by Nat Kozinn
“I didn’t ask for none of that. Now what you gonna do, old man? You’re supposed to be some big hero. You gonna hit a kid?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” David said and lifted Mario high enough that the boy’s head brushed up against his ceiling. “I’m going to tell your mother.”
David threw Mario under his arm like a barrel. The boy kicked like a mule, but David paid no attention, and Mario gave up once he saw the futility of his struggle. David walked out of the house and knocked on the door two apartments down. It took a few minutes, but eventually the knocks were answered by Fernanda Marquez. The woman in a ratty old bathrobe yawned and rubbed her eyes as she answered the door. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head when she saw her oldest son hanging limply under David’s arm.
“What is going on here?” Fernanda demanded as her motherly instinct to protect immediately switched on.
“I caught Mario in my apartment doing some unsolicited redecorating,” David said as he put the boy down.
“Is that true, Mario? Just what in the hell were you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing. I was just playing around and this freak freaked out,” Mario answered while giving the floor a good hard stare.
“Mario was trying to steal some of my heirlooms. When I caught him in the act, he tried to run away and ended up destroying what he was trying to steal,” David said.
“It was just a bunch of old-ass newspapers or whatever. You can get all that stuff off think.Net. What’s the big deal?” Mario asked.
“The big deal is that you don’t get to take other people’s things whether you think they are important or not. You don’t get to decide!” David yelled.
“Mom, what’s going on?” Luis asked from inside the apartment, his young sheepish voice cutting through the tension-filled conversation.
“It’s nothing, Luis. Just go back to bed,” Fernanda said dismissively.
“Hi, Savior!” Luis said and waved to David. David gave back the slightest of nods.
“I said go to bed!” Fernanda barked, and Luis scurried off. She turned to David and said, “I’m very sorry, Mr. Gilbreth. Mario knows better than this. I’m sure he was just trying to impress those stupid deadbeat friends of his. I promise you he will be punished. In fact, I have an idea. You volunteer at the church, right? The food line? I think that it would be great for Mario if you brought him along.”
“I don’t know. It’s a lot of work, a big commitment,” David said. He thought dragging Mario back home would be the extent of his involvement in the punishment process.
“Hell no. I’m not going to hang out with a bunch of stinky-ass homeless people. No way. You can’t make me go,” Mario said.
“Oh yes, you are going to do it. And if you don’t, the Savior of Seattle is going to bend you over his knee and spank your bare bottom in front of that group of morons you call friends, isn’t that right, David?” Fernanda said in that tone of vile threat mixed with love that only a parent can pull off.
“Yeah, that’s just what I’ll do,” David stammered, trying his best to bluff through his terrible poker face.
Mario seemed to buy the bluster, though, and just muttered to himself while looking back at the floor. Everyone turned at the sound of something falling from back in the apartment.
“Luis? What in God’s name are you doing?” Fernanda yelled into the apartment. “I’m sorry about all this, Mr. Gilbreth. I promise you Mario will be ready to go Sunday. Have a good night,” she said and closed the door while storming off to deal with whatever Luis was doing.
4
“Why did you agree to do this interview?” Alexis asked.
David and Alexis were sitting in David’s living room. Alexis sat on David’s ramshackle dining room chair, and he sat in his ratty recliner. Alexis had a pen and paper she was using to scribble notes.
“Because you’re paying me, but I don’t think you want to print that answer,” David said back with a smirk.
“Come on now. No offense, but it’s pretty clear this isn’t the first time you’ve been strapped for cash. If that was the only reason, you could have sought out the payday yourself. Our readers might be the best audience for you, but I’m sure the think.Net pubs would have been interested. You might have been able to get a bidding war going if money was all you were after.”
“I could have? Maybe I should ask for a raise then,” he said with a laugh, and then he saw the look on Alexis’s face that indicated she was not amused. “I guess I’m not that different than a lot of your readers. You get to a certain point in your life and realize there’s more behind you than in front. I’m not exactly living a life full of excitement these days. Most of my thrills come from remembering my adventures from when I was young. I figure doing this interview will give me a chance to relive the glory years so to speak—and pay the bills.”
“Okay then, let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about when you first got your abilities.”
“A nuclear bomb?” David suggested.
“A little further back than that, if you don’t mind. Tell us why there was a bomb in the first place,” Alexis said.
“I’m not a foreign affairs expert. Isn’t research part of your job?”
“If people wanted a history lesson they’d read a textbook. The point of these interviews is to tell the story from your perspective, not to be 100% accurate to history.”
“I don’t want to mislead anyone,” David said.
“You can’t. The story is about what you know. So what do you know about the bomb?” Alexis said.
“It is my understanding that in the 1980s, General Nicholas Gorshev was in charge of the Soviet armies around Sevastopol on Russia’s Black Sea coast. He came from a small fishing village and joined the army as a young man. He shot through the ranks, becoming the youngest general in modern Soviet history. That may have had something to do with the fact that he was a Different, a Telepath. And by all accounts, he was an extremely powerful one at that. He was also completely insane.
“He believed that the Plagues were a plot coordinated by the United States government in order to destroy the Soviet Union. As we all know, when Cabot released his bacteria that ate the world, he did so in Jerusalem, because he actually thought he was serving God. The Plagues went east from there, spreading across Asia and the Soviet Union first, so for a time Gorshev’s theory might have made some sense, but he did not change his mind even as the Plagues devastated America along with the rest of the world.
“Gorshev raged at the other Soviet leaders and demanded they respond in force against the Americans. But even if they wanted to, the Soviet military was in tatters, just like the armies of the rest of the world. Cabot’s bacteria ate the fuel for the ships and the metal for the bullets. Not all of it mind you, but enough to make it impossible to conduct an invasion of an enemy on the other side of the planet.
“But Gorshev would not take no for an answer. His men were fanatically loyal; that’s what happens when you can push thoughts into people’s minds. He didn’t mind control his whole army—he wasn’t that powerful—but he did it to a few, and frenzy breeds more frenzy. His army grew to almost a hundred thousand strong, enough for him to declare himself the true leader of the Soviet Union and take control of a large chunk of the western part of the country.
“His army wasn’t what made him dangerous. It was the nuclear missiles that he took control of. The Plagues obviously did a number on the Soviets’ nuclear capabilities, but just like some buildings, cars, and guns survived Cabot’s bacteria, some nukes did, too. The Plagues struck at the height of the Cold War. They say the Soviets had enough missiles to destroy the world a hundred times over, so Gorshev really only needed one percent of their bombs to survive. The world was lucky that Gorshev was only able to successfully launch three, and they weren’t particular high-yield bombs. Not that the people in Portland or San Francisco would agree with that.
“It was a beautiful winter day by Seattle standards, whi
ch means it was only sporadically drizzling. It was nice enough that I was outside of the house. I saw a flash. If it had actually been a clear day, it would have been blinding. I knew what it was right away. There were videos in school that showed us what a nuclear blast would look like. We all forgot once the Plagues got going, but before that, fiery hell reigned down by the Soviets was what kept us up at night.
“I turned to run, silly as that was. I don’t think there were any Speedsters fast enough to outrun a nuclear blast. But I didn’t have to outrun it. As soon as the blast hit me, it stopped. It turns out I’m what is known as Externally Activated Different. There’ve been a few other cases, but we’re pretty rare. Basically, my body was waiting for enough energy to transform my cells into something else. If the bomb never hit, I might never have known. But it did. And my cells stored the energy, or so they tell me, and that gave me my strength. I don’t really know how it works. It’s like my cells are tiny batteries or something, and they are using that stored energy to power my muscles. Government eggheads poked and prodded me for a long time, and they never quite figured out how it works. Who knows how anything works with us Differents? The point is, instead of the bomb destroying the city, it became a source of energy for me.”
“But not everyone was saved, correct?” Alexis interjected. “Nearly a hundred thousand people were killed before you stopped the bomb. Including your own brother, correct?”
“Next question,” David said sternly.
“Uhh, David, tragedy is a part of life. It’s a part our readers want to know about. It’s part of what made you who you are,” she pleaded.
“And it’s something I’m not going to talk about, and you’re going to move on if you want to get that second hour next week,” he answered flatly. His looks and tone made it clear debate was pointless.
“Okay then,” Alexis said, battered but not broken. Years ago, she wouldn’t have taken that answer, but it was not years ago. “Let’s go back to you then. Is it true that you don’t need to eat or drink?”
“Yeah, well, mostly. I have to drink water to lubricate my joints or something like that. And I need it to talk or my tongue doesn’t move right. That’s the only reason I need to breathe, too, so there’s something to vibrate my vocal cords. Again, not really sure how all this works. Hell, even the scientists who checked me weren’t sure, but I know the cells in my body aren’t like anyone else’s. They don’t need food or oxygen.”
“What happens if you try to eat?”
“I can’t even swallow it down. My cells are running off the energy I absorbed from the bomb. I don’t process food.”
“What’s that like? Not being able to eat or drink. I think I might kill myself if I couldn’t eat fried Manna.”
“They weren’t making that yet when I was fifteen, so I guess I can’t miss that. I miss eating for sure, but it was so long ago that it’s hard to remember what anything tastes like. I tell you what I miss the most: sitting down and having a meal with people. I mean, I can sit there, but everyone feels awkward when I’m just nursing a glass of water the whole time. People don’t think about how much social stuff is built around getting food. No one ever asks me to do lunch, and if they do, they say sorry and get embarrassed, but I’d be happy to sit there.”
“Maybe that’s what we’ll do for hour two. Assuming I’ve passed the test?” Alexis said.
◆◆◆
David held a large stack of folding chairs on his shoulder and handed them to Mario one at a time. The boy unfolded the chairs and put them in place around the tables. The two worked in silence, setting up over two hundred chairs in just under an hour.
“Okay, now comes the fun part: giving out the food. You’re going to be on entrées, which means you’re the most popular man in the church,” David said and led Mario back into the kitchen.
Sister Berta and a few other similar-looking women were hard at work preparing the meal. They were frying large ladlefuls of Manna. Manna was a carbohydrate-filled substance produced by a Different. Manna had complex carbohydrate chains unlike anything else on the planet, making Manna the most calorie-rich food on Earth by a factor of thousands. The ten-pound bag of Manna the church had acquired was enough to feed several meals to the two hundred or so poor souls who would come to the church in need of sustenance. The Manna was combined with a little bit of much more expensive flour and salt for taste and deep fried in palm oil mixed with a tiny bit of pork fat. The sisters formed it into patties to give it the appearance of actual food. The illusion could only work on those that hadn’t seen the real McCoy in a while.
One of the sisters was hard at work stirring a large pot of liquid. The pot was mostly water and some sorry-looking vegetables. It was called soup, but blandly flavored water with mystery chunks would have been a more apt name.
The sister beckoned Mario over to the pot and instructed him to carry it.
“Put it at the start of the line. Hopefully everyone fills up on that. We’ve got a lot more soup than entrée,” the elderly nun said and handed him the pot.
Mario nodded and picked up the pot. His arms quivered. The muscles, though young and lithe, were not used to a hard day’s work.
“You okay with that?” the nun asked.
“I’m fine,” he said.
That did not appear to be the case as he struggled to take each step. Still, he carried the pot out through the kitchen, turning around to push open the double doors with his back. His face turned red and his arms shook more and more as he went.
Meanwhile, David approached Sister Berta as she worked the Manna-frying line.
“Scales been in lately?”
“What do you think?” the nun said without looking up from her task. “He’s going to stay away till he thinks of a good excuse for how he blew all your money, preferably an excuse that leads to more charitable donations.”
Before David could deliver his hollow rebuttal, there was a crash and a scream that came from the food line. David rushed through the double doors to see the soup pot lying on the floor, its liquid contents spreading like blood from a murder victim. Mario was the killer.
“You okay, kid?” David asked, bearing a concerned frown.
“It burnt me,” Mario said. His voice quivered like the child he was.
“Where’d it get you?”
“My hands.”
David took Mario’s hands and inspected. Then he let out a little laugh. “You’re going to live. In fact, this was an important step in your development. Everyone who works in a kitchen needs to develop calluses to protect their hands. You just experienced step one.”
“It hurts real bad.”
“That’s why you need the calluses. In fact, I know the perfect second step to grow them. Mop’s over there in the corner. Why don’t you clean up after yourself?”
“You serious? I just burnt the crap out of my hands, and you want me to keep working?” Mario said in disbelief.
“Where’s the tough guy who broke into my house? You need to go run to those hooligan friends of yours and tell them you’ve got a boo boo. I’m sure one of them will kiss it for you,” David said mockingly.
“Easy for you to act tough. You don’t feel pain.”
“Why don’t you ask to see one of the sisters’ hands then? Now get that mop. If I tell your mom you weren’t doing as told she’ll add three more Sundays to your sentence.”
Mario muttered something to himself with all the conviction of someone who wouldn’t speak loudly enough to be heard. Then he dragged himself over to the mop in the corner and did as he was told.
Mopping was followed by more food preparation. Soup pots were put in place, fried Manna was put on hot plates to be served, and trays were stacked at the front of the buffet. Mario did all these tasks with a first-timer’s ineptitude and with his face deformed to a frown, but he followed orders and did what was asked.
When the doors opened, Mario was put to work dishing up servings of the pork-fried Manna. The swine-flavored d
eep-fried goop was the closest thing to meat the church ever served outside of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Cooking the sugary Manna in oil infused it with flavor while also providing fats and a little protein to supplement the carbohydrates. A far cry from a balanced diet, but it was something.
“What do we have here today, young fella?” an old man said with a toothless grin.
“I don’t know, man. It’s just some pig-smelling junk. Looks like something you should feed a dog,” Mario said with disgust.
“Smells great to me!” the old man replied with an unbroken smile.
Mario ladled a spoonful onto the man’s plate as the old man licked his lips. The next patron walked up and Mario ladled again with perhaps ten percent less disgust.
Each serving Mario plated and heartfelt thank-you he received pushed his frown incrementally upwards. Happiness can be infective that way. Toward the end of the night, he started saying “you’re welcome” to every thank-you instead of nothing. And by the last serving, he shook the hand of the receiver.
“Yo, you take care of yourself, alright. You’ll get back up. Don’t worry about it,” Mario said with a smile and an elaborate handshake with the smiling man. The eater took his healthy portion of food and went off to indulge.
“You’re looking a little more upbeat,” David said to the boy.
“Oh, that? Nah, I used to know him. He lived in our building when we was little. He used to give Luis and me these little lemon candies. He was a good dude. Sucks to see him like that,” Mario explained.
“You seem surprised.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t a druggy or crazy or nothing. How come he’s got to come to a place like this?”
“Everybody needs a little help sometimes. Luckily the church is here to give it. And now you’re here to help them.”
◆◆◆
“Which of your heroic deeds are you the most proud of?” Alexis said as she sipped her cup of coffee. She thought for a second, pulled out her flask, and poured a couple slugs into the mug.