A Once Crowded Sky (37 page)

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Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face:
Battle Call One Shot #1

Weeks later, Pen comes out of Anna’s room and finds David, The Freedom Fighter, sitting in the hospital lobby, his legs crossed, his arm stretched out, as if he’d been waiting for a while. Pen could do it. It would be easy, and it wouldn’t really hurt the guy. A quick elbow to spot three, and he’d be unconscious just long enough for Pen to slip away.

“What are you doing here?” Pen asks.

“You can’t hide forever.” David tilts his head. He’s chewing gum, and when he smiles, his teeth clap up and down. “Not when every cop and do-gooder in Arcadia gets their doughnuts at the same diner.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Think I want to be?” David widens his eyes and laughs. “Grandpa says go, and you go. You got all the powers. You fight him.”

Pen knows where the six closest exits are, how each of them leads to
a contingency plan where he could disappear for however long he needs to. “What do you want?”

“Grandpa wants to talk to you. Saturday at noon. At the diner. He’s making something special for lunch, he said, just for you.”

“I’m not meeting anybody.”

“It won’t take long.”

“I can’t.”

David laughs, throws his arms up. “Like I said, you want to fight him, go ahead.” David stands. “But you’ll lose.”

“What’s it about?”

David puts his jacket on. “I think he wants to talk about Soldier, about fixing things, but who knows? The man can ramble.” David walks up to Pen, slaps him on the shoulder. “I’ll see you there, buddy.” David turns and walks toward the door.

Six exits. In thirty-two seconds Pen could be gone. “Is it about me coming back?” he calls after David. “Is it about going back and closing the hole? Is that what it really is?”

David stops, his back facing Pen. “You change your mind? Are you doing it? Are you bringing us back?”

“There haven’t been any attacks this whole time. Ultimate’s still gone. I would’ve helped. I would’ve stopped them. If they came.”

“Are you doing it? Yes or no?” David looks back over his shoulder. “Has anything changed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.”

David chews hard on his gum, then looks back to the exit. “I’ll see you at the diner,” he says as he walks away.

Six exits. Six contingency plans. They couldn’t find him. Not really. Not if he really went away. Pen sits down on a cushioned bench, then stands and goes back to see his wife.

The Soldier of Freedom: Battle Call One Shot #1

Soldier answers DG’s door. He’d been looking out the window, and he’d seen David coming up, and he knew there was no more point in keeping low.

“This is where you went?” David asks as the door opens. “Seriously?
Who knew? All this time, I thought you were in the Middle East or something.”

“Can I help you, son?”

David snaps his gum and takes a breath. “Grandpa wants—”

“When and where?” Soldier asks.

David laughs and leans against the doorway. “Saturday. At the diner. Twelve thirty.”

“Thought the diner was closed.”

“Nope. Reopened and repaired. Good as new. Shiny even. Maybe everyone else is messed up, but Grandpa still has power.” David laughs again.

Soldier runs his thumb across his nose. He spits past David, onto the front garden. “It’s about Pen. That’s what it is?”

“Sure,” David says. “You know the old man. Ever the peacemaker.”

“He’s not afraid we’d start up fighting? That I’d attack the kid again, mess up y’all’s business all over again?”

“Hey, who said Pen’s going to be there? He’s gone. PenUltimate is very powerful. No one knows where PenUltimate is. Grandpa just wants to talk.”

“No one knows where I am.”

David straightens up. He arches his chin, tries to look serious, but there’s still some smile left on his face. “Are you really going to fight Pen? For what? To get what? How many times do we have to get hit in the face to know when to stay down?”

Soldier rests his hands on his guns. “Diner. Twelve thirty.”

“Twelve thirty. Saturday.”

“All right. Thank you.” Soldier nods and closes the door. He walks back into DG’s house and sits at her kitchen table. He watches David walk off, get back in his car. Soldier’s hands stay on his guns.

Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #581

“Let me tell you something about your friend Soldier. Now, this was some time ago, during the war. The Second World War. I was quite the fighter then. Not like now. You see me now, maybe you think he’s just an old man, with the bad feet, he can’t do any fighting. But then, my
God then, I was a good-looking boy. Like you, eh? I had the clothes that stretched over the skin. Where you can see the muscles. And the girls! If you could’ve seen the girls then, how they thought of that outfit. But this isn’t about the girls, eh? Ah, but maybe every story is about the girls? You understand, I know. But for now this is about the fighting. And we were good fighters. We were fighting for something. We were fighting the Nazis. And Hitler. And one time I hit Hitler in the face with my own fist. But that’s a different story too. But I
did
hit him. He was looking for the übermensch, the superman. When I hit him,
that’s
when he found his superman, eh? But this, what I’m telling you now, happened after that, after the punch. It was me, The Freedom Fighter, and The Soldier of Freedom. We were sabotaging a Nazi base deep inside the line. Very dangerous. Very secret mission. There was a scientist, a Nazi scientist, and we had the information he was helping Hitler with—this is what we were told—with time traveling. Going back, you understand? Like in the funny books. Can you imagine, time-traveling Nazis, what could be worse? Nothing. So, we had to stop it. We charged in, guns going, Freedom Fighter and The Soldier of Freedom! And there was an explosion!
Boom!
And we went out, unconscious. And we wake up, and we are back in time. Yes, back in time, in some Austrian town at the beginning of the century. And there’s a lady standing over us, shouting at us in German, just yelling and crazy, and we are scared of her so we tie her to a chair, and we ask her questions, and I figure out that she is Hitler’s mother. My God! And what happens next? Hitler comes in! He was on a walk or something, I don’t know, but he walks in, and he’s just a boychick, maybe nine or ten, a little boy Hitler standing in front of us, looking at us standing there with his mother all tied to a chair. And he screams. He is so scared. He is crying and screaming, and I can’t understand him, but I am trying to talk to him, to calm him maybe, when Soldier takes out his gun and shoots him. Dead. Just like that. Bullet between the eyes, above, in the forehead here. And I think that this is it. We have won the war, but at what cost? But then soldiers begin to rush in on us from outside, not old soldiers but new ones, modern ones, 1944 ones. You understand? And the woman is crying now, screaming, that it is a fake, all a fake. There is no time traveling. There are just actors, a fake village set up for Hitler, for him to see his childhood, to make it better. It is all an act. The boy is not Hitler. He is a boy, some boy taken from his family, made to play Hitler. The boy
is only a slave. Another slave. And there he is dead, Soldier’s bullet right here, gone right through here. And everywhere, everywhere soldiers all with the guns out, firing guns. And I look at Soldier, The Soldier of Freedom, the greatest hero ever, and I mean no disrespect to your Ultimate, but Soldier was the greatest, who could argue this? And I looked at his face, the boy dead there in front of him, and Soldier looked back at me, and then, I cannot forget this, and then he looks up, he looks up and up and up, and we were in a house, there was only the ceiling above us, and there were soldiers coming everywhere,
boom
, the guns were firing, and he was just looking up, his guns in his hands, pointed down, not at anything at all. Useless. And I shouted at him.
‘Soldier!’
I shouted. I shouted loud.
‘Soldier!’
We were going to die. Without his guns, those people coming in were going to kill us, probably the actors too, everyone. And Soldier wasn’t moving. He was only looking up, but we had to move, we had to save everyone. And he looks up. My God, my God. Let me tell you something. My parents, they never once believed in the God. They liked Marx much more. And me? I made some deals. I had a son, a grandson, a beautiful wife, and I hurt some people. What can you do? All you can do now is tell the stories to the young people. Tell them what it was like in that house. Let them decide if it meant anything. Tell them about the guns, how there was no more time. The guns were going off.
Boom! Boom!
You understand?
Boom! Boom!
” Jules accentuates these last words by banging his fist against the table, knocking a cup of coffee over the side. Jules bends over, disappears under the table. A minute later he comes back up holding a few pieces of the cup. He waves at a busboy, who rushes over and hands Jules a towel. He’s headed back down when Pen reaches out, puts his hand on Jules’s hand.

“Wait, wait,” Pen says. “What happened? Soldier and you, what did you do?”

Jules hesitates. “Do?” he says after a while. “Eh, who remembers? It was all so long ago. Besides, all these things all have the same ending anyway, they just start again.”

Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #582

Pen sips at his burnt cocoa as he watches Jules shuffle off to check on something in the kitchen. Pen pulls his baseball cap down farther over
his face. He hasn’t been out since the graves. It’s a corner table in the back, but someone’ll notice him eventually. He doesn’t know what to tell people. He knows they’ll ask, just like David asked, and he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know if he’s going back.

Swoosh
—the slicing of air in the distance. Pen places his cup on the table as the wires inside his muscles begin to pulse. Thirty-four people are sitting at nineteen tables; eleven of them used to be heroes, old friends. Someone outside is smoking a familiar brand of cigarettes. The Soldier of Freedom arrived at the diner sixty-four seconds ago, his pistols, as always, hanging in their holsters. The wires did their job, and Pen’s burnt arm is at 99.6 percent effectiveness. What’s coming is traveling faster than a MiG-22, much faster.

Crack
—and the front wall of Jules’s diner blasts inward. Pen doesn’t need to look to know who’s climbing through the debris. The speed of the flight, the force of the impact, the screech of metal scraping against metal, the scent of a clean, polished shine. He reaches out and takes his mug back in hand. They all come back. Every goddamn last one. He takes a sip and swirls his tongue through the pleasant heat, trying to think of what to say.

A large piece of rubble hurls through the air, and Pen throws himself to the side as it collides with his table, crunching through wood and plastic and into the floor below. Pen kicks at the ground, moving himself farther away from the impact site just in time to avoid another piece of rubble burrowing into the checkered linoleum at his feet. He rolls to his right, and a smaller ball whizzes by his ear.