by John Ridley
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 calendar was phat. God knows. Eddi didn't. Much as Eddi… appreciated
Soledad, Eddi didn't know all 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 Hal! 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 semi truck, 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, Ms 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 deterred 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?
None of them.
Keep running. Keep…
Climb!
Up, over a chain-link fence and then… Keep running.
Never mind the hurt, the bum. 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 if. 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.
And then Anson's brain finished its processing. His receptors kicked in and he hurt like the devil. But even the devil didn't know hurt as detailed as when Anson took to the ground landing at sixty-plus mph. Skipping a couple of times, skipping along, whipping and twisting along. Clothes shorn on coarse earth. The repeated, repeated, repeated slap of flesh on road until there was a sound. The sound of an animal begging to be put down.
A few seconds or so. A few seconds. Then Anson realized the sound was his own putrid screaming. One more lesson In a night of learning. Being invulnerable ain't shit against hurting.
What Anson didn't hear was the sound of the train braking. It kept hard-rolling, the engineer not wanting to have to go through due process and the form filing for hitting whatever it was he'd hit. If he kept on for Union Station, pretended like nothing had happened, well… maybe he'd just hit a bum. That was the same as nothing happening.
LA. Even through the hurt of getting hit, Anson thought: Goddamn LA.
And Anson straggled up to his feet. Gingerly. Then he reminded himself, had to actually remind himself he was indestructible. He was not hurt. Not truly hurt. No need to be ginger. It was time, again, to run.
Run to…
Where would he run that It hadn't already demonstrated It would follow?
Run to the police? If they saved Anson from It, who'd save Anson from the police?
Home?
Diane? Run to her? Bring It to her?
No.
Run to where?
Tungsten. Anson thought of Tungsten. Anson used to want to be: Tungsten, same as just about every metanormal- before San Francisco- dreamed of taking their gift and being something more than normal. Doing something beyond regular. Acting like a hero.
Tungsten had been KIA by King of Pain. King of Pain had previously, in one of those used-to-be-common battles between the supergood and the superevil, put the otherwise indestructible Tungsten in a coma for five months.
Didn't matter.
To Tungsten it didn't matter. When it came time to square off with King of Pain again, he stood his ground. Knowing King of Pain had the ability to take his life, Tungsten didn't run.
Heroes don't run.
No more running.
No equivocation in what Anson told himself, ordered himself to do: no more running. No matter the outcome might, be same as with Tungsten, Anson would stand. Anson would fight It.
I will be, Anson said in his head, something more than human.
A trick of the moonlight. Clouds cleared the sky. Up the street darkness seemed to part.
Coincidental. It was coming.
I feel no pain, Anson told himself. I cannot die. I am more than human.
The caller ID on her integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine that had every advanced feature except the one that allowed Soledad to walk more than five feet from the base unit while talking on the phone said it was Soledad's parents calling.
She didn't pick up. Wasn't Sunday. Wasn't the day Soledad had designated in her mind and by habit as being the day to talk with her folks. Sit on the phone while they talked at her.
She let the phone ring itself out, was through the door by the time the answering machine picked up and her mom started asking of Soledad's empty joint: "Are you there? Sweetie, it's Mom. Are you home?"
Melrose to Robertson. Down to Third, over into BH. That was the route Soledad was going to run. A five-mile loop. Same one, with slight variation, she ran the four days out of seven she did road work. Not too many places m LA offered decent scenery and a fair lack of traffic. The city was built for driving. Health nuts be damned. Soledad had found a course, and she stuck to it. Some Hybrid on her iPod to speed the miles along. The sun was, as always, up there. The heat from the endless pavement, the smog; they'd mix for a physically taxing workout. A good workout.
Some sweat and ache to wear away that nagging, fucking… Death. Death was nagging Soledad. Shouldn't be. She'd gotten over, thought she'd gotten over, Death a long time ago. The day of San Francisco: Soledad, her family, were supposed to be in the city when a battle between the superhero Pharos and the supervillain Bludlust turned half the town and most of its citizens to slag and ash. But Soledad, her family, weren't there. They are alive. Alive, Soledad figured, on borrowed time. So what was Death..
Left on Robertson…
When Soledad was already dead? Should already be dead? That kind of thinking ha
d kept company with Soledad, given comfort to Soledad as she jobbed her way through the LAPD academy, worked a beat, SPU and MTac without so much as getting sweaty palms. Not once.
Until…
Right on Third.
And a thought came to Soledad, came like a frank observation that, being objective, was separate from her own thinking.
The thought: Know what you're scared of?
What?
You've been hanging around Vin. You're attracted to Vin. But you're scared you don't really care for Vin.
Endorphins pumping in Soledad. Runner's high coming on.
A high coming on.
Stupid, Soledad told herself. Losing herself in natural bliss, she told herself the thought was stupid. Why would it matter if she-
You don't care for Yin. Used to hate Vin. So you're scared Vin's just a bounce-back thing. You're scared 'cause if he is, then who you really love, who you're still in love with, what's really giving you unease-
No! It wasn't qualms or questions or misgivings on the ways of her heart. It was Death. Soledad felt Death creeping close and, yeah, it scared her because she didn't… she wasn't afraid of losing her life. She didn't want to lose the life she could have with Vin. Vin. Vin she loved, she told herself. And told herself. She could deal with Death and falling for a guy she used to hate. What she couldn't deal with- A horn.
Soledad looked as she ran out onto Ivy. Looked too late. As she saw the massive front end of the Ford Expedition bearing on her, she thought: I hate SUVs.
There was laughter all around. Rare thing. Odd thing.
Laughter from Eddi and Alcala. And from Soledad. Soledad laughing out loud, continuously. That was the bit that was rare and odd, and made more so by the fact that there were three MTacs cracking up and they were doing it in a hospital. Mostly, MTacs in hospitals meant cooling for some specialist to arrive from an ER, blood-covered, telling the rest-or the remainder-of an element, eyes lowered and with a mournful shake of the head, "Nothing we could do." Mostly, MTacs in hospitals meant waiting for spouses or family or lovers or life partners to come around, get the official word, then break down in sobs while the rest-the remainder-of an element wondered how long it'd be before their spouse or family, lover or life partner would be heaped on a dirty tile floor sobbing for them.
