rest of it falls under local government—the municipality or the state. That’s when we come in.

HERO BEAT: With the EPA’s approval?

BARTLET: That’s right. We are a privately owned business, but the EPA vets us, they perform surprise inspections of our equipment, our facilities, you name it. We pass them with flying colors, naturally, but they keep us on our toes. We decontaminate places so that work crews can go in to rebuild damaged property. It might be the city, or insurance companies, or corporations, but we can move faster than any municipal or Federal agency, I’ll tell you.

HERO BEAT: But your company’s come under fire. You’ve been accused of theft of–

BARTLET: Theft’s a really grand word here and I’ve heard it so often, I’ve learned to nip it in the bud fast. We’re the blue collar workers of Genomics [she says, laughing]. We’ll collect all those samples and sure… we send the residuals off to labs and research facilities. There’s a market for anything with meta DNA or properties. Doing what we do safely, though? That costs money, and it doesn’t pay to take shortcuts.

HERO BEAT: Many metahumans consider that a breach of their privacy.

BARTLET: Oh, you bet. Some even get in our faces about it, try to sue us, but the court’s on our side.

HERO BEAT: The 2013 ruling by the Supreme Court determined that DNA couldn’t be patented.

BARTLET: DNA in its natural form, sure, but let’s face it… metas aren’t a natural occurrence. Their mutations can’t be charted or predicted. What they do doesn’t happen in nature. That falls outside of the Supreme Court’s ruling and makes their genes open to research and trademarking.

HERO BEAT: For now.

BARTLET: For now and a long time, hun. Besides, with the samples we provide, it’s barely enough to whet the appetites of biopharma. If they see something interesting with the samples we send them, they’ll contact the metas directly and pay them really well for more genetic samples. It’s a win across the board.

HERO BEAT: Have metahumans taken them up on that offer?

BARTLET: Yes, but I couldn’t say who. And I mean, really. I couldn’t. Lawyers and all that. But… weren’t you here to talk about me?

HERO BEAT: So how did you get the idea to start Roadkill Inc.?

BARTLET: Watching Ghostbusters. No, cross my heart, I’m serious. After that scene in the grand ballroom when they zap Slimmer and the entire place is trashed, I started wondering who handles all the residual left behind. I’m not talking cleaning up the smashed plates or the tables or anything. I mean the supernatural goop and the radiation left from the proton accelerators. Then I started wondering what happened to the cleaning staff? Would they get cancer? Or get sick because they touched all that slime?

HERO BEAT: Who you gonna call?

BARTLET: Us, right? [She laughs] At first, we were in the disposal business with one van, but then we started getting pinged by biopharma and metallurgy companies, asking to buy anything unusual we found.

HERO BEAT: Unusual?

BARTLET: Anything with genetic information, but I mean, look at what metas can do with metals and substances… it’s incredible. The way they rearrange crystalline structures to play with things creates metals with unique properties. Here… take someone like Chain-Spider. We cleaned up after that fight with Atom-Slayer and sent her broken chains to our client. Turns out, they were made from some kind of bone with a micro-weave of metal, but you take normal bone, right? It’s five times stronger than steel at the same weight. Chain-Spider’s chains were still lighter and just as strong if not stronger. If she’d taken up an offer to donate more links, we could have had a lighter, stronger organic metal that could regrow right now. How terrific would that be?

HERO BEAT: She refused your client?

BARTLET: She vanished. After her accident? But that’s my point. Isn’t it a meta’s responsibility to make the world a better place. Well, what if their bone marrow turned out to be a universal donor for Leukemia patients? What if their skin cells could help burn victims? But no… they’re more worried about fame or protecting their identity than getting checked out by the labs.

HERO BEAT: So you’re holding metas accountable by selling their genetic material?

BARTLET: You’re saying that, hun, not me. And I’m not selling anything they didn’t leave behind. You don’t want me using your residuals, then clean up your mess. It’s what I tell my son. Clean up the mess you made. It’s that simple. Metas are just miffed they didn’t think of it first, but we’re still generous. There’s a couple of metas out there sitting on millions because we put them on the radar of biopharma.

HERO BEAT: Is there really that kind of cash out there?

BARTLET: Sure, it depends, but yeah, if you’ve got the noggin for it. Take a look at Henrietta Lacks… the poor woman responsible for the HeLa line of immortal cells. Without the cancer cells that killed her, we never would have found a vaccine for Polio or conducted all that AIDS and cancer research, or discovered the effects of radiation. Her cell samples created an entire industry. And she was one of us, human.

HERO BEAT: Most metas would take offense at not being referred to as ‘humans.’

BARTLET: Humans don’t poop things that glow in the dark. Do you know how many times the Department of Sanitation or Department of Environment Protection had called us because they found “something” in the sewers or canals that puts their workers at risk? They have us on speed dial. We already call them “metahuman.” That means beyond human… so why are they upset if I call us humans and them metas? I tell you, people are just too damn sensitive.

HERO BEAT: Have you ever caught flack for Roadkill Inc.?

BARTLET: Oh sure, you bet. ‘You’re being insensitive, showing up someplace where people got hurt with that name’ blah blah blah blah blah! Listen, hun, I’m not in the business of holding anyone’s hand. We’re not in this for grief counseling. We’re not there to put a bandaid on your knee. We’re here to run a business, and I’m sorry for what happened to you, but please–get off your high horses and stop pretending that everyone has to cry for you.

HERO BEAT: Has any metahuman ever come after you for something you collected?

BARTLET: Yessir, they have. We have a couple of metas on staff who can put a stop to that.

HERO BEAT: Like Brownout. She suppresses powers?

BARTLET: Oh, she’s a gem. She can stop any misunderstanding before it starts. And she’s great for neutralizing problematic residuals.

HERO BEAT: But not all the time, right? You lost someone last year to a residual?

BARTLET: Poor Hank, yes we did, but that wasn’t on Brownout. We were helping the NYPD with a patch of this… tar-like droplets that they found at a murder? Well, those droplets got real agitated the minute we tried to scan them, and quick as a bullet, they shot into Hank, who was holding portable spectrograph. It was horrible, the way it dug into him.

HERO BEAT: This was the murder investigation of Nano-Gen’s CTO, correct? Gordon Oliver?

BARTLET: Mm-hmm. It’s still under investigation, but whatever killed dear Hank also killed Gordon Oliver and his assistant. Like I said… it’s a dangerous job already. We’re just the most qualified to handle it, and the city knows it. That’s why we’ll continue to be there whenever metas fight, cleaning up the mess so there’s no further damage or loss of life.