Hero

by Michael Grant

“Don’t forget Simone. She’s blue, she can fly, and her father is the very supervillain we’re after.”

  Edilio smiled. “You know, I was just getting used to the fact that I would never return to the States. And now you’re asking me to be Agent Coulson.”

  “Huh?”

  “Agent Coulson.” Edilio shook his head in mock disapproval. “You know, Dekka, if you’re going to be living in a comic book . . . Coulson was the character who sort of organized the Avengers. He was killed in a movie and came back to life for a TV series.”

  “If you say so,” Dekka agreed dubiously. “You and Malik will get along. He’s our comics guy.”

  Edilio fell silent, thinking, as they crossed the bridge into Manhattan. Then he said, “We need a place, we need money, and I need to know what allies and resources we have.”

  “The mayor of New York has our back,” Dekka said. “Simone has fifty grand—don’t even ask. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs and I are practically on a first-name basis. And we have a brownstone.”

  “It’s a start,” Edilio allowed. “The other thing we need is weapons.”

  “Weapons? We are weapons.”

  Edilio shrugged. “You couldn’t take down the bug man, because your powers are great, but not for fighting a cloud of insects. You needed poison. Or a flamethrower.”

  He became aware that Dekka was smiling at him, and Dekka smiling was a rare occurrence.

  “What were you doing when we came barging into your life?” she asked.

  “I was working the front desk of a hotel. I speak English, and a lot of the tourists are American.”

  “And here you are, already plotting and planning.” More seriously she added, “Sorry, man. Really.”

  Edilio leaned close as if about to divulge a great secret. “You know, Dekka, I really wasn’t all that crazy about being a desk clerk.”

  “There’s a pretty good chance you get yourself killed doing this.”

  “Enh,” he said with a shrug. “Lots of people have wanted me dead. Drake. Caine. Gaia herself. I’m not so easy to kill.”

  And silently to himself added, Don’t tempt fate, Edilio.

  CHAPTER 22

  Normal Is No Longer with Us

  THE LOCATION EDILIO obtained from the mayor was the Park Avenue Armory. The armory had long since ceased to be an actual depository for weapons and was now a collection of elaborately decorated reception rooms, spaces for art exhibitions, and a fantastically big “drill hall,” an enclosed space that looked like it could be used for the reception after a royal wedding. From the outside, it was a massive redbrick structure fronting on Park Avenue, conveniently just a block from the nearest Starbucks on Sixty-Sixth Street.

  Convenient, Cruz thought as she balanced a cardboard drinks carrier and a paper sack of muffins and set them in front of the serious young Honduran. He sat at an ornate walnut desk beneath oil portraits, looking like he might be playing an updated Bob Cratchit role in A Christmas Carol, a hunched, focused person with a phone wedged against one ear and a laptop open on the ancient desk.

  “Weapons. Yes, weapons,” Edilio said into the phone. “Guns. Stun grenades.” He was nodding as someone at the other end of the line read off a list. “No, no body armor. Tasers, sure. But what I really want are flamethrowers.”

  Every day it gets weirder, Cruz thought, and walked down the corridor and into the echoing drill hall where Malik sat at a long card table with a police officer at his side with her own laptop open, taking names and running criminal background checks. There was a short line, very short, six people. And only two bore the telltale marks of ASO-7.

  Cruz handed Malik a latte and the police officer a chai latte.

  “How’s it going?” Cruz asked.

  Malik rolled his eyes.

  Word had gone out that the Rockborn Gang were talking to anyone who had acquired powers following the fall of ASO-7. So far, Cruz knew, Malik had interviewed eight aspiring supers, though only one had had actual power, and that power had been the ability to become translucent. Not invisible, just translucent.

  Malik had gently suggested that the ability to show people your internal organs might not be quite what they were looking for.

  Another had insisted he could freeze time, but it turned out all he could really do was stand still and hold his breath while time marched on.

  “I saw Macbeth here.” Simone had come up behind Cruz and accepted a hot tea. “It was good.”

  “Here in this giant space?” Cruz asked.

  Simone nodded, and gazed up at the arched honeycomb ceiling. “It was impressive.”

  “The good old days,” Cruz said sadly.

  “Yeah. New York is a city full of survivors, but what’s happening now . . . Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “If you walk with me to find Dekka. I am not bringing that girl cold coffee.”

  They walked back across the endless floor, steps echoing.

  “You’re trans, right?”

  “Yep.” Cruz braced for something stupid and told herself not to overreact.

  “And everyone’s okay with that?”

  “You aren’t?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Simone said quickly. “No. I just was wondering how they’d react if I told them I was a lesbian.”

  Cruz laughed. “Simone, half of us are from Chicago, Armo’s from Malibu, and Francis has been living with her meth-head mother and a biker gang out in the Mojave. We’re none of us real judgmental. Not to mention Dekka.”

  “What do you mean about Dekka?”

  Cruz heard something in Simone’s voice that Simone probably did not intend on anyone noticing. A bit too much interest, concealed poorly by a bit too much nonchalance. She resisted the urge to smile and said, “Well, you know she’s a lesbian, too, right?”

  “Is she?”

  That was a palpably false question, Cruz thought. “Yep.”

  They reached a stairwell and began to climb. “She’s impressive, isn’t she?” Simone asked.

  Cruz stopped mid-flight of stairs, turned, and said, “Dekka Talent is impressive in just about every way a human being can be.” She started trudging back up and out of sheer mischief added, “Lonely, though, I think.”

  “Oh?”

  Oh, she says, like she doesn’t really care?

  “Dekka is one of these people who had one great love in their life. The girl died in the FAYZ, and Dekka still carries her picture wherever she goes.”

  “One great love,” Simone muttered under her breath.

  “Yep. I don’t think she’ll ever get over it, either,” Cruz said. “Although, I think if the right girl came along . . .”

  Simone’s answer was a grunt. Then she snapped her fingers and said, “I just remembered, I have a thing to do. Downstairs.”

  “Ah.”

  Simone fled down the steps, and after a bit more climbing, Cruz emerged on the walkway that circled most of the building, a walkway defined by the raised roof of the drill hall on one side, and the crenelated redbrick front wall on the other. Dekka was on the north tower roof, a rectangular space that looked down on Park Avenue and Sixty-Seventh Street.

  “Here you go,” Cruz said, and handed her a coffee.

  “Thanks.”

  “Whatcha doing up here?”

  Dekka let go a long sigh. “Trying to think of something brilliant.”

  “Might help to talk about it.”

  “What are you, the resident therapist now?” Dekka affected a growl, but by now Cruz knew when Dekka was really annoyed and when she was just playing tough chick.

  “Three hundred bucks an hour,” Cruz said.

  Dekka was silent for a while, sipping her coffee. “I’m out of my depth,” she said at last. “It’s been what, like, twenty-four hours since we even decided we’re a group? Now we’ve got a mission statement, and a headquarters—”

  “I like to think of it as a lair.”

  “Uh-huh. And Malik is interviewing people like we’re Macy’s loo
king for some temps. Edilio’s organizing and hunting for weapons. Shade is downtown taking care of some lunatic who morphs into the image of Jesus and says he’s Jesus and he can heal the sick. Last I heard, he was offering to cure cancer for ten thousand dollars a pop.”

  “White, blond, blue-eyed Jesus?” Cruz asked.

  Dekka gave her a wry look. “Of course. Swedish Jesus. Just like all the paintings. Crazy, but since he’s a mutant, I guess he’s our business.”

  “Where’s Francis?”

  “The Statue of Liberty. Her and Armo. They wanted to play tourist.”

  Cruz was immediately hurt that Armo had not asked her to go with them. Then again, she’d been running errands, and Armo was not known for his patience. If he’d decided to go, he would go. Immediately.

  Still . . .

  “The Jesus thing, it’s all over social media,” Cruz reported. “Not this particular guy, but several people who were sprayed by ASO-7 and think it’s stigmata.”

  “Stig what a?”

  “Stigmata. It’s when people have markings that look like Jesus’s crucified hands.”

  “Oh, good,” Dekka said dryly, “because I was worried we might be running short of crazy people.”

  Cruz lingered, sensing that Dekka still wanted to talk, an event about as rare as Halley’s Comet.

  “The thing is, I don’t know what we’re doing,” Dekka confessed. “We’re six, well, seven people, with weird abilities, but it’s like suddenly people are looking to us to fix things. I got news for those people: we aren’t that strong. We do not have the power to save the world. We barely saved Vegas.”

  A long, thoughtful silence. Cruz let it build.

  “Now we’re talking about bringing in more mutants? I’m not a general; I’m not some big organizer who should be running this.”

  “What about this Edilio person?”

  Dekka shrugged. “Edilio’s great. I trust no one more than him. But his job is organization; he’s not really a leader and he knows it. The thing is, even a natural leader like Sam . . . I mean, this isn’t the 314 square miles of the FAYZ; this is the whole country. The whole planet.” She turned for the first time to look at Cruz. “We’re not going to win, Cruz. We can’t.”

  “We can try,” Cruz said.

  “So we can be good little avatars in some alien’s simulation?”

  “Oh, that,” Cruz said.

  “Yeah: that. If that’s what we are, a sim, a program, if all this is fake . . .” She waved a hand to encompass Central Park and the larger city. “Then why are we bothering?”

  “Nothing’s really changed,” Cruz said. “Look, I believe we were created by God. If I find out God created some aliens who created us, well, okay, that’s pretty weird. But we are still us. You know? The sun is in the sky, donuts taste good, and there’s another Star Wars movie. You know?”

  Dekka was silent again, shaking her head slowly, side to side. She heaved a heavy sigh and said, “The four guys at the Pine Barrens? They’re still alive. The mayor updated me. Us. Texted me, anyway. They tried shooting them full of opioids to reduce the pain. Didn’t work.” She turned to make eye contact. “They just scream. It’s hell. That’s hell, right? Eternal torment without the escape of death?”

  Cruz put her hand on Dekka’s arm, the first time she could remember touching Dekka. “Sweetie, there is a whole lot of pain and horror coming from this. People all over the country. All over the world. It’s awful. We can’t help all those people. We can only do what we can do.”

  “It’s never going to get put back together, is it? The world. The country. Our lives. This isn’t the FAYZ; we’re not trapped in some dome hoping to get out and thinking everything will be fine if only we can escape. It’s never, ever going back to normal, is it?”

  Cruz wanted to argue. She wanted to dismiss Dekka’s despair and cheer her up. But when she thought of lying, she just didn’t have the energy for it.

  “No, it’s not,” Cruz said.

  CHAPTER 23

  Problems at Home

  SAM TEMPLE HAD never been the sort of person to spy on others. He was certainly not the sort of person who would spy on his wife. What he had with Astrid was a relationship that had already endured more stress than a hundred normal marriages. They weren’t just solid as a couple; they were chiseled out of granite.

  And yet . . .

  Sam was also not overly neat or particularly obsessed with keeping a clean kitchen, so he was not the sort of person to reorganize the dishwasher. But the thing was, he had a coffee cup he’d left out on the balcony for, oh, maybe a week, and it had grown a ring of something green and scummy. He wanted to get it cleaned before Astrid noticed it because Astrid was overly neat and quite obsessed with keeping a clean kitchen.

  But the dishwasher was almost completely full. In order to wedge his cup in there he had to move a few things around and . . . and then he saw the glass. It had clearly been used for orange juice. But clinging to the bottom and sides of the glass, along with the innocent pulp, were grains of something gray and gritty.

  Sam pulled the orange-juice glass out and looked at it from every angle. Then he ran his finger around the inside and worked the grit between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Oh, Astrid,” Sam whispered. “No, no, no, sweetheart.”

  Astrid was at a spin class or Pilates or whatever, he could never recall. The world was falling apart, but the exercise classes must never stop; this was LA, after all. He glanced at the clock on the microwave, which displayed the proper time because: Astrid. He had a solid half hour, minimum.

  It took just five minutes to locate the FedEx envelope, still containing a baggie partly filled with powdered rock.

  Sam sat on the edge of their bed and hung his head, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of memory, and with those memories came dread. Dread of a repeat. Dread of more and more and more. He felt sick inside. He wanted to cry.

  He wanted a drink.

  But this wasn’t about him, or his feelings; it was about Astrid. There was no point in asking why she had done it, and no point in asking where the powder had come from. Two women who loved him in different ways were doing their best to protect him. He couldn’t get angry over the deception; they’d done it because they were worried about him.

  They think I’ll crack. They think I’ll drink.

  And Sam knew that Astrid did not trust him to be able to stop Drake. Which was fair enough because he knew he couldn’t stop Drake. He’d had many battles with Whip Hand, back when Sam could still fire a killing beam of light capable of cutting through stone. He’d killed Drake, or so Sam had once thought. And when they got word that Drake was still alive, Sam had done . . . had done what?

  Stuck my head in the sand and did nothing.

  He raised his head and saw his own forlorn reflection in the mirrored closet doors. He looked at himself almost curiously, as if trying to understand what was going on inside his own head. He was no longer the serious, quiet young surfer dude. His hair was growing darker. His skin, too, since he did still love to paddle out and sit there off the beach, sit out there on his board with his legs freezing, waiting for a wave he could ride all the way in. The surf report website was still the last thing he checked at night and the first thing he checked on waking. He didn’t get to the beach as often as he would have liked, but still he felt a need to know the surf conditions at Venice Beach, Zuma, Ventura. . . . Each time he checked, he told himself not to look at conditions for Perdido Beach, his old beach, the one where he and Quinn had surfed before the FAYZ had stilled the waters and made surfing impossible. But he always did.

  Sam had not gone back to Perdido Beach. Every now and again he would start to text his old friend and surfing buddy Quinn and see whether he was up for a road trip north. But he’d never sent the text. Quinn had made a life for himself, living with his folks, attending community college, and working as a deckhand on a sportfishing boat out of San Pedro.

  “You’re scared,” Sam told his r
eflection.

  He had good reason to be scared. He was sober and wanted to stay that way.

  No, that’s just your excuse.

  That thought fired up resentment in him. Had he not done enough? Seriously? Had he not suffered enough? Was he not still awakened in the small hours of the morning by nightmares? Good God, what more could anyone demand of him?

  But that anger fizzled and died. No one was asking anything from him. No one.

  And that’s the real problem, isn’t it?

  No one had said, Come on, Sam, once more. . . . And the truth was he wanted . . . Wanted what? He had a brilliant, gorgeous wife. He had money in the bank. And he had more job offers than he could even consider. He could get paid just to show up at new clubs where he was too young to drink (legally) but had enough celebrity to draw a crowd. Or he could be the advertising spokesman for Pyzel, the surfboard manufacturer—they’d made the offer. Or he could write a book. Or he could go to work for Albert, who’d offered him a make-work job doing nothing but collecting a charity check.

  Or, or, or.

  Each possibility filled him with a mix of dread and the anticipation of brain-numbing boredom. He didn’t want to be a rent-a-celeb. He didn’t want to pimp surfboards. He certainly didn’t want to write a book, or sit in an office all day doing whatever pity work Albert sent his way. No.

  “What do you want?” he asked himself, but of course he knew. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be.

  He wanted to be Sam Temple. That Sam Temple.

  Astrid returned, sweaty and sexy in her bodysuit.

  “You started the dishes,” she said, nodding approvingly at the churning dishwasher.

  “Every few weeks I like to do something useful around the apartment,” he said.

  “Or at least once a year,” Astrid snarked.

  “Mmm,” Sam said. “Oh, and by the way: we’re out of orange juice.”

  Any other woman would have thought nothing of it. An innocent reminder that they needed orange juice.

  But Astrid was not any other woman. She had been walking away, but Sam saw her hesitate. Then stop. Then turn to look first at the dishwasher and then aim her penetrating gaze at him.