by John McCrae
Vista shook her head. A lump was growing in her throat.
“Okay. With all this in mind, I have one suggestion and two orders. My suggestion? Stop trying to be everything they were. Be what you’re good at, a caring, sweet young woman who everyone on the team likes. My professional opinion is that you have it in you to fill some of that void Gallant left. Use that empathic nature of yours to help others with their own struggles. Be the team’s heart.”
Her eyes started watering. She blinked the tears away.
“And my orders?”
“Order number one is that you go see the PRT’s therapist. If I can clear it with Director Piggot, figure out a way to make the patrol schedules work, I’m going to try to get everyone to go. I’m honestly kind of flabbergasted that nobody higher up than me has mandated it already.”
“Okay.” In a way, she was relieved, at that instruction.
“Order number two is to let yourself cry, damn it. Stop holding it back.”
Just the mention of crying made her eyes water again. Vista wiped it away once more, “I’ve cried enough.”
“If your body wants to cry, then you should listen to it. It doesn’t make you any weaker if you let it happen. You think I’ve never cried? Looking like I do, facing the disappointments and frustrations I have? Maybe it’s self-serving to think so, but I think it takes a kind of strength to let yourself face your emotions like that.”
The tears were rolling down her cheeks, now. She let her head hang, her damp hair a curtain between her and her team leader. He stood, pulled her into a hug. She pressed her face against his shirt. It was soft, but the body beneath was hard, unyielding. It was still very gentle.
When she pulled away, a few minutes later, his shirt was damp. She sniffled, taking the offered tissue to wipe at her eyes and nose, Weld spoke, gently, “I’m always here to talk, and the therapist will be there too.”
Vista nodded.
“If you need a break from the team, just say the word. I’ll talk to Piggot.”
She shook her head, “No. I want to work. I want to help.”
“Okay. Then we’ve got patrol in… two hours and fifteen minutes. Go relax, watch some TV, maybe take a nap.”
“Alright. Don’t you dare let me sleep through patrol.”
“I wouldn’t.”
She made her way back to the elevator, noting the lights were on in Kid Win’s workshop. Heading back down to the base, she walked toward her cubicle-room.
“Holy crap, you’ve been crying again? I thought you were over that.” Sophia commented from the console. She was on her laptop, sitting just to the right of the main console. Nobody else was present in the headquarters. Again, the two of them were alone. Was Sophia’s nice act only for when others were around?
Vista turned, irritated. “I was venting a little with Weld, what’s your issue?”
“I just really hate crybabies,” Sophia turned back to the computer.
Crybaby. Whatever else someone could say about Sophia, there was no denying that she was very, very good at finding someone’s weak points, be it during a brawl or in an argument. Vista couldn’t think of an insult that would have needled her more.
“Bitch,” Vista muttered, moving toward her room.
She thought she spoke quietly enough that Sophia didn’t hear, but the girl did, because she had a response. “You annoyed him, you know.”
Vista stopped in her tracks, stayed where she was, her back to Sophia. She replied without turning around “Weld? You don’t know-”
“Gallant. Twelve year old following him around all the time, brimming with prepubescent lust and lovesick infatuation? And he can feel all of her emotions? You know how gross that would be? How disturbing and awkward?”
Vista clenched her fists.
Sophia went on, “Think about it, every time you got just a little turned on while you looked at him? Every time you crushed on him? He felt it, forced himself to smile and play nice even as you totally repulsed him, because he was that kind of guy. You know he was that kind of guy.”
“I loved him,” Vista spoke. The first time she’d spoken the words aloud. Why did it have to be to Sophia? Why couldn’t she have said it to Gallant, before he passed? “There’s nothing gross about love.”
“You don’t know what love is, little one,” Sophia’s condescending tone rang across the room, “It was a first crush, a little infatuation. Real love is what he had with Glory Girl… that long-term bond that survived through a dozen really nasty fights, and brought them back together again and again. A schoolgirl crush is easy. Real love is hard, something tempered and enduring.”
Vista turned to look at the older girl.
Sophia was reclining in her chair. She smiled a little, “I know it sucks to hear now, but it’s better to hear it straight than to look back and realize how horribly stupid you sounded, five or ten years down the road.”
“I am not going to feel stupid for how I feel now.”
Sophia shrugged, “Kids.” She turned her attention to Facebook.
Vista unclenched her fist. She could tip Sophia out of her chair, bend the computer screen, carry out any number of petty revenges. But Weld’s advice stuck in her head.
“What happened to you, Sophia?”
Sophia looked over her shoulder. “You’re still here?”
“What kind of situation led to you becoming like this? So casually cruel, so lacking in basic human decency?”
“My advice is for your own benefit, little tyke. I’m not the bad guy.”
“You’re the only one who doesn’t have any friends on the team, you keep yourself at a distance, you talk only with your friend or friends from your civilian life. Even there, you’re always in trouble. Getting suspended, picking fights. It’s like you want to break your probation and go to some juvenile detention facility for the next few years.”
“Not your business.”
“Out in costume, you’re scary. You hurt people like you’re hungry for it. I just want to know why. Where did you come from? What situation led to you being like this?”
“Drop the fucking subject. You’re irritating me.”
Vista sighed. Feeling the traces of anger and the hurt from Sophia’s words, she still tried to soften her parting words as she turned to go back to her room, “If you ever do want to talk about it, I’m willing to listen.”
“I’m not about to talk about it with you. Fix your own shit before you start worrying about me, crybaby.”
Frustrated, disappointed in herself for failing in her first genuine effort at taking Weld’s advice, trying to reach out to a team member that needed it, Vista shook her head, muttered, “I pity you.”
The sound of a laptop crashing to the ground made Vista turn. She saw Sophia in her shadow state, wispy, her skeleton visible beneath her skin, warped. The girl’s eyes were too reflective, her entire body seemed to bend and distort, not completely solid as she leaped towards Vista.
Sophia dropped out of her shadow state in time to push Vista flat onto her back, hard, one fist gripping the collar of the younger girl’s t-shirt. She shook her. “Pity?”
Feeling strangely calm despite the pain that radiated through the back of her head, where it had struck the ground, Vista spoke, “Weld said it takes a kind of strength to face your emotions. Are you really that scared, Sophia, that you’d attack me instead of talk to me?”
Sophia raised a clenched fist. Vista screwed one eye shut, anticipating the hit. It would almost be worth it if she hit me and violate the conditions of her membership on the team, to have her gone. But we need all the help we can get, right now. “The security cameras are watching us right now.”
Sophia dropped her hand, stood, and stalked over to the far side of the room. She gathered her costume in her arms. “I’m going on patrol.”
“It’s not your shift,” Vista spoke, sitting up.
“Don’t fucking care. If Weld asks, I’m doing a double shift.”
And then Sop
hia was gone, having used her shadow state to disappear through the elevator door.
“Okay,” Vista spoke, pulling herself to her feet. “Guess I’m manning the console.”
9.06
Shadow Stalker paused in her patrol when she arrived at the roof of the Hillside Mall, downtown. She’d hoped to run into some looters, had had some luck earlier in the week at this spot, but it seemed that police forces were stationed at the entrances, now. Annoyed, she walked over to the corner of the roof, so the toes of her boots were just at the brink.
She got her smartphone and dialed Emma. The phone automatically made the wireless connection to her earbud.
“Hey, superhero,” Emma answered.
“How’s Portland?”
“Good food, good shopping, boring as hell. I wish I could come back, hang out.”
“I wish you to come back, too,” Shadow Stalker admitted, “These morons are fucking pissing me off, and I’m not getting enough breaks from it. I don’t have the patience for this.”
“Which morons? The Wards?”
“The Wards,” Shadow Stalker confirmed. She sat down on the ledge. “They’re children.”
“Yeah,” Emma replied. She didn’t prod for more information or clarification. Shadow Stalker had gone over this before enough times, in one variation or another.
That didn’t stop her from returning to the subject, “Sure, some of them are older. Some have more time in the field than me. Maybe. But they’re still children, living in their comfortable, cozy little worlds. I dunno if you’ve seen what the city’s like now-”
“-I saw some on the news.” Emma interjected.
“Right. Damaged, destroyed, fucked up. This is a place those kids visit, and they’re still convinced they can fix it. I’ve lived with this all my life. Waded through this shit from the beginning. I know they’re deluding themselves. So yeah, they’re immature, new to this, and I don’t know how long I can fucking put up with them.”
“Two and a half more years, right?” Emma asked, “Then you’re off probation, free to do your thing.”
“God, don’t remind me. Makes me realize I’m not even halfway through it. I can’t believe it’s already been this long, constantly hearing them bitch about dating, or clothes, or allowances, and every time I hear it it’s like, I want to scream in their face, fuck you, you little shit, shut the fuck up. I’ve killed people, and then I washed the blood off my hands and went to school and acted normal the next day!”
Silence hung on the line for a few long moments.
“I remember,” Emma spoke, a touch subdued.
Shadow Stalker chewed on her lower lip, watched a butch policewoman pull into the parking lot, then hand out coffees to the others on duty.
“If it weren’t for all the crying and the complaining, I would almost be glad Leviathan had attacked the city. Tear away that fucking ridiculous veneer that covers everything. Get rid of those fucking fake smiles and social niceties and daily routines that everyone hides behind.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Shadow Stalker didn’t elaborate too much further on the subject. Leviathan had revealed the desperate, needy animal at the core of everyone in this city. He’d made things honest.
Most were victims, sheep huddling together for security in numbers, or rats hiding in the shadows, avoiding attention. Others were predators, going on the offensive, taking what they needed through violence or manipulation.
She didn’t care what category people fell into, so long as they didn’t get in her way, like Grue had a habit of doing. Worse yet were those who seemed intent on irritating her by being lame and depressing, like Taylor or like Vista had been this past week.
They weren’t all bad. The victim personality did have a habit of pissing her off, but she could let them be so long as the person or people in question stayed out of sight and out of mind, accepting their place without fight or fanfare. There were some ‘predators’, she could admit, that were even useful. Emma came to mind, the girl went a long way towards making life out of costume tolerable, and there was Director Piggot, who had kept her out of jail thus far, because she fit into the woman’s overarching agenda of PR and the illusion of a working system.
There was a need for that kind of person in society, someone willing to step on others to get to the top, do what was necessary, so they could keep the wheels spinning. Not all of them were so useful or tolerable, of course, but there were enough out there that she couldn’t say everyone with that kind of aggressive, manipulative psychology was a blight on society. She could respect the Piggots and Emmas of the world, if only because they served as facilitators that allowed her to do what she did best, in costume and out, respectively.
She was a ‘predator’, whether she was Shadow Stalker or Sophia. Few would deny that, even among her own teammates.
A convoy of trucks on the road below caught her attention. Each vehicle was painted dark, and two had the look of army vehicles, with gray-black mottled cloth or canvas covering the cargo or personnel at the rear. They had their headlights off to avoid drawing attention. There were two good possibilities for who they might be. The first was that it was a shipment of supplies. Food, water, first aid and tools, which would mean there was a small contingent of capes inside one of the trucks or in the immediate area. The second option was that it was Coil and his troops.
She realized she was still holding the phone, and the noise of a television or music told her Emma was still on the other line. “Something’s going on. Going to see if it leads to anything interesting.”
“Call back when you’re done, give me the recap.”
“Right.” She hung up.
Leaping into the air, she entered her shadow state, every part of her body shifting gears in the span of a half-second. Her lungs automatically stopped taking in air and her heart stopped beating. She was suddenly hyperaware of changes in the atmosphere, movements of air as it passed through her body. She had enough solidity for her body to seize the air molecules as they passed through her, and in this manner, each of her cells nourished itself.
It was strange, to feel so still. She lacked even the most basic processes and routines that normally kept the body going, things people rarely gave a second thought to. There was no near-silent roar of blood in her ears, no need to blink, no production of saliva in her mouth or movement of food and water in her gut. She just existed.
But the movement of air through her body made her feel just as alive, more alive, in a very different way. The material and gravel of the rooftop were still warm from the day’s sunlight, even submerged beneath a thin layer of water from the rain. This rising, heated air from this surface offered her an almost imperceptible added buoyance. The rest of her ascent was carried out by the momentum from her leap and the fact that she was nearly weightless. Jumping fifteen feet in the air to a rooftop one story above her was almost effortless.
She turned solid long enough to land. Changing back brought a sudden, thunderous restarting of her heart, a shudder running through her entire body as her bloodstream jerked back into motion. It only lasted the briefest of moments as she bent her knees and threw herself forward. The moment her feet left the ground, she entered the shadow state once again, sailing across the rooftop. She used one wispy foot to push herself out further as she reached the roof’s edge, so she could glide just above one rooftop without even touching ground.
In this fashion, she kept pace with the trucks, which weren’t moving slowly but weren’t going full-bore either, likely because of the condition of the roads.
It was five minutes before trouble arrived.
It was Menja that made the first move, stampeding out of a nearby alleyway, standing at a height of twenty feet tall. She drove her spear into the engine block of the lead truck, stepped in front of the vehicle and wrenched her weapon to tip the truck over and arrest its forward momentum.
The truck immediately behind tried to stop, but the flooded pavement made it impossible to
get enough traction. It skidded and collided into the back of the foremost truck.
Miss Militia was climbing up out of the lead truck’s passenger door in an instant, hefting a grenade launcher to blast Menja three times in quick succession. The giantess stumbled back, raised her shield – her sister’s shield – to block a fourth shot. Hookwolf, Stormtiger, and Cricket all joined the fray, followed by their foot soldiers. On the PRT’s side, the trucks emptied of PRT troops and one more cape, Assault. They mobilized to defend, and the noise of gunfire rang through the night air.
Shadow Stalker crouched at the corner of the roof, loaded her crossbow and fired a shot at Cricket. It passed a half-foot behind the woman. Her second shot was on target, and Cricket dropped a few seconds later, tranquilized. Good – The woman’s radar might find Shadow Stalker if she wasn’t in her shadow state, and Shadow Stalker could be far more effective if the enemy didn’t see where she was attacking from.
Who else? Menja was classified as a breaker, the spatial-warping effect that surrounded her made incoming attacks smaller even as she simultaneously made herself bigger. The darts wouldn’t even be noticeable to her. Stormtiger could deflect projectiles by sensing and adjusting air currents. With the right timing, so her shots came out of the shadow state as they arrived to make contact with him? Maybe. But he was engaged in a fist fight with Assault, and she’d be risking tagging the hero. Hookwolf? No point. He was currently in the shape of a gigantic wolf made of whirring metal blades. Even if the dart did penetrate something approximating flesh, which it wouldn’t, his entire biology was so different that she doubted he would be affected.
Instead, she settled for targeting the clusters of Hookwolf’s troops. ‘Fenrir’s Chosen’. Each of the thugs had white face-paint extending from forehead to cheekbone to chin, in a crude approximation of a wolf’s face. She began dropping them at a steady rate, aiming for the biggest, the most aggressive and the ones who looked like they were in charge of lesser troops, the captains. As the troops began falling, Hookwolf’s forces became unsettled, hesitating to advance. Hookwolf reared up on two legs, pointing and howling orders, likely demanding they attack. His words were incomprehensible from the rooftop where Shadow Stalker crouched, but the tone left no mistake that he was threatening them to drive them back into the fight.