As I felt the cold biting into me, the thin air starting to tug at me, I looked up at the sun. It was bright, so bright, a placid yellow orb, eternal, fixed, unchanging.
The air cooled me, but the sun warmed me. I drank it in. I gave myself over to it. Just as my lungs burned with a pain beyond bearing; just as I thought my flesh would freeze and be torn from my body, I changed.
The sun, unfiltered as it is on the ground, gave me just enough radiation to change back to my neutrino form. I couldn’t fly, I could barely move. But I didn’t feel the cold, the thin air no longer bit into me, my lungs, no longer lungs, didn’t need oxygen.
I fell then, amidst the remnants of the meteor, I fell.
As the atmosphere became denser, the rocks started to glow and trailed fire. They started to dissolve as we streaked towards the surface below.
I looked around, briefly interested, but then turned my attention back to the sun. The more I focused on it, the better I felt.
As the atmosphere started to occlude the sun’s radiation from me, I turned my attention back homeward.
We tumbled through the air, the rocks and me, in a large group as far as I could see.
Most were small, but some were still the size of houses, and although I felt myself coming back, I didn’t have enough energy to do anything about it.
I stared below me trying to get my bearings. I wasn’t over Arizona anymore. It looked like I would be coming down in the Pacific. I wasn’t sure, from my altitude now somewhere in the stratosphere, it looked like it would be an ocean landing.
And at first I was fine with that. I couldn’t hurt anyone. But there would be no help for me either.
I turned east, towards my home, and with what little energy I had, I thrusted.
It came in spurts and sputters, but it was enough to change my trajectory.
As the clouds came closer and closer, I saw a glimpse of the fighter jets, the SR-71 Blackbirds running at the highest altitude. What caught my attention was seeing one of them explode; one of the meteors must have hit it. I was still far away and I continued to thrust for all I was worth.
When I saw the second set of jets, I wasn’t as far off, and this time one didn’t need to explode for me to see them.
I gave one last push, all of my energy exiting out my feet, moving me back into my expected flight path, and then I knew nothing again.
Interlude 4
Motives
Spring 2025, Casita de Soledad, Central Arizona
I didn’t need to look to know she was there, I could feel her behind me; I could sense her electrical presence. She was shifting slowly from her left foot to her right foot and back. She was reading what I had just written.
“Yes?” I asked, without turning around. I could feel her question too.
“Why, exactly, are you doing this?” she asked, her tone even, her words loaded.
“We’ve been over this,” I said as I swiveled in my chair to face her. “I think our true story needs to be told. There is so much misinformation about us and the other q-morphs, about the war and what happened.”
She nodded slowly. She wasn’t buying it. “And…”
“And?”
“And what are your other reasons? Is it that you are just bored with retirement? Miss the ‘good ole days’ and need to relive them through writing them down?”
I paused. What she said had merit, but it didn’t feel right. I shook my head, “No.”
“Then?” she prompted.
“Then what? Do I need more of a reason than telling our story?”
She paused, her eyes searching me. “Yes, you do. I know you; you need more of a reason than that.”
I sighed and nodded. She was right. I didn’t really think it was just setting the record straight, or just ego. It was—
“Our love story needs to be told,” I said with a smile. “You yourself said that was the place to start.”
She smiled back with a nod. “And?”
“And what!” I was growing exasperated, but I knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t stop digging until she found what she was after.
“Is it about him?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
That brought me up short, fear growing in my belly. I hadn’t thought about it yet; he was a huge part of this story, but—
“I’m not ready to even think about him yet,” I snapped. “Not even to think about thinking about him.”
“So that’s it then?” she asked. “That’s the ‘and’?”
I felt my cheeks flush red and nodded, turning back to my writing.
Chapter 17
Landing
Fall 2004, Entering the atmosphere
An intense roaring sound, like an untuned radio turned all the way up, stuck in my ears. Cold tugging at my flesh like I had been thrust in frigid arctic waters. Pain tearing through my lungs as they sucked for oxygen; this time finding it, but not enough.
A fiery crackling pain in my chest. A noise so sharp and loud I was sure my eardrums would burst. The sharp smell of ozone. Energy coursing back through me. Life returning to me as my neutrino form flickered back on.
The ground rising up at an alarming rate to meet me. Several ponds of dark inky water, round buildings, and a nest of spindly sliver towers and wires.
Flesh returns as the ground nears. Searing crackling pain in my back. Neutrino form comes back.
Impact. The ground explodes around me and swallows me. Flesh returns, unbearable pain. Darkness.
Chapter 18
Recuperation
Fall 2004, Luke Air Force Base, Arizona
I heard first: a steady beeping, loud and shrill. I smelled next: the sharp tang of antiseptic. I felt then: deep throbbing pain masked by a light floating sensation that made me feel nauseous.
I heard a moan and realized it was me making the noise. I felt a warm squeeze of my hand.
“Nik… Nik…” A feminine voice. Light, like meringue; silky and smooth. Rich and delicate and strong, with an undertone that seemed out of place: fatigue and fear.
I heard myself moan again and tried to open my eyes, but they wouldn’t obey me. They felt glued shut.
“Nik. Oh thank God.” I felt the warmth squeezing my hand again and felt the barest tingle of electricity. I heard the sound of crying. I tried to soak in the warmth like I soaked in the sun while I was falling earthward.
My eyes obeyed me when I tried to open them next. A face, round and smiling, framed by long black hair. Thick eyebrows, brown eyes, tears running down the cheeks of that face. Lips pale and drawn, white teeth pressing down on their lower lip.
“Licia…” I groaned.
“Nik, you’re okay. We are in a hospital.”
“Meteor?”
“You did it, Nik, you did it.”
“We…” I said weakly.
“We?”
“We did it.” I remembered those lightning bolts striking me as I plunged towards the Earth. That energy had let me be neutrino again; those lightning bolts had save my life. “You saved me.”
She laughed then, it escaped her as if it had been trapped and under pressure too long. It wasn’t an easy laugh, it was full of pain and strife, but it was laughter. I liked it.
“Zap me.”
She laughed again, this time easier and lighter, but still weighty.
“Does this mean there’s going to be a second date?” I asked. This time her laughter rang out bright and clear. I rode its blissful rhythm back into unconsciousness.
~~~
I begged them to take me to the reactor, or to let Licia zap me, but they wouldn’t. They said I wasn’t stable enough to move, that the danger was too great, that my injuries were too extensive.
And they were extensive. Broken pelvis, left arm, and left leg; broken ribs and collapsed lung; concussion; frostbite; and various bruises and lacerations.
I had been my neutrino self when I hit the ground, right on the edge of the transformer towers, right behind the power
plant. That had saved my life. My impact dug a crater fifteen feet deep in the ground, throwing sand and rock for hundreds of yards.
I also took out half of the relay towers, plunging two states and millions of customers into darkness for a week. It was officially a “terrorist attack” linked to the missile attack on the helicopter. But, I felt bad for that and for—
While I had vaporized and broken up most of the meteor into small enough sizes so they burned up in the atmosphere, there were still some sizeable chunks. There was great destruction and damage.
A chunk the size of a bus struck in downtown Los Angeles taking out the US Bank Tower and some surrounding high-rises. The biggest remaining piece landed about fifty miles out in the Pacific, creating a mini-tsunami that caught much of the West Coast unawares. There were smaller pieces, from the size of a baseball to the size of a bowling ball, that came down all across the Desert Southwest and California. One of those chunks entered through the capstone of the Luxor in Las Vegas. Another blasted the historic Pima County Courthouse in Tucson. But, the Desert Southwest being as sparsely populated as it is, most of them didn’t do any real harm.
But I felt bad. Bad that I hadn’t done a better job. Bad that there were so many deaths. The death toll eventually climbed to 24,389—most of them in LA. I tell myself that it could have been—would have been—much, much worse without me. But I still feel for all those who died and their families.
Lying in bed waiting for my bones to heal gave me way too much time to think about it.
~~~
My mom was there the second time I woke up. I felt warmth in my hand, but it felt different, the hand felt fatter. I opened my eyes hoping for Licia and found my mom staring at me. She was in bad shape: dark circles under her eyes, her normally well-groomed hair flat and oily, brown and grey roots vigorously pushing out the blond.
“Al,” she croaked, calling for my father. “Al, he’s awake.”
I smiled around the pain. I wanted to show her that I was okay. “How’d the Cardinals do yesterday?” I wanted to distract her.
She shook her head. “The Cardinals played last Sunday, six days ago. You’ve been out for a while.”
I found out we were at a facility on Luke Air Force Base, so I knew the doctor had clearance and he confirmed this when he told me he knew who I was. That is when I found out they had no plans of transporting me back to Palo Verde anytime soon.
“I am sorry, sir, you are too weak,” he said.
“Weak? Yeah I’m weak. Put me in a nice radiation bath and I’ll get strong, fast.”
“I am sorry, sir. Orders.”
And that was that. It was the military, after all. There didn’t need to be logic or reason, just “orders.”
I had a suspicion that going q-morph would more than help. I believed it would heal me and quick. I had experienced it before on a small scale. At that point, I had morphed once with the flu, and once with a sprained ankle. In both cases, my ailment did not come back when I returned to my physical form.
They knew this, I had mentioned it in debriefs, but it had never been investigated or acted on. It was not part of my official dossier. So, no, they wouldn’t let me go. They wouldn’t take a chance on this. I was way too valuable. And that just made me mad.
The next time I awoke it was to the angular face and brush-cut of Colonel Williams. No one was holding my hand. No one else was there except for round-faced General Markus, and the door was closed.
“On behalf of a grateful nation and world, I thank you,” General Markus said. “You do understand, of course, that these events are, and must remain, top secret.”
His little speech just relit my anger. Barely conscious and some old-fart general is lecturing me on keeping his secrets, reminding me that I am a prisoner in his hospital.
Maybe it was the drugs; maybe it was my mood. But, come on, I had just saved the world. I expected more than that. It was clear that they would want me to keep my mouth shut, go back to my janitor job (and janitor salary) and act like nothing had happened. They were keeping me stuck in this bed when a short trip to Palo Verde would do me wonders.
“I want access to the reactor. Now,” I said. I meant it to sound like a command, but my voice was weak and it came out as a croak.
“The doctors have advised against it,” Williams said.
“It will help,” I said.
“The risk is too high.”
“The risk is mine to take.”
“I am afraid not, son,” Markus said. It grated on my nerves, him calling me “son.” I wasn’t his son. “If something goes wrong, if you are not strong enough to handle the radiation, to contain it… well, that would be catastrophic.”
“I’m sorry, Nik,” Colonel Williams interjected. He, at least, I believed. “You’re just going to have to tough this out for a while longer.”
I nodded. I didn’t like it, but I can’t say that I wasn’t a little bit worried about it too. It was unknown territory.
“Can I get some time in the sun at least?” I asked, remembering how the sun had saved me when I had been in orbit.
Williams nodded. “Now, can you tell us what happened?”
The debrief was short, and I’m not sure if they believed me when I told them about the structure on the meteor. But at that point I didn’t care. The sun, I would get to be in the sun soon. The sun would give me what I needed.
My recuperation was very slow, until it wasn’t. I was in the hospital for another three weeks. When they finally let me into the reactor, I rolled in on a wheelchair and walked out with a cane. It wasn’t instantaneous, it still took a long time, but morphing did speed up my healing.
And as I grew stronger and stronger one thing—or rather, one person—was on my mind. Licia Lopez. It felt true. It felt right. It felt like Ashley and all that coasting after her departure was over. I finally knew who I was. I knew who I wanted to be. I knew who I wanted to be with.
Chapter 19
A Second Date
Fall 2004, Page Springs Cellars, Arizona
We sat at a picnic table on a deck that overlooked Oak Creek on one of those weirdly warm fall days Arizona can have. We had finally made it to that little winery in the Verde Valley. There was a bottle of wine from the winery (a lovely red wine called El Serrano), a red and white checkered tablecloth, a plate of assorted cheeses, and some crackers.
And there was Licia. She had her dark hair tied back and was dressed casually in a red tank top and some khaki shorts. The shirt was emblazoned with the Flash Gordon logo: a white circle in the middle of the red with a yellow lightning bolt going through it. I loved it. It was her. A sly embrace of who she was and a not-so-sly thumbing at the authority that was just starting to feel oppressive.
I watched her as she talked, her face expressive and animated. Her hands darting out to take a piece of cheese and then delicately putting it on a cracker, as if apologetic for depriving me of even one morsel of the stuff. I watched how she laughed with her eyes, almost more than her face.
We spoke in hushed tones. We were alone, it was in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, but we didn’t want to be overheard. Not all of it was talk of powers and saving the world. Our tones were hushed even with the most mundane of matters. Like, how she loved to watch reruns of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how I loved to watch really bad sci-fi movies on lazy days off.
The surroundings seemed to support us. The creek below provided pleasant white noise; the tall cottonwoods guarded us as they swayed in the gentle breeze; the grapevines in the vineyard above watched respectfully.
Towards the end, after I had poured the last bits of wine into our glasses, she leaned over the table, stretching towards me like a flower reaching for the sun. Without thinking I stretched towards her too, and as our lips came close, tendrils of yellow neutronic energy stabbed from my lips to hers as sparks of electricity jumped from hers to mine. And all of the sudden—
We were kissing. Our first kiss. That
last few inches happened so fast, as if the energy exchange had acted like a magnet, drawing our lips together. It was a relatively chaste kiss, just lips, but I felt it to the soles of my feet.
It was electrical, yes. But somehow, it was something more. It was as if my life began in that moment. As if her soft lips pressed against mine, her breath smelling of wine and cheese, breathed life into me for the very first time.
We were interrupted by our phones going off simultaneously. Hers played “Flash a-ah …”; a tiny snippet from the theme song from the 1980 movie Flash Gordon. It went perfectly with her shirt.
Mine played a snippet from “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” from Armageddon. It was my (way too subtle) thumbing at authority.
She groaned and held her phone to me, it said: “Report to PV ASAP.” I laughed and showed her my phone—it said the same thing.
“I guess it’s time to save the world again,” I said with a shrug.
Our first kiss didn’t last that long. And you know what, it didn’t need to. It was all I could have wished for. A perfect second date.
Epilogue
Spring 2025, Casita de Soledad, Central Arizona
I sat in a chair outside our casita on our flagstone patio, absorbing the rays of the sun directly above. It had been a long time since I had had access to reactor number three at Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. I missed it. The sun was the next best thing available.
I heard the pages turn every minute or so. A soft quiet whisper as Licia read the story I had just completed. She had insisted that I print it out. She was afraid if she tried to read it on the e-reader she might get “emotional” and fry the thing.
I was dressed only in shorts so I could get as much solar radiation as possible. Despite my several hours a day of this, my skin was as white as a sheet. My body absorbed the UV differently than most.
A silence had descended—the turning of pages had ended some minutes ago—and it filled up the space between us. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t. I let the silence deepen. She just needed a moment to gather her thoughts.
Neutrinoman & Lightningirl: A Love Story, Season 1 (Episodes 1 - 3) Page 8