A Once Crowded Sky (28 page)

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Soldier says. “It ain’t confirmed.”

“Oh, F that dude, I got a feeling, this could work, it could really
work. Everybody comes back. That’s a rule. That’s how it works. Just like how we always fight, and then we find out what to do. That happened to me like a thousand times. And we fought Prophetier. And we got this. Now Pen fights Star-Knight. And he gets that. The real solution. And then all the powers come back. Dude, that’s how we did it!”

“I suppose.”

Runt throws his arms wide and looks at the sky. “We all come back!” he shouts. “We all come back!”

“We all come back,” Soldier says, his voice low.

His father had a destiny; his mother had a gun. All that’d happened, all those heroes home safe, all those villains dead and gone. Proph was right. He was too weak to save anyone, to even save her. Soldier’s hands go to his holsters.

Thunder sounds and rain comes. Runt laughs and runs for his bike as The Soldier of Freedom gets into his truck, putting the notebook in the passenger seat where Pen usually sits. He should look at it, but he’s got to get home soon. The flag. It’s raining again, and he’d left the flag out.

Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #578

Something happens, and Pen is saved. The bullets stop. Ultimate retreats to the sky. Sicko lies dead, his neck broken. Star-Knight shouts on his phone for someone to come and come quickly. Strength’s hand is on the small of Pen’s back, and she’s whispering that it’ll be all right.

Pen drops to his knees and cradles his wife like a child, maybe like their child. His nose presses into hers; his tears wet her cheek. He’s sorry. He’s so sorry.

Small shards of metal in Anna’s hair catch the light from a ceiling lamp. A few pieces fall onto Pen’s lap and glimmer against his black T-shirt. In the background, far off: a crowd of noises, a blare of sirens, the clatter of neighbors, the screech of a radio. Lightly, he kisses his wife.

She remains still. He wants to help her. He wants to make it better. He wants to hear her voice. Instead of all this. Just her voice.

But nothing comes. And Pen starts to babble on, just to combat the silence, as if it were an enemy, something that ought to be punched or
kicked. What comes out is nonsense, but it’s better than before, better than not hearing anything at all. Not knowing what exactly he should say, he finds himself telling her stories, mumbling on about the men and women he’d known before her, the towering figures who defended the innocent against the forces of whatever.

There’s the time Broadsword was fighting the Crooked Crusader, sword to sword, swashbuckling their way across the surface of the Moon, and each time one would leap toward the other, they’d fly fifty feet, clashing in midair, blades crossing against a background of a blue, clouded Earth.

Once, during the war, Freedom Fighter and The Soldier of Freedom were hiking across the Russian front when they encountered an entire company of Nazi ninjas, who immediately began bombarding the two heroes with swastika throwing stars, not understanding that they were facing good men with good guns.

He tugs her in, swaddling himself around her, tracing his lips over her shoulders. On her body, running up and down her limbs, he sees the damage he couldn’t stop, dark blue circles spotting her pale skin.

There’s shame in it, in the stories. If he could, Pen’d go on and on about their time together, their love, how when he touches that one place on her back, she quivers. That’s what he should say. But instead he finds himself spinning tales of battles and heroes, a time of men great and petty.

One of his favorites was when Sicko decided to take out the entire CrimeBoss organization in a single night, climbing up from a drug dealer on the street through a midlevel pusher to that guy’s boss to that guy’s boss, until finally Sicko busted into CrimeBoss’s office, raging and bragging about what he’d done, showing absolutely no respect for a man that asked for only that, a man who was willing to kill and be killed to maintain it.

She liked to hear the stories, but he never much liked to tell them. It embarrassed him. His best friends, the only people he knew, secretly snuck out at night wearing leotards in order to punch other people who’d made that same peculiar choice that day. They were all freaks, weirdos who’d improbably decided, each for his or her own reason, to save the world or destroy it.

But she didn’t seem to care about that. Her father was a cop, and she
respected people who chose to do something with what’d been provided to them, who worked through whatever means to make the world a little safer.

But what about him? If she had it in her to admire all these heroes, what could she think of the man who walked away, of her husband, who ran away?

That was different, she’d say. That was completely different. The heroes belong to the world; they rise above and fall below, carrying the weight of all of us. Pen, you belong to me. The rest of them can have their glorious causes, and you can have me and only me. It’s not fair; it’s selfish. But it’s the way things turned out, and she liked the way things had turned out.

The ambulances’ horned beat grows louder, and Star-Knight again shouts that help’s coming. Did you hear me? Help is coming, Star-Knight says, or something like that. Pen’s not really paying that much attention. Shut up, Pen says, I need to talk. I have stories to tell. At least Strength’s quiet, at least she lets him go on without interrupting.

Wingnut loved to fly over the city, night after night, every night—no matter if there was a great-hero crossover or some date he’d have to get to, he’d always make time to rake the sky, swooping between the molded-glass buildings of Arcadia City.

Night was the greatest of the hand-to-hand fighters—better than Soldier, better than Pen, certainly; and when she and Day were at their apex, one acting as the other’s eyes as one acted as the other’s body, they became a bladed whirlwind into which the likes of Black Plague and Liarliar would throw themselves only to be unmercifully expelled.

Pen tucks her into his chest, lets his heart beat against her ear. Through tears, he searches the room, remembering for some reason where they got each piece of furniture, how they’d decided to place the bed against the back wall and prop up a bookshelf nearer to the bathroom. His mind trots around aimlessly, but he keeps talking, babbling on about inconsequential stories she might like to hear, that he’s pretty sure she’s heard before.

Beside Pen, Sicko’s body rests heavy on their wood floor. Another hero who tried to play the game after The Blue and was brought crashing down. How pathetic they all were at being normal. The rest of the world managed to go on each day without the ability to burrow into a mountain
and toss it into a lake; but these heroes, they couldn’t do it. They just kept dying.

And not only heroes. Those poor people that stand next to them when the buildings fall and the bricks come down. The daughters. The wives.

Doc Speed once saved the rest of The Liberty Legion when he discovered a Death Virus that was transforming heroes into zombies, a transformation that would’ve been permanent if The Surgeon of Speed hadn’t done seven simultaneous operations in less than a minute, saving the world just ahead of another dreadful deadline.

Burn detested his power, condemned by his ever-searing flame to not being able to touch another person, to not being able to hold his child or run his hand along his wife’s skin; but still he fought and fought hard, Lord knows why, but he wanted to help—it was all he’d ever wanted.

Star-Knight had already explained it all, as they always do after a fight. Sicko saw Ultimate land on the roof and called Star-Knight, worried about this unexpected development. While Sicko rushed in to see what was going on, Star-Knight rounded up his men, his guns, and even Strength, who was helping him now, who was doing what she could to help now. They got there as quickly as they could and entered the room, their fantastic guns beautifully blazing; and Ultimate fled, crashed through the wall of the apartment and flew off into the clouds.

It was one of those great last-minute rescues out of which Pen patched together most of his life: a climactic cliff-hanger providing seemingly no avenue of escape until, at last, so predictably at last, someone comes and saves the day. He’d been through a lot of those. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t relieved when it happened, was unmoved by the details. Or maybe it was the woman in his arms, the absence of her voice, the lack of response to the stories he’s telling.

Starry and Pen tried once to form a teenage Liberty Legion, The Young Yeoman, but nothing ever really came of it: there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to be in a team, play sidekick, get through school, handle your latest crush, and do all you could to get better, to make sure you were always prepared when the fog descended.

Herc was a giant of a man, had a giant smile; he was always telling jokes, making sure everyone knew that whatever the great problem that day, whatever the imminent threat to mankind and all we held dear,
there’d be another day after this one, another enemy tomorrow, another cold beer after a night of fists and guns.

The stories are idiotic; it’s all just pointless nonsense: good guys defeating bad guys, buoyantly breasted women and robustly chiseled men absurdly dedicating themselves to overcoming whatever uncomplicated dilemma presented itself that month. At its core, in its house of origin, the game is nothing more than a child’s fantasy, puerile desires satiated through the exaggeration of human qualities.

Everyone engaged in it, all those heroes and villains beating the shit out of one another, knew this, understood each day that their lofty efforts were meaningless, mere extensions of this immature beginning. It’s why they refer to it as a game, the tacit acknowledgment that the stakes were never real, only the powers. Even death didn’t bother them because they knew: everyone comes back. How silly is that? How utterly devoid of any worth?

Sure they strove to justify their existence by emphasizing the nobility behind their deeds, the transcendent virtues inspiring their punches and kicks. But after The Blue, after the game faded and they finally won the peace they’d always fought for, that strained effort was exposed. Without the mutated DNA, the radiated monkey, the inner-space virus, without all the other outsized oddities and manly mysteries that propelled orphans beyond the stratosphere, without villains, the participants in the story were revealed to be not the upholders of a godly good, but instead to be little children, rising from a dream, shouting out in the middle of the night for mommy to give it back, to somehow let them have it all back.

And they hated Pen; they all hated him for still retaining some token of how things once were, how they were once perfect and how now they’re all so normal; how they were once part of The Story, and now they microwave hot dogs for their kids on Sunday night.

Once they were gods; they were more than gods; they were the myths from which gods are drawn. But what good is that to her? How does that help her? His wife. It’s fine to tell stories, to read them and appreciate them. That’s fine. But stories end. And when you put down the book, place the pretty words on the pretty coffee table, and lean back to fall asleep and expect her to follow, to cuddle into you and quell the early shiver of dreams—and she’s not there; she’s gone—what use are the stories then?

Pen once soared through a crowded sky, and his wife was dying. And he wanted her back. He just wanted her back. He loved her. He loved her so much. He had all the power in the world; he hadn’t given it up, he still had it. And it meant nothing. It was just nothing. Just a stupid story.

Star-Knight saw himself as second to no man, no man that is except The Man With The Metal Face; only to Ultimate would Star-Knight ever concede an argument or yield in a fight, only to Ultimate would Star-Knight ever admit that he wasn’t the best—there was one out there, just one, who was better.

One time, after Prophetier predicted Red Rapist would use Liarliar to convince a bevy of heroic women to marry him, The Liberty Legion had Mindy Mind-Reader dress up as Strength—so that when Liarliar made his first try at seduction, he was met by a mental blast that sent him reeling back.

She moves. A breath, a tiny breath. And then another.

He watches her, wills it to be more. Something’s working. The stories. She likes them. And he’s afraid to stop. He tells the stories, though he hates them; he hates them all. But she likes them.

Soldier and Mashallah made love only once, and though they tried to keep it a secret, everyone ended up knowing after Purgatory took control of Mashallah’s soul and exposed the worst moment of her life: laying naked in bed afterward, telling Soldier that she had to leave—she loved him, but she loved God more.

She moves again.

Techno placed the mind of the world’s greatest detective in a helicopter a few years ago, and to everyone’s astonishment, it worked pretty well for a while: it seemed for, like, six months, this large machine, its rotators churning, would land whenever there was an unsolved murder, then take off again into the skyline, dedicated to finding the killer, though it couldn’t really ever get indoors to question anyone, which might’ve been its downfall.

On her neck, underneath her skin, a quiet heartbeat. He can feel it now. It was gone for a little while. For a few moments. But now. He can’t get closer to her. He clutches her and kisses her and tries, but he can’t get any closer.