by James Maxey
Her father had never understood how she could fly. He’d analyzed her to the atomic level, ruled out ionic propulsion, dark energy lensing, gravitational shielding, and magnetic levitation. Through some unknown reactionless propulsion, she could simply will her body to move through the air. Anything she held onto came along for the ride. She willed herself to rocket straight up 100 feet with the dervish in tow. She smashed through the thick plates of glass of the arched roof of the mall. The force dislodged her unwilling passenger who tumbled toward the floor laughing like a giddy hyena.
The dervishes weren’t invulnerable, though they did behave as if they were completely pumped up with adrenaline and oblivious to all pain. Combine that with their preference for running amok beheading men, women, and children and they could still terrify a populace grown numb to bombings and mass shootings. Fearful as they were, they couldn’t fly. Skyrider watched as the dervish flailed his arms as if convinced he might avoid the fate awaiting him. He hit hard, bouncing twice, until his limp body came to rest across the edge of a marble fountain.
“Got him!” Sarah cried. She winced as soon as she spoke. Her broken ribs were like knives beneath the skin. “I need medical attention,” she whispered.
“You got one of him,” said Katya. “Security footage shows six copies of him now.”
“Damn it,” said Sarah, folding her arms to her side and diving back down into the mall. She’d thought the multiple copies might have been an illusion, the product of impossible speed allowing a dervish to be more than one place at a time. She’d definitely killed the one she’d dropped. What were these others? Clones? Some sort of solid hologram? Whatever they were, they’d already beheaded several victims.
Sarah had no time to contemplate as she spotted one with his cleaver held high, about to attack a white-haired lady that had to be somebody’s grandmother. She shot toward him with fists outstretched, accelerating as much as she could bear. Her armored gauntlets combined with her speed to knock the dervish from his feet, teeth flying from his broken jaw. In her head, she’d imagined racing past him in a perfect arc and taking down the next dervish an instant later. Unfortunately, her body didn’t quite cooperate with that plan. The impact with the dervish compressed her rib cage. Black spots danced before her eyes. The next thing she knew she’d smashed through the window of an Old Navy and her vision cleared half a second before she crash landed onto a table stacked high with sweaters. It definitely wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever fallen onto.
She sat up slowly, tasting blood in her mouth. The heads up display on her monitor showed her blood pressure dropping. No amount of grit and determination was going to keep her fighting more than another minute if a broken rib had severed an artery. She had to stop the remaining dervishes before she passed out.
“Help’s on the way,” said Katya as Sarah lifted back into the air, searching around for a weapon. She spotted the large sword the last dervish had dropped. It had tumbled through the air and landed in a potted plant, the hilt jutting up. She darted forward and snatched it free. The dervish blades were ugly weapons, like meat cleavers stretched to the point of parody, with a cutting edge two feet long and a shaft big enough to hold with both hands. Though the blade was effectively weightless once she touched it, the wing-like wedge of the blade messed with her aerodynamics. She slowed to adjust her grip. The target icons in her heads up display went red as three of the dervishes lunged toward her, apparently unhappy that she’d killed two of their brethren. She raised her blade in an attempt to parry at least one of the incoming blows.
All at once, the three dervishes went limp in mid-stride. They fell face first, sprawling on the floor in front of Sarah, their blades sliding across the mall floor. Looking down at their backs, she saw shurikens jutting from each neck precisely where their skulls joined with their spines.
“What the hell?” she muttered.
“Servant hasn’t responded to the alert,” said Katya. ”You needed help. I made a judgment call.”
Sarah had no time to ask what she meant. A chimpanzee dressed in green and yellow ninja garb dropped down from the balcony above to land with a crouch just beyond the dead dervishes. In each of her hands she carried razor-sharp shurikens. The two remaining dervishes were foaming as the mouth as they charged toward Sarah, screaming with incoherent rage. The chimp’s arms sprang straight, her fingers opened, the shurikens vanished. Both onrushing dervishes dropped, their cleavers clattering loudly. A heartbeat later, pools of blood began to grow around their throats.
Just as they had in the aftermath of previous attacks, all but one of the dervishes dissolved into a pale light. Their swords crumbled to red dust.
The chimp turned her head back over her shoulder. Her face was hidden by a gold silk scarf, save for her brown eyes. “I’m Chimpion,” she said. “You must be Skyrider.”
Sarah could only nod in response.
“Are you all right?” asked Chimpion, her eyes showing concern.
“No,” Sarah groaned, falling from the air, landing hard on the floor. She tore off her helmet just in time as she violently vomited dark red blood. Sometimes, when she threw up, it left her feeling better. This was not one of those times.
“We have a team member in need of immediate medical evacuation,” said Chimpion, rushing to her side, placing a hand on her shoulder.
The mall vanished. Sarah rolled to her back in the Foundation’s medical center. As darkness edged in around her vision, all she could see was the nurse’s white shoes as they ran toward her.
Chapter Five
The First Step Forward
“Brother Clint,” Sister Amy called up to him from the base of the ladder. “Your pants are buzzing.”
Clint put down his hammer and stared over the edge of the roof at Sister Amy on the ground. He’d had stranger things said to him during his lifetime, but it still took him a couple of seconds to parse the preacher’s meaning. She meant that the pants he’d left in the truck were buzzing, not the pants he had on.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s probably my phone. It’s embedded in my costume.” He cringed a little as his fellow workers on the roof looked toward him. When he was with them, he enjoyed, for a little while, the illusion that he was just another man. Of course, no one else on the roof had a superhero uniform made of tiny self-assembling robots. When he’d first appeared in public he hadn’t even owned a costume. His force fields would disintegrate any fabric they were in contact with for more than a few minutes. He’d been able to manipulate his fields to look like a costume, but this had left him naked on more than a few occasions when he’d been knocked out or rattled enough to lose his concentration. Fortunately, the geeks at the Knowbokov Foundation had finally designed him a costume that repaired itself as quickly as his fields degraded it, and he’d also finally learned to dampen his fields enough to be able to wear normal clothes like his overalls for several hours before they fell apart.
He looked past his fellow workers, shielding his eyes as he looked around the bright, white landscape and the jumble of buildings in various stages of construction. They were in western Texas, not far from the border with Mexico. Even though it was December and barely an hour past sunrise, the pale sand and gravel that surrounded them shimmered with heat. Of course, no matter how hot it got, he wouldn’t feel any discomfort. The rest of his fellow laborers didn’t have this advantage, which is why they’d started working on the houses a little before dawn.
“Is it something you need to attend to?” asked Sister Amy, drawing his attention back to the phone call.
Clint sighed. “Probably.” He moved toward the ladder. He could have jumped down from the roof without harm, but again didn’t want to draw attention to his differences. When he was with his church brethren, he wanted to forget his life as Servant, and be happy as plain, ordinary, Brother Clint. He looked toward the rising temple as he stepped onto the ladder. Here in a barren desert, a new city was springing to life. Jerusalem, the old one, had been destroyed e
ight years ago by a supervillain named Rail Blade. The old Jerusalem was now a flat circle of scoured white rock where not even a single weed could grow. Politics and war kept the city from being rebuilt.
Reverend Amy McPherson had decided to take the matter into her own hands, founding the Ministry of the New Jerusalem. If the old Jerusalem couldn’t be restored, then it was up to her to build a new one. After years of fundraising, the time had come for actual construction. Clint felt pride in how quickly the place was starting to look like a real city, but a touch of shame that it wasn’t even further along. If he’d used his full strength and speed, he could have finished the city by now. But he didn’t want to show off, or make his brothers and sisters in Christ feel that their contributions were less important than his own.
Back on the ground, Clint wiped his hands on a towel that Sister Amy offered him. She wore a long white gown without a single speck of dirt showing despite her movement back and forth across a dusty construction site. He said, “I’ll see what they’re calling about, but whatever it is I’ll tell them to handle it without me. There’s still so much work to be done.”
“There are a thousand men here who can swing a hammer,” said Sister Amy. “You’re the only who’s bulletproof. If you’re needed elsewhere, we understand.”
“I know,” said Clint. “But the sooner these houses are finished, the sooner the refugees can move in. I’ve been to the camps. Every day they go without proper housing is a sin.”
Sister Amy smiled gently. “They may be lacking in material things, but the refugees are spiritually rich. There’s something about hardship that brings a body closer to the Lord.”
Clint returned her smile. “I feel that when I’m here, working with the others.” He shook his head, his smile fading. “When I’m with the Covenant… all I’m good for is fighting.”
“Fighting the forces of darkness,” said Sister Amy.
“Fighting darkness with darkness,” said Clint. “It’s hard on the soul. The man I used to be… so angry, so quick to violence. When I’m fighting alongside the Covenant, that anger rises up again. It’s hard to feel love for your fellow man while you’re being shot at, even though the bullets bounce off.”
“The Lord gave you your talents for a reason,” said Sister Amy. “Go answer your call. What if the dervishes have attacked again?”
“If the dervishes attacked again,” said Clint, “the fight’s already over.”
On this, he’d been right. It still didn’t ease his guilt when he picked up his phone and discovered that Sarah had almost been killed.
“Prepare for transport back to the island,” said Katya.
“Why?” he asked.
“You knew your leave would be cancelled if the dervishes attacked again.”
“Yeah. But the fight’s over. The dervishes were stopped with their lowest body count yet. Sounds like the chimp proved herself worthy of being on the team. What’s left for me to do at this point?”
“We need you ready if there’s another attack.”
“I can be just as ready here. Look, I’ll keep my costume on under my overalls. I’ll get your calls this time. You can cut and paste me out of Texas to a fight just as easily as you could move me off the island.”
“Mrs. Knowbokov will have my head if we don’t bring you back.”
“All she wants is to yell at me face to face for letting Sarah get hurt.”
“You know she’s not going to yell at you. Yelling’s not her style.”
He nodded. “She never raises her voice, but somehow I walk out of every meeting with her feeling like my hair’s on fire.”
“I’m not pretending she’ll be in a good mood,” said Katya.
Clint looked around at the construction going on near the truck. Mixed among the adult volunteers were teenagers, some in their early teens, being taught the value of service, of working hard for their fellow men. When he was young teen he’d been a supervillain, Ogre, god-king of the gangs of Detroit. He’d already killed a hundred men at their age, and nothing would have stopped him from killing hundreds more if Rail Blade hadn’t trapped him inside a cube of solid iron. He’d changed his life since finding the Lord, and wanted to atone for his past by doing all the good he could as Servant.
But was Clint really a role model as Servant? When he talked to the younger members of the congregation, they didn’t want to hear about how many houses he’d helped to build in New Jerusalem. They only wanted to hear about his latest battle. Some days, the only lesson he seemed to be teaching was that violence was the only solution to confronting evil. Yes, the Lord had given him great strength, just as he’d given men like Sampson great strength to fight against evil. Still, it was hard to preach peace and love when you lived a life of rage and war.
With shoulders sagging, he said, “Fine. Bring me back.”
And then he was back. App was waiting, arms crossed, scowling as their eyes met.
“What?” asked Clint. “You didn’t answer the call either.”
“I was talking with cops all night. Just as I was finishing up they got a call about a huge accident involving a fuel tanker. There were lots of cars sitting right in the center of a lake of gasoline. The whole highway could have turned into a fireball if someone tossed a cigarette out the window. I’d just gone into foam mode when the dervish attacked. I couldn’t leave until I was sure everyone was safe. What were you doing?”
“Putting shingles on a roof,” said Clint.
“Sarah’s hurt,” said App.
“I heard. They’ve got her stabilized, right?”
“She shouldn’t have been out there alone.”
“She wasn’t alone. She had the chimp.”
“I do have a name, you know,” said a voice directly behind Clint.
He turned and didn’t see anyone. He looked down. Chimpion was only about four feet tall, standing directly in front of him, her hands on her hips. She was still wearing her green and gold ninja robes, but her face scarf and hood were pulled back to show her whole face.
“My hero name is Chimpion,” she said. “But my friends call me Jane.”
Clint couldn’t help but smirk. “Like Tarzan’s wife?”
“Who?” asked Jane.
“What do you mean, who?” asked App, coming over. “You’ve never heard of Tarzan?”
“No,” she said. “Is he some sort of human celebrity?”
“He’s a fictional character,” said App. “He’s been in, like, a hundred movies.”
“Ah,” she said. “I’ve never seen a movie.”
“You’ve never seen a movie?” said App, astonished.
“Is this a common pattern for conversations around here?” Jane asked. “I make a statement and you repeat it as a question?”
“Sorry,” said App. “I mean, I’ve never met anyone before who had never seen a movie. You don’t have them on Pangea?”
“Of course we have them on Pangea,” she said. “But I was born in captivity and lived in cages until I was three, treated as a test animal for an extensive pharmacopeia of dangerous experimental drugs. Worst still, I was subjected to horrible operations that replaced my nerve fibers with optical cables, supplying me with digital reflexes, and unimaginable pain that took me a long time to manage.”
“Right,” said App. “By Rex Monday.”
“He tested his drugs on many of my kind, but I was the only subject to survive the surgical enhancements,” she said. “With my strength and speed boosted to super-primate levels, Monday decided I was too dangerous to keep around. Rather than euthanize me, he sold me to an illegal fight promoter in Russia. I spent years battling daily in pits and rings for the amusement of others. When I escaped, I smuggled myself aboard the first plane I encountered with no clue where it was going. I wound up in Japan. There, a kindly monk took me under his wing, and I learned to deal with the anger and trauma of my years of captivity through meditation and the discipline of the martial arts. When I finally left Japan to serve the newly
established nation of Pangea, the government decided that an ape with my abilities was too valuable an asset to waste. After the fiasco of Dr. Trog attempting to destroy mankind, it’s been decided that I should serve as a new public face for our nation. A hero even humans will grow to respect. Thus, my role as Chimpion.”
“Like Captain America, but with shuriken instead of a shield,” said App.
“Captain who?” she asked.
“Oh, come on,” said App.
She grinned. “Just giving you a hard time. I’ve never seen a movie, but to prepare for my role as a superhero I was assigned to read an extensive collection of comic books.”
“Awesome,” said App. “Which did you like more? Marvel or DC?”
Clint suspected that a moment of pop-culture bonding was about to take place and he didn’t care to be the vicinity as it happened. He distained small talk. The world had too many serious problems. Why anyone wasted God-given moments of life with a comic book, a movie, or even a novel eluded him. Fiction seemed like a sort of stealth drug, as effective at distracting its users from life’s real problems as any of the junk he’d trafficked as Ogre. The Bible was the only book he owned, and the only book he’d ever read… assuming that, one day, he got around to actually reading it.
“Excuse me,” said Clint, walking away. “Mrs. Knowbokov wants to see me.”
He walked down the hall toward the infirmary, past a team in hazmat suits mopping up blood in the corridor. Before he reached the end of the hall, he spotted Mrs. Knowbokov standing at the window that looked in on the surgical center. She gazed through the window dispassionately, no hint of emotion on her face. As always, she was immaculately dressed in a tailored business jacket and skirt, wearing shoes that likely cost more than it took to build a new house in New Jerusalem.
He walked up and saw two large robotic arms moving over a female form mostly obscured by green surgical drapery. The robotic arms didn’t end with scalpels or needles, but blunt steel tubes. With his own force field, he could sense the magnetic fields surrounding them.
