by Mark Gardner
He colored his sneakers in red pools of watered blood that seemed black in the darkness and covered them in guts galore dropped in little piles where the broom hadn’t swiped them back into the river. “Oh man...” he whispered to himself and sighed. On the bright side, his body didn’t hurt from the impact or the gunshot and Joaquin had to smile at his ability to heal. At least that’s how he understood it. He felt bulletproof; unlike that agent swimming face-down in the river. Joaquin bit the inner side of his cheek at the memory, all too present in his adrenaline-fueled mind. He’d seen death many times before, but not like that. The man had been out to kill him and indirectly Joaquin had caused his death, crashed and drowned under his car. Missing a watch, Joaquin had no notion of time. He was either at the right place or missing entirely on the party. In his head, he could hear Massey’s judgmental voice, Andy’s sneer for fucking up a simple task.
Andy... Shit, he didn’t want to think about that fire. The guy was a 50/50 chance and Joaquin didn’t want to think about him right now either. Disasters were piling one atop another and just like in the streets Joaquin found himself standing in the middle, fending off any sucker aiming for a chance to mess with him. Only he was fending off the thin air here. He wanted to scream.
A light right above his head flickered on. Joaquin snapped to his senses and crouched low beside a stack of pallets, nearly tipping them over. He looked up and swore at the sensor. A pair of voices approaching did the same.
“That shit scared me!”
“Don’t worry mano, it’s just a light.”
“Turning on before we even got near it?”
“It’s probably just broken, esé. Calm down.”
Joaquin didn’t dare move, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. The voices dropped low, cautious, with words sparse. He had to raise himself on tiptoes to peek through the gap of one of the pallets. Down the side of the building was a red door; above it, a red light beamed brightly against the dark sky. The taller of the two men banged his fist against the door. He wore a hoodie and his companion a hat set low. To Joaquin, both were just silhouettes. The door inched open and after seconds the two men were let in. Before they snuck inside the shorter one looked around, still suspicious.
After he decided it was safe, Joaquin emerged from his hideout. He tiptoed to the door and inspected it. He could try the signal, he was sure he got the pattern—one heavy bang followed by three rapid ones. The signal suffered from artistic indecision. But, once someone opened and saw he was a stranger, what was he going to do? Threaten them with no weapon? Joaquin instead looked for a window.
His eyes scaled the upper portion of the building, spotting windows tightly shut. As nimbly as he could he stacked up enough pallets to lift himself close enough. The rest was a game of balance. Lifting himself on the unsteady Jenga tower he’d made, Joaquin put his body as close to the façade as he could and rested his arms on the rusting tin ledge underneath the middle window. Yellowing foil covered the window, but it was transparent enough to allow him some view. And he could see what he had come for and more.
At first, he spotted their shadows, four in total, intersecting giants on the opposite wall and on the ground below. Then he saw the source of the light—a barrel filled with orange flames dulled to a sickly yellow by the foil. The four people sat facing each other in a circle. Hushed voices seeped through the space between glass and metal and concrete. Their words were not coherent, however. Joaquin paused. Miles Jensen was not dealing, nor was he up to some petty crime. It felt too much of a coincidence to not be true, him coming here to this...meeting. That made no fucking sense to Joaquin.
There was a sudden deprivation inside the warehouse, of something that Joaquin couldn’t rightly place but it drove his attention back to his spying activity. He blinked and squinted and tried to see what was amiss. And then he saw it—the shadows missing from the wall, missing from the entirety of that vast room filled otherwise with shadows of all kinds, thrown by the wild flames. They were being pulled down like a curtain from a living shadow, that of a man sliding down the wall with ease, an inconsistent silhouette vibrating in and out of view. The humanoid shadow returned to its owner vaguely revealed by the singular source of light, the barrel. With itself, it brought a bundle of swirling like smoke shadows misshapen and formless that now rested in the hand of the man. He lifted them up to his mouth and swallowed the dark bubble, cementing the overlapping darkness that had now settled in with comfort.
The room had taken an ultimately intimate mood, a thick blackness that eyes and flames alike couldn’t penetrate. Joaquin’s eyes lost sight and it was like he was staring into nothingness. His eyes sunk into it, his body inclining to break through the window and fall into the darkness consuming everything inside the building, mostly the inhabitants of the circle who’d been engulfed. It was like they weren’t there at all. And just like that, as he was wobbling on the unsteady pallet tower, his mind snapped back into place and his eyes bulged.
He pulled away from gazing within and blinked through his dizziness as he stared into the outside where colors and lights and sounds existed aplenty. The warehouse grounds returned him to his normality, the space lit with the same dull lights flickering restlessly in the night; the shadows of the outside were placed where they were rightly to be and Joaquin was thankful for that. Excitement and some primal fear of the unknown battled inside of him. To the inside, he threw a look again.
Excitement won over fear, as Joaquin was a man of tomorrow, a person granted abilities that told him fear was just an attribute of others and not him, never him.
In that warehouse was the truth he was seeking.
Inside, a whole new world existed and Joaquin wanted to be a part of it.
He allowed for a second proud smile to play on his lips. It wasn’t just any meeting Miles was coming to. It was a Supers Anonymous Meeting.
Betty left the dimly lit corridor and went back through the bland-looking door leading to Andy’s secret hospital room. The nurse busied herself with his painkillers and soaked bandages, replacing them with clean ones. He was drifting to sleep; half-awake asking questions about the fire, about someone named Anne, about Joaquin, but mostly about himself. All questions Betty couldn’t answer. She was given scarce information in the heat of the moment, rushed to the hospital in the dead of night to keep new secrets away from people who desperately wanted to know them. But she was given enough to know something was amiss with the Jensen case, with Major Globe. Massey’s warning had been brief and hurried, but always the same—that she couldn’t trust anyone right now. The world was turning upside down, friends became foes and vice versa.
Betty shivered in her thin jacket; the weight of her service weapon pulled her down. She looked to Andy, near-motionless in his drug-induced haze. He’d got hurt on account of supers but he was still eager to help. Was it some shared insanity driving everyone to do crazy shit and risk their lives? Or was it a duty of care that they couldn’t turn away from? Did they just crave adrenalin?
“You know it’s funny how the world suddenly depends on a street thug, a sociopathic woman, a crazy old detective and a small time hacker,” Andy croaked from his bed. Betty sat on the edge of his bed. “You’d think that among all these people with powers there’d be someone, anyone, who would, I don’t know, put a cape on and fight crime and corruption. You know, the cliché. Instead, they’re proving that prick right.” He tried to look at her but Betty knew his mind was muddied, thoughts ricocheting madly, pain and helplessness and adrenaline jolting his mind awake when it should be asleep, resting. Andy was committed to his emotion exchange, so she listened.
“Once you let fear in it’s pretty much over. I mean I’ve seen the bad and the ugly on the supers side and I’ve seen them on this side, our side. Am I making sense? The pills are kicking in mighty fast. Officer, can you imagine genocide based on something unsubstantial? So many lies were told, but people buy them. It’s so easy once you let fear in. We’ll get an uprising. Do yo
u think we’ll pull it off? Save the city? The world?”
Andy’s voice was hoarse, now fading away as he was lulled to an unconscious sleep by the morphine that the nurse was injecting. But he did make sense. He summarized the ludicrousness of the situation. A situation that Betty now invested in the outcome.
She rested her hand on his bare arm. “I don’t know, buddy. I guess we’re about to find out.” Right now she could believe just about anything.
Without a uniform she felt like a person overstepping the law, wielding guns in desolate hospital wings, protecting people she barely knew, prophesizing about a world ending and caped crusaders. True, she had her badge uncomfortably biting into her leg inside her pocket, but she was still incognito. So when her personal cell vibrated on the small table in Andy’s room, Betty jumped, nearly pointing her gun at it. She mustered all the control she had to pick it up and leave the room to the sleeping and the injured.
“Felix, what do you want? Do you know what time it is?”
“Massey just got arrested! I’m at the station filling out a shit ton of paperwork and that agent, what’s his name—”
“Batiste?” Please don’t be Batiste, Betty thought, her palms sweating.
“That’s right. He just waltzed in with Massey and announced to the entire precinct that the detective has been accused of a fucking Homeland Security breach! Harboring a terrorist with powers and obstructing a leading case with false evidence, that’s what he said. They’re taking him to the Bureau now. Christ, I’m hiding in the fucking toilet. Betty, are you there?”
Betty felt anywhere but in the present moment. She needed time, seconds to catch her thought process skipping wildly ahead of her and Felix breathing heavily on the other end of the line. She leaned against the avocado-painted wall. She felt sick. Her mouth was dry but then it filled with a sickly sour taste and she had to swallow it back down to force out a sentence instead.
“Yeah, yeah I’m here. Did Batiste say anything else?”
“No. It felt personal though, like he was showcasing Massey, making sure we knew what will happen if we obstruct the law. We are the goddamned law! What’s happening? Massey got up in his face earlier about the Jensen case. Do you think that has anything to do with this?”
“Maybe. Possibly. Massey...wasn’t sure the FBI was handling the case properly.”
“Like they were hiding something? I won’t believe Massey did any of the things they accused him off. That’s just...oh shit, wait. Someone just came into the restroom.”
Betty’s pulse was jackhammering in her head listening to Felix’s raspy breathing.
“They’re gone. You’re not in trouble are you, Betty? You snuck those files out today and I didn’t ask why...I mean, I know you lied about the reason but—”
She cut him off, the noise in her head muddying the signal she needed to function properly. “I’m fine, Felix. I might need to go low for a while. You stay safe. I have to go.”
Betty ended the conversation before his voice could catch to her and shake off her intentions. She was rebelling, planting seeds of anarchy and chaos, proving right the wrong people. But she had to go.
She pushed the door hard, startling the nurse whose eyes darted to the pistol Betty didn’t realize was holding with a finger on the trigger. She went to the window and pushed the blinds wide, searching the street for any signs of trouble. Her eyes didn’t find any but her gut told her otherwise. It was possible the entire hospital was crawling with FBI. It was possible they were coming this way. The nurse tried to make it to the door, sensing some danger that betrayed the promise she’d made to Massey.
“No,” Betty warned her. “You stay with him and do as Detective Massey said. If someone comes knocking you tell them terminally ill, you tell them contagious. Fucking say whatever medical lie you want but you don’t let them here. I’ll come back soon.”
Betty pulled the clipboard from Andy’s bed and wrote down Felix’s number. “When Mr. Kitz gets better you call this number and tell him to come here. Tell him Officer Patterson said so. Understand?”
The nurse took the clipboard reluctantly but nodded nonetheless.
Betty pushed her hair out of her face, trying not to hyperventilate. She bent over Andy and took his shoulders, shaking him. “Andy, wake up.” She shook him hard until his eyes fluttered open, disoriented but present. “Massey’s in trouble, the kind I can’t get him out of right now. Whatever deal you two had, I need in. Tell me where you told him to go.”
Andy’s thin pale lips curved into an asymmetrical smile. Andy made an effort to force his lips and mind to behave. “Whidbey Island.”
Joaquin jumped down from his pallet spy tower. He rubbed his knuckles against his eyes and willed the bleeding white stars away—an after-effect from the super-power he’d witnessed in secret. With the world now returned to its colors, objects took healthier shapes, outlines and details solid, Joaquin found his way back to the red door. He rapped the signal against the decaying dented surface. Rust flaked off of it where his fist landed.
After a palm-sweating moment, a man’s face appeared through the opening of the door swung ajar. His face was pinched, and his eyes narrowed. Joaquin made sure he was first to speak, spitting his thoughts out fast.
“Got room for one more, bruh?”
The man in the door chewed on his bottom lip, sizing up Joaquin. He saw crusted blood over Joaquin’s brow, torn clothes and bullet holes without matching wounds. Joaquin was a circus attraction, a sight to behold, but a deep plea in his eyes, still watery from the impossibly fast transition from light to no light, spoke a powerful enough tale to the man guarding the door. He stepped aside and let Joaquin enter.
The man grabbed him above the elbow and lead him through the pitch-black. It was like walking blindfolded; no matter how much he blinked, Joaquin couldn’t detect any shapes. He followed the directions blindly, allowing the man to steer him by the elbow. A lit barrel emerged instantly from nothingness. Glowing embers faded as they launched on fragrant wisps of smoke. The scene reminded Joaquin of some space sci-fi movie. That’s how he felt too, stepping into seemingly thin air, approaching a circle of light supported by nothing, surrounded by nothing. It just floated there ominously. But he heard—proof of a solid plane under his feet and of reality. There were people and the sounds they made that were too audible for his ears. Did the oppressing darkness heighten other senses? Joaquin would never know.
The people in a circle around the barrel emerged from nothingness; they were all quiet while waiting for Joaquin to enter the halo of light and reveal his face. A woman in her mid-thirties stood up first from her red plastic chair. “We won’t turn you back now that you’re here but…” she paused and met each of her companions’ eyes, “how did you find this place?”
Joaquin took in the sight of them. They appeared to be ordinary people. Even his former guard was behind him toying with the keys on his belt. It was such a common thing to do. The one playing with his keys was the short one; the tall man had his hands in his pockets but his eyes were dark and sharp like the knife tattooed on his left cheek. The woman had the look of a kindly kindergarten teacher as she nervously pushed her glasses back up her nose. A pimply teenager, younger than Joaquin, kicked his backpack further under the red plastic chair and stared at Joaquin with wide eyes.
Completely ignoring the woman’s question, Joaquin’s laugh echoed off the tall roof of the warehouse. “You guys have powers!”
The quartet looked at each other.
“Are you fuckin’ retarded, esé? Isn’t that why you’re here?” The tall man with the knife tattoo chuckled, rubbing the back of his head.
“He shouldn’t be here. What about Miles? What if he comes back?” The teenager now stood, too.
“Shut your mouth kid, we talked about this,” the tall one hissed back.
Joaquin stood, dumbfounded, in the middle of them. The warmth of the burn barrel embraced him and he started to see clearly for the first time since the
cabin in the Canadian wilderness. He slowly started to realize what was happening, how his destiny was coming together. He now knew that he hadn’t failed Andy. He wasn’t going to fail Massey. He wasn’t going to return to being nobody, a kid with a mug shot and a knife, robbing his neighbor. He was going to be better than Kristof—a hero, not a villain. He wasn’t going to be the quiet passenger on the bus, just biding his time until his stop came.
“Miles was innocent.” It was easy for Joaquin to say that, now having seen the proof. He barely caught how sullen their faces turned at the mention of Miles from a stranger.
“You know Miles?” the woman asked and took a step closer.
Joaquin met her eyes. “My friends tried to save him but it was too late.”
“Speak up puta, what’s too late? What do you know about Miles?” The tall man scratched the knife tattoo.
“He didn’t kill those kids!” the boy blurted.
Joaquin bit his lip. The gravitas of the situation hit him. He was the one delivering the bad news, the partial failure on his and Andy’s side. They had discovered that Miles was innocent, true. But they hadn’t done anything to help show that. Everything had gone haywire.
“Your boy Miles, he didn’t do nothin’ to those kids. He got hurt real bad and there ain’t no coming back from that stain. You got Major Globe to thank for that.”
“Major Globe? The scientist, Jacob Globe, who’s running for mayor? He did this to Miles?” The woman sat back down, a trembling pink-nailed hand clasped over her mouth.