Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero by Harn Darby

Author:Harn, Darby [Harn, Darby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Superhero Fantasy | LGBTQ
Publisher: Fair Play Books
Published: 2020-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Smoke trawls across the dawn. Ash devils drift down the street ahead of me. Which street, I’ve no idea. An ochre haze shrouds The Derelicts, reducing the scale of the disaster to the hollowed facades of brick buildings and immolated cars, the neighborhood a cardboard set on a Hollywood soundstage from some 60s sci-fi show. The island a sketch in cinder. I don’t know where I am. Where to go. What to do. I wander the ruins like I always have, waiting out the storm at home, but there’s no avoiding this. No denying the awful truth of what happened. I slump to the charred concrete. My skin ember. Thoughts ash. Feelings smoke. There’s enough intact of me to know one thing.

I can’t run from this.

Refugees from all across The Derelicts form a line behind the mobile clinic, wrapped around the Halfway Hotel three and four times. Men, women and children, wrapped in coats and blankets, if they have them. Most suffer from smoke inhalation. Shock. Burns go straight into the clinic for treatment. I apply bandages. Salve wounds. Pat shoulders. There’s not much else I can do; the clinic’s supplies exhaust in hours. Vidette cuts up her white lab coat into strips she dresses wounds with and when that’s gone, she starts in on the curtains partitioning the different exam rooms. Six Corners starts to resemble the dirty, bloody, raggedy aftermath of a nuclear war in some bad 80s film.

Disheveled men argue over what really happened. Few believe it was an airplane. Airplanes don’t crash. Planes have been flying for years into Break Pointe. None of them ever had any trouble with the magnetic web of the wreck. No one argues over how the fire was extinguished. Everybody saw the light show I put on. Rain storm. A woman with a glowing heart. No one recognizes me now. No one sees me as an alien, or even a resident; though I’m Kit in the rain puddles, I’m no one to nobody, a stranger in my own neighborhood like I’ve always been.

Noon comes. So do dozens more injured. There’s nothing left to strip or cobble together for triage. The line frays, and then reforms down Shelley toward the bridge. More and more head for the Stitch, but the line doesn’t really move.

Vidette eases down on the steps folding down out the side door of the clinic, eyes bloodshot. “That’s a private hospital over there. Private city. Probably won’t get far.”

I wonder if they would have run into the same interference on the other side of the bridge last night if The Uniform had been leading them to safety. There’s no place for all these people in Blackwood’s city. There won’t be when all of Break Pointe is the model he planned and executed. There isn’t now.

“I did this,” I say.

“You’re a hero. Hey. Can you make it rain cash?”

I look up, as I always do. “I did this.”

“Kit… what’s the matter?”

I zip down the front of the suit she gave me.

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