“There are hunters and there are prey in life, see,” Charlie Cooper told the clerk behind the counter of the shop, nestled in a corner of East London, “and I don’t figure you for a hunter.” Cooper held his hand up at the clerk; it didn’t shake at all. It hadn’t shaken when he’d fired a blast of red laser beam out of his palm a second earlier, past the clerk’s ear and into the display behind him, and it didn’t shake now, pointed at the fellow’s heart.
This wasn’t Charlie Cooper’s first robbery. It wasn’t even his tenth. He’d lost count after twenty. London was all in a tizzy, wondering where he was going to strike next. He didn’t care about the stir he was causing. Hell, he reveled in it. Maybe they’d make him a folk hero, like Robin Hood, except he wasn’t sharing any of the loot with the villagers.
“Hurry up and get the money from the till, Charlie,” Billy Fischer said behind him. Billy was all swelled up, muscles stacked on muscles. When his metahuman power had shown up, it had taken this form, growing three sizes too large, like a bodybuilder who’d gone overboard. Charlie’s was to shoot laser beams out of his hand, lethal blasts that could take the heart right out of this poor, sweating shopkeeper, who actually was shaking, who had his hands behind his head, the poor bastard, a pitiable sort that Charlie Cooper didn’t have an ounce of actual pity for.
