by John Jr. Yeo
The Necromancer was starting to get to his feet, clutching his head in what I imagined was a great deal of pain. The stories of his illusion-casting powers were obviously true, he had someone caused all of us to hallucinate. The strange visions had vanished as soon as I clocked him with the vase.
“This isn’t what you think it is,” I began, taking one step away from Andromeda. “It’s the bad guy we were stealing from…”
“Listen, this was my day off,” Andromeda said sweetly, trying to reason with me as she took another step towards me to match my retreat. Around her forearms and wrists were leather bracelets, tightly wrapped to the point that it almost looked like it was cutting off her circulation. My eyes popped open when I noticed that they seemed to be sewn directly into her skin! I kid you not, the cords that slid through the eyelets of the bracelet were actually piercing her flesh, as if it had been surgically implanted! I squinted my eyes to take a closer look, and that’s when both of her arms burst into a controlled but blistering flame. It got my attention once again, and I locked eyes with the hero.
“This is the fire of Huitzilopochtli,” she informed me.
“What the hell?”
“I don’t have to burn you. I don’t wish to. Just get down on the ground, citizen. Make this easy.”
I leapt to the counter and grabbed the laptop. It had everything we needed to bring down Christopher Whitfield, and I wasn’t about to let him get away with his crimes. I hurled the computer at Eamon, and screamed at him to make a run for it. With any luck, after this situation calmed down, I could explain what we were doing. I’d even take a few days in lock-up if it meant Whitfield went down for the rest of his life.
On the other hand, I helped escort a lot of women to prison. I might not be the most popular new inmate.
And there was my son. My baby.
I did the exact thing that I’ve told hundreds of kids and dozens of schools not to do when being questioned by authority figures. I panicked. I ran.
Eamon ran one way, I ran the other. He ran towards the balcony, and began the dangerous climb down to the street with the laptop in hand. I ran around the corner, hoping to escape through the bedroom window. With any luck, as the heroes chased us, Sadaf could sneak away as well.
As I moved down the hallway, I was nearly to the bedroom door when I felt strong fingers grab my hair and pull my head back. I didn’t even hear her run after me, but it was possible she was flying down the hall. I was lucky that she didn’t give me whiplash, the girl had definitely worked out. I slipped and fell on my hip when she pulled me back, and she was on top of me a moment later.
“Get off of me!”
Andromeda did not get off of me. I was in a seated position, trying to get the leverage to shove her away. But she was straddling my lap, pinning me down. When I continued to struggle, she landed a closed knuckled punch right across my cheek. I’d been hit harder, but not by much. Stars exploded in front of my eyes when she struck me, and I lay there in a daze. She placed her knees on my shoulder and ignited her hands once again, holding them over my face. It knew it was my last warning.
From around the corner, I heard Eamon’s terrified scream, followed by a cacophony of crashing noises. It sounds like he made it down to the street, but not as slowly or carefully as he would have liked.
“Young lady? You need to come out here, please,” Andromeda was calling out. “No one else needs to get hurt. Just keep your hands above your head and come to me.”
From the living room, Sadaf stepped out. Her eyes were swollen with terror and fury.
“You really need to put that down,” Andromeda said carefully.
I’d never seen Sadaf handle a firearm. I didn’t even know if she knew how to fire one. But she had gotten into my duffel bag and retrieved my gun. She was now pointing the gun at the world’s most famous and popular heroine.
Andromeda pointed her fingers towards Sadaf, and a twirling spiral of flames launched towards her! In other circumstances, I would have admitted what a beautiful display it really was. But things were getting very surreal and intense right now. We were fighting a super-hero.
It wasn’t my intention to be the bad guy, but there was no talking my way out of it now. It was fight or flight…or die.
The spiraling beam of fire didn’t hit her, but Sadaf dropped down to the floor to avoid it. Before Andromeda called another flaming missile into existence, I grabbed her arm and twisted.
“Get off of her!” Sadaf screamed! From the corner of my eye, I could see her sitting up again, shakily pointing the gun in our direction. I wasn’t sure which of the two was more dangerous to me at the moment.
“The big dude is out, I think he might have broken his neck.” It was the Necromancer, who had returned to the other side of the hallway, now carrying the laptop. He stopped talking when he saw the situation. On the other end of the hall, I was still struggling with Andromeda. Between him and us, Sadaf was screaming and waving the gun. The dark man leapt towards her and pulled her free arm, trying to drag her out of the hallway.
Things got even stranger after that. As I pulled on Andromeda’s arm, the most bizarre experience occurred. Well, most bizarre up to that point, of course. The silver cords that attached the bracelets into Andromeda’s skin began to unravel loose! The cords were actually sliding out of her arm, wiggling and shaking like snakes. The bracelet was loosening, as if the cords were trying to find a new home.
They were pressing themselves against my arm, and trying to dig their way into my skin! As the first one began to pierce my skin, I felt the agonizing sensation of scalding heat penetrate my entire hand! It felt as if my hand was on fire. A few seconds later, it really was. My hand was on fire, and it was burning Andromeda as well!
“Holy shit, Chidike! Help me out here, this bitch is a Spark!”
I had never heard Andromeda swear, nor refer to one of her team mates as what might have been his real name. Whoever these super heroes really were, their identities were a well-kept secret from everyone. But if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that Andromeda’s entire elegant persona was just a disguise, and she’d just broken character. But why did she call me a Spark?
These were all thoughts that I would muse over later, of course. At the time, there was nothing going on in my blonde head but how much pain I was in, and how much I wanted it to stop.
Andromeda punched me again, this time in the eye. I screamed, which made Sadaf scream, which made Necromancer pull her arm even more angrily.
Then something happened that would haunt me for the rest of my life. Something I still have nightmares about.
The gun discharged in the struggle. She missed me, although sometimes I wish she hadn’t.
Andromeda’s head exploded next to mine.
There was a pathetic whine and some twitching, and then her body fell lifeless on the floor next to me. The leather bracelet, once alive and trying to bond with my skin, went as cold and still as its bearer.
Sadaf was perfectly still, her eyes wide with shock at what had happened. No amount of will power could make me move my legs. The most horrible thing that I could have been involved in had just happened right next to me.
“I didn’t mean—“
The rest of Sadaf’s weak apology was drowned out in the furious scream coming from Necromancer’s mouth. He grabbed Sadaf’s head and twisted it completely sideways. The snap was still echoing in my ears as he hurled himself down the hallway, raising his fist to hit me across the face.
The last thing I saw before the world went completely dark was Sadaf’s body slumping against the wall. Then, he hit me. He hit me hard.
4
Consequences
Thursday, May 1 – 10:00 a.m.
I’m not a big fan of hospitals, generally speaking. The last time I was a patient was when Caleb was born, and the nurses and I didn’t exactly get along. Then there were all of those weeks where Dad was being treated in the oncology wards, so that wasn’t a pleasant experience
either.
I think I’d have preferred waking up in a prison cell than on a hospital bed. But after I noticed that my right wrist had been securely handcuffed to the frame of the bed, I realized that I was having the delightful experience of having the best of both shitty worlds.
As a police officer, I was familiar with most of the hospitals in Philadelphia. I had no idea where I was now, though. The first order of business was to get my bearings.
“Hello? Can someone tell me how long I’ve been here?” My voice had a raspy rattle to it, suggesting I hadn’t spoken for a few days. That was alarming. Ann-Marie was expecting me to pick up Caleb the next morning. I repeated my question, but no one answered. I could hear footsteps and chatter nearby, but I was alone for the moment.
My phone was probably blowing up, so I looked around for it. But the room was a sterile, empty chamber with white walls and no windows. There was nothing to tell me where I was, or what time of day it was.
My left hand was still free, and I began to explore any part of my body that didn’t feel happy. There were a lot of spots to choose from. My shoulder was bruised, my hips were sore, and my head felt like someone had struck me with an iron skillet. There were no mirrors in the room, but judging by how much my temples stung when I touched them, I knew I’d be thankful not to see my face.
It was starting to come back to me. The Necromancer knocked me out cold with one punch. He might have kicked me a few times for good measure. It would explain why my tits were screaming at me. It’s all a dark, hazy blur.
Eamon had tried to escape with the computer, but he must have fallen off the balcony escaping the Necromancer. I remember hearing him scream, I remember hearing the crash as his body hit something a few stories below. I remember that black-robed vigilante screaming and running towards me.
Sadaf had been waving the gun, and it discharged. The memory replayed over and over, flashing the image of cold metal drilling itself through Andromeda’s skull. Her face and skull had been shattered, and no super power on Earth would be able to reconstruct her head.
Then the memory of Sadaf’s eyes going dead just burned a hole in my brain as well, and the image of her life being snapped out before my eyes just assaulted me. In a violent rage, he snapped her neck! He’s a super-hero, and he killed her!
Which brought me back to the original question of wondering where I was? At first, I thought I was in a hospital under police guard. But I had never seen a hospital room like this, and the few people walking past the open door on the other side of the room were wearing dark blue uniforms that I didn’t recognize. They didn’t look like doctors, nor were they Philly police. They had side arms, so they looked vaguely military. But it wasn’t like any government I’d ever seen before. They looked like costumes you’d see in a science fiction movie.
“Is there anybody out there?”
I didn’t expect anyone to reply. But a few seconds after I opened my mouth, a tall man walked around the corner. He was smiling at me, which automatically put me on edge. My vision was still fuzzy, and I couldn’t make out his features until he got close enough to touch me.
“Is there anybody out there?” He was repeating my words in a familiar melody. I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me, or just being weird.
“Where’s my friend?”
“I like that album, it’s quite good,” he continued on, ignoring my remarks and taking a close look at the monitors situated next to my bed. “You know, I met Roger Waters in Barcelona once. Pleasant chap.”
The man’s features were starting to come into focus now. My initial assumptions that this was a handsome young doctor fizzled away as he got closer, and I saw that it was the complete opposite. He must have been about eighty years old, maybe older. He looked ancient, although he didn’t stoop when he walked and he certainly seemed more agile than many men his age.
“Who the hell is Roger Waters?”
He gave me the stink-eye for that remark, as only the best crotchety old men can deliver it. He harrumphed for a moment, adjusted one of the knobs on the machines, and then pulled out a smart phone from one of the pockets on his white coat. He held it a few feet away from my face and silently stared at the screen. I assumed he was taking a picture, but he was moving the device around in small circles, which wouldn’t have let it focus. What the hell was he doing?
“I need to call my sister,” I advised the old man. “How long have I been unconscious?”
“Only two days,” he said without emotion. “You’re a strong young woman, but you took quite a blow to the head. When you blend that with the Necromancer’s spells, it rather leaves one muddied.”
Two days? Ann-Marie was going to kick my ass! “I need a phone, sir.”
“Progeriat,” he replied simply while checking some numbers on his clipboard and making perplexed expressions. “It’s Dr. Jonathan Progeriat. Afraid I don’t have a phone.”
“You’re holding one,” I pointed out, hoping that my growing impatience could be detected. “Come on, I have a kid who’s probably shitting himself wondering where I am. I’m a cop. Hand it over.”
“You are no longer a cop, and this is not a phone, Miss Watts. This is a bio-molecular spectrometer, and it’s performing an analysis on your unique blood type and genetic markers to identify your compatibility to the Huitzilopochtli Gauntlets. We don’t have any cell reception down here anyway. You’re fifty feet underground, you know.”
Well, they knew who I was. But everything else he said might have well been in a foreign language. “Where the hell am I?”
He was ignoring me, and doing an extremely and annoyingly great job at it. The not-a-phone in his hand beeped twice in a positive sounding tone, and he stuffed it back in his pockets with a satisfied smile.
He made one more look at the machines positioned next to my bed, and began to make some adjustments to one of the many intravenous tubes feeding fluids into my arm.
“What is that?”
“You were dehydrated,” he told me. “But you’re probably going to be fine.”
I wasn’t sure I really liked the word probably, but a knock at the door interrupted me before I could ask him to elaborate. I expected another one of those soldiers wearing the dark blue uniforms to be there, but it was someone that made me jolt. If my arm hadn’t been cuffed to the frame of the bed, the tubes would have been yanked out of my arm.
It was him, and he was staring at me with accusing eyes. It was the super-hero known and feared throughout the world as the Necromancer. The man who killed Sadaf. If he wanted to come over here and kill with me his death touch, I wouldn’t be able to stop him.
With the exception of my breathing, I stayed silent. I didn’t want to set him off any worse than he already was. It was my only hope, I decided. That, and the hope that he had calmed down in the last two days.
He pulled down the black, shrouded hood that always obscured his head, and knocked on the door frame once again. It was the first time I had seen the Necromancer without his hood on. In fact, I can’t ever remember him ever appearing in public without the hood. Super-heroes were notoriously protective about their public identities, and he didn’t exactly have a face that could blend in a crowd.
“Dr. Progeriat, I would have words with you.”
In my silence, I could only stare at him. I didn’t mean to stare, but I couldn’t stop. His accent and facial features suggested he was from Africa, but his skin was an unhealthy pale shade. He was bald, and his cheeks were dotted with dark freckles. His eyes were a strong brown color, but the whites around them had a pinkish tint that made me involuntarily shudder. When he made eye contact with me, I realized awkwardly that I had been staring at him for several seconds. With an angry grunt, he concealed his face once more with his hood and knocked again. Everyone talks about the Ambassador being an alien. Was he one as well?
“Is it true?” he asked, a bit louder this time. “This is your solution to the Legacy Initiative?”
“Chidike, you’ve b
een told to stay out of the medical wing,” the old man complained. “Unless you need some skin ointment, I’ll have to ask you to—“
“Is it true?!”
His voice sounded emotional, like some passionate anger was fueling his questions. I had the sinking suspicion that I was the reason behind his agitation.
Dr. Progeriat put down the clipboard and walked up to the dark man. He shoved him, urging the bigger man out of the room. “We are not going to have this conversation now, Chidike. And I don’t answer to you. And we have to explore all possibilities to maintain the--”
I was watching the Necromancer’s body language during the old man’s speech, and I could tell from his trembling body language that he was about to have a breakdown. Whatever Dr. Progeriat was going to end up saying was lost in the noise of Necromancer shoving his fist into the concrete wall. I don’t know if he hurt his hand, but it left a slight crack in the bricks. Then he turned towards me.
Two more people stepped into the room, each of them wrapping their arms around the Necromancer to hold him back. I recognized one of them, at least from the videos and pictures I saw paraded daily on television, on magazine covers and on the internet.
In person, DeathTek was even taller than the Necromancer. In all of the pictures that I’ve seen of him, he had small stinger missiles, armored wings and laser guidance doohickeys strapped to his shoulders, arms and back. But right at the moment, it was just a man standing six foot four, covered head to tie in a tight suit of fabric, steel and armored plates woven together into a fluid form. He looked strong enough to stop a train, to say nothing of holding the Necromancer back, but still agile and flexible enough to do cartwheels and drop kicks if he wanted. Whatever his face looked like beneath the armor, it was hidden the skull painted on his gleaming silver helmet.
The other person was a dwarf compared to the other two men. It was a young woman with long black hair that reached down to her lower back. She had a pretty face, although I could tell that her features had been sabotaged by a lot of rough memories. She was probably in her early twenties, but she carried herself like a war veteran. She was wearing an expensive looking sweater, a tight pair of jeans, and a set of leather boots that added a few inches of height to her small frame.