A Once Crowded Sky

by Tom King

  “I didn’t see you here when I walked up,” Soldier says. “I didn’t hardly see anyone. I’m sorry. I would’ve said something.”

  “You heard what I told you? The game’s coming back.”

  Soldier twists his torso, tries to stretch away the pain. The stretch takes enough of the edge off; he can live with the rest of it.

  “Did you hear me?” Prophetier asks again. “It’s coming back.”

  “Yeah, I heard you.”

  Prophetier stares at Soldier, looking for a while at Soldier’s face and then at Soldier’s guns; after some time waiting, Prophetier looks around, smoke from his cigarette following his eyes. “My father’s buried here.” He points over the headstones into the distance, toward a hill at the edge of the cemetery. “I came to visit.”

  “I didn’t know your father was a villain. I’m sorry to hear it.”

  Prophetier shrugs. “He built something he couldn’t control.”

  “Lot of them were that way. Not bad men. Just let things get away from them.”

  “I suppose.” Prophetier removes his cigarette and throws it onto Survivor’s grave. “Your villain there, he was a father too.” He reaches in his pocket and lights up another.

  “Yeah.” Soldier picks up the cigarette, tosses it off into a nearby clearing. “Survivor and his kids, The Nefarious Nine.”

  “All dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  Prophetier’s gaze sticks on the northern edge of the cemetery, where the last row of graves butts up against the surrounding tree line. He grunts and twitches his nose back.

  “Something wrong?” Soldier asks.

  “All except Runt. He survives, makes the sacrifice. The son of Survivor who became a hero. The son of the villain.” Prophetier laughs. “None of our stories are original, are they?”

  “I don’t know.” Soldier looks where Prophetier’s looking. There’s movement up there, some people coming. With his eyes as they are, Soldier can’t quite make out who it is. “Is there something I can help you with, Proph?”

  Prophetier smiles, inhales deeply on his cigarette. “We all come back. Something will come. Our stories. They’re not original. Something will happen, and we’ll come back.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I know. I’m the Prophetier.”

  “Maybe.” Soldier is still looking out at the approaching crowd, about half a dozen men making their way through the graves. “But I don’t think so. For what that’s worth.”

  “I’ve been working with Pen. We’ll need him. But he’ll need help.”

  Soldier gestures out at the men coming at them. “You know those fellows?”

  “I know them.”

  “Is there going to be trouble?”

  “I’m not allowed here,” Prophetier says. “They’re here to take me away. So maybe some trouble.”

  Soldier squints again at the group walking toward them—and Prophetier reaches around quick and grabs Carolina from Soldier’s holster.

  “Hey!” Soldier shouts.

  “I don’t know really,” Prophetier says, backing away from Soldier, the gun in his hand pointed at Soldier’s head. “Is this trouble?”

  “What’s the problem here, son?” Soldier asks, his hand dropping down to California.

  “We all come back.”

  “Put it down,” Soldier says, taking a step forward. “Put the gun down, Proph. Nice and simple.”

  Prophetier coughs, his cigarette falling from his mouth. Soldier takes another step, and Prophetier points his gun at the air, at the ground, at Soldier. “We all come back.”

  Soldier grips the handle of his pistol. As he always does before he draws, Soldier flicks his fingers against the back of the triggers. It’s a bad habit he picked up ninety years back.

  “Son,” Soldier says, talking slow, breathing hard. “Son, listen, listen to me. Put the gun down. Nothing good comes of that. Just put it down.”

  “We all come back.” Prophetier straightens his arm, aiming his gun now at Soldier’s chest. “We all come back.”

  “C’mon, just put it down.”

  Prophetier smiles. “We’ll fight again. You’ll fight again.”

  “Proph I . . .” Soldier pauses, gets some breath back, remembers how many men he’s faced like this, how many men are dead after facing him like this. Until next time. “I don’t know about any of that,” Soldier says, tightening his hands around California.

  “We all come back!” Prophetier yells.

  Soldier licks his lips. “Listen.” Soldier pauses, takes a good swallow. “Listen to me.”

  “I’m the Prophetier.”

  “I know you are, son, I remember all you did. But, listen, it’s over now, it’s all gone. And that ain’t all bad. It ain’t.”

  “You don’t get it. You don’t understand.”

  Soldier steps forward. There’s barely a foot between him and the barrel. “It’s over, and it ain’t bad, because I can tell you, if this was before, and a man held my gun and was standing where you’re standing, I’d have drawn faster than you could aim, and I’d have killed you. You wouldn’t have known it was coming. Prophetier or no. You’d not even have thought to know it was coming.”

  “I have to prepare you.”

  Soldier takes his hand off his weapon. “But the game’s over. I ain’t firing. There’s no need for it. Let’s settle this better. We can do better than bullets.”

  “We all come back.”

  “I’m not playing the game anymore.” Soldier raises his hands. “There’s no need for this. It’s done. Powers are gone. Villains are dead. That’s a hard lesson. But it’s true. I swear, son, I swear.” Soldier puts his hands well over his head, as if he was catching the sky. “Just put the gun down, and we can talk this out.”

  “You’ll save the world again.” Prophetier tilts the gun and fires, blasting at the dirt at their feet, firing into Survivor’s grave. Soldier reels back, trips over nothing, and falls on his side. The pain that was there before levels up and hits him hard. He scrambles some, trying to pull his body back into position as the bullets pelt the ground near his feet. As soon as he’s able to get back up, he loses his footing again and falls back down.

  Soon enough, Carolina runs out, and Prophetier stops shooting. As the gun quiets, Soldier can hear men shouting, running toward them, the men from the tree line. Soldier cranes his neck, tries to find them, tries to see how close they are, but all he sees is Prophetier standing over him, Soldier’s gun balanced on his palm.

  “There,” Prophetier says. “Now it’s done. Now he’s dead for sure. Now you can go home.”

  “Son, what the hell is your problem?”

  “Stop wasting your time. Go home. Start preparing. When it comes, we’ll need your help. Stop being weak. Stop talking. We all come back. You’re The Soldier of Freedom. You’ll save us again.”

  “What the hell’s your problem!” Soldier shouts.

  “Be prepared when it comes. If you’re weak, you won’t be able to save the world. You won’t be able to save Pen. You won’t even be able to save Mashallah. If you’re weak, distracted, she’ll die. So get going.”

  “Just shut up. Just be quiet.”

  Prophetier lets go of Carolina, and she falls heavy onto Soldier’s chest. “You’ll need this,” Prophetier says, and a man comes from the right and tackles him, shoves him down onto the graves. Another man is there, a security guard, and he grabs Prophetier’s arms and binds them behind him. Prophetier tries to say something, and the first man shoves his face into the ground.

  A third man comes up behind Soldier and starts to lift him to his feet. “You all right?” the man asks.

  “I’m fine,” Soldier says, bucking out of the guard’s arms, getting his own legs to stand him up. He looks over to Prophetier, who’s struggling against his captors.

  “We’ll take care of this,” one of the men says.

  “He didn’t mean any harm,” Soldier says. “He just ain’t right.
It ain’t his fault.”

  Another guard picks Soldier’s gun up and hands it to him, and Soldier holsters the weapon. “Don’t worry,” the guard says, “we’ll take care of this.”

  “Please,” Soldier says. “He ain’t right.”

  They don’t seem to hear him, and the guards prop Prophetier up against Survivor’s headstone. Proph’s yelling now, going on, and they find some tape and put it over his mouth as they go about reporting the incident over their radios.

  Soldier steps back. He means to say something else, explain what this was about, how a man can be like that, struggle against nothing. Sometimes you need a fight. Everyone needs a fight, a villain waiting for your shot. Pull the trigger.

  “I’m sorry,” Soldier says, and he’s not sure if anyone hears or cares. He says it again, then he turns and walks toward the cemetery exit where he left his truck.

  A few yards down the road he hears Proph going off again, shouting at all the dead villains, “We all come back! We all come back! We all come back!” Proph must have got an arm free, got the tape off his mouth. It’s hard to keep a hero down.

  Soldier keeps a steady pace, walking the best he can for a man with knees made of silk and blades, and behind him, back near all those buried villains, Prophetier continues to shout out, “We all come back! We all come back! We all come back!”

  The Soldier of Freedom #520

  Soldier drives around for a while. Eventually, he heads to the range and takes aim at a paper man, three circles drawn in his center. Pull the trigger. He draws and fires from fifty feet and misses. He calls the target closer. Forty feet, and he misses. Thirty feet, and he misses. Twenty feet, and he misses. Ten feet, and he misses. Ten feet. Pull the trigger. He remembers a war where he killed thirteen men from ten feet away—with eight bullets. Another battle won. Well done. Well done.

  Soldier holsters his guns, walks to the metal door, and exits the building. A slip of moon serves well enough to light his way to his truck, which isn’t too far off. There’re shots in the air. The sound of them echoes, and his hand twitches.

  At home Soldier flicks a lamp on and sits back into his couch, his pistols scratching into his side. He looks up at a poster on the wall Mashallah’d given him. It shows two people hugging, crying, and after a while, he gets tired of looking at it, and he tries to read something. He’s got a collection of books now, not military-strategy books as he always had, but classics, fictions he’s been meaning to read over a lifetime, and he picks one out, and it’s a nice enough story, but he doesn’t get anywhere with it, doesn’t see the point to it, and after too long, he gets up and walks to the kitchen to get his speech and some water.

  His speech is laid out on the kitchen table, and he grabs it and takes it and the water back to the couch. He needs to go over it again. Proph was right. He’s only wasting time. The funeral’s tomorrow, and he’s got to have it all down and proper by then. Pull the trigger.

  He reads through it a few times, tests himself, then he puts the speech back and washes the glass, puts it away in the cupboard. He goes back to the couch and sits down. He thinks about Mashallah and the Survivor and the graves and Prophetier and Prophetier’s shouting and everyone’s coming back, and he gets up and walks over to the guest room.

  His suit’s been laid out for a day, but he’ll need different holsters for the funeral, and he’s been meaning to find them. The ones he’s wearing now had been given to him by General Pershing for leading some charge or another back in France, and they’ve got red, white, and blue brushed up and down them. Pull the trigger. All that plume and shine doesn’t do any good anymore.

  Soldier gets in a closet, starts rooting through all the junk he’s got piled up. Over the years and wars you gather a lot of junk. After almost fifteen minutes he finds a brown pair of holsters. They were hidden beneath a recon map of south Baghdad; that’s why he didn’t see them at first.

  Soldier goes to the bedroom and lays the new holsters on the bed. He draws out California and Carolina, his oldest, best friends, and sets them down too. He unhooks his belt, takes off the Pershings, and puts them in the top drawer of his dresser, next to an old, bloody medal he’d won in Italy and worn in Korea.

  Soldier coughs and takes up his suit from a hook on the back of the door and irons it again and puts it on. It’s a new suit, but it fits well enough. He gets a tie from the closet, a black tie, a gift from someone he’d saved in Laos. He doesn’t really remember who. It takes him six tries to get the knot right, but it fits eventually.

  With his tie and suit on, Soldier picks up the holsters from the bed and strings them through his belt. He looks down at his guns. The grips are pointed at him, and they are inviting. He takes them up, and they fit just right in his palms, and he puts them away in the holsters, lets them rest. And it’s all fine. Fine and done. Finally done.

  Soldier sits back down on the couch and stares at the picture on the wall. He goes over his speech in his head, mouthing out the words. When he’s finished, he sits for a few minutes in silence, then he gets up and goes to the mirror in the bathroom to look over the whole outfit. You don’t know until you look it over.

  It doesn’t quite sit right, the guns and the suit and the tie—they don’t go together no matter how rutty these old holsters are. Pull the trigger. But Soldier’s never been anywhere without California and Carolina, least not since a long time back.

  He removes California, meaning to leave her on the sink and see the suit without the pistol’s decoration; but instead he watches as the figure in the mirror lifts the weapon to his temple, his finger, as ever, placed with confidence inside that lovingly curved trigger-well. Pull the trigger.

  The game’s over. You can’t shoot Survivor. You can’t shoot Prophetier. There’s no use to any of that. All those boys killed in all those wars as you won all those medals fighting all those enemies. That’s all done. Pull the trigger. All those families killed in all those adventures while you were fighting with your perfectly matched villain. All that life lost. Mashallah. It’s done.

  A destiny. A gun. Another battle won. Well done. Well done. Pull the trigger.

  It’s over, it’s over, and now you got nothing. No family. No wife. No skill or use beyond the killing you’ve done and the killing you can’t do no more. Pull the trigger. Better men should be in your place, taking your air. Men who haven’t done what you’ve done.

  You think you’re better than Survivor? Because maybe you killed for a cause, or at least tried to? But, here you are, just like him, staring at the same destiny, clutching the same gun. But have you the guts to go as he did? Pull the trigger. Can you face up to what you’ve done? Until next time! Pull the trigger.

  You think you’re better than Prophetier? Think you’re fixed while he’s cracked? You think you’re beyond the hope we all’ll come back, that it’ll just be so darn exciting to turn the page and find yourself once again leaping into battle? But here you are. With California to your head. How sad is that? How childish. Like the destiny. Like the gun. Pull the trigger.

  Is that it? Is that it? Or maybe you think you’re better than him? Better than Ultimate, ready to give your life to save all others, finally let this game go on without you. You think you can rise off into the empty blue and be finally free. Fine then. Here you are. So pull the trigger. Show them what it means.

  Pull the trigger, Soldier. Pull the trigger! PULL THE GODDAMN TRIGGER!

  1

  The Blue Aftermath: The Funeral, #1 of 2

  The Soldier of Freedom

  “Thank you. Thank you all for coming.

  “My grandfather Washington, when he was giving a speech up North to his men about why they shouldn’t abandon the cause, he took out a letter to read to them. The letter had some small writing on it, and he took out his spectacles, and he put them on, and he said—he apologized to the troops there for having to do that, and he said he was sorry but he’d sacrificed his eyes for his country along with everything else.

 
“So now, if you all don’t mind, I’m going to pinch a line here from him while putting on my own glasses, first pair I’ve ever worn after too many years of service. And let me apologize now for having to do this, but like most of y’all in the room tonight, I’ve done a touch of giving for this world, and I’ve given my eyes along with the rest of me.

  “But we have all given a lot. Given a lot of what made us. Most of you in the room—well, I know most of you. One time or another, we teamed up against some villain trying to rob a bank, or destroy a world, or whatever was the latest scheme.

  “And we fought that villain best we could, and we beat him ’cause we knew we had to, knew that we, the people here, we’d been given something extra, and it was our duty to use that to help folk. So we fought, and we risked, and we did some real good. I don’t like to brag, in fact I can’t much stand a braggart, but I can recognize when something’s gone right. When some people’s done something right.

  “That was our greatest joy, I think. And I know we all did it for our own reasons, and I know that some of those reasons weren’t always moral like. But that don’t matter all that much at the end of it. What matters was that people felt safe, people could live the lives they wanted because of what we were doing. That there’s what was important. That there’s what made our own lives worth doing.

  “And that there is what died when Ultimate flew away from us, didn’t it? When we gave him all those powers and he flew away. And I know this funeral here—it’s about him. And don’t you worry, I’m getting to him, if in a roundabout way. But this place, this mourning here, it’s about more than that, ain’t it? I mean, that empty box behind me we’re all pretending’s holding our friend is about more than just him, ain’t it?

  “And the only reason I’m saying that’s because he was about more than that, I think. He stood for something, and I’m thinking if he were here, he’d deny that, but we all’d know it was true. He stood for what was good and just, stood for us helping one another like we did. Whenever you were out there—and I know y’all understand this—you knew no matter how bad it got, no matter how hard you was being pushed by just the worst types, he had your back.