Project Northwoods

by Jonathan Charles Bruce

  It was now or never. She scrambled upright and charged, gathering rain drops in her hands until she felt the heft of them. Pushing her palms together, she shifted the water until she felt it bend to her will. She pulled her hands apart, the water in them extending into a bat which she brought down on the back of the goon’s legs.

  He buckled and fell on his face. Rolling aside, he managed to instinctively avoid an overhead attack. Turning to face Morgan, he ducked under a horizontal swipe, then dove aside as she swept it up at him. Morgan would have been impressed by all her water-based attacks and improvisation had she not been so focused on beating the guy’s head in.

  He was scrambling away, focusing more on flight than fight. She lobbed the weaponized rain at him, the bat twirling in the air before shattering against the back of his head. The goon fell, one arm pinned beneath him, by the rooftop greenhouse and didn’t move.

  Morgan wasn’t going to fall for any tricks. She balled up some water and pelted it at his back as she approached. The hard thunk went apparently unnoticed on his spine. She swallowed, and gathered up enough water again to form a bat. “Are you alright?” she asked, not really sure if she had just done something fatal to her opponent.

  She had barely closed in on him when he spun around and whipped a small device in front of him, aimed squarely at her. With a powerful flash, she was blinded and, somehow, even more enraged. She whipped the bat around blindly, and heard the greenhouse window shatter. The rain around her turned violent at the sound, individual water drops blasting off in every direction like tiny rockets. Her vision slowly returned, and she realized he was standing right in front of her.

  The first blow was a backhand, spinning her enough for the second blow to land on the back of her head. The strikes were hard, dazing her. The bat slushed out of her hand as the rain returned to its unaltered state. He spun her back around and headbutted her square on the nose. Tears welled in her eyes as he shoved her away. Morgan tried to stay upright, and she stumbled as the mobster rushed toward her in apparent slow motion.

  Please-don’t-kill-me kept rolling through her head as she wobbled. “No,” she whispered as she took a step back. Her leg hit the lip of the building, and she spilled backward over the edge. She didn’t really have the time to process that she was falling to her death, but she really didn’t have to. Pressure on her leg and the sudden halt of her momentum sent blood rushing to her head. Morgan forced herself to gaze skyward, and she saw that the goon had grabbed her leg and was struggling to bring her back to the roof.

  She couldn’t remember being pulled up. But there she was, dry-heaving on the rooftop next to the seated and exhausted goon. Morgan was mortified, but she didn’t care. She was alive, and she had never felt so unbelievably happy about that fact… even if it did feel like her intestines were trying to force their way out of her body.

  “Why…” she managed to gasp. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

  “I never wanted to kill you.” He coughed and spat away from her. “You declared me rogue, remember?”

  She shot a nasty look in his direction. “Yes, clearly I over-reacted,” she snarked. His eyebrows arched and he looked away. “I didn’t call it in. I guess… I guess I owe it to you to not say anything.”

  He cracked his knuckles and got to his feet. “Yeah, you did get your ass beat, that’s for sure.” The goon walked in front of her and knelt. “Honestly, kid, it’s in your best interest to not mention seeing me.”

  Half of her vision was going hazy. At some point, she must have been whacked hard enough in the eye to make it swell shut now that the adrenaline was working its way out of her system. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “And that’s for the best.” The goon scratched absently at his face, turning suddenly introspective. “At least the computer sent some no-name hero after me,” he said as his eyes darted away. His gaze returned to her for a moment, a semi-sheepish and pink-toothed grin crossing his face. “No offense,” he coughed as he stood up and began gauging the distance between buildings. “Maybe I have enough time…” she heard him mutter before spitting blood onto the roof.

  A thought buzzed in her head. Right after the primordial ‘get out of the rain’, there was something else, too. She watched him take a few large paces back, away from the lip of the roof. Something he said… he needed to know… but what?

  He was about to take off running when she blurted out, “It wasn’t the computer!”

  Immediately, he looked at her, then the surrounding rooftops. His eyes darted, flashing between water towers and air-conditioners, the darkening night looking ever more foreboding. “Kid, you need to get out of town. Now.”

  His panic sent a surge of fear through Morgan, though she didn’t know why. She shakily got to her feet. “What? Why?”

  “Just trust me!” He reached into his coat again and pulled out a standard, boxy nine millimeter pistol. “Do you have anyone you can reach out of state?”

  “Just my aunt…”

  He checked the weapon’s magazine and slid it back in. “Get to her house and do not let anyone you do not trust in, got it?”

  Morgan’s mind was reeling. It was hard enough to concentrate, and weird aspects of the conversation were fighting to be taken seriously. “Please tell me those are rubber bullets…”

  “Aquaria, for heroes’ sake, listen to me!” He grabbed her face and pulled it upright so she could look in his eyes. His green eyes were oddly beautiful, though hard to see in the shade of his trilby hat. But then that fear flashed again, and Morgan knew that she needed to be scared, too. “You need to start running,” he said.

  She nodded, pulled herself away, and he resumed scanning the rooftops, weapon at the ready. But then she realized something, something which gave her enough pause to say, “I never told you my name.”

  Their eyes met. It was a legitimate point. No one should know she existed except her employers and friends.

  A flicker of movement at the opposite end of the roof. Her eyes caught it, and the man whipped around and trained his gun at the shadows. An orange flash lit up the night sky. A fireball, huge and surprisingly fast, shot toward them. Without thinking, the man fired his weapon twice before turning and running toward Morgan. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close as the fire ball loomed terrifyingly close.

  Although mentally and physically drained, somewhere in the recess of her mind, the primal need to survive clawed its way out of Morgan’s subconscious and tapped into a hidden reserve of will power. With a flick of her wrist, the pooled water on the roof jetted upwards into a wall, thinner than last time but thick enough to halt the fireball’s progress. An initial wave of steam blasted them, and she heard the goon wail in agony a split second before the fireball burst, exploding with astonishing power. The concussive wave of fire billowed out, lifting them up and flinging their bodies backward.

  They were falling. The man’s grip slackened on her, and then Morgan was falling on her own. Once more, she barely had time to think as the rain stopped falling down and started pushing upwards, slowing her own descent as her companion rocketed past her and fell to the ground with a wet thwack. She hit the ground soon afterwards, fast enough to hurt but slow enough to survive.

  The clouds were unseeable, weeping above the reaches of the streetlights. Morgan was dimly aware that the orange flickering on the rooftop was where she had been moments before, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. All she wanted to do was sleep.

  Then she heard the voices from the street, the gasping and people leaping to get better views of what was going on. She rolled to her side and gazed down the alley. Everyone was staring at the smoke puffing from the smoldering hole on the rooftop.

  Everyone, except the man who had saved her life.

  She crawled toward the twisted form resting nearby. Morgan pulled herself close enough to him to pull him onto his back, and the green eyes which had been so full of life before stared glassily into the night sky.

  “S
hit,” she moaned. “No, no, no…” She felt tears well up in her eyes. She was shaking as her hands flexed, trying desperately to figure out what to do. He was dead. Five minutes ago, that would have been fine with her. But right now, at this juncture, something was terribly wrong. Something the villain had been trying to keep her safe from. Her stomach knotted, and she retched.

  There would be inquiries. She never reported his rogue status, which was operational procedure. It would classify her as vigilante if Internal Affairs determined she killed him. Not only that, but someone had clearly wanted him dead.

  She swallowed and gathered him up as much as possible, hefting the dead weight over her shoulders. Eyes burning from the mere act of staying open, she tried her hardest to concentrate, focusing a shell of rain around her thick enough to hide behind. She was amazed that she could do it as well as she did, even if it wasn’t so much impenetrable as it was just really thick. Adjusting the man as best as she could, she started to walk. The Heroes’ Guild seemed impossibly far away, but it was the only way to make things right. He would be upright again in a couple of hours, she could thank him for not letting her die, and they could both pretend it never happened.

  Morgan had to find Zombress, the legendary Queen of the Dead.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PARALLEL

  AESCHYLUS BROWN, ALSO KNOWN AS Purgatory’s Inventor, sat in his indoor garden listening to the soft instrumental tunes of the radio and the patter of rain against the windows. Eyes closed, only the subtle movement of his long fingers swaying in time to the music betrayed his consciousness. Strands of his long, greying hair clung to his forehead while the majority of it was pulled back in a ponytail. Physically demure, his aged features were patched with white facial hair between the creases of his skin. A white t-shirt, covered with dirt, clung to his body, while his jeans bore the stains of many uses and improper care.

  The humming lights overhead were long since reduced to white noise, their own addition to the music nullified by their particular insistence on providing only one note. Above them, the night and gentle rain had stolen the remaining natural light. In the distance, a lonely siren started up, wailed, and faded. Aeschylus merely absorbed the music and the rain, forcefully keeping everything else out of focus. The metal table he sat next to held a stack of letters, held down by an hourglass-shaped paperweight. A second chair waited patiently for a guest.

  He was dimly aware of a door creaking open and shut in his house, but more interested in the music. Another squeaky hinge, closer to him, prompted him to lazily open his silver-blue eyes. He cocked an eyebrow toward Ariana as she stood in the doorway looking at him.

  “Sweetheart,” he began, his voice slightly gravelly but still kind, “if you’re going to stand there all night, at least shut the door.” He got to his feet and crossed to her. “You’re letting the heat out.”

  She smiled slightly and walked forward, pulling the door shut behind her. “Sorry, dad.” Ariana hugged him, tightly. He stood a good six inches taller than her, enabling him to wrap her in his arms.

  “Hey, easy,” he said as he ruffled her hair. She released him. “Are you sure you don’t have super-strength?”

  Ariana’s smile continued as she put her hands in her back pockets. She averted her eyes. “No, not since last time.”

  Aeschylus looked at her. He nodded solemnly and turned to look at his plants. “Now, then,” he said with a smirk. “All this father-daughter bonding has given me a headache,” he said as he touched a nearby leaf and gently pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. “To what do I owe the unexpected visit?”

  “Nothing…” Ariana approached and looked at the same plant he had been appraising. “Can’t I just stop by?”

  “Of course.” He turned and smiled warmly at her. “But I can see that something is wrong.”

  Ariana tried to force a smile, but her lips didn’t cooperate. She felt the sting of tears, and she had to look away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Fatherly intuition.” He patted her shoulder. “And your eyes are red from crying.”

  She turned and walked to the table, sniffing back her tears. “I lost my job, daddy.”

  Aeschylus’s heart sank at the final word. She seldom called him that, and it always struck the terrible memory… when he had tears in his own eyes, when he had to choke out an explanation of why her mother was never coming home.

  He moved to the other chair and reached across the table for her hand. Despite appearances, he was still spry, a by-product of being Bestowed. He should have looked much younger, but depression takes many tolls. “Honey, it’s alright,” he offered.

  She yanked her hand away, suddenly realizing how vulnerable she appeared. “How is it alright?” The sudden action and strength in tone made Aeschylus withdraw his hands from the table. She sniffed and stood upright. “I don’t have insurance. And if I don’t have insurance…” she trailed off.

  “Then the world will come to a crashing halt.” Her father rose and slowly made his way to her front. “The tides will rise and locusts will eat my tomatoes.” She tried to move away, but he grabbed her shoulders. He tilted his head in an effort to make eye contact. “What’s the worst that can possibly happen?”

  “I have no income.” She took a step back, freeing herself from his grip. “I can’t help you this month. How’s that?”

  “I survived the Silver Age. I can survive without money,” he declared softly yet defiantly, as though simply saying it made it true.

  She shook her head and sniffed, trying to keep the tears at bay. “I still can’t believe they won’t let you collect any benefits.”

  “Yes, well, I didn’t become a villain all those years ago because of the fantastic retirement package.” He walked past her and picked up a spray bottle from the floor. “That’s something they provide you whipper-snappers. Us old-timers did it for the glory.” Spraying a nearby plant with water, he waited for a response.

  “This is serious.”

  He didn’t turn to her, but merely changed which plant he was working on. “I am serious. I knew full well what it meant to be a villain. It’s not the same as it is today.” He turned to her now, smiling.

  “But what if you get sick?” She approached him. “Or… I don’t know…”

  “A building falls on me?”

  “Dad…” she said, bordering on annoyance.

  “My problems would be over, Ari.”

  She put her hands over her ears unhappily. “Can we not talk about death, please?”

  He nodded and went back to his plants. “In other news, I’m considering coming out of retirement.”

  “What?” she asked incredulously. “Since when?”

  Aeschylus stopped and gazed upwards, squinting his eyes in thought. “Thirty seconds ago.” He resumed spraying water.

  Ariana shook her head. “Dad, you aren’t Purgatory’s Inventor anymore.”

  “So you keep saying, but I’ve been meaning to show these upstart villains how it’s done.”

  “That isn’t funny, you know.”

  “Relax, dearest,” Aeschylus soothed. He smiled again and put his hand on her cheek.

  “Sorry,” she said as she grabbed his hand. “I’m just not in a joking mood.”

  “Are you ever?” She smiled sincerely for the first time since she got there. “A smile? A real one? I’m blessed.”

  Ariana rolled her eyes. She flicked at his dangling whip of hair. “Dad, you’ve got to get a haircut.”

  “You don’t think it makes me look hip?” He grinned, posing for her.

  “No. You look like a lazy hippie.”

  Aeschylus nodded and squinted. “Would an earring help?”

  She laughed and pointed at his face. “You are not getting an earring.”

  “All the cool kids are doing it!” he offered in his defense.

  Still grinning, she turned back to the house. “I’ll make some coffee.” She opened the door.

  �
��My doctor doesn’t want me to have any caffeine, dear.” Ariana tossed him a nakedly hostile look. He made a face. “What, did you think I was serious?”

  She smiled too sweetly and reached into the kitchen. She grabbed two cups and walked back into the garden, toward a wall-mounted hose. “Black okay?”

  “There’s another way?”

  She grunted in annoyance. “You’d be surprised.” Carefully, she balanced the mugs by their handles in one hand while filling them up with the hose. “People are crazy.” Once full, the clear liquid clouded and became jet-black. Satisfied, she took a mug in each hand and crossed to her father, who had seated himself at the far chair. “Take my idiot roommate–”

  He cut her off immediately. “Alright. I like Tim.”

  She rolled her eyes as she sat down. “Ha ha, very funny,” she muttered in a way which did not lend much credulity to her words. Ariana passed her father a mug of coffee. “My other one.” She put her own mug on the table and folded her arms. “The dipshit…”

  “Language.”

  She smirked, irritated. “Sorry.” Ariana took a deep breath and continued, “The mentally deficient miscreant screws up everything. He comes to my work today and…” She trailed off. “Well, you know what happens when I lose my temper.”

  Aeschylus had been sipping his coffee and was only able to nod until he set his mug down. “Yes, I do.” He gestured to his garden. “Do I need to remind you of how many plants you’ve killed?”

  She shook her head. “This isn’t the first time he’s done sh… stuff like this, either. He just doesn’t understand what it’s like to have a real job at all.” Reaching across the table to point at her father for emphasis, she continued, “Any time he can’t just mooch off of Tim or me, he starts selling crap on the internet.”

  Her father’s face grew serious for a moment. “Nothing of yours, I hope.”

  Another head shake. “No. But where he gets the stuff, I have no clue. He won’t tell anyone and we’re never allowed to see it.” Ariana looked away. “The guy is always sulking, or buried in work, or whining about how SVAC never approves his proposals, or acting like a punk, or just being a complete waste of chromosomes.” She puffed aggravatedly. “And with his incompetence with women, it’s hard to believe his sperm convinced an egg to let him in.”