Nubian Princess.
Much as Soledad despised all of them with their stupid names and ridiculous costumes, the thought of the Nubian Princess sometimes still gave her a thrill-chill.
Vin took it, the details of the call, as a matter of course, showing an emotional spike only when Soledad detailed the metanormal rights protesters.
“They’ve got an opinion . . .” Tight little shakes of Vin’s head. “I don’t care how stupid it is, okay, they’ve got their opinion. But . . .” Vin reduced his thoughts to a phrase: “Freak fuckers.” Added: “Israel Fernandez; glad he died.”
“Oh, no. Didn’t die. The black copters from the special ops assassinated him.” Sarcasm buttered with bitterness. “He probably killed himself just so we’d get the blame.”
Then, talking about Eddi, Vin said: “She’s good. She’s a good operator.”
Soledad said yeah to that, complimented Vin for having seen Eddi’s abilities early on.
Vin was the one who wanted Eddi to join his and Soledad’s element as a probee to keep her hot head from getting taken off by a freak.
Ironic.
Vin thought it was ironic: He’d brought Eddi onto the element to help watch over her. Eddi ended up walking away from their bad, bad call relatively unhurt. And he had . . .
Vin looked to his bionics.
He thought of his days on MTac. Two-legged days. Days without painkillers.
Days that were only months ago.
Like she was dialed into his thoughts, Soledad: “What are you going to do?”
“Order a pizza. Watch The Simpsons.”
“With yourself: What are you going to do? It’s been eight months.”
“Thanks. ’Cause a lot of times it’s hard for me to keep track of how long it’s been since I had my leg—”
“You’re off rehab. You’ve got your new leg. So what are you going to do?”
“The only thing I’ve ever been is a cop, and that’s done with.”
“You could work Admin. You could work DMI.”
“I was just thinking how much I want to hang around a bunch of other busted MTacs talking about how good things useta be when we had all our limbs instead of just a couple of them.”
“So instead you’re going to sit here, get fat off pizza and watch TV. If you were any more pathetic, you’d be a cliché.”
Vin said nothing. Vin, fractured Vin, let Soledad have the last word.
And then, again, there was quiet between them.
And sometime after that Soledad said: “I was scared yesterday.”
“Going against a homicidal shape-shifter, how are you not going to be scared? All the macho bullshit aside, I never knew an operator who didn’t get tight on a call. You’re crazy if you don’t. You can plan on getting killed otherwise.”
“I’m not talking that kind of scared. Scared that makes you sharp. I was scared to death. Vin, I was scared to where I felt Death. I felt it right there with me, crawling all over me same as a million ugly maggots.”
“And you were wrong about it. Wrong about it for you, for the element.” Thinking of Whitaker, thinking of him still lying up in a hospital between the here and the hereafter: “Maybe you were.” Vin worked himself to where he was as sincere as he could be. Open as he knew how to be. “If you really felt Death, if that’s what you really felt, fear, there’s no shame in stepping aside. Bo was as tough an operator as there was. When it was time for him to get out of the bag and behind a desk . . .” Recalling a moment he and Soledad’d shared; their senior lead, Bo, telling them he was quitting MTac: “Nobody’s done it with more whatever. Dignity.”
Bo was still around MTac. Around in a big way. He was 10-David. Unit commander. He was the guy in charge of day-to-day operations. That meant a lot of pencil pushing. Politicking. A lot of filling out requisitions and forms. Begging one way or another for the couple of extra bucks in the budget that meant the difference between good equipment and the best equipment for G Platoon. And difference between good equipment and the best equipment? Sometimes the difference was living and dying. Soledad wasn’t sure how other operators felt about Bo’s choices. But how she felt, how she felt when she saw him knee-deep in paperwork: She felt he was lucky. Not just lucky to be alive. Lucky to have the smarts to know when to get out off the streets.
Maybe not just lucky. Bo, different from most MTacs, had a wife. Kids. Probably, Soledad conjectured, having something to live for keeps you from doing shit that’ll get ya killed.
Probably.
She didn’t know. Not for sure.
From Soledad, a tick of her head, dismissing all that. Getting back to what was what: “The way I felt wasn’t just about the call. I felt . . . it was like an O’Hara novel. I felt like things were inevitable.”
“Well, you’re pressing thirty. Thirty, and you’re not married. Yeah, you’re thinking about dying.”
And Soledad laughed. A little. And this was why, despite their distant natures, she chose to spend time with Vin. Vin knew her. Could slice the bullshit. Could move her. Could touch her from feet away. Always could.
She wanted to kiss him.
Just a peck.
Maybe a little more.
Wouldn’t let herself. And she wouldn’t tell Vin that when she thought of death, she thought of him. Thought of losing him or being lost to him. Whichever. Thing was, Vin gave Soledad something to live for. And the thing about that . . .
“You think too much, Soledad.” No idea what was going on in Soledad’s head, but Vin was precise with his insight. “You think, then you let your thinking get to you. Yeah, you’re gonna die someday. Somehow. You stay on MTac, it’s gonna involve a mutie. But you’re getting a cloud over you . . . what’s got you feeling like that?
Like that.
What had Soledad feeling like that: Last time Soledad felt like she had something to life for, someone to live for, turned out to be a freak.
Hell if that was going to happen again, freak or normal human. Hell if it would.
Love = weakness all around.
Well, this was stupid.
Well, Eddi thought, this was just about insane.
She’d made it this far and she couldn’t . . .
She’d made it this far, this far being from her duplex where she’d showered and primped and gussied up. Dressed in some hip couture that lacked the right amount of fabric in all the right places. She’d gotten in her ride, rode to Sunset in WeHo, overpaid for parking that wasn’t all that close to where she wanted to be. Walked. Actually walked in the city of Los Angeles. And was standing across the street from what, according to her Googling, was real much “the joint.”
The ridiculous part: She’d been cooling across the street from “the joint” going on four minutes. Four. Long. Minutes.
Couldn’t make herself cross the street, go in.
It’ll probably be too loud. She’s not gonna know anybody. They probably aren’t spinning the kind of music she’s into.
Probably. Probably to all that.
But she had to get cleaned up, go out, spend dough to stand on a street corner to debate the act of going out in the first place?
Ridiculous.
And what really blew: This was supposed to be a . . . an “I made it through another call alive” celebration. Little more than eight months on MTac. She’d seen a grip of operators wounded, killed on the job. She’d almost done as much to one of her own on her first call. Somehow she’d survived.
Luck. Skill. Whichever. She figured she owed herself a little something for making it another day.
But standing outside a club alone? Ridiculous.
Eddi had actually thought about calling Soledad. Inviting her along. How weak would that’ve been? First off, Soledad was probably out doing whatever Soledad does when she’s on her downtime. Dating a bunch of guys or kickboxing or bullfighting. God knows a woman like Soledad; her social calender was phat. God knows. Eddi didn’t. Much as Eddi . . . appreciated Soledad, Eddi didn’t know al
l that much about Soledad.
What she did know: Oh, the laughs she’d get from Soledad for asking Soledad to hang out.
So she went solo. And there she was . . . stupid.
Eddi made the cross. Overpaid, again. This time for cover. Entered the club.
Mostly, Eddi wasn’t a drinker. Her parents weren’t drinkers. At least in the time she had parents, she never much saw her father taking a drink outside of special occasions. Eddi grew up thinking that was the only time you were supposed to have a drink: marking an event that was memorable. In the time she was fatherless Eddi’s mother drank. A little. Also to mark an occasion. An anniversary, a birthday, Christmas. Maybe not mark it. Dull the pain of it. So for Eddi, here was a moment to combine both habits of her parents. She drained some of her apple martini, which she knew wasn’t strictly a martini but dug its candy goodness. She took in a little more, celebrated inside herself. Here’s to eight months, six calls, two kills and no one to—
What was she gonna say? No one to share it with? She was in a club sick with people, the male percentage more than eager to share something with her. But she’d been sitting around, thinking about her past, her parents, what constitutes a proper martini. Eddi hadn’t even been savvy to the three guys who were giving her the eye. One guy was clearly older than her but not old. Looked like he had means but didn’t flaunt it. The other guy was gorgeous, and that was gorgeous measured against the average man in a city where the average man in a club at night made or hoped to make his living acting, modeling or otherwise engaged in a profession where a superior collection of features was an absolute requirement. The third guy didn’t come off as being moneyed, was not nearly as gorgeous as the gorgeous guy, but was cute in the way he nervously, shyly stole glances at Eddi. He was a little country. In a good way.
In the way . . .
Yar was country.
Yar got killed courtesy of a piece of animated metal freak-jabbed through his chest.
Eddie finished her drink.
Marked the occasion.
Dulled the pain.
Went home.
People think about it. Average people. Real people. Normal people. They think about, surely every now and again, what it’d be like to be super. Average, real, normal people—as much as they hate superpeople, hate them for what they did to San Francisco, hate them for all the average, real and normal people who were killed when a couple of warring superhumans turned half the city to slag—they still think: What would it be like to have abilities beyond imagination?
After San Francisco—as people refer to the history of man since the tragedy—the response to the thought, at least openly, was disgust and revulsion and strong statements of contempt. Why would I want to be like them? Who the hell would want to be like them?
But the false plating on the statements was fairly obvious. Like racists who spent their time at the beach working their tans. Normal people couldn’t help but think what it’d be like to be a god.
The real, true answer to the thought depended on who was doing the pondering. The real, true answer was sometimes banal: If I could make myself invisible, I could hide out in the women’s locker at 24 Hour Fitness and ogle all the naked chicks I wanted!
The real, true response was sometimes, probably, noble: If I had superpowers, I could’ve kept that little girl from being hit by the truck, saved the space shuttle crew, put an end to the war in . . .
But those are the thoughts of normal humans. People who have to shield their eyes from the sun as they look skyward from the bottom of an unclimbable mountain.
Truth is, reality is, looking down from the mountain, the view’s not all that better.
Yeah, you can turn yourself into a human torch, but when you do, you ignite, incinerate, everything within a ten-foot radius.
Superstrength is real nice. Except you have to work, actually concentrate on opening a door without ripping it from its hinges. Picking up an egg is an Olympic event. Your fear, your sweaty nightmare: someone saying, “Here, you want to hold the baby?”
If you’re invulnerable—bones like titanium, skin like steel—sure, you could walk from a plane crash scratchless.
Physically.
But an invulnerable’s still got pain receptors. It could survive a plane crash, but it would feel the associated trauma. The impact, the metal of the fuselage slamming into, twisting against its body. The shock of the explosion, the burn of the resulting fireball.
What would it feel? A shitload of pain.
For an invulnerable, at some point, a sustained influx of pain could overwhelm it, fry its CNS. Do to it what the physical force of getting plowed by a bus or hit by lightning couldn’t. Kill it.
Anson Hall was feeling a lot of hurt.
Anson had jumped from an eight-story building, had been slammed against a brick wall, had a motorcycle thrown at him . . . And the running. All the running hurt like hell. His lungs burned from overuse, lactic acid nuked his legs. Brimstone in the body. Hurting like hell wasn’t just an expression. Fact was, no matter he could take a hit from a semitruck, what Anson could not do was run any more.
Yet he kept on.
Adrenaline.
Adrenaline propelled Anson forward. Adrenaline brewed by panic.
Anson could die.
That he could die: It was a concept that hadn’t so much as entered Anson’s mind in the twenty-seven years since, when he was thirteen, a couple of rottweilers mauled him. Tried to. Ended up shattering their canines without so much as breaking his flesh. The thought of dying had no traction with Anson since Anson realized he was . . . different.
Special, his parents told him. They told him he was special. Then they told him to never say anything to anyone about being special because even in the Age of Heroes regular people had fear of superpeople. Special people. People who were different.
Then San Francisco.
Then “after San Francisco.”
Then everyone who was special . . . different . . . just kept their mouths shut. Heads down. Acted normal.
Anson knew the score, played the game. But Anson also knew what he was and death wasn’t a consideration for him. Never before.
Now death was a demon on Anson’s back, chasing him down. The demon drove him on.
Run.
Run to where?
Didn’t matter.
Just away. Run away from it. It.
Except It kept pursuing, and It could not be lost. It had followed Anson when Anson tried to lose It in that apartment complex, then jumped from the building to the street, crashed through the boarded window of an abandoned self-storage. It had been the one to hurl the motorcycle at Anson, pick Anson off the ground by his throat and slam him—repeatedly—into a brick wall.
Anson had broken away, run away, as he’d been running for the last eighteen minutes. Since It—middle of the night, at a lonely stoplight as Anson’s car stalled—had run up on Anson, ripped the door from the frame and Anson from his seat. Introduced Anson to the asphalt of Chavez Avenue.
In Los Angeles, a city that traffics in random violence, this thing—It—had come specifically for Anson.
And It brought pain.
Fingers which crackled with electricity, electric fire which could not be detered by indestructible skin and bones. Forget the drop from the building, the thrown motorcycle and wall. Brought pain? It was pain.
So keep running.
Keep running.
Keep . . .
To where?
Anson had run, had been chased into East LA. Was like getting chased into Beirut. Abandoned cars, houses shrouded behind metal bars and locked doors and chained gates. Citizens living as inmates. Scared into submission, driven to seclusion by bangers and crackheads and LAPD Rampart cops who were most times little better than bangers and crackheads. Sometimes they were the same thing.
Farewell, age of heroes.
Who was going to help? Who among the timid, the thuggish, the strung out would help Anson?
&nbs
p; None of them.
Keep running.
Keep . . .
Climb!
Up, over a chain-link fence and then . . .
Keep running.
Never mind the hurt, the burn. Keep running.
Jesus.
Diane.
He thought of, Anson thought of . . .
Jesus.
Light.
Anson saw the light. Too late. Anson turned, but the light was on him. The light and the wail of an air horn. They were from the Gold Line, the light rail that cut from Pasadena to Downtown. Anson was standing dead in its path.
The train’s horn shrieked.
That was what, a warning? Useless. The train was rolling too fast to stop. Anson was too tired to move. Too beat to care.
This was going to hurt.
And then came the impact: the grille, the steel of the engine slamming into Anson, picking Anson up and launching Anson’s body.
And then there was a moment, the pain so intense it didn’t exist. It was off the agony scale. Anson’s mind could not quantify it. The sensation did not register. Not immediately. Later Anson’s head would find a way to process the hit, and the hit would hurt.
Later.
Now . . .
There was a moment when Anson was sailing in the air.
Sailing.
Flying.
And in the moment Anson thought, he thought: If there was a superhuman ability to possess, this, the ability to traverse without effort and with dispatch from one point to another, was the one to own. Anson thought: If he could truly fly on his own and unaided by a speeding train, he would not be here. He would be passing easily to Diane. He would go to her and take her in his arms, and together they’d sail away . . . God, Styx. When was the last time he’d . . . They’d sail to somewhere that people who were different and those who loved them weren’t hated and hunted like rabid dogs. Wherever that mythical land was.
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