High, very high in the sky, above the reach of the weather, Captain Marvel called upon his strength and the last blast of magic he would ever summon—
“Shazam!” the Captain said to divert, upward and away, much of the terror of the bomb.
“Shazam!” Billy Batson managed to choke, tumbling downward across the bending sky and the superheated air that enveloped him.
“Shazam!” Captain Marvel whispered after he rose again to touch Death on the face so his lightning could push most of what remained of her sting.
—and Billy Batson knew that just once more he needed to fight the fire with his cold heat in order to save the skins of those directly below. He could not gather a gulp beyond his last breath to contain the conflagration any further.
*
“Judgment,” I heard the Spectre say.
In that moment and in that place—the place and moment where the light made the daylight seem as the darkness of the pit—I thought I too was in Heaven.
CHAPTER 33
Sentencing
Perhaps the shock wave was too loud for my ears even to register the sound. Perhaps the explosion was too great for my meager spiritual senses to perceive. I did not hear it. I saw only a color that gradually faded to white. And all I heard when the moment came was the hollow voice of the Spectre. “My mission is complete,” he said to me.
Again I saw Superman on his knees and in excruciating moral pain even as the emerging sun restored his starborn strength. Again he threw back his head and again he screamed and again his eyes burned with searing heat. But this time it was not in my mind’s eye; it was in the line of sight before which I stood. On Kansas, a ruin laid to ruin.
He howled at the sky.
He pounded the earth with his fists.
He threw his head back and howled that deafening wail.
Down he came again with his fists extended to arm’s length to batter the ground beneath him and cause the ashen skeletons, some of them still wearing their armor with colors faded against the heat, to leap from the ground and dance for a moment and drop. They were bones gone shapeless, ground to powder, into the white-hot poison dust.
At a loss to express the degree of my consternation, I could tell the Spectre only, “You cannot possibly be serious.”
“I thank you, Norman McCay.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” I told him.
Over and again, Superman repeated his sorrowful regimen, screaming and pounding, screaming and pounding, then he rose to his feet. His cape was gone, but now it was his eyes that glowed red. His hair and face were ashen, gray. His costume hung torn in a dozen places. His own blood clotted over wounds that his singular physiology had already healed. When he rose into the air he did it slowly at first, without thought or direction, in the same posture a man might wear to stand on the ground. Then he brought his fisted hands up above his head and pounded them together with an anger that cast a wave across the air. He straightened his bearing, pointed his toes, and a thunder-head of dirt and dust and debris twisted beyond discernment rose below him as the speed he gathered took him suddenly away from even our perceptions.
His disappearance distracted me from the growing frustration and horror I was building to bestow on this insufferably dispassionate Spectre. “Where?” I asked him.
“Undoubtedly to confront his human attackers,” the Spectre said. “He feels alone. He need not. There were survivors. They are fewer in number, and their pain is great, but their war has ended.”
Then I saw them, a handful, huddled together in a cloud of green. I would have looked more closely in that moment to see who they were, try to determine how they had lived, but my anger was gathering steam again.
“Judgment has been passed,” the Spectre declared like a segregation-era judge clapping down his gavel to lock tight the vault where he folded away the conventional wisdom. “I am no longer needed. Farewell, Norman McCay.”
“Farewell?” I thundered across whatever ether separated figures in this spaceless timeless place. “Farewell?” I bellowed. “You think you brought me all this way just to watch people die? Think again. No, you’re not done.”
The Spectre stood, unmoving, unfading, unflapping. “Is that your considered judgment?”
“You want to confront evil? That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“I do not believe I did, but given the opportunity—”
“Then look in a mirror. You saw Superman. You saw an anger that can twist steel. If what happens next happens the only way it can”—I tried to find some reaction in those shaded eyes and found none—“and if you let it happen, then that is evil.”
“What do you propose?”
“Get us the hell to the United Nations. Now!”
CHAPTER 34
The Kingdom
The Spectre and I reached the New United Nations as Superman blew through the outermost wall. A debate droned over the floor concerning whether the Security Council should or should not bomb the American Heartland. It was broadcast live over Netservice News, but then again everything was these days. I wondered, only for the moment I had in which to wonder, whether it would have concerned these petty bureaucrats and narrow-visioned folk to know that the bombing was done; that the war in the Midwest was over. Maybe some of them knew and debated some more anyway. Maybe that was just what they did because they could do nothing else.
Then a screaming came across the sky. And a sound from somewhere outside the big room made heads turn, though the speaker who held the floor continued without missing a beat. Among those in the room only I—and, I presume, my ghostly companion—knew that it was the sound of Superman bursting a hole through the concrete-and-steel exterior wall of the General Assembly building.
Successive bursts of sound grew louder and closer, and soon the cries made even less relevant the debate on the floor that, in the face of this new crisis, dwindled and stopped. Superman came through the wall of the General Assembly chamber. A gaping hole hung high on one wall, and plaster and chips of wood rained down on those below.
The room devolved into confusion, then quickly to panic.
A person’s native language is the one in which he or she responds when the telephone rings at four in the morning, or the one in which a person embraces fear:
“Courez pour vos vies!”
“He’s mad! Mad!”
“The doors! He’s welded shut the doors!”
“Cover your head!”
“Out of my way!”
“Mein Gott!”
“Out of my way!”
“God in Heaven, run! He’s gone berserk!”
“Salga del Medío!”
… in every language and dialect under this polyglot city’s bending sky.
Superman’s eyes glowed not with heat but with something akin to madness.
He stood against the high ceiling over the General Assembly chamber, slowly pressing against a central structural beam, watching as capillaries of plaster and concrete formed along the lines of the massive ceiling and chipped down in small pieces to reach the floor and the panicky diplomats below. He watched them running and screaming and praying. He wondered to whom these creations of some god inferior to the One he knew, were moved to pray.
“My God, he’s bringing the roof down!” I exclaimed. “He’ll kill them all. Somebody’s got to do something!”
“After ten years,” the Spectre said, “he has finally set free a wrath that would move Satan himself to cower. How can any man possibly calm the fury he feels toward his persecutors?”
“Clark?” I asked him. He did not hear.
He began slowly to press the sides of the steel structural beam in on themselves, apparently to see what would happen.
“Make him see me,” I demanded of the Spectre. “Up there”—I indicated the highest observation balcony near him, the one already empty of people and ankle-deep in debris—“make me whole.”
I was in that balcony and I felt for the ability to read his soul, to se
e things that could not be seen, my temporary angelic powers. I felt those powers fade and I felt my physical self become whole again.
And I asked again, “Clark?”
His back was to me, but he did not need to turn to see me. I was reflected in a hundred crinkles of the steel in his hands as he exposed the beam that, before, was wrapped in decorative caulking.
He could not reason through the rage or speak through the sorrow. I waited. He looked at me but faced away, and I was grateful not to have to feel those eyes piercing my being just now. I must have confused him for a moment. Then something inside him reached down and cupped his rage in a compartment, and he allowed himself to say quietly, “You again?”
“Yes. It’s Norman. We’ve met, yes. Listen to me. You blame yourself for Captain Marvel. For Magog and Kansas. For mistakes and misjudgments over ten years that ended today. You’re angry at the only one you’ve ever allowed yourself to be angry at: yourself.”
“What are you talking about? How would you know what I feel?”
“I minister. It’s my job. I minister to pain and joy and numbness. Today you feel only pain. And you have forgotten what humans feel. What they fear.”
He let go the ceiling, and as he did he floated around in place, as if on an axis, to look at me. At first, I did not know whether I could handle that. Then I remembered before Whom I had stood previously, and I was fine with it. “Who are you? Why are you here?”
“To bear witness. The job imposed itself upon me through circumstance. Much as yours did.”
“Don’t talk to me in riddles.” The anger welled up in him again and I had to press it down, God help me.
“Now listen to me, Clark,” I said, with as much authority as I could handle. I said it slowly. Perhaps I struggled to figure out what to say; perhaps I merely wanted to stretch out the time that those on the floor below had to live. “Of all the things you can do, all your powers, the greatest has always been your instinctive knowledge of right and wrong. It was a gift of your own humanity. A gift from Clark. You never had to question your choices. In any situation, in any crisis, you knew what to do. But the minute you made the ‘super’ more important than the ‘man,’ the day you decided to turn your back on humankind, that instinct fell away. And it took your judgment away with it. Take it back. You must want redemption, Clark. We all do. For you, it lies in the very next decision you make. Make it as a man. And make it right.”
He turned to face me. Did he want me to say more?
To my surprise I found something to say, and I went on: “They won’t forgive you for this, Clark. Forgive yourself.”
He hovered. So I asked him, “You never had to question anything before, did you?”
“Sometimes.”
“The question of right and wrong, I mean. Did you?”
He paused. “No,” he said. “No, never.”
He was like a child, I realized, a weathered, graying giant of an adolescent eager to learn whatever he could learn. I wondered how long he would live, how he would age, whether he would have a single black strand left in his head when he reached effective maturity. I was in awe of this being whom I had followed invisibly all this time, this modern-day titan, this high-water mark of human capability.
He was nothing but a man. I had to make him understand that. There was a great hole in the wall high above the reach of the hundreds of mortal women and men—diplomats, ambassadors, observers, reporters, kids on class trips to the United Nations—who stood in the great hall straining but unable to hear words of the conversation we had. Now some of them, terrified at what might happen next, looked toward the sounds they were hearing from that great hole in the wall. But I kept talking. It’s my job.
“Once, not long ago—in a cavern deep under the suburbs of Gotham—I watched you walk into a haven for spoiled monstrous superchildren. That day, you made many of them into far more than they had been. You gave a simple, powerful talk and then left them to their own decisions. Do you remember the last thing you said to those people, Clark?”
“Yes. I said, ‘Be heroes.’ ”
“Well, Clark,” I said, “be a man.”
He looked down to the floor where faces looked up, expecting to die. Others watched the gaping hole in the wall. He looked at the hole, the source of new noises, of whirring and clattering and something approaching. I saw him stare at it pointedly, stare beyond it, and the corners of his mouth twisted upward just a little.
“Survivors?” he whispered. “Norman, were there—”
“What?” I asked him.
“Norman?” he said, looking at me, then looking to either side of me. “Norman?”
“Right here,” I said. “What is it?”
“Norman?”
He did not see or hear me. There was more I needed to tell him. I needed to talk to him about the nature of civilization. I needed to explain how a people are defined by what they leave behind. I had to talk about the importance of buildings and icons and art and poetry. I wanted to tell him how the Sword of Hephæstus had been able to cut him not because it was stronger than he was, but because he did not understand its magic. I looked around, and behind me was the tall figure of the Spectre again. He decorporealized me before I could say any of these things. I made a spectacular exit and did not even have the sense of drama to appreciate it.
“I need to tell him—”
“You have told him,” the Spectre said.
So that’s what it felt like.
“Now we must again let events take their course,” the Spectre said. My ghostly companion, on the other hand, had a sense of drama for which I failed to give him credit.
The first one through Superman’s makeshift entrance to the General Assembly hall was the Batman; the wings of the remarkable craft that was his battle suit caught the faintest of breezes to lower him gently like a glider to the floor. Wonder Woman, with her golden eagle wings and ancient sword, followed. She was less concerned with a soft landing. Green Lantern flew in with his injured daughter, Jade, in his arms. There, thank Heavens, was the Ray. Once already he’d swept the radioactive contaminants from the sands of Kansas and returned the surface to rich topsoil; he might do it again. There was a blur of red; the Flash. There came the maniac with the black swastika tattooed over his face and torso; I was even glad to see him. Magog, absent his headdress, poked his head over the edge of the opening, wondering whether he was welcome here. He was, finally. The clown lady in the checkerboard trousers, the Joker’s Daughter, tumbled down the wall. Red Robin was wounded badly. Yet here he was, on the shoulder of the daughter who yesterday was estranged from him. Together—mostly through her effort—the two rappeled to the floor. Beneath his own mask Bruce Wayne winced at the collective impact that such efforts and bruises and bones broken and healed and broken again were certainly having on the integrity of his sometime ward’s physiology. There were a handful of survivors, still coming down the wall. Slowly, Wyrmwood and some of the others collected closer to these objects of their recent fury.
“Is this everyone?” Superman asked.
“With his dying breath, Captain Marvel managed to get the bomb high above Ground Zero before he detonated it,” Wonder Woman said. “More survivors huddle in shelters in Kansas still. Most are injured. The Green Lanterns willed up an impenetrable shield. Flash whisked some outside the expanding shock wave. For others the Ray diverted the impact of the energy. But there was so little time to—”
“How many?”
“Enough,” Batman offered, “to leave us with the same problems as before. The same impasse. The same dangers. The same distrust. The same everything.”
“What now?” Wonder Woman wanted to know.
Superman looked at Wyrmwood, who looked away. Superman kept looking until the Secretary-General who had set free the nightmare looked up again and caught the Kryptonian’s eye.
“I’m sorry,” Wyrmwood said.
“For what?” Superman asked.
Wyrmwood shrugged.
/> Superman took his hand. “We need to set things right,” Superman said. “Years ago I let those I swore to protect drive me away. We all did. That was where we went wrong.”
“We saw you,” Wyrmwood said, “as gods.”
“And we accepted that illusion. Eventually we began to believe it. We were both wrong. Today I lost many friends, and you surrendered a part of your soul to pursue what you thought was a correct decision. I no longer care about the mistakes of yesterday. I care about riding into tomorrow, together.”
“Thank you, Superman,” the Secretary-General said.
“We’ll talk,” Superman told Wyrmwood. “Talking is good.”
Magog stood against the wall, wondering why he was still alive. Then Superman told him.
“We have a great deal to learn from one another, Magog, don’t we?”
“I have a lot to learn in general,” he said, his famous face scarred with the ordeal from which his power grew.
“Together,” Superman said to him, and then to the group at large: “The problems before us are problems we all face. Nobody solves them by putting on a costume and flying through the air. We’ll solve them all right, but I’ve learned that the first step to doing that is to approach them together. No longer will we impose our power on humanity. No longer will we arrogate to ourselves the responsibility of ruling over you. We will live among you and thus we will earn your trust.”
Wonder Woman smiled as she stepped up to Superman’s side, removing the tiara that symbolized her royalty. Batman’s armor fitted over his artificial skeletal frame and only suggested now the thermal bat-suit he’d worn in his youth. He lifted off the pointy-eared helmet that covered Bruce Wayne’s head. Once, revealing the face of the billionaire industrialist beneath his cowl would have been anathema to the Batman, and the midpoint of waves upon waves of news ripples all over the world. Kal-El had been bringing in the harvest years ago when the news had broken. He wondered what it had felt like for some fortunate reporter to break that particular scoop of the century. He wondered how it had changed his friend’s life, and supposed they would talk about it sometime.
Kingdom Come Page 33
