A Once Crowded Sky (6 page)

Soldier coughs and takes up his suit from a hook on the back of the door and irons it again and puts it on. It’s a new suit, but it fits well enough. He gets a tie from the closet, a black tie, a gift from someone he’d saved in Laos. He doesn’t really remember who. It takes him six tries to get the knot right, but it fits eventually.

With his tie and suit on, Soldier picks up the holsters from the bed and strings them through his belt. He looks down at his guns. The grips are pointed at him, and they are inviting. He takes them up, and they fit just right in his palms, and he puts them away in the holsters, lets them rest. And it’s all fine. Fine and done. Finally done.

Soldier sits back down on the couch and stares at the picture on the wall. He goes over his speech in his head, mouthing out the words. When he’s finished, he sits for a few minutes in silence, then he gets up and goes to the mirror in the bathroom to look over the whole outfit. You don’t know until you look it over.

It doesn’t quite sit right, the guns and the suit and the tie—they don’t go together no matter how rutty these old holsters are. Pull the trigger. But Soldier’s never been anywhere without California and Carolina, least not since a long time back.

He removes California, meaning to leave her on the sink and see the suit without the pistol’s decoration; but instead he watches as the figure in the mirror lifts the weapon to his temple, his finger, as ever,
placed with confidence inside that lovingly curved trigger-well. Pull the trigger.

The game’s over. You can’t shoot Survivor. You can’t shoot Prophetier. There’s no use to any of that. All those boys killed in all those wars as you won all those medals fighting all those enemies. That’s all done. Pull the trigger. All those families killed in all those adventures while you were fighting with your perfectly matched villain. All that life lost. Mashallah. It’s done.

A destiny. A gun. Another battle won. Well done. Well done. Pull the trigger.

It’s over, it’s over, and now you got nothing. No family. No wife. No skill or use beyond the killing you’ve done and the killing you can’t do no more. Pull the trigger. Better men should be in your place, taking your air. Men who haven’t done what you’ve done.

You think you’re better than Survivor? Because maybe you killed for a cause, or at least tried to? But, here you are, just like him, staring at the same destiny, clutching the same gun. But have you the guts to go as he did? Pull the trigger. Can you face up to what you’ve done? Until next time! Pull the trigger.

You think you’re better than Prophetier? Think you’re fixed while he’s cracked? You think you’re beyond the hope we all’ll come back, that it’ll just be so darn exciting to turn the page and find yourself once again leaping into battle? But here you are. With California to your head. How sad is that? How childish. Like the destiny. Like the gun. Pull the trigger.

Is that it? Is that it? Or maybe you think you’re better than him? Better than Ultimate, ready to give your life to save all others, finally let this game go on without you. You think you can rise off into the empty blue and be finally free. Fine then. Here you are. So pull the trigger. Show them what it means.

Pull the trigger, Soldier. Pull the trigger! PULL THE GODDAMN TRIGGER!

1

The Blue Aftermath: The Funeral, #1 of 2
The Soldier of Freedom

“Thank you. Thank you all for coming.

“My grandfather Washington, when he was giving a speech up North to his men about why they shouldn’t abandon the cause, he took out a letter to read to them. The letter had some small writing on it, and he took out his spectacles, and he put them on, and he said—he apologized to the troops there for having to do that, and he said he was sorry but he’d sacrificed his eyes for his country along with everything else.

“So now, if you all don’t mind, I’m going to pinch a line here from him while putting on my own glasses, first pair I’ve ever worn after too many years of service. And let me apologize now for having to do this, but like most of y’all in the room tonight, I’ve done a touch of giving for this world, and I’ve given my eyes along with the rest of me.

“But we have all given a lot. Given a lot of what made us. Most of you in the room—well, I know most of you. One time or another, we
teamed up against some villain trying to rob a bank, or destroy a world, or whatever was the latest scheme.

“And we fought that villain best we could, and we beat him ’cause we knew we had to, knew that we, the people here, we’d been given something extra, and it was our duty to use that to help folk. So we fought, and we risked, and we did some real good. I don’t like to brag, in fact I can’t much stand a braggart, but I can recognize when something’s gone right. When some people’s done something right.

“That was our greatest joy, I think. And I know we all did it for our own reasons, and I know that some of those reasons weren’t always moral like. But that don’t matter all that much at the end of it. What matters was that people felt safe, people could live the lives they wanted because of what we were doing. That there’s what was important. That there’s what made our own lives worth doing.

“And that there is what died when Ultimate flew away from us, didn’t it? When we gave him all those powers and he flew away. And I know this funeral here—it’s about him. And don’t you worry, I’m getting to him, if in a roundabout way. But this place, this mourning here, it’s about more than that, ain’t it? I mean, that empty box behind me we’re all pretending’s holding our friend is about more than just him, ain’t it?

“And the only reason I’m saying that’s because he was about more than that, I think. He stood for something, and I’m thinking if he were here, he’d deny that, but we all’d know it was true. He stood for what was good and just, stood for us helping one another like we did. Whenever you were out there—and I know y’all understand this—you knew no matter how bad it got, no matter how hard you was being pushed by just the worst types, he had your back.

“I remember this one time, I was with Doc Speed—who I can see out there in the third row—and we were fighting this villain, Deadly Sinner or some such. And he’d kidnapped Doc’s wife. You remember that, Doc? When he had Penelope? Don’t seem so long ago.

“Anyway, this Mr. Sinner had us pinned down, dangling out of the federal building. I mean, I was holding a ledge with one hand and Penelope with the other. You remember, right? And Sin throws some sort of bomb and blows the ledge, and we both start to fall. And I’m thinking, well, that’s it; had a good run, fought in some wars, stopped some bad
guys—and this was it. But sure enough, out of just nowhere, Ultimate comes swooping in.

“I seen him there in my six, that big metal skin just glaring. With, of course, that little kid PenUltimate attached behind him by a string, riding his little surfboard through the sky and making that silly yell: ‘Time to feel our metal!’ Goddamn. Most soothing music I think I ever heard. I swear.

“First I was falling, I was losing. And there he was: The Man With The Metal Face.

“He picked me up, managed to grab Penelope there too. And I . . . I consider myself to be somewhat of a tough guy. So I’m just brushing it off, pretending it was nothing, another day. So I says to him—and, Penelope, you shout if this ain’t true—I says, ‘Well, thank you, partner, but if you don’t mind dropping me, I was right about to learn to fly, and you’re in my way.’ I hear some laughter, but I don’t hear shouting, so y’all know that’s true now.

“And this man, this robot whose own creator died in making him, this metal man who ain’t never had a mother or a father, and this I swear is true, this man here, without missing a single second, well, he turns to me—and you got to imagine he’s holding me in one hand and Penelope in the other, and we must’ve been three hundred feet over that hard pavement of Arcadia—he says back to me, in that computer voice of his, he says, ‘I know, Soldier. I was just coming by to see if, when you figured it out, you could provide me with a lesson.’

“Ha. Hot dog. ‘Provide me with a lesson.’ Cool as anything.

“That’s a true story, and I know y’all know it’s true because y’all have been involved in stuff like it probably even more times than I have. That man . . . he was always collected, always raring to go. I don’t know if he was programmed without it, but I don’t think he ever felt doubt in his whole life. Not one moment. He always knew what was right, the right way to fight, right way to win.

“I can’t hardly believe it’s been six months since he went. Like all y’all I thought he might come right back. We all come back. That’s why we waited so long to have this. But he didn’t. Like always, he did something none of us could do. He died.

“I was there. With him at the end. At The Blue. It was me and Star-Knight and him. Before this, we’d fought the worst villains out there.
Together we’d gone up against them all, and we’d fought them hard, and we’d sure as anything took them down. The three of us, we’d been together a long time—a long damn time.

“I’ve got stories, I mean, we all got stories, don’t we? But we couldn’t do it that time. Couldn’t figure a way out. Just . . . couldn’t, I guess.

“And I know what . . . I know what it meant to you all out there. I know that you all trusted us to do what was right. Because you’d been with us; you’d been fighting with us for Lord knows how long. Each one of y’all in one way or another had saved each of us. And probably we’d saved you. So there was something to be counted on there, when the three of us . . . when we tried to figure out what to do. We knew that.

“We all thought there must be a better way. A way to do it so you all wouldn’t have to give up what you did. But, hell, we couldn’t get at it. And there wasn’t that much time, and the world was pretty close to coming to an end. The Blue, that damn wave of energy, digging into the horizon. And I know, lot of us in this room—to a lot of us—that ain’t all that big a deal. That there’s just another day. But this, it felt different, more permanent somehow, I don’t know, just a gut feeling, but we felt it. We all agreed, the three of us agreed, we all felt it.

“We had to make a decision, and we decided to do what we did. Star-Knight had a solution, and we took it. We needed everything, everything you all could provide that day to put a stop to that thing from killing our world. All your powers to stop that damn thing. And someone had to gather that, take Star-Knight’s flame belt and take all that power and go into The Blue and confront it head-on like, close the slash it was leaking through, stop it from coming. And we knew, whoever went, he’d die, burn up in The Blue.

“Ultimate, he insisted. I can tell you that Star-Knight and me, well we ain’t shy. To say the least. The both of us were screaming at him to let us be the one to go. But he wasn’t having it. He just put out his hand . . . just, well just like this. Just put out his hand in front of him. And he cut it through the air. We told him that he was . . . what he meant to us. That we couldn’t lose him.

“But he just put out his hand out, and he cut us off. ‘This is mine,’ that’s what he said. ‘This is mine.’ I don’t . . . well, I’m not sure exactly what it meant, but I knew there weren’t words that needed to be said after that. And then he took the belt and flew off and left us behind. All our
powers, we gave it to him. He took everything with him, and he left us all behind.

“And he wasn’t like us; we weren’t his people. He was built, not born. But some men, I suppose, are like that. Some men come to us not from an ideal place. They got a past they don’t like or a father or whatever. They got something makes them different. And some men they let that weigh on them hard like and just drown them. They’re strangers, and they never get to be nothing but that.