Strang eyes shimmer. ‘Ha! Now that’s the Ernest I know!’ He turns around in his driver’s chair as Ernest closes, ready to remove Strang by his throat if need be.
Strang jams the gas pedal.
The bus lurches. Ernest buckles and falls to the rubber aisle. Superheroes may indeed have super strength, but don’t have suction cups attached to their feet—well, most don’t. Plus, these newer-model school buses seem to have a lot more lot more pep than the ones that schlepped Ernest around in his youth.
Strang keeps his foot on the gas. He bends at the waist, retrieving something from under the seat. It’s a small-caliber pistol. Strang fires four shots over his shoulder, more an attempt to keep Ernest at bay than finish him off.
At the sight of the gun, Ernest grabs one of the bus’s bench seats. He yanks back. A big cushioned rectangle comes loose, and Ernest pulls it into the aisle. The last two bullets thwack into upholstery, and Ernest breathes a sigh of relief. Faster than a speeding bullet? Possibly. Bulletproof? Hardly.
Ernest glances over his temporary shield. The bus has attained cruising speed, and Thaddeus Strang leans over the steering wheel, completely riveted on his destination, which is now crystallizing though the large, flat windshield.
Strang has the bus aimed at the parking lot.
More specifically: at a cluster of well-heeled parents who are just now turning around in confusion, wondering why kids have now fled away from the buses, and why one bus in particular is hurtling their way.
Ernest growls. Leaps to his feet. Advances two steps closer. Strang sees him in the oversized rearview mirror—the mirrors that allow drivers to peer into a high school student’s soul.
Strang tucks the gun away, braces himself on the steering wheel with both hands, and slams on the brakes.
The timing is perfect. The emergency exit door slams shut, clanging on the broken latch. Ernest does likewise, pitching forward just before he can grab another seatback. Strang cackles, the man of science most enjoying Ernest’s struggle with Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
Strang punches the gas pedal again.
---
In the fog of this particular war, one of the girls from Lincoln Prep—a cellist, judging by the size of her instrument case—has made it over to her parents. She looks up from a hug, sees the approaching bus, and screams.
It has the effect of a gunshot near a flock of birds. Kids and adults scramble.
Inside the bus, Strang grins though stained teeth. The humans in the parking lot obey the same laws of physics as his captive in the aisle.
Ernest grabs for another bus seat. Two, in fact. This time, he uses both hands to anchor himself; he won’t risk having his feet touch the floor. James Bond makes all this look so easy, Ernest laments. Maybe because Bond is usually maneuvering between cars of a smoothly-running train, not the floor of a school bus that seems to have the suspension of a carnival bounce house. Or maybe because Bond’s fights occur with the aid of a choreographer. That’s probably a factor, too.
The superhero catapults forward. He crashes into the windshield. Lands on the rubber just beside his nemesis.
Strang sees his chance. He removes his hand from the wheel, grabbing for the gun. But not quickly enough. Ernest is already to his knees. As Strang raises the weapon, Ernest swipes with the heel of his hand. Strang’s arm bounces on the arm of the driver’s chair. There’s a crack of bone, and Strang yelps in pain.
Then Strang stomps the gas again.
Ernest is about to pitch over, but stops his backward lurch by grabbing the steering wheel. He steals a glance at a cluster of parents who are frozen in horror.
Ernest jerks the steering wheel. The speeding bus careens. Tires scream in protest.
The yellow missile whizzes by.
It jumps the curb, then continues for two or three seconds that seem to stretch into another dimension. Still traveling about 35 miles an hour, the bus hits a landscaping berm a few yards from the school entrance and leaps skyward.
The steel tube pitches to one side. Gravity takes hold. It lands on its side with a heavy crunch, and skids the remaining few feet to the school. It burrows under brick and mortar like a mole burrows into earth. Time slows even further.
With a roar, stone and sheetrock and iron from the school crumble all around, burying the vehicle save for the rear exit. Parents and students let out a collective gasp. The bus’s two occupants must surely be trapped.
Quite possibly, they’re dead.
Thirteen
Flynn Smith dashes for the bus and the rubble that was her school entranceway.
One of the parents holds out an arm to block her. Flynn screams, but another parent—a wide, foreboding man with a grey buzz cut—adds his body to the human barricade. About half a dozen police officers are already rushing to the crash site, trying to set a perimeter. Ryland Washington arrives seconds later. He motions toward the bus, keeping his focus on Flynn. ‘It’s not stable. It could blow at any—’
All three men turn to the sound of metallic scraping. He sees what Flynn has seen a split-second before. The bus’s emergency exit swinging open. Because it’s still mostly perched on its side, the door won’t open all the way. But it opens enough.
Ernest Smith tumbles out like a loose sock from a just-opened dryer. He thumps down on earth and loose brick. Even from her distance some 50 yards away, Flynn can see the blood on his shirt. He’s taken shrapnel of some sort. And that’s in the best case.
The super man struggles to a knee, then pushes himself up, standing at his full height. He scans the crowd, and finds the lone figure he’s looking for: Flynn. Ernest smiles in relief. He sees her say something to the two men preventing her from coming forward, and they step aside. Flynn breaks into a run.
But then her father steals a quick glance over his shoulder, as though he’s just heard something coming from the bus. He holds up a hand. Flynn stops in her tracks.
Satisfied that his daughter is still a safe distance away, Ernest turns back toward the cabin of the bus, and toward the sound that caused him to stop his daughter. It was a man’s grunt, one of pain and frustration. Now, Ernest hears a second noise. Then rattle of metal against metal.
He grabs for the opening where door’s handle used to be and pulls open the rear hatch.
Dr. Thaddeus Strang lies prone on what remains of the floor. He is pinned by several large chunks of brick and metal; Ernest tries to imagine the damage to the man’s legs. Strang has located his pistol, however, and tries to take aim. Ernest sees a crook in Strang’s forearm where his bone snapped.
The act of lifting the gun proves excruciating. Strang’s arm droops. The pistol clangs against the bus floor, still in his grip, yet useless as an instrument of mayhem.
Ernest speaks quietly. ‘Strang. Don’t. It doesn’t have to end like this. I can still get you out of here.’
Strang looks up. Takes a shallow breath. ‘The suits… men in suits… killed my wife.’ Ernest’s old adversary squeezes his eyes; tears of hot anger roll down his cheeks. When he opens them again, he seems to have reached a final decision. With a snarl of pain and final effort of will, Strang raises the gun.
In the span of a split second, Ernest’s eyes register acceptance, followed by pants-crapping alarm. He grabs for the hinge of the emergency door and yanks, freeing the entire door.
In the time that follows, Ernest hears the thin crack of a gunshot, then the tinny ping of bullet colliding with metal.
The explosion roars from beneath the bus, angry and red.
An even more sizable chunk of the school vaporizes, and what isn’t pulverized into dust collapses, completely burying the bus. Ernest is thrown backward by the concussion. He lands on his back, on the downslope of the landscaping berm, still clutching a bus door that has served as his only armor against the blast.
---
Ryland Washington climbs to his feet, having thrown both himself and Flynn to the ground at the sound of the blast. He scans the crowd, look
ing for any that need triage with the grim focus of someone who’s had to treat fellow platoon members for shrapnel wounds. But other than a few suits in need of a tailor, he finds nothing. No wooden splinters sticking out of necks; no incisions caused by shards of glass that Dr. Strang, in his final act, turned into scalpels.
Flynn looks toward the school. She wipes brick dust from her face.
No one says a word.
At last, the detached emergency door moves.
Ernest casts the metal rectangle aside, but remains on the ground. Flynn, who is in her second year of high school art classes, sees that the once-impressionistic blood splotches of his white oxford shirt have now turned into something more suggestive of Rothko—one big swath of dark red.
Flynn hears shouting somewhere behind her. A woman: ‘He’s okay!’
A cheer.
Flynn begins walking toward her dad, her strides long, purposeful. Washington is already on his walkie-talkie, ensuring that paramedics are just seconds away. He matches her stride for stride, and is re-holstering the radio by the time one of the male students shouts:
‘No school!’
An even bigger cheer.
But Flynn Smith’s scream cuts through the voices. Ryland reaches for her, but Ernest’s daughter is already in a full sprint.
Part Two
Fourteen
P hoebe Smith strides through a sterile corridor at the Barnes Jewish Medical Center, barreling forward like a cyborg. Unstoppable. In her right hand, she bears a vase of fresh-cut flowers—about a dozen daffodils mixed in with tulips. She passes the nurse’s station, a head pokes up from behind a flat-screen monitor. A female voice tries to get Phoebe’s attention.
‘Ma’am? Ma’am, can I help you?’
‘I’m seeing my husband.’ Phoebe doesn’t break stride.
‘Excuse me? Do you know the room number? Ma’am?’ The woman in green scrubs directs her last question at the vapor of Phoebe’s contrail. Point of fact: Phoebe knows exactly what room Ernest is in, even if she doesn’t know the number.
She only needs to look for the cop.
He’s stationed in a chair at the end of the hall. Full uniform. Nightstick, stun gun, sidearm. Ready to swat away any unwelcome visitors, like any that might be bearing a makeshift bouquet of flowers at this time of night. As Phoebe nears, he rises and holds up a hand.
‘Sorry, ma’am. Visiting hours are over in—’ he checks his watch, ‘well, they’re over now. The doctors want him to rest since they just moved him out of ICU.’
Phoebe plants herself in front of the officer. ‘Ha. Wait till I’m done with him.’
The policeman stares back, hands atop the weapons latched to his utility belt. Phoebe looks up. The man isn’t tall—maybe 5 foot 9—but he’s no stranger to the bench press. Nor the squat rack. Square jaw, vascular forearms. A man whose bearing says he’s not averse to confrontation, if only because he’s in the habit of winning them.
‘So. You’re the wife?’
Phoebe nods, rooted to her spot. She watches the officer’s face as he performs some sort of mental calculus. The policeman doesn’t like the result. He cracks a smile, and the staring contest is over. ‘Ryland warned me about you.’
‘That was smart of him.’
---
From the hospital room door, Phoebe stares at the haggard figure in bed.
Phoebe approaches the sleeping figure cautiously. He has a clear tube twisting out of his nose, another from his wrist, and a third protruding from his ribcage. Hovering bedside, she takes a moment to study her husband. Even helpless in a hospital bed, Phoebe appreciates Ernest’s broadness of shoulder, his messy tufts of light auburn hair just starting to diffuse with grey, the darker stubble shading his jaw and neck. She delights in holding this face in her hands, and the thought of it being taken away fills Phoebe with a sudden rage.
Just as suddenly, her rage dissolves into a puddle of worry. She glances at the tube in his ribs, her eyebrows arched in concern. This isn’t his first collapsed lung.
But it’s going to be his last, she thinks.
Ernest opens one of his eyes. Inhales. The act looks like it takes some effort on his part. ‘Hey. Tiny bug.’
‘Hey. Big dummy.’
Phoebe Smith smiles, concern and grace etched into her large brown eyes. Then the rage grips her once again. She raises the vase.
Ernest inhales again. ‘Flowers?’
The anger and worry have combined into a cocktail which have turned Phoebe’s eyes red, and have filled the lids of those eyes with tears. She looks around, as though making sure there aren’t any witnesses. It appears that she’s giving thought to belting her husband.
She sets the flowers on the windowsill.
Phoebe leans over Ernest, deciding, as humans tend to do in moments like these, that any opportunity to express love for a spouse or a sibling or a son should not be taken for granted. She takes Ernest’s stubbled face in her hands, and kisses him.
Ernest opens the other eye just in time—just before it gets covered with one of Phoebe’s many kisses. ‘You didn’t have to go to the gift shop,’ he says.
She inspects the pile of daffodils and tulips, and looks back at Ernest, sheepish. ‘Oh. The gift shop is closed.’
Ernest manages to arch his eyebrows.
‘The Miller’s flowerbed is open, though.’ A bashful chuckle bursts forth; Phoebe tries to catch it with a hand over her mouth.
Ernest grins at the thought of his wife harvesting the neighbors beloved landscaping under cover of darkness. The smile then dissolves. ‘Dr. Strang. Did he—’
Phoebe quiets her husband with a hand on his chest. ‘Gone. And good riddance. Ryland told me. What he did. Was going to do. And what you did to stop it.’
Ernest turns toward the window, staring into the darkness of the evening beyond. Pastel lights from the St. Louis Science Center glow in the distance. A look of anguish more mental than physical clouds his face.
‘What about—’
‘The kids? You mean ours? Officially, I told them the same thing as always,’ Phoebe says. ‘That sometimes firefighters respond to emergencies even when they’re off duty, and that this time was a very unique emergency that won’t happen again.’ Then she adds, with emphasis: ‘Ever.’
Well, it won’t happen with Dr. Strang again, Ernest thinks.
‘Same story they haven’t believed for years,’ Phoebe adds.
‘They’re too young. Still.’ Ernest says. His chest expands as he draws breath; he pays the price with a small grunt of pain. ‘I don’t want them to worry. I don’t want them to end up here.’
‘Ernest. You can’t protect them forever. And none of that matters now. We’ll talk more when you’re out of this bed. When you can breathe without a tube.’
Ernest grabs for his wife’s hand and, with a look, thanks her.
‘The only thing that matters right now,’ she leans over to offer her husband a long kiss on the forehead. When she straightens, she wipes back tears before they have a chance to run down her cheeks. ‘Is that I have your promise.’
‘Anything,’ Ernest says, giving her hand a squeeze.
‘Promise me you’re done. That the minute you get up and walk out of here, you’ll keep walking.’
Ernest tries to prop himself onto his elbows. His breathing is ragged, but he pushes through, ignoring Phoebe’s urging to lie back. ‘Why would I promise that?’
Phoebe tilts her head, eyes staring like she’d just heard a question from someone in the wrong ward of the hospital. ‘Why? Because you love me, and because you love your kids.’
‘You’re scared,’ Ernest says.
‘Yep. So that’s a second reason. Want a third? I’m selfish. I want to spend the next 40 years growing old with you, and holding your hand, and sipping tea, and watching our kids play in the symphony. And none of that happens if I have to put you in a box because you were out trying to save everyone.’
‘Instead of what? Not saving e
veryone?’
‘You can’t save everyone. Right now, you can only save one.’
Phoebe kisses the hand she holds in hers. She rests her forehead against the scarred flesh of the hand, and then moves the hand once more, placing it over her chest, letting it rest there, feeling the thrum of her heart. ‘This time, the one you save has to be you.’
A gentle grin spreads across Ernest’s face. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You do that. Think all you want, you magnificent, strong, heroic dummy.’ She turns to the windowsill. She arranges the flowers on the nightstand next to his bed, moving a bedpan out of the way to make room. ‘But after that: do what I tell you.’
When Ernest kisses his wife goodbye, his love for her easily fills the entire room, and then spills out into the hospital’s 12th floor hallway.
Fifteen
Ernest plops down into a leather-backed chair in Ryland Washington’s office.
As he waits for his friend and nominal boss to arrive, he surveys the decor for maybe the 50th time. The trappings of this chief of police are nothing like those of his predecessor, Chief Josephs, and Ernest notices some new detail every time. Amidst the various bric-a-brac, there’s little indication that Ryland is in the business of law enforcement. If it weren’t for the dozen police officers in uniform at their desks just outside the door, Ernest might as well be visiting a college professor during office hours.
For starters, there’s the bookshelf: rather than tomes on crime and punishment broken up visually with football helmets, autographed baseballs, and other sports knickknacks, Ryland’s shelves are filled with works of literature and philosophy. Mostly classics: Chekov, Hemingway, Poe, Faulkner, Atwood, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Twain, Morrison, Orwell, along with a few Eastern authors Smith has never heard of.
Ernest is noting what seems like a few new additions (two works, one from Carver and one from Murakami with almost identical titles), when he turns to the sound of the door. Washington greets Ernest with a friendly pat on the back. He soon settles into his own chair, and tosses a thick folder on his desk.
I, Superhero Page 6
