One More Day

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  My nightmares, when they weren’t about things like my mother finding out what a fraud I am or being outed as a thief to the world, were nothing more than re-enactments of the last time I’d had to face Maddoc. Looking at him now, it all came slamming back to me. His enormous hands worked at the shackles around his ankle, and his bulging muscles strained under the effort. Veins stood out under his skin. He looked monstrous, and the cold, empty look in his eyes was one I wouldn’t be forgetting any time soon.

  He glanced up and saw me coming toward him. He paused in trying to free his ankle, and sat up straight, looking casual and at ease.

  “Daystar,” he said, loud enough that his voice echoed through the prison wing.

  “Who turned his mic on?” I muttered.

  “Rob did. He thought it would help us to hear what he was doing,” Marie said.

  “Did it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not like we could do anything about it anyway.”

  “Stay back,” I told her. “But be ready when I call you. Apparently, he’s still pretty strong, even with the dampener on.”

  She nodded, and I kept moving forward, alone.

  “You’ve been scarce here in the prison, Daystar. All your other teammates check in on us. Not you, though. Wonder why that is,” he said, crossing his arms, watching me with a smirk on his face. “You’re not scared, are you?”

  I didn’t answer. Because yes, to be honest, I was fucking terrified. I could feel his hands on my throat, strangling the life out of me. At the same time, I was enraged. I was missing parts of who I was supposed to be, because of him. I had nightmares every night, because of him. I still had headaches, and my body refused to work the way it should, especially when I was tired. All because of him.

  “You want to play again, Daystar?” he taunted.

  I didn’t bother answering. I was thinking. Mostly, I was wondering if there was anyone else I could hand this particular shitty task off to. Since it seemed to be down to me, I had to figure out how to get him knocked out and restrained again without getting too close to him.

  “Is Dani around?” I asked, pressing my comm.

  “She is. What’s going on down there, Daystar?” Jenson asked.

  “Oh, nothing much. Just Maddoc, with two hands free, trying to break out of the rest of his shackles.”

  “Shit. Okay, I’ll send Dani down to you. Do you want me to call David or Caine back in?”

  “I got it. Just send Dani.”

  “Okay.”

  I turned and looked back at Maddoc, who was still sitting in the same position, looking smug.

  “Too scared to come in, Daystar?”

  “I just don’t feel like dealing with your shit right now,” I said.

  “Right,” he said with a smirk. “Come on in. Tie me down. Tell me what a bad boy I’ve been. You know you want to.”

  “Well, there goes my breakfast,” I said in disgust.

  “It’s okay. We’ll have plenty of time to play after my boss gets a hold of you.”

  “As if he has a chance in hell of doing that.”

  He smiled, an oily, slimy-looking smile. “I wouldn’t write him off just yet. He’s not like me. I get all impatient and ragey. Lose control. He’s not like that. He won’t make a mistake. But you will.” Then he laughed. “You already have. You have no idea.”

  “What are you talking— ” At that second, Maddoc kicked out, hard, and I heard the shackle on his leg snap. He was down to one, and that one was looking pretty bad.

  Where the hell was Dani?

  He was bent over pulling at the shackle around his ankle, and I glanced around.

  “Daystar, his dampener is malfunctioning,” Jenson said in my ear. Her normally calm voice sounded tense, stressed. “Do not go in there.”

  And then the final shackle snapped, and he gave a triumphant shout.

  “Get someone else down here, now,” I said. I ran forward, as fast as my clumsy legs would take me, and I met him at the door of his cell, which he was wrenching open from the inside. This. This is when the damage I sustained in my fight against him last time really hurt. I knew I was stronger than him, even when he wasn’t dampened. The difference was, his reflexes were normal and mine were shit. A fight against Maddoc right now, an actual hand-to-hand fight, which was clearly what he wanted, just wasn’t going to go my way no matter how bad I wanted to hurt him. I had to ignore my urge to try to make him pay. At least for now. This was about keeping him contained and away from everyone he could hurt if he got free.

  I pushed hard against my side of the sliding door that separated his cell from the main corridor, trying to keep it pushed in the “closed” position, as he pushed in the opposite direction from his side. His face, up close through the shatterproof glass pane between us, turned red as he fought to open it.

  “I am going to kill you when I get out of here,” he shouted. “Fuck what the boss says.”

  I tried to ignore him, focusing all of my power on keeping the door closed. Every once in a while, he’d push harder and I’d lose some ground, the door slipping beneath my palms, but then I’d push harder and gain it back again.

  “You’ll die with my hands around your neck. Your eyes’ll bulge, and your face’ll turn purple— ”

  I tried to tune him out, even though his words made me flash back to that day. I’d tried, so many times, to insult or cajole myself into just “getting over it,” to try to force myself to forget what it felt like. It’s impossible to explain unless you’ve been there, unless you’ve felt yourself slipping away, how completely horrifying it is. And I’ve always prided myself on not being easy to scare, but those eternal moments, and the helplessness I felt as my lungs screamed for air and my chest exploded in pain, as my limbs went numb… I can’t forget it.

  “Your body lost control last time,” he shouted. “Pissed yourself like a baby, you know that?” And then he laughed and pushed harder.

  I felt the door start to creak, bending under the weight of the force we were putting on it. Reinforced steel, giving way under opposing sources of super-powered strength.

  I heard footsteps behind me, running.

  “We’re here,” I heard Jenson say.

  “Dani?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Do your thing. Knock this fucker out.”

  “It’ll get you too, though,” she said in a panicky tone.

  “Better than him getting out and I’m starting to lose ground here. Do it!”

  Dani went to the edge of the door, which was just starting to open as Maddoc pushed it open from his side. She opened her mouth wide, and everyone in the prison wing, myself included, was hit with a screeching blast of sound that felt like repeated stabs to the brain. I kept my eyes on Maddoc as I tried to ignore the agony. She’d been right next to his ear, ensuring that he got the worst of it, and he fell to the ground. I guess he was screaming, but I sure the hell wasn’t able to hear it over Dani’s eardrum shattering screech. He fell, hands to his ears, and I noted with some satisfaction that his ears were bleeding. As soon as he was down, I shoved the door open. Dani handed me a new dampener she’d brought with her as I walked past, and I nodded my thanks. I quickly fastened it around Maddoc’s throat, clicking the latch on it shut tightly, which activated its dampening powers.

  I gave Dani a weak thumbs-up, and the horrendous noise ended. She helped me get Maddoc (who was unconscious by this point, and, from the looks of it, most of those in the prison wing had succumbed as well) into a chair in the next cell over. We secured him with the manacles, and Jenson came back with a second dampener.

  “Just in case,” she said as she slipped it over his head and activated it. Her face was grim, angry, even. “How the hell could this happen?” she asked, and I wasn’t sure if she was asking me or just venting out loud. I sure the hell didn’t know how his dampener had managed to fail.

  “Maybe it was faulty, or old, or something?” Dani said. Her voice was a little hoarse, which wasn’t su
rprising after the damage she’d just done.

  Jenson was staring fixedly at Maddoc. Then she walked over to Maddoc and took his original dampener off. It sat below the two thin metal rings we’d just put around his throat. She held it in her hands and inspected it closely.

  “I’m going to see if Beta will take a look at this when he gets back. If it failed on its own, we need to know that so we can work on making sure it doesn’t happen again. And if it failed thanks to someone messing with it…”

  “I do not even want to think about that,” I muttered.

  “That makes two of us, but we need to consider it. We’ve never had one of these fail. Ever. Not even the one you had Marie re-size with her power when you tricked Alpha. That one’s still working perfectly.” Her brow was furrowed, her mouth a thin line.

  “How would that even happen?” I asked. Dani leaned in, looking at the faulty tracker.

  “I don’t know. If someone disabled it remotely, figured out how to do that somehow, maybe? Or messed with the circuitry somehow. It’s probably nothing. Probably just wore out or something. But I don’t want to leave it to chance.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s going on with the girl you brought in?” Jenson asked.

  “I don’t know. Portia and Steel were walking her down to her cell last I saw.”

  “Oh. They had to leave. A call came in about some guy threatening to use his telepathy to destroy his enemies just after the Maddoc stuff started.”

  I shook my head and stalked toward the women’s wing again. “I promised her she wouldn’t be locked up alone,” I said. “Damn it.”

  “You should rest or something,” Jenson called after me. I didn’t bother answering. I entered the women’s detention wing again, peeking through the cell windows as I walked past them. I found Darla in one of the last cells on the left and hit the button to open the door. She wasn’t manacled into the chair, thankfully. She was sitting, hunched into a little ball, at the far side of the cell.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said with a sniffle.

  “They made a liar out of me. I promised you wouldn’t be in here alone.”

  “They were about to go help you, I think, but then they said there was another bad guy they had to go after. Is it always like that here?”

  I shrugged. “Some days are crazier than others.” I sat down near her. Not too close, but close enough that she could talk without raising her voice. And, on the floor, she wouldn’t have to crane her neck to look up at me. Hopefully, it would put her more at ease.

  Like that was even possible.

  “I’m gonna be stuck here forever now, aren’t I? They can’t just let me go, because what if I hurt someone? They’ll be worried that I’ll be the type of person they have to chase down.” She closed her eyes, then rested her forehead on her knees.

  “Look, the stuff you did was pretty minor, right?” I asked her. I mean, considering the damage she could have done, setting one house on fire when she was under stress wasn’t all that serious. “Just sit tight for a while, and Steel will work something out so you can get out of here.”

  “Yeah?” she asked. Her eyes were still red from crying. Big brown eyes, full of fear and innocence. Had I ever been that young? I wondered. I doubted I’d ever been that innocent.

  The one thing I did know is that having a kid here felt every kind of wrong. I remembered, way back when I’d first started working with Damian, that his dream had been to open a school for super powered kids, a place where they could feel like they belonged. Where they could feel safe.

  It really sucked that he was a villain now. Because undoubtedly, if his little dream ever happened at this point, it would be to train a bunch of little super villains. Maybe it was something we should think about, though.

  And as soon as I had the thought, I wanted to laugh. Yeah. Us. StrikeForce. We could barely manage ourselves, let alone training and being responsible for anyone else. We were a national, and probably an international, joke. Until very recently, the team had gotten its collective ass kicked almost every time it faced off against a villain. Now, our problem, more often than not, was that when a fight broke out, our enemies were usually whisked away by the teleporter they had on their side. So now the jokes were about how often we lose our villains.

  So maybe we shouldn’t be the ones to train the next generation of super heroes. But somebody should. Because then we wouldn’t have to wonder what to do when an eleven year old girl sets a house on fire because she’s stressed out over the crazy way her powers make her feel, which was what I guessed had happened.

  “I know this is all kind of scary, probably,” I continued. “You’re not going to be here for long, Darla.”

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” she said in a tiny voice.

  “I know you didn’t,” I said. I rested my back against the wall. “I made a big mess when I first got my powers. Way worse than what you did.”

  She looked at me, and I was relieved to have grabbed her interest. Anything was better than the terrified way she’d looked since we’d brought her in. “Yeah? What are your powers? I mean, I know you can fly.”

  I nodded. “I can fly. Super strength, super stamina.”

  “Were you scared when your powers showed up?” she asked, looking down.

  “At first I was. It’s scary. You feel all messed up inside, right? Like you’re going to burst, and you don’t know why.”

  She nodded, watching me.

  “I felt like I forgot how to just do normal things, at first. I’d go to open a door, and I’d end up ripping the knob off, because my strength was more than I was used to. Sometimes, I’d open a door, and I’d end up taking it off of its hinges.”

  She laughed.

  “And don’t get me started on the first time I flew,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Tell me!”

  So I told her. About how free I felt. And then about how I couldn’t figure out how to land. I told it all, including the way I’d face-planted into the field behind a local school when I’d finally made it down. By the time it was done, she was laughing freely, and I couldn’t help but laugh along.

  “So how’d you manage to deal with it?”

  I paused, shrugged. “The thing with the crazy, full feeling is that you have to use your powers. It’s the only way to not feel like you’re losing it. Obviously, you’ll have to be careful about that. See if your parents can track down a big steel drum or one of those patio fire pits or something. Set fires there to release some of the pressure. The rest of it is just trying to be calm. I’m not good at that part.” I told her about some of the calming exercises my doctor had given me after my injury from fighting Maddoc. I knew it was essentially meditation, but she didn’t call it that, probably because she figured I’d brush it aside. At this point, though, I’d try just about anything to make the nightmares and anxiety go away.

  “I destroyed our house,” she said in a small voice, as if she’d just realized it.

  I thought of the money sitting in the accounts Luther had helped me set up. Much more than I could ever use. More than StrikeForce would need for a while. I’d gotten a good amount of it before Jenson had frozen Alpha’s accounts. I could keep the team afloat with some of it after we lost access to Alpha’s money, which was bound to happen eventually. I had plans for a bit more of it, but there was still a lot left.

  “We have a program… thing,” I said. “We’ll get you guys into another house. I’m pretty sure yours is not livable anymore.”

  “You’d do that?”

  I nodded. “Um. When you get out, tell your parents about it, and once you guys find a good place, have them call me here.”

  She studied me. “Well, how much can we spend? I mean, what’s the budget?”

  I shook my head. “Tell you what. You guys find something in a neighborhood that works for you, and then tell me how much you need for it and we’ll go from there.”

  “You’re kidding.”


  “Well, I’m assuming you aren’t going to go nuts. No gold toilets or any shit like that.” I winced. “Excuse the language. Damn it.”

  “I’ve seen videos of you fighting. You say a lot worse than that,” she said with a laugh.

  “Shh. They’re going to take away my official superhero badge if that gets out,” I said with a laugh, and she joined in.

  We were still laughing when the doors whooshed open, and Amy and Jenson stepped in. “I’m sorry we had to step out on you, Darla. Your mom and dad are here,” Amy said. “I talked to them, and we’re going to let you out of here now, but we’re going to keep an eye on you. We need you to be careful, okay? I don’t want you back here like this.”

  “Same here,” she said.

  She stood up and Jenson, Amy, and I walked her out to the lobby, where her parents, the woman we’d met at the scene and a graying man with the same kind eyes as his daughter, waited anxiously.

  “We talked, we tried to give her some ideas for how to handle the stress,” I said to her mother, who nodded, and kept her arms around her daughter. “As we’ve seen now, stress seems to trigger it, which is totally normal,” I assured her. “So I gave her some things to practice for calming down, things my own doctor has me doing to help me deal with stress.”

  “Thank you so much,” her father said.

  “It was no problem at all. We were happy to help, and, more importantly, happy that we were able to talk to Darla before she started fearing her powers.” I met Darla’s eyes. “Your powers are nothing to fear, kiddo. They’re you. One more facet of you, but you’re still the person you’ve always been. Just… more.”

  She nodded, then reached out and hugged me for a moment before pulling away.

  “Call if you need anything,” I told her. “If you need to talk, or you’re feeling stressed, or you just have questions or whatever. Call the StirkeForce line, and if you want to talk to me, they’ll put you through to me or have me call you back. Or if you want to talk to Steel or Portia or Jenson or whoever. And about the other thing we talked about.”