***AWAKE***

“Are you okay, man?” Jacob asked.

“Yeah, just desecrating my girlfriend’s grave. You know how it goes,” Tom said, wiping the tears on his sleeve and continuing to dig. He’d scoped out the graveyard several times in his sleep and figured out exactly how long it took to dig down to Lily’s casket, but he still lost it every time. The smell of his girlfriend’s grave was going to linger in the back of his mind for years.

Thankfully, they didn’t need to make the hole wide enough to actually open it. The casket was made of Styrofoam painted to look like wood.

Tom heard the screeching crunch of Styrofoam under the blade of his shovel, and snapped out of his thoughts.

“I hit the casket. Can you give me a measure?” he asked Jacob, who was standing outside the one-man hole.

Jacob took out a measuring tape, using the left edge of the gravestone as an anchor, then dropped a plumb bob at the exact distance Tom had instructed him.

The plumb bob hung over a couple inches of dirt he hadn’t moved yet, so Tom scooped it out of the way, then made a quick cut with the blade of his shovel before squatting down and wrenching the chunk of Styrofoam out of the way.

There, scattered with dirt, was a cold, dead hand, with a cold, dead ring on it.

Tom had made the mistake of excavating her whole grave before he knew what he was doing, and wound up face-to-face with his decomposing baby momma. He’d thrown up all over her corpse, and learned his fucking lesson.

Tom picked up the hand and peeled the ring off, the skin of Lily’s finger coming along for the ride.

He almost lost it again, but choked the bile back, because he could not afford to lose time. The groundskeeper actually liked strolling through the graveyard at night, and the place was surprisingly popular with teens who wanted to sneak out and plow each other somewhere spooky.

Actually, maybe those two things are related.

Basically, there was no way to perfectly time a grave robbing. Speed was the name of the game.

Tom yanked the sleeve of decomposing skin out of the ring before shoving the jewelry in his pocket. It was time to go.

Tom climbed out of the hole and began vigorously brushing himself off while Jacob started filling the hole back in.

“What are you doing?”

“Filling it back in,” Jacob said, scooping like crazy.

“Forget it. The groundskeeper always fills it back in before anyone has a chance to see that it’s been robbed. It makes him look really bad if he doesn’t. And I mean, even if we spent hours filling it in, he would know it’d been messed with. It’s not worth the time.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jacob said, wiping his fingerprints off the shovel with a baby wipe before dropping it beside the grave. “Are you psychic?”

“Eh.” Tom waggled his fingers as they walked away. “Kinda, sorta.”

“Can you predict the future?”

“No.”

“Give lotto numbers?”

“No.”

“Contact the dead?”

“No.”

“Find missing people?”

“Maybe, but probably not fast enough to do anything about it.” Tom glanced over at him. “My specialty is long-term, stationary secrets with high barriers to access.”

“Wow…” Jacob blinked. “I have no idea what that means.”

“Things that a person could learn by themselves, but would be really risky or costly for them to learn, and the payoff has to be something that doesn’t move around a lot.”

“Wow… That’s kind of lame.”

“Tell me about it,” Tom said with a scoff. “Still, it’s not bad. I could be a scrub like you. As thanks for helping me with the grave robbing, you can be part of my entourage, steer my yacht, and serve drinks to the supermodels.”

“Sweet. I’ll have the supermodels call me ‘captain’ or ‘sir’. No take backsies.”

Tom shook his head as they walked down the street.

They were still chewing the fat when a spotlight landed on them from the road, causing Tom to freeze in place.

Well, this feels familiar, he thought sourly.

“Run!” Jacob shouted, already three strides away.

Suddenly, Tom realized he was covered in dirt and had stolen jewelry in his pocket, a block away from a grave that had just been robbed.

Tom ran, his brain absolutely flooding his body with adrenaline.

“Freeze!” a voice bellowed behind him.

Tom didn’t freeze. Instead he caught up with Jacob, putting his longer legs to good use.

“What do we do!? Split up!?” Tom asked, lunging for an alley.

“Dead end!” Jacob shouted, grabbing Tom’s shirt and hauling him back towards the road before he could fuck up his escape.

“Normally I would say split up, but you’re obviously terrible at this!” Jacob shouted at him as they sprinted down the street, the footfalls of two bulky dudes right behind them.

“I’ve never run from the cops before!” Tom shouted back. That was generally considered a good thing.

“Yeah, I can tell!” Jacob hauled Tom around a corner before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a can of something.

Tom heard a hissing sound as they ran, followed by a metallic clatter against the street behind him.

The police officers turned the corner and began cursing and coughing violently. Tom and Jacob’s lead began to widen in a matter of seconds as the officers fell to the ground, scrambling backwards while struggling to breathe.

“Don’t stop!” Jacob shouted when he spotted Tom gawking over his shoulder.

“What the hell was that?” Tom demanded, starting to run out of breath, but pushing on anyway.

“Bear spray! Stronger than pepper spray, makes a fog instead of a stream! Great for running from cops! Or dealers…pretty much anybody!”

It was at that moment that Tom realized the vast gulf of life experience between himself and Jacob.

“They’re forty nine ninety-nine in the sports aisle!” Jacob shouted. “Worth every penny!”

They kept running in silence for a little while before they reached Jacob’s beat-up truck. The stocker immediately jumped into the truck bed and snatched up a pair of plastic bags.

“Get changed!” he said, tossing one Tom’s direction. “In about five minutes, they’re gonna report, going mostly by what you were wearing.”

Tom stared as Jacob stripped down to his underwear in a matter of seconds, donning a different color shirt with a bright, eye-catching pattern on it, followed by new jeans, then a pair of non-prescription glasses with thick black rims.

“Hurry up!” Tom was startled into motion, ripping the bag open and shrugging out of his dirt-covered clothes in a matter of seconds.

***Kenneth***

Ken was filling out paperwork, idly listening to Stan regale the office with his most recent clusterfuck.

“So me and Brian turned the corner and the street was fucking filled with—get this—bear spray. Just hanging in the middle of the street like a cloud of pure pain. We found the aerosol bottle in the street once we’d flushed the fucking shit out of our eyes, like an hour later.”

“Those grave robbers were more prepared than I’d expected,” Brian said, nodding.

“Grave robbers?” one of the desk jockeys asked.

“Yeah, the tall one was covered in dirt from head to toe. We found out later, one of the graves had been dug up. Pretty sure we had the perps,” Stan said, clenching a fist.

“Fucking sickos,” Ron said, shaking his head and sipping some coffee.

“Probably thought the girl was hot in the obituary glamour shot,” Harry said, shuddering.

“Who?”

“That girl that died a month ago in a crash, the big-tittied goth chick.”

“Oooh, that one. Yeah, she was pretty fuckable, but necrophilia is where I draw the line.”

Ken’s pen paused on the paper, and he refocused on the conversation, peering over at the loose circle of men chatting before they broke up and went home.

“Did they steal anything?” Ken asked, drawing their attention to him.

“Dunno,” Stan called back with a shrug. “The groundsman filled the hole back in right away, and she doesn’t have any family to make a fuss, so this one’s probably gonna…” Stan made a ‘sweeping under the rug’ motion with his palm.

Ken clenched his teeth and nodded, dropping the subject. Showing an unhealthy interest was the surest way to attract attention, and he didn’t want attention.

Coincidences were one thing, but the girl who’d had the superpower doodads in her car had her grave robbed? There was no fucking way that was a coincidence.

Was she buried with one? Did somebody else know about them?

Ken’s grip tightened on his cheap pen until he could feel the plastic gradually deforming under his fingers. Somebody else had gotten wind. Somebody else might even know more than he did.

That was unacceptable.

Especially with the gold being out of reach.

Ken had tried to ghost into the evidence room through the exterior wall, his car parked nearby, but he’d simply failed to slip through. He’d stood there for a good two minutes, pressed up against the wall, looking like a suspicious idiot.

He unconsciously touched the lump in his pocket.

It no longer gave off that popping, sizzling sensation in his guts. Instead, it sat there like a cold, dead lump of gold, mocking him. Making him feel like a fucking retard.

Who knew the damn thing ran on batteries? Not my fucking fault. Not only that, Ken had no idea how to recharge the damn thing. The dead girl was probably reaching for it so her car could slip through the roadblock.

Now he was stuck here with no powers, the other doodads were being relocated in about a week, and somebody else was sniffing around where they weren’t welcome.

Fuckin’ great.

Ken tapped his pen against the paper. The baby-daddy didn’t know about the gold superpower doodads; otherwise, he’d have asked for them back, day one. And Ken probably would’ve given it to him.

Now that he knew better though, Ken wasn’t interested in letting some idiot teen use them to peek in the girls’ locker room or smoke behind the school or whatever the hell idiot shit teenagers would do with superpowers.

No, the kid didn’t know about the gold, but maybe he knew who did. The baby daddy was the only reference on the dead girl’s paperwork, so he was the only person Ken could talk to. Maybe get a list of associates.

One of them probably knew about the gold.

Maybe they even knew how to charge the batteries up.

Ken’s brow twitched.

Maybe they were wearing one of them when the car crashed.

Something had punched through the front windshield during the crash, but there hadn’t been any body, or blood. If someone had been carrying some kind of invincibility superpower...battery thing, that would explain it! Then they had fled the scene.

Implying they were guilty of something.

That means there’s already a supervillain out there. And I’m the only one who knows about them.

Ken grinned. Since they were bad guys, it was his job to catch them. And of course, when he confiscated their superpower thingy, he would keep it away from the rest of the PD, because it’d probably disappear into the wrong hands.

I’m the good guy. They’re the bad guys.

There. Moral dilemma solved. Ken liked his worldview distilled down into a simple us vs. them. It was where he was most comfortable.