A Once Crowded Sky

by Tom King

  A scream—motion at the edge of his vision, and Prophetier turns. No.

  “What are you doing?” Prophetier shouts out at Pen, but he can’t be heard over the younger man’s yelps of pain as Pen backs away from the light, clutching his smoldering arm.

  The crowd seems to gasp collectively, though it’s really only a few people who are able to react. The rest remain silently stunned, cramped between pity for the boy and what they just had only a moment prior: being close to it, coming back to it.

  Pen scratches at his arm, and crusted black skin flakes off. A cry shoots through him, and Pen gags, pukes on himself—bits of orange and yellow ooze onto his shirt and pants, and he lifts his arm, tries to keep the bile from the hurt.

  Prophetier’s hand is again at Pen’s neck. There’s a scream in Pen’s ear. And there are shouts from others. But it’s easy to ignore them all; the pain’s so much louder than their poor voices.

  Pen throws back a hand—he doesn’t know how hard—and breaks Prophetier’s hold. He tries a few staggered steps and trips. The world surges brown, and the sky slips to the right; and Pen too falls, lands only a few feet from Soldier.

  Prophetier follows Pen down, continuing to squeal into his ear. “What are you doing? Go back. You’ve got to go back. Do you hear me? Now, Pen! Now!”

  Pen peers into Prophetier’s face, the sunken eyes that beg him to do his duty and save the world one more time.

  “No,” Pen says, and he sinks a little farther into the graves below.

  Prophetier’s pulse rises, but he resists panicking. But he knows. This is different. Pen should burn, he should burn bright like the stars. That’s how the story ends. Prophetier needs to act, but he doesn’t know how, and then another figure in the field moves, rises from the dirt.

  Soldier crawls toward Pen. He’s not sure what he’ll do when he gets there, but he’ll do something. There’s something to do now.

  “Get away!” Prophetier shouts. “Get away from him!”

  But Soldier doesn’t care, and he crawls, and he reaches the boy. “Good,” Soldier says. “Good.”

  Prophetier plunges forward and shoves his hand into Soldier’s face, forcing the older man back. “Don’t be fooled,” Prophetier says, addressing Pen, “not by this traitor’s stories.”

  “I don’t know what he’s saying.” Soldier’s voice is low and weak. “But we can do this without you dying. Without powers. We can end it. We can beat it and end it. I swear, PenUltimate. I swear.”

  “Shut your goddamn mouth!” Prophetier yells as he kicks Soldier in the head, rolling the old man back into the graves. Prophetier bends down, again whispers into Pen’s ear. “Don’t listen to that. Just remember the lesson, what you learned. We all come back.”

  There was a long ago when Prophetier was alone. Then he found The Blue, found the stories, wrote them, walked among them, emerged strong and unafraid like all the great heroes living inside all the great myths.

  “Remember your wife,” Prophetier says. “She’s still alive, and you need to save her. You need to save all of us.”

  And then Prophetier’s stories were gone, but they were gone as they were supposed to be gone, for a reason, as it was shown to him in The Blue: they were gone to bring this boy to this field and have him die and have him be redeemed. You have to be gone to come back.

  “You save us, Pen. Get up and save us.”

  Prophetier waits, and the crowd waits with him. It’s Pen’s sacrifice, but it’s their story. Finally, an explanation for their suffering, for their actions over the past year. It’s been too long. It’s about damn time.

  “Get up, Pen. Get up.”

  Soldier’s close to Pen now, inches away. The rank of the boy’s burnt arm is in his nostrils. Soldier looks to the light, sees an image of a young boy leading a charge, running into the blast of guns, and Soldier pushes his face into the ground, trying to mask the smell, bust up the vision.

  Something’s waiting at the edge of Soldier, at the weak parts of the man; something’s waiting to tunnel into him, flood him, soak into every good part of what’s now left. It’s got something to do with the wars, and it’s got something to do with Pen, and it aims to overwhelm Soldier, drown him.

  He does his best to push it off, to keep what’s coming at bay a while longer so maybe he can be of use, make a good decision for once in his godforsaken life. But it’s a powerful force, and it’s coming strong, and he can see that the walls are leaking and the roof’s starting to slouch. No, there ain’t much time left now before it’ll be coming down good and hard.

  So with all he’s got left, Soldier looks to Pen, who’s got the power to ruin everything, and Soldier tries to think of some advice to give the kid, something to say that’s worth a damn at a time like this.

  No words come to him that might give comfort. You live so much, you expect to learn some, but sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it all goes by, and you walk away same as you came.

  As the barriers inside him give and something wet and cruel plows into the old soldier, all he can think to say is that it’s probably best not to go down on your knees. Whatever’s coming, it’s probably better to face it with a straight back and a keen eye. That way when it hits you and you fall, at least you can say you tried.

  Soldier opens his mouth to tell Pen this last piece, this final, feeble moral, but it’s too late, and the hurt that’s coming now comes, and his eyes shrink back into his skull, and his head slacks forward; tears stream down Soldier’s face, dropping to the dirt.

  He didn’t have time to say it. It came too fast. He didn’t have time to tell the boy to get up. Get the hell off the ground.

  The sun comes out a little farther over the Villains’ Graveyard, and the blue light of the story dims. The wind that curls around the graves teases a few degrees warmer, but no one really notices. As dawn passes, the heroes are as silent as the trees that mark the cemetery’s outline, growing around them in long and intersecting horizontal and vertical columns, forming a tight square around the entire picture.

  Pen stands. He looks to the light. He looks to the crowd, to the sky, to the ground, to the stone markers, to the walls of green around him. He runs, and as he runs, he wonders at the power in his legs, at the strings of metal that Ultimate has sewn there that allow him to get so far so fast that the scene behind him can so rapidly recede into the background, become a vague line penciled across the rising sun.

  He’s so fast he doesn’t hear the call of someone from the crowd or maybe inside the circle that tries to chase after him. Probably, he’s glad not to hear it.

  “Where are you going, PenUltimate? Where are you running to?”

  1

  Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face:

  Battle Call One Shot #1

  Weeks later, Pen comes out of Anna’s room and finds David, The Freedom Fighter, sitting in the hospital lobby, his legs crossed, his arm stretched out, as if he’d been waiting for a while. Pen could do it. It would be easy, and it wouldn’t really hurt the guy. A quick elbow to spot three, and he’d be unconscious just long enough for Pen to slip away.

  “What are you doing here?” Pen asks.

  “You can’t hide forever.” David tilts his head. He’s chewing gum, and when he smiles, his teeth clap up and down. “Not when every cop and do-gooder in Arcadia gets their doughnuts at the same diner.”

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Think I want to be?” David widens his eyes and laughs. “Grandpa says go, and you go. You got all the powers. You fight him.”

  Pen knows where the six closest exits are, how each of them leads to a contingency plan where he could disappear for however long he needs to. “What do you want?”

  “Grandpa wants to talk to you. Saturday at noon. At the diner. He’s making something special for lunch, he said, just for you.”

  “I’m not meeting anybody.”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “I can’t.”

  David laughs
, throws his arms up. “Like I said, you want to fight him, go ahead.” David stands. “But you’ll lose.”

  “What’s it about?”

  David puts his jacket on. “I think he wants to talk about Soldier, about fixing things, but who knows? The man can ramble.” David walks up to Pen, slaps him on the shoulder. “I’ll see you there, buddy.” David turns and walks toward the door.

  Six exits. In thirty-two seconds Pen could be gone. “Is it about me coming back?” he calls after David. “Is it about going back and closing the hole? Is that what it really is?”

  David stops, his back facing Pen. “You change your mind? Are you doing it? Are you bringing us back?”

  “There haven’t been any attacks this whole time. Ultimate’s still gone. I would’ve helped. I would’ve stopped them. If they came.”

  “Are you doing it? Yes or no?” David looks back over his shoulder. “Has anything changed?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  David chews hard on his gum, then looks back to the exit. “I’ll see you at the diner,” he says as he walks away.

  Six exits. Six contingency plans. They couldn’t find him. Not really. Not if he really went away. Pen sits down on a cushioned bench, then stands and goes back to see his wife.

  The Soldier of Freedom: Battle Call One Shot #1

  Soldier answers DG’s door. He’d been looking out the window, and he’d seen David coming up, and he knew there was no more point in keeping low.

  “This is where you went?” David asks as the door opens. “Seriously? Who knew? All this time, I thought you were in the Middle East or something.”

  “Can I help you, son?”

  David snaps his gum and takes a breath. “Grandpa wants—”

  “When and where?” Soldier asks.

  David laughs and leans against the doorway. “Saturday. At the diner. Twelve thirty.”

  “Thought the diner was closed.”

  “Nope. Reopened and repaired. Good as new. Shiny even. Maybe everyone else is messed up, but Grandpa still has power.” David laughs again.

  Soldier runs his thumb across his nose. He spits past David, onto the front garden. “It’s about Pen. That’s what it is?”

  “Sure,” David says. “You know the old man. Ever the peacemaker.”

  “He’s not afraid we’d start up fighting? That I’d attack the kid again, mess up y’all’s business all over again?”

  “Hey, who said Pen’s going to be there? He’s gone. PenUltimate is very powerful. No one knows where PenUltimate is. Grandpa just wants to talk.”

  “No one knows where I am.”

  David straightens up. He arches his chin, tries to look serious, but there’s still some smile left on his face. “Are you really going to fight Pen? For what? To get what? How many times do we have to get hit in the face to know when to stay down?”

  Soldier rests his hands on his guns. “Diner. Twelve thirty.”

  “Twelve thirty. Saturday.”

  “All right. Thank you.” Soldier nods and closes the door. He walks back into DG’s house and sits at her kitchen table. He watches David walk off, get back in his car. Soldier’s hands stay on his guns.

  Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #581

  “Let me tell you something about your friend Soldier. Now, this was some time ago, during the war. The Second World War. I was quite the fighter then. Not like now. You see me now, maybe you think he’s just an old man, with the bad feet, he can’t do any fighting. But then, my God then, I was a good-looking boy. Like you, eh? I had the clothes that stretched over the skin. Where you can see the muscles. And the girls! If you could’ve seen the girls then, how they thought of that outfit. But this isn’t about the girls, eh? Ah, but maybe every story is about the girls? You understand, I know. But for now this is about the fighting. And we were good fighters. We were fighting for something. We were fighting the Nazis. And Hitler. And one time I hit Hitler in the face with my own fist. But that’s a different story too. But I did hit him. He was looking for the übermensch, the superman. When I hit him, that’s when he found his superman, eh? But this, what I’m telling you now, happened after that, after the punch. It was me, The Freedom Fighter, and The Soldier of Freedom. We were sabotaging a Nazi base deep inside the line. Very dangerous. Very secret mission. There was a scientist, a Nazi scientist, and we had the information he was helping Hitler with—this is what we were told—with time traveling. Going back, you understand? Like in the funny books. Can you imagine, time-traveling Nazis, what could be worse? Nothing. So, we had to stop it. We charged in, guns going, Freedom Fighter and The Soldier of Freedom! And there was an explosion! Boom! And we went out, unconscious. And we wake up, and we are back in time. Yes, back in time, in some Austrian town at the beginning of the century. And there’s a lady standing over us, shouting at us in German, just yelling and crazy, and we are scared of her so we tie her to a chair, and we ask her questions, and I figure out that she is Hitler’s mother. My God! And what happens next? Hitler comes in! He was on a walk or something, I don’t know, but he walks in, and he’s just a boychick, maybe nine or ten, a little boy Hitler standing in front of us, looking at us standing there with his mother all tied to a chair. And he screams. He is so scared. He is crying and screaming, and I can’t understand him, but I am trying to talk to him, to calm him maybe, when Soldier takes out his gun and shoots him. Dead. Just like that. Bullet between the eyes, above, in the forehead here. And I think that this is it. We have won the war, but at what cost? But then soldiers begin to rush in on us from outside, not old soldiers but new ones, modern ones, 1944 ones. You understand? And the woman is crying now, screaming, that it is a fake, all a fake. There is no time traveling. There are just actors, a fake village set up for Hitler, for him to see his childhood, to make it better. It is all an act. The boy is not Hitler. He is a boy, some boy taken from his family, made to play Hitler. The boy is only a slave. Another slave. And there he is dead, Soldier’s bullet right here, gone right through here. And everywhere, everywhere soldiers all with the guns out, firing guns. And I look at Soldier, The Soldier of Freedom, the greatest hero ever, and I mean no disrespect to your Ultimate, but Soldier was the greatest, who could argue this? And I looked at his face, the boy dead there in front of him, and Soldier looked back at me, and then, I cannot forget this, and then he looks up, he looks up and up and up, and we were in a house, there was only the ceiling above us, and there were soldiers coming everywhere, boom, the guns were firing, and he was just looking up, his guns in his hands, pointed down, not at anything at all. Useless. And I shouted at him. ‘Soldier!’ I shouted. I shouted loud. ‘Soldier!’ We were going to die. Without his guns, those people coming in were going to kill us, probably the actors too, everyone. And Soldier wasn’t moving. He was only looking up, but we had to move, we had to save everyone. And he looks up. My God, my God. Let me tell you something. My parents, they never once believed in the God. They liked Marx much more. And me? I made some deals. I had a son, a grandson, a beautiful wife, and I hurt some people. What can you do? All you can do now is tell the stories to the young people. Tell them what it was like in that house. Let them decide if it meant anything. Tell them about the guns, how there was no more time. The guns were going off. Boom! Boom! You understand? Boom! Boom!” Jules accentuates these last words by banging his fist against the table, knocking a cup of coffee over the side. Jules bends over, disappears under the table. A minute later he comes back up holding a few pieces of the cup. He waves at a busboy, who rushes over and hands Jules a towel. He’s headed back down when Pen reaches out, puts his hand on Jules’s hand.

  “Wait, wait,” Pen says. “What happened? Soldier and you, what did you do?”

  Jules hesitates. “Do?” he says after a while. “Eh, who remembers? It was all so long ago. Besides, all these things all have the same ending anyway, they just start again.”

  Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #582

  Pen sips at his b
urnt cocoa as he watches Jules shuffle off to check on something in the kitchen. Pen pulls his baseball cap down farther over his face. He hasn’t been out since the graves. It’s a corner table in the back, but someone’ll notice him eventually. He doesn’t know what to tell people. He knows they’ll ask, just like David asked, and he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know if he’s going back.

  Swoosh—the slicing of air in the distance. Pen places his cup on the table as the wires inside his muscles begin to pulse. Thirty-four people are sitting at nineteen tables; eleven of them used to be heroes, old friends. Someone outside is smoking a familiar brand of cigarettes. The Soldier of Freedom arrived at the diner sixty-four seconds ago, his pistols, as always, hanging in their holsters. The wires did their job, and Pen’s burnt arm is at 99.6 percent effectiveness. What’s coming is traveling faster than a MiG-22, much faster.

  Crack—and the front wall of Jules’s diner blasts inward. Pen doesn’t need to look to know who’s climbing through the debris. The speed of the flight, the force of the impact, the screech of metal scraping against metal, the scent of a clean, polished shine. He reaches out and takes his mug back in hand. They all come back. Every goddamn last one. He takes a sip and swirls his tongue through the pleasant heat, trying to think of what to say.

  A large piece of rubble hurls through the air, and Pen throws himself to the side as it collides with his table, crunching through wood and plastic and into the floor below. Pen kicks at the ground, moving himself farther away from the impact site just in time to avoid another piece of rubble burrowing into the checkered linoleum at his feet. He rolls to his right, and a smaller ball whizzes by his ear.

  Pen tucks in his knees, leans forward, squats, and bounds to his feet, swiveling in the air to face the source of the incoming barrage. Two more jagged squares of concrete spin toward his head. They’re bigger than bullets, but slower, and he calculates their movement and speed, arching his back around one while leaping over the other. Behind these he sees more coming, and behind those he can make out the silhouette of the man throwing them, his cape now waving in the midday wind.