What the hell did he have to stay in New York for anyway? A one-room apartment? Easy access to Hooters? Not forgetting some tired and extremely crusty old socks?
“Susie,” he said, reaching into his pocket, taking her hand in his other and looking her straight in the eye.
“I love you so much,” he gestured to the waiter, who he saw in the corner of his eye reaching for the roses behind reception.
“Will you marry me?” the ring was out of his pocket, and he held it out to her.
The diamond glinted in sunlight, it seemed to sparkle as if it was on fire, and Stanley felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up with anticipation.
“Yes Stanley, of course I will, I'd love to be married to you, and to be honest I thought you'd never ask.”
With that Susie died.
If Stanley could slow down time, he would have seen the beam of coherent energy flash through the window and strike Susie on the side of her head. He would have seen it cut through her skull like a hot knife through butter and burst out the other side, spraying bone and brain matter across the elderly couple at the table next to them.
He would have seen the beam carry on across the room, cutting the waiter in half.
He would have seen the top half of the waiter fall forwards spilling the roses across the floor, and finally seen the energy beam flash fry a bucket full of lobsters in the kitchen beyond.
He would have seen her hair frazzle then vaporise, and her skin blister and burn. He would have seen the smile vanish from her face, and the light dim in her eyes, just before they exploded out of her sockets.
He would have seen her dress ignite, and her body collapse in on itself as the bones crumbled.
He would have seen her turn first to dust in a vaguely human shape and then to nothing as even that dust was broken down into its component atoms and blown away by the wind from the shattered window.
As it was Susie’s death took place in a fraction of a second, she went from happily looking forward to her life with Stanley in London to dark nothingness in an instant.
She was dead and gone before the waiter realised that the weird feeling, like he’d wet himself, was in fact the lower half of his body falling away.
Susie was dead before the first rose petal hit the floor.
Susie was dead before the Meta Powered Hero; having successfully melted the gun in a muggers' hand had flown away, not noticing the damage his first, far less accurate energy blast had caused.
Stanley was left holding Susie’s hand, staring at the empty chair across from him. Her hand was still attached to her wrist, but not much else, because her arm terminated just below the elbow. As he watched blood sprayed out from the stump coating the chair in sticky red fluid.
Stanley started to scream and he didn't stop for a very long time.
What the fuck…
Chapter 2 – Margaret’s life changes dramatically.
“Do you know how many people have died since I sat down on this fine, expensive leather couch, not,” he glanced at his watch, “four and a half minutes ago?”
“No, sorry, I've really no idea.”
”In the whole world, there are approximately 19,098 so far, the war in Russia is warming up I'm afraid. A thermonuclear bomb went off 12.5 seconds ago and it's not going to be pleasant there for the next three thousand years. And in the immediate vicinity, let's say within 50 miles of your oh so lovely office, which takes you right to my back garden there have been exactly 123 deaths.”
John Smith cocked his head slightly to one side as if listening to something far away.
“Sorry, 129, no it’s 134 now; there was a ten car pile-up at the Newport exit ramp, it’s a nasty business. A drunk driver crossed the central reservation and hit a school bus head on doing 55 miles per hour. It's sad, and it could have been so easily avoided. It's quite heartbreaking for me to hear the children screaming for help.”
A tear ran slowly down his face, he made no move to wipe it away; he made no move at all starring as he was across the room into the middle distance.
“Ok, if you say so,” in 15 years of practicing psychiatry Dr Margaret Mason thought she had seen and heard it all. The lunatics justifying their sick little needs, murders full of imprecise remorse, arsonists with their burning desires, rapists, wife beaters, she’d treated them all, had cared for none of them and been disturbed by only a few.
Foolishly, as it turned out, she was confident that this first appointment with her newest client, John Smith, would prove no more challenging than the hundreds of others she’d sat through over the years. She thought, wrongly, that was nothing new under the sun and that at worst she could get through the session by mentally running through her shopping list.
“What makes you so sure?” she asked, toilet roll, ham slices, bottle of red wine. Keep him talking she thought, get out of him what the problem really is and eventually his ramblings would start to take on their own structure. Give it time and it's own internal logic would become clear.
“I hear them calling out to me now, calling my name as they take their final breaths, looking for someone to drag them away from that proverbial tunnel of light,” he seemed strangely pleased with himself.
“They want me to save them,” he continued, “they don't want to die, of course they don't. They want someone to help them, they want a hero, but no one is coming you see, not this time I am afraid. They have grown far too complacent; the people of this city need to become much more self-reliant. From now on they need to save themselves, because I won't be saving them anymore.”
“Schizophrenia nutter,” she wrote on her notebook, “absolute, god complex, freak show.” Her own version of shorthand, it was insulting, unprofessional but usually fairly accurate.
John Smith smiled at her grimly and nodded, “Perhaps, perhaps not, that will be for history to decide, not for you or me.”
“Anyway of the 139 deaths, 26 were household accidents, 15 were the victims of crime, and one was a particularly nasty assault which ended with the young woman having her throat slit from ear to ear. She was so young and so pretty; and she had such a long-drawn-out and painful death. It's such a shame no one stopped the attacker when they could have. It’s such a shame to be honest, that I didn’t stop him. Anyway 56 were standard medical problems, heart attacks, old age, things like that, interestingly one young man choked to death trying to swallow a live hamster which had just spend 20 minutes up his arse. And there I was thinking there were no surprises left in the world. The other deaths were what I would now class as unassisted suicides.”
“They were thoughtless people throwing themselves in front of cars, diving under trains or tossing themselves off buildings,” he continued.
“Thoughtless people taking stupid risks and expecting someone to save them.”
“Thoughtless people who were looking for their 15 minutes of fame, looking for the interview with the Daily Globe, looking for something to tell their grandchildren, “remember the time was I saved by...” Well we will see what happens now won't we.”
“I see,” she said, crossing her legs and settling back into her seat, this one's a talker she thought, butter, olive oil and three bottles of milk.
“No, no you don't really, not yet anyway, but you will, we have an hour after all don't we? Of which there are now what, 53 minutes left?” Margaret nodded and he continued. “It's almost 140 deaths now, how sad, for me in particular. You see the last one; number 140 is going to be my wife. I am afraid she's just got far too used to being saved, she takes, sorry took she has just hit the pavement and shattered her skull, as I say took far too many risks. This time she took her last risk in search of that next great story. She is, again sorry, this takes some getting used to, she was, a newspaper reporter for the Daily Globe.”
“It's a shame, but she really shouldn't have crawled out on that ledge, she really shouldn't have worn those high heels, she really shouldn't have worn such a short tight skirt. I am afraid that she really
shouldn't have expected me to save her again and again and again. In a way it was quite selfish of her. I suspect that her last thought was one of confusion why I'd not been there yet again to grab her at the last minute.”
He paused for a second then his face changed, “Stupid bitch, really, she made me sick sometimes.”
The vitriol in his voice shocked Margaret; he had up to now seemed mild mannered, where had the anger come from?
“You see Dr Mason, I've just about had as much as I can take of you humans, and it’s just got to end, today, now, within the hour.”
“As much as you can take,” Dr Margaret Mason leaned back in her soft leather chair, self-consciously pulling her dark skirt down below her knee as she did.
She was acutely aware of the physical presence of the man sitting on the couch not a meter from her. He was 6-foot 5 and the muscular frame which had filled her doorway now filled her couch, physically he was the most imposing man she had ever met.
At 5 ft. 6 and a size 10 she relied on the inherent superiority of her professional position to keep a distance from her patients. So she rarely felt as uncomfortable as she did now. There was something about him which screamed at her to run away. There was she realised something about him that was distinctly nonhuman.
“Yes, I've had about as much as I can take,” he repeated, his voice a strange mixture of deep and bland. He adjusted his glasses, unremarkable dark framed horn-rimmed glasses, on his unremarkable face.
Dr Mason looked down at her notebook, and licked the end of her pencil nervously. “Why don't you start at the beginning Mr Smith, or can I call you John?”
“If you like yes, John, it’s not my real name of course, but it will do for today. The beginning, now that's a big question, where was the beginning? I'm not sure when the beginning is really. Is it when I was born? When I first came to this planet? When I started my double life? Or when I realised that all the miserable, self-obsessed, useless people of this flea ridden city were just not worth saving?”
Margret wrote “delusional” on her notebook and looked over her glasses at her patient, she didn’t need glasses, her eyes were perfectly good. The glasses served two purposes, first she thought, they made her look more professional. Second they provided both a useful prop and a tangible separation from her personal life, she only wore them when she was working.
“Whichever beginning you want, it's up to you,” she said.
“I'm not delusional Dr Mason,” he had sat up straight and was looking directly at her, or more accurately at the back of her notebook. She shuffled in her seat feeling extremely uncomfortable.
“I never said that you were Mr Smith.”
“No, of course not, you never said that Dr Mason,” for the first time he smiled at her, his eyes were, she noticed, piercingly bright and intense, it was as if he could look right through her.
“Anyway,” he continued, “that's a story for another day,” he laughed, “except that there won't be another day so I’d better tell it today. Not another day for me anyway, and for a while at least, not for many of the lazy self-obsessed people who live in this filthy city. People who like to kill one another without a seconds’ thought. People who don’t value the great gift that they have been given, the gift of life, and take no responsibility for their actions at all.”
“Dr Mason, do you mind if I show you something?” he asked.
“No, not at all Mr Smith.”
John Smith stood up, and she noticed that despite his bulk he moved rather like a ballet dancer, like a man who was completely in control of his entire body. He left the room briefly, returning with a small silver briefcase which resembled a professional camera case. Placing it carefully on the table he unclipped the catches and lifted the lid.
Margaret couldn’t see what was in the case, and she was now more than slightly worried the man was after all clearly mad. This was not a professional diagnosis she knew, she grinned to herself when his back was turned, but he was absolutely nuts.
“Damn!” she gasped. From the case John Smith had taken a large grey pistol. Her analytical brain recognised it from countless films as a Magnum 45. As the films said, it was the most powerful handgun in the world, and she wasn’t feeling lucky.
“Mr Smith,” she said shifting uncomfortably, the room only had one exit, and he was now between her and it, “what the hell are you doing with that?”
He turned, holding the gun confidently in his hand, he was clearly used to handling weapons. “I am sorry if I alarmed you Miss Mason, there is no need to worry, I mean you no harm, either by accident or design. I merely want to show you something amazing and tell you something unbelievable, and need you to believe it, so don't worry.”
He reached into the case, and took out a long metal tube, which he screwed onto the end of the barrel, “we don't want to disturb the neighbours do we.”
Without looking at her he returned to his seat with his now silenced pistol and sat down smoothly.
Margaret, didn’t move, she didn’t run nor she didn’t cry out, if she sat still and kept calm, she felt sure that she could talk him out of whatever he was planning.
John looked at her, smiled and reached into his pocket, taking a bullet out he loaded the gun and without hesitation put it flat to his forehead and pulled the trigger.
In the small room, despite the silencer the gun made a horrendous sound. It was not that it was loud, but the sound of a pistol fired into someone’s head was heavy with meaning and inherently sickening. There was a dull thumping noise as the bullet was pushed at high velocity into John Smith's skull. Margaret flinched, standing up and pulling away to avoid the blood splatters, which to her surprise never came.
John Smith lowered the gun to the table, a bullet, squashed beyond recognition fell to the floor at his feet. He looked Dr Margaret Mason straight in the eye, “I am not delusional, schizophrenic, nor suffering from a God complex, but I am much certainly far more than human, I am The Guardian.”
“Oh,” Margaret put down her notebook, and placed her pencil carefully on the arm of the chair, “well that explains a lot.”
“You wanted me to start at the beginning, then I will, at least as much as I know. Some of which I’ve been told rather than know from direct experience. So bear with me, there are big gaps in the story.”
“My home planet was, as they say, in a galaxy far far away, and I assume is now long dead. I have traveled all over the Milky Way, and can find no trace of it, or indeed any other members of my less than noble race. So it’s safe to assume that it’s long gone. Anyway, whatever happened, I arrived here in the summer of 1934.”
“1934?” she asked, “surely not, you’re not that old, you look…..”
“I look about 33 in your years; it appears I age differently to humans, just one of the many small differences between our races, as similar as we look on the surface.”
“What differences?”
“Other than my super powers you mean?”
“Other than your super powers, yes, many people have super powers; they’re not all aliens are they?”
“No, of course not, billionaires, robots, amazons, but not all aliens, no. Anyway there are lots of differences, but perhaps most importantly and most frustratingly in my day-to-day life is that my senses are heightened.”
“Heightened?”
“Yes, heightened, heightened beyond belief to be honest with you, it’s something that has developed over the last few years. They’ve always been good, but in the last 4 years they have just got stronger and stronger. Now I can hear people speaking hundreds of miles way, I can hear every sigh, every burp and every grunt they make. And smell, I can smell every odour within half a mile, every petrol tank, every dog shit, every rotting bin, every stinking sweaty human. You all smell rather abominably you see.”
“I can for example smell that you had garlic last night and at least one glass of red wine and you use a very expensive brand of soap. But it does not completely mask the smell of
piss you carry with you, which you all carry with you in fact. To put it bluntly, the human race stinks Ms Mason. For a start you all fart far too much and by god does that smell linger. Do you wonder why I spend so much time in Alaska, it's because there are none of you there. You are contemptible, disgusting and I can hardly bear to be in the same room as most of you.”
“To make it worse, I had to go and marry one of you, I had to have sex with one of you.”
“Do you know,” he continued, “how many times The Warrior Queen begged me to fuck her in the last ten years?”
“Strangely no I don't, but, I'm not surprised she has a reputation for a fearsome sexual appetite, and she is certainly very well-built.” Margaret had seen the Warrior Queen on the cover of hundreds of Men’s Magazines, she was known as one of the most liberally minded super heroes.
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