*
I spent a lot of time that week walking through Metropolis. I walked all over much of the town, from Central Square to the Financial District.
Down near the old ferry port I saw where George Washington had hidden out before taking command of the Continental Army in the first months of the American Revolution, and I saw, plainly and clearly, a young officer in no uniform but buckskin handing him the hilt of a long sword. Washington looked over the blade, scraped off a trace of tarnish with a fingernail, and slipped it into the scabbard at his side, and he allowed a bit of a patrician wince as his troops broke attention to whoop and holler their approval. I suppose people passing by thought I was a bit daffy as I stood there watching and listening and occasionally smiling at what seemed to be nothing in particular. A little daffiness in a decorous, neatly dressed man is tolerable in Metropolis these days.
On the lower west side I saw a score of British clipper ships—circa the Seventeenth Century—docking secretly. The armed men who unloaded from them made their way undetected through the forests of Indian country to breach the flimsy wall of the first Dutch settlers who founded the city, to declare it a British Crown Colony.
Along the east side where today a shining steel and concrete garrison houses the New United Nations, that great urban fortress fell away like the cities that H. G. Wells saw rising and tumbling from his time machine. And across the water that came visible as the seat of the world body vanished, there was a long Viking ship, cracked abeam on a sandbar, and a brace of men at oars drowned in its hold, and one enormous glowing figure of a man, unaware that he was still alive, washed on the shore. The man wore tattered furs of animals that had surrendered their skins halfway across the world, and a throwing hammer hung from a leather belt slung on his waist. The man, damp and muscular, got to his feet, and he actually looked at me in the face. My mad vision addressed me with a glare and grunted. Then he walked off into the forest primeval to join a local tribe and lay the foundation for the Iroquois Federation, the first republic to stand on the North American continent.
I believe in visions. I think we have them, all of us. As a teenager experimenting with meditation and second sight, I always had thought the tip-off in the battle of dreams from my unconscious versus communications from elsewhere was whether a vision provided something I could not have made up myself. Once, in something seeming to be a dream, someone had told me a joke and I’d laughed. The joke had been new to me. Then upon opening my eyes, I could not remember the joke. My casual experimentation with the paranormal had ended with divinity school.
My lately acquired psychosis—that is how I still thought of it, even as I alternately enjoyed and was horrified by it—allowed me to remember what a historic place, what a center of life, my adopted city was. I am sure that had I been allowed simply to wander the city looking at its past indefinitely, I would have seen an allosaurus making a meal of a pteranodon; a curious sea creature dragging itself ashore and giving birth to amphibians; the sea reclaiming the land; the glacier reclaiming the sea; the mantle of lava reclaiming the ice; the void reclaiming the dust. I might even have heard the magic words He spoke at Genesis. Yet, my dementia did not allow me to indulge my passion for the past. The future arrived too soon.
*
Friday, there was a rumble. In midtown, not far from my church, a flash of yellow-orange light blew past me, and I walked on. Surely it was a blast from another time, and I was not in the mood. I looked both ways before I crossed the street to try my luck waiting for a bus and noticed a few people turning to run from something I could not see yet. Then a bus rose from the ground and hurtled in my direction.
The sky was full of screaming colors. This could only be a vision; I could not make this up. Then when a howling little girl popped out a window of the bus as it slammed to a stop against a curb and fairly flew into my gut, the third alternative occurred to me: This really might be happening.
According to the word of God, the meek will someday inherit the Earth. Someday. But God never accounted for the mighty.
Like dust devils coalescing from the tightening air, a handful of colorful figures suddenly appeared in the sky, on the ground, on the walls and roofs of the buildings. Who knew what the conflict was about, or to whose standard to flock? A mortal could only follow the ancient rhythms embossed on genetic memory and run for safety.
I snatched up the terrified little girl and retreated with her into the recessed doorway of a mattress shop. I nearly dropped her because she was so wet—I still do not know whether with tears or perspiration. We huddled in the doorway, and I wrapped her as well as I could in my body, careful to let her see as little of the terror in the sky above as I could. But as dense, flying hardware and flying bodies that were even harder slashed by close enough to slice gashes and footprints in the very wall against which we sought shelter, I could not look away.
They were beautiful. They were perfect. Their skin was unblemished, the movements of their muscles like the dance of continental plates. Most of them were in their teens and twenties, after all, but the older ones were likewise beautiful. Costumes hugged their bodies like paint and rolled over their musculature as they contended and flexed.
Probably the most stunningly beautiful creature I have ever seen—I learned later that she went by the name of Nightstar, the daughter of an alien princess and a circus acrobat turned freelance adventurer—rose in a reverse parabola above the street and left a contrail of violet light and flowing hair. From her fingertips she shot bolts of rippling heat to slice through the hull of a big horned robot creature that somehow offended her.
A golden woman wearing apparently no clothing other than long jagged golden spikes covering her head and limbs rose over the wind currents. Her name, it turned out, was Lightning. As I looked more closely at her, I realized that she was like a photographic negative. Shadows and highlights reversed on her body. Just looking at her was quite unsettling. She seemed to vanish like the center of a spiral, then reappear in place whenever she moved. She unleashed doglegging white streams of static charges at a hulking, body-armored, furry longhorn bison who walked on two legs and wielded an enormous gun in a pair of heavily muscled suede arms. I realized it was the Manotaur, an accident of a cloning experiment of years ago. He’d begun life as a cause célèbre in the tabloids, a creature who ought to be allowed to come to term, people had insisted. Now he spent his life ripping the other works of humanity apart.
A thinning shaft of dry blue heat, navy at its edges and shifting between baby blue and strands of blinding white in its thick core, slithered past us, sunburning us as it went. His circulatory system shone through translucent skin. Nuculoid was the stretchable being’s name, and I’d read that a medical research facility had certified that the bionuclear power he generated was noncarcinogenic, but I huddled around the child with my body as he whipped by nonetheless.
An elephant-eared figure wearing a full body covering of dark steel—Tusk, he was called—ran on clattering flexjoints across the boulevard, carrying a turreted multi-snouted weapon that looked as though it could level a large state.
A woman encased in some other type of metal—somehow this “person-of-steel” look with jagged and vented bodily features had become a kind of fashion declaration among metahumans during the past generation or so—stood morphing on the arch of a street light. The metal of her back flowed down and outward, dropping into tear-shaped extensions that rose and hardened to the shape of wings. Trix was her name, I learned later, the child of a S.T.A.R. Laboratories expatriate who’d decanted her biological components directly into the alloy shell he had built for her. She would never grow physically but then she was about nine years old, and I wondered whether and how she might ever reproduce. I stopped wondering when the door against which we pressed rattled like a salt shaker.
This vibration was not due to the antics of the flying, pounding, shooting, and slashing people on the street. A truck driver did it. Or rather his truck did when he saw hi
s eighteen-wheeler headed into the middle of the rumble and realized he could not brake before the vehicle passed under the path of the slowly descending Trix. He jumped out and left the truck to the elements. It smashed through the window of the mattress store that gave us our shelter. I told the little girl not to worry, it was just a thirty-ton truck, nothing dangerous, and she took comfort in this. Then the temblor began.
Trix blasted the Manotaur with an extrusion of metal that flew out—who knew how far? maybe forty feet?—to jolt the big bull on his reinforced chest and throw him spine-first through the many-paned window of a jewelry store. The arm retracted into itself as quickly as it had flown out. The ground rolled like an ocean wave.
The robot on the street, the one that Nightstar attacked with bolts of energy, was sliced in pieces and seemed to be stalled in place. This did not stop the others from attacking or defending it. I could not tell, for the most part, who was doing what. The machine was of some sort of malleable ceramic. It flowed over the ground, looking for its disconnected pieces whenever a blow dismembered it. The device was evidently the focus of the conflict, though I have no idea how such a conflict—once its participants whip themselves up in a hormonal frenzy—finds a way to wind down. One gathered that these street gladiators had done this dance before from every angle. Those who fought today might have been allies yesterday and would rejoin or plot against one another tomorrow as the fancy took them.
The Earth shook with every blow. Could the earthquake that had leveled Anchorage the previous spring and permanently covered two islands in the Cook Inlet have been any more intense? There was a crack, and then the Earth moved. A smash and another motion below our feet. A roar and another. Soon the sound itself caused our bodies to react in terror, anticipating the shudder to come. We stood on liquid concrete and were unable to swim.
“Your mother,” I said to the quivering little girl wrapped in my arms. “Where is your mother?”
“There,” she whispered, “with Calvin,” and pointed at the crumpled wreckage of the city bus from which she had emerged. It now lay like a pile of laundry, twisted around a fallen light pole and an erupting fire hydrant.
“Calvin. Your father?”
“My little brother.”
Who knew where the child’s mother and little brother were now?
Wesley Dodds had loved his heroes. He loved the legacy of heroism and sacrifice that, through his own career, he’d helped to define for them. The world of the children and grandchildren of Wesley’s heroes, though, was a shaky place. They numbered in the nameless thousands, these progeny of the past, moving through the world under color of the legends of those who’d come before. They no longer fought for the right. They fought simply to fight; their only foes were each other.
The superhumans boasted that they had all but eliminated the supervillains of yesteryear.
Small comfort.
They moved freely through the streets, through the world. They were challenged but unopposed. They were, after all, our protectors.
This too shall pass, I told myself. As long as their world existed, then humans had the chance to reclaim what they had built. In the face of superhuman might and superhuman odds, time still had not run out on humanity, I insisted to myself.
The rumbling stopped. The blows of air and Earth suddenly dissipated. I looked up and saw them vanishing in a handful of flashes in the direction of Planet Square, where the day’s headlines walked around the triangular tower and advertising displayed itself on a jumbo monitor that people could see clearly for half a mile uptown. Regular people—business people and shopping people and walking-around-town people—popped their heads out the doorways and windows and crevices of the street like prairie dogs. As if with a hive mind, they too ran off in the direction of Planet Square. There was a buzz in the air. Everyone was talking to everyone. I ignored it. Good riddance, I thought, as the child and I scurried in the direction opposite the intersection and the pile of twisted steel and ceramic that used to be a bus.
“Mama?” the child called, at a loss to figure a way to enter or deal with the wreckage.
I held her back, determined myself to crawl inside alone, but there was a sound. A baby cried.
“Oh for Heaven’s sake,” I muttered, and found a slit that, when it was wider, had held a window. I slithered in like a caterpillar.
I felt the girl tugging on my cuff as I made my way in, wondering suddenly how I might find my way out again, or what I would do at all if there was a recurrence of the rumble.
“Are you all right, mister?” she wanted to know. “You’re barely moving.”
“I’m fine, child. Just making my way in.”
I heard a sigh, and the baby cried some more. It whimpered, actually, but at least sounded healthy.
Once I got past the fallen seats that were embedded in the distorted wall of the vehicle and blocking my way, I found myself in a chamber like a cave. Glass was all over the floor like granite crystal, and in a far corner huddled the shivering figure of a woman. I went to her and touched her, and she jumped. She did not jump far; I learned later that she had broken one leg in two places and the other in three, and her spleen had been punctured by a shard of window glass that got her from behind. But she was wrapped around her baby, Calvin, as an added layer of protection. It worked.
Inside the wreckage of the bus I splinted the woman’s legs with broken metal from the dismembered seats and strips of cloth I took from the jacket I was wearing. I had never liked that jacket much. The little girl—her name was Vanessa—was able to call a rescue unit with a cell phone she found in the wreckage outside, and firemen came to cut the three of us out. My little girl’s brave mother would be hospitalized for several weeks, but she would recover. She would carry an artificial spleen for the rest of her life.
No one asked any questions. Everyone wore dour faces. Even the firemen walked strangely, stiffly, through their rescue work, like zombies.
Then my visions mingled with my surroundings again. The enormous television monitor on the triangular tower in the Square was blowing out nonsensical images. The people in the Square, and all throughout the city as I made my way home, wore the expressions of the dead. They looked like those stricken figures of the damned that Michelangelo had painted on the chapel ceiling, slapping their faces and pounding the pavement and wandering the streets in a fog.
KANSAS IS GONE, the superscript over the big public television monitor said.
Preposterous, I told myself, even as I saw again the images in my mind’s eye of the golden eagle and the giant bat rising above the clouds to meet a hurtling ball of fire.
Statistics and diagrams flashed across the screen for the brief moments I watched it—for the length of time it took to convince me it was a manifestation of my own mind lying to me some more. There were phrases like EQUIVALENT THROW WEIGHT and GROSS MEGATONNAGE and GENERAL NATIONAL ALERT and a dozen other collections of words whose import was meaningless to me, just like the visions on the lenses of my eyes.
It was Friday and I had a sermon to write and I needed to get started on it, I supposed. It would take me more than a day, I expected, to get my thoughts coherently onto paper with these visions assaulting my senses and these snatches of apocalyptic Scripture tumbling unbidden from my lips.
My visions were seeing visions. Amid searing jolts of flame and white heat and metaphorical suggestion, the city now took on the aspect of the dream. Nobody wore any discernible expression beyond the range from horror to blankness. There were no advertisements among the flashing lights of the Square, only dire news of the loss of the world’s Breadbasket that could have come only from my own nightmares. This was not my city. This was not a fit place for humans to live. This was a projection from my unconscious onto the very images among whom I walked. I believed nothing I saw or heard.
At home I did not turn on a television or radio, and when I flipped on the computer I ignored the flashing light of the Netservice News.
I had work
to do, and the world could go hang for a day.
There was hubbub on the sidewalks. I shut my streetside windows.
I sat down to write and fell asleep at my desk. Again I dreamed:
A giant basket of bread and corn and vegetables sat on an enormous flat verdant plain. A great golden crow circled the basket and cawed menacingly, then dove into the bread and tossed it about so not a crumb or a seed remained. And the sun rose and burned the land even unto the roots of the grass.
CHAPTER 3
Bleeding Kansas
There seemed to be no time at all, after the boot-up of the new Millennium, between an event and the general worldwide awareness of that event. If the Secretary-General of the United Nations sneezed in Metropolis at noon, the Singapore Commodities Exchange did a plié before close of business. If a fire burned a microchip plant in Senegal overnight, the price of Random Access Memory got boosted at Fry’s Electronics in the San Fernando Valley before the store opened that morning. If a tree fell in the Amazon Rain Forest and the Netservice News did not report it, then it probably did not really happen. This time the news reached me a day later than it reached everyone else. Alone on the planet, I was absent for the final sign of the Apocalypse. When the news came over the wires I had already rejected the evidence of my own senses. How much more rejection, therefore, did I have to heap upon these journalistic heralds of doom?
I love the story of Joseph. Technically, I have always felt, it is the best-constructed story in the Bible. It’s the one about the young son of the Patriarch Jacob, the eleventh of twelve boys, who has prophetic dreams of personal glory. His jealous brothers sell him into slavery and tell their father he was torn up by beasts. Years later, in time of famine, his brothers travel to a far country to ask its mighty Prime Minister to sell food to their family. The mighty Prime Minister turns out to be Joseph, once enslaved but having grown up to make good. As it happened, it was Joseph’s talent for understanding and interpreting prophetic dreams—the personality trait that his brothers found so objectionable—that gave him the opportunity to rise from slave to Prime Minister. I shuddered to think that such a kingmaking talent now devolved from Wesley—whom I believed, when dying, to be mad rather than prophetic—to me.
Kingdom Come Page 4
