Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  The bitch burned me. My eyes, my face, my body.

  He found an alley and shot down it, slamming into the brick next to a dumpster. He caromed off the wall and landed on his ass, a dirty, disgusting water puddle that stank of refuse soaking through his clothes.

  Colin didn’t care. He barely noticed. Sienna Nealon had just hurt him more than anyone in his entire life had hurt him, even before he’d gotten his powers. He huddled into a ball and hoped, gagging his lungs out and coughing crimson liquid, hoping that his ability to heal would spare him. And he sat quivering, hiding, worried for the first time that it wouldn’t.

  48.

  Sienna

  Veronika showed up a few minutes later, naturally, before the cops could get to the scene. I was fully expecting her, just chilling in the middle of the crater of glass where the force of the explosion I’d made had pushed the dirt down before changing its molecular state. Veronika came into the stadium at a run, at metaspeed but not as quick as Colin the speedster, and she grinned with pleasure when she saw me waiting for her.

  “Don’t get up,” she said, slowing as she approached. She was smiling, probably thinking I’d cleared some of the competition for her. “I take it you wiped Colin’s smug face off the earth at the speed of light?”

  “Presumably,” I said, sitting on my naked ass, watching her. The stadium was still burning on the upper decks, filling the sky with dark, drifting clouds of smoke. I guess I’d torched everything on the lower decks with my blast, because nothing was burning there. “Either that or he ran off, I don’t really care which at the moment.”

  “Yeah, it’s not really going to matter soon, is it?” she asked with a big ol’ smile. “You didn’t even bother to run, which means—” Her shoulders fell. “Ohhh. Nealon. Tell me it’s that you’ve given up. Tell me it’s not that you think you can beat me.”

  “I haven’t given up,” I said, drumming a bare foot against the bottom of the glassy crater. This would make a real nice hot tub the next time it rained. Maybe the local synchronized swimming team could practice here. It’d certainly be more elegant than letting da Bears keep using it.

  Veronika made a tsk-ing noise. “Let’s just … run through this. You use fire, I snuff it. You don’t have a gun. You try and net me, I burn through. You warmind, I shrug it off. You try and punch me, kick me, whatever, I do the same thing, but with hands that will burn through you.” She got an annoyed look. “And if you try and fly off again, I will lead you with my eyebeams and smoke you that way. Don’t expect a repeat of the police station. I won’t trail you again.”

  “I’m not going to do any of those things, Veronika,” I said coolly as she shuffled toward me, cautiously.

  “Oh no?” She stopped about ten feet away. “What’s your big plan to defeat me?”

  “Well, I like to play to my strengths,” I said, and slid my phone across the glassy field. It clicked as it came to rest where the team benches had probably once been. I stood up and brought my makeshift weapons with me. “So I think I’m just going to beat the living shit out of you.”

  Veronika’s eyes widened in unmistakable horror as she saw what I’d done with the time between when I’d torched Colin and when she’d come rolling into the stadium. I came at her like she’d come at me before and she barely had a chance to put up a glowing blue hand before I crashed into her with a giant block of glass the size of a tall dresser. I’d personally pounded it out of the ground near the fifty-yard line, and another just like it for my other hand. It gave me a nice, six-foot reach, was probably not going to dissolve easily, even under attack by plasma, and allowed me to punch right past Veronika’s hands and ram it into her face like a truck bumper to the jaw.

  The best part? It didn’t even shatter when I hit her. Veronika’s jaw did, though.

  I’d had about enough of this assassin bullshit. I wanted these monkeys off my back. I was sick of them sitting there cackling, throwing feces, and generally dragging me down. I punched Veronika in the face again with a giant block of glass, and her plasma hands didn’t do squat to stop it.

  Ahh, punching people in the face. I was very much in my idiom here.

  Little shards of glass broke off my massive, comically large boxing glove stand-ins. Veronika took another hit, then started to stumble back, trying to avoid my long, powerful shots. It wasn’t easy on her; she couldn’t fly, she could only move so fast, and I was coming after her with a vengeance, flying, pounding my glass meta-beaters like pistons. I broke her arm, aimed a little lower going for her leg, and watched her try and throw up a fist to go knuckle-to-knuckle with me again.

  This time, it didn’t end as well.

  Her hand glowed blue and it refracted through the glass, making a searing noise and filling the air with a smell of something burning that wasn’t quite like anything I’d ever caught the scent of before. The closest I can think of is the smell of water evaporating off of pavement on a hot day. The glass sizzled as I slammed it against her hand. She cried out and her fist sank into the six-foot glass buffer between us, all the way the way up to her elbow.

  Naturally, I was merciless. I pounded her in the face twice before she got her other hand up to sink it into my second weapon. This immobilized both of them, but by now her face and body were bleeding from a good dozen wounds created by both my punches and shards of the glass chipping off as I slammed them into her at high speed.

  She grinned faintly now that she had my weapons trapped. I could tell by the sizzle that she was burning through, gradually, her arms going hot all the way up to the shoulders, firing her way through the edges of the glass.

  Fortunately, I had anticipated this, and I hit her with the big surprise.

  Okay, it wasn’t so much a surprise as it was me using Gavrikov’s flight power to slam her forward into the glassy ground faster than she could push back or burn through the glass barriers between us.

  She hit the ground hard, glass shattering for ten feet in every direction. The glass weapons I was using broke from the impact, too, Veronika’s glowing hands bursting through and falling to the side, the light beginning to fade in her stunned state. Her eyes were dulled and I was determined not to waste this opportunity.

  Because I knew, if our positions were reversed, she damned sure wouldn’t.

  I snatched one of the biggest shards out of the air in front of me as the glass burst and fell, and I lifted it up high for less than a second, getting momentum behind it.

  Then I drove it right through the middle of her.

  She moved at the last second, damn her, and I perforated her right through the middle. She screamed in pain and lashed out at me with a freshly glowing hand. It hit me across the face, and OH MY SHIT THE PAIN.

  I flew backward twenty feet, all thoughts of flight and fight and anything else pretty much shooting out of my mind as if they’d been blown out with my brains. It hurt so bad I couldn’t even assess the damage at first, all I knew was that it felt like she’d ripped off my entire lower face. No, worse than that, actually, because I’m pretty sure my lower face had been ripped off before and it hadn’t hurt this bad.

  I was moaning on the ground, and when I came back to myself I raised my head to find her doing exactly the same about twenty feet away from me. Wolfe, I begged, and he obliged, coming to the fore and starting the healing process. I tried to speak but nothing came out, and the smell of char was everywhere, as omnipresent as the pain in my face.

  About ten seconds later, I sat up. “Owwwwww,” I moaned through newly forming skin and lips.

  “Unnnnghhh …” Veronika said from where she lay, closer to the edge of the stadium. “I’m not sure this is worth the contract money.”

  “Youuu shud acks fir a rayseeee,” I said, not able to fully form words. Had she burned my tongue out?

  “That’s a good note,” she agreed, letting out a little moan of pain. “I’m adding that … to my … to do list.”

  “Yu realiiiise, ob course … that dis means warrr.”


  She sat up just in time to see me flying at her, and she raised a hand just in time to turn me aside with a burst of flaming blue plasma. I dodged back as it burst forward in a blinding flash, so bright I couldn’t even see. When my rods and cones returned to normal, the flare of plasma she’d released was gradually falling to the earth, way slower than gravity would have brought normal objects down. It fluttered, slowly, like a curtain dropped but catching a stiff updraft to slow its descent. It wasn’t a small burst, either—it was like a blanket she’d thrown at me, three dimensional and tilting wildly toward me on three sides. I flew back ten feet as it fell to the glass and sizzled, burning the already crisped molecules as it ate its way into the ground.

  I looked up and found Veronika running, looking over her shoulder as she jumped into the stands. It took me a minute to realize why she hadn’t run toward one of the major exits. Then I heard the sirens.

  Reed came pounding up behind me, his pistol drawn. Maclean and some other cops were behind him a good hundred yards or more, huffing their way over.

  “Reed,” I said, drooling as my lips finished healing, “shoot her.”

  Reed stared at me, horrorstruck. “I can’t do that! She’s running away.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, wiping the drool off my chin, afraid to pursue for fear she’d toss up another lethal barrage of plasma, “but she’ll be back to kill me. Again. And she might succeed next time, so do your sister a solid and shoot her already!”

  “But …” I could see he was desperately torn, the barrel of his gun not even aimed at her. “That’s so … that’s just so …”

  “At some point,” I said, losing my patience, “you have to decide whether you’re going to let Greedo take that first shot in hopes he’ll miss. Because I don’t have a crew of visual effects wizards to make my head tilt out of the way in a cheesy, claymation-style effect, which means next time she comes at me, she might just kill me.” I stared him down. “Now you have to decide whether you want that to happen, or whether you’re going to just man up and shoot first, Han Solo.”

  My brother blinked at me, then steadied his aim and started firing, running through the whole magazine in about five seconds. I turned my head in time to see Veronika stagger, and I knew he’d pegged her at least once. She jumped into an exit and disappeared. I didn’t dare follow her into that blind corner.

  “Well,” I said, staring after her, “it was a good effort.

  “I just shot a retreating woman in the back,” Reed said, his voice as soft as puff pastry.

  “I’m proud of you, Han,” I said.

  He gave me a hard glare. “No matter how you say that, it sounds like Vader to me.”

  I lowered my voice to as close to the James Earl Jones signature hiss as I could replicate. “Come to the sensible side, dumbass, where we don’t let murderous assassins take free shots at us in hopes that they have terrible aim.”

  “What the hell did you do?” Maclean yelled at me as he came running up, breathing heavy. He had a bevy of patrolmen behind him, and all of them, without exception, were looking around at the wrecked Soldier Field like one of their relatives had died, their faces ashen.

  “I just delivered an ass-whipping to the visiting team like you would not believe,” I said. No one seemed to find it amusing. “What? I’m still alive.” No one found that amusing, either. Reed handed me his long coat to put over my naked body. None of the cops was even looking at me; they were too horrified by the destruction of their football stadium to even care that my pretty ass was hanging out. I looked at Reed as I buttoned up the coat, thus closing the gate on any of these guys getting their own sort of free shot.

  “You are not part of the home team,” Maclean said, grabbing his grey hair and running his hands through it with a clear wish to just tear it out. He looked at the ruin of the stands around him and stomped a foot on the field of glass experimentally.

  “My last week in government service is going super well,” I said, turning to Reed, who didn’t look any happier than the rest of them. “How much do stadiums cost again?”

  49.

  I slept like the dead. I wasn’t dead, fortunately, but I slept like I was. I hadn’t been able to leave the scene of the carnage for hours after the Soldier Field showdown, and when I had, it had required me to cross a line of reporters and locals who all looked angry and offended in equal measure, like I’d murdered their mothers or something. I really thought they were going to throw things, but they didn’t, which was fortunate. I’d definitely exhausted some rage on Colin the speedster and Veronika the terrible, but my tank wasn’t exactly running on empty yet. In fact, an argument could be made that the sun might burn out of the sky before I ran out of furious anger.

  The sleep was a beautiful thing, though. Reed and I had retreated to a hotel way on the outskirts of town and told no one, not even Maclean (actually, especially not Maclean) where we were going. Reed wasn’t really speaking to me, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because I’d convinced him to shoot Veronika in the back as she was fleeing or because I’d blown up da Bears stadium. I doubted it was the latter, but I didn’t want to probe.

  At least I knew their team colors. I’d burned them right off the scoreboard, and that’s the sort of thing I remember. Navy and orange. I doubted that was going to get me any points with Bears fans, though.

  I closed my eyes when the sky was dark and didn’t open them again until I heard the knock at the door at eleven-thirty in the morning. I knew what time it was because of the clock by my bedside, glowing red right in my face. My cheek was wet with drool, which was something that happened a lot, and I still smelled like something had burned all around me. That smell was impossible to get off, it took like fifty million showers, or maybe a good dip in the Chicago River, though that was a little like trying to get the funny smell out of your house by burning it down.

  “Reed,” I moaned as the knocking came at the door again, very polite, like someone was just a little too effete to knock like a man.

  He didn’t answer, and I looked up. The hotel we were staying in was another suite, though smaller and less impressive than the one downtown. I could see his door through the main living room. It was closed, and there was no light coming from beneath it. For all I knew, he was the one knocking.

  The knock came again, a little more insistent this time, and I groaned. My head hurt, either from the fight or the untold fumes I’d inhaled last night while I was vaporizing the stadium and flying around a collapsing police station. I exhaled. My morning breath was pure dragon fire, and not of the Gavrikov variety. “Ungh. Reed!”

  I still heard nothing from the other room, and the knocking came once more. I sloughed off the covers and wrapped the bedspread around my naked skin (I still hadn’t gotten replacement clothes, and I’d be damned if I was going to send Reed to do so again, not after what had happened last time). I padded across the floor of my room and out into the living room. The knock sounded again, still quiet, like the person doing it didn’t have an ounce of self-confidence to their name.

  No assassin would knock like this, I was sure, and by now I was so irritated that whatever hotel employee was disturbing me at this ungodly hour of nearly noon that I was intending to give them a piece of my mind. I dragged my makeshift toga’s tail behind me as I went to the door, ripped it open …

  … and my mouth dropped in shock as I saw who was waiting on the other side.

  50.

  Harry

  Following the chaos wasn’t terribly difficult for Harry, especially when he was paying attention to the world around him. It was the sort of thing that intruded whether he wanted it to or not, but with a little careful practice, a little effort toward indifference, he’d learned to keep his head down and shut it out, keep it from mucking up his life too much. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than having to see the jangly, sharp edges of the world as he went about his preferred business of gambling, drinking and smoking.

  Some things, however,
were too much for even him to ignore, and the eruption of a massive explosion at Soldier Field was one of them. Keeping his head down was one thing. Ignoring enormous detonations was another, and Harry wasn’t in the business of turning his face away from all danger at his own peril. No, the destruction of Soldier Field would have been the sort of thing to break through his shield of disinterest, even if he hadn’t more or less shrugged it off back at the garage where he’d beaten Paul Beckman to a pulp.

  No, in his search for Sienna Nealon, the explosion of a Chicago landmark had been something akin to a flashing sign saying, “Here I am!”

  He’d arrived on the scene with the rest of the reporters and lookiloos, people who wanted to pick over the carnage and people who wanted to look on in horror at this piece of their life that had been ripped apart. Harry could sympathize with the second sentiment, at least. He used to bet big on the Bears back in the day. Now he tended to bet against them, but the sight of the stadium destroyed, pieces of concrete falling off the sides, the entire exterior fried to a crisp, had caused him more than a small cringe.

  When Sienna Nealon had come out clad in a trench coat, he’d noticed her lack of shoes or pants pretty much immediately. Even for Harry, that was a hard detail to escape. He hadn’t gotten too good a look at her before, down by the beach, when he’d been working his ass off to waylay her so he could get away. She was cute. More than cute, really, though her hair was kind of a mess. It was kind of a good look on her, though, even though she was scanning the crowd with penetrating eyes. He could see the glacier blue from where he stood, and he nonchalantly dodged a couple times to guarantee she didn’t spot him.

  It hadn’t been the time for a confrontation, after all. He could see the weariness on her, the shuffling way she walked. She was ready to collapse, and he could sympathize with that, too.

  Plus, she was naked, and he envisioned any scenario in which he approached her at that moment would end with her coming out of her trench coat, and as much of a dog as Harry was, he still prided himself on being a gentleman of the old school, and making a lady jump out of clothes was not something he cared to do if it didn’t lead to a mutually consensual and enjoyable action afterward.