Wonder Guy (19 page)

“Being hostess is still my job.” Some spirit returned to her voice and eyes. The party continued, kids yelling over by the Slip n’ Slide, adults chattering around the grill and along the picnic tables.

Hardly anyone seemed aware of what had happened.

“The party can wait,” he’d insisted and tugged on her hand. “People are still eating their burgers and hot dogs. You should get away from here for a while anyhow.”

“Okay.” She gave in so readily he’d been afraid she was broken.

When they got to Greg’s place, the instant she saw their faces, Aggie left off mixing a fresh batch of lemonade for the party. She rolled over, pulled Gloria up on her lap, and rested the girl’s head on her shoulder while Greg explained what had happened.

Gloria never did get to cut her birthday cake. One of the mothers who’d come to help out with festivities took over the task, making up plastic-wrapped plates of cake to send home with the guests as they left, as most did, very soon after the news broke.

Today came as an echo of the past. At least this time Gloria seemed to be over her tears, for now. If she wanted to be alone, and doing her craftwork gave her comfort, he’d leave her to it.

* * * *

Gloria loved this part of it. Maybe not the smell of the hot glue, but she loved transforming a plain bit of leatherette by affixing rhinestones arrayed like a scattering of stars, or making it punk with steel grommets and chains, or steam punk with bits of clockwork and brass. She loved the variety of textures, materials and styles her imagination conceived.

She and Aggie had standing orders for popular items too repetitive to be much fun–like those featuring gold, silver or rhinestone capital initials. Gloria rewarded herself for completing a job-lot of these by taking time to work on one of their high-end pieces. Like now, as she tweezed tiny orange and white Swarovski foil-backed crystals into place on the butterfly-shaped flap of a black cell shell.

With old episodes of
The Gilmore Girls
playing on the shelf behind the worktable and her attention focused on filling in the pattern of a Monarch butterfly’s wings, she wouldn’t have to worry about what had happened to Jo. She’d move on with her life. In theory.

Jo’s family would come, dispose of Jo’s stuff and her apartment. Jo’s coworkers in HR would pack up her desk and take over her workload until the company hired someone new. If they decided to hire anyone at all, and didn’t dump the extra work on Anne and Patty.

In any case, after a while, the waters of daily life would flow back in, smoothing over the impression Jo’s life had made in the world, like waves filling in footprints left along a beach. It would be as if she had never been there at all.

Gloria blinked away fresh tears. Dwelling on the past would set her off again. Maybe she should have stayed at the office, commiserating with Anne and Patty–if Ms. Dexter had the heart to let them.

She’d come home hoping to find Aggie, only to wind up alone. She’d expected the work, if not
The Gilmore Girls
, would be enough to take her mind off things, but she’d seen this episode before and her mind kept wandering. Situations she’d ordinarily find amusing seemed trivial in the face of Jo’s senseless murder.

Gloria turned back to her work. The droplet of glue meant to secure the crystal in her tweezers had set while her attention wandered. It hit her, how much of the pleasure in the work she did here with Aggie was the pleasure of their camaraderie. Even when they had nothing particular to say and only shared their reactions to whatever show played or passed tools and supplies across the table.

With Aggie and Greg gone, it seemed too much like she sat at somebody else’s table, in somebody else’s house. She couldn’t go home. She had no real home. She had the small refuge of her bedroom in the face of her father’s zone of chaos and she bided her time there until her escape–until she moved in with Pete.

People chattered rapid-fire at each other on-screen. Gloria set aside her tweezers, reaching for the glue gun to set another droplet of hot glue in place. She paused, hand in the air. How much of her attraction to Pete lay in the prospect of leaving her father’s house for his? If she had an apartment of her own, would she be quite this eager to get married to Pete?

How long had she felt this way? It had been almost as if she’d lost both her parents when Mom died. Dad had continued to work and support her, to pay the bills for years afterward, until he lost his arm. Afterward he’d withdrawn into himself, as if going through the motions of living. He hadn’t been someone she could turn to for comfort. He’d never been what she’d call sociable. Mom had been the one to make friends in the neighborhood, to listen to Gloria, to reassure her when she felt sad or frightened. Dad just didn’t know how. His way of being social was to share his beers in front of the television.

She’d been fifteen when he started offering her a beer now and then. She imagined all too easily what she might have become if she’d ever accepted.

No wonder she’d been attracted to Pete. Pete was The Anti-Dad, the polar opposite of what her father had become. Pete talked to her. He listened to her. At least, he did when he wasn’t working. He didn’t drink, or if he did, it was like an afterthought. “Oh, there’s wine with dinner? Sure, I’ll have a glass.” Was that the substance of her relationship with Pete? Was it based entirely on his not-dadness?

Chapter 12

Greg hated leaving Gloria alone, but when he looked back before letting the door close behind him, she already had the hot glue gun in hand and a bead tray open before her. She’d said she was okay. He had to take her at her word.

She might be okay, but could he say the same for himself? An innocent woman had been murdered and he might have prevented it. Greg glanced around the yard, making sure no one would see and said, “Super-ize Me.”

At least Wonder Guy might have prevented it. If he’d been around instead of living Greg Roberts’ life. What did Greg Roberts do that was more important than saving innocent lives?

Greg, now as Wonder Guy, leapt into the air at an angle to avoid entangling himself in the branches of the trees shading the yard. Good one. He looked back to verify if he’d managed the leap without leaving a pit in the patio tiles. It seemed to be as much a matter of intent as thrust. Lucky Newton hadn’t known about this. It might have set physics back a hundred years.

The cool wind of his flight, the freedom of the surrounding blue expanse, lifted his heart as ever, but his thoughts dragged. He couldn’t spend every minute of the day and night as Wonder Guy. The world needed Greg Roberts too, didn’t it? What if his technology research helped save lives someday? Light-speed computing might have applications in medicine and a thousand other applications. Not everything worth doing could be done in a flash or drew the kind of attention Wonder Guy got. Who knew what might be built on the few bricks of knowledge he would lay in his lifetime? Now it seemed like Wonder Guy was his competition.

Bzzz
. He clapped a hand to his ear. “Ow!”

“Oops. Volume control seems to be off.” Serafina’s voice diminished from a roar to a normal speaking tone before the words were out. “Hurry, dear. Something quite disturbing is happening at one of your lakes.”

“Which one?” He twisted in midair, high enough to see the city spread below him, the lakes a shining chain to the west.

“The one in the middle.”

He plummeted toward Calhoun even as she spoke.

In seconds he’d made it close enough that screams drew him to the north end of the lake. People scattered, running, scrambling out of the water and away across the beach.

Wonder Guy hovered far above the scene.

Two monstrous shapes, locked in combat, roiled the waters of the lake. At first sight, he thought one must be Minne–the dinosaur sculpture, which made its rounds of the city lakes every summer–come to life. Except, the scale was wrong. This creature must be nearly a hundred feet long. He blinked in amazement. Apatosaurus. What his mother still insisted on calling a Brontosaurus.

Impossible. The other, only slightly smaller creature in the melee stood upright, lifting tiny forearms and a massive, toothy jaw toward the Apatosaurus while the gargantuan tails of both creatures whipped the water around them to froth. Tyrannosaurus Rex. This couldn’t be happening.
Thinks the man soaring unassisted in midair.

A boat bobbed too close to the monsters, overturned in the churning water. Two swimmers swam frantically away from the bloodstained water where the two impossible shapes clashed. He scanned the water, but spotted no injured people. The blood must belong to the dinosaurs, but that might change any second.

Greg dove, plummeting like a missile, maneuvering through the high-flung spray, past the Tyrannosaur’s flank to grab a middle-aged man by the straps of his Day-Glo orange life vest and lift him free of the water. He held the man suspended from one hand as he dove to save the woman, visible only by the bobbing appearances of her orange life vest among the waves. Greg dodged a lashing tail, diving beneath it, dunking himself and the man to grab the straps of the woman’s vest with his free hand. He turned in the same instant to lift both his passengers up and away from the churning water.

Greg swooped high to avoid the waves and the battling monsters. The woman screamed, dangling from her vest. She looked young enough to be the man’s daughter. Maybe she was, despite lacking any family resemblance. Not his concern, especially now.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Greg shouted over the wind of his passage, already soaring back toward the beach. He deposited them on the beach and turned in midair, soaring high again, to return to the battle from above.

The Apatosaurus bled from several gashes across its long neck. Its battle strategy consisted of swinging its massive neck from side to side, knocking into and deflecting the tyrannosaur’s lunges. T-rex’s low center of gravity, combined with the support of the surrounding water, assured that it couldn’t be knocked off its feet to give Apatosaurus a chance to escape.

These creatures shouldn’t exist. Not in this time and place. He had no idea how to send them back wherever they came from. A concern for later. He had to stop this battle now. If T-rex killed Apatosaurus it wouldn’t be long before the enormous predator menaced the rest of the city.

Poised above the battle, Greg put a hand to the radio connection in his mask. “Serafina? Are you responsible for this? Are you manufacturing monsters so Wonder Guy can play hero?”

“Oh no, dear.” Her voice sounded tiny in his ear. “I’d never do such a thing. I have an idea as to where this trouble came from and will explain later, but something must be done now.”

“All right then.” First things first. Separate the combatants.

Greg took a deep breath and plunged toward the water, aiming to come down behind T-rex. The huge beast staggered, thigh-deep in the lake, when a lash of Apatosaurus’s neck caught it broadside along its jaw. He spotted the huge predator’s tail through the murky green water and dove beneath the rough waves. He grabbed the end of its tail where it narrowed enough to get his arms fully around it and hauled it across his shoulder. The pebbly hide gave him a good grip. Straining against the great weight, he battled his way above the water’s surface in time to gasp in another breath.

With the tail slung over his shoulder, Greg rose higher and higher, dragging the massive beast behind him. It took him a tremendous effort, as few things had since he’d gained Wonder Guy’s powers.

Below him, T-rex squalled an ear-piercing shriek when it found itself upended, falling forward, face first into the water and dragged up backward by its tail. The cries ended when the beast’s head hit the water and submerged. Soon the head trailed the neck upward, spilling a long stream of water. The ferocious jaws dangled high above the lake’s surface, high above the bewildered Apatosaurus, weaving its own head side to side, apparently seeking some sign of its recent attacker.

Now what? Dropping the T-rex from a great enough height would kill it. The only living tyrannosaurus in the world. With Wonder Guy’s strength, he could haul it away somewhere safe. But where? He did a hasty mental shuffle through the possibilities. Set T-rex atop one of the city’s skyscrapers–where it might fall on people? Trap it between the locks on the Mississippi–where it would disrupt shipping? He had to get it entirely away from human habitation. Maybe somewhere in the Black Hills of Dakota, or the Badlands. The tyrannosaurus should be safe enough wandering around those maze-like canyons until a properly equipped scientific team came to take charge of it. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to get there if he climbed high enough and angled his descent.

Greg continued his climb. The gargantuan beast slung dangling over his shoulder twisted and squalled. It made a valiant effort to twist high enough to reach him against the pull of gravity. He felt sorry for the creature so out of its element, despite knowing, given the chance, it would swallow him in a single bite. However the dinosaur had gotten here, he doubted it had been the poor beast’s own idea.