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None of which did anything to help the man known as Vengeance to understand where he was. His head felt like a thousand billy goats were fighting one another in order to work their way out. His attempts to recall any of his past only caused the pain to radiate that much worse. I don’t even remember how I got on top of this tower, let alone where I came from before that. I need answers, he thought. I need to find out what happened to me.

He knew standing atop the highest perch in the city wasn’t the way to do that. He didn’t recognize the King Building, and unlike much of the rest of the city it seemed wholly unfamiliar. Several bits and pieces of the city skyline harvested the same reaction. The city has changed, but where was I when it was happening? No answer was forthcoming.

Far below, movement drew his attention. A blonde woman in a blue, yellow, and white skirt and matching vest made her way across one of the rooftop throughways. From his vantage point, Vengeance could see the three toughs emerge from the shadows, but the woman showed no signs of doing the same. They would be on her in seconds.

Vengeance didn’t think about his next action. He immediately threw himself off the King Building and plummeted towards the woman and thugs below.

His hand went down to his belt and yanked free his winch-hook. It was a simple hand-held device that one gripped in their hand. An opening stuck out between the middle and forefingers. It was from that opening that a winch with a two hundred yard cable launched at over eighty miles per hour. The winch flew up and in to the side of the King Building where it embedded and three appendages sprang out to hold in the concrete. Below him the woman screamed when she saw the three toughs.

Vengeance swung out to avoid wrenching out his own shoulder. He pressed the trigger on the winch-hook twice. The grips embedded in the wall immediately retracted and the cable sped back in to the winch-hook. Still nearly ten yards over the woman and the thugs, he spread his cape up and out. This locked the telescoping bars at the edge of the cape in to place. The cape now served as a makeshift glider and cut Vengeance’s falling speed down to a safe level.

He landed just behind the woman as she screamed, “Don’t do this!” Her three assailants stood in shock at the sight of Vengeance.

Vengeance moved left and hit his closest foe with a hard left. Each of gloves had raised steel appendages over his knuckles. Coupled with his own natural strength, the blow had no trouble shattering the tough’s jaw.

While his friend clutched at his damaged face, another thug came at Vengeance with a knife. He lunged at the costumed hero wildly. Vengeance easily side-stepped the jabbing blade. He caught the tough’s arm, held it locked by the wrist, and drove his elbow down hard on the tough’s upper arm. The bone shattered with a sickening crack and the arm turned raggedly upward.

The final man grabbed the woman by the waist as he pushed a gun to her head. He moved behind her without taking his eyes off the masked man. Vengeance could feel the panic and fear rising off of him. The man’s hand shook as he shoved the gun harder in to her head. “Stay back or I’ll shoot. I mean it!”

Vengeance continued to stare at the man. Not just at his face, but at his shaking hand, at the sweat dripping down his body. At the look of fear in his eyes.

Vengeance suddenly charged the man and his hostage. The tough pulled the gun away from the woman’s head and aimed it at Vengeance. It was already too later. Vengeance tackled the man and drove him down hard in to the ground. He pounded the man in to the rooftop with fist after fist.

When the tough stopped moving, Vengeance stood and turned his attention to the woman. She was a natural blonde in her mid-twenties. Well-shaped face, muscular but her curves were still in all the right places. She was downright gorgeous. She was sprawled on the cement roof, crying. Vengeance reached out a hand to help her up.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much. Who are you?”

Vengeance’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not quite sure anymore.”

As the words came out of his mouth, Vengeance immediately felt his head spinning and throbbing again. The woman rushed towards him just as his legs turned to jelly. The last thing he remembered was her face before he collapsed to the pavement.

*****

His vision still fuzzy, Vengeance opened his eyes. A blonde blur stood over him. “June?”

As his eyes adjusted to the light, he realized it was the woman he saved from the thugs.

“No, my name is Amy Evans. Who’s June?”

Vengeance realized his mask was gone as he sat up and surveyed the room. He was on a futon in the living room of an apartment. Other furnishings in the room were sparse, only an end table, a lamp, and a mirror on the wall. Two doors leading to the rest of the house were closed.

He caught his reflection in the mirror. His face was young. He seemed to remember more lines, more wrinkles. I was old, wasn’t I?

“Who’s June?”

“I’m not sure.” His brain seemed to explode as he again tried to think back. “I don’t remember.”

The blond sat down on the futon next to him. “You got a name at least?”

“My name’s Ven—” He stopped himself. Vengeance is a role I play, not my identity. I have a life, a name. There is more to me than just this costume. “My name is Robert Benton.”

The word’s surprised him as much as they did her. Robert rubbed his still aching skull and hoped some more information would let itself be known. “I don’t think I’ve known that myself for a long, long time.”

Amy scratched the back of her hand as she looked at him with confusion. “What do you mean?”

Robert shook his head. “I’m not really sure. I just know that I’m different now. Different from when I started wearing a costume. Different from how I’ve spent the last seventy years.”

“Seventy years?”

The memories seemed to spring in to his head fully formed. “I remember the date. May 19, 1939. It’s a long story…”

Amy shrugged. “I have time.”

“May 19, 1939. The world was different back then…

*****

Robert Benton was my name, but my friends called me Bob. I was a rich playboy, the heir to the Benton family empire. My mother, her husband, and my grandfather made their money in the paper and pharmaceutical industries and kept it growing through dozens of interests. I needed for nothing; I wanted for nothing. I wouldn’t have even known of the Depression if it wasn’t for the fact that I loved the news. Every little bit of it. I devoured the papers as a boy, and when I grew to adulthood and received my share of the inheritance I rushed out and immediately bought a controlling interest in the Daily Clarion. I took a staff job at the Clarion under the pen name John Perry. I started out on the bottom at obits, but worked myself up to my own column. I called it “Man on the Street”. It was little more than a gossip column, but to me it was pure journalistic dynamite. What can I say? I was naïve in those days.

It all changed on that day in May. I just put the finishing touches on the last paragraph of my gripping news story on what Hollywood starlet would soon be paying New Salem a visit when I went out to meet my mother and my fiancée, June Sanders, of the Valhalla Sanders oil family. She and I were comfortably in love and set to be married at the end of July.

I was to meet them outside the Daily Clarion offices at five in the afternoon. So focused on my own story, I hadn’t heard that my editor, an old school newsman by the name of Joe Belzer, had approved an expose on the activities of the Black Hat Mob.

I exited the offices just as the Black Hats came gunning down the street in their BMW. I could only watch in horror as they lowered the passenger side windows of the car just enough to push out their tommy guns. I yelled to Mom and June, but it was already too late.

I watched my mother and fiancée die in a hail of gunfire. I ran to them as the car streaked away. Mom was gone, literally torn in half by the bullets. But June was still alive, if barely. I held June in my arms and watched her slip away. I broke down over their corpses. The grief faded quickly, in only minutes, to be supplanted by an unrelenting rage. A need for vengeance filled my very being.

Plans began to form in my head, almost immediately. I had seen and heard of a few mystery man in other cities and had already heard tales about the so-called “Wonder Man of Tibet”. I knew that with the right look, with the right equipment, and the right training, I could do what the police was too corrupt and too inefficient to do so.

I knew I couldn’t do it right away. So I left New Salem behind to train under the masters. In England, I learned the art of detection from the aged Professor Holmes and espionage from a pair of MI6 agents named Smith and Petrie. I traveled to China to become the first westerner to train at the Chin Woo. As I entered my teenage years, I had already studied both judo and kung fu under a wizened old man named Won, skills that Chin Woo honed to a new level. But I would not stay there long, as my inner turmoil pushed me from the country. In India in the city of Kerala, I learned to master my own inner turmoil and focus it in to strength through the art of yoga and kabaddi.

I did it all in twenty months. Considering average travel speed back in thirty-nine and forty, that was quite the feat. It was early in forty-one that I returned to my estate in New Salem. My father’s old bodyguard Conrad served as the estate’s caretaker in my absence. Conrad became my trusted confidant and helped me set up my Citadel beneath the city. Three months later, I donned my first costume, a black and red affair with a skull sown on to the chest by Conrad. My cape was black on the outside, crimson-lined on the inside, and when wrapped around me could easily cloak me in the shadows. So garbed, I took to the street for the first time.

I knew—hell, everybody knew—that Anthony Giordello was the man in charge of the Black Hat Gang. Nicknamed the Spartan by his fellow dons do to the sick joy he took in dismembering his gang’s victims, he had been in charge of the rackets in New Salem since prohibition. Despite a lack of proof in the hands of the police, his paw prints were all over the slayings of my family and six others in front of the Daily Clarion.

I immediately targeted every operation the Spartan had. I started by busting his pimps one after another, night after night. After a week of that, I moved on to his drug houses and dealers. By week three I was in his gambling dens, and word on the street was the Spartan was furious. He would pay a million bucks to the man who could bring him the head of the man ruining his operations.

He also let word get out on where the palookas gunning for me could meet him. So I did what any wise crimefighter would do: I set up a meet with Spartan and his men.

He brought twelve of his best goons with him to the old warehouse out on the docks. He figured those big mugs could make short work of any enemy, even the masked man terrorizing his operation, he was wrong. It took me just over a minute to subdue his men. I barely broke a sweat.

I turned and walked towards the Spartan. “You can’t do this!” Giordello screamed the words at me. He thought I was there to kill him. Hell, I thought I was there to kill him. “Please. I’ll give you anything. Money, power, all the women you could want. Please don’t hurt me.”

“Can you raise the dead, Anthony? Can you bring back to life those you kill?”

“Are you crazy? Nobody can do that!”

I grabbed him by the lapel and yanked him in to the air. I could see the sweat run down his face as we looked at each other eye to eye.

I yanked the silver-steel dagger from my belt and held it to his throat. “That’s too bad for you then.”

“No please. Please.” I could smell the acrid scent of the Spartan’s urine as it ran down his leg. I dropped Giordello to the floor.

“I’ve given all the evidence I’ve gathered against you to the police and the district attorney. Copies will be going to all the papers and radio stations in the morning. It doesn’t matter how far your influence goes. Today is the day the Spartan goes down.” Police sirens sounded in the distance.

“They will be here soon for you, Giordello. I suggest you comply. Because you would rather face them than me again. The next time I see you will be the last thing you ever see. I sliced the blade down across his face, from just below his right eye to his mouth.

He roared in pain. I kicked him down to the floor again. I disappeared in to the shadows.

The Spartan was gone, his empire destroyed. But I knew my crusade was far from over. I could no longer live in a world where deaths like those of Mom and June could occur. Corruption still spread across New Salem, and I would see it destroyed.

*****

“That’s how it began. I remember it like it was yesterday. But everything after…”

Amy gave Robert a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t push yourself too hard. I could see the strain just telling that story put on you. Give it time.”

Robert shook his head. “I have to find out what happened to me. I’m ninety years old and look exactly as I did when I first became Vengeance. I need to know why.”

Amy sighed. “You helped me, so I feel obligated to help you in return.”

“What do you suggest we do?”

Amy smiled. “When it comes to gathering information, the twenty-first century has a few perks.” She walked across the room and opened a door.

Robert watched her enter a small dining area with an enjoined kitchen. A small table and two chairs sat in the middle of the room. As he followed her, he also saw a desk next to the door through which they just passed. He recognized the item on the desktop as a computer, but he wasn’t sure if he could even operate it.

It was no matter. Amy hopped in to the seat and quickly brought up an internet browser. She furiously hit a few keys, moved the mouse up and down a few screens, before she settled on a page from the New Salem Journal-Clarion, the city’s only surviving newspaper.

“Here you go. Just what you might be looking for. This article is all about a fire in the Benton Estate just over two years ago.” She scrolled down the page until she reached two photos. The one on the left showed his family home on the western outskirts of the city. It stood proudly even as the city continued to massively grow around it.

The other picture was clearly the same lot. Now only a still-smoldering ruin filled it. His family home was gone, destroyed utterly by the flames.

The flames. The thought made him break out in to a sweat. He knew the fire. He could see a dark shape in the midst of the flames. Even in the blinding light, the shape seemed clouded by shadows. Who? Who was it?

The memory faded and Robert cursed himself. He knew he would not find answers here. He needed to go back to his home, back to the estate. Something there could answer his questions, or so he prayed.

“Give me the address.”

Amy continued to scroll through several more pages on the fire. “I don’t know if you will get anywhere. King RPD has started development on a ninety-seven story condo and business high-rise. You won’t find a trace of your old home there.”

Robert shook his head. “There’s more than just the house. The estate may be gone, but my Citadel still exists beneath it. No fire above would reach it.”

Robert pulled his cowl back up over his face. Vengeance looked down at Amy. “Thank you for your help, Ms. Evans. I appreciate all the aid you’ve given me.”

“Just promise me you will come back after you go to this Citadel of yours. I…I can’t help but worry about you.”

Vengeance patted Amy on the shoulder. “I may have little choice. The Citadel is fine as a base of operations, but as a home it leaves little to be desired. I will need somewhere to sleep tonight. I hoped your couch would be available for my use.”

“Of course.”

Vengeance nodded. “Thank you, Amy. Your help today… well, it feels like it’s been a long time since I had anyone on my side.”

Amy glanced back towards the computer. Vengeance stepped back and disappeared in to the shadows of the room. Amy looked back to Vengeance to find him gone.

Amy rose from her seat and walked to the window on the far side of the room. She could just barely see Vengeance as he swung away from the building.

She turned and walked back through the dining room, through the living room, and in to the bedroom. She pulled off her top as she entered the room. She stopped in front of the mirror to examine her appearance. Everything remained perfectly in place. She donned one of the utterly unfashionable sweaters from the second drawer of the dresser.

She walked to the closet and opened the door. She leaned down and checked the pulse of the tied and bound woman on the floor, just behind the clothes. The woman started at the touch. She looked up at her captor with eyes nearly identical.

“Amy” grinned down at the real Amy Evans. Everything was going as planned. Soon Robert Benton would be hers, once and for all.