Superman's Cape

by Brian Spangler

  A volunteer lifted a small pot of coffee and offered it to the Captain who eagerly accepted it. “Biz Bop,” he praised nodding his head which by now everyone knew meant many thanks, or something on those lines.

  The Captain fixed him a look of empathy and said, “Nobody knows better than me what happens in your head when it comes to this kind of work.”

  “Peter, I know,” Dale started. “But we have twenty percent,” he finished. His voice frustrated.

  “It’s easy to gamble all your emotions against the bank. Truly it is. But the cards aren’t always there. Even when the map is showing twenty percent.”

  Dale crossed his arms as his frustration morphed to anger. “But twenty percent is twenty percent,” he argued.

  The Captain made a flapping gesture with one hand. “Not when eighty percent ate the majority of the time. Besides, we can’t risk any more lives. Bitch’s wind is a bad one.”

  “The evacuation – is it mandatory or voluntary,” Dale pressed.

  The Captain lifted his chin, a prideful gleam in his eyes. He knew what Dale was planning.

  “It’s a gray area, Dale. If you’re a civilian, the Governor’s request is voluntary. But, if you’re not, then it’s mandatory.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “Like I said, it’s a gray area. We’re a civilian agency with an oath to protect the public; at all costs. That being said, orders are orders and we need to smash the hull.” Smash the Hull, was another phrase that could mean a hundred different things.

  A gust of wind ripped one of the ties, freeing a green tent flap that snapped up and down and scolded the Bitch’s wind. Dale understood Smash the Hull and he didn’t like it. It meant a complete bug out. Pack it all up. Every last thing. It was time to evacuate the premises and leave nothing but the grass they were standing on.

  The Captain turned to face the operations in the tent and raised his hands above his head. With his unusually large wedding band, he clanked the outside tin of his thermos cup. After a few raps with his hands, the commotion of the volunteer work slowed. The tent began to go silent, leaving only the sound of wind and the hum of the generators. All attention moved to the sound of the Captain’s metal on metal call to meeting. The Captain brought his arms down. He was content that he had enough ears waiting for his direction.

  “People, listen up – listen up. We’re smashing the hull. Time to close it down on account of Hurricane Dani. The storm’s riding up the coast and knocking on our door. We got no choice on this one. Governor’s call. Let’s start pulling the search parties back in. Let’s break down the gear and stow away what we can,” the Captain made the orders, and followed it up with a fresh mouthful of coffee. When he was satisfied with his coffee, he gave Dale a wink and barked a few more orders.

  “We’re smashing the hull. But there isn’t going to be time enough to break it all down. The important thing is to get the volunteers out of the woods. Get’em back in here so we can evacuate. Break down and stow away just the small items, leave the rest. I’ll repeat. Break down and stow just the small stuff, leave the rest. We’ll come back and clean up later,” the Captain finished.

  Dale knew from his experience just how long it would take to bug out. He knew how long it would take to break down the equipment and move the volunteers to safety. He knew just the number of hours and the number of minutes to Smash the Hull. Dale nodded to his Captain as he understood what the real plan was. His Captain was leaving the ship behind. He’d Smash the Hull, so to speak, and get the volunteers to safety. He might even stow some of the equipment. Beyond that, his Captain was leaving the ship. And anyone, even a second in command, willing to tempt the Bitch’s wind on their own, would have a ship to steer in continue their search for Kyle.

  30

  Jill reached down to rub her knee. It was almost double the size of the other. It was a melon. The agonizing pain, and embarrassment, of her tumble from the van passed. But as they drove back to the Connely place, an aching throb became steady and made the trip miserable. It’s broken for sure, she thought solemnly. She felt crunching through the front of her knee whenever she moved.

  She grimaced while holding her seat. Her body was moving as they drove. The WJL-TV news van followed the winding yellow line that split the road in two. It weaved in and around as they drove. The van seemed to dare both the hills and the curves with its top-heaviness, causing its tires to squeal and chirp the road. She winced more when the turns pushed and pulled her along.

  “How’s the Knee?” Steve asked with one eye on the road.

  “I think it might be broken,” Jill offered back. She tried to smile but a frown was locked and frozen with the ache in her leg. Steve dropped a deposit of chaw juice in his cup.

  “Yeah, well sorry for laughing. I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he said warmly.

  “Thanks. Would help taking it easy with the drive.”

  “Will do the best I can. Anyway, I’m still runnin with money in my pocket – beers 'n burgers, what’dya say?” he bellowed. Jill sighed but her frozen stare thawed. She couldn’t help but smile at his excitement and enthusiasm. He wore a grin near ear to ear. Steve spat into his cup and jabbed at his jaw with his sleeve to clear his chin.

  Steve might have been a little hard to take, but Jill found a liking for him. Burgers sounded good. It wasn’t until he brought it up did she realize just how hungry she was. The burger was starting to sound better than good. In fact, it sounded awesome. But, as quick as the excitement for a beer and a burger caught Jill’s interest, she let it go. She dumped it. They had to get back to Jacob. She needed to get him. She needed him to be okay.

  “Not sure we’ll have the time --” she hated saying, “-- I mean with what Andy told me about the Governor’s evacuating, and all.”

  “Hurricane is on its way. Can’t stop that. But we also can’t get to Jacob without us passing right by the Grease Stain a few miles from here,” Steve replied. His voice was still hanging on to the initial enthusiasm, but it sounded a bit deflated.

  Jill leaned to see out through the front window. The road ahead could have been carved into the hillside. It was a perfect cut for two lanes of road. On her right side, the road was held against the hill by a steel guard rail. Dented and scratched. She could see where the colors of passing cars tempted fate, leaving their mark to show for their mistakes.

  Steve swerved the van far to the right. They were high above a ravine and Jill could see clear over the guard rail. The sight pushed her stomach into her throat. “Whoaa,” she said. Her voice rattled excitedly and thoughts of roller coasters came to mind. The best part was that first steep drop – the big seller. She pulled her head back but then peeked over the edge again. And again, her stomach went into her throat while a funny feeling ate her up deep inside. She giggled. In her mind she could hear the faint sound of an old cranky chain as it took the next roller coaster cars up to the top and let them go.

  On her left was the other half of the mountain. She thought the hill’s face might have been tortured in some past millennia. It looked like a giant had thrown stones, peppering the side of the hill, leaving prehistoric sized divots. Some of the boulders were captured half way up to their waists while others hung onto the surface of the hill by the sheer tips of their toes. And then others were burrowed far enough into the earth that just the tops of their heads could be seen. Where there were no boulders, there were trees. Tall trees. Collections and groups of them that made up small patches of woods.

  Jill wondered why, or how, it came to be that the trees didn’t just fall over onto the road. How could they be rooted in this mess of earth and stone and on a hill that was so steep as if all its occupants were defying gravity? She watched the trees dancing back and forth with no direction or rhythm. Early hurricane winds moved their tops to what she thought could be a point of breaking. But before the wood splintered and shattered into pieces like her knee, the trees settled a moment then started to sway again in the other direction.r />
  “Winds are really picking up. I think I see why they are evacuating,” she said over the noise of the van

  “Nahhh, just a breeze, we should be back to Croatan to pick up your boyfriend and then to the studio before we see any rain…” As though on cue, and before Steve could finish, a drop of rain blossomed on the windshield. The raindrop began to creep and Jill flinched when a wiper blade swept across the glass.

  “Guess I called that one too soon – no Burgers and Beer, huh?” Steve said disappointed, and dropped another punch of chaw juice.

  Jill offered a smile against the pain in her leg. “Nope, you won’t be running with your money today … let’s just get Jacob and go home.”

  31

  Kyle was running – he didn’t remember getting up from the ground. He didn’t remember his legs working again. And when he saw his feet, he didn’t think they were working very well at all. But they did move. He moved. And any movement was much more than he thought he could do at all.

  He heard a voice screaming, almost screeching, like his hawk friend George. Kyle turned to give George a welcome shout. A quick thank you for joining along in his run to somewhere. The voice had a death grip on the wet air and after a second shout he realized it was his voice he heard. He screamed louder and wondered if he was dead. He screamed again, not caring who or what in the forest might answer back.

  His running was more of a stammered and labored shuffle. In his mind it was a marathon and he was in the lead. His feet were pacing huge steps and he was about to break the white tape and take home the gold medal. But in Croatan National Forest, his running shoes were his wrinkled and peeling gray feet with pine needles piercing the undersides of his ripped toenails.

  At some point he’d lost his socks. Or, he never put them back on like he told himself to do. It didn’t matter though. The pine needles sometimes hurt, but he could pull those out later. He didn’t feel much of his legs or feet anymore. He shuffled his knees up and down and told his broken brain that he was running for the gold. This isn’t running. What am I running from? he wondered as he shuffled again. His breathing sounded tired and old; even tortured at times. The sun was behind me? Kyle questioned where he was and when it was that he had become lost.

  The sounds of the woods were giving way to the wheezing in his ears. He struggled to suck in a heavy dose of air and then let it back out. He felt his heart beating in his face as heavy mucous gathered in his lungs. The rattle in his chest was spreading. It loosened in his vain attempt at running, and threw hints up his airway that made him gag and cough. Kyle stopped and coughed hard enough to send one of the chunks of mucous into his mouth. He chewed on it and then spat it to the ground.

  “Come on tick ut your deet,” he mumbled and smiled a broken smile at the taste of salty warm mucous in his mouth. Left knee up then right knee up. The sun was out and behind me, he questioned again, turning his good eye up to the trees in search for a glimpse of the gold and orange slice of warm light that had all but disappeared from him. It was there though. I saw it. I remember seeing it. It is why I got up and ran. My shadow was there. But now it’s gone again. The tops of the trees swayed in large swings. The clouds rushed over him like a blanket covering the sky. All hopes of the sun coming back to him were dashed. Kyle slowed his feet with this realization. He slowed and then he stopped.

  Kyle flinched when a drop of rain landed on his face. It was cold and wet and welcome. He pulled the edges of the rain drop with his finger and brushed it over the open and peeling skin on his lips. Kyle pursed his lips and tried to eat as much of the wet he could. It felt good.

  Kyle needed to rest. He turned his broken body around to see where he’d run from. He had no idea what direction he was running in and he had no idea how far or how long he’d been on the move. At some point the sun was behind him. But now it was gone and he was still thirsty and starving.

  “Watch out Auntie Enn, I’n coning hone,” he protested to the woods and dropped to his knees and then eased himself back to the seat of his pants. A sour urine smell rushed up to his nose as his bottom landed on the ground. “I pisded my danz … I really did dat,” he mumbled as shame and embarrassment peeked then faded. He rested and studied the trees around him. He listened for anything familiar and only heard the wind beating up on the highest branches.

  The smell of autumn fought past the sour urine. He thought of how fast seasons change … how fast the curtains of green turned to brown and then were gone. Blink of an eye he thought of his Dad saying as leaves ended their seasons and fell in silence around him. He wondered … if the season were to actually change in an instant, then would it let him see home? Would he be looking from the other side of prison bars that were made up of tree-bark shingles? Could his skinny body slide past the bars and escape back to Jonnie and his Momma?

  There was movement on his arm. The Boar cut remained alive and all passengers were present and accounted for. The little pustule machines worked their way around the wound. There were more of them as they chomped and chewed and Kyle hoped they were cleaning his infection.

  Kyle poked a finger in the Boar cut and nudged one of the maggots off course. He nudged another before picking it up and popping it to the back of his mouth. Not too many, he warned, gotta let them finish. There was Jack and Sam and of course Nancy and her best friend in the whole wide world Celia. The class of maggots was hitching a ride on a buffet train that was him.

  “I niss George. Dut you guys will do,” he whispered. The names were easy to remember. He used the names of the kids in his class. Most were his friends, but some, not so much. Nothing wrong with using their names, he considered while he watched the maggots do their work. Saliva built up at the back of his throat. It was a good wet. The kind you see your dog lick away when you put the dinner on the counter. Not the bad wet that pulled his stomach apart and left parts of it on the ground. He reached in and pulled out Joe.

  “Deen saving you,” he said to the maggot. Joe was one of the fatter and juicer maggots who in Kyle’s starved mind looked just like Joe Rascome in the third row – fat, smelly and a bully; always a bully. Kyle thought of how Joe stole the mechanical pencil his father bought for him. His Dad bought a two-fer from the drug store. One fer work and the other fer home. When his Dad saw Kyle’s eyes and ears perk up to the click-click-click, he gave it to him. “Time to learn the magnificence of a pencil over a pen,” his Dad preached, smiling.

  Kyle thought of Joe’s pudgy fingers with the ragged and torn dirty fingernails. He thought of the fat fingers holding his mechanical pencil and how Joe took it from his hand while Kyle was scratching his name across the top of his homework paper. He’d put his first letters on the paper when pudgy bully fingers stretched a smelly reach across his nose and yanked it out of his hand. “Mine,” Joe snorted and offered a puffed cheeky smile before running back to his desk.

  “What an effen assdolhe,” Kyle mumbled as he looked over Joe Maggot for a minute. He turned the white pustule around in his fingers. He held him with some care so as not to pinch or puncture and rush the maggoty juice from the little sac.

  “Joe naggot, I here-dy sendence you to death,” he said in the best judge sounding voice he could muster under the circumstance. Kyle tossed Joe maggot into his mouth and chewed the juices out of him.

  With his eye closed, and with a fevered mind, he imagined that he had Joe’s little sausage fingers. Kyle took the mechanical pencil back, it was his after all. His dad gave it to him. He took it back and then pulled Joe’s pudgy digits up to his mouth and bit down through the skin and bone while blood streamed up across his good eye. He bit down again amidst harsh screams from Joe Maggot – and Joe Maggot’s mother standing behind him and yelling and begging Kyle to stop. She was sorry her little boy was a bully, a monster bully, who took what wasn’t his.

  Kyle tore the middle finger off of Joe Maggot’s hand in the next bite. His teeth sawed through the bone as though it were made of twizzler; a strawberry twizzler. His favorite. Kyl
e used his tongue to shuffle the pudgy finger around in his mouth. Joe Maggot’s crying mother begged and pleaded with him to stop, to please stop. He turned the finger around and with his tongue; he pushed the middle digit out through his lips. He pushed the finger so that the fat pudgy gray thing stuck straight up from his kisser. He shot his chin up into the air and gave them both the middle finger. Kyle flipped them the bird using Joe Maggot’s own grubby mechanical pencil stealing finger. He laughed at them as he watched their reaction. He watched them retch while he chewed on the finger. They spewed vomit on each other as he kept on chewing, breaking the bones and then swallowing it down – skin, blood, bone, strawberry twizzler, all of it.

  Kyle pulled and pushed his tongue in and around his teeth to grab every bit of the skin and juice Joe Maggot offered him. He was disappointed by the little of it there was.

  Kyle opened his eye. Not a single thing in his view told him any more or any less of anything that could help him understand where he was or even where he had come from. In front of him he only saw the near mirror image of what was behind him. More rain drops escaped the capture of the tree tops and made their way to his face and shoulders.

  The fevered skin in his arm was spreading. He knew that. It was all through him. He could feel it. It was high in his lungs and he could hear his air bags wheeze with nearly every breath. He felt it in his hands and chest and it was getting strong. It’s a flood, he thought. Lungs are gonna fill up like a pool of Nickelodeon Green Goo? And he wondered if he might drown.

  “Wouldn’t dat be a spat,” he coughed out, “drowning with no water?”

  Kyle pushed his insides against his chest and hurried along a cough that was building. He pushed harder and felt the mucous loosen and rupture. He threw what air he had until a warm lung puck was sitting on his tongue. He kept the heat of the salty good in his mouth for a minute. And then he spat it into his hand, but then wished he hadn’t. He was sicker than he thought.