I woke up in a cold sweat that morning. A headache pounding from shitty sleep. I had dreamt the same dream I’d dreamt in the hospital. The same dream I’d been dreaming since it happened.
Two faces looked up at me. Begging me.
Ethan. Jasmine. Those were their names. I tasted copper in my mouth.
I read the stories already, the eulogies in the local paper, the new mural being painted on the side of the school. Flowers planted, they browned in the rain.
They were good people. Ordinary folk. Human. That made it worse.
Ethan was the same age as me. He died in that same hallway I did. A shorter kid, quiet, lean with high cheekbones and a messy mop of black hair. He was new to town too, like me. Loved art apparently. His sketchbook is a memorial piece in the art building; pages filled with still sketches of everyday observations.
I opened my eyes; it didn’t stop me from visualizing his death. Freezing up in that hallway, all doe-eyed deer-in-the-headlights. Fuck.
Jasmine was two years older than me. She was a good person, a genuinely good person, someone who stayed good despite probably being bullied. She volunteered at a local soup kitchen on the weekends. Tall, gangly, and geeky looking, with braces and thick-lensed glasses, she was a band and theatre kid. Would’ve graduated this year and probably gone to Berklee or Juilliard or something. Done something with herself. Art.
They were both artists, Ethan and Jasmine. Artists create. I destroy.
I closed my eyes. I saw her death in the dark. She died hugging a random freshman. Someone she never knew, never met before. A kid just fresh out of eighth grade. Adam. I read his account in the local paper and tried to forget it afterwards.
Downstairs smelt like laundry detergent. Clean. I didn’t like it; it reminded me too much of that industrial cleaner scent I’d smelled when I hit the ground.
Mom was already up, at the table, a plate of eggs and toast in front of her. She smiled when she saw me. It looked forced, trained, like a hairline crack on a stained-glass window.
“Morning, hero” she said before she could stop herself. I flinched. Tried to breathe like nothing in my skull wanted to explode.
“Don’t.” I meant for the word to be soft. It shot out of my mouth instead.
“Alex,” she said, voice small. “Someone from the station called, they want to book you for- “.
“No.” I said, cutting her off. The grip I had on my fork tightened, I remembered the first law, and set it down on the table. “I’m not going. I didn’t fucking do anything!” I regretted the words that choked out of my soul as soon as they left my mouth.
Tension coiled itself in the air, thick and static, like standing near a bolt of lightning.
Mom froze at the table, her hand holding a fork hovering above the eggs. The room smelled too clean, the detergent stinging at my sinuses, making me gag on the memory of the school floor. I could still feel the metallic tang of my own blood in my mouth, the warmth of that primal fear.
I shoved my chair back, the scrape against the tile loud in the morning quiet. My chest felt tight, my skull pounding with the weight of everything I couldn’t say. Everything I couldn’t undo.
I needed to get out. I needed to move. The weight of my words closed in on me, pressing against my throat, suffocating it. A thousand-and-one eyes stared at me. I grabbed my hoodie from the back of the chair, yanked it on wordlessly, and walked.
Mom tried to say something. It didn’t register in my head. It didn’t click. The front door slammed behind me, too loud, too harsh.
Fresh air hit my throat like a menthol cigarette, sharp and unrelenting. My lungs struggled for rhythm, my legs aching from the sudden burst of adrenaline that had nothing to do with running late.
I had nowhere to go, but nowhere was preferable to home right now. So, I ran, like the coward I was, unable to confront anything. I ran far enough to breathe, far enough to think, far enough to pretend that I wasn’t falling apart at the seams and that everything would be okay.
Far enough to where I was just Alex.
I ended up downtown before I knew it. The city of the City-Townopia’s name. A wretched hive of scum and villainy to quote Obi-Wan
I wondered if it was due to the name. I mean, you can't just name a place City-Townopia and expect every City-Townopian to be a functioning member of society. My head hurt from thinking about the sociological implications of naming a civilization “City-Townopia”. When in doubt, I blamed Steve.
Downtown was actually quite decent and relatively clean. The further out from the center you went the worse things got. I remembered the drive over here from the airport, and how jarring it was to go from broken windows and tagged streets where angels dare not tread, to reinforced bus stops, and “titan-resistant” buildings holding offices and small chic-y storefronts.
Officially there wasn’t any evidence of any corruption. Unofficially you could sense something was amiss.
I was lucky I lived in a relatively nice suburb near the center of town. Close to downtown and filled with mostly old people. Dad’s life insurance payout had bought it. Briefly, I wondered what things would’ve been like if he was still around.
For all its faults, I missed Texas.
I didn’t let the thought weigh on my mind too deeply. I couldn’t let memories engrain themselves into my psyche. The past was the past no matter how much I wished I could change it. I told myself that, it was another tidbit of advice I’d probably give out to someone while being unable to accept it for myself.
Lost in my thoughts, it took me a moment for my brain to play catch-up and realize the adrenaline had worn off. Sore legs and a renewed headache begged me to rest. I listened, taking a moment to commit illegal loitering and sit on a stoop.
I sat until my legs had stopped twitching, observing the sights City-Townopia had to offer. There was a pigeon arguing with a soda can. A busker playing the same few notes on repeat creating a soundtrack for this cinematic moment. People walked by, I sat. They had earbuds in or held coffee or their phones, going to work or college or wherever people went. I sat and stared.
I sat there, in this pseudo-Buddhist zen state of disassociated observation until sirens brought me back to reality.
I watched as people casually started to scan the rooftops. Sometimes masks, the more responsible ones, would battle it out on top of buildings rather than in the streets to avoid unnecessary damage.
City-Townopia had one of the highest rates of superhuman crime. Mostly small-timers committing theft. Druggies like Space Out or Guitar Dude, assholes who would’ve led an uneventful life, probably dying of an overdose, had they not been superhuman. Occasionally you’d hear about gangs though. There were a few that came to mind, the Porch Pirates being the most prominent. They were, as the name implied, primarily package thieves supported by some techie in a souped-up white van.
Mentally, I’d chalked up high crime rates as another consequence of naming a place “City-Townopia”.
The sirens getting closer broke me out of my thoughts again. Something was off. The crowd moved in one direction, traffic hastening in the other. The busker stopped mid-note. The pigeon had ended its intense geopolitical debate with the can and flew off. Clever girl, that probably should’ve been my sign to do the same.
A gut feeling, something deep, and primal rumbled. This wasn’t my problem. None of it was. But the feeling sat there in my gut, creeping up my throat, and I ignored the aching of my legs and stood up, moving at the very edge of the crowd.
Curiosity killed the cat.
I smelled him before I saw him. All of us did. A sweet, indulgent, borderline hedonistic scent pierced my nostrils. Like sex and cotton candy scarred by bleach, burning my lungs as a thick multicolored fog swept over the streets.
My vision fractured.
The world melted sideways, upside down, reflected, and then right ways up. Asphalt bled into the sky, stretching itself impossibly, standing taller than God and rippling like the ocean.
Every noise in the crowd broke into twenty different tones. Laughter, screaming, sobbing, static, all at once.
Deeper in the fog, in front of me, a well-dressed man tried desperately to claw his own face off, sobbing all the while. Next to him, a woman violently seized, eyes rolled back, mouth frothing.
I saw a six-sided pentagon and my head imploded upon itself. Underwater, drowning, suffocating, twisting, and folding like the world had. Whatever hit my eyes broke, no, deconstructed themselves and re-assembled into a spiraling kaleidoscope.
Pure vertigo, yet I only felt the need to dry heave when I saw them.
Bricks and concrete and steel and glass twisted themselves into faces.
Ethan and Jasmine’s. They stared, not at me, through me.
I stared into the void, and it screamed back.
It screamed at me to do something.
I took a step back, every bone in my body telling me to use what lucidity I still had and run, I stumbled. I stumbled on the body of a kid, a boy probably no older than eight, curled up in the fetal position frothing from the mouth.
I blinked and I saw Ethan, clutching his sketchbook like it was a shield.
I blinked and I saw Jasmine, curled up around Adam.
I blinked and I saw myself, dead, blood pouring out of a bullet-hole in my skull.
Kill or be killed.
The weight of death bore itself upon my shoulders.
I could feel blood run down where the bullet shot me. I could see blood pour out of where the bullet had hit me in the head. I could taste blood in the back of my throat; iron.
The primal iron in my body burned white-hot.
I couldn’t run anymore. I knew that, yet I’d refused to accept it. I didn’t want to be a Mask. Not like this. No, but as the fog drew closer and sirens were drowned out by screams. I knew that there was no other option. I had a power, a fucked-up-sick-cosmic-joke-instant-murder-charge of a power, but it was still something.
I couldn’t be a bystander.
I had to act.
That was the moment I knew any hope of Alex Carter living a life of normalcy had died. I’d seen the body already. It takes pressure to turn coal into a diamond. Someone else was born.
“Fuckin awesome” a voice slurred out.
My head whipped up so sharply it nearly gave me whiplash.
A tall, thin, long-armed, lanky man in a mismatched tie-dyed suit, with gaunt cheeks, a crooked nose, and bright blue shaggy hair put his wet, sticky, sweaty hand into the mouth of the sobbing businessman I’d seen earlier.
The man instantly fell over, head hitting concrete. Violent convulsions and a frothing mouth letting me know that the fall hadn’t killed him.
Space Out squatted down casually, and began to rifle through the seizing man’s pockets.
My body acted before my mind did, taking advantage of the opportunity that had presented itself to me. My left-hand dove into the pocket of my jeans, shaking fingers wrapping themselves around a loose coin.
I took a moment to breathe, to remind myself, to steady my hand. Then, I fired.
A sonic boom erupted out of my hand, the shockwave visible in the air for a moment. The coin became a blur, launching itself with that primal sense of white-iron fury I’d kept inside of me for too long. It shot out, missing his head by mere centimeters, leaving a hole through a car and embedding itself into the concrete of a building.
I took a breath and it didn’t burn my lungs. The fog lessened for a second. Space Out whipped his head at nearly the same whiplash-inducing speed when I’d turned towards him.
“Holy fuck”, he sounded surprisingly sober for a junkie. Maybe it’d clicked that he’d nearly lost his head and he’d been scared sober.
Maniacal laughter derailed that train of thought.
The fog intensified upon itself tenfold, pouring out of his body like a fog machine, and rolling through the air in waves like a sea at storm.
He laughed and it sounded wrong. It doubled, halved, tripled, bounced between buildings and ricocheted into my eardrums. He dragged his hand into the air as the world devolved into static.
The fog rippled, colors bending like an oil spill on water.
I blinked to give myself a millisecond of relief, and suddenly there were three of him. One standing tall, one fading-in-and-out, and one crawling backwards like a crab. They smiled at me, a manic grin, before blowing out another cloud of fog.
The smell hit me again. The caustic-candy-sex-rot. It hit me harder this time, sharp enough against my nostrils to cut through thought. I gagged and tasted iron. I realized I’d bit my own tongue.
“Hey buddy!”, one shouted, or maybe all three did. The world split itself in half midair, warped into laughter and screams and someone shouting my name.
I couldn’t fumble through my pocket to get another coin quick enough before they all lunged.
I put my index and thumb on the zipper of my hoodie, trying to angle it forwards as best as I can.
I fired. Again.
The street folded inwards like paper as the zipper tore through the fog. It ripped through a Space Out, turning him into pink mist. Bile made its way up my throat; my hands went numb.
“Missed me!”
That was my answer.
He was behind me. Or above me. Or maybe I was upside down. The world spun, and I felt his hand graze my neck. Just a touch, enough to make the air shatter.
I was back in that hallway. I saw Ethan. I saw Jasmine. Their mouths opened, but no sound came out. Static and shapes and blood and flesh. My blood spilled out of my forehead again.
I drowned in it.