by Tom King
Prophetier drops his phone, bends down, wraps his arms around Felix’s torso, yells into his broken ears. It’s time to go. The hospital’s been attacked. Your family’s outside, the pour is outside, and the itch itches—it itches on and on and on. Get out of here, Doc. Let your family greet you now, while there’s time, sit with your family, have a drink and sit with them. Get out of here, Doc. Get the hell out of here.
I have to save her. I’m a hero, Proph. I’m the fastest surgeon in history, The Surgeon of Speed! I’m a doctor. I save people. I’m a hero.
But you can’t save her, Felix. You’re not Doctor Speed anymore. You’re Felix. And Felix leaves and goes to his family and has another drink. That’s why you’re here. Why they sent you here. Your daughter and your wife—they know: you’re not fast enough.
Felix looks over at Prophetier and then back at the woman squirming under the weight of all that concrete. She’ll die. You’re not fast enough, and she’ll die.
The bartender finally pays some damn attention and pours the itch a drink, three fingers of blissful brown, and the itch clutches the glass, brings the glass to his lips, touches his lips to the glass.
And the woman screams again, and it’s not her, it’s his wife, and she shouts at him that he doesn’t need it, the brown isn’t needed. Just because the speed’s gone doesn’t mean you need this, not you, Felix. You’re more than the speed. Get help. Go to the heroes’ hospital. Go to the doctor. Let her help you, let her teach you that you’re Felix, not Doctor Speed, not a hero, but a man who can live without speed, without heroics, without the itch waiting.
We’ll come back. Once you’re fixed, we’ll come back. Penelope and I will come back. We promise. But for now, go there, be with help, with her. Let her save you. Because you can’t save yourself anymore. You can’t save anyone.
When are you going to accept it, Felix, you can’t save anyone. Not anymore.
The itch smiles as the brown feathers the tip of his tongue, the familiar tease before that fine, fine follow-through, and you can’t save anyone, and Felix twitches, throws his shoulder to the left and slugs Prophetier in the face, the way he used to slug all those villains in those easy, sober days. The itch drops his drink to the bar, the glass still full. Full and waiting.
As Prophetier reels back from the unexpected blow, Felix is able to wiggle out of his grip, able to rise to his feet and finally rush toward the pinned doctor. Prophetier shouts at him, tells him it’s all coming down, there’s no time, the place is coming down, run away, Felix, run away to your family.
But Felix isn’t thinking of any of that now. The pour is on the bar, and the itch is impatient, and he isn’t thinking of any of that now. The girl is screaming, the way his daughter screamed, and someone has to save her, the way he’d save his daughter if she were here, the way he’d save his wife if she were here. You can’t save anyone, but Felix isn’t thinking of any of that now. You’re a drunk, and you can’t save anyone, and the drink’s on the bar, and Felix isn’t thinking of any of that now as he gets to the doctor and hooks his wrists under her armpits and yanks her free.
She screams again, but Felix knows it’s all right, he’s a doctor and he knows it’s all right, it can be fixed with the right surgery, and who is he if not The Surgeon of Speed, and a chunk of the roof crashes in, gouges into the floor inches behind them, and Felix starts to pull, dragging the woman as he was once dragged not so long ago.
Prophetier’s gone; the waiting room’s been abandoned, and chunks of the building now hammer around them as the structure disintegrates under the stress of the attack, and Felix pulls, though his legs are no longer strong, and the speed is no longer his, and the drink sits there waiting, and he pulls her, pulls her to the door, out the door, to the hallway, and something hits him in the knee, in the head, and it hurts, and it bleeds, and he pulls her, and the pour, the pretty pour, is waiting.
But he doesn’t need it. Real heroes don’t. That was the lesson, wasn’t it? That’s what he’s learning as he skates her body through the building to the last exit, to the waiting grass and the waiting glass—that was the lesson. He hadn’t had the powers, so he’d had the drink, but now he didn’t have the drink, all he had was the girl, his girl, his daughter, his wife, dragging them all to safety, all he had was the drag, and he was still the hero. He didn’t care about the itch or any of that. He cared about the scream at the far end of the building, like his daughter’s scream, like his wife’s, like Penelope’s, and he saved her, he saved her.
Felix pulls the doctor through a final door, out onto the cool lawn in front of the building and then pulls her farther as the building collapses, and it’s one of those unexpected last-minute victories that is just like all the old unexpected last-minute victories. When they’re finally far enough, he allows her to lie on the ground, the blast of sirens declaring that real help is on the way, real doctors who can save them, save them more.
And Felix drops down next to his doctor, lies next to her, comforts her as he once comforted his child, Penelope, and his wife, Penelope, he comforts them all, and he notices for the first time that the itch has fallen back, pulled back from the bar and stretched his hands out, and Felix smiles because he saved them, he saved them, he saved them.
He doesn’t need the drink. He doesn’t need the power. He saved them. He can still be the hero. He can live without the drink and the power, and live with his family, live again with his family. It’s better to be with your family.
And above him stands a pretty girl, her red hair haloed by the sun’s brilliant light. It’s the unmasked girl from the office and the funeral, the one with the doctor, and she bends down and kisses his cheek and tells him he’s done well, he’s done good, and he thanks her, but he doesn’t get up. He’s too tired.
The girl giggles, stands, and twirls in the chaos surrounding them. And Felix laughs too, happy to be out, safe and happy for the first time in a long time, since The Blue, since the itch, since his wife left, since his daughter left, and the girl bends down and offers him a swig of the good stuff off a flask she keeps in her coat, and Felix has a swig of the good stuff, and another swig, because it’s better to be with your family, drunk with your family, than sober without them, than drunk without them, and he takes another swig, until he too is twirling in the chaos, celebrating the return of the game, the redemption of them all.
Anna Averies Romance, Vol. 3, #1 of 4
The phone in the kitchen rings three times before Anna can answer it, interrupting her writing. Her deadline’s in a few hours, and if she—
“Hello,” she says.
A screech of noise.
After giving it a few seconds, she hangs up and heads back to the computer. By the time she reaches her chair, the phone’s ringing again. Under her breath she swears freely and then returns to the kitchen, her bare feet chilled on the linoleum floor.
“Yes,” she says.
A slow-stirring static comes down the line. Small tones now bounce under the liquid fuzz, attempting to pierce the crackled surface. Sounds of screaming.
“Hello, is there—hello? Are you okay?”
A voice breaches the white noise: “Put PenUltimate—phone.”
“Hello? Hello? I can’t hear, you. Please can you—what did you—hello?”
The voice on the other side pokes again through the buzz: “My—Prophetier—PenUltimate—come—the—now.”
“Hello? Can you hear me? Is that you? Profet . . . Proafeteer . . . hello? Pen’s not here, he’s at a lunch. Can I . . . I mean, get you a message—get a message to Pen?”
“You—tell him—Arcadia General—attack—dead—tell him to—attack.”
“What did you say? Can you talk louder? Hello? What attack? I don’t . . . hello?”
“Attack—they’ve come—attack—he—back—all of us.”
“What attack? What are—what are you saying?”
Another screech of static.
“Hello? Hello? What attack? What attack? Who
—who’s—what attack?”
The line goes dead, and Anna drops the phone, smashing it on the floor, sending a flurry of electrical components skidding across the kitchen. Ignoring it all, she sprints to the living room, tries to figure out where her husband left the remote for the TV. A sudden cavity in her chest. Pen shouldn’t be involved in any attacks. He doesn’t do that anymore.
Her hands—as they move around the room, her hands, displacing cushions and blankets left in odd positions, left by Pen in the oddest of positions. The ring scratching at her hands. How many times has she told him to clean this damn room.
She finds a shirt buried in the couch, left over from an impromptu tryst, and it smells like him, sweet and stale. When he gets home, she’s going to yell at him about leaving this here. He just needs to think about these things when he leaves a room; it’s not so hard. He can learn that. When he gets home.
Despite her efforts, the search is futile: she finally concedes she’s lost, and she hopes that next time, beautiful and lovely and predictable next time, he’ll get it right.
Anna kneels down in front of the TV, begs the cable box to turn on, pressing randomly at a scattering of never-used buttons at the base of this cruel machine. God, she detests this monstrosity, all the knobs and wires that correspond to nothing and won’t do anything. If she could, she’d pick the whole thing up and throw it off the balcony of their apartment, watch it shrink away as it spun into space. If she had powers, that’s what she’d do.
Finally, some mysterious permutation activates the screen. Of course, Pen left the thing turned up to a typically unreasonable level. How many times does she have to tell him to turn the damn thing down before he leaves the room? She means to reach for the volume, but her hand is unwilling, and she leaves it as it is.
On the TV, on a channel that should be showing reruns of some asinine courtroom show, there’s an overhead shot of a window burning. The view switches: shots of men and women, their faces mudded red-brown from cuts and bruises, fleeing from something, but not all in the same direction. Anna reaches out; the static of the TV buzzes at the tips of her fingers as she glides her hands over the crowd and demands that each of them be a stranger.
Some announcer she doesn’t recognize repeats the same familiar phrases over and over. The words terrorist and cause and unexpected come and go, but she’s not really paying attention anymore. At one point he says something about heroes, but she’s not sure if he’s referring to the game kind or to the firemen or to something else.
He lost his phone. That’s why I got the call. That stupid boy. He left his phone at the funeral. That’s so like him. And he never went back and got it. So he had hers; she lent it to him. Which means she can’t call him from her cell, because he has it. That stupid, dumbass boy.
She returns to the kitchen and finds the shattered pieces of their portable on the floor, the back open, the battery missing. They need to get another landline, but they’re waiting until they’ve got a bigger place. They’re always waiting. She keeps telling him—
She drops to her hands and knees, the hard floor biting at her joints through the small cushion of her sweatpants. It’s not there. Where the hell is it? Where the hell—after placing her ear against the ground, she spies the battery under the cabinet, and she squeezes her fingers into the tight space to reach it. At her touch, it jumps and scoots farther back.
Why’d they get these cabinets? Why? They could’ve gotten ones that fit better. But he insisted they’d save money this way. He insisted. Jesus Christ! He could—Jesus Christ! Now she can barely make out the outline of the damn battery in the stupid shadow haunting the bottom of her too too small, too fucking small kitchen!
Her husband can dodge bullets. Though she has her doubts, he claims he could put his fist through a wall and not feel a thing. Before he could drive a car, he was bounding through the air, steering a slit of metal through the clouds of Arcadia, his hand clutching a metal bar attached by a metal rope to a metal man who’d saved the world countless times.
She asked him once—in the beginning, when they wouldn’t even call what they were doing “dating”—if he was ever scared. “No,” he said, “not once,” and then he was quiet.
And she knew it was bravado. She knew he had to cover up the fear with something thick in order to do what he had to do; but that was enough for her. He didn’t have to say everything—some of it she could figure out on her own.
Her thumb and forefinger pinch in, seizing the sides of the battery. Not breathing, she tenderly places a speck more force on the object and begins to drag her arm backward. It moves, just a hair or two, but it moves.
Finally, she fits both arms in, brackets her fingers on each of the battery’s sides; with that slight illusion of a grip, she starts to slide the cruel thing out of the gap. As it comes, she whispers to it, coaxes it forward. There’s no one around to hear her, and she tells it some secrets about how she worries sometimes and sometimes she needs to know.
The battery listens and kindly cooperates by slithering out to the open. She picks it off the floor, but in her rush it slips from her hands and, only by the grace of God, lands in an easily accessible spot in the middle of the floor. With as much calm as she can possibly be expected to fucking muster, she picks the goddamn thing up one more time and shoves it into the back of the phone, clicks on the back covering, and finally dials his number.
She can still hear the steady man on the TV pacing through his commentary about heroes. While the phone tries to connect, he meanders on about what it’s like to live in a world where flying men with metal faces can no longer respond to such tragedies. What a tragedy that is.
“Hey, this is Pen, leave me a message. I guess.” The voice mail from the lost phone, of course, and she hangs up, again swears openly, and dials her own cell number. Stupid boys. They can’t do anything without—
Yes, the narrator on the TV opines, where are the heroes of today? Where have they all gone?
2
Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #569
Pen’s phone rings. Well, thank God.
“Hey, your phone’s going off.”
“Yeah,” Pen says to the short, fat, and pale man sitting across the table from him who happens to be sporting lifts, a girdle, and a splotched spray-on tan, “I noticed.”
“Mine drops the Superman hook, like when it rings, right?”
Pen nods and smiles, mouthing the words, One sec, as he puts the phone to his ear. He also just barely manages to resist shoving a fork in Sicko’s sweetly open jugular. For now.
“Hello,” Pen says.
“Hey, man, you up in comics?” Sicko asks. “You read the comics, man?”
“Honey? Honey?” Anna’s voice on the phone. “Penny, that you? Are you okay? Is—are you all right? Just tell me you’re all right.”
“Annie, honey? You okay? I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” Not quite true, but his wife’s tone prevents him from talking about the leech-infested swamp of a lunch he’s been wading through with this, thankfully, former “edgy” gamer.
“Dude, I crush comics,” Sicko says. “All them people, all them powers. Just like the day, bro, like the mad-ass day.”
“Good, good,” Anna says. “It’s nothing. I was worried because what, y’know, with the TV thing. It’s stupid, I’m sorry. I know you’re in the middle of your lunch, I can call later.”
Sicko keeps piping on about his comics, and Pen again judiciously decides not to murder him. “. . . and I’m reading this one, man, about like Wolverine, and he’s back in time like fighting with Jason and the Argonauts, yo, but with powers . . .” Very judiciously, because he could just reach out and—
“Honey, you there?”
“Oh, yeah,” Pen says. “Sorry, just—what’d you say? What TV thing?”
“. . . and they’re on this ship, right, and they’re fighting, right, like with gods and shit . . .”
“Honey, are you okay?” Anna’s harsh tone: she knows he�
��s not paying attention. At times he regrets finding an omniscient wife. “Aren’t you seeing this, it’s on every station? There’s been some sort of explosion, I guess, at Arcadia General. They think it’s a terrorist attack. It’s on every channel, and Prophetier called and asked me about you.”
“Prophetier called?”
“. . . and Wolverine’s like snikt! And the other dude’s like . . .”
“Oh, so what? Now you’re listening?”
“. . . and this other dude just whacks him! It’s real, I mean really real . . .”
“Hey, wait, that’s not fair, honey.”
“Jesus,” Anna says. “I think he was calling from—I don’t know. I’m glad you’re okay. I thought you were there too.”
“. . . dude, it’s awesome, art’s awesome, story’s awesome . . .”
“I’m fine,” Pen says. “What did Proph say? Did he want me to do something?”
Sicko, loudly: “But, dude, seriously, you’ve got to read this one!”
“I don’t know,” Anna says, her voice breaking softly. “He sounded, I don’t know, like something—look just forget that, just stay safe, okay?”
“Hon, I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m safe. I’m always safe.”
“Okay, okay—I’m sorry. I’ll let you go back, back to your—I’m sorry. Just be careful.”
“Hon, it’s fine.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Anna takes a breath, swallows back tears. “How’s it going anyway? How’s lunch?”
“It’s okay.”
“. . . know people think it’s for kids, but, dude, comics are a genre not a—no, I mean, they’re a medium, not a . . .”
“Okay?”
“We’re talking comics, I guess, or something.”
“. . . and super-Jason’s like with a sword, but like a fire . . .”
“That well, huh?” Of course she knows.
“It’s fine,” Pen says.