Michael Grant - Hero

Simone had no choice but to leave her father lying on the floor, where he risked being trampled, as she competed for the attention of besieged nurses.

After an interminable wait, during which time the numbers of patients doubled every few minutes, orderlies came to whisk Bob Markovic away on a gurney. Then Simone, too, was led to a line of curtained bays, all full to overflowing, and told to sit on the floor and wait. All around her a controlled panic of doctors and nurses dealt with burns, crushing injuries from falling walls and roofs, terrible cuts from flying glass, panic-induced heart attacks, and quite a few with injuries like Simone’s.

Simone waited and sat and oozed blood for hours, listening to cries of pain and screams of grief, forgotten in the mayhem. At one point she noticed that she was sitting in a pool of her own blood, that it had saturated the seat of her trousers. But her body was fighting back, deploying clotting factor, doing all that a billion years of evolved survival mechanisms could to keep the blood on the inside.

She managed to use a nurse’s station line to call her mother, who was, thankfully, alive but unable to go anywhere since a piece of rock had blown right through the elevator in her building. Simone also called her current girlfriend, Mary, and snagged a few ibuprofen, which did almost nothing to dull the bruising pain in her body or the migraine building steam in her head.

After hours of waiting, after multiple unanswered questions about her father’s condition, they put Simone through a full-body CT scan. A doctor had ordered an MRI, but that was before another victim had been placed in the machine. MRIs use super powerful magnets, and no one had realized the shrapnel was magnetic. The first patient in the MRI had been ripped to hamburger by dozens of bits of the rock being drawn through the meat of her body.

Two hours after the CT scan, and far into the night, they were telling her nothing. But the staff—justifiably exhausted and haggard—looked more than just tired, they looked scared.

Explanation of what had happened came not from any of the doctors but from Mary, who’d had to walk twenty-three blocks through a city lit by police-vehicle light bars and accompanied by a soundtrack of sirens, car horns, and burglar alarms. The subway was shut down. Cabbies had all headed for cover. Buses were being used as emergency treatment facilities.

Mary’s first words were not helpful. “Oh, my God, Simone! Oh, my God!”

Simone tried to smile, but her face was stiff from impact bruises and a dozen bandages dotting her body. “Yeah, I know, sweetheart, it’s gruesome. And I think my dad is worse off; they won’t even tell me what’s happening with him.” Simone was not prone to hysteria, but she heard the edge of it in her own voice.

“Don’t worry. It will be okay.” Mary’s tone carried no conviction, and her face was a mask of disgust. She kept moving her hands as if about to reach out to Simone, but then kept pulling away, as if she was frightened.

“I don’t even know what happened,” Simone said.

“Haven’t you seen the news?”

“What do you mean?”

“It was one of those rocks. You know, like the ones that turn people into mutants or whatever?”

“Mary, what are you talking about?”

Mary shrugged. “I’m just saying what the news says. They said a big rock, a meteorite or asteroid or whatever, was heading toward Manhattan, so they nuked it.”

The bright pinpoints of light: nuclear explosions going off at the edge of space.

“The nukes broke it up, I guess, but it still hit. There’s buildings burning and all. I had to cross the park, and it’s full of people all scared to death. People are saying it’s worse than 9/11.” Mary had started to cry, which angered Simone: Mary wasn’t the one bleeding.

Still sitting on a floor no doubt crawling with exotic hospital germs, Simone looked past Mary and saw looming over her three people: one in NYPD uniform, two in jeans and blue windbreakers with large yellow letters across the back reading ICE , one male, one female.

A nurse was with them. She said, “This is one of them.”

“All right,” the female ICE agent said. She fixed Simone with a no-nonsense look, like a disappointed assistant principal who’d caught her ditching class, and pointed to a gold shield on her belt. “I’m with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, operating under emergency presidential decree.”

“Wait, what?” Simone frowned and shook her head not so much to say no, but to try and clear her head. “ICE? But I’m a US citizen.”

“Understood, miss. We’ve been deputized to act in this emergency. It’s for your own safety.”

Simone was confused, but not so confused that she didn’t know bullshit when she heard it. And as a child of privilege, she knew what words to say. She climbed to her feet, wincing at pains that had become deep aches, fighting the resistance of bruised and stiffening muscles. She said, “I want a lawyer.”

“We aren’t arresting you, miss. This is for your own protection.” The other ICE agent, a balding man with permanent worry lines around his eyes, tried out the same lie but was even less convincing.

“I want to see my father. And I want a lawyer. I’m not going anywhere until I—”

“Miss, you have to come with us.”

Simone turned to the NYPD officer. “Are you standing there allowing these people to drag an American citizen, a New Yorker, out of a hospital?” The policeman winced, then looked away, clearly not happy with his role.

“We are the federal government,” the plainclotheswoman said as if that would shut the conversation down. But this was tough New York, not nice Minnesota: New Yorkers were not by nature easy to shut up, and Simone was very much a New Yorker.

“Hey, Feds are the people who were doing that crazy stuff out in California. I’m not going anywhere with you people.”

“Under the Special Emergency Decree, we can take you to a secure facility for—”

“Hey, you!” Simone snapped, pointing at the uniformed policeman again. “You’re NYPD and I’m a New Yorker. Protect and freaking serve, man. Are you going to stand there and let these guys bully me? Where’s the warrant?”

The policeman seemed to agree, but he shook his head ruefully and said, “I’m sorry, miss, but we have orders to cooperate with the Feds.”

“I’m an American citizen in a goddamn hospital, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, and I have done nothing wrong. You want me, you’ll have to drag me. Mary! Are you taping?”

“On it,” Mary said, holding her phone up.

“You need to put that phone down and wipe that recording,” the male ICE agent demanded.

But Mary was also a New Yorker and answered, “It’s live-streaming, and basically, screw you. I know my rights.”

At which point the agent stepped in quickly and snatched the iPhone away as Mary and Simone both unleashed verbal tirades liberally punctuated with F-bombs.

In the end it took the NYPD officers plus both ICE agents to carry/drag Simone, while fending off Mary, and the five of them went kicking and yelling out through the emergency room and down a corridor to the parking garage, where a black SUV with darkened windows waited.

FINDING IT HARDER and harder to think about writing fiction. Reality is too weird. I’m part of a group of superheroes, for God’s sake. Best friend can run 800 mph. Malik can make people wish they were dead. Francis moves through walls. There are silent, unseen aliens in our heads when we morph. Just the fact that I can write words like “alien” and “morph” and have them be a real thing, WTF ?