A Once Crowded Sky

by Tom King

  2

  Distant Sun #96

  He meets her at the airport and pretends it was an accident. When she sees him, Mashallah smiles and leans toward him, perhaps to hug him. Sun hesitates, having heard that she’s different now, that her religion has given her a new set of rules that he could never understand. She hugs him, and he apologizes, explains his confusion. She laughs and tells him the universe is vast, there are many worlds full of many things, “as long as my love for God goes with me in all of them, the rest will come.”

  He gives her his story, tells her he’s going overseas to see about another attack. How funny to have run into her here just as she was leaving to go back to her home. He doesn’t tell her why he follows the attacks, the orders his father’s given him to follow Pen, save Pen. He doesn’t tell her that he knew she’d be here, that when Star-Knight paid for her tickets, Sun had found her schedule, noticed that they would overlap at the airport, that they would be together long enough for Sun finally to save the world.

  They sit by a large window and watch the planes fly off into the blue. They reminisce about flying, how they used to fly together, playing games. Sun reminds her of how much he liked hide-and-seek, how he’d always take to the clouds, how she’d always find him. He should’ve thought of a new place to hide, but it was always the clouds. But he was only twelve then, “Starry,” his father’s sidekick, looking for something to do between Liberty Legion missions. He’d always run to her, tug on her cape, and ask to play the game. Again and again, and then always to the clouds. She laughs hard into her hands and tells him she doesn’t need to be reminded. She remembers it all.

  “Do you miss flying?” he asks her, and she doesn’t answer. Instead she looks down at the dozens of small mirrors that decorate her outfit, that split the light of the airport into a thousand strands of color. “I miss it,” he says, and she looks up and smiles. “Sometimes I just want to jump. Just find something high and jump. See what happens.” He laughs and points his hands to the ceiling, as if it were all a joke.

  She doesn’t laugh with him. Instead she looks out the window as another plane powers its engines, rolls fast down the runway, and flies away.

  “I need your help,” he says.

  Her eyes stay on the window. “What help could I give you?”

  “It’s about Soldier.”

  She looks back at him. “I don’t know anything about Soldier.” She tugs at the scarf around her neck.

  “I need you to talk to him for me. I need you to pass on a message.”

  “I’m sorry, I won’t see him. I’m going home.”

  “Listen, my dad follows me, I swear, records everything I do. I need someone who can talk to Soldier, so my dad won’t see. And you’ve got all that history. No one would think it’d be weird or anything if you talked to him.”

  “Sun, don’t be funny. Your father is not following you. Star-Knight loves you.”

  “I know but . . . but he told me something.” Sun stops and looks at a camera perched above them. He considers again if his father could have bribed his way into these lenses. “You don’t understand,” he says, his voice low. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  Mashallah reaches for his hand, then stops and puts her hands back in her lap.

  “Darling boy, listen. I don’t think you should be so sensitive about this. Which makes me think I shouldn’t be hearing it. If your father has confided in you, it is not my business to know. A father should talk to his son. This is the will of God, you should not take that lightly, Sun.”

  Sun looks down at the falling star inscribed on his belt. He remembers how it used to glow when he would fly. “Please,” he whispers. “I think I can save everyone.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Sun looks up. “If you can just talk to Soldier, tell him what my dad told me.”

  Mashallah shakes her head. “No. Your father is a good man. I don’t want to hear more of this. A son should respect his father.”

  “Please.” Sun takes Mashallah’s hand. “I can still save everyone.”

  Mashallah tilts her head and takes her hand from his. She strokes his face, then puts her hand over her mouth. “A son should respect his father. Like a wife respects her husband.” She smoothes her dress with her hands. “I am not going to see Soldier. I can’t see him. Things are different now, Sun. It doesn’t matter what we miss or do not miss.” She smiles and talks through her teeth. “We cannot hide in the clouds forever.”

  “Look, just listen for a second—”

  “Sun, no. I don’t want to hear any more. If there is a problem, talk to your father. Talk to your father, or I will talk to your father.”

  A call for his plane comes over the speakers. He looks up at her, and she shakes her head. “Please,” he says.

  “Trust in God. Talk to your father. He’s a good man.”

  He waits, and she says nothing.

  “Is this your husband? Because you’ve gone back to that shit? I mean, c’mon. Is this because of your new bullshit? You have to listen. I can save the world.”

  “How dare you. You are speaking of things you do not understand.”

  He wants to scream, all of a sudden; he wants to scream and scream and blast and burn and fly and roar and scream and just scream forever. Sun stands, starts to turn away, then bends over to her and lowers his voice. “Let me tell you, my dad’s a fucking liar.”

  Mashallah slaps Sun across the face. Some of the noise of the scampering people softens as passengers turn their heads toward the sound of the blow.

  “Never talk of your father that way,” Mashallah says. “Never. You are acting against God. You don’t know it, but you are.”

  Sun wipes his fingers over the new sting. “We used to fly. We used to fucking fly.”

  He turns and walks toward his gate. Eventually, he gets on board and takes off. Right before he calls his father from the plane, he sticks his cheek to the window and tries to look up, to see what’s left of the sky. But he can’t find the right angle, so he gives up and makes his call, reporting no change in the situation: everything’s the same.

  After he lands, he visits the public square where the crack had gone off two days before, killing dozens. He finds a spot on top of one of the buildings where he’ll be able to see them, and he waits. He waits a while, then he comes back down and gets in a cab, ready to go back.

  The driver lights a cigarette as Sun settles back into the seat. And there they are: Soldier and Pen cutting across what’s left of the square, and the cab honks at another car blocking their way home.

  “I want to save the world,” Sun says.

  “Eh?” the driver asks.

  Fuck who’s watching. Fuck the plan. Fuck Pen. Fuck Mashallah. Fuck The Blue. Fuck the power. Fuck the belt. Fuck Star-Knight.

  “I’m going to save the world,” Sun says while opening the door. He shouts out to Pen and Soldier. They turn in his direction as he gets out and starts to walk across the square.

  Crack.

  He’s in the air, thrown into a cloudless sky. Around him people scream out in pain and terror, and he tries to tell them not to worry, that he will save them all, and as he falls back down, he closes his eyes and waits once again to fly.

  The Soldier of Freedom #523

  A car flips across the square, spinning end over end; and underneath its spreading shadow, a girl with two mismatched socks peers upward, ponders the dimming sky. Soldier’s too far, though he tries to get his legs under him, tries to stumble forward. He’s too far and too slow. The air between the girl and the car thins until Soldier can’t hardly see that there’s anything at all separating her from the metal.

  Pen is there—slamming his shoulder and back into the car’s underside, shoving it the few inches off-balance it needs to tilt a little farther to the left, to come down just a yard away from the now screaming girl. The car bashes into the concrete surrounding the stadium, launching a crowd of shrapnel through the midday air. A shard of gla
ss from one of its mirrors lances into the girl’s side, and she falls.

  Soldier arrives and scoops the girl off the ground, tucks her wet face into his shoulder. Crack. An explosion hurls ripples of pressure into his body, and Soldier curses his useless joints as he’s forced down to one knee. Crack. Another, closer now, shock waves pulsing through his dry muscles; and he clutches the child closer, shrugs off the ground, and walks on.

  He tries to get to where he’d put Starry: a small cave created by two crossed support beams that ought to be enough as long as whatever-the-hell-it-is doesn’t get too close. When he reaches Starry, he props the girl up against the unconscious boy’s body, hoping the two’ll provide some comfort to each other. A cursory check shows she’s been hurt, but not too bad, and there’ll be more soon enough; as he walks away, he can hear her screaming for him to come back and take care of her, but nothing can be done about that.

  A few more cracks shout through the air, real close in now, and bits and chunks of the monuments in the square around them seem to form a bladed cyclone that rambles along the edge of the park: all those piles of steel and wire circling around and around until they can find something solid to put themselves into.

  A man in the distance squeezes himself into the ground, almost waiting to die under the fury coming at him. Soldier puts his feet down and tries to get there in time. He dodges a spinning chunk of girder, then an oblong, blue hunk of something, then a slip of glass hurling in close.

  He moves left and right though his body complains, and he survives each second and prepares for the next one, and it ain’t that bad, he ain’t that bad, and then a splinter of wood about the size of a good rifle is spinning right at him, and Soldier knows he’s going down.

  Pen is there—a fist out of nowhere plows through the object, rending it into a dozen nothing splinters that slide off Soldier’s face, cutting into the skin maybe three or four times. Then Pen’s gone, running faster than anything to save the man Soldier couldn’t.

  And the cracks follow him—flame and debris erupting behind each of Pen’s footsteps as he trails away from Soldier. The chaos chases him, bursts from the ground surrounding the running boy, plastering his back and sides with soot from the torn structures underneath.

  But it never gets too close. Though it flirts and teases, it doesn’t lay a direct hand on Pen; instead, it provides him a crooked pathway to jump and loop through, obstacles to stretch around and pummel with his deft kicks.

  Soldier stands upright, the danger receding from him and toward the boy. He jiggles loose a pinkie-length splinter of wood from his chin and places it between his teeth. He chews slowly on the mix of saw and blood.

  In front of him, Pen grabs the poor fellow off the ground and slings him over one shoulder. He turns to the right, but stops immediately as a crack convulses inches away from his feet. How lucky he is to’ve just missed it. How fortunate and skilled he is. Pen turns back toward Soldier and starts to sprint in the older man’s direction.

  Sure as anything, the ground behind Pen combusts and dashes right after him; crack-crack-crack—it roars right along, just a few steps too slow to catch the boy.

  Though it’s coming his way fast, Soldier’s not too concerned. He knows what Pen’ll do, and when the strong arms wrap around his waist, Soldier allows his body to go limp, making it easier for the kid to carry two men while he’s running from something that refuses to catch up.

  In no time at all, they reach their sort-of sanctuary, and Pen slides under the crossed beams on his knees, a grown man hanging on each of his shoulders. Pen settles them both down, turns back to the field, and is off again.

  Soldier watches him go, watches the spurts of earth that tumble in his wake, twisting around Pen’s ankles without tripping him or nothing. The cry of the cracks softens as Pen’s figure dips beneath Soldier’s line of sight. As they fade, he can finally hear the high whimpers of the man they’ve saved praying and blubbering, repeating some nonsense over and over.

  Something conscious is coming after them, that much is damn clear. It ain’t just an alien biting at them without understanding. It wants something, something beyond just killing them all. The way it nips at Pen’s feet. It ain’t random.

  It’s a villain, and like all the villains before it, it wants to dance with the hero of its time, play its little games, play the game they’ve all been playing for the past God-knows-how-long. And Pen does what they all’ve been doing since the beginning: he offers his arm and invites it to center stage, tucks its hand in his, and begins an ancient and just lovely waltz.

  Goddamn . . . he’d thought . . . just goddamn.

  Remembering he ain’t completely useless, Soldier bends down to at least comfort the girl, but when he touches her, he knows it’s much too late, her skin’s much too cold. He checks her pulse, and there ain’t nothing there, just a waste of soft, new skin.

  He lays the girl out next to Starry, who gives up a low cough that Soldier can barely hear above the other man’s wet ramblings. Soldier’d checked her, but you can never check enough.

  Soldier pulls down the girl’s eyelids and kisses her forehead, like he’s done a dozen times before in a dozen other fights, or probably more than a dozen, probably a lot more than a goddamn dozen.

  Soldier fondles his guns and squints out into the distance. Villain and hero, gracefully coming together and then parting with such formality and then coming together again. The old patterns. The old ways. The old stories he’d heard DG tell him 150 years ago.

  And behind them, Starry coughs again, a man sobs, and a little girl lies still, not listening to anything, not caring how fun and exciting the game is that’s being played a short distance from her mismatched socks.

  Classic Freedom Fighter Special #1

  “Where the hell’s that damn boy?” Jules’s eyes slip across every panel of his trifocals as he looks for his grandson. “I swear, I will kill the boy.”

  “Don’t think you’re allowed to off the employees, boss. Even the ones with which you’re related.” Burn, the cook who used to turn his hands into fire, makes another joke. Jules doesn’t bother with it and takes his grandson’s order from the spit-clean counter over to the waiting patrons.

  “Pastrami, rye, with the fruit salad and extra pickles for the gentleman. Chopped liver with a cup of cabbage for the lovely lady with the very good taste.” Jules’s back fusses with him as he places the food on the table.

  This guy’s name was Chimera, and he could project illusions. The girl? His mother, maybe? “Anything else you need?” Jules asks. “Jose, some refills here. Diet, right?” Near the back of the restaurant, Jose leaves his rag on table nineteen and rushes toward the boss. Jose was one of Melancholy’s old flunkies, used to run around robbing jewelry stores in a fakakta “sad-face” mask before Jules got him a real job maybe a year ago.

  “Thanks, Jules,” Chimera says, reaching for one of the four mustards before him. “Hey, you hear about Starry, Star-Knight’s kid? Hear they got him over at St. Mary’s.”

  “Yeah, all tragedy. They’ve got him on the machine now, they say. God forbid, he might not make it. You know, Star-Knight helped put up the money for this place. I’ve got nothing but sympathy for that family.” Jose comes to the table and waits for God knows what. Jules indicates with his eyebrows that the boy maybe ought to get started? And Jose scoops up the drinks and heads back behind the counter.

  “Hey, where’s your boy, Jules? Wasn’t he the one who took our order?” Chimera smears spicy-brown over his five-inch-deep sandwich.

  “Please, don’t get me started.” His hands thrown wide, Jules uses the laughter as a cue to peel off and leave the two to their meal. If the kid’s not on the floor, it’s not so hard to figure out where he’ll be. Jules has already followed David’s father through all these same mistakes.

  At the delivery entrance in the back alley, David’s enjoying a cigarette, his eyes too busy tracing a pair of long legs on the main avenue to notice his grandfather’
s hand swooping down on the pink of the boy’s neck—snap!

  “What’s the deal, Pa?” David used to wear a red, white, and blue mask, and like his grandfather, he called himself Freedom Fighter. Like the two generations of Golds before him, the boy’d been able to manipulate the forces of chaos and order, sometimes healing wounds and sometimes causing them. Now though, he has to live with the sore neck.

  “You don’t have a table to get to? You have all the time to sit out here doing nothing, while your eighty-three-year-old grandfather does the work for you?”

  David flicks his cigarette into the alley. “All right, all right. Sorry, Pa, lost track.” The boy stands and heads back to his job. Really, Jules should be relieved. If it had been David’s father, he’d be out here doing the drugs, and this poor girl might have to fear for her life. Jules looks up for the millionth time, thanks God for blessing him with such a good grandson, and reenters his deli.

  From the back he sees them waiting on a plush bench next to a fake, planted fern. He tries to remember the new girl’s name, and he also tries to remember not to yell because she’s new. Quick as his bean legs can carry him, he shuffles over to the front door.

  “Stacy,” Jules says.

  “Penelope, sir.” Penelope, right. Like her mother, Doc Speed’s wife, poor girl.

  “Penelope, I’m sorry, do you know who those two men are?” He doesn’t bother waiting for an answer. If she knows and she left them sitting, he’ll be upset; and if she doesn’t know altogether, he’ll be upset—why bother? “That’s PenUltimate, Ultimate’s coward of a partner, and that man with him is The Soldier of Freedom, greatest hero this country’s ever known—God knows what he’s doing with that schmuck. They don’t wait, dear. They sit wherever they like.”

  Soldier looks over to Jules and waves at him; Jules does his best to be calm and manages to wave back. “Put them at table fourteen.” For a second, he considers letting David handle the order, but who’s he kidding, the boy’s not ready. “You don’t have to assign it. I’ll have it, okay?”