Supers Box Set
Page 33
He shifts his weight and takes a knee.
“This city is the asshole of the world; an abyss from which none return. In sixty-eight she took Harmony—the paragon of courage and compassion—and now she’s taken, too, my friend, Radiation Brother—the formidable and brave," he sighs, lost. "He who could open my eyes when I thought them already open…”
He stares out at the corporate skyline, whose steel shimmers blue in the moonglow, and orange in the shadow of the blooming poison mushroom. A cold breeze blows upon his back, riffling his coattails against the parapet. He closes his eyes as the wind rocks him on his heels, teetering on the eaves of his tower perch.
“Cleo Wallace and Ajax Madison… Harmony and Radiation Brother… Give and take… Light and—” his eyes flick open, and his tongue lingers in the front of his mouth. “Both halves of perfection, lost to the abyss: She, the light that survived her darkness, and he, the darkness that survived his light—the embodiment of yin and yang…”
He looks to the southwest, where the moon hangs low and full in the sky.
“And so he could not exist without her, for then there was only darkness, and darkness consumed him so deeply that only death’s warm kiss could cure his pain.” He clears his throat. “Balance restored, but nothing rectified. Vixen was only a pawn—collateral for the grand machine—and now, with the king and queen dead, the game shall change… and the manner remains to be seen.”
The mushroom cloud dissolves into the aether, wiped from its urban canvas by the southerly winds.
“Now the city blows its plague to the sea, as if she predicted this night would need it.”
The fading cloud trails like campfire smoke from ground zero, where one of the damaged structures crumbles with a calamitous caterwaul, collapsing over itself and blanketing the wasteland in further rubble.
The nightprowler doesn’t blink.
“How long did the island wait to claim them?” he grumbles, looking out upon the horizon—an oceanic black. “Did she know the inevitable before I recognized it? Did she know before the Dutchmen came to make their bows? Did she know it when the land was permafrost and mammoths roamed the Berkshires?”
He purses his lips and—from the inside chest pocket of his trenchcoat—he retrieves a candybar, unwraps it fully, breaks the chocolate log in half, pops both pieces into his mouth, and he chews, slowly.
The southerly winds sweep the wrapper off the parapet and send it fluttering down the sheer glass face of the midtown tower, into the canyon avenue below, where a throng of pedestrians gather to ogle the mauve cinders that drift out and above the financial district.
Dark Patriot rises to his feet, spreading his stance and crossing his arms; looking down at the populace.
“October, nineteen-seventy. Gotham has chalked two more upon her list, and there's more to come. The people don’t know it but she's on track to take one-and-a-half thousand of ‘em by year’s end—yet only a murder-suicide will make the front page, cos it was perpetrated by a super,” he snarls, baring his teeth, “and because infrastructure.” He thumbs his chin. “Sobering thought.”
He turns his back on the city and drops to the rooftop deck, striding across and clambering atop a corner’s ornament—an art deco figurehead; a steel eagle of judgment—and he looms over the island like a gargoyle perched upon another.
“They'll scapegoat him to help their cause, mandating registration, oversight, and imprisonment of supers and vigilantes. They'll whitewash his history and paint him a villain. They'll wage war against all who resist, and the people will follow like sheep.” He scoffs. “At the end of every war, they tell us to move on—and we abide, eager to remember a time of ease and leisure…
“They tell us to forget—to instead be happy and feel comfortable; to buy things that make us numb and dumb. They teach us that war is outdated and ugly—until they start another, and then they wave flags and call for heroes—and when it, too, ends, they'll want us to forget it like the others; to forget how they failed us and sent us to die in vain, under the weight of cannons and treads and gas. They want us to forget so we don't teach our kids about the gore, guilt, and horror we lived through; what it's like to have your flesh burned and torn and shot full of holes; what it's like to lie all-but-naked in the snow, for ten sleepless nights, expecting the enemy to crest the horizon as soon as you turn your gaze… or what it's like to die in your friend's arms, or to be the one who survives…
“A wise man once wrote that we suffered from optimism; that we were polishing the rose-colored glasses when we should've removed them; that we traded consciousness for a momentary peace of mind—and he wrote as much in the late Forties, before Korea; before Vietnam and Cambodia…
“And so the grand machine keeps turning, like the Earth around the Sun, in this fucking game of make-believe, where we're all marionettes, doing as we're told, with no questioned asked.”
He draws the lapels of his trenchcoat tight across his chest, as if shrouding a window with curtains. He stares out upon the skyline, whose spires glisten in the moonlight, and he sighs.
“So prepare the table, ye princes, and anoint the shield, for the Lord has said unto me, ‘Go, set a watchman; let him declare what he seeth’—and what do I see?” he scoffs, in jest. “Ajax Madison is dead. Babylon is Sodom, and the four horsemen are outside our gates.”
The nightprowler shakes his head and shivers. The cold breeze blows over him and he squirms in his seat, the steel beak of a decorative eagle.
He looks at his wristwatch, and then at the ground far below his feet.
He exhales forcibly.
"I need a new hobby."
“SUPERS” will continue in Act III…