A Once Crowded Sky (39 page)

His chest contracts, and Pen’s breaths become short and piercing. Ultimate clenches and squeezes. Pen is dying. Light crackles burp out of his body as he struggles not to let loose of this moment, not to fall into unconsciousness just to make the hurt go away. That’s not a good way to die; Ultimate wouldn’t have approved of that.

Once more, right as he is about to slide away, Pen looks back at his mentor, at the man who created him, peers at his own suffering features peering back at him, folded around the curves and corners of The Man With The Metal Face. He notices the difference between this reflection
now and the one back at the beginning, the childish face wrapped around this same smooth skin, the boy staring up at the man who’d murdered his parents and then decided to take him home. The boy’s face is so different now; Pen sees a few wrinkles now, a few scars now that weren’t there the day Ultimate began to build him. Like Jules. Like Soldier.

And as the pressure in Pen’s ribs grows, the mirrored scars begin to fold, move: black lines twisting in Ultimate’s face, swelling and multiplying, new lines birthing from the old, rippling and spreading across the plane of steel. And as they enlarge, more lines, more wires, sprout from the originals: arms, legs, hips, shoulders, fingers, fists—so that each becomes a figure stretched out vertically across Ultimate’s cheek and forehead. Heads appear. Faces with mouths locked in place, looking ever determined as they increase in size, as they dart wildly forward.

They’re heroes. Old heroes, rushing toward him. FireFighter, The Bow-man, Stain and Strain, The White Dahlia, Sergeant Hardcore, Wingspan, The Soldier of Freedom, Stretchy, and others he doesn’t know by name but whom he’s fought beside countless times, him and Ultimate swooping ahead of the rest, leading the charge.

They emerge from the dark spaces in Pen’s own likeness; they form out of a pinpoint of light until they become whole, or at least whole enough to push ahead and rejoin the game. They swell forward until their figures can no longer be seen and Ultimate’s head is awash in a sea of color, each of their outfits competing along his metal skin.

And Pen likes the vision, likes the ending, and he closes his eyes just as Sergeant Hardcore crashes into Ultimate’s body, shaking the man slightly, and declaring with a crack of bone against metal that the stories will go on.

Pen opens his eyes as Ultimate flicks his hand at the crinkled, gray man. The Sergeant flies backward for a moment, then falls to the floor and lies quiet. A young girl jumps on Ultimate’s neck, wraps her arms around his shoulders, and he bolts his head backward into her face, which now bubbles red as she slips down his long back leaving a wet trail in her wake, dirtying the once-pristine cape. An older man who used to hypnotize people with his tattoos shoves a butter knife into Ultimate’s lustrous flesh. The knife breaks, and Ultimate lets Pen go as he turns to pummel the man with his steel fists. The tattooed man breaks and falls.

Two people, chubby and agile twins, jump on Ultimate’s elbows and
hang there until they are thrust together by a swift swivel of his metal arms; their two bodies
thump
and
pud
as they collide. The Tenacious Two. That was their names. Back in the game. The Tenacious Twins. Or the Tough Twins. Something alliterative like that.

Bow-man picks up Jules’s rifle from the floor, but before he can aim it, Ultimate grabs the weapon, tugging it so hard and quick the hero’s finger rips from his hand and hangs lifeless in the trigger-well. Bow-man’s jaw slackens, and a scream of pain begins to wheeze out, and Ultimate shoves a steel fist into his face.

Blood begins to gather, pooling on the floor around Pen’s arms. But the stories keep going. The heroes keep coming. Though winning is so obviously impossible, they throw themselves on Ultimate from every direction only to be hurled back through the air, only to be followed by another few and another few and another few after that. Wave after wave they come and they’re defeated, and wave after wave they come back again.

Soldier pulls his guns and fires into the metal body; one of the bullets rebounds back into its owner, and Soldier keels over.

At the center of their efforts, Pen lies back on Jules’s body and allows their liquids to seep into his clothes, drench his skin. The agony of his physical wounds, the crushed remnants of his arms, ribs, and shoulders, are eclipsed by the shame of the sacrifice around him. It’s not for him. He knows that. It’s for Jules. For this restaurant. The years of service. The small, kind gestures. Not for the poor stupid boy who refused to walk into The Blue and save them all. Not for the man who was unwilling to burn as they all were willing to burn, as they burn now, brightly and quickly, forever and forever gone.

But it’s not important what it’s for. No one’ll remember the meaning, least of all the dead who stack in sad walls around him. No one will care.

And in their eyes as they make their final leaps he sees this recognition, this final apathy as their martyrdoms are embraced. They’re heroes. They die because they’re heroes. They have no powers. They die without them as sure as they lived with them, but they die as heroes, figures crafted for battle, putting the good above the man. There’s no regret. No happiness either. Just a banal acceptance of a fate they thought they’d avoided because once they were too powerful for such meaningless gestures and once, not so long ago, they were much too weak.

Their lives are violence, day after day, month after month, year after year, and as another old hero leaps into the fight, Pen sees the hole in Ultimate’s chest, a small gap dug out by Jules’s gun, enlarged by Ultimate’s flailing arms fighting off the onrush of heroes, each movement cutting at the edges of the gap in his body, tearing The Man With The Metal Face a little more.

Pen’s body is broken, but it’s been broken before, and he sits up and thrusts his working hand forward into the wound, the black at the center of the metal gleam. His arm is cut as it enters the exposed edges of the metal robot; serrated teeth drag along his skin.

Ultimate looks down at the action, his metal eyes again clicking and whirling as they again focus in and out. It’s not quite a look of fear; the rest of the steel features stay placid, revealing nothing. But it’s something, a mark of realization maybe.

With a sharp jerk, Ultimate heaves upward; and Pen is taken with him, his arm now lodged inside his mentor’s body. More heroes around them fling themselves into the climbing pile and are driven away by deadly blows.

Ultimate’s feet leave the floor just as Pen’s fingers reach their goal; a beating brushes against Pen’s nails, and he pushes in farther, is sliced a little more as he wraps his hand around the throbbing point at the center of the metal man. Ultimate takes off. Both men rise, again.

With searing, searing speed Ultimate launches toward the broken ceiling of Jules’s diner, and Pen drags along with him, the metal wires in his own wrist dangling out, interweaving with Ultimate’s. The few heroes that are left struggle to hang on and then fall away as the two men fly, Ultimate clutching at Pen, crushing him against his body as Pen’s arm continues to fumble inside the hole in Ultimate’s chest.

Pen looks up and sees the metal face of his childhood, again expressionless and unchanged after all these years, all these villains and all these pains; still the lips are held together solemnly, the eyes stare out with rigid determination, the chin does not waver.

Pen thinks of The Blue, thinks of his wife, thinks of his father, thinks of the men and women beneath him. His grip tightens, and he feels a prickled tremble crawl from his fingers up his bloodied wrist, past his forearm, into his shoulder, neck, head, eyes, and the world quivers.

They breach the ceiling, drive out into a clouded, gray sky, and
Pen pulls and pulls hard. The beating object in Ultimate’s chest resists, but Pen is strong, as strong as Ultimate made him, and it dislodges, and it breaks away. Wrapping his legs around his mentor to keep steady in their climb, Pen rakes his hand back through the crooked metal, grating his skin on Ultimate’s steel one last time. And Pen’s arm is free, and in his clenched fist beats the heart of The Man With The Metal Face.

The metal man and his ever-faithful ward lock eyes. Neither’s face moves. Though the atmosphere around them breeds danger, they remain calm. In that way, in their scoff at the chaos that comes, they resemble each other for an instant, looking for a time almost like father and son. The pupils in Ultimate’s eyes stop spinning, pulsing, and he dies forty feet above the earth, Pen gripped in his hard, strong arms.

Their climb ends, and for a moment their bodies hover above the world. A cloud moves; the sun blasts blue through gray; and Pen is embraced by a lovely, familiar sky, patiently waiting for him to continue his ascent. This must be the last of the fliers, the only one of her children still left who strives to escape the cumbersome below and nestle himself into her warmth. She’d thought them all gone, but one remained; and she’s delighted to see him back, and she hopes he will continue upward, and she prepares for his return, expands her arms, accepting his heavenly attempt. Pen reaches out to her, and then he falls.

Pen and Ultimate crash down to earth, bursting through the ceiling of the diner, concrete and paint chips gathering around their tumbling bodies. Pen tucks Ultimate close, positions all that metal between the ground and himself as they pummel into the diner’s floor, cracking the foundation and sinking into the dirt below. The sound of the impact booms for miles, and Pen once again goes black.

Drenched in rubble and ash, Pen’s body convulses away from the new crater at the center of the falling debris. It reacts without its owner’s knowledge, prepared for such a moment by years of training and miles of wire acquired from the metal man who now lies dead beneath it.

Pen wakes, sucks in an air of ketchup and blood as he clutches the still pulsing heart in his hand. Above, the sun hangs clear now, a solid yellow circle set against an endless plain of blue. He pulls the heart to his chest, feels it beat along with his own, feels how much stronger it is, how much more steady and consistent. Its cold metal tubes wane and swell,
like the wires, like Pen’s wires, but not like Pen’s heart, not like that at all. Extending his arm, Pen pushes it toward the sky.

Pen opens his eyes, and the steel heart gripped in Pen’s fingers is framed in the sun’s circled light. Metal. It’s metal. Not red. Not bloody. Not real. Pen starts to laugh. It’s metal, and it’s not real. Pen laughs hard now, his ribs creaking and cracking with staccato breaths. It’s not Pen’s heart. It’s not the heart Ultimate carried in his chest. It’s metal. Not like Ultimate’s heart, Pen’s heart. More like the cat’s. The Cat With The Metal Face.

The Cat With The Metal Face. Of course, Ultimate gave it to him knowing the cat’s heart was a replica of the heart in Pen’s chest, Ultimate’s original heart. He must have known that it could be used like this, to build another robot. And he didn’t spell it out in the will because he didn’t want others to know, to figure out how to bring him back, to control him. But he trusted Pen, trusted Pen to figure out the cat, to know what to do with the cat. And Pen just gave it away. He gave it to Star-Knight, who gave it away again.

Clues. Mysteries. Puzzles. Stories. Their lives are violence. Pen laughs and laughs and laughs and waits for the man to come to him, to walk over to him from the table at the side of the room and tell him that it’s over, that Pen’s finally figured it all out. He grasps a metal heart, and he waits for Prophetier.

Adventure Team-Up #25:
The Solder of Freedom and The Prophetier

The bullet went clean through, leaving Soldier hurt and bleeding, lying faceup on the dirty floor of Jules’s diner. In the distance, he hears their voices, another hero and another villain discussing their revelations, playing their roles. Soldier turns over, clutches his gun, and begins to crawl forward, toward Pen and Prophetier.