The Lavender Menace by Tom Cardamone

Author:Tom Cardamone [Cardamone, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938720239
Publisher: Northwest Press
Published: 2014-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

The Plan

Charles “Zan” Christensen

Charles “Zan” Christensen is a comics writer and publisher living in Seattle, Washington. He was the founding President of nonprofit LGBT comics organization Prism Comics, and is currently the publisher of graphic novel publisher Northwest Press. He was featured with artist Mark Brill in OUT magazine’s “OUT 100” for 2011 for their work on the anti-bullying comic book The Power Within. “The Plan” is his first prose fiction work and is dedicated to the guy who turned him in to the police.

I remember rain like this. Thick, heavy rain, driving almost sideways in the wind, with drops so big that they hurt when they hit your exposed skin. Rain like this will soak you through in a just few seconds and chill you to the bone. But not us; we gave off so much heat that we barely noticed it. This rain always got us in the mood.

But you’re not here with me now.

The city erected some bleachers in the town square yesterday in preparation for today’s public relations lovefest, but it’s way too early for anybody to be here yet. It’s not quite dawn, and with the rain clouds covering up whatever dim light might be on the horizon, it’s near pitch black out. I’ve already disrupted the power to the few streetlights on this block to make sure it stays that way. Darkness never bothers the mysterious Eclipse; my sleek, flexible black armor helps me blend into the shadows and I always see perfectly, thanks to my Infinity Lenses.

I’ve never told anyone the whole story of how I got them, since it doesn’t exactly paint me in the best light. Still, you might have heard variations on the general theme: alien crash lands on Earth, entrusts almost magical technology to incredulous Earth man with his dying breath to use it to defend the powerless and mete out justice.

They actually weren’t lenses when he pressed them into my hands. They were two small stones, diamond hard and clear, and they seemed to respond to my thoughts, as if they could become whatever I needed. I shaped them into a pair of obsidian lenses and discovered when I wore them, I had all kinds of amazing powers. I vowed to honor the alien’s dying wishes and use my newfound powers for the benefit of all.

Well, that lasted all of about three weeks.

I discovered that being able to see in pitch darkness and move through walls and having the strength of ten linebackers and the agility of a jungle cat was actually not very lucrative when you spend all your time foiling bank robberies, intervening in gang wars and maintaining a full-time shitty office day job. So I switched teams.

Save your moralizing and your judgements; it’s easy to brag about how you stuck with doing the selfless thing, but you weren’t the one who was faced with missing another mortgage payment and losing your house. You weren’t the one buried in credit card and student loan debt from getting a worthless masters degree.

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