I was engaged in this flurry of crime-fighting for Dad. Sure I enjoyed the fact I was helping people. But to be honest, that was not my primary purpose. My primary purpose was to make as big of a splash as possible so I would attract Iceburn’s attention. I did not know where he was, and had no idea how to go about finding him. But, if I drew enough attention to myself in the media, he would be able to see where I was. Maybe he would find me. He had done it twice before. I hoped to lure him into making a move against me again.
This time, I was ready for him. Or, so I hoped.
Bait was on the hook, and my line was in the water. Now, I just waited for my fish to come along and take a bite.
29
I looked at my handiwork with satisfaction. It had been a bit of a struggle at first, but I had pulled it off. It was a job well done.
I got up out of my crouch and stood up straight. My cape rustled as I did so. My hands were filthy. I clapped them together in a vain attempt to clean them off some. My back felt tight from me being bent over for so long. I resisted the urge to stretch it out. There were people across the street, filming and taking pictures of me with their phones. They were memorializing a hero in action. Stretching did not look heroic.
I stepped up onto the sidewalk. “Looks like you’re all set,” I said to the woman I had come to the aid of. Her name was Mrs. Wilson. She looked like what would come up on your computer if you did a Google search for “little old lady.”
“I don’t know what I would have done without you,” Mrs. Wilson said with gratitude. Despite her age, her voice was clear and strong. Her thin white hair was up in a bun, and her shoulders were slightly stooped. Her blue eyes were huge, magnified by her thick glasses. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“I’m just glad I was here to help.”
Mrs. Wilson glanced at the people across the street filming the incident. She shook her head in disgust.
“All these people, and not a single one of them lifted a finger to help an old woman change her tire,” she said. “They’re more than happy to gawk when a superhero stops to do it, though. Other than people like you, are there no gentlemen left?”
“What is the world coming to?” I asked in agreement.
We were in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. It was dusk. In a little while the streets would be much busier than they were now as Adams Morgan had a thriving nightlife. I had been flying by on patrol when I had spotted Mrs. Wilson down below, struggling to change her own flat tire. I had landed and asked her if I could help. Thanks to the conspicuousness of my mask and cape and my newfound fame, a bit of a crowd had gathered as I changed the tire.
Once I had loosened the frozen lug nuts, changing the tire had been a snap. I knew all about changing tires. Not because of the Academy. There were no automotive maintenance classes there. Dad had taught me how to change a tire before he even taught me how to drive. Thanks to him, I also knew how to change oil and do routine car repairs. If I got a car, I would not need a mechanic. If I ever bought a Kineticmobile, I was ready.
Kineticmobile? Huh. I could work on the car itself, but the name still needed work.
“In my day, things were different,” Mrs. Wilson was saying. “Back then, men would go out of their way to help someone. Now they won’t spit on you if you’re on fire. And the women were women. Now they’re part woman, part man, and half monster. It’s shameful.”
“Kids these days,” I said, growing uncomfortable. My mind groped for a non-rude way to fly away from Mrs. Wilson before she had a chance to tell me more about the Garden of Eden society allegedly used to be. I need not have bothered. Something hit me on my right side so hard, I was knocked off my feet. I gasped in surprise, swallowing water. It roared in my ears.
Before I could react, I was slammed against the glass storefront of a neighboring business. The glass shattered. It felt like I was jabbed by a thousand needles. I was flung inside the business, surrounded by water, spinning wildly in the air. I hit something hard. I caromed off of it like a cue ball. An instant later I hit something else, something big and solid that stopped me from flying through the air further. I saw stars. The air whooshed out of my lungs. I fell. I crumpled to the ground.
Darkness closed in on the edges of my vision. I fought to stay conscious. I felt water dripping off of me. I coughed up water. My lungs and throat burned.
It was touch-and-go for a few moments. But finally, my vision started to clear, like I was slowly walking out of a dark tunnel. I groaned. I staggered to my feet, feeling as old as Mrs. Wilson had looked. My face was on fire. I reached up to my face, feeling something hard and jagged there. I tugged on it. I pulled out a long piece of glass from my cheek. It was covered with my blood. My blood mingled with the water I was soaked with, dripping onto the carpet.
I was inside a large office containing several desks. Right behind me was the wall I must have slammed into. Directly ahead of me was the broken glass facade I had apparently been thrown through. Based on the partially destroyed lettering etched on the outside of the glass, I was inside an insurance agency. In between where I now was against the wall and the glass facade was an overturned desk. I guessed I had hitting that desk to thank for at least some of the aches in my body. Wet paperwork was everywhere, like the sprinklers in a paper factory had been activated right after a bomb had gone off.
I was not alone. There were maybe half a dozen people in the office. Some sat, some stood, all were open-mouthed with surprise and alarm as they stared at me. It reminded me of the way cows looked at you when you approached them. I might have laughed if my throat—not to mention everything else—did not hurt so much.
“Is everyone all right?” I asked. My throat was raw, my voice strained. A couple of people nodded. Everyone else just stared at me like I was Bigfoot.
“You’re the one who’s bleeding,” a heavyset black woman said to me. “We should be asking you if you are all right.”
Wetness dripped into my eye, obscuring my vision. I wiped my brow with the back of my hand. It came away red. My tongue probed at the inside of my mouth. A tooth was loose. I felt like I had been in a hurricane and then hit by a truck. Being thrown through glass was not a walk through the park the way it seemed in movies. Regardless, I remembered my Academy training. A Hero was supposed to always appear in control of things, especially when he was not. “Never let them see you sweat,” Athena had said time and time again. It was bad enough these folks were seeing me bleed.
“Never better,” I said. “Sorry about the mess.” My words were a little slurred. My tongue felt thick, like it had been partially anesthetized. With more effort than it usually took, I formed a force field around myself. I zoomed out of the hole in the glass storefront like I had been shot out of a cannon. Once outside, I saw who I expected to see:
Iceburn.
He stood on the sidewalk, about a hundred feet away from me. I landed on the sidewalk, facing him. I still had my personal shield up. Around us, people shouted and ran. I was only faintly aware of them. I only had eyes for Iceburn.
“Howdy kid,” Iceburn called out. “Did you miss me?”
“Desperately. I wondered how long it would take you to find me.” Iceburn was in the same head-to-toe black costume I had always encountered him in. As always, the surface of the costume looked cracked. Lines of energy glowed in the cracks.
“Once you became a one-man anti-crime spree, it wasn’t hard to find you,” Iceburn said. “You became D.C.’s resident caped crusader to attract my attention, I assume.”
I nodded. Iceburn was a killer, but he was not stupid.
“Well, congratulations—here I am,” he said. “It’s time for me to finish the job I was hired to do. I’m a professional. I’ve been paid a lot of money to take you out. Fortunately, my employees have now authorized me to dispose of you even if there are witnesses. The fact I haven’t managed to kill a snot-nosed kid yet is making people start to wonder if I’m slipping. It’s bad for bus
iness.” He had the gall to sound faintly offended, as if I was being unreasonable by not having the good grace to roll over and die.
Iceburn hesitated for a moment. “This is where you’re supposed to tell me to give myself up and turn myself over to the authorities to be punished for my heinous crimes. That’s how the script normally goes. You Hero types are so predictable.”
I shook my head in the negative.
“I don’t want you to give yourself up. I’m not turning you over to the authorities.”
Silence.
“I see,” Iceburn finally said. He sounding surprised. “So it’s like that, is it?”
“It’s how it has to be. You’ve killed a lot of people. My father.” My voice caught. I swallowed hard. “Those people caught in the wildfire. God knows who else. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
“An eye for an eye?” Iceburn repeated. He barked out a laugh. “That’s the spirit! You know what kid? I like you. You’re starting to remind me of me.”
“Now you’re just being offensive.”
“I’ve just started being offensive.” Iceburn raised his arms toward me. His left palm glowed blue; his right one glowed reddish-orange. “I would say ‘see you around,’ but I don’t suppose that I will. If you see him, say hello to your daddy for me.” A blue beam shot out of Iceburn’s left hand. Simultaneously, an orange-red one shot out of his right. The beams combined, forming a massive stream of water that raged toward me like river rapids.
Unlike a few minutes ago, this time I was ready. The water hit my shield, splashing around me harmlessly. Even so, the force of the water was so immense that I took a couple of steps back. I braced myself harder, pushing against the back of my body with my powers to counteract the tremendous water pressure. The water roared in my ears. It sounded like I was standing under Niagara Falls.
I couldn’t see further than a half inch in front of me thanks to the rushing water. I needed eyes on Iceburn. I strained against the water pressure, flying up into the air, out of the torrential stream of water. I could see again. There Iceburn was. With my powers, I flung at him the three heavy metal manhole covers I had lifted from the street while I had been trying to distract him by talking to him. They rocketed toward him like deadly discuses. I would lop his head off like it had been guillotined.
Iceburn must have spotted one of them out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head toward one of them. The spray of water abruptly stopped. His body glowed white hot. Even as far from him as I was, I felt the searing heat emanating from him. He became blindingly bright. I squinted, but dared not look away. I needed to aim the manhole covers.
Unfortunately, thanks to the intense heat Iceburn emitted, the manhole covers literally melted in mid-air as they got close to him. With my powers, I felt them become mere droplets of molten metal before they impacted him. They got so small I could no longer control them.
The paint jobs of several nearby cars bubbled. A green awning behind Iceburn burst into flames due to the intense heat he gave off. Several people screamed. The street was now even more of a madhouse. I cursed myself for my stupidity and tunnel-vision. I had been so focused on Iceburn, I had lost sight of the fact there was a decent number of people around. Someone might get hurt. It was time for a different battleground.
I rose higher into the air. I went more slowly than I was capable of going. I did not want Iceburn to lose me. I hoped he would follow. He took the bait. He dimmed down to his usual black form. He leapt up into the air after me. I darted off toward the east. I looked back. Iceburn was in hot pursuit. Literally. A jet of fire speared out from his hand, engulfing me in flames. Even with my personal shield up, it felt like I had been plunged into a bed of hot coals. I could not contain a shriek of pain.
I dove down, out of the flames. I moved quickly back up, to the left, to the right, constantly randomly zigzagging so Iceburn could not get a bead on me. Jets of flame danced in the air around me. Target practice was not much fun when you were the target.
Despite my evasive maneuvers, I still made sure to head east. Soon, I spotted familiar buildings down below. I quickly dropped down out of the sky at a steep angle like a missile rocketing toward its target. The wind screamed around me. In moments, I was flying amid some abandoned buildings I had scouted out before in my earlier patrols. Iceburn followed, still taking potshots at me. I dodged most of them. Some I could not. The ones I could not dodge made me feel like I was being cooked like a rotisserie chicken. I could not take much more of this.
I weaved in and out of gaps between the buildings. I could not shake Iceburn. Rather, he got closer and closer, which made his blasts of fire at me more and more accurate. We were flying low to the now-blurred ground since D.C.’s buildings were relatively short. Unlike many other big cities, D.C. was not a city of skyscrapers. By law, no building could rival the height of the Washington Monument. At 555 feet tall, the monument was the tallest structure in Washington other than a radio tower. It’s strange the random facts that flit through your mind when you were fleeing for your life, trying to keep your goose from literally being cooked.
I approached two old, abandoned structures built close to one another. High fences were around them to keep loiterers out. No one had been inside them when I had checked days before. There was a narrow gap between them. I glanced at one of my wristbands. It told me my airspeed. I looked back at where Iceburn trailed me. I made a rough estimation of how far he was behind me. I did a quick calculation in my head. I would have to time this just right.
Right as I was about to enter the gap between the two abandoned buildings, I hit a button on my communicator. An invisible electronic signal went out to the explosives I had set in the old buildings days before. I had taken the explosives from the Old Man’s armory. I had set different booby traps all throughout the city. This was but one of them. As Sun-tzu wrote in The Art of War, “Don’t depend on the enemy not coming; depend rather on being ready for him.”
I felt the explosions before I saw them. The force of the powerful shock waves from them knocked me to the side, into the building on the left. My shield was still up. Thanks to my forward momentum, I bounced off the side of the building and out of the gap between the buildings like a tennis ball rebounding off a wall. Even with my protective force field, the impact made my insides rattle.
Though shaken like a martini, I managed to turn in midair once I cleared the buildings. I watched Iceburn and the now collapsing buildings. Just as I had planned, they were collapsing toward one another, into the gap between them. Iceburn tried to veer out of the way, but my timing had been right. It was too late for him to change course sufficiently. His forward momentum carried him right into the falling debris. Pieces of the building pelted him. I helped by grabbing all the pieces of falling debris I could with my powers. I slammed Iceburn with them. He dropped toward the ground, surrounded by roaring debris and dust. Soon he was lost from view.
Iceburn had dropped a building on my friends and me before. Turnabout was fair play.
The buildings’ collapse took less than a minute, though it took longer for everything to settle. When it was over, the scene was as still as a grave in contrast to how loud it had been when the buildings were falling. Dust and particles from the collapsed buildings hung in the air like fog. The building on my right had completely imploded. With the one on my left, perhaps a fourth of the structure still stood. The surrounding buildings were untouched by the explosion. Not bad for a first-time controlled demolition. Maybe, after the authorities eventually let me out of prison for murder, I could go into demolition work. I certainly could not be a Hero.
A huge pile of rubble stood where the gap between the buildings once was. It was over. I would dig through the rubble to find Iceburn’s body to make sure, but it was over. I was sure of it. Nobody could have survived that. Well, the Old Man could, and Avatar certainly could have before he had been murdered. But those Heroes were invulnerable. I had no reason to believe Iceburn was.
> I hovered in the air, surveying the destruction. As I did so, I took stock of how I felt. I felt like crap physically, of course. My body felt like someone had shoved me into a bag and then pelted me with rocks. My Academy uniform had protected my body from getting all cut up when Iceburn had shoved me through that glass, but I could not say the same about my face. It still bled and felt like it had been slashed in countless places. I was exhausted and in a lot of pain. I looked down at my hands. Some of the skin was bubbled up. I was burned pretty badly. I shuddered to think of what I might look like now naked. Thanks to Iceburn’s blasts of fire, I was like a half-boiled lobster. But, I’d live. That was more than I could say for Iceburn.
What I felt emotionally surprised me. I expected to be happy. I expected to feel triumphant. Jubilant. I had dreamt of this moment ever since experiencing the nightmare of holding Dad’s smoldering body in my arms. I had worked for this, planned for this, hungered for this.
Why, then, did I feel so terrible?
I was trying to pin down why when the top of the rubble shifted a bit, like a disturbed anthill right before the ants come pouring out. A hole opened at the top of the rubble. Iceburn, his costume torn and coated with dust and blood, crawled out of the hole. He got up on one knee. Shaking, he struggled to get on his feet.
Seriously?
I was on the move before I consciously even thought about it. With my personal shield up, I shot toward Iceburn like a stone out of a slingshot. I rammed him like a linebacker sacking a quarterback, wrapping my arms around his waist. I flew him off the tall pile of rubble. I felt him getting hot in my grasp. The heat burned my skin more than it already was. I instantly made my shield impermeable to air. It kept Iceburn from burning me further. It also kept me from getting fresh oxygen. But, I would not need to hold my breath for long.
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