John Ridley - What Fire Cannot Burn

Helena bought it. Through her love of her man, her fury at him for maybe having gotten himself hurt or worse, she bought the lie.

Raddatz did a quiet thanks to God. Helena being a cop's wife, he knew her intuition-or her enhanced suspicion from years of proximity to a DMI officer. There was a chance she wouldn't have gone for word one. Then would come questions and recriminations. Accusations. Was he off drinking, was it another woman… Raddatz really only had the time and temperament to douse a small fire, not to deal with a whole forest set ablaze.

So in a way it was a little ironic. She'd bought the big lie of her husband stepping in and helping out. What she couldn't get past: him telling her he had to go out and push paper. Right now.

"Somebody else can't do it?"

"I was a witness."

"So do it tomorrow."

"The time I sit here talking I could be done and back."

Head up, looking right at her husband: "You were dead." "I don't…»

"I said to myself he's dead. Not maybe, but… I wanted to accept it. Be done accepting it. I wanted to be ready for it."

"Those days are over. I'm not MTac anymore."

"It doesn't matter. If you know the feeling once, you never-"

"3 was gone a couple of hours."

"To me, Tucker, you were dead."

Just then he realized she was cupping his mangled wrist. Hook off. Raddatz was letting it breathe. His nerve endings were pretty much useless. The whole of It, the stump, the scars, the remnants of surgery-surgeries- was a hideous sight. Never, never once that Raddatz could remember had Helena ever recoiled from it or from its touch to her body. Never that he could recall did she hold back from making contact with it.

She was such a good woman. No pejorative there. No marginalization regarding her gender in relation to modem society. What was right and fine, what was the core of all vows that a man and woman take when joined before God and the law was what Helena owned and regularly put into practice.

Raddatz asked himself: Would she-if Helena knew the truth of things, if she knew that he was helping the kind who'd tried to turn her into a widow, had done as much as they could to turn the human race into a distant memory-would she finally recoil from him then? Would her anger still be a combination of love and rage, or just the rage?

Or maybe, know what might shove her away? The fact her husband didn't trust this "good woman," this woman ofher vows… he didn't trust his partner, his wife, the heart of his life enough to be honest with her. That would most likely set her back same as a fist to the face.

"I'm telling you those days are done." Raddatz hoped he'd go to his grave not knowing what the revelation of the lie would do to his wife. He could endure, had endured a lot of pain and loss and suffering and come away from it a version of whole despite his scars. What he could not take, what would leave him a wreck: breaking Helena's heart. "I'm not that kind of cop anymore."

"So you get in the middle of, of-"

"A punk acting like a man. A kid running around high with a knife. His knife, my gun. You don't need two hands to win that fight." An attempt at humor. It got Raddatz nothing. "I sat on the kid for a minute until the-"

"It wasn't a minute."

"I had to wait for uniformed cops. I told you."

"Go two hours without hearing from me when I'm supposed to just be running an errand. How would you feel?"

"Jesus. By the time it was all done-"

"How would you feel?"

Like he'd been hacked open. Like his insides were being lifted from him for no greater purpose than being spilled onto a floor. Like he was dying, which he might as well be because he wouldn't want to go on living. And all that would pretty much be his initial reaction.

But Raddatz said, calmly, evenly, covering his true concern: "I'd be worried as hell. But my worry wouldn't let me keep you from doing what you had to do in life." "Paperwork?"

Raddatz's exasperation was turning real. "I'm going to go to the station, I'm going to do some work, I'm going to come home. You need anything from Ralph's?" He was already moving for the garage.

Helena mumbled a no.

Raddatz gave the most casual good-bye he could. The kind a wife'd get from her husband cop off to do paperwork and a stop at the store on the way home. The land he'd given her a thousand times previous. Now he couldn't even be sure he was faking it well.

Raddatz pulled out of the driveway, rounded a corner, stopped his car and picked up Eddi.

Re: the time it'd taken Raddatz to deal with his wife: "Home issues?"

"Cop's life, cop's wife. Always issues."

"Where are we going?"

'To Hayden's."

"Who's Hayden?"

Raddatz kept mum to that.

Eddi, again: "Who's Hayden?" "You carry grudges well?"

"Why?"

"Hayden's the one who laid you out."

Eddi'd always wondered… not always. Not even sometimes. Occasionally, when she was taking the Sepulveda exit off the 405, the La Brea exit from the 10, almost any exit, off the 101 between Cahuenga and Sunset, Eddi wondered: the little apartments? Dirty, ratty apartments tucked close to the freeway that absorbed the continual roll of rubber on road, the noise pollution associated with it, the toxic fumes that came from it: Who lived in those? Who the hell would live in those?

The answer, obvious: anyone who couldn't live somewhere else, somewhere decent. The poor. The transient, The unbalanced. The undocumented.

And now Eddi knew to add to the list at least one superhuman who would otherwise, living normal, risk being exposed and hunted down. Killed.

Standing across from that superhuman, Hayden, standing in his shithole of an apartment, Eddi wasn't sure what she should be feeling. The hate she'd always felt for the kind that'd made her fatherless. Hate with some added resentment for this freak that put a single, unanswered punch on her that still left each pulse of her heart throbbing in her head. Some kind of awe that she was spitting close to a metanormal and they weren't actively trying to kill each other.

Or maybe she should be feeling pathos. Not so much for the freak, but for his wife and for his kid who was maybe three years old. Old enough he should be starting preschool. He should be outside playing, running, laughing. He was doing none of that. Probably never would. That kind of life was reserved for kids who didn't grow up hiding out in. crappy apartments near off-ramps 'cause at least one of their parents was a freak.

Not a social worker, Eddi told herself. She wasn't there to hand out pity. Contrivances were in need of being conceived. Conceive them. Make, things correct. Move on. Eddi told herself quite firmly: You are not part of this world.

"It's difficult sometimes." Hayden was doing the talking. "With my abilities, enhanced strength, it's difficult-"

"To know how hard is too hard to hit somebody?"

"I'm sorry,"

Eddi recognized him. Beyond being the wispy, reedy guy who'd knocked her loopy, Eddi recognized him as the guy Raddatz had chatted with a couple of times at the newsstand. Chatted. Passed information with. Eddi should've been a little more observant.

Queer. Here was a guy, Hayden… trim and slight as he might have looked, here was a guy who could punch his way through a concrete slab same as regular people could poke a finger through tissue. Here was a guy that could've taken off Eddi's head using any two digits of one hand. And here was this guy apologizing to Eddi. Standing back away from her. Cowering slightly, unconsciously, now that she stood opposite him. This is how badly the MTacs had freaks scared. This was the legacy of Soledad, of Yar, of Bo, of Reese, of every MTac that'd ever chalked a freak in the name of the law.

Eddi, making sure everybody's on the same page: "So you got freaks getting killed. You wanted to know if freaks're going after each other, starting back with their old ways."