True Heroes (36 page)

              “No….” The casual nature of the conversation struck raw against Stephen’s ear. ‘Can’t blame him. He’s caught up in more muck than a swamp guide no doubt.’ The rising levels of dissention in the military cost most of the ranking officers their ability to remain inconspicuous behind the shroud of impersonal, frank social interactions with underlings. Smiles and encouragement were nearly belittled with their overuse for fear that petty officers such as Stephen would remember they were the shaft of the hammer. “Just a safety switch. I like old school better.”

              “Well, we’ve just received word that some top brass wanna talk about you showcasing some of your old-school talents in a new operation. They say it’s big.”

              Stephen gently began to dismantle his gun and place the pieces into their foamed compartments. He was hoping the motions would demonstrate his graphic apathy towards any more operations. “Hostages in Iran, assassinations in the middle of third-world Europe, blah, blah, blah. I’ve served here for twenty years, turning down promotions for more action and doing what I can to end this war. It hasn’t been cooperative. This one better either involve a hooker, or something equally pleasurable.”

              The informality and disrespect for authority made the Captain squirm. Stephen could feel the MPs stiffen with anxiety and spreading impatience. ‘You boys may have it worst of all. You’re not just sweating the rebellion, you’ve gotta try to keep patching holes against guys with the same training and more experience as you. Easy, guys, no rebellion from me.’ “Ending the war single-handedly might get you more action than you know what to do with, Cole.”

              The silver case closed and locked under his hands as his head wandered aloud. “That’d be quite a resume booster, and retirement plan guarantee-er, wouldn’t it? Retired before I ever turn forty-five to some island they give me…maybe for the American dream and all that jazz too. All right, I’m listening.”

-                            -                            -                           

              Caleb shifted into the passing lane and continued to accelerate as he made it out of the tangled Columbus loop. His foot seemed heavier and as eager as his mind to abandon the careful, meticulous route. Forty miles passed without a checkpoint or helicopter; radio waves thinned the farther he drove from the battle scene until his power only revealed people’s varying interest in music. They’d taken an exit then, barely noticing as three hours were suctioned from the late morning into planning, shopping, avoiding busy roads, counting, license plate switching, and eating lightly. Residual companionship existed between his power and him from the battle, for now, allowing Caleb to shop as regularly as possible, dark sunglasses allowing Power to monitor people while he took his time. His abilities were dominant as he trolled around various parking lots, switching a dozen plates, leaving a dozen possibilities that would entangle pursuers even further into knots the more they followed.

              Eyeing another exit, he felt the need to repeat the act coming on, as was the need to stretch the impatience out of his legs. He couldn’t let anything messy his getaway. The empty quiet in his head had lasted far too long, making him feel that his power was plotting again. ‘Perhaps we could find a quiet place to talk again.’

              ‘No need, I was just allowing us both to gather our thoughts so we didn’t destroy the landscape again.’

              Caleb glanced in the rearview mirror, seeing Power staring on from the middle of the backseat. “Then you won’t mind if we talk now.” He pulled the car off the exit and turned to a shopping center, alive with motion and candescent with the hot sun. The parking lot was nearly full on the inner sanctum of the paved, lined desert, but a spot was luckily open at the very back. Caleb parked in the slightly shaded space and helped the car come to rest. The door swung open, his legs uncurling slowly as his muscles felt both fatigued and energized. His arms stretched in the air as his feet walked between cars and further into the shade, his toes lifting his body repeatedly on a cement curb. A part of his power extended without his will and a shaded form appeared a few feet from Caleb’s. “How did you touch me in the woods?”

              Caleb stared into the trunk of the short tree shading him, not prepared for the conversation to begin precisely there. His mind was spent, but his mouth was still willing to answer in low, barely audible whispers. “I’m not sure. You know more about this than I do. Maybe you’re starting to win a bit and become more physical.”

              “Don’t stroke my ego. If I thought I was winning our little internal struggle, I would’ve finished you instantly before running from the idiots with guns.”

              Caleb could feel frustration vibrating through his power’s voice. “Fine, I tackled you because I finally got sick and tired of how you treat other people. You killed that poor woman with my hands and tried I-don’t-know-what in that field all because you think humans are trash.”

              Caleb’s own quickened voice crooked a smile from Power’s face. “That was one of my back-up plans for the end. I suppose I let myself get carried away a bit. For a strange moment, I didn’t care for entertainment or punishment. It’s a dominating ability I found that I have: to create space within the atmosphere of Earth. It works like an atom bomb, displacing air so violently that a vacuum is created, causing implosive recourse that could, theoretically, turn the world inside out. A bit brutal admittedly, but it would appear I’m too weak to close the deal anyways.”

              That final, forlorn glimmer of fact was accompanied by a glare. “Get used to it.” Caleb blinked slowly, briefly taking the shadowy cool of the hanging leaves too deeply and feeling its strong invitation for a restful nap barely leave him standing. His power had moved and was now kneeling on the roof of the car, staring at him strongly. “This fighting is pointless. We’re stuck with one another for as long as we’re alive.”

              “Forever, then. I’ll be there every time one of your human needs rears its ugly, bestial head. Every time you sleep,” it phased away and was again back in the shadows; its blue, semi-opaque body darker and easily visible to Caleb, “I could smother you. Every time you eat, I’ll try to choke you. Any vulnerability I smell, and I’ll wriggle out of the loose grip you have on me.” Power appeared leaning against the back door, its hands in fake pockets. “Ask Carol about losing a grip on the world. Ask her what it’s like to feel enough pain to break something as strong as the human spirit, and ask what it’s like to face more and more pain no matter how far into madness you spiral. Everything she pushed away and buried came exploding out, and she wasn’t nearly as sensitive or combustible as you. Your skin is papyrus and your blood is fire. You’re no more a human than I, which is why you could never ask Carol any of these questions. She was a human while you never even had an idea of how to be human. I am the whole while you two were rotting parts of the idea of humanity.”

              Caleb clenched his muscles and felt his emotions run wild. His muscles wouldn’t relax; every joint burned fuel from a fire his tired mind couldn’t contain. All the fury looked for a turn, looked for a cause, but always rotated and swung back at his own face with accusation.

              His eyes glowed slightly brighter as they stared into the curious pits of nothing that his power claimed to be eyes. “We’ve let down so many people. I’ve…you…. She sacrificed everything for us. They all did. Everyone,” his voice rose into a shout, “all those people you distracted me from saving showed a bravery and acceptance of reality you could never have!” The shaking finger pointing at his thoroughly nervous power ended his tirade. Caleb couldn’t bring his body to lower the finger, or his intensity. There was some sort of justice in the pointed finger as Power’s faked expression mirrored his own; as the gathering crowd could never have gathered, his finger need barely extend at all for the blame to be properly placed. “Us. It was us.”

              His body was sizzling beneath his skin, his brain begging for the end of temporary fixes and endurant stands in favor for rest the likes of which a boned scythe alone could give. Caleb fell to the curb again, feeling ready. A guillotine, a hood and noose, a line of loaded rifles, electricity straight to the brain, painless cold spreading through his veins all took a hold of him through a single sensation. Drowning: challenging the spinner of lies to a breath-holding contest while the liquid of his failures fought for entrance to his lungs, for the vengeance they each deserved many times over.

              Caleb felt his body move numbly, seeing glimpses of the world from his mind and hearing Power’s smooth voice. “I’m fine, yes.” That was the final auditory sense he received before wandering into a dark plane, not caring for exterior danger or interior plight. His entire mind rove for a dark crevice.

              “That’s the kind of power I can’t understand,” Caleb heard as if spoken plainly from the far end of a narrow corridor, and didn’t interrupt his shambling stride to nowhere.

-                            -                            -                           

              Stephen grimaced at the plan as it was being described to him. “Wait, whoa, this isn’t a one man job. This sounds more like a bull-rush of a thousand troops.”

              The two officers exchanged a look that made him nostalgic suddenly; his mother and father had smiled that way on their one good Christmas, sharing the secret of a surprise they’d known he would love. His past had always been more enjoyable than his present, even when his past didn’t exist. ‘Always a black sun with yellow spots, never the other way.’ “You’ll have the tactical force capable of surpassing a majority of their forces while disposing of the minority forces easily. With this—”

              A few drag-and-clicks on the monitor revealed an auspicious insanity on the screen in front of Stephen. His mind immediately compared it to battle armor thousands of years old, shined and glowing against the dusty sun with a Gladius in one hand and thick shield in the other. Under the shine was the current works of American engineers: complex weavings under what looked to be broken pieces of mirror that flung over one shoulder, connected to an apparatus across the back and to forearm and leg plates by large wires, and with chrome dripping from head to toe. A hood appeared out of the device along the back and covered a projection’s head, covered with mirrors again down to the nose and with some goggles built into the eyes. “Am I going to a dance in this?”

              “This prom dress will get the entire country laid, son. It’s an enhancement suit that multiplies the user’s strength, speed, brain activity, awareness, and their body’s ability to process natural energies. Yeah, you’ll be stronger faster and all that jazz, but you’ll be able to use it without feeling fatigue or injury. We call it the Zeus Suit. Your body can push out about nine-hundred watts at its peak. The suit should make you capable of pushing out more power than a blue whale, and that’s while you’re at rest. Boys in white even tell me you’ll be fast enough to catch synapse firing in your brain, if that interests you.”

              Stephen let his back hit against the creaking conference room chair. “Why so much? It’s over-kill to spend billions on a covert operation of this magnitude when a smaller one with a squad could get the job done.”

              The General spoke. “We’ve tried small operations, big operations, and negotiations. They’ve got their leader sealed away behind half of the guerillas on a moving convoy that’s never further than twenty minutes from a village, and yet we can’t find them. We need something so decisive that the Americas will be seen as the protector of the good in the world again, even if we are only trying to save face.”

              Major Howard looked keenly at the General for a second before letting his tried patience into his voice. “Our priority is our own people. After that, you’re right. The perched officers expect positives across the board from something this expensive. Get in, get who we need, dispense with the bad ones, and bring every soldier out there to loving arms and apple pie. You’d be authorized to use any and all means. Your record states you’re not into torture. You may need to change that stance.”

              “You don’t see too many total green lights today.”

              “More now than ever before actually. Priorities change in desperate times. Everything seems less cloudy, ideas sharpen into mountains above the fog, and we all learn what we’re willing to do for them. The problem comes when priorities differ. Then, well, then it’s almost never a good idea to be in power. When you start telling people what their priorities should be, you eventually create a chasm where people choose sides. In the end, everyone’s on their own side when they have a nickel in their name and weights on their shoulders.”

              The Major looked skeptically again towards the General. “The point is that our priorities
are
the same. The only question is how far you’ll be willing to go for it. We think you’ll go as far as we, as a country, need you to go. Will you?”

              “Have you tested the suit?”

              The duo across from him exchanged another look. “Follow us.”

              They eagerly stood, leaving nothing to change the blatant disregard for Stephen’s question as he stood, straightening his colors before following slowly. He couldn’t imagine the weight their old backs held with their incredibly decorated fronts. Everything from bravery to leadership was etched into tiny, chesty medals that did nothing but ache their backs and offer a deeper well into the inky secrets of democracy. ‘My knowledge eclipses theirs without all the fancy bottle caps on my chest.’