Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (8 page)

Lennie says quietly, “Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair.” For the first time I wonder what Uncle Lennie might’ve done, who he might’ve become, if he hadn’t been captain of the Phantom Ship before me. He’s been running the Sea Star for as long as I’ve been alive. I’d never considered that maybe, when he was younger, he might’ve wanted to do something else with his life. I look down the street to the front door of the Arcade, where Calvin Gallant and his little sister are eating ice cream cones on the sidewalk, and I realize that I can’t imagine being anything other than what I am.

I put my hand on Uncle Lennie’s, understanding why he stayed, why I’ll stay. “Islanders help each other out. That’s just the way we do things here.”

Red soil stains my fingertips. Out on the ocean, for just an instant, I catch a glimpse of an old-fashioned three-masted schooner. She waits for me, my Phantom Ship, and I know the Island is where I belong.

* * *

Mary Pletsch and Dylan Blacquiere live in New Brunswick, where they share their home with books, comics, and four cats.

Blunt Instruments

Geoff Hart

The voices whisper incessantly in my ears: news of the world, patriotic slogans, occasionally old comedy routines. Sometimes there are the sex dreams. Those hurt; I wish I knew who I was cavorting with, or even whether they were dreams or memories. Whatever drugs they’re giving me make it impossible to distinguish the two. I don’t know who I am, don’t even know my name. I have a strong sense of a life before this, but it’s there by inference, like the empty socket left behind after a tooth has been pulled. I have a sense of gratitude to those who feed me through tubes and who keep me here, safe and knowing that someday I’ll be useful again. I remember newsreel images of starving Biafrans, napalm strikes on jungle, other horrors. Here, they promise me, I’m useful and a guardian of everything we hold dear against The Forces of Evil. (Yeah, I hear the capital letters.)

* * *

Then there are the awakenings: my eyes open, my body still damp, and I slowly focus on the circle of flickering fluorescent light, and the voice of my handler, no longer filtered through water.

There follow what could be called “battles.” Not pitched fights with dozens of men on each side firing guns at each other, but epic knockdowns between various titans. I hear bits and snatches from the Special Forces troops who sit opposite me in the chopper, casting scared glances my way when they think I’m not looking. Because of my impenetrable hide, they wake me to fight the energy villains: those who’ve mastered electricity, electromagnetism, sunlight, plasma, dark energy, nuclear power— even photosynthesis. Some are geniuses, some not so much (even by my standards), but it always goes down the same way. They drop me from the chopper, we size each other up, and then we set to whaling on each other until one of us can’t take anymore. Usually the perp; it takes a lot less energy for me to stand there and grin and take a beating than it takes them to exert every last scrap energy, hoping they’ll blow me away or blast me into tiny bits.

Nobody’s blasted me into tiny bits, but I hurt for days afterwards. Maybe it could happen, though. I don’t take anything for granted, least of all survival.

Sometimes they give me the killer robots, giant critters, and other things best handled by a good pummelling. I hear hints they have others who specialize in other types of perps. I’ve seen the wombs they keep us in, but never the residents. Guess they figure it wouldn’t be a great idea to let us compare notes. Sometimes I have to fight two or more perps simultaneously. Three or four is worst, particularly when one of them’s like me and can take a pounding, while their buds nip at my heels, trying to bring me down so the big guy can step on my throat.

When the smiting’s done, I either hand them the cuffs and convince them to do the smart thing, or beat on them again until they stop moving, then snap on the cuffs myself. I don’t
think
I’ve ever killed anyone, but I undoubtedly came close a couple or three times, and my handlers are always quick to reassure me that a loss here and there would be acceptable. We’re the good guys, they remind me, and if the bad guys want to share in our rights, they shouldn’t be bad guys.

* * *

My handlers aren’t stupid— or at least they’ve learned from past stupidities. Since the CN Tower fell, they know enough to drive the perps outside urban areas to minimize the collateral damage. Today, they drop me out of the copter onto a stretch of three-lane highway, just uphill of a soaring cloverleaf, and I see her, standing there, fists clenched, lycra straining against an unlikely bosom. She’s as scared as I am. She probably knows as much about me as I know about her— basically, nothing; they didn’t even give me a sitrep this time, or hint about why I’m supposed to be fighting her.

She gathers balls of energy around her fists and casts them at me, screaming. When they hit, they
hurt
, like the worst sunburn ever. But me and pain are old friends, and my hide keeps the heat from penetrating. My ugly goes skin deep, but it does have its benefits. I ball my own fists and whack the ground, the concussion knocking her off her feet and flinging her back under the overpass, which shakes like a jello sculpture. I pursue, not giving her time to get her feet back under her, and she scuttles backwards like a crab, leaving bloodstains after the first few feet.

“Surrender,” I hiss, knowing I’m wasting my breath.

“
Die
!” she screams in return, and fires another energy blast past my head. As I look up to see the source of the rumbling, she lashes out with a kick that takes one leg out from under me, and uses the recoil to push herself into a shoulder roll and back onto her feet. She fights smart. I lose track of her then because I’m on my back watching tons of pre-stressed concrete fall toward my face in slow-motion. I have enough time to cover my eyes with my arms before the weight of the world lands on me, crushing the breath from my lungs.

Lucky for me, I’ve been here before; it’s an old supervillain gimmick, and something of a cliché— for the good reason that it works so well. All those sessions pumping iron pay off; I squirm onto my stomach, gather my knees beneath me, arch my back, and shed all that weight with one mighty heave. Then I wipe the grit from my eyes and look around for my foe.

I said she’s smart; she hasn’t waited around to see if she finished me off. She’s not flying, but she’s skipping so high with each jump, energy glowing around her feet, that she makes an easy target. I pick up a chunk of rubble the size of my fist, judge the apex of her leap, and fling it. It catches her in mid-skip, and she goes down in a tangle of arms and legs that doesn’t bode well for her future spinal health. I lope up to her, and it’s only then I notice the cameramen in black body armor, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. I ignore them, and when I get to her, she’s lying with one leg beneath her at an angle that makes me wince. Bone sits at an unnatural angle in one forearm, but it’s not protruding. “Just” a nasty compound fracture. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.

I kneel beside her. “Surrender.
Please
! I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

“
Fascist!
” she spits at me, and the spittle runs down my face. But there are tears in her eyes, leaving tracks through the blood smears on her face, and there’s pain and humiliation in her eyes, and she gathers what remains of her strength, and energy begins forming around the fist of her remaining usable hand…

One of the camera men shouts something.

“What did you say?” I ask, disbelieving.

“Pound her to hamburger, you fucking monster!”

I look back at her and something changes in her eyes. Presumably she sees what’s writ large across my face. When I’m done strewing the two men across the landscape and the stench of cordite is drifting away on a light breeze, I turn back to her. “This is going to hurt,” I warn her. She grits her teeth and closes her eyes, and I carefully grip her arm, not wanting to do any more damage with these fingers, thick as her wrist. I pull gently until the bone pops back in place, and splint it there with the still-hot barrel from one of the dismembered rifles and strips of cloth torn from a uniform. Though blood runs from her bitten lip, she makes no sound. She’ll need a doctor, but she won’t lose the arm.

“The leg is going to hurt worse, I’m afraid.” She nods, eyes still closed, and when I pull it out into the correct alignment, feel it click back into place, she sobs. I bind her legs together with a belt from one of the cameramen.

Then her eyes open as we both hear the sound of the chopper. I pick her up in my arms. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I say.

“In a moment,” she replies, and with her good arm gathers one of those energy balls around her fist, and flings it weakly at the chopper.

Then I turn and walk away with her in my arms, greasy smoke rising into the sky behind us.

* * *

Geoff Hart is a scientific editor, technical writer, and translator from Montréal.

Bloodhound

Marcelle Dubé

The smell insinuated itself into Luke Corrigan’s dreams; he turned away from the open window of his bedroom, trying to escape the acrid stink.

Finally he woke up and swung his feet out of bed and sat on the edge, naked and sweating, his heart beating fast. In the war, he’d wake up just like this, convinced that something was in the trench with him. Only once had it been a German. Usually it was just rats.

He reached for the filter on his bedside table, then paused. He needed to figure out what the smell was before putting on the filter.

It was still dark, and the only sound was the loud ticking of the alarm clock by his bedside. Moonlight streamed through the window of the barn loft that was his bedroom, gilding the barrel stove against one wall, washing the rough pine planks of the floor in pale light, and bouncing off the old, warped mirror above the chest of drawers, where he kept the flowered porcelain pitcher and bowl for shaving.

The smell teased him, first appearing, then disappearing, leaving only the ancient smells of hay, manure, and horses filtering up through the floorboards of the loft, along with the more recent smells of gasoline and grease from the little repair shop he had set up in the far corner of the barn.

He wrinkled his nose and took a deep breath. Some smells grew bright and sharp when he did that. Not this time. Whatever it was, it wasn’t near. Still, something about it was familiar enough to raise his hackles.

He pushed the tangled sheet away and stood up to pad over to the window. The hot Manitoba night filled his room. Filled the valley with dust and parched crops and small dead things lying by dried-up waterholes. Even the crickets didn’t have the heart to chirp. His back was damp from the sheets, and he could smell the sweat on his scalp.

Harriet MacNeil’s farm stood middle-of-the-night quiet, with a half-moon and a wash of diamond stars beaming down on the seared fields beyond her farmhouse. Nothing moved.

Breathing shallowly, he turned his head one way, then the other, trying to make sense of what he was smelling. Dry earth thirsty for rain. Boulders gradually releasing their warmed stone smell. The faint whiff of a coyote that had passed by a few hours ago.

Other smells were so prevalent that he only noticed them by their absence: Rex, the MacNeils’s dog, whose smell was as much a part of the scent landscape as the smell of the maple trees in the farmyard; the faint, gagging smell of Jamison’s pig farm three miles upwind; the ever-present perfume of a wild grass that he had yet to identify but had come to call “sweet hay,” which was what Allie, Missus MacNeil’s granddaughter, called it. He had moved into the loft above the empty barn in February, where he near froze to death before he figured out the wood stove, and even then the smell of sweet hay had lingered.

And now, underneath them all, the ghost stink of death riding the wind.

He stuck his head out the window and looked in the direction of the pig farm. There, on the horizon, was a long, glowing snake that seemed to leap toward him even as he watched.

* * *

Harriet MacNeil woke from a deep sleep to the sound of her name. Allie? Then the voice penetrated her sleep-befuddled awareness. Luke. Her strange tenant.

She sat up suddenly, clutching the threadbare cotton sheet to her chest, and the old iron bed that had belonged to her parents squeaked beneath her bulk. What was Luke Corrigan doing in her bedroom?

He was a dark figure standing by her bedside. Rex stood next to him, whining a little.

“What is it?” she asked, automatically looking to the window, but there was no glow of fire, her ever-present fear, especially now, in this drought. The farmhouse had been built in 1912, after the original one burned down, but the barn was even older.

“Fire,” said Luke. “You have to take your granddaughter and get away from the farm.”

“What?” She pushed the sheet off and climbed out of bed, despite the fact that she wore only her cotton nightgown. At sixty-three, after bearing six children and losing two husbands, one to a horse’s hooves and one to influenza, not to mention struggling to keep herself and Allie afloat, she had outgrown any idea of modesty. Luke stepped back, giving her room to go to the window. Rex followed her, and leaned against her when she stopped. The Lab was getting on in years, too.

Even the linoleum beneath her feet felt hot and sticky. After a moment, she turned back to her tenant.

“Have you been drinking?” She wouldn’t have thought it of him, but a lot of the men who came back from the front had taken to drink. Not that she blamed them. Buchenwald and Dachau… who could live with the things these young men had seen?

Luke Corrigan had been lucky, in a way. A piece of shrapnel had injured him, sending him home months before the war’s end, and leaving him with an ugly pink scar peeking through his short brown hair, just above his left temple. But at least he had his life, and all his limbs.

“No, ma’am,” said Luke calmly. “I saw it from the window in the loft. You need to take Allie and Rex, and head for Souris. You need to get across the river.”