The pain was mostly gone from my back as I looked around. It wasn’t a very big place, a pretty typical two-bed hotel room. I ran fingers along my flanks, seeking places where the ribs felt disjointed through my shirt. No obvious points stood out, and there was no tenderness as I pressed harder.
I’d healed. However long I’d been out, it’d been long enough for my metahuman powers to bring my body back up to snuff. No small thing given how injured I’d been.
My head ached, probably the result of not having any Scotch for a while. I’d missed a good evening of drinking, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that other than annoyed. I stood, glancing at the dark curtains behind me. Light streamed through a small crack in them, giving the room a little illumination. Peeking between them I saw a grey Minnesota day.
At least, I assumed I was still in Minnesota. I could have been anywhere, though, really.
“Hello?” I called. There was a light on in the bathroom, which I couldn’t really see into from where I stood in the room. I meandered over, shuffling, slow, just in case someone came jumping out at me.
There was nothing to worry about, though. My personal savior, Sigourney Weaver, was gone, not a trace of her left in the room. No purse, no keys, no suitcases, no personal effects at all.
She’d just dropped me off here to recuperate and … vanished?
“What the hell …?” I used the bathroom and washed my hands, then took a look at myself in the mirror. There was a little blood on my face, so I borrowed one of the wash cloths under the sink and fixed that problem, trying not to look at my too-thin face as I worked on making myself look—well, not presentable, but at least like I hadn’t just been in a street fight. Which I kinda had. More like a freeway fight, I guess. Rumbling with the Sharks. Or the Terminator, in this case.
I went back into the room, which was quiet. The clock told me it was 11:32 in the morning. I looked closer at the phone and it had the name and address of the hotel, which was in St. Paul, pretty close to the Minneapolis city limits judging by the address on Snelling. Now that I listened, I could hear the sounds of the city outside the window, though when I’d looked outside earlier all I could see was a vacant lot next door and train tracks a little farther in the distance.
“Oh, man,” I muttered and sat back down for a minute. I tried to take stock of my situation.
I’d damned near beaten the Terminator in a straight-up fight until he’d dragged innocent people into it. That was pretty dirty, and told me a lot about him. He seemed fully prepared to make a jelly paste out of those people if I hadn’t put my life on the line to stop him. That made him a villain, full stop, and the next time I met him I was not going to hold back in my efforts to put a fist through his face and out the back of his head. Not that I’d had much chance to be restrained thus far, but any thought that he might be some determined law enforcement operator hell bent on catching me had gone out the window when he’d tried to pulp that family. Decency and the benefit of the doubt definitely weren’t going to hold me back anymore.
Now I found myself squarely in the middle of the Twin Cities. Someone had brought me here, and—who the hell was Sigourney Weaver, actually? Had I really met her before? Was she part of the memories Rose had sucked out of my brain, never to return? It was a shame my life didn’t function like the movies, because if it had, I’d have had a happy ending when I’d blown Rose’s own brains out. In a Hollywood ending, all my memories would have magically returned, and I probably would have gotten all those superpowers back that I lost, too.
But I didn’t get the Hollywood ending. I didn’t even get the happy ending, or the marginally happy ending, or even the kind of dirty, hollow happy ending that politicians pay for at a massage parlor. I got the drunken funk ending, where I retreated into my own shell again and stayed in a cloud of booze for months without resolving anything until shit in the world went so far sideways that even I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
At about that moment, I was wishing the room had a minibar.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I wondered, then remembered. The Terminator wasn’t my only problem, and the mysterious Sigourney Weaver wasn’t my only mystery. I had another one, one that had brought me here, and one that had left a trail of complications behind it.
Reed. Augustus. Scott. The team.
I scrambled for the TV remote on the nightstand between the beds. It clicked on easily, and the flatscreen on the wall lit up, going straight to a news station. I needed to know if my team was okay, if they’d had any fatalities, if Reed was conscious, was—
Trying to control my breathing, I waited the infinite seconds for the screen to brighten. It was already on a breaking news alert, fortunately, but …
I stared at the screen, which was a live feed of downtown Minneapolis. I could see the Nicollet Mall in the background where it crossed 6th Avenue. The sign for Murray’s, Scott’s favorite downtown steakhouse, was visible in the background shot. I could see Oceanaire, the awning for Ike’s, and a Starbucks all in the foreground, and one of the skyway bridges that connected downtown buildings together like a webwork for easy traversal during Minnesota’s bitter winters was in the foreground.
And there, in the center of the shot, occupying the middle of a downtown intersection—6th Avenue and Nicollet Mall—
Was our big bad guy.
He glowed, wreathed in fire like Gavrikov when I’d first encountered him, every inch of his skin engulfed in flames. There was another barrier shimmering around him, water vapor in the dry, cold air, and I had a guess what that was. There was also the sound of wind whipping, which was usually natural in Minneapolis streets, but in this case I had a worse feeling … that it was not natural, that it was totally related to the enemy hovering there.
A gunshot cracked through the downtown canyons, and there was a slight movement on the screen, the high-def image of the man on fire darkening around the shoulder for just a second, then a little drip of liquid running off like he’d been hit by a large, leaden raindrop.
He hadn’t, of course. He hadn’t been touched by it.
It only took me a second to figure it out; a police sniper had just taken a shot at him from down the street, and a couple things had happened that my meta eye caught. One, this barrier of water vapor and wind the bad guy had created had slowed the sniper bullet just slightly—or maybe more than slightly, it was tough to gauge that sort of thing even with meta eyesight at 2,500+ feet per second.
And when the bullet had gotten close enough to this man on fire, it had completely dissolved under the intensity of the heat, melting and running off like liquid slag channeled down a drain pipe.