The subway car swayed, screeching over the rails. I tried not to think about how many tons of water rested above us. Too bad parking in the city was so scarce because I would have much rather had Sarah drive into town. Honestly, I would have rather walked into town.
I closed my eyes, trying to think of song lyrics, but nothing would come to mind. Nothing except Angeline’s death hymn at the end of act 2, and singing that seemed like a bad omen.
The subway screeched again, slowing its momentum. My eyes snapped open, and I craned my neck to look out the window and down the tunnel. There was no glow of an approaching platform. There was nothing.
The entire car screamed as the lights flickered, winking out in a dull buzz of electricity.
There was only darkness.
I felt Sarah’s fingers dig into my wrist. “What just happened?”
“Power,” I mumbled, riffling through my purse for my phone. The dark always had a terrifying ability to make my body constrict, growing smaller with each second. Like anything could be lurking inside the black.
The light of fifty cell phones flooded the car, and we all watched as the subway came to a stop in the middle of the tunnel.
“Well. That’s not good,” Sarah said. Her face was covered in a blue glow from her phone screen. “Do you think we’ll miss the movie?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone will…” The flashlight on my phone bounced around the car, stopping on the wall of the tunnel. I pressed my face against the glass, watching a thin stream of water trickle from the ceiling. Drip, drip, drip. I jerked my flashlight to the left. Another hole. And another. And another. And another. At least a dozen, covering the walls and ceiling, dribbling down onto the tracks.
Nudging Sarah, I pointed outside. One of the cracks on the ceiling was growing wider, gushing water like a fire hydrant.
Around us, other passengers were doing the same, watching the leaks with confusion plaguing every face. For a moment, there was only silence. Then, just like in the tunnel, the dam of calm inside the subway car split wide open.
Sarah and I jumped onto our seats to avoid the stampede as the passengers rushed the doors, not caring if they trampled anyone’s bags or bodies to get there. They crashed into the glass, but the seals stayed firmly in place. I leaned around Sarah, tugging at the door leading to the platform of the next car where Isaac had disappeared. It wouldn’t budge. The power outage kept it locked up tight.
Like a tomb, I thought briefly. I pushed the horrific image from my mind.
“Abby.” Sarah clung to my arm, panic lacing her voice. She pointed outside. “More water.”
No longer just dripping, the cracks in the ceiling and walls were all gushing, filling the tunnel with at least a foot of water by now.
I could barely think. There was too much screaming. Too much moving around without going anywhere. The cars in front of and behind ours were doing the same, passengers banging at the doors and trying to break the glass themselves.
Two feet of water in the tunnel. Then three.
I looked at my phone. I didn’t even have service to call for help.
A red blur flashed past my eyes.
The subway car behind us rocked on its track, and a deafening cheer went up inside the tunnel.
“Abby!” Sarah pulled at my arm again. “He’s here!”
A window in our car shattered, and Red Comet flew inside. He collided with a metal pole, crashing to a halt.
Smooth, Connor.
Red Comet stood rather ungracefully, brushing dirt and whatever other grime that lurked in the subway off his suit.
He made quick work of prying open the exit doors with his bare hands. “Citizens of Morriston!” he boomed. “I have come to save—”
No one bothered listening. Connor was a forgotten superhero as the passengers rushed into the tunnel, climbing the steep slope of the tracks toward the pinprick of light and the outside air. When the car emptied out, Connor’s shoulders drooped. “Way to make a guy feel good.”
Beside me, Sarah squeaked.
Connor’s head snapped up. He ran the length of the car, skidding to a stop in front of us.
“What are you still doing here? Go!”
I gripped the front of Connor’s suit so he couldn’t shove me away. “You’ll get everyone out, right?” I thought of Isaac and his friends in the next car over. I even thought of the snooty tourists and anyone else we might know but couldn’t see down here in the tunnel’s dark depths. He had to save them. We couldn’t leave anyone behind.
Connor pulled at my wrists. “I will once you let go of me. This isn’t amateur hour, you know. Now run!” He gave me one final shove before flying off. He crashed through the next car and the next, the tunnel filling with wave after wave of desperate passengers.
Sarah and I waded with the crowd, our clothes waterlogged as we slipped up the tracks. A suffocating mass of passengers pressed in from all sides. An elderly man tripped, and a woman hoisted him to his feet. In front of us, a father carried two sobbing children on his shoulders. The mob edged forward as one. We reached the mouth of the tunnel, where Sarah and I helped haul the last straggling passengers onto shore just as the water bubbled up behind us. As far as I could tell everyone made it out safely, but the tunnel was officially flooded.
Panting, I whirled around, searching the sky for Red Comet.
The air was empty.
“No,” a tiny breath of air escaped my lips. “No, no, no.” He wasn’t with the passengers onshore, he wasn’t in the sky. The river gurgled, churning into a fierce undertow as the tunnel began to crack apart, collapsing.
One person was left inside.
“No!” Sarah held me back when I made a break for the tunnel. The water continued bubbling as I watched, helpless to stop it. He would make it out. He always made it out.
My thundering heartbeat was muffled by the roar of the crowd when two dark shapes burst from the middle of the river. The first, Morriston’s favorite B-list superhero, Fish Boy, with his bright blue flippers. And the second was Connor, looking like a drenched rat as he coughed and wrung water from his gloves. He hovered above us for a moment before flying toward our house. He moved slowly, much slower than normal, and I knew instantly that Connor didn’t escape without injuries.
“Don’t worry about him. He’ll be fine.” A shadow fell over my shoulder, and I turned, finding my nose nearly pressed up against a chest covered in spandex. White letters—an F and a B—glowed against the navy-blue super suit.
“Facebook?” I said dumbly, still distracted by Connor’s well-being.
“Uhh, no,” he laughed. “Fish Boy. But I’ll forgive your slight faux pas on account of your near-death experience.”
I leaned back from Fish Boy’s chest to get a good look at his face. I’d seen him in photos but never in person. If I could describe him in one word, it would be blue. A navy-blue mask covered the top half of his face, and ocean-blue eyes peeked out beneath a mop of curly brown hair. His blue super suit was much more revealing than most supers’ costumes. The sleeves cut off like a vest around his muscular shoulders, and the material of the legs stopped just above his knees. The fabric was thicker, more like a wet suit, which made sense because Fish Boy’s favorite activity was obviously swimming. Shiny, neon blue scales covered his arms from wrist to elbow. My eyes traveled farther south, moving past his webbed fingers and finally coming to rest on the infamous flippers replacing his human feet. Briefly I wondered whether Fish Boy would grow a mermaid tail if submerged in water long enough.
“Did you ladies lose anything in the water?” he asked. “I’m trying to recover everyone’s stuff.” He pointed to a small black circle clipped onto his suit near his shoulder. “And I just got this new video camera. It kind of sucks about the subway, but I filmed everything. It’s going up on my website. Do you want the link?”
Sarah blinked at him. She glanced at the sky.
Fish Boy followed her gaze, looking a little crestfallen. “Like I sai
d, don’t worry about Red Comet. He’s tough. So … do you need anything? No? Yes? Your blatant staring is filleting me alive.” He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes. “Ha. Fillet. I love a good pun.”
“We’re fine over here,” I told him. “Thank you.”
“Suit yourself. If you need me to fish anything out, let me know.” He patted Sarah on the shoulder. “Take it easy, sweetheart.” He moved farther down the line as the crowd jostled for his attention.
Sarah was still staring at the sky. I wondered if I needed to slap her.
“Sarah, a super just touched you and you’re still breathing.” I chuckled nervously.
She slowly turned around. She looked from me, to the sky, then back to me. Her brows furrowed before her eyes snapped open, wide and unblinking as she made the connection.
“Abby,” Sarah whispered, “when Red Comet was inside the subway, why did he sound exactly like your brother?”
I knew I made a mistake screaming when Connor didn’t show up right away. I was so afraid for his life that I panicked and didn’t care about being reckless. I could have completely blown his cover, and it looked like I did—for one person at least. Red Comet’s biggest fan.
Connor would understand. I thought he was dead, and he knew as well as I the heartbreaking punch in the gut that accompanied the loss of a family member.
“Because…” Sarah could keep the secret. She didn’t have a choice. “He is my brother.”
CHAPTER SIX
“I can’t believe you told her,” Connor moaned from the living room couch while I finished tending to his wounds. A hospital visit was out of the question because his abnormal DNA was a dead giveaway he was a super. Just a single blood test would be enough to condemn him. My mom had been a nurse once upon a time and I knew a little about sterilizing injuries, but I had to admit that I was clueless when it came to removing the broken glass lodged in my brother’s side. The amount of blood staining his skin was enough to make me woozy. But I tried my best. For Connor’s sake.
“It’s your own fault you weren’t disguising your voice,” I muttered, gathering the shards in one hand while I used the other to dab antibiotic ointment on his cuts. I tried to keep my eyes averted from the blood.
“Maybe it’s your fault for freaking out with a crowd of people around.”
I pressed harder than necessary on a particularly deep wound, making Connor hiss in pain. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t really think twice about your secret identity when I thought you drowned.”
“Come on, I’m fine. Aren’t I fine, Sarah?”
Sarah hadn’t said a word since I told her the truth. The only reaction she gave when I told her she couldn’t tell anyone was a slight shake of the head. We took a bus from the city to Sarah’s house, then drove to mine. All in painful, gut-twisting silence. When we arrived home, Sarah nearly fainted seeing Connor struggle to remove his super suit without aggravating his injuries, his mask lying on the ground. She had taken up refuge on an armchair by the television and barely blinked since.
“We ruined her life, didn’t we?” Connor asked, throwing an arm over his face to shield his eyes from the light. Now that I removed the glass and cleaned the cuts, he looked much better, though his bare torso was marred with four long gashes on the right side of his chest. They extended around to his back, but it took more than a few injuries to keep Red Comet down. In a few days, he’d be back to normal.
“Is she going to speak at all?” Connor snapped his fingers in Sarah’s direction, and she jolted in her seat. “Sarah, you aren’t going mute or anything, are you? Because that would suck. I’m dying for you to read me some more Red Comet fan fiction.”
Ah, my kind, compassionate, sensitive brother.
Sarah looked at Connor’s super suit as if it would suddenly grow legs and try to attack. “You’re—you’re really him, aren’t you? I mean, he’s—he’s really you. You … him…”
“Yeah.” Connor tousled his dirty blond hair that appeared more dirty than blond after his dip in the river. “You can’t tell anyone. It’s really not as cool as it seems. I mean…” He gestured to the needle I was using to slowly stitch his midsection. “This is pretty painful right now.”
“But for the last three years all I did was … was talk about you!” Sarah cradled her head in her palms. “That’s so embarrassing. All the things I said…” Her eyes locked with mine. “Abby, how could you never tell me?”
“Hey, I was sworn to secrecy.” I tied off the thread and held my hands up in surrender.
“It’s true,” Connor said. “I make everyone take an oath. I blindfold you and light candles and then we chant.”
“Seriously?”
“No.” He slumped down on the couch cushions and fluffed his pillow. “Not seriously. Just don’t tell anyone. I’m not creative enough to invent another secret identity if you screw this one up.”
The doorbell rang as I was cleaning up the first-aid kit ten minutes later. Connor’s eyes were closed, but he pointed at the front door, wiggling his fingers in an obnoxious shooing motion that only he would be obtuse enough to try. If he weren’t injured, I would have hit him.
“Abby, get the door please,” I imitated my brother’s deep voice under my breath.
Connor’s lips lifted in a weak grin. “Thank you.”
Shaking my head, I kicked Connor’s suit behind a potted plant, stepped over Sarah’s feet, and headed down the hall as the bell chimed a second time. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I grumbled.
A young man was sitting on the porch swing. He jumped up when he saw me, turning his Morriston High School baseball cap around backward. The tail of his flannel shirt fluttered in the breeze.
“Hi, Abby!” He grinned like we were old friends. Which was kind of a problem because I had no clue where I’d met him before. “I came to see how Connor’s doing. Is he here?”
“Ummm…” I looked back into the living room. “He’s … uh, who … who exactly are you?”
He removed his hat, revealing a messy poof of brown hair. He sighed, though still smiling. “How soon they forget. It’s been what, two hours? I know you said you didn’t need my help, but I’d still think you’d remember. Maybe I should have given you the link to my website after all.”
“Wait … Fish Boy?” But that couldn’t be right. My brother told me he never gave his identity out to anyone, not even other supers. I rolled my eyes. Connor seriously whined after I told Sarah his giant red secret? What a hypocrite.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “So you know my name, but I don’t know yours?”
Fish Boy laughed. “I guess that’s a little weird for you, huh? I’m Hunter.” He held out his hand. I didn’t take it. I was feeling oddly protective over my brother at the moment, collapsed on the couch while the city was falling to pieces around us. Could I trust Hunter? I didn’t know.
“Abby, let him in,” Connor called from inside, his voice groggy. “We got drunk together a few months back. Our names just slipped out. He’s cool.”
“Oh, of course.” I nudged open the heavy oak door with my foot to let Hunter pass into the foyer. “Staying out all night, getting drunk. What next? Impregnating fans?”
“There are perks to the job,” Hunter said with a wink. Then he cleared his throat heavily. “Not that that is necessarily one of them.”
“Sure.” I rolled my eyes a second time. I immediately understood why Hunter and Connor were friends. Their vulgarity knew no bounds.
I followed Hunter down the hallway and into the living room. He seemed to know just where to go, and it made me feel a bit like a stranger in my own home, wondering how many times he had a little playdate with Connor when I wasn’t around to witness it.
“You look a lot different without your scales and flippers,” I observed. Hunter’s arms lacked shiny scales, and the toes showing at the tips of his brown flip-flops were distinctly human.
“Don’t worry, I get that all the time. The ladies love the flippers.” I wasn’t s
ure if he was serious. I hoped he wasn’t. “Check this out.”
Hunter stretched out his forearm, flexing his fingers. Blue scales popped up one by one along his skin. He flexed his fingers again and they disappeared. “All my fishy parts come and go as I please.” Hunter shot me another wink while I stared wide-eyed at the place where the scales sank into his flesh. “Cool, right?”
A loud squeak punctured the otherwise silent living room. Connor covered his head with his pillow as Sarah bounced in her seat, her mouth hanging open. She was completely lost for words … and thoughts … and as I looked closer, I realized that she was probably just plain lost. Too much new information in one day had zapped her dry.
“Hi there!” Hunter waved. “It’s you again. How are you?”
Her mouth moved like a fish out of water. Oddly ironic.
Hunter leaned close to me. “Does she ever talk?”
“Usually, yes,” I said. “Today? Not a chance.”
“Okeydoke.” He clapped Connor on the shoulder, making him groan, then ventured through the swinging door that led to the kitchen. “Do you guys have food? Saving people makes me hungry.”
* * *
Sarah wouldn’t leave our house until Connor and I reassured her that I didn’t have a superpowered bone in my body, and Hunter wouldn’t leave our house until he consumed all the food on the top shelf of the fridge.
When they finally headed home, I flipped through the television channels, ignoring any news related to the flooded subway, while Connor napped on the couch. The grandfather clock in the hall just struck eight when the door opened and my dad hurried in. He dropped his briefcase and phone to the ground while he examined Connor. My brother tried to push him away and continue sleeping, but Dad relentlessly made certain he was stitched up and bandaged correctly and wasn’t bleeding anywhere I might have missed.
As I watched my father’s meaty fingers poke and prod at his son, I remembered my mom’s funeral. Her skin looked so fake in the coffin, like someone carved her from wax and put her on display. There was no trace of the grin she wore while teasing Dad or Connor or me. No evidence of the tan she earned from spending hours lounging by the pool during our summer vacation. She looked pale and plastic in death, and I understood why my dad checked and rechecked Connor’s injuries. He had to do what he was unable to manage for our mother. My dad had to keep us safe.
The Supervillain and Me Page 6