A Once Crowded Sky (10 page)

“Attack—they’ve come—attack—he—back—all of us.”

“What attack? What are—what are you saying?”

Another screech of static.

“Hello? Hello? What attack? What attack? Who—who’s—what attack?”

The line goes dead, and Anna drops the phone, smashing it on the floor, sending a flurry of electrical components skidding across the kitchen. Ignoring it all, she sprints to the living room, tries to figure out where her husband left the remote for the TV. A sudden cavity in her
chest. Pen shouldn’t be involved in any attacks. He doesn’t do that anymore.

Her hands—as they move around the room, her hands, displacing cushions and blankets left in odd positions, left by Pen in the oddest of positions. The ring scratching at her hands. How many times has she told him to clean this damn room.

She finds a shirt buried in the couch, left over from an impromptu tryst, and it smells like him, sweet and stale. When he gets home, she’s going to yell at him about leaving this here. He just needs to think about these things when he leaves a room; it’s not so hard. He can learn that. When he gets home.

Despite her efforts, the search is futile: she finally concedes she’s lost, and she hopes that next time, beautiful and lovely and predictable next time, he’ll get it right.

Anna kneels down in front of the TV, begs the cable box to turn on, pressing randomly at a scattering of never-used buttons at the base of this cruel machine. God, she detests this monstrosity, all the knobs and wires that correspond to nothing and won’t do anything. If she could, she’d pick the whole thing up and throw it off the balcony of their apartment, watch it shrink away as it spun into space. If she had powers, that’s what she’d do.

Finally, some mysterious permutation activates the screen. Of course, Pen left the thing turned up to a typically unreasonable level. How many times does she have to tell him to turn the damn thing down before he leaves the room? She means to reach for the volume, but her hand is unwilling, and she leaves it as it is.

On the TV, on a channel that should be showing reruns of some asinine courtroom show, there’s an overhead shot of a window burning. The view switches: shots of men and women, their faces mudded red-brown from cuts and bruises, fleeing from something, but not all in the same direction. Anna reaches out; the static of the TV buzzes at the tips of her fingers as she glides her hands over the crowd and demands that each of them be a stranger.

Some announcer she doesn’t recognize repeats the same familiar phrases over and over. The words
terrorist
and
cause
and
unexpected
come and go, but she’s not really paying attention anymore. At one point he
says something about heroes, but she’s not sure if he’s referring to the game kind or to the firemen or to something else.

He lost his phone. That’s why I got the call. That stupid boy. He left his phone at the funeral. That’s so like him. And he never went back and got it. So he had hers; she lent it to him. Which means she can’t call him from her cell, because he has it. That stupid, dumbass boy.

She returns to the kitchen and finds the shattered pieces of their portable on the floor, the back open, the battery missing. They need to get another landline, but they’re waiting until they’ve got a bigger place. They’re always waiting. She keeps telling him—

She drops to her hands and knees, the hard floor biting at her joints through the small cushion of her sweatpants. It’s not there. Where the hell is it? Where the hell—after placing her ear against the ground, she spies the battery under the cabinet, and she squeezes her fingers into the tight space to reach it. At her touch, it jumps and scoots farther back.

Why’d they get these cabinets? Why? They could’ve gotten ones that fit better. But he insisted they’d save money this way. He insisted. Jesus Christ! He could—Jesus Christ! Now she can barely make out the outline of the damn battery in the stupid shadow haunting the bottom of her too too small, too fucking small kitchen!

Her husband can dodge bullets. Though she has her doubts, he claims he could put his fist through a wall and not feel a thing. Before he could drive a car, he was bounding through the air, steering a slit of metal through the clouds of Arcadia, his hand clutching a metal bar attached by a metal rope to a metal man who’d saved the world countless times.

She asked him once—in the beginning, when they wouldn’t even call what they were doing “dating”—if he was ever scared. “No,” he said, “not once,” and then he was quiet.

And she knew it was bravado. She knew he had to cover up the fear with something thick in order to do what he had to do; but that was enough for her. He didn’t have to say everything—some of it she could figure out on her own.

Her thumb and forefinger pinch in, seizing the sides of the battery. Not breathing, she tenderly places a speck more force on the object and begins to drag her arm backward. It moves, just a hair or two, but it moves.

Finally, she fits both arms in, brackets her fingers on each of the
battery’s sides; with that slight illusion of a grip, she starts to slide the cruel thing out of the gap. As it comes, she whispers to it, coaxes it forward. There’s no one around to hear her, and she tells it some secrets about how she worries sometimes and sometimes she needs to know.

The battery listens and kindly cooperates by slithering out to the open. She picks it off the floor, but in her rush it slips from her hands and, only by the grace of God, lands in an easily accessible spot in the middle of the floor. With as much calm as she can possibly be expected to fucking muster, she picks the goddamn thing up one more time and shoves it into the back of the phone, clicks on the back covering, and finally dials his number.

She can still hear the steady man on the TV pacing through his commentary about heroes. While the phone tries to connect, he meanders on about what it’s like to live in a world where flying men with metal faces can no longer respond to such tragedies. What a tragedy that is.

“Hey, this is Pen, leave me a message. I guess.” The voice mail from the lost phone, of course, and she hangs up, again swears openly, and dials her own cell number. Stupid boys. They can’t do anything without—

Yes, the narrator on the TV opines, where are the heroes of today? Where have they all gone?

2

Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #569

Pen’s phone rings. Well, thank God.

“Hey, your phone’s going off.”

“Yeah,” Pen says to the short, fat, and pale man sitting across the table from him who happens to be sporting lifts, a girdle, and a splotched spray-on tan, “I noticed.”

“Mine drops the Superman hook, like when it rings, right?”

Pen nods and smiles, mouthing the words,
One sec,
as he puts the phone to his ear. He also just barely manages to resist shoving a fork in Sicko’s sweetly open jugular. For now.

“Hello,” Pen says.

“Hey, man, you up in comics?” Sicko asks. “You read the comics, man?”

“Honey? Honey?” Anna’s voice on the phone. “Penny, that you? Are you okay? Is—are you all right? Just tell me you’re all right.”

“Annie, honey? You okay? I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” Not quite true, but his wife’s tone prevents him from talking about the
leech-infested swamp of a lunch he’s been wading through with this, thankfully, former “edgy” gamer.

“Dude, I crush comics,” Sicko says. “All them people, all them powers. Just like the day, bro, like the mad-ass day.”

“Good, good,” Anna says. “It’s nothing. I was worried because what, y’know, with the TV thing. It’s stupid, I’m sorry. I know you’re in the middle of your lunch, I can call later.”

Sicko keeps piping on about his comics, and Pen again judiciously decides not to murder him. “. . . and I’m reading this one, man, about like Wolverine, and he’s back in time like fighting with Jason and the Argonauts, yo, but with powers . . .” Very judiciously, because he could just reach out and—

“Honey, you there?”

“Oh, yeah,” Pen says. “Sorry, just—what’d you say? What TV thing?”

“. . . and they’re on this ship, right, and they’re fighting, right, like with gods and shit . . .”

“Honey, are you okay?” Anna’s harsh tone: she knows he’s not paying attention. At times he regrets finding an omniscient wife. “Aren’t you seeing this, it’s on every station? There’s been some sort of explosion, I guess, at Arcadia General. They think it’s a terrorist attack. It’s on every channel, and Prophetier called and asked me about you.”

“Prophetier called?”

“. . . and Wolverine’s like
snikt
! And the other dude’s like . . .”

“Oh, so what? Now you’re listening?”

“. . . and this other dude just whacks him! It’s real, I mean really real . . .”

“Hey, wait, that’s not fair, honey.”

“Jesus,” Anna says. “I think he was calling from—I don’t know. I’m glad you’re okay. I thought you were there too.”

“. . . dude, it’s awesome, art’s awesome, story’s awesome . . .”

“I’m fine,” Pen says. “What did Proph say? Did he want me to do something?”

Sicko, loudly: “But, dude, seriously, you’ve got to read this one!”

“I don’t know,” Anna says, her voice breaking softly. “He sounded, I don’t know, like something—look just forget that, just stay safe, okay?”

“Hon, I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m safe. I’m always safe.”

“Okay, okay—I’m sorry. I’ll let you go back, back to your—I’m sorry. Just be careful.”

“Hon, it’s fine.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Anna takes a breath, swallows back tears. “How’s it going anyway? How’s lunch?”

“It’s okay.”

“. . . know people think it’s for kids, but, dude, comics are a genre not a—no, I mean, they’re a medium, not a . . .”

“Okay?”

“We’re talking comics, I guess, or something.”

“. . . and super-Jason’s like with a sword, but like a fire . . .”

“That well, huh?” Of course she knows.

“It’s fine,” Pen says.

“Okay.” She laughs. “Love you then, okay?”

“God, I couldn’t love you more.”

After a final “Stay safe,” she hangs up.

Pen puts his phone away. Undisturbed and likely unaware of the interruption, Sicko continues to babble on about all the wonderful, incomprehensible characters who occupy his, what must be infinite, free time.

This is Prophetier’s fault. He said this guy was having some problems losing his once so-sweet abilities and needed to talk to Pen because Sicko apparently admired Pen for some unfathomable reason. So Prophetier’ll have to die too. Obviously.

“That was my wife,” Pen says. “She—something about a terrorist thing on the news. I’m going to check it out, just give me a sec.” Without waiting for a reply, Pen retreats to the bar, thanking the gods for small favors, though he does note, because he’s a good guy and all, he’d appreciate if terrorists weren’t involved next time.

A gaggle of patrons has gathered at the front of the restaurant and is staring at the images on a mounted TV. They’re silent, and they appear to be smoking and drinking only as afterthoughts, as if their bodies hadn’t decided to stop, though their minds had already moved on.

Pen joins the crowd, looks up at the TV. The images are terrible, and like most things terrible, they’re familiar. Fire and debris weaved between inert, blackened sticks, which are not certainly—but are most likely—what remains of the hospital’s patients. Occasionally, the announcers cut to scenes of a scattering of white buildings on an old, idyllic
farm just a few miles outside of town. They inform their audience that the facility was converted to a high-end hospital to house celebrities and other rich clients only two years ago. Six months back, the building began to specialize in treating so-called Game Players suffering from the traumatic effects of surrendering their powers.

Pen doesn’t bother to tell the crowd that their info’s wrong. They used to treat us before that; there’s a snack machine on the fourth floor where you can get, like, those old-time candy bars. There was a nurse there. A nice nurse. She loved basketball, but only college. She thought the pros were fixed.

The training takes over as it always does. The repeating images on the TV are already stored in the deep parts of his mind where the wires tangle-pulse. From the patterned chaos, he understands the origin of the attack: he knows how long it took, how much resistance was offered, where the emergency crews set up, where they should’ve set up, and on and on and on and on . . .

A girl with red hair is being interviewed by some intrepid reporter who’s talked his way into the medical tents. Pen recognizes her, but can’t decide from where. The girl’s going on about the heroic acts of one of her buddies or something, and in the background there’s something else terrible-familiar: a friend.

“Dude, Big Bear, right? Damn, dude looks messed up, yo.” Because the wires’ve already been activated, Pen knows, before looking, the exact brand of cigarettes Sicko’s about to light up beside him. “Shit, what happened, man?”