Echo Classified: Gravity

by Steve Libbey

  ~*~*~*~

  Matai found the dead Mach Three, Carnivora, draped over the backseat of a vintage pink Cadillac. His back had been broken. Blood leaked from the lupine hero’s fanged mouth and caked in his fur. His green eyes stared lifelessly at the abandoned, garish vendor booths.

  The other metahumans gathered around him. Einhorn had never stopped weeping, but now her sobs caught in her throat. Shahkti quietly chanted “om mani padme hum,” both sets of palms placed together. Motu put his arm around his older brother in a solemn, intimate embrace that reminded Devil of the Vaa brothers’ island origins. Corbie had been propped up in a chair, half-conscious.

  Devil himself struggled to identify the feelings that raced through his mind. He had never known Carnivora, so his sorrow for the meta’s loss rooted itself in empathy and self-preservation. Were it not for his own extraordinary luck, the fallen comrade could have well been him.

  In the last few weeks he had seen the kind of wanton death and carnage that veterans experience in overt warfare. Klaus understood sociopaths, who, in the pursuit of their cruel pleasures, paid no heed to the welfare of others. In fact, most metacriminals, Anson included, fell into that category: selfish, callous people who happened to acquire the ability to wrest their desires from an otherwise unyielding world. They were, by and large, short-sighted, vindictive and unambitious.

  But the Thule Society instigated a strangely lopsided war, one without borders or territory. War itself was sociopathy on a societal scale, us against them, the hatred of the other. No one was more Other than the Nazis, certainly. Yet they had struck a vicious, surgical blow – giving Klaus and his comrades a taste of genuine warfare -- and then vanished.

  So Klaus hung his head in mourning for Carnivora, because the man – wolf-man – had fought side by side with his brothers against a mysterious threat; and at the same time he set his grief aside for a time when a threat no longer loomed over them. In wartime, grief was a luxury for those who were distant from the fight; the warriors fought to come home, victorious, and reclaim their humanity.

  The Thule Society had stolen that humanity from Klaus. He would get it back, he promised himself.

  Einhorn laid the dead man out on the ground, hands crossed over his crushed chest. “We can’t just leave him here.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Matai said. “Remember that riot? We’re needed there.”

  “Jesus, Matai. Have a heart.”

  He turned his back on her and the dead man, and stalked out of the Expo Center on shards of broken glass.