by Various
“Well, it isn’t really my area of expertise, but I’ve done several studies—”
“What, on your patients?”
A few moments passed where neither one of us said anything. She took another sip of water. I glanced through the window at the lake and the geese.
“Perhaps we should get back to the assessment.”
“I’d rather talk about your findings.”
“I digressed. It’s not what we’re here for and time is limited. Why not just tell me what happened next.”
I sighed.
#
I was a terrible flyer, especially for a pilot. You’d think it would be the whole fish to water analogy, but on my first pass I tried to grab the girl, completely missed, and shot past her, whirling off-balance. About three-hundred yards later, I figured out how to right myself and bank. By then, she was a dot among dots, but my vision did something weird, homed in on her like a telescope. I desperately set off on a trajectory to intercept.
When I got to the girl, we collided so hard I heard bones crack. I thought I’d broke her spine, but found out later she had a few broken ribs, a snapped collarbone, and a shattered arm. Let’s say I was glad she was already unconscious when we impacted.
Unconscious, but alive.
Turns out we weren’t over the ocean. We were close. We hit the ground on the western fringes of the Los Padres Forest, our emergency descent coming to a less than graceful end. I had instinctively shielded the girl’s body with my own, and when I came to I was on my back, stripped of clothes, lying in the falling rain in a trench of broken trees and churned earth. I had my arms wrapped around the girl and she lay on my chest, quietly breathing.
I looked down at my arms and hardly recognized them. They had to be twice as big. I looked at my torso, slabs of muscle on my chest, a ridged abdomen.
“What…the…fu—?” Thunder hammered the skies. I looked up into the storm, the play of light flickering amongst the clouds.
I held the small girl close to my chest. I went to check her breathing and realized I could hear her heart beating, a steady rhythm. Good. I put my head back and closed my eyes.
#
I tried to wake up. I once lifted a blue whale and flew it back to the deep. I could toss an SUV like a football. But my eyelids were so heavy.
Sounds sorted into vague voices.
#
“So this one lived. You saved her?”
“Yeah. Yeah, she lived.”
“Who was she?”
I frowned. “Just a girl.”
The doctor watched me a moment. I was getting restless, and my head was hurting.
“Okay,” she said. “Continue then.”
“What’s the point? Why not just do your mind thing? You probably took a peek and already know who she is.”
“Even if I were a telepath, I…well, you’re Hero. I’m sure you’ve had some training along the way. How to shield your mind. You were in a team with Veil, after all.”
This doctor sure knew a lot for someone who didn’t know who she was going to treat. “Yeah. You have a trading card or something you want me to sign?”
#
I met Viviana Ortega, again—the falling girl I’d saved. She was 13 and living with her grandmother, since both her parents were killed during the crash. I paid her a visit on a whim. By then, the media had fatuously christened me as Hero. I hated that stupid name, but TCA encouraged it. Hell, I suspect they were actually responsible, said it was great public relations. Hero.
About six weeks after the Quintara 311 incident, I was signed over by the State of California to a government machine known as The Chimeric Agency. They probed and pinched as much as they could and taught me how to control, even hone, my abilities. Back then, I thanked God for these people, and I’ll begrudgingly admit there are still a few good souls there…well, one or two maybe. I’d still like to dropkick Director DeAngelo into orbit.
I keep digressing. I guess it’s because that first meeting with Viv really let the wind out of my sails. Hmm, how does one let the wind out of sails? I can see letting the wind out of a balloon…anyway…
I floated over Santiago Square. Not the best of neighborhoods in our fair city. I knew the girl was sitting on the porch in her grandmother’s backyard, smoking her third Lucky Strike. Her thick eyeliner was a mottled mess from tears that had dried up ten minutes before.
I quietly touched down. “I hear those give you cancer.” Yeah, that was the first brilliant thing out of my mouth.
She didn’t even look at me, just took another draw and blew the smoke from her lungs, flicked some ashes on the cement. She may have been acting cool and unaffected, but her heart was thumping like a jackhammer.
I took a few steps toward her, a sudden brisk wind flapping my red cape. “Can I sit?”
“Why? You tired?” She took a draw and suppressed a small cough. “Do you get tired?”
“I…sure, I get tired. Well, sort of.” This already wasn’t going how I expected. “I, uh…I just thought I would check in and see how you were.”
“How big of you. I’m fine. You can go.” She blew smoke and peered off to the side, looking at anything but me, I could tell. Her heartbeat pulsed at me in a way that felt oddly similar to Agent Supernova’s neutron beams during advanced combat training.
“Listen. Uh, if there’s something I can do to help…”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure you’ve done enough for me already, Hero.”
What was with this kid? We stood in silence for an uncomfortable length, then she turned her face to me. She had several piercings in addition to her ears—her right eyebrow, her lip, the bridge of her nose, her septum. I wondered for a second if she shoved all that metal through her flesh and cartilage herself. Maybe. Her dark eyes stared intensely into mine. “You know, some people don’t ask to be saved.”
“They don’t have to.”
“So you decide for them.”
“I just…I can’t just stand by. It’s my duty to—”
“Why didn’t you save my parents then? Huh? Why just me?”
The snapshots of screaming faces. Mothers. Fathers. Grandparents. Children.
The images played and replayed all the time.
I paused, mouth open, then, “Look…I manifested the same time you did. If I had known—”
“Known what?”
I blew out a breath. “I…”
“Known. What.” Her young girl’s voice deepened menacingly. She flicked her cigarette in my direction. It landed on the ground between us.
“Viviana…I’m sorry about your parents, kid, I am. I just…”
Her heartbeat turned into something physical now, deafening. Her breath like a jet engine. The Agency had taught me how to filter these things out; I suppose I was feeling vulnerable when it came to this girl. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone.”
I half turned and took a step, preparing to ascend, when I saw her out of the corner of my eye. One moment she was glaring at me from her grandma’s rusty patio chair, the next she was a faint blur, and then I felt a sledgehammer blow to my ribs.
Despite months of combat hardening, I was a novice back then when it came to checking collateral damage. We demolished two fences, a wooden shed, an elderly Latino woman’s fastidiously trimmed herb garden—just missing the woman herself, thank heaven—and a recently-stolen Yamaha V-Star cruiser, all before we ended up in the middle of 20th Avenue.
That was from one punch. One.
Clearly, little Viv had some pent-up rage issues. A guy like me, a chimeric who could shrug off small arms fire without even trying—despite what people think, a salvo of 9 mm Lugers still feels like an angry swarm of bees—had become her target, like it or not. So, instead of launching her off of me and into the air with a double heel kick, I lay there and took it.
“You don’t…” Punch. “Get…” Punch. “To walk…” Punch-punch. “Away!”
Viviana sat on my chest and her small sledgehammer fists came down in a staccato flurry. Right around the fourteenth or fifteenth punch she started to do some real damage. My lip split. My teeth bounced in their sockets. The next punch felt like it embedded my left eyeball into the back of my skull; I sure hoped it hadn’t as that would be a bitch to fix. Despite her size, the girl was no lightweight. All that unrestrained fury drove her powers to heights I suspect she didn’t even know she had. How could she? Unless the girl had been out in the local rail yard poking her knuckles through steel-reinforced train cars. Shit. Maybe she had been.
After two dozen blows, my entire upper body was buried nine or ten inches deep into the fractured road, making one hell of a pothole, so I was about to yank her off me when she just stopped, one fist in the air, mascara streaking her face in fresh wet lines. She shook and sobbed and fell forward onto my chest. I realized car alarms were sounding off and dozens of oglers had gathered, a crowd of folks in suits and dresses having just emerged from the gospel church to our left.
I couldn’t see out of my left eye, reached up to find it was swollen shut. I almost chuckled; instead, I put my arms around the kid in a familiar way and let her cry a bit.
#
I cocked my head at Doctor Legato. What was that?
“And you seem to have a history of this type of behavior.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Type of behavior?”
“How do you reconcile that whenever you intervene against—”
“Against what? Criminals?”
“Let’s say ‘offenders’…“
I scoffed, but she went on. “…you tend to leave a wake of destruction like the aftermath of some bad Godzilla movie.”
“First of all, Doc, there is no such thing as a bad Godzilla movie. Second, I’m the one who tries to prevent the wake of destruction. Look, if I didn’t know better—”
She started ticking things off on her fingers. “San Juan, 2010, the Revengers. Anchor City, 2011, against Doctor Phantom a.k.a. The Immortal. The Hattenberg Gas Fields debacle in 2013. Oculus and Inferno, 2014. The Chimeric Lives Matter rally in D.C., 2015. And just eight months ago, you and your teammates fought the entire Covenant and nearly half of the South Bay district was—”
“Those are incidents where things escalated quickly, but sometimes…look, sometimes you have to get a little rough. There’s no way around it.”
“Yeah. Violence comes with the territory in your line of work,” the doctor said, paused a beat. “It’s my opinion you’re dangerously self-destructive.”
“Oh yeah? Your professional opinion. That’s what you’re putting into those Bitotiqs of yours?”
“Yes, actually.”
I clenched my jaw. Her heartbeat was irregular. “DeAngelo. He put you up to this.”
“I have never spoken with Director DeAngelo in my life. But a Class A-plus-plus chimeric who can fly at supersonic speeds, toss tanks a hundred yards, and shrugs off point blank armor-piercing rounds, runs amok seeking out chimerics in hopes they might, I repeat might, be able to kill him? Sound accurate?”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Do you know the amount of collateral damage your quest for the afterlife has cost? Consider just this city alone, not to mention dozens, scores of other cities and towns across the globe?”
“Like I said, ridiculous and pointless. And I don’t run amok. What does that even mean? Amok?”
“Seventeen billion dollars. That’s just Port Haven. Your home. And only since 2010. So, you see, you’ve cost—”
My mind shifted abruptly to the TCA lighthouse facility. Director DeAngelo is on a tirade about the collapse of the Bowen Financial building during a ‘battle-royale’ with the Covenant: …one-hundred-and-fifty-goddamn-million dollar building, Noah! Nickolas Bowen is one of our chief patrons!
Co-director Laws just sat there, not saying a thing. She had been going to bat for me less and less.
You and your idiot cohorts even destroyed the goddamn parking garage. Not to mention the security personnel still inside and all the people working after hours!
“What?” I blinked erratically, shifting back to the present. “That’s not right.”
“That is right, Mister Jensen,” Legato replied. “I have a fastidious memory for facts and figures and my interests in studying—”
“No,” I interrupted. “There wasn’t anyone inside the Bowen building or the parking garage! I made sure of it.” I glared at the doctor, whether she could see me or not. “You know, for me being some ‘anonymous client’ that you weren’t briefed about, you know way too much about my history. Who pulls seventeen billion out of their ass like that?”
“I have a fastidious—”
“Nope. No. I smell a rat, lady. We’re done.” I started to stand up.
“Sit down, Mister Jensen.”
I raised my finger at her. “Stop calling me that.”
“Stop calling you ‘Mister Jensen’? What do you prefer? Hero?”
I wasn’t sure if that was my own self-loathing talking or if the doc was putting the voice in my head despite my mental shields; either way, I let off a blossom of body heat. Sight or not, I wanted her to feel something.
The room’s temp shot up at least fifteen degrees in an instant.
Click-click. The A/C came on. Something rippled across my skin, up my arms and legs and the back of my neck.
Dammit, why was I getting so bent out of shape? Was it because of the voices I’d been hearing? This wasn’t the first time. Was it the endless fifths of vodka I soaked up at night just so I could sleep for two, maybe three hours? It wasn’t a new subject; how much urban planning my activities had instigated over the years. There were plenty of articles. Hell, I was the favorite subject—or used to be before I publicly shunned the cape and removed myself from the limelight—of Vulpes Network’s talking heads like fricking Buck Richman or that grating little pundit Aisha Cordell on American Hour and on her Call-To-Action blog or vlog or whatever crap she calls it.
The doctor took a slow breath. “Your reaction suggests maybe we’ve struck a nerve, and…I’d really like to help you work through this. Please sit.”
I remained standing. “I’m not buying it.”
Her face turned in my direction, but she kept her glossy-lipped trap shut.
I continued: “First, that may or may not be the bill for my so-called ‘self-destructive’,” I made air quotes and instantly felt like an idiot, “rampages, but maybe if I hadn’t been around the cost would have been way higher, lady, in lost lives.”
“I’m not finished. So, what? You have me run through some deep emotional back story, then start pushing buttons? I’m pretty sure I know what you’re up to, serving up a Freudian value meal with a side of Nietzsche fries. That’s pretty reckless, Doc, considering who you’re dealing with.”
“And I think you’re more than what you claim to be. You’re like that sensory Goth-wannabe Veil and I thrashed a couple years ago. Chaos Hound or whatever. You feed off emotional garbage, gnaw on it like a juicy T-bone.”
Her face hardened; like, not just hard, she sneered, jaw muscles clenching. I sensed her heartbeat quicken. She flickered a tiny smile. Her voice came out measured, a dour undertone slithering beneath the surface. “Now you’re being inordinately offensive.”
“Yeah?” As they say, I had no fucks left to give this woman. I started for the exit. “I’ll send you an inordinate gift basket. Whatever the hell that means.”
Legato’s commanding voice bounced around inside my skull with surprising clarity, tripping me up. She actually made me feel small. So, this Legato was more than an empath; she was some sort of hybridized telepath. And a
liar.
“Get out of my head,” I said, not even turning to look at her.
Anxiety and anger came hard at me wave after wave. I was quickly starting to feel useless. Weak. Small.
I turned to face her, saw that she was hovering a foot off the ground, fists clenched.
#
A sweltering night in Naranja County, not that a heat wave in La Futura’s concrete jungle bothered me. I coursed through the thick air toward the derelict church. A dog barked below me. In an alley a block away, a homeless man slurred insults at his empty bottle, while further off, towards Hillywood, Channel 4’s traffic-copter skirled above the jammed knot of exits and expressways. Last, the thump of some poser’s cranked-up bass system dropped off as I let it all fade, until there was nothing…except the crickets in the weeds. I let the crickets chirp a moment, then shut them out too.
I hovered. Closed my eyes a moment, reveling in the stillness I’d created. To borrow the cliché, it was the calm before the storm.
Just like with my hearing, with a little focus I could widen my spectral range beyond visible light. Never really cared much for X-ray vision. Always had trouble with depth control. It’s not like in the comic books. One second you’re taking a glimpse at some adoring fan’s lacy Victoria’s Secrets, then something shimmies, so to speak, and you’re staring at Stage 2 breast cancer. “I hear it responds well to early treatment,” I’d said, before launching up, up, and away.
Thermal vision, though. No argument about its uses. I altered my photoreceptors, shifted to infrared, and opened my eyes. Much handier. Easier to control the depth of field, too.
Twenty-five feet in the air, I pulled rotted lumber away from a boarded-up window. Quietly. And just enough to get inside. Artemis’s voice whispered in my receiver, reminding me to keep it quiet since we were dealing with lab hostages. Stealth wasn’t typically how I rolled, but I was making a cameo on this mission. It was Artemis’s and Veil’s sand pile; I wasn’t about to piss in it. I was fine with my role as the ‘big gun.’