by Matt Carter
I’m not sorry.
Shouldn’t I be sorry?
“The heroes are coming,” he says, limping painfully, lopsidedly toward the body, taking out his already bloodied bat, and dipping it in the trickle coming from the base of the skull.
He’s dripping blood of his own with every step as well.
“You didn’t do this. Understand? I did.”
“What?” I don’t understand at all. “What are you doing?”
Eddie opens the front of his trench coat and I take in a sharp breath at the knife handle sticking out of his abdomen, dripping steadily onto the floor.
“Well, dying, for starters.”
As soon as I can force myself to move, I’m in front of him, examining the wound.
It’s bad.
God, it’s bad.
“No,” I shake my head, not sure if I’m refusing his suggestion or his condition. “No. I can’t let you do it.”
“Kimberly—”
“Because before you can count to three, you’re going to be in the best hospital on the West Coast, and when you’re better, we’re going to explain how we saved the city.”
Eddie smirks sadly, and even though he doesn’t believe me, he nods.
“Sure.”
He takes my shoulder and turns my back to him, and in the same instant I realize he can’t ride that way with the knife in him. Something then clicks open under his coat, and his other hand darts out to press the glowing piece of Jovium to my face.
I try to break away, to tell him that he can’t, that I won’t.
To tell him goodbye.
But consciousness slips away in a few wordless seconds.
THE DETECTIVE
Knocking Kline out was a shit thing to do, but necessary. If I had a tomorrow to see her in, I know she’d be pissed at me, but since tomorrow’s gonna be for everyone but me, I don’t have any regrets.
Truth be told, despite the knife buried in my gut, I’m feeling pretty good right now, though that’s more than likely due to my pills kicking in.
I stumble over to the ruined wall and peer outside. The compound’s now surrounded by dozens of police cars. Setting a perimeter, not going to burst inside just yet, not until the area’s secured. Then it’ll be guns blazing.
The pro-heroes, though, they won’t be held back waiting for the area to secure. As soon as they get here, that’s it. No amount of holding paperwork over my head is going to save me this time.
I reach into one of my coat pockets, pull out a half-crumpled pack of cigarettes, place the most intact one between my lips, and light up.
“You know those things’ll kill you?” Dissident says, dropping to the floor beside me and tossing a battered laptop into the wreckage.
“If you think smoking’s bad, you should try one of these,” I say, opening my coat enough to show off the knife in my belly.
She cocks her head to look, then says, “I’ll take your word for it.”
“Thought so.”
“You’re not going to try to get out of this, are you?” Though it’s hard to tell with her digital voice scrambler, I know she’s not joking anymore.
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. I had a good run.”
“It should’ve been longer.”
“There’s a lot of things that should be that aren’t.”
To this, she says nothing. Though I can feel the life draining out of me, there’s a few things I have to take care of first.
“Tell me you got the file.”
She shows me a flash drive.
“And it’s good?”
“Julian collected more than we could have ever hoped for,” she confirms.
“Good. Deliver it to whoever’ll take it. FBI. DSA. Dump it all online if you have to, but people need to know what happened here.”
“They will. They’ll know everything.”
“But they can’t know everything.”
She doesn’t say anything, cocking her helmeted head again.
“Kline. She may be one of the only good superheroes out there. Her involvement tonight can’t be known. No one can know she killed her uncle, or she will go to prison. Even if he’s exposed, they’ll never accept him as a legitimate supervillain target under her heroing license. Fill the gaps in the story however you want, just make sure she sticks with it. Say I killed them all. Private detective, vet, crazed ex-henchman, uncovered a conspiracy, and after being driven mad by the conspirators killing his friends took the fight to them. Kidnapped Kline at gunpoint as leverage or revenge or something along those lines. Killed Milgram and Erickson and however many others died here, before being killed himself. Taking advantage of this, the costumed vigilante known as Dissident, who has always had it out for both Milgram and Card, jumped in to take her pound of flesh.”
“I like the part where you add me in. Might actually help my image,” she says.
“Least I can do.”
“You know, some people will hate you for this, but I think more will love you.”
“Well then it’s a good thing that I couldn’t care less, don’t you agree?”
“Not really.”
A silence passes between us as we watch the lights and listen to the sirens.
“We’re really surrounded here, aren’t we?”
She nods. “Pinnacle’s waiting outside for some backup; he’s already got the Justice Juniors waiting in the wings, but from the chatter I’ve picked up it sounds like he’s getting some out of town help, too. ATHENA, Helios, maybe even El Capitán.”
“Huh. Pinnacle City’s really hit the big leagues.”
“It was bound to happen eventually.”
“Do you need a distraction to get out of here?”
“No. But if you’re offering, one could only help.”
Hefting the Flesheater, I let my cigarette fall to the floor and smile. “You got it. Now get out of here before they’re all over us.”
She turns from me and begins to walk away.
With her back to me, she says in a low voice, “You always were a good friend, Eddie.”
“You too, Fadia.”
And in a swirl of her dark cape, she’s gone. I don’t want her to get caught, but there’s a primal tug inside me that doesn’t want to die alone, either. Having one friendly face by my side, even if I can’t actually see that face, would’ve been nice.
I guess I’m just going to have to settle for doing the right thing.
I take one last, long look at Kline unconscious on the floor.
There’ll be tough days ahead for her, but she’ll make it through. She’ll want to tell the truth, but her desire to be a true hero will ultimately kick in and she’ll tell the lie that needs to be told… and if everything goes well, she’ll be able to save this city from those who’d tear it apart without a second thought.
I meant it when I said she was one of the good ones.
Now I just hope she won’t be alone.
A few weeks ago I wouldn’t have thought that possible, but I have to think now that people like Kline and Dissident can’t be the only ones. There are heroes in this city, some of them already in capes and masks, some wanting to do what’s right but feeling beaten down by the world. If we expose this, let people know that there are those who’ll fight for what’s right no matter the odds, I have to believe those who’ve been waiting to step up will.
I laugh. A wet, bloody laugh.
Fucking Kline. Her optimism really is infectious.
“Let’s do this,” I mutter, ripping the knife from my stomach in a massive gush of blood. I can’t last much longer like this, but no way in hell am I dying with that thing sticking out of me.
Lifting the Flesheater, I fire a long volley into the sky, blowing out more of the ruined wall and giving me a great view of the night sky. The gun and its smoking barrels finally die after only a few seconds, but it seems to have attracted the right kind of attention. The silhouetted forms of a small group of fl
ying heroes come my way.
I hobble over to the broken body of Ethan Erickson, original golden boy of Pinnacle City, and lift Harriet high above my head with my good hand.
The heroes hover by the broken open wall, looking down at us.
In the middle is Pinnacle, flanked by members of the Justice Juniors. At first Pinnacle looks down at me with that stern, angry gaze that only a disapproving superhero can really pull off, but when he sees Erickson at my feet, when the recognition hits, his face collapses into profound sadness.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he repeats to himself, softly.
If you got any epic last words, now’s the time to use ’em.
“I just killed Ethan Erickson and saved this city. What’ve you done today?”
So I probably could’ve put some more thought into them, but that doesn’t matter anymore.
Pinnacle’s face rebounds to stern anger before transforming into a look of pure, impossibly powerful rage. His eyes glow a brilliant crimson as he charges his eye beams and floats closer to me. The Justice Juniors try to hold him back, screaming and telling him that this isn’t how heroes do things, but Pinnacle is far too powerful and too far gone to hear their pleas.
I can feel the heat from here, even before he unleashes his eye beams, but that doesn’t last. Soon they are around me, through me, cutting through my near-indestructible trench coat and flesh.
And then, finally, the pain is gone.
CHAPTER 25: THE SUPERHERO
The cemetery in the Crescent is overgrown and a little cramped, but I like it better than Lilac Hills, where the Erickson family plot waits for me someday.
The perfectly trimmed grass and recirculating water features there remind me of my fake, dignified brave face when they lowered my dad into the earth, and my even faker sad face when they did the same with my uncle last winter, all part of the obligatory funerary pageant of pretending that everything makes sense.
The dandelions and clover patches that cover everything here may not be the most dignified accents to the faded tombstones, but they’re real, and they grow without anyone telling them when, where, or how high, and make the bouquet of orchids in my hands feel just a shade pretentious.
There was no service to attend, no family to throw one, and even if there had been, in accordance with his wishes as Fadia relayed them to me, I wouldn’t have been allowed to be seen there. She took care of the arrangements herself, such as they were.
I think it’s been long enough now for me to risk a visit, though. If anyone catches me, I’ll tell them I needed to see it, to make it real.
It won’t even be a lie.
The grave is easy to find. All I have to do is follow the graffiti.
Edgar Enriquez
Detective
Soldier
Friend
Under this Spartan epitaph, squeezed onto the tiny grave marker, someone has spray painted “and psycho.”
In another color, the next visitor has crossed out “psycho” and replaced it with “hero.”
This disagreement has been splashed all across the city in similar dueling scribbles.
Officially, Eddie is a criminal and I am a victim, and back home in EPC, this story goes more or less undisputed. I’m still getting about ten offers a day for exclusives on the story of my terrifying kidnapping. On this side of the city, though, his name and face adorn every reachable surface that paint can adhere to.
There are even a few murals of the two of us together. The details are all wrong. We’re usually holding hands and gazing at each other with sappy-yet-daring Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque expressions, but better that than painting me as his hostage.
Fadia’s work again. She broke the story that needed to be broken. I don’t doubt she also leaked a few extra details that needed to be leaked.
I stand at the foot of the grave, staring at the engraved words and searching for a place to start.
A woman with dark eyes watches me from a few rows away, cementing my jaw self-consciously shut, but when I look back a few seconds later, she’s gone. There’s just a girl rolling in the clover a bit farther off, running her fingers through it, probably looking for the perfect four-leafed specimen.
“Hi. I brought flowers,” I say, setting the bouquet down by the marker and sitting in the grass.
“Sorry if you hate flowers.”
This is harder than I thought it would be.
Mom used to take me to Dad’s grave and encourage me to talk to him, and when I was little, I took her word that he could hear me. I loved telling him every little thing I’d done that day, imagining the tombstone acting as a magical intercom, pretending I could hear him answering me through it.
When I was about twelve, I told her I felt stupid talking to a rock, and we didn’t come back much after that.
I don’t know what I believe now, about whether the dead can hear the living. After fifteen years of superheroics, fighting demons and soul-eaters and all manner of paranormal beings, it’s hard to discount any possibility, but the idea that Eddie’s chances of hearing me are somehow improved by my proximity to his bones, stored in a box under six feet of dirt that a living person couldn’t hear through, feels like a stretch right now.
But I’ve come this far.
“So, that was a pretty dirty trick you pulled on me, you know?” I say, winding the long grass between my fingers. “Taking advantage of a weakness I trusted you with in case of mind control. Making me choose between lying to the world about who you were or destroying everything you died for. Brutal.”
The grass tears in my hand.
“But you got your way. I’m still here. Sole surviving non-incarcerated heir to both the Erickson-Kline fortune and the Pinnacle City Guardians. I might actually be the most powerful person in the city right now.”
I wish I weren’t laughing alone at the strangeness of this phrase.
“Technically, I could claim the Pinnacle mantle now, being the senior member of the Guardians and all, but I’m sticking with Solar Flare. It’s more mine to redeem, I think. I changed the outfit, though. And I’m rebuilding the team. Now it’s me, Dissident, Petting Zoo … is it just me, or is there something going on between the two of them? Anyway, it’s us and some of my old friends from the Justice Juniors. Gothique, Makeshift, Brisk Boy. We’re working on a new name for him.”
If Eddie were actually here, he’d probably be giving me a blank stare.
“You never met them, but they’re good people. They’ve just been overdue to get out of the Junior zone for a while. It was awkward at first, kinda merging two cliques, but I think everyone’s finally falling into a rhythm. We’re thinking of starting a new Justice Juniors satellite team, get some new kids onboard. Right now, there’s just Kaley. She’s sort of our live-in apprentice. Our ward? I’m going to be officially dubbing her the new Glitter Girl this weekend. She’s, uh, she’s not okay. But she’s doing good, considering. Better than when you last saw her. She’s actually learning a lot more from Dissident than from me, but she wants the purple supersuit, and I can’t tell her no.”
We’re all learning a lot from Dissident, actually. The Guardians have become more of a co-op these days, but if we had to name a leader, it’d be her, not me.
“Mason’s still off the grid. I think I’m finally hoping it’ll stay that way this time. I never told you about him either, did I? That’s probably just as well.”
The topics of conversation left open between Eddie and me comprise a shorter checklist than I thought.
“Let’s see, what else? Um, Ace is in jail—for now, at least. So are my mother and the old Guardians. I don’t visit. Card managed to weasel out of doing time, but he had to resign from office in the plea bargain, drop his senatorial campaign, and the mansion’s in foreclosure. Apparently, he went way into debt gambling on the WPC demolition scheme, and most of his “investors” have filed lawsuits against him … so, I doubt he’ll ever get back on his feet again. The new guy’s okay, I guess. He won on a platf
orm of police accountability, but we’ll see how well that ends up working. Oh, and In the Cards is finally off the air.”
I hope this gives him the same satisfaction it does me.
“Anastasia’s filing for divorce and trying to get a new show started with her daughters and new ex-superhero fiancé …”
What am I doing? I didn’t come here to talk sordid celebrity gossip. If there were ever a way to make Eddie roll over in his grave.
I take a breath.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us, still. There are a lot of people who still want everything from the Crescent to the docks purged and leveled, and some others who want to declare themselves the next coming of Milgram. Mostly, I’ve been working on resurrecting the Julian Foundation, setting up infrastructure repair and community outreach programs. And then the team has to come in to arrest whoever shows up to sabotage them or extort the people who show up for help. It’s working so far, but the predators keep coming.”
It occurs to me that I may have spoken more to Eddie today than I ever did while he was alive.
We had one drunken night and a few days of guerilla heroing together.
He helped me find a new way to be a Guardian when I was ready to quit, and he set me up to rebuild the city when I would have left it broken just to keep it out of the wrong hands. And in that time, we never watched one movie together, or shared a meal more substantial than dry crackers in the Well.
I don’t know what TV shows he watched or what foods he hated, or what he believed about whether the dead can hear.
“I think,” I brush away the pile of shredded grass I realize I’ve gathered in my lap. “I think I would have enjoyed being your friend.”
My phone vibrates, and I check it.
Mutant bomber pigeon attack at the new free clinic.
I text Leah back, let her know I’m on my way.
“City in peril,” I tell Eddie’s grave, lifting myself off of it to hover in the air, removing my street clothes from over my full-length Solar Flare leotard. “You know how it goes.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, we’d like to start off by thanking our wonderful agent at Literary Counsel, Fran Black, for everything she has done, will do, and is always doing for us. There are times when being a writer is phenomenally taxing, and she has always lifted us up and kept us going as no other could. Thank you, as ever, for taking a chance on us and the crazy stuff we write.
