Superpowers (24 page)

SATURDAY

Good evening, I'm Dick Datsun. Our top story tonight: the Madison All-Stars have released a statement regarding last week's tragic gas explosion which left area teacher Cheryl Raymond badly burned and homeless along with her husband. The statement was delivered anonymously to this station and others in the area, and reads as follows:

"We whom the media has named the Madison All-Stars deeply regret that our actions escalated a situation and contributed to the injuries suffered by Cheryl Raymond. In the wake of this terrible incident, we plan to take some time to consider our role as crime fighters, and to seek ways to make amends for the hardship our actions have caused."

This statement has fueled speculation that the All-Stars have abandoned their activities as self-appointed guardians of the Madison area, speculation given credence by police reports of increased numbers of assaults and robberies over the past week. An anonymous police source stated that the criminal element has been emboldened by the widespread public outcry against the All-Stars' involvement in last week's tragedy and their apparent disappearance.

Meanwhile, Cheryl Raymond's husband Richard is waging a fight of his own. Prudence Palmeiro has that story. Prudence?

"Dick, Cheryl Raymond teaches at an elementary school here in Madison, and despite the fact that school is out, numerous students and teachers have sent cards and flowers to her here at the hospital. Co-workers say Cheryl is well loved, and her husband Richard would no doubt agree.

"Richard Raymond works in construction, but he hasn't worked since last Thursday. Since that time, he's spent his days at St. Mary's Hospital, where his wife Cheryl is being treated for second- and third-degree burns."

"She's the most important thing in the world to me. Her smile, her laugh . . . I just want to hear her laugh again."

"Richard says he doesn't doubt that the All-Stars acted with the best intentions last Thursday, when their apparent attempt to intercept a stolen vehicle led to the explosion that put his wife in the hospital."

"They saved my life, and Cheryl's. But that explosion wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been there."

"Richard is lobbying local leaders to hold the All-Stars accountable for the accident. So far he's spoken to the mayor and several city council members, and he's hoping to speak to the governor this week. He wants the All-Stars to come forward and take responsibility for what happened."

"I don't hate them, you know, I don't wish anything bad on them. But they need to take off the masks and—they need to come forward and be accountable. Otherwise they're no better than criminals. To take the law in your own hands like they do isn't right. I know they're trying to help, but they have to let the police do their job."

"Richard says he's grateful that the All-Stars saved his life but doesn't understand why they couldn't have done more for his wife."

"Cheryl. . . sh-she's got burns over sixty-five percent of her body. She's hardly been awake, with the drugs and everything. Sometimes I wish they had left me there, saved her instead."

"Richard says the response from city leaders has been mixed, but he plans to keep lobbying for the All-Stars to be brought in to answer to charges of property damage and negligence. Some good news, though, as tonight Cheryl Raymond's condition has been upgraded from critical to serious. Dick?"

TUESDAY

Welcome to Shady Meadows Retirement Community. How can I help you?"

"We're here to see Bert O'Brien," Mary Beth said.

"Are you family?" The woman at the reception desk looked them over. The boys wore suits, the girls their most conservative dresses. "We look like a church group," Caroline had said, and Mary Beth had told her that was the idea.

"Mr. O'Brien is expecting us," Charlie said. "We're here to interview him about his experiences in World War II."

The woman raised an eyebrow. "It must be quite an interview, if it requires four of you."

"It's for a video project," Jack said and hefted a large duffel bag. "I'm the cameraman."

The woman nodded. "I'll call Mr. O'Brien's room, to let him know you're here."

"Thank you." Mary Beth rolled her shoulders, trying to loosen up muscles tightened by two hours of driving. They'd had to rent a car to get them all down here, and hardly a word had been spoken among the five of them.

The lobby had no sharp edges, dirt, or feeling of welcome. No one sat on the sectional couch in the corner between the doors and the reception desk, and it looked like no one ever had. There were paintings of violets and daisies above the couch and on the walls. Mary Beth wondered if anyone ever visited here, or if they simply wheeled in relatives of a certain age, signed papers, and then left. They sent checks and Christmas cards and spoke of taking the kids to visit Aunt Gladys, but never made the trip.

"Mr. O'Brien says he's expecting you." The woman held out a clipboard. "Please sign in here. Visiting hours are until six o'clock. Mr. O'Brien is in room 3282. Take a left down the hallway and follow the signs to the Honeysuckle Wing."

Mary Beth signed her name as Kate Nickelby. "Thank you very much."

The rooms that lined the hallway—Craft Rooms 1, 2, and 3— held quite a few older people, quilting, making papier-mache, working with clay. The place reminded Mary Beth of nothing so much as an elementary school.

"They look like they're having fun," Caroline said.

"Most of them are," said Charlie.

They followed the signs for the Honeysuckle Wing, through a TV lounge where a dozen people in wheelchairs sat watching
Judge Judy.
Some of them wore pajamas and bathrobes. Most stared at Mary Beth and the rest as they passed through. None of them smiled.

"That room was not as happy," Charlie said in a strained voice.

They passed a nurse's station and a small greenhouse and a woman in a nightgown talking to herself as she rocked back and forth in her wheelchair. The walls were yellow above, wainscoting below, and the hall was lined with bulletin boards on the one side, windows on the other. The windows looked out on gardens where residents shuffled along singly or in pairs, some with canes or walkers.

"Did we pass it?" Jack asked.

"No," Caroline said. "It should be around this next bend."

"Feels like we've been walking a long time," Jack said. His skin was still red in spots, but otherwise the burns had almost completely healed.

"If it's been long for us, it must seem like weeks to you," Caroline said.

Room 3282 was around the next bend. Mary Beth knocked on the door.

Harriet answered. "About time you got here," she said.

The room was a pinkish orange color that wasn't exactly offensive but didn't seem entirely soothing either. There wasn't much in the room, just a small sofa, a recliner, a table, and a TV.  To the right, an archway led to another room.

Harriet stalked back into the room and stood leaning against the windowsill, her arms crossed. She shrugged in the direction of the man in the recliner but didn't look at him.

The man glared and clicked his remote to shut off the TV He was a small man, Mary Beth thought, not much larger than herself. He hadn't lost much of his hair, or else he had a really good toupee. Judging by appearances, he spent a lot of time in the recliner; he had a good-size gut on him, and the chair listed to one side as if awaiting the right moment to collapse.

"Come right the fuck in, why don't you?" The man's voice was thick with age and tobacco tar. "Jesus Christ."

Harriet shook her head. "Mr. O'Brien's quite a charmer, as you can see."

"All I said was I didn't know why you sent a Schvarze to tell me you were coming. And she gets all huffy." Bert O'Brien shrugged. "She doesn't like me. No skin off my prick. Shut the door so we can talk."

"Mr. O'Brien," Mary Beth said once Caroline had shut the door, "my name is Mary Beth Layton. This is Charlie Frost, Caroline Bloom, Jack Robinson, and you've already met Harriet Bishop."

"You're the Madison All-Stars," he said. "She tells me you've been all over the news, but I stopped watching the news when Cronkite retired. I don't know the lot of you from Adam, so before you ask any questions I want to know how you found me."

Everyone looked at Mary Beth. "Well, sir, first there were the sightings of an elderly man flying around Milwaukee. I guessed that you might be a veteran, found some mentions of the Yankee Doodle Dandies. After that, a friend helped me cross-reference a database of surviving World War II veterans with residents who moved into assisted living facilities in early 1995."

"Jesus. What are you, a detective?"

"No, sir. I'm just very determined."

"What if I'm not the guy?"

"You are," Charlie said.

O'Brien squinted at him. "What makes you say that, son?"

"I can read minds, Mr. O'Brien. But I'm not getting a thing from you. It's like you're not even here."

Bert O'Brien chuckled. "So how does that tell you anything?"

"It tells me you're different. The only person I've met so far that I can't read."

The old man leaned back in his chair. "Son, I worked with a telepath for eight years. I learned to block her after a while. We all did, except Jacques. He never had the chance. We had to, you know, to keep her—and us—sane. The military folks, though, most of them never learned how. They were all scared of her. They were scared of all of us, but Thea, she had Eisenhower quaking in his boots. Montgomery wouldn't come within a mile of the base when she was there. Not that it kept her out of his head."

"How did you block her?" Charlie asked.

"I don't think I could teach it, son. Hiram was the one came up with it. He read a lot about Zen Buddhism, about keeping an empty head. He sort of adapted it so we could keep the noise down for Thea. She only heard us when we wanted her to. So how did it happen?"

"We don't know," said Jack. "We just all woke up one morning with powers."

O'Brien nodded. "So you got a telepath. One of you a flyer?"

"I am," Caroline said.

"You know, then. What it's like up there. Ain't no one's ever seen the world like we can, when the moon's shining on her, and the stars are bright. I always wanted to take a girl up there. If I were forty years younger, I'd say we ought to take a flight together."

"You can't fly anymore?" Caroline asked.

"I can fly, I just can't get it up anymore. Don't believe in Viagra. Some of these boys around here, they pop that stuff like Geritol and think they're Eddie Albert."

"Who's Eddie Albert?" Mary Beth asked.

"Never mind. Well, sit down. Lots of room on the couch. There's a chair in the bedroom, bring that in here."

Mary Beth sat on the couch. There was a smell in the room like bad broccoli, and she wasn't sure if it was coming from Mr. O'Brien or from his chair. Caroline and Charlie sat beside her on the couch, and Jack dashed into the bedroom and appeared an instant later with a chair.

O'Brien seemed lost in thought. "Well. Sounds familiar. Not that there was anyone else around that changed when I did, but the suddenness, that's how it happened with me. One day I could fly. Couldn't fly the day before. I was at boot camp, is the difference. They had me off in Top Secret land before I could change my shorts."

"What kind of operations did you handle?" Jack asked.

"Impossible ones. Top Secret stuff. Most of it never made the history books."

"Why not?" asked Mary Beth.

O'Brien looked out his window at the traffic. "Hell of a place. Shady Meadows. Doesn't even make sense, does it? No shadows in a meadow. Meadow's grassland. People don't pay attention to words anymore. They don't remember that words are the only things that are real. Without a name things don't exist. No name, no identity.

"Bert O'Brien, he's real enough. Social Security number, driver's license, birth certificate. Stocks and bonds and a safety-deposit box. Even got a grave site, bought and paid for. Names and papers. Numbers. Real things.

"We had other names, back then. Names the papers gave us. The French called us Les Enfants de la Liberte. The British called us the Ultralight Brigade. The Americans called us the Dandies. The Germans called us lots of names. Most I don't remember. Never did get a good handle on that language.

"Thing was, officially, we didn't exist. Only the top Allied brass and a few technicians knew about us as more than a rumor. We didn't have code names or costumes or anything. The military controlled the press then, you know. Not like today."

"You think it's better now?" Harriet asked.

"Hell, no. It's just not the military that's controlling it now. It's money."

"Did they hurt you?" Charlie asked.

"What?" Bert O'Brien laughed. "No, they didn't hurt us. What, like experiments? You ought to have a little more trust in your government, son."

"It wouldn't be the first time," said Mary Beth. "The Tuskegee experiments, for one. It isn't hard to believe that they'd feel justified trying to figure out how your powers manifested so they could duplicate them."

"We were at war, you know. They took an ocean's worth of my blood over the years, for testing, but they never cut me open."

Mary Beth wanted to be comforted by his words. She wished Charlie could read Bert O'Brien, to tell them whether he was telling the truth or not.

"This isn't what you came here for, is it?" O'Brien asked. "Why'd you come looking for me?"

Mary Beth looked at Charlie and realized that the others were looking at him too. He shrugged.

"Lots of reasons. Because people have been hurt because of us, and some of us are thinking about quitting as a result. Because we don't know where all of this is supposed to take us. Because we don't understand how this happened, and what it means. I guess we were hoping you would say something that makes sense out of what's happening."

"You don't expect much, do you?" O'Brien grimaced. "Meaning isn't something you find on a goddamn quest. It's in you or it's in the people you know, or it's nowhere. You understand? Unless you're a believer, and more power to you if any of you are, there's no point looking for reasons. You changed, somehow, and you've got to live with that. You can dress up in costumes and fight crime or you can walk around wishing you were like everybody else. It's not going to change the world one way or the other. You do what you've got to do, and you don't get too high and mighty about it.

"Thea and Ross called it quits after the war. They wanted a family. They walked away and never looked back, and the War Department let them go. It was the right choice for them. Me, I didn't know where I was headed, so I stayed on awhile. Did some surveillance work in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Got shot at a lot. Hiram worked with MI-5, but he mostly used his brain instead of his powers. He was smarter than the rest of us—smarter than me, anyway. Me and him were still fighting the war, I suppose. But we didn't fault Ross and Thea for quitting. It was their choice."

"What about the other man?" Caroline asked. "Jacques. You made it sound like something happened to him."

"Something did." O'Brien was quiet for a moment. "These powers, they're not always good for a body. Ross and Thea, they both died too soon. I always wondered if the changes wore them out early. Course, I'm still alive, and Hiram. Jacques, though ... he was fast, Jacques was. Me, I could fly about three miles a minute. Jacques could run a hundred miles in a minute. Thing was—and we didn't realize it until it was too late—he was living fast, too. Aging twenty, thirty times faster than the rest of us. One of the scientists who treated him said it was more like fifty.

"He was a nice guy, Jacques. Didn't speak a lot of English, and didn't talk a lot even in French. He was nineteen when his powers showed up. When he died, about eight months later, the docs figured he was over ninety years old."

"Oh my god." Mary Beth looked at Jack. All the things she had noticed over the past month or so, the thinning hair, the weathering of his skin, his weight loss—things she had attributed to the changes in his metabolism, to his constant running—the true implications of those things were now terribly clear, and she wondered how it was she had not realized it sooner.

"What is it?" Bert O'Brien asked. "What's wrong?"

Jack sat as still as Mary Beth had ever seen him, more still than she had seen him since the morning she had woken up and everything was changed. He seemed incapable of moving. And then she saw that he was shaking, so fast that it was hardly visible, the only evidence the slow wavering of his image as the light traced his form, his body too fast for light, for time.