Free Forced Retirement by Robert T. Jeschonek

Forced Retirement
    By
    Robert T. Jeschonek
    Hericane was pursued by her murderously psychotic super hero father, Epitome, for over an hour before she finally realized that he thought he was chasing himself.
    It was something he said that finally tipped her off, and it was not exactly hard to interpret. “You don’t think I’ll kill you because you’re me ?” he screamed as he flew after her at lightning speed. “Then you’re dead wrong !”
    This just brought up another question. Instead of asking herself, “Why is my father trying to kill me?” Hericane now wondered, “Why is my father trying to kill someone he thinks is himself ?”
    She asked herself this question as she felt Epitome’s hand close around her ankle, catching her in mid-flight. As he hurled her out of the sky with a mighty swing, sending her plunging toward the city below.
    It was a fall that her cape would not survive. With a great effort, Hericane managed to spin around and shoot back up, narrowly missing the lofty spire of the Scalzi Building...but an antenna on the spire snagged her white cape and ripped it from her shoulders. Not for the first time, she was glad that she had designed the cape as a tearaway piece; otherwise, it might have yanked her back to slam into the building.
    The delay from such a collision would have given Epitome that one extra heartbeat he needed to catch up and pounce on her.
    As powerful as she was, Hericane knew that once her father pounced on her, she might not survive for long. Hericane was easily one of the five mightiest super-powered people on Earth...but she had had a non-powered mother, so she was one generation diluted from the pure source of her father’s blood. Epitome was the apex of the pyramid, the strongest of the strong, the king of the superhuman gods.
    And he had lost his mind. The man who had defeated such super-criminals as Heat Death, RNA, Noble Rot, and the Walking World War had fallen victim to his greatest enemy.
    Alzheimer’s disease.
    Hericane flew as fast as she could away from the Scalzi Building and her father, though her seventeenth sense alerted her that he was following at high speed. Frantically, she tried to think of a strategy to escape him...but she drew a blank.
    As often as she had succeeded in high-stress situations before, whipping the bad guys with ingenious impromptu battle plans, this time was different. This time, her opponent was her father, who was incredibly powerful even at the age of seventy-two...and even if she did come up with a plan to beat him, the last thing that she wanted to do was hurt him.
    Hericane’s hands were tied, while Epitome had the complete freedom of a disease which, in him, had led to something like insanity.
    A sudden, sharp pain struck the middle of Hericane’s back, knocking her from her beeline flight path. She recognized the effect of Epitome’s “dagger eyes” power, which had already hit her at least ten times that day.
    The key to neutralizing “dagger eyes,” she knew, was to break out of Epitome’s line of sight. Hericane did so by flashing down and hard to the left, putting a tall office building between her and her father. The pain stopped immediately.
    Spotting an opportunity to escape more than just the “dagger eyes,” Hericane stopped suddenly on the far side of the building and ducked back against the wall. Her costume—-a head-to-toe one-piece with chameleonic properties--immediately changed color and texture to match the brick surface against which she was flattened.
    Epitome shot past in a streak of red and gold and kept going, as if Hericane were flying between the skyscrapers somewhere up ahead.
    As she watched Epitome fly off, Hericane wanted to let out a big sigh of relief...but she remembered how acute his hearing was and puffed out a few tiny breaths instead.
    Hericane was by no means convinced that Epitome would not see through her ruse and come back for her. Nevertheless, she took the opportunity to rest for