A Once Crowded Sky (38 page)

Pen tucks in his knees, leans forward, squats, and bounds to his feet, swiveling in the air to face the source of the incoming barrage. Two more jagged squares of concrete spin toward his head. They’re bigger than bullets, but slower, and he calculates their movement and speed, arching his back around one while leaping over the other. Behind these he sees more coming, and behind those he can make out the silhouette of the man throwing them, his cape now waving in the midday wind.

Pen darts forward, swinging through the obstacle course of detritus clouding the air between him and his target.
Get to the source. Address the cause, not the symptom. Solve the problem, don’t become part of it.
The relentless clichés of his teacher begin to thump through his head as they always
have when the danger peeks in close. He can’t shut them out. He knows. He’s tried.

Feet from the man now, Pen takes to the air. His legs are strong, and he covers the distance well, his body extended, his arms stretched out. A final rock zips toward his head, but he’s able to block it with his elbow, and white dust from the impact puffs into the air around him.

Pen’s fingers touch the giving fabric of the man’s spandex costume, and he wraps his hand around the massive, solid shoulder. And Ultimate begins to fly, his former sidekick draped around his metal body. Both men rise.

2

Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #583

He’d have gone all the way up. Ultimate would’ve used his classic move of forcing a fight into the outer atmosphere, where Ultimate’s lack of dependency on oxygen and mild temperatures gives him an advantage over more flesh-based opponents. But as they were pulling away from the diner, nearing the clouds, Pen released his grip and somersaulted back down, hitting the ceiling of the diner with a painful and predictable thud.

His limbs strewn in a number of awkward directions, Pen calculates he has less than two seconds to react, but he’s wrong. Ultimate is there in under one, sweeping his flying body into Pen. It’s an old tactic, and Pen pivots sideways with the blow, allowing the metal man to swish past him at incredible speed, Ultimate’s fingers only lightly grazing the young man’s torso, but even with that minor touch leaving trenched, blue bruises on the surface of the skin.

With so much momentum built up, Ultimate can’t stop himself from bashing into the taller building beside the diner. Red bricks rain
around his head, but he easily wipes them aside as he emerges from the wreckage, ready again to go at his young ward.

Ultimate charges, his hands outstretched, and just as he reaches the kid, Pen leaps, flips forward and over the massive metal figure, again dodging a blow that would easily have cracked every bone in his sternum. Ultimate controls the thrust of his attack this time, stopping a few feet behind his intended target, the heels of his feet grinding into the dense concrete ceiling.

Jokes come to Pen out of habit, little throwaway lines he’d have been spouting if this were another day, another opponent, something completely normal. The repeating theme of an outraged bull pummeling down upon a cocky matador seems to play a role in many of the quips, a sort of cartoonish retelling of this dire confrontation. That’s the way he used to do it, punning and prattling his way through battles where at any moment the villain might not accept the levity of the situation and could quite possibly use his Hyper-Gorilla-Strength to gouge in Pen’s eye and crush Pen’s head.

Now though, Pen stays quiet, focused instead on the in-and-out whirl and click of his opponent’s pupils, a sign Pen recognizes of Ultimate assessing weakness, planning action.

Ultimate lunges at him again, faster this time, and again Pen leaps. Like the last time and the time before, Ultimate sprays harmlessly by, and Pen begins to descend, relieved to have survived another round. Only as Pen’s shoes touch the roof does he notice the adjustment his opponent’s made, the anticipation of Pen’s defense.

Ultimate had cracked the ceiling with his powerful steps, renting the concrete on which Pen meant to make his soft landing. As Pen’s feet come down they plunge through the crumbling structure.

Pen falls. Seventeen feet below, his back plows into a glass counter still supporting a few unserved meals. The glass beneath him shatters, and for a moment he’s bathed in its white shards as he drops another few feet to the floor below. All the while he’s focused upward on the hole above him and the man peering down, the metal face dim against the underlit sky.

There’s pain. There’s always pain. But there’s always been pain and there’ll always be more. Pen lumps it to the side, as if it were nothing, as if it could be ignored.

Ultimate leaps down, and Pen rolls to the right, barely dodging the heavy crunch of the boots that burrow into the diner’s foundation, trembling the earth around them. Ultimate swings his distended fists downward, and Pen twists into a handstand, flipping himself upright, threading himself between his mentor’s frantic arms, rolling away as Ultimate’s hands sink into the tile below.

The whirl and click. Metal hands and metal limbs lurch toward him, and there’s the old whirl and click, and it’s the same old noise he remembers from his youth, and it’s the same old noise he still hears under his own skin, and it’s the same old Ultimate thrusting his massive fists into Pen’s head.

Pen arches backward, and the first fist misses by inches; he can feel the dusty air between the knuckles and his chin blow backward onto his face, the concrete particles settling in his half-shaved neck. The second fist comes behind the first, and Pen’s not quick enough, and he takes the brunt of the blow on his right temple.

He goes black. His knees cave. Then the world blinds bright as the fist seems to lift him, carry him, until he’s flying, just as Ultimate flew, all those years ago.

Pen’s body dives through the air and lands again a moment later, his shoulder crumpling into the ground, his head bobbing back and forth, first into the hardness below, then up, then back again. His elbow belts into the linoleum, leaving a dent, and his hands flail about, reaching out for anything to help as Ultimate lurks in the air above, coming upon him.

At the tip of a finger he feels the rough corner of a dislodged table-top that’s been separated from its base during the fight. Pen slips his fingers underneath it, hooks his thumb over its slippery side. Not able to contain the moan, his mouth opens and he cries out as he hurls the thing upward, his wired muscles straining, whining, but eventually cooperating.

Above him, the tabletop twirls clumsily through the air until it hides the approaching metal figure. Just for a second. Then a fist rams through the center of the white glass, mashing it to chalk dust.

Pen doesn’t wait for it. He hurts too much to sit around waiting for it. He kicks his legs out and springs to his feet, bolting forward, hoping to duck between the blows, to get to the center of the man and do some damage there.

Go on the offensive, he’d been taught.
Don’t let anyone keep you down,
and he hears Ultimate’s words again even as another fist moves faster than he’d anticipated, slicing up and under Pen’s chin. The bottom of his face seems to rise faster then the top, and the two halves collide, bone against bone, and Pen falls, goes dark, and the wires wake him, force him to stare up at his unstoppable mentor.

This is pointless. How far can you run from a man who can fly? How many blows can you exchange with a man whose skin is made of steel? How much more can you endure than a man who doesn’t feel pain? Pen’s tired of this. Tired of the jutting and squirming away. He squints into the dense air around him. For some reason, he wants to see it coming.

Ultimate steps closer. Another step and closer still; the metal man looms over Pen, reaches down toward Pen’s limp body. Ultimate wraps his fingers around Pen’s neck and lifts him off the floor.

Bang. Click-click. Bang.

The loud crunch of a shotgun. The scrape of metal against metal as the pump jerks, another round cramming into place. The loud crunch of Techno’s shotgun as Jules fires again. A wave of energy blasts into Ultimate’s chest. The metal face whips upright in time for the next round to fling into his cheeks and eyes. Ultimate rears back, releasing his grip on the boy.

The gun seems to have some effect, certainly more than anything Pen’s done. Ultimate staggers back a few steps before bucking forward again, only to be slapped back by another blast that causes him again to teeter on his metallic heels. But it’s not doing enough. The gun seems to have plenty of power, but it has to run out at some point. And Ultimate looks to keep coming, to be able to take the pummeling and resist.

Though he has to know this, Jules doesn’t seem to care. Instead of seeking refuge he scoots up to his target, pumping and pulling, trying to down the man who destroyed his restaurant. The blasts from his gun become the only barrier between Pen and Ultimate, shielding Pen from an inevitable death at the hard hands of his onetime mentor.

But Ultimate soon begins to reclaim his momentum, stepping forward with a staggered but steady pace even as the gun’s energy continues to shiv in and under his steel skin. He seems to understand that the weapon can’t stop him, and he moves now with determination toward his attacker, his hand extended, his fist opening and closing.

Still firing, Jules finally reaches Pen. From this distance, Pen can
hear that he’s shouting. It’s hard to make out, but it’s something about forgiveness and sacrifice and contracts and some other things about this place, that it’s always stood as a good place, a sanctuary of sorts. He asks Ultimate to stop. Pen hears that clear enough.

Above Pen, Ultimate and Jules stand only feet apart, and Jules is still firing. With Ultimate distracted, Pen lunges into his mentor’s legs, wrapping his arms around the stumped ankles. He yanks at them in the hopeless hope that a joint inside the hard skin bursts or breaks.

Ultimate brings his foot down and into Pen’s arm, his boot merging flesh and bone underneath it until it reaches the floor. Pen releases his grip as a scolding agony blasts through him; he cries out, tugging at his pinned limb. How long ago was it? He was the last one. The only hero left. Vomit surges into his mouth, and he gags as Ultimate grinds Pen’s skin and blood into the diner floor.

Bang. Click-click. Bang.

Bang. Click-click. Bang.

Bang. Click-click. Bang.

There’s not much room now between Ultimate and the gun, and the blasts begin to dig out a hole in the great hero’s metal chest. But, really, there’s not much room left now.

“Get away from him!” Jules shouts. “Get away from the boy!” That’s it. His last words are nothing better than that.

Ultimate peers up, cocks his arm, and swats at the old man, almost casually. The back of the open metal hand meets the wrinkled cheek, and Jules’s head snaps to the right much too fast. His body slackens. He crumbles into the floor beside Pen, the trigger of the rifle slipping off his inert finger.

Jules’s head drops a few inches from Pen, and Pen can see Jules’s eyes, grease-brown, the pupils boiling bigger even as the ghosts at their centers retreat away. Pen reaches out his working hand toward the body and lets his fingers fall on the rough, furrowed face.

Though Ultimate finally lifts his boot off Pen’s crushed arm, Pen hardly notices. Instead, his focus is on Jules, on the scars that revolve around Jules’s face, circles descending to the center, draining down into the dead man’s mouth. It reminds him of Soldier, of the scars he’s seen there these past months, and Pen pictures the two men together on the battlefield, shaking hands, growling at the distant boom.

Strong hands grasp Pen’s shoulder and begin to lift him, but still Pen ignores the metal behind him and focuses on the scars of those two men on the field, counting them, letting them recede back into the skin of the men at war, allowing them to open into wounds and bleed again. As Pen rises, his dead arm dangles at his side, bumping against his hip in the slight imbalance of the stance, but he doesn’t care. All he sees are their cuts and bruises, each one drawn on their skin with a sharp instrument, a boy sketching out a history of what has come before, drawing out the lifelines of suffering and triumph, hoping the telling will be enough, that there will be true meaning in simply writing it all down.

Pen is raised up, turned, and he faces Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face, a brilliant shine of liquid poured over his generically handsome features: the confident, sculpted nose, the steady, concave cheeks, the hearted curves of the cleft chin. How different it is from Jules’s, from Soldier’s. How cold and smooth, so that it accepts nothing, not even light. It’s perfect, and in its perfection it conveys nothing. It tells no stories.

Ultimate hugs him closer, and Pen knows his own end is near now too. This. These cold arms, these cold fingers. This here. He has felt his last metal.

He knew Ultimate would come back someday. They all do. No one dies, not really. To gods like Ultimate, death is ever inconclusive, eternally weaker than the powers that forever churn inside them. While everyone else falls into the ground, they linger. They fly.

Maybe Pen’ll come back too after this. Somehow. And then he’ll figure it all out. Pen’ll understand why Ultimate escaped from The Blue only to find him. Only to kill him. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s not at their level, and this’ll be it for PenUltimate. As in all else, maybe Ultimate’s just better than Pen at this game.