The Ninth Metal

by Benjamin Percy

  Victoria and Hawkin hold hands and watch from a nearby rise. Their skin tightens to gooseflesh, maybe because it is cold. They hear a humming that trembles the air. The wind rises and for a few moments the meadow vanishes behind a thick, white veil. Then a blue flash strobes and shines hard, and for a long second every snowflake seems to hang frozen in place—before continuing to fall.

  When the air clears again, Mother and her people have vanished, but the monument remains. A smoking gateway. So hot that an invisible dome surrounds it where the falling snow transforms instantly to steam.

  37

  * * *

  John drives the Bronco along the highway, chasing the tracks of the third vehicle, which is gone, maybe waiting around the next turn or maybe hurrying on to Gunderson Woods and definitely calling for backup. Smoke rises from the edges of the Bronco’s hood. Something grinds in the engine. The steering wants to drag left, because one of the wheels is bent out of alignment.

  All this time his phone—tossed on the passenger seat—keeps buzzing. Jenna. He doesn’t want to talk, but he also can’t risk her turning around and coming back this way. He picks up the cell and shakes the glass off it and accepts the call.

  “Johnny?” Her voice comes in a panicked rush. “What’s going on? Talk to me, baby. Please.”

  “I need you to find Stacie Toal.”

  “Stacie who—what?”

  “Find Stacie Toal and tell her what’s happening. She’s the only honest person left in this town. She can help.”

  * * *

  The sandbox is long gone, but Hawkin determines that he presently stands rooted in the place where it used to be. Somewhere beneath the ankle-deep snow and the layer of omnimetal, he imagines the outline of it, the wooden rectangle where he once played. Where he conjured and dashed away worlds, and where he lost his mother for both the first and the last time.

  It’s possible the sadness will come later. It’s possible he’s experiencing shock. It’s also possible he doesn’t feel lost so much as found because of the woman standing next to him. Victoria looks at him with snowflakes feathering her eyelashes. Her mouth opens and closes as she struggles to find the right words.

  He saves her the trouble. “I’m freezing,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She takes his hand in both of hers and gives the knuckles a kiss. “That sounds like a fine idea.”

  Their footsteps whine and squeak in the snow as they head back the way they came. In the parking lot out front, there are dozens of cars no one will miss. The two of them will search the surrounding cabins and tents and shacks until they find some keys, and then they’ll go. Where doesn’t matter right now. Away from here.

  But when they round the corner of his former house, Hawkin goes still so suddenly that Victoria nearly loses her balance. “What?” she says.

  With a gust, the snow closes around them. It is difficult to see through it, but something glows ahead. A sparkling redness. Coming toward them. It diffuses and then coalesces into the shape of a man.

  “Oh my God,” Victoria says. “It’s him.”

  Thaddeus. He carries the wizard blade two-handed and at the ready. This they have seen before. What surprises them is the armor he wears. It appears to be made with the same technology, circuited red. He has a helmet with two sizzling spikes along the top and plates along his chest and arms. He is a laser-lit knight. His whole body hums like an electrical wire, and the snowflakes spit and hiss when they strike him.

  He stops ten yards away. He wipes a finger across his glasses to see them better. “You know,” he says, calling out loudly to be heard over the wind, “I used to think I wanted to simply enlist the boy. Make him into a human tank. But then my thinking clarified. Do you know what I realized?” He waits a beat, as if he actually expects them to respond. “I’m harboring an enemy warhead. It doesn’t belong to the Russians or the Chinese.” He hefts the wizard blade and points to the sky. “It belongs to them. Whoever they are. Wherever they come from. I’ve been stupidly, maybe selfishly, sheltering a weapon of mass destruction that could destroy this country. That ends right now.”

  * * *

  As soon as John has Gunderson Woods in sight, the gunfire begins. They are waiting for John. Inside the cab of the Bronco, sparks fly as bullets ricochet and zip and wang. One of the tires gives out with a slump. Then another. The engine utters a dying cough. Then something squeals and cracks in the underbelly of the vehicle. John is maybe fifty yards away when it grinds to a stop.

  The third SUV is parked in front of the open gates, and two men are stationed on the other side of it, using it as a barricade. The Bronco catches fire when John gets out and walks toward them. His feet slide in the snow but his course is determined, even as the bullets shred his clothes. When the men run out of clips, they try grenades. One sends up a geyser of snow. The other knocks him over, but he gets right up.

  * * *

  Over the years, in his cell, Hawkin had a lot of time to think, and one of the ways he occupied himself was by pretending. Comic books owned his imagination. He had always liked Batman best of all the superheroes. It was more than his haunting mask and the militaristic Batmobile and the gadgets he kept on his utility belt and the way he crouched like a gargoyle on Gotham’s skyscrapers with his leathery cape fluttering in the wind. It was the villains. The villains who made up his rogues’ gallery were the best of any series. Because they weren’t merely masked and spandexed weirdoes to punch and kick and throw Batarangs at. They meant something. They really mattered emotionally. If Batman was order, then the Joker was chaos. Mr. Freeze represented Bruce Wayne’s emotional coldness. Ra’s al Ghul was the father figure he wanted desperately but had to reject for his sinister ways. Two-Face captured the constant battle between Wayne and the Dark Knight. What you eventually came to understand, if you read enough comic books, was that Batman was a unification of his worst enemies.

  All of the hate and grief and weakness and loneliness of the past few years—the ruined sense of destiny—have been crushed down to this single moment and found a focusing agent in Dr. Gunn.

  Victoria pulls at Hawkin, cries for him to hurry, but he shrugs her off and says, “No.” She wants to run, but he’s ready to fight.

  Because Dr. Gunn is the Joker and Scarecrow and Mr. Freeze and Penguin and Ra’s al Ghul and all the rest of them. And this is Hawkin’s Crime Alley, where Thomas and Martha Wayne fell in a rain of bullets and blood and pearls. It was a moment of fusion, convergence. Here is the villain and here is the place and here is the core wound that Hawkin might conquer if he is going to come into his power as a hero. That’s the way the rules work.

  His mother said he had to choose what kind of monster he wanted to be. And that’s what he’s going to do. He charges forward, imagining that he would be faster except for the clinging trap of snow around his ankles. He lets out a scream, imagining it more low-throated and heroic. He swings an arm at Dr. Gunn, imagining the impact will blast him back twenty yards where he’ll crater the snow and send up a cloud of powder.

  But it doesn’t work out that way. Dr. Gunn pivots at the last second and slashes the wizard blade—and Hawkin stumbles and falls. Hot pain sears his back, and cold snow fills his mouth as he opens it to scream. Just like that, the dream dissolves. He’s still just a child after all. He feels paralyzed by pain and bladder-souring fear, but Victoria is crying out for him to get up, get up!—and he manages to roll onto his side.

  Dr. Gunn stands over him, his feet planted wide, the wizard blade held high above his head. Their eyes meet in a baleful stare. But the blow never comes.

  The shuff-shuff-shuff of footsteps rushing through the snow steals Gunn’s attention. He renegotiates his stance and wizard blade just as a man comes charging out of the storm. A man whose eyes are ablaze and whose skin teems and pulses blue like the atmosphere of some storm-troubled planet.

  Gunn waits for him—and then dodges aside at the last second. The slash of his wizard blade catches the man
across the chest. He lets out a scream of pain and the air brightens with a blue pulse of energy so severe, Hawkin turns away.

  When he looks again, he discovers the man now on his knees, panting, clutching the gash that reaches diagonally across his chest.

  Gunn stands at the ready. He could easily rush in and strike once more—lop off his head, cleave his chest—but he seems in no rush. His face is busy with curiosity. “There’s more than one of you?” He takes a few hesitant steps toward him. “But how?”

  The man springs forward with a yell—and Gunn brings the wizard blade down on him. Another gash opens in the man’s chest, forming a ragged blue X. He falls back in a heap, consumed by pain.

  “Who are you?” Gunn says, his breath short with exertion or scientific excitement. “Are you part of this cult? Are there more of you? Is this what happens when you smoke enough metal?”

  He keeps up his rapid-fire assault of questions, but Hawkin is distracted by Victoria. She snatches at his arm and begs him to come with her and he says, “No,” and she says, “I promised your mother I’d keep you safe.”

  “No!” Hawkin escapes her grip and scoops up a handful of snow. It’s damp enough that it packs easily. He remembers the feel of the cold, wet sand in his hand when he tossed it into the stranger’s face so many years ago when he snaps his arm forward and lets the snowball fly. It arcs fifteen yards through the air before striking Gunn in the face.

  His glasses are knocked off. He staggers back in surprise and knuckles the snow from his eyes. “What was ​—” he says in a panicky voice. “Where did—who’s ​—” He nearly slips and swipes at the air blindly with his wizard blade. “Stop!”

  The man rises from the ground with slow, pained difficulty. His clothes are ragged, his eyes and his skin throbbing blue. He takes two staggering steps and then hurls himself at Gunn.

  The two men don’t merely fall—there is a kind of detonation that comes with their entanglement. A sound like doom accompanies a great bomb blast of air and the snow all around them vanishes, swept away by a rippling globe of energy.

  Victoria goes flying back as if yanked by an invisible rope. And Hawkin is knocked aside; he rolls and skids for twenty yards, kicking up a big wave of snow. It is as if the man were packed with plutonium, a human missile.

  For a few long breaths, Hawkin lies there, stunned into stillness. He feels a blend of gratefulness and regret. He helped, but this fight didn’t belong to him. It isn’t his time to be a hero after all. His ears ring. Night is coming and against the backdrop of the darkening sky, snow falls like paper stars. He manages to struggle upright and trudge back the way he came.

  In a high-lipped crater of snow, a blue light throbs. He goes to it.

  A few pieces of scorched metal—the remnants of the armor and sword—lie scattered like shrapnel, but Dr. Gunn is nowhere to be found. Dematerialized. A dispersion of atoms. But here lies a man. Naked, his eyes open and staring at Hawkin. He has a birthmark on his face and it leaks light. His face is light.

  “I know who you are,” Hawkin says. “John Frontier.”

  “I’m sorry,” John says at last. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could take it back.”

  Hawkin holds up a hand and makes a fist and it shakes. Blue light begins to seep from between his fingers. He can feel the power there. He knows what he can do with it. He knows one life is irrelevant while at the same time every life is precious. He knows the pain of losing his parents, but he knows the gratitude of gaining Victoria. He knows the rage of being treated like a tool, but he knows the monstrous joy of becoming a weapon. He knows this man has killed, but he has also saved. In him is a beginning and an end, and an end and a beginning, and the two of them both destroyed each other and created each other, and metal is, metal is, metal is.

  “Go ahead,” John says. “I understand.”

  A shiver goes through the boy. And then his fist slackens and drops to his side. He stands there long enough for the snow to pile up on his shoulders. Finally he reaches for the stranger and says, “Let me help you up.”

  38

  * * *

  A week later, beneath the unmoving gaze of the stars, a rental home is left empty, and a moving truck rumbles out of town and onto the highway; John is at the wheel, and Jenna and Timmy are tucked into the bench seat beside him. Though it is early, the air is bright with oncoming headlights as traffic continues its steady stream into Northfall, people chasing dreams, jobs, the future. Theirs is the only vehicle headed south as John leaves it all behind.

  Most of what’s in the truck belongs to Jenna, but he did pack a few things. At Gunderson Woods, the boy had led him into the house, and in the living room, he pulled a book off the shelf. A Bible. “I think this is what you’ve been looking for,” the boy said. Or maybe he didn’t say it. Maybe he merely thought it. There was a strange sensation between them when they stood side by side. A magnetic binding. Secrets hushing between them like fragments of radio signals. And indeed, the boy was right—the center of the pages had been cut away to accommodate a hollow in which was tucked a dime bag of weed and his mother’s necklace. On the chain hung a pendant. Embedded in it was the first piece of iron drawn from one of his family’s mines. Ore. What his family always called the soul of Northfall.

  John wears it now beneath his shirt, against his chest. The pendant dangles at the junction of two thick purple scars crisscrossing his torso. They stitch his skin with pain, but the pain is good. A welcome vulnerability.

  The radio is on and he turns up the volume—and they begin to sing—first Timmy, then Jenna, and finally even John, his voice uncertain but trying.

  * * *

  A week later, as dawn breaks, Yesno returns home from the hospital to the vast empty tomb of the Frontier compound. He finds two housekeepers absently dusting and a nurse spoon-feeding Ragnar, who sits up in bed, propped up by pillows. He isn’t talking yet, and one side of his face droops, but he can write in a shaky script. Welcome home, son, he scratches on a piece of paper.

  Yesno folds this note up again and again and again until it can’t be bent anymore and tucks it into his pocket, and he will keep it for the rest of his life. It means even more to him than the manila envelope left for him on his bed that contains paperwork signing over the family estate—including Frontier Metals and Gunderson Woods—to him.

  * * *

  A week later, in the midmorning light at Gunderson Woods, the door stands in the center of the ring of omnimetal monoliths. It seems to cast a shadow in several directions at once. A cardinal flutters along and lands on top of it and begins to sing. But the song is cut short. A moment later, it drops to the ground, expired.

  * * *

  A week later, as the sun creeps toward noon, Stacie stands on the shore of a lake—one of thousands that puddle and spill across the Boundary Waters—watching her father load gear into a forest-green canoe. He’s joined by the boy, Hawkin, who thumps his backpack into the hull and says, “I get to paddle, right? I’m not just going to sit there?”

  “Sure you get to paddle. We’ll need you to. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us.”

  “Good. Because I’m sick of just sitting around. I want to actually do something.”

  “Oh, I’ll have plenty for you to do.”

  The short-haired, older woman—Victoria—carries a tackle box and a wobbling set of fishing poles down to the water. “Nothing better than pulling a fish out of the lake and dropping it right in the pan,” her father says, treating this like just another guided expedition. “We’ll be eating plenty of it. Unless you’d prefer to stick with the granola bars and beef jerky.”

  The snow has melted, but the next storm won’t be far behind. Winter comes early in northern Minnesota. And that hurries them along as much as anything. The promise of ice is as dangerous as the threat of what might pursue them.

  When John Frontier arrived—and all this trouble began—the temperatures were in the low nineties. Now there’s frost edging the pine needles and
stemming the cattails. The seasons change too fast up here. So does everything else.

  There’s a point in everyone’s life when something shifts dramatically and he or she finds a different path: A death. A divorce. An illness. A job won or lost. Whatever it is, nothing will ever be the same. Stacie sighs and rubs a hand across her face as if to clear the fatigue from it. That’s what happened to her. That’s what’s happened to all of them.

  The lake carries the reflection of the sunlit cirrus clouds ribbing the sky. A loon calls out on the water. “Hey, Hawkin,” she says and the boy tips his head toward her. “You like fish?”

  “I’m not sure.” He tromps toward her, his footsteps rattling on the stony shore. “I haven’t had it in a long time. I used to like fish sticks?”

  “Well, when I was your age, I hated fish,” she says. “But my daddy was always making me eat it.” And here her voice drops to a whisper. “Just in case you don’t like walleye, I’ve got something for you.” She pulls a sleeve of Starbursts out of her pocket, and he takes it with a surprised smile. “Don’t share. It’s just for you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Soon Stacie will hug her father and kiss him on the cheek and say thank you and be careful. She will wave as they go paddling off into the green, headed for Canada, and then she will return to Northfall, to the sheriff’s department, where her shift will soon begin and she will no longer refer to herself as a peacemaker.