Peter Clines - Ex-Heroes

Midknight. The Mighty Dragon. Cairax. Even the police during a few standoffs. I was the ultimate support guy. With me backing you up, nobody could fail. Heck, with me there everyone was an immortal. And then, with all this going on, then she died. It was stupid. A stupid way to die. She’d been safe. So safe. It wasn’t fair. That’s what’s important to remember. It wasn’t fair for her to get taken away from me like that. That’s what they’ll need to understand. What happened wasn’t right, so I didn’t do anything wrong. A broken finger. She died because of a broken finger. Mashed in a car door, broke the skin, heavy bleeding. If I hadn’t been out playing hero I could’ve fixed it in ten seconds. Instead the neighbors called an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital. And once she got there, the emergency room staff screwed up a test and gave her the wrong type of blood. She was A-negative and some idiot nurse misread a chart and gave her Rh positive blood. Blood which should’ve been screened out of their blood banks to start with, because it was tainted with hep-B. The mixed symptoms confused them and they spent hours pumping her full of poisons to deal with misdiagnoses, and filling her with more of the wrong blood. The odds of it happening are a million to one.

I know this. Two horrible, freak mistakes that both fell on one person. As someone in the medical profession, I know this and I understand why they could’ve been so baffled. Hell, anyone who watches House knows why they were baffled. It still wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Meredith died in agony just as I got home and the neighbors were telling me she’d gone to the hospital for something minor. And so I did what anyone else would. What anybody with my abilities would’ve done. It didn’t take long to claim her body. The hospital staff knew how bad they’d screwed up and were willing to agree to anything. I talked about religious beliefs and they let me walk out the door with her body. I kept my hands on her the whole time, willing life into her nerves, every fiber, each individual cell. My power let me see what had gone wrong. Let me reach in to fix her. But there was so much that needed to happen. Even more than I could do. I had to rebuild her, redesign her, so she could fix herself. Twist and tweak her blood cells to let them restore her nervous system and replenish her and fight the problem. Make them multiply faster. Make them stronger.

Tougher. More aggressive. Like a virus. Sixteen hours after I got her home her eyes fluttered. An hour later her right hand twitched. I collapsed from sheer exhaustion after fortytwo hours of forcing every bit of my energy into her, but not before I saw her lips move and heard her body shift. I slept for thirty hours. It wasn’t her. I could see that as soon as I woke up. It was just a thing, still strapped to the gurney. The eyes were wrong. Flat. Meredith was gone. Dead. I’d just brought back her body, like some superpowered lifesupport machine, its jaws snapping at me. I should’ve destroyed it, but I couldn’t. It had her face. So I kept hoping one morning her eyes would be normal again, that her skin would be warm. And she never was. I had a funeral with an empty coffin. I went to work. I went out on patrol. I went to counseling. People everywhere told me how sorry they were for my loss and assured me things would get better if I just gave it time. That’s all I needed was time. And then I’d go home and feed the thing that had been my wife. One day, after six weeks of this, I came home and it was gone.

Mrs. Halifax, our neighbor from two doors down, was dead on the dining room floor. She had a key, in case we needed her to feed the cats. There was a casserole dish near her right hand. Her right hand was six feet from her body, along with the rest of that arm where it had been gnawed through.

She’d been gutted and eaten, by the look of her. I called the police. I think that was when the denial kicked in.

I’d been at work the whole time and dozens of people could vouch for me.

There was no evidence, so I couldn’t’ve done anything. Nothing but an empty stretcher in the living room, which a grieving doctor could explain with no problem. I did nothing wrong. The police agreed I’d done nothing wrong. That Saturday I heard about the woman attacking some Seventeens outside a movie theater. The woman who clawed and bit and ate an ear. The Channel 7 reporter said they put over twenty rounds into the woman before she stopped. They brought the body to our morgue. The face was gone. Most of the left hand had been shot off. But it still had Meredith’s hair, and the little scar under her right breast. I made sure she stayed a Jane Doe. Two weeks later I heard about another attack. Nine days after that the Mighty Dragon told me Stealth had called in Zzzap to help search the city for “some kind of infection.” By month’s end we had an uprising. The month after that it was a war. Then the war was over. And Meredith was still gone. And my powers were all but gone. And most of the world was gone. They’re going to find out. I try to slow down the tests, contaminate the samples, corrupt the data where I can. But there’s only so much I can do. Julie Connolly is a smart woman. Very smart. If the world hadn’t fallen apart she’d be a top doctor by now, I have no doubt. I think she suspects. She doesn’t know why I’m dragging my feet, can’t believe I’d be messing with results. But it’s nagging in the back of her mind. I can see it in her eyes when she looks at me. They’re going to find out. And when they do, they’ll kill me.

Gorgon drove his fist into Josh’s stomach again. The doctor slammed into the wall and his handcuffs chimed as he sank down to the lobby floor. “You have to understand,” he coughed. “I wasn’t …I just wasn’t thinking right. Haven’t you ever lost someone you loved?”

“Yes,” growled Gorgon. They stood in the Roddenberry lobby, the closest Cerberus could get to Stealth’s office. As it was, the battlesuit rested on one knee, its head scraping the ceiling. Zzzap hovered nearby, lighting the entire lobby even as he charred the ceiling panels. Josh coughed again. “And what would you do, Nick?” he said.

“If you could bring Kathy back right now, if you had that power, wouldn’t you use it? Wouldn’t you try to do it?” The goggles lowered to the floor. “I did what any of you would’ve done,” he told them.

“George, wouldn’t you try to save someone if you had the power? I tried to save the woman I love and I …I made a mistake. That’s all. Just a mistake.”

“You killed the world,” said Stealth. “Billions of people are dead because of what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” St. George was standing off to the side, still bare-chested, kneading his scalp with both hands. “So now what?”

“What do you mean?” He threw a glance at Josh. “What do we do with him? This is .

. . Jesus, this is huge. This is war crimes huge.”

“He makes Hitler look like a fucking saint,” muttered Gorgon. “Do we tell everyone? Do we lock him up forever? Do we . .

.” St. George’s voice drifted off. “I think we’re missing the big issue here.” They all looked at Cerberus. “You started this. Can you stop it?” Josh turned to her. “What?”

“This all stems from your powers. Can you undo what you did?”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, of course not. I can’t un-heal someone. Don’t you think I would’ve done that years ago if I could?” This isn’t healing, though , said Zzzap. This is …this is just

unnatural. “Unnatural,” smirked the doctor. “You’re a walking fusion reactor. George is bulletproof. Nick’s a fucking vampire, for Christ’s sake.