by John Ridley
The question at the end of a snide laugh: Don't even know, do you? You got no idea.
He must have been figuring things.
Soledad's rage wasn't going to keep secrets hidden much longer. She had to force the issue."Got an idea… How ahhh—bout I blow your head off… Give me baah… back my arms. Juuust for a second. Juhh… just long enough to put a bullet in your lousy freak head."
Quietly, very much in control of himself, not sounding like a killer freak or a husband out for vengeance, Vaughn said, thought: No.
Pain disappeared. Sensation returned to Soledad, but it was not her own. Her body rose, but not of her doing. A consciousness inside her forced her to kneel.
Vaughn, again: No. Then: I don't think that's how things is gonna end. And it's what I'm thinking that counts. So I think you'll lift up your special little gun…
Soledad's right hand curled up guided, manipulated, puppeted by Vaughn. She struggled. She fought. Internally. Physically she did as controlled. The freak was in her now. The freak was her. She was nothing but a bystander in her own body, like one of those dreams where you're awake in your mind, but you won't respond to yourself.
You're gonna take your gun and you're gonna push it against your head.
Vaughn giving a play-by-play to Soledad's action.
Hand shaking, she jammed the muzzle of her piece to her temple. Vaughn was going for the signature kill of the telepaths. He was going to make Soledad empty her own skull and, better, he was going to make her do it with one of her special, freak-killing bullets.
"Y-you fucking…"
And now…
No way to stop him. Soledad's eyes teared. Her breath came in frantic huffs that shot spittle from her mouth.
You're gonna…
She felt her finger curl. She felt the trigger of the gun slide back. The snap of falling timber; she could hear the scrape of metal on metal as she millimetered toward her own end.
Die.
The trigger full back. The gun fired. A simultaneous flash-bang. Soledad's head jerked. It lurched on her neck like a smacked pinata, a spray of red splattering from her temple. Her body swirled and twisted and hit the floor and…
And lay there.
And…
And Vaughn didn't feel anything. He'd expected to feel good. Maybe victorious. At least relieved or satisfied. All he felt was empty where Michelle had been, and killing a cop did nothing to fill the hole.
Gods.
That's what the cop, Bullet'd said: Vaughn and his kind thought they were gods. And because they thought they were gods, because they thought they were above man, they didn't deserve to live. That way of thinking got the cop killed.
And yet here was Vaughn, having ended a life, and he felt nothing. Wouldn't a human feel something? Couldn't only a god take a life and feel nothing in return? Maybe the woman was right. Maybe Vaughn and his kind were gods. And maybe gods had no place on earth.
Vaughn muttered: "Michelle…" It came out as a quiet plea for help. Now what? the name asked. Now that I've done this for you and to them, the normals, and now that I've done this in spite of the other metanormals who are too scared to do anything… now what?
No answer from Michelle. No direction.
Vaughn decided then, lacking any better ideas, to go kill the remaining, wounded MTac cops.
Vaughn had a very good and logical reason for wanting the two cops dead, for wanting to kill them. He thought about it walking the hall to the back room where they were laid out. He would kill one of them and he'd feel remorseful for it and would thereby prove he wasn't a god. Just a man. He'd prove to the dead cop, Bullet, the one he'd murdered same as clipping a nail, just how wrong she was. And if killing one of the cops didn't make him feel… wrong, then he'd kill the other and he would keep killing until something like compassion or guilt or regret flowed back into him. Until something like humanity was part of him again. Because a man who could kill and be carefree about it, whether it was with an ax, a gun or his mind, a man who could kill without pause was nothing short of insane. Vaughn was not insane, or inhuman, or nonhuman. He'd prove it no matter how many bodies he had to stack.
Ahead of him, the door to the back room. Vaughn felt, sensed, nothing from the other side. Of course not. The cops were unconscious, so he couldn't control them, so he couldn't make them kill themselves. Vaughn looked at his hands, clenched and unclenched them. Well, wouldn't this be interesting.
Vaughn smiled.
He moved for the door ready to take back his humanity. The man or the girl: Which should he kill first? The girl probably. More guilt associated with killing a woman. Should be. If he killed her, felt something, he wouldn't have to waste time with the man. But then… what the hell? He was already there. Why not just kill them both?
Hate and rage racing; he sensed them racing up behind him. Vaughn turned. He started to gear up his mind, stoke it like a hot fire ready to do some damage. But his flowering psychosis slowed him down. He was slowed down a step more by shock. Behind him, leveling her freak-killing gun, was Soledad. The one they called Bullet.
Questions: How? How's this possible? How is she alive when she killed herself, when I made her kill herself, when I saw the gun fire and the blood jump from her head?
The bang and the muzzle flash from Soledad's piece were simultaneous. The deep, sharp pain in Vaughn's shoulder came less than a millisecond later.
"Naaaaahhhhh!"
No more than thirty feet from him. Vaughn tried to reach out to Soledad with his mind. He couldn't make contact. His spouting, burning wound made the simple act of even looking at her nearly beyond him.
"Hard to control people when you can't concentrate." Soledad was telling Vaughn the obvious, but she handed out the facts laced with glee.
But he could concentrate. He was more metanormal than this woman was superhuman. If all he had to do was focus to kill her, to finally and forever give payback for Michelle, then Vaughn could concen—
Soledad fired again. A bullet pounded itself into Vaughn's thigh with a loud, dull thud that sounded simultaneously with the crack of his shattered femur. The combo of the new wound and the damage it caused put concentration, mind control and even stable, moment-to-moment thought way beyond Vaughn.
"Nothing special for you." Soledad sneering."Just a regular old bullet." She holstered her gun. Stepping quickly, Soledad covered the distance between herself and the collapsing freak before her.
Vaughn looked up.
Soledad swung her leg in a crescent. The outside of her boot pounded the right side of Vaughn's head. He twisted some, staggered. Somehow he stayed upright.
Soledad: "I take back what I said. You're not hardly gods."
Her leg moved in an inward arc. This time the inside of her foot that came smacking into the left side of Vaughn's face brought him back to center and straightened him some.
"Fact…"
Soledad tensed her body, spun in a tight, fast pivot. Like Tashjian had minded her, she thrust her leg at the last second. The target for the blunt of her heel: the center of Vaughn's chest.
Contact.
Vaughn took to the air trailing streamers of blood from his twin wounds. He sailed, he hit the door behind him. Hit it hard, hard enough to knock it from its rusted hinges and send it to the ground just a moment before Vaughn thudded motionless next to it.
Soledad over the metanormal. She looked down on him."You, your kind, you're nothing at all."
Stepping over the body, Soledad entered the room, checked on Vin and Eddi. Both were breathing, if just barely. Next she checked herself. It seemed like there wasn't a part of her that wasn't bruised, swollen or cut. It seemed like there wasn't a space on her body that wasn't flowing blood. Soledad unhitched a radio from Vin, dropped to the floor as she tuned to Tac-1. She called out her 10–20 and requested a rush on a bus. And then she sat and waited and listened to the quiet.
It wasn't entirely quiet.
There was the sound of a light breeze scraping
along the building and the rustle of tree branches. There were birds somewhere not too far away. There were sounds of life. Everyday, normal life.
And there was a siren. Way in the distance, coming closer, was the wail of a racing ambulance.
And there was something else, a scraping noise that wasn't wind or trees, and wasn't outside the building but right behind Soledad.
She turned.
Vaughn clutching a metal rod, a part of a car or maybe the building, but sharp where it was twisted off at one end.
A flash of motion. A blur of hands moving with frantic speed.
Vaughn slashed.
Soledad scrambled out her gun. By the time she had it aimed, it was over. Vaughn was slumping to the ground having jammed the metal up under his rib cage and deep into the cavity of his chest. Blood came like a fountain as his heart pumped itself dry.
He said, as he faded: "… Can have your world… Don't want it…"
Soledad's gun kept up a stare at Vaughn.
He said: "… Can't wait to see what the truth does to you…"
Vaughn went down and stayed down.
Soledad spent a long moment looking at Vaughn's body. After that she went back to listening to the approaching siren. She went back to waiting.
Life was very okay. It was nowhere near great. It was not even good. It was just barely better than all right. Yarborough was dead. Vin had one less leg and would be permanently gimped. Eddi had a badly smacked-up knee but was expected to make a satisfactory recovery. It was possible, if she regained mobility, stability, she would be allowed to return to active duty on an element. In exchange for all that, one freak was captured and another dead. So, for Soledad, as she rode in Ian's Jag, top down, wind tearing through her hair, up PCH north toward Napa Valley—toward five days of rest and only rest—life was very okay.
She'd earned five days. She'd earned way more than that, but she felt like she could take five days. She felt like, five days from work, and the world wasn't going to end. The debriefing Soledad went through after serving the warrant told everyone that the immediate crisis had passed. The final verdict: The telepath, Vaughn, and the metal morpher, Aubrey, were acting alone in an effort to exact revenge for a perceived wrong. And although it appears that meta-normals maintain surreptitious contact with one another, it is at best a loose and unorganized association rather than an extensive and potentially dangerous network.
Case closed.
Even at that, Soledad carried her O'Dwyer with her just as she carried an off-duty piece. The job remained her life.
There was a coda: an award or plaque or some such thing that Soledad was supposed to be given, that Rysher was desperate to give to her, so that he could have his picture taken with MTac's top cop.
One more photo for his wall.
Soledad told Rysher yes, she'd be honored to accept the award. Or plaque.
Yeah.
She checked her watch. Right about then Rysher was probably doing some kind of embarrassment dance to cover the absence of the guest of honor, who was at the moment riding north. Top down, wind tearing through her hair.
Soledad found herself to be surprisingly happy about having the confrontation with Vaughn behind her. Besides being alive, she never fully realized before exactly how much pleasure there was in spending empty time with someone you cared about. And with every mile traveled she found herself taking more delight in the distance put between her and Los Angeles and the LAPD, MTacs and the responsibility of being a watchman in the struggle between freaks and normals.
Soledad thought about what Ian, just days prior, had said to her. Let's go away, he'd said. Let's get away from the rest of the world. At the time, Soledad went through the motions of considering the maybes of the deal. But now, the Jag's odometer scrolling upward, getting away and staying away seemed like more than just a remote, someday possibility.
Why not?
Soledad, in record time, had or had been part of putting down five freaks. The amen to that: and lived to tell. Hadn't she done her part? Didn't those numbers add up to some kind of ongoing sabbatical?
Why not?
The department recognized—was forced to recognize—her gun was a viable weapon against muties. It was only a matter of time before it went into wide use among MTacs. Wasn't that legacy enough to deserve an early retirement?
Why not?
And, yeah, an element was nearly wiped out, but Eddi would recover. Busted knee or no, Eddi would be back doing work in short order. Another element would get built up around her and no doubt, her leading the charge, they'd all be BAMF in no time. And Soledad didn't have to entirely kiss things good-bye. She could work R&D, keep developing hardware for the frontline cops. She could transfer to DMI, start doing some HUMINT for the PD. That's where a good number of half-busted MTacs eventually ended up anyway. And knowing your enemy was the first step toward kicking your enemy's ass.
So with all that balancing things out, why not step aside and let some new blood pump through MTac?
Soledad looked over at Ian, and Ian looked to Soledad and smiled. He was plainly, purely happy. He'd put in the time and ended up with someone he cared for. At that moment, for every moment in his foreseeable future, that was all the more simple bliss he needed.
Her hand to his. A tight squeeze. A transferred affection.
Over the noise of the air whipping around the convertible, Soledad said: "You're right."
"About…?"
"We're no good for anyone but us. And probably we're no good back there." She committed."So maybe we shouldn't go back."
A smile between them.
Ian's head turned to center, saw the black BMW—asshole-driven way over the speed limit—jumping up over a rise in the road, shooting toward them across the center line.
Ian went to Ohshitland, hit the brake, jammed it hard, wrenched the wheel. The front end of the Jag—old, not built for lifesaving driving—dipped, plowed low as it jerked and leaned and stretched desperately to get clear of the oncoming car.
The driver of the Beemer was too drunk or too scared or too something to do much but nothing. Its front fender copulated with the rear of the Jag, sending the English car side-skidding toward the rock face to the east of the road. The BMW whipped uncontrolled in the other direction.
From the Jaguar came the sharp shrieks of tired metal torquing and tires pulling on asphalt. There were no human sounds. Despite the speed and the fact that they were, at the moment, riding an unguided missile, both Soledad and Ian were impressively quiet. Ian was working too hard trying to force the car to a stop to bother with useless wailing. And Soledad, bracing for impact, was swirling in disbelief. This is how she was going to die? After every other thing she'd survived, this?
Only, death was far from a given. Under Ian's persistence the Jag came out of its skid. Wheels back in-line, control was returned to the driver. The Jag slowed. The Jag stopped. Not before scraping a good way along the rock face. But that, together with the smashed rear quarter, was all the more damage that was done.
Ian, danger over, post-near-death-experience shock replacing adrenaline-laced terror, body drenched with four seconds' worth of intense and profuse sweating, turned to Soledad, gave a little" you believe that" huff of a laugh.
Soledad wasn't looking at Ian. Soledad was looking behind them, checking on the other driver, making sure the other driver was okay, even if the other driver was a BMW-driving bastard.
Impacting on the passenger side, the German car had form-fitted itself around a tree in a harsh concave pattern. The engine was hissing steam but ran on, and even up the road and over the odors of smoking tires Soledad could smell leaking fuel. It took no experience in crash forensics to know what that combination could lead to.
Wordless, Soledad was up, out of the Jaguar and over to the BMW. Inside the car, behind the wheel, was a woman. BMW-driving bastards come in both genders. Mid-twenties. Good-looking. Used to be right up until her face got punched by the deploying air bag and her
head whiplashed against the glass of the door window. Uncon-scious. Bleeding from the skull. But the slow rise and fall of her chest said the driver was still alive.
Soledad grabbed and pulled the door handle. Nothing. The crash fused it shut tight.
Things got worse.
A popping whoosh. Heat and light. The leaking fuel ignited, almost instantly went from fire to conflagration that licked up over the front of the car.
Yanking at the door, Soledad got nothing more from it than before. A quick look around. No other cars, no one to help. Just Ian standing and gawking deer-caught-in-headlights fashion.
Gas fed fire, the fire burned hotter.
Soledad banged her hands on the door window. It didn't give any more than the door had.
"Help me!" Soledad screamed at Ian.
Ian just stood.
A tire of the BMW burst. Inside the car the driver began to stir. She'd burn alive, she'd burn awake.
Heat should have pushed Soledad away from the wreck. Desperation kept her pulling at the door even as she, with all too vivid a memory of her own fire-related experience, began to feel the blistering of her skin. She went rabid with tugging, pounding and pulling.
"Help me!"
Ian just stood.
And then he did something. As Soledad stared, some… thing, some unnameable event rippled outward from the center of Ian and across his body. All his color, his hue faded. Light no longer reflected from him, but passed through Ian as he phased from material to intangible. Ian stepped to the car, reached for the mangled door of the BMW. Phantomlike his hands passed through it, slipping to the driver's body. He did something to her. Ian changed her. Manipulated her. Whatever, it was so far beyond Soledad she couldn't know, couldn't understand. But with no effort she could see, Ian phased the driver from solid to immaterial as well. The fire burned, but it didn't burn Ian. Couldn't touch him. He ignored it. Existing on the same plane, Ian lifted the driver's body and passed it through the car. The background clearly visible through them, Ian carried the driver to the far side of the road— walking across the pavement the same as any normal man despite the fact he wasn't close to normal—laid the driver down on the soft shoulder, and then did what would be the most difficult thing of all for any superpowered metanormal human. He turned and faced Soledad.