Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  Elena said, “Mr. Bojars—”

  “Get him,” he replied.

  Elena ran into the mill, dodging pallets and bodies. She scooped up the sleeping boy, ignoring the pain in her hand, and carried him back outside. She could feel his body trembling in her arms.

  “I can’t find my book,” Matti said. He sounded feverish. “I think I lost it.”

  “Matti, you’re going with Mr. Bojars,” Elena said. “He’s going to take you someplace safe.”

  He seemed to wake up. He looked around, but it was obvious he still couldn’t see. “Elena, no! We have to get Grandmother!”

  “Matti, listen to me. You’re going across the river to the hospital. They have medicine. In the morning I’ll come get you.”

  “She’s still in the basement. She’s still there. You promised you would—”

  “Yes, I promise!” Elena said. “Now go with Mr. Bojars.”

  “Matti, my boy, we shall have such a ride!” the mechaneer said with forced good humor. He opened his big green parka and held out his arms.

  Matti released his grip on Elena. Mr. Bojars set the boy on the broad gas tank in front of him, then zipped up the jacket so that only Matti’s head was visible. “Now we look like a cybernetic kangaroo, hey Mattias?”

  “I’ll be there in the morning,” Elena said. She kissed Matti’s forehead, then kissed the old man’s cheek. He smelled of grilled onions and diesel. “I can’t thank you enough,” she said.

  Mr. Bojars circled an arm around Matti and revved his engine. “A kiss from you, my dear, is payment enough.”

  She watched them go. A few minutes later another truck arrived in the yard and she fell in line to help carry in the wounded. When the new arrivals were all inside and the stained litters had all been returned to the truck, Elena stayed out in the yard. The truck drivers, a pair of women in coveralls, leaned against the hood. The truck’s two-way radio played ocean noise: whooshing static mixed with high, panicked pleas like the cries of seagulls. The larger of the women took a last drag on her cigarette, tossed it into the yard, and then both of them climbed into the cab. A minute later the vehicle started and began to move.

  “Shit,” Elena said. She jogged after the truck for a few steps, then broke into a full run. She caught up to it as it reached the road. With her good hand she hauled herself up into the open bed.

  The driver slowed and leaned out her window. “We’re leaving now!” she shouted. “Going back in!”

  “So go!” Elena said.

  The driver shook her head. The truck lurched into second gear and rumbled south.

  As they rolled into the city proper it was impossible for Elena to tell where they would find the front line of the battle, or if there was a front line at all. Damage seemed to be distributed randomly. The truck would roll through a sleepy side street that was completely untouched, and twenty yards away the buildings would be cracked open, their contents shaken into the street.

  The drivers seemed to possess some sixth sense for knowing where the injured were waiting. The truck would slow and men and women would emerge from the dark and hobble toward the headlights of the truck, or call for a litter. Some people stood at street corners and waved them down as if flagging a bus. Elena helped the drivers lift the wounded into the back, and sometimes had to force them to leave their belongings.

  “Small boats,” the largest driver said over and over. A Trovenian saying: In a storm, all boats are too small.

  Eventually she found herself crouched next to a burned dragoon who was half-welded to his jet pack. She held his hand, thinking that might give him something to feel besides the pain, but he only moaned and muttered to himself, seemingly oblivious to her presence.

  The truck slammed to a stop, sending everyone sliding and crashing into each other. Through the slats Elena glimpsed a great slab of blue, some huge, organic shape. A leg. A giant’s leg. The U-Man had to be bigger than an apartment building. Gunfire clattered, and a voice like a fog horn shouted something in English.

  The truck lurched into reverse, engine whining, and Elena fell forward onto her hands. Someone in the truck bed cried, “Does he see us? Does he see us?”

  The truck backed to the intersection and turned hard. The occupants shouted as they collapsed into each other yet again. Half a block more the truck braked to a more gradual stop and the drivers hopped out. “Is everyone okay?” they asked.

  The dragoon beside Elena laughed.

  She stood up and looked around. They were in the residential district, only a few blocks from her apartment. She made her way to the gate of the truck and hopped down. She said to the driver, “I’m not going back with you.”

  The woman nodded, not needing or wanting an explanation.

  Elena walked slowly between the hulking buildings. The pain in her hand, her face, all seemed to be returning.

  She emerged into a large open space. She realized she’d been mistaken about where the truck had stopped—this park was nowhere she recognized. The ground in front of her had been turned to glass.

  The sky to the east glowed. For a moment she thought it was another superpowered UM. But no, only the dawn. Below the dark bulk of Mount Kriegstahl stood the familiar silhouette of the Slaybot Prime bolted to its gantry. The air battle had moved there, above the factories and docks. Or maybe no battle at all. There seemed to be only a few flyers in the air now. The planes and TDs had disappeared. Perhaps the only ones left were U-Men.

  Power bolts zipped through the air. They were firing at the Prime.

  A great metal arm dropped away from its shoulder socket and dangled by thick cables. Another flash of energy severed them. The arm fell away in seeming slow motion, and the sound of the impact reached her a moment later. The übermenschen were carving the damn thing up.

  She almost laughed. The Slaybot Prime was as mobile and dangerous as the Statue of Liberty. Were they actually afraid of the thing? Was that why an army of them had shown up for an ordinary hostage rescue?

  My God, she thought, the morons had actually believed Lord Grimm’s boasting.

  She walked west, and the rising sun turned the glazed surface in front of her into a mirror. She knew now that she wasn’t lost. The scorched buildings surrounding the open space were too familiar. But she kept walking. After a while she noticed that the ground was strangely warm beneath her feet. Hot even.

  She looked back the way she’d come, then decided the distance was shorter ahead. She was too tired to run outright but managed a shuffling trot. Reckoning by rough triangulation from the nearest buildings she decided she was passing over Mr. Bojars favorite spot, the corner of Glorious Victory Street and Infinite Progress Avenue. Her own apartment building should have loomed directly in front of her.

  After all she’d seen tonight she couldn’t doubt that there were beings with the power to melt a city block to slag. But she didn’t know what strange ability, or even stranger whim, allowed them to casually trowel it into a quartz skating rink.

  She heard another boom behind her. The Slaybot Prime was headless now. The southern gantry peeled away, and then the body itself began to lean. Elena had been inside the thing; the chest assembly alone was as big as a cathedral.

  The Slaybot Prime slowly bowed, deeper, deeper, until it tumbled off the pillars of its legs. Dust leaped into the sky where it fell. The tremor moved under Elena, sending cracks snaking across the glass.

  The collapse of the Prime seemed to signal the end of the fighting. The sounds of the energy blasts ceased. Figures flew in from all points of the city and coalesced above the industrial sector. In less than a minute there were dozens and dozens of them, small and dark as blackcap geese. Then she realized that the flock of übermenschen was flying toward her.

  Elena glanced to her left, then right. She was as exposed as a pea on a plate. The glass plain ended fifty or sixty meters away at a line of rubble. She turned and ran.

  She listened to the hiss of breath in her throat and the smack of her heavy
boots against the crystalline surface. She was surprised at every moment that she did not crash through.

  Elongated shadows shuddered onto the mirrored ground ahead of her. She ran faster, arms swinging. The glass abruptly ended in a jagged lip. She leaped, landed on broken ground, and stumbled onto hands and knees. Finally she looked up.

  Racing toward her with the sun behind them, the U-Men were nothing but silhouettes—shapes that suggested capes and helmets; swords, hammers, and staffs; bows and shields. Even the energy beings, clothed in shimmering auras, seemed strangely desaturated by the morning light.

  Without looking away from the sky she found a chunk of masonry on the ground in front of her. Then she stood and climbed onto a tilting slab of concrete.

  When the mass of U-Men was directly above her she heaved with all her might.

  Useless. At its peak the gray chunk fell laughably short of the nearest figure. It clattered to the ground somewhere out of sight.

  Elena screamed, tensed for—longing for—a searing blast of light, a thunderbolt. Nothing came. The U-Men vanished over the roof of the next apartment building, heading out to sea.

  Weeks after the invasion, the factory remained closed. Workers began to congregate there anyway. Some mornings they pushed around brooms or cleared debris, but mostly they played cards, exchanged stories of the invasion, and speculated on rumors. Lord Grimm had not been seen since the attack. Everyone agreed that the Savior of Trovenia had been dead too many times to doubt his eventual resurrection.

  When Elena finally returned, eighteen days after the invasion, she found Verner and Guntis playing chess beside the left boot of the Slaybot Prime. The other huge components of the robot’s body were scattered across two miles of the industrial sector like the buildings of a new city.

  The men greeted her warmly. Verner, the ancient mechaneer, frankly noted the still-red cuts that cross-hatched the side of her face, but didn’t ask how she’d acquired them. If Trovenians told the story of every scar there’d be no end to the talking.

  Elena asked about Jürgo and both men frowned. Guntis said that the birdman had taken to the air during the fight. As for the other two members of the heavy plate welding unit, no news.

  “I was sorry to hear about your brother,” Verner said.

  “Yes,” Elena said. “Well.”

  She walked back to the women’s changing rooms, and when she didn’t find what she was looking for, visited the men’s. One cinderblock wall had caved in, but the lockers still stood in orderly rows. She found the locker bearing Jürgo’s name on a duct tape label. The door was padlocked shut. It took her a half hour to find a cutting rig with oxygen and acetylene cylinders that weren’t empty, but only minutes to wheel the rig to the changing rooms and burn off the lock.

  She pulled open the door. Jürgo’s old-fashioned, rectangle-eyed welding helmet hung from a hook, staring at her. She thought of Grandmother Zita. What possesses a person to put a bucket on their head?

  The inside of the locker door was decorated with a column of faded photographs. In one of them a young Jürgo, naked from the waist up, stared into the camera with a concerned squint. His new wings were unfurled behind him. Elena’s mother and father, dressed in their red Gene Corps jackets, stood on either side of him. Elena unpeeled the yellowed tape and put the picture in her breast pocket, then unhooked the helmet and closed the door.

  She walked back to the old men, pulling the cart behind her. “Are we working today or what?” she asked.

  Guntis looked up from the chess board with amusement in his huge wet eyes. “So you are the boss now, eh, Elena?”

  Verner, however, said nothing. He seemed to recognize that she was not quite the person she had been. Damaged components had been stripped away, replaced by cruder, yet sturdier approximations. He was old enough to have seen the process repeated many times.

  Elena reached into the pockets of her coat and pulled on her leather work gloves. Then she wheeled the cart over to the toe of the boot and straightened the hoses with a flick of her arm.

  “Tell us your orders, Your Highness,” Guntis said.

  “First we tear apart the weapons,” she said. She thumbed the blast trigger and blue flame roared from the nozzle of the cutting torch. “Then we build better ones.”

  She slid the helmet onto her head, flipped down the mask, and bent to work.

  TONIGHT WE FLY

  IAN MCDONALD IT’S THE PARTICULAR METALLIC RATTLE OF THE FOOTBALL SLAMMING THE GARAGE DOOR THAT IS LIKE A NAIL DRIVEN INTO CHESTER BARNES’S FOREHEAD. SLAP BADOOM, SLAP BADOOM: THAT HE CAN COPE WITH. HIS HEARING HAS ADJUSTED TO THAT LONG HABITUATION OF FOOT TO BALL TO WALL. SLAP BACLANG. WITH A RESONATING TWANG OF INTERNAL SPRINGS IN THE DOOR MECHANISM. SLAP BACLANG BUZZ. BEHIND HIS HEAD WHERE HE CAN’T SEE IT. BUT THE BIGGEST TORMENT IS THAT HE NEVER KNOWS WHEN IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A RHYTHM, A REGULAR BEAT, YOU CAN ADJUST TO THAT: THE RANDOM SLAM OF BALL KICKED HARD INTO GARAGE DOOR IS ALWAYS A SURPRISE, A JOLT YOU CAN NEVER PREPARE FOR.

  The bang of ball against door is so loud it rattles the bay window. Chester Barnes throws down his paper and is on his feet, standing tiptoe in his slippers to try to catch sight of the perpetrators through the overgrown privet. Another rattling bang, the loudest yet. A ragged cheer from the street. Chester is out the front door in a thought.

  “Right, you little buggers, I had enough of that. You’ve been told umpteen times; look at that garage door, the bottom’s all bowed in, the paint’s flaking off. You’re nothing but vandals. I know your parents, though what kind of parents they are letting you play on the street like urchins I don’t know. This is a residential area!”

  The oldest boy cradles the football in his arm. The other boys stand red-faced and embarrassed. The girl is about to cry.

  “I know you!” Chester Barnes shouts and slams the door.

  “Chester, they’re nine years old,” the woman’s voice calls from the kitchen. “And the wee one, she’s only six.”

  “I don’t care.” Back in the living room again, Chester Barnes watches the five children slink shamefacedly down the street and around the corner. The little girl is in tears. “This is a quiet street for quiet people.” He settles in his chair and picks up his paper.

  Doreen has balanced the tea tray on the top of her walker and pushes the whole panjandrum into the living. Chester leaps to assist, sweeping up the precarious tray and setting it down on the old brass Benares table.

  “Now you know I don’t want you doing that, it could fall as easily as anything, you could get scalded.”

  “Well, then you’d just have to save me, wouldn’t you?”

  There is tea, and a fondant fancy and a German biscuit.

  “Those chocolate things are nice,” Chester says. “Where did you get them?”

  “Lidl,” Doreen says. “They’ve a lot of good stuff. Very good for jam. You never think of Germans having a penchant for jam. Is it in again?”

  “What?”

  “You know. The ad. I can see the paper, you’ve left it open at the classifieds.”

  “It’s in again.”

  “What does it say this time?”

  “Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle.”

  “And?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Are you going to reply?”

  “With what? It’s nothing. I’ll bet you it’s not even him. It’s kids, something like that. Or fans. Stick on the telly, we’re missing Countdown.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t like that new girl. It hasn’t been the same since Carol left.”

  “It hasn’t been the same since Richard Whiteley died,” Chester says. They watch Countdown. Chester’s longest word score is a seven. Doreen has two eights, and gets the numbers games and today’s Countdown Conundrum. Doreen gets up to go and read in the backyard, as she doesn’t like Deal or No Deal. “It’s just a glorified guessing game,” she says. Not for me it’s not, Chester Barnes says. As she advances her walking frame through the living room door, s
he calls back to Chester, “Oh, I almost forgot. Head like a sieve. The community nurse is coming round tomorrow.”

  “Again?”

  “Again.”

  “Well, I hope it’s after Deal or No Deal. ”

  Doreen closes the door after her. When the creak of her walking frame has disappeared down the hall, Chester Barnes picks up the newspaper again. Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle. A rising racket on the screen distracts him. Noel Edmonds is whipping the audience up into a frenzy behind a contestant reluctant to choose between the sealed prize boxes.

  “Twenty-seven, pick number twenty-seven, you blithering idiot!” he shouts at the screen. “It’s got the ten pounds in it! Are you blind? No, not box twelve! That’s got the fifty thousand! Oh for God’s sake, woman!”

  Nurse Aine is short and plump and has very glossy black hair and very caked makeup. She can’t be more than twenty-two. She radiates the rude self-confidence of the medical.

  “You’re not Nurse Morag,” Chester Barnes says.

  “No flies on you, Chester.”

  “Nurse Morag calls me Mr. Barnes. Where is she anyway?”

  “Nurse Morag has moved on to Sydenham, Belmont, and Glenmachan. I’ll be your district nurse from now on. Now, how are we, Mr. Barnes? Fair enough fettle? Are you taking half aspirin?”

  “And my glass of red wine. Sometimes more than a glass.”

  “Bit of a secret binge drinker, are we, Mr. Barnes?”

  “Miss, I have many secrets, but alcohol dependency is not one of them.”

  Nurse Aine is busy in her bag pulling on gloves, unwrapping a syringe, fitting a needle. She readies a dosing bottle, pierces the seal.

  “If you’d just roll your wee sleeve up there, Ches … Mr. Barnes.”

  “What’s this about?” Chester says suspiciously.

  “Nasty wee summer flu going around.”

  “I don’t want it. I don’t get the flu.”

  “Well, with a dose of this you certainly won’t.”

  “Wait, Miss, you don’t understand.”

  Plump Nurse Aine’s latex hands are quick and strong. She has Chester’s arm in a grip, and the needle is coming down. She checks.