A Once Crowded Sky Read online

  A reacts first. He aims his gun and fires, and it’s a good shot. Given the speed of the projectile and the reaction time of the human constitution, dodging the bullet will be impossible. It’s impossible for a regular human to do it. I can’t do it. Then you will have to be better than human, Ultimate replies.

  Pen moves, and the bullet whizzes by.

  Pen connects with spot four on A, driving a fist into A’s right kidney. The man goes down, dropping his weapon. He shouldn’t have relied on that crutch; he might’ve lasted longer. B starts spouting obscenities as he takes what appears to be some kind of martial arts stance, and Pen approaches him patiently, anticipating the predictable thrust. When it comes, Pen grabs the jutting wrist and bends it back to where it pops. The man shouts out, coiling into the pain, leaving spot eight dangling sweetly in front of Pen. A touch and some pressure, and the man falls.

  Pen approaches C, the last one. C’s hands are spread across his face, blood gathering between his fingers. “You can’t do this,” he says. “You fuckers are gone.”

  C’s pants still hang around his ankles, and Pen strikes hard on spots six and fourteen. The man screeches, lunges back, tripping over his own clothes. He stumbles and drops—his head thumps into the asphalt, and he stays quiet.

  Pen scans the alley. Look for backup. Look for the others who first ran and are now ready to return. Look for the ones who think you’re vulnerable now. Look for the danger, and when it comes, end it.

  A rat scurries from behind a green Dumpster thirty yards off. Four stories up, a woman three months pregnant closes her window and gives off a disgusted scoff. A camera flashes in the distance, too far to capture a steady photo. Thirty thousand feet above, a rising 777 accelerates past 450 knots. The rat returns to the Dumpster. The area is safe, secured.

  “Where’s your little windboard, you fucking coward?”

  Pen is torn from his training. He drops to his knees to check on her. Strength’s hurt. Her hand bleeds onto her shredded shirt. Through the gaps in the fabric, he sees the black bruises that now cover her body. Pen reaches out to her.

  “Get away—don’t you dare!” She’s twitched herself into a fetal position and appears to be struggling to emerge from it, pushing out legs and arms that stretch and then retract. “Don’t you ever touch me again. Just get the fuck away.”

  “Alice, let me see it.” He tries to move her arm, to look at her hand. She reacts as if he were Burn and jerks away. “Alice, Strength, c’mon, please, just let me help.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He stands, steps back. Spots one to fourteen are on her, and they shine. “I can get you help. I’ll get an ambulance.”

  “Fucking coward.” She rolls to her side, manages to untangle her legs. “No robot daddy around to cart your bony ass around. Think you’re so fucking great, the great and powerful fucking hero.”

  “Look, this isn’t the time. I’m going to call an ambulance.”

  “I don’t need a goddamn ambulance!”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. No ambulance.”

  “Always looking for someone else to do it for you.” She sits up and leans against the wall. “That why you didn’t show?”

  Pen bends down and then straightens up again. He looks at her, watches her struggle to treat the wounds, then he looks at the sky, waits for all the heroes to come flying back. That’s the rule. Everyone knows. They all come back. After a while, he walks over to her and sits down next to her, close but not touching.

  “Fucking coward,” she says as she inspects her wounded hand. “At least the villains had the decency to kill themselves.”

  Pen scratches at his shirt, picks at a long scar that runs down his chest. “Can I ask, why is it always fucking coward? Every time I get that these days, it’s always like a, y’know, a fucking thing. I got to say, I don’t really see the connection. It’s not like I was busy copulating while you all were doing the whole defeating-The-Blue thing.”

  “Jokes,” she says, removing her shirt to reveal a sports bra underneath. “You’re so fucking transparent.” She wraps the shirt around her bleeding hand.

  “You’ve got to stop doing this.”

  “You’re a fucking coward, because coward doesn’t”—she grimaces as she pulls the wrapping tight—“doesn’t cover it.”

  “You’re going to end up killing yourself.”

  “You want to know something, Pencil Dick? I’m not mad at you. I do kind of like getting saved; I’m glad that little Prophetier stalker calls you. Bet that’s a shocker, but I am, I like seeing you do your little routine thing, prancing all about. It’s cute.”

  “This isn’t about me!” Pen shouts.

  Strength stares at him for a few seconds and then laughs. Using the wall as a brace, she inches herself up until she’s above him. She rests for a second, then takes a step forward, scowling as her foot twists into the concrete.

  “I like you saving me,” Strength says, turning toward him. “I like how it reminds everyone you didn’t show when we all did. How grand it is that you’ve still got all that special specialness, and we’ve got nothing, that you were the only little piss too scared to help Ultimate. Your Ultimate. I like seeing it. I think you deserve it, I do.”

  Pen looks up, watches the bruise growing around her left eye, the blood drying on her lips. As always, the robot voice is inside Pen’s ear, berating him, demanding he help her, save her, save the day. Metal wires in his brain hum loudly as they examine every wound on her, as they tell Pen exactly how to fix them all.

  Pen bends his head back into the wall. “Whatever you want,” he says.

  She spits blood at his feet. “You’re a fucking coward,” she says, and, gradually, hampered by all those wounds, she limps away.

  He watches her go, not really knowing what to do. He saved her. She would’ve died, and he saved her. What would they do without him?

  “Hey!” he shouts, trying to get her attention. “You know Ultimate’s funeral’s finally happening, I’m giving a speech. You probably should try to keep yourself not killed until then.”

  She’s a hundred feet away, and there’s no light around. But his eyes are good; they’re the only eyes left that are good. It’s how he’s able to see her middle finger wave side to side over the back of her shoulder.

  Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #568

  Thrown in the general direction of a hook, Pen’s jacket crumples to the floor. He’s home. Anna is outside their living room window, sitting on their fire escape, looking out at the lights of Arcadia. He knocks on the wall, and she looks over to him, smiles weakly, then looks back to the night.

  A few dirty plates sit on a table in front of the TV, and Pen grabs them and washes them in the kitchen, sweeping pieces of pancake down into the trash. When he’s done, he goes back to the living room and watches his wife watching the sky.

  The day he met Anna she was a gray blur set against a placid-blue background. Ultimate was wrestling Hawkhead in the clouds above Arcadia, and the two men slammed into the side of a large office building. A woman tumbled out. Ultimate threw a fist and focused on the fight because he knew she’d be fine. Someone else was looking out for her. Pen unhooked his windboard and glided through the sky, sweeping Anna up in his arms, instantly falling in love, kissing her passionately, longingly.

  Or at least that’s the story they’d agreed to tell the kids, because saying they’d met in a bar, hooking up after too many tequila shots, didn’t have the same ring. No, that wouldn’t have done. It needed to be something better, more dramatic.

  Eventually she comes back in. Wires in Pen’s eyes point out every line of color in her face, show him exactly how much she cried waiting for him, how she sat alone, worrying about that one bullet he might not manage to dodge. He tries to ignore it all, but he fails.

  “You’re safe?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Day saved?”

  “Of course.”

  She sits on the couch, turns on t
he TV. He joins her, and she leans into him, pushes her face into his chest. After a while, he tells her what Strength had said, and he laughs. “They always say fucking coward, like I was busy copulating while they were off saving the world.” He looks down at her and smiles.

  Anna doesn’t laugh, she just looks back at the TV. “You could’ve gone with them. I would’ve been fine.”

  “Hey, I retired from all that. What’s the point in retiring if you’re just going to keep showing up?”

  She reaches over and puts her hand on his. “I would’ve let you go.”

  He tangles his fingers into hers, wraps his arms around her. “I know,” he says.

  3

  Mashallah #211

  “I could give a piss what your little hen-picked husband thinks, you’re coming.” The voice is tense, and it calms her. “It’s Ultimate, Christ, you’re coming to his funeral.” Maybe because it is familiar, maybe because it is different.

  “Alice, I can’t possibly—”

  “Strength. You called me that then, you call me that now, all right? Just because the power’s gone doesn’t mean I lost that.”

  “Well, that is fine for you then.” Mashallah pauses and allows a crackle to snake through the satellite phone signal. “But for me, it is not the same. I am Fatima now. And my husband has a say in my life now, however he was picked, that is not—doesn’t matter. He has said I cannot go.”

  “Fuck that. You’re Mashallah. The beam of light who used to blast all those villains’ asses, God rest them. That’s you.”

  “No.” Mashallah tugs at the head scarf bunched along the back of her neck; a seller is coming to the house with some fruits, and she will have to pull it on quickly when he arrives. “I am sorry, I am, but no.”

  “All right, enough of that shit. You need to come home.”

  “Alice . . . Strength, you have to understand. I appreciate you. But I love my husband. He’s a good man, and I have to respect him. We are learning to live as a family.”

  Strength sighs. “Okay, look, you of all people know I don’t want to play this card, but, Soldier’ll be there, right? You know that? He’s giving the eulogy along with my dickless ex.”

  “My sister,” Mashallah says as she strains to keep her voice sounding effortless, “you know, that was . . . that was a young girl’s . . . that was not anything.”

  “Ma, what’s the point in saying that? I mean really.”

  “Soldier doesn’t—I am married now. Soldier does not affect me anymore.”

  “Girl, you know better than most, Soldier affects everyone. All big fancy three of them do. Did.”

  “That’s done. We made our decisions. Soldier is done. I’m done.”

  “Yeah, look, whatever, believe whatever stories’re easiest, and he’ll do the same. All I’m saying is he’ll be at the funeral. And you should be there.”

  “I am with a husband now. A family. Soldier or no Soldier. That’s finished, we’re finished. I don’t fly, it’s done.”

  “Right, when were any of us done?” Strength laughs, a strong, fake laugh. “Look, if you change your mind, Star-Knight’s paying for all the tickets, like always, so just get him at the usual place, all right? Just come back.”

  “You think it is so easy?”

  “No. I think it’s pretty fucking hard.”

  The conversation pitters out with nothing solved, like in all of Mashallah’s endless arguments with Strength. Eventually, Mashallah hears her brother answer a seller at the door, and she excuses herself knowing she must go to pick out the best fruit as Khalid will always choose only the ones that are perfectly ripe and the fruit will undoubtedly be spoiled by the time it gets to her table.

  The loud haggling over price begins, and her household erupts in Pashto voices. God help us. She recalls the wonder in her heart when she was young, studying her mother shepherding a family a dozen times this size only a few blocks from here. As she pulls the hijab over her head and clasps the material over her face, she reminds herself it takes a woman of exceptional fortitude to keep the chaos from overwhelming them all. She walks toward the door and imagines herself again soaring as a streak of light, a gift of God scratched white across the night sky. She thinks of Soldier. How clear things were then, when she was wrapped in the clouds.

  Her voice soon joins the chorus of shouters, and she commends her resolve for choosing her new family and her old life; and in her mind she is already on the way back: she is pulling aloft across the horizon and turning ahead of a westerly wind; and it worries her—never has she been more at ease, never has she felt more grounded.

  The Soldier of Freedom #518

  The Soldier of Freedom stands in front of a grave, his gun drawn. Pull the trigger.

  “Next time,” he says. Soldier hesitates, licks his lips. “Until next time.” Soldier breathes in deep.

  Though his joints object, Soldier sits on one knee and points his gun into the dirt. He stares for a while at the tip of his pistol, at the metal going into the ground. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he looks up, takes in the markers that surround him, that tell the story of the Villains’ Graveyard. There’re so many of them. So many men he once fought. So many dead. They almost go on forever.

  Soldier’s eyes finally rest back on the headstone in front of him. On top of a curved rock sits a bust of a man’s face: Survivor, Soldier’s ever-ready archnemesis, looking younger than how Soldier remembers him. But then again, the man always did look young for his age.

  Survivor was born at the beginning of man, and he had done his best to drown his toe in every puddle of human misery that lay across his path over the last few millennia. He’d been a slave owner both in Egypt and Virginia. When Mongols were popular he was a Mongol; when Nazis were popular, he’d been a Nazi. Only thing he ever gave to this world was a generation of his evil offspring, each competing to be as cruel as the old man, excepting one.

  It was death, other people’s deaths, that kept him going. All he ever wanted was another year, and he was always willing to trade whomever or whatever to get that particular commodity. The suffering that came with these transactions didn’t seem to bother him.

  Hell, pretty much nothing bothered that villain until Soldier, really. Not until he met a man who also had some history was Survivor ever really stopped.

  They seemed to cross each other’s way at least once a month for years on end. Survivor always had some latest scheme, and Soldier was ever willing to sniff it out and, inevitably at the last second, foil it. He’d belted Survivor so many damn times the contours of the man’s face still tingle around Soldier’s knuckles. It’s possible Soldier’s guns, Carolina and California, don’t even need to be aimed at the man: they’d probably find his vulnerable spots by rote memory. But it didn’t matter how many times Soldier’d beat into him, Survivor was back soon enough, killing more, waiting patiently for Soldier to draw again.

  How’d Survivor always gotten loose? How’d he always found a way to come back with another damn plot? Survivor’s got a knife to the president’s throat at a UN conference. He wants to disrupt it for some forgotten reason, killed twenty-seven people getting in the door. Pull the trigger. Soldier draws and fires two shots. One goes into Survivor’s hand, and the other hits a chandelier that cuts between the villain and the hostage. Another battle won. Well done. Well done. And a month later, Survivor was back again.

  Man was polite enough about it though. “Until next time,” he always said before his unavoidably predictable escape. Until next time. Next time. Soldier racks his weapon and rests his free hand on the ground for leverage.

  Survivor’d died like all the rest of the villains just as The Blue started ripping apart this world. If you asked him, Star-Knight’d give you some fancy explanation for it, why it all tied together, some suicidal virus spitting up out of The Blue making them all kill themselves. Star-Knight had gathered their bodies together, buried them here in the newly christened Villains’ Graveyard, explaining that it would help conta
in the virus or help us all remember or some such nonsense.

  But all that doesn’t matter. Point is, all the villains, all them threats, are just as gone as the powers, just as gone as all of us. Pull the trigger.

  Which was good in the end. Just as the heroes faded away, all their opposites went right along with them, leaving a world at rest, a hushed peace that finally went undisturbed by the constant clash of bionic swords against oversized reptile tails.

  Soldier pushes the gun deeper into the grave. He rotates the barrel, collecting a few grains of sand along the metal lip of the weapon. Closing one eye, he tries to focus on the front site, letting the side sites fade away into his unconscious, as he’d done a thousand times before, a thousand other men locked in their place before him and his guns. Eventually all he sees is the dirt, slightly interrupted by a small line of metal.

  Until next time. Survivor’s down there now. Buried for now. And he could be down there now getting it together. He’d done it before. Pretended to be dead and come right back. He could be down there getting it all back together again. Waiting to pop up and start it all again. All those dead. All those dying in the game. It all can start up again. Survivor fighting Soldier. Coming back from the dead and fighting again and again. That’s the game. That’s how you play it. Month after month. Until next time, until next time. Pull the trigger.

  “Doesn’t matter what you do.” A voice from behind Soldier. “They all come back.”

  Soldier turns his head and finds a bald, pale man huffing on a cigarette. When he talks, the man’s voice comes out as a loose, low crackle.

  “Soldier of Freedom, you know me, I’m the Prophetier. I see what’s to come, and we will all come back. And you will save us.”

  The Soldier of Freedom #519

  Soldier gets up from the ground and holsters his weapon. “I’m sorry,” he says, wiping dirt from his pants. “I’m sorry.”

  “The game will come again,” Prophetier says.

  Soldier arches his back. He’d stood up too fast, embarrassed by it all, and now that newly familiar ache was coming up from his hips into his spine. Soldier rubs into his back with his clenched fist.