Blackjack Wayward

Part Three

Arise, awake or be for ever fall’n.





Chapter Twenty-Four

I eased off the throttle as the Yucatan Peninsula loomed ahead, turning toward the southeastern coast of the United States. Still at high altitude, I imagined the country partitioned as it had been on those big high school maps, each state color-coded to make it easier for the kids to find. Below, the Gulf of Mexico raced by, marred only by the occasional oil rig, each streaming a long line of foaming sea tailed with a contrail of black oil dancing along the currents.

Ahead were the southern states, from the western reaches of Texas, across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, to the Florida panhandle. I had gone too far north and had to correct, swinging due east toward the Florida peninsula, aiming for the southeastern-most coastlines. I was headed to the Boca Raton/West Palm Beach area, to the childhood home of Madelyne Hughes, a.k.a. Apogee, and as I got closer, a tightening sense of trepidation began to grow within me. I was unsure of what I would say, what I would do if I found her there.

This was absolutely ridiculous; to come all this way – one of the most wanted men on the planet – just to make sure she was okay. Hell, I knew it was more than that. I wanted to see her, to tell her what I felt, to hope she would smile and welcome me in, that all would be forgotten.

But how could it? I had killed her friend. I murdered Pulsewave. It didn’t matter that it was life or death, or how much I had grown since then, or even that I had saved the planet and her life. How could she know that my life had changed because of her, that I would always be paying back that debt? I needed to tell her without question how important she was to me.

My fear was that none of it mattered and that her feelings for me, if there were any, would always factor in that one horrible moment. That nothing would ever clean my slate.

So I focused on the other reason, on Zundergrub. I had a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach that Apogee still factored into his plans. I knew he was still alive, dangerous as ever, and only I could stop him. His mental powers were as impressive as they were frightening, and I was the only person who had shown a semblance of resistance to them. There were other heroes and teams, sure, some with a thousand times my power combined, but in the end, they would approach Doctor Zundergrub with the idea of apprehending him, getting him to surrender, and that was all the time he needed to exert his will and control whomever he faced. I should know: I had been under his capricious thumb, a powerless marionette. With continued exposure to his abilities, I had become somewhat immune to them. I had fought them off completely one time while under a rage induced by his rape-like mind-wiping of Apogee. They had been desperate times, with a lot at stake, so perhaps the anxiety of those moments that had made me immune. He had skated past serious repercussions the last time out, and that haunted me. I had taken the responsibility for how things turned out after Hashima, taken blame for his murderous betrayal, and was punished for his crimes by a world more concerned with exacting revenge than finding justice.

I knew the next time we saw each other there would be no banter, no standoff like some spaghetti western. I was going to kill him, pulp his body into a sticky mess. There wasn’t going to be a discussion, nor hesitation. But I had to find him, and that wouldn’t be easy. He’d be lying in wait, ready to pounce on me when I least expected it, surrounded by waves of enemies. I couldn’t see him giving me a chance like last time, and that made it all that much cleaner. We would see each other, and get to the dirty job of killing each other. In a way, I could respect that, the single-mindedness of what was coming.

Before that, though, I had to make sure Apogee was okay. Then make sure she was well out of the way. If he had her, Zundergrub had power over me, and I couldn’t have anything weighing me down on my initial charge. Otherwise his powers might encroach on my soul, weaken my spirit. All would be lost if I let him ensnare me.

Earlier, I had paused my trans-planetary voyage in the West African nation of Nigeria, making several stops until I found its largest city, Lagos.

Landing in the middle of a busy, midday street caused uproar, but I strutted into a small tourist shop and stole a half-dozen hand-held camcorders for their battery pack. Using the battery components, I recharged the power pack to the boots. I also stole a laptop and the store owner’s meal, a plate of vegetables and fried rice, topped with some sort of seared meat that I wolfed down in a nearby alleyway.

The small store was a tourist trap, selling isles of local clothing set against a wall of electronics and touristy doodads. I stomped in, a head and a half taller than every person within a square mile, and that was without factoring in my boots. The shopkeeper stared at me, mid-bite as he sat behind the counter, letting me grab what I wanted. He got brave as I walked out, peppering me with a few shots from his revolver, but after the fourth or fifth bullet bounced off my back, I shot him a baleful glance and he gave me a queasy smile and laid the gun gently on the counter.

With the laptop, I cracked into local wi-fi and began to research the Hughes family in the Boca/West-Palm area. I didn’t expect Madelyne to have left her mother’s home address and phone available in the local directories, so I dug deeper, going back into every newspaper archive and library microfiche I could hack into, looking for mention of Madelyne’s name. They’d done a hell of a job deleting her past, protecting her from exactly what I was trying, but I had an insider’s perspective into her life and I knew where to look. I turned my attention to everything having to do with the years she had attended the University of Florida, specifically her days as a basketball player, and it didn’t take long to find a news story in the Gainesville Sun of a spectacular victory, in which power forward Madelyne Hughes had scored 31 points over L.S.U. After that, it took me three minutes to find a picture of Madelyne and her mother from commencement on someone’s Facebook and to write a face recognition program to match her mother’s face in that picture. The software ran for ten minutes with no success before I decided to edit it with a subroutine that narrowed the pool down from “every picture available on the Internet” to “pictures of socialites in the South Florida area,” and it then took only thirty seconds for a half-dozen images to pop up.

Madelyne’s mother was an attractive woman, almost as tall as her daughter, with a long, elegant face and narrow nose that was almost unmistakable. From her, Madelyne had inherited not just her looks and immaculate physique, but also an air of nobility that was hard to ignore. Her mother had changed her name on two separate occasions, the last time to Laura Wilder, no doubt due to her love of the famous novelist. I didn’t find her address in the directories either, but hacking into the Florida Power and Light, Comcast, and AT&T databases took only moments, and I had her address in a process that took, in total, just under an hour.

Of course, if I still had Mr. Haha dangling from my wrist, he would have done it in just minutes, maybe seconds. The vainglorious bastard also would have rubbed it in my face.

So, turning toward southern Florida, my heart pounded and breathing grew heavy. I had an address, and I would be there shortly.

The landing in south Florida should have been controlled and measured, as I already had some practice tempering my eager approaches, but instead I powered in at high speed, oblivious to both my momentum and the approaching pavement.

Realizing I was about to crater the landscape, I panicked, twisted my body, and powered the rocket boots to create reverse thrust, which when combined with slowing arc should have brought me to a halt. But I was late, and the thrust from my boots reduced my speed marginally before the thundering crash of man on ground and the explosion of gravel, asphalt, and tons of raw earth tore into the morning.

I managed to crawl out of the hole with most of my dignity intact, chuckling at the poor fellow who ran towards me pounding away at the keypad to his smart phone to call for help.

“Don’t need to do that,” I warned with enough conviction to make him put his phone away. “I’m okay.”

His facial expression let me know I wasn’t. My enhanced genetics had weathered the blow, but I was covered with dirt and sweat, and the jumpsuit I had stolen from Odyssey’s pilots was shredded and torn from the hours of flight and the stupidity of my landing.

“You know where there’s a Big/Tall store nearby?” I asked the man.

For the second time that day, I had reverted to my old ways: I stole.

I was a wanted man, penniless and back in the jaws of the wolf sent to chase me down, but I wasn’t going to show up on Apogee’s doorstep looking like I did, so I had to steal some clothing. Another felony to add to the long list of things that I was wanted for.

One of the rocket boots was damaged, so I was forced to walk to a nearby Army/Navy store. Strolling inside, I found the shopkeeper arranging a display.

He flashed me an acknowledging nod when I crossed the threshold laser beam that played a small portion of the National Anthem on a tinny speaker. He was a black man in his sixties, slim and tall, with reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. He bowed his head to allow a clean look at me as I walked up to him.

“Hi,” I began.

“You’re that Blackjack guy everyone’s up in arms about,” he said rather suddenly.

The tag pinned to the right pocket of his short-sleeved, striped shirt read “Will.”

“That’s right,” I said. “But don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you.”

But he seemed concerned neither by the implied threat nor by the precarious nature of his situation. If I was Blackjack, then at any moment half a dozen supers might tear out the side of the wall and try to apprehend me. He was in the line of fire, but instead he flashed a bright smile after taking a moment size me up.

“You know, I was homeless for eighteen years before Mr. Harris brought me in to work with him,” he said, pausing to raise his glasses and study the impromptu metal rig of the rocket packs, which looked more like metal mangled around my boots than like an intentional construction. “But I don’t think I ever looked this bad. What are those?”

I laughed. “They’re rocket boots. I made them.”

“Looks like you broke one of them.”

“Yeah, looks like it.”

And suddenly it hit me: I blushed with shame that I was going to steal from what looked to be a decent guy.

“I think–” I started, looking back at the front door and noticing a video camera staring back at me.

“I’m sorry, I made a mistake,” I said, making my way toward the door.

“Oh, and what’s that?” he asked, turning back to finish his display.

“Huh?” I said, pausing.

“Your mistake.”

I don’t know why, but at that moment, I became introspective. I was flushed with images of the past, back to everything that had passed. A silly smile came creeping over my face as I thought of Influx; of the battle at Hashima; of Pulsewave, Cool Hand, and Retcon; of the lie at Utopia and everything that had followed. It was a long, sordid list of foolish decisions and mistakes. In some cases it was simply choosing the wrong path to walk, and in others associating myself with terrorists and sociopaths as if their friendship wouldn’t have an effect on me.

“Ah...well, bothering you, for starters. You have a nice day.”

“Now hang on a second,” Will said, taking off his glasses and folding them into his shirt pocket. “You came in here for a reason.”

I looked back around at the camera.

“I just realized I didn’t have money.”

Will’s eyebrow furrowed and he cocked his head slightly.

“You were going to steal some clothes,” he said and my expression only confirmed it.

“But I’m not going to,” I said.

“That’s interesting,” Will said. “And why not?”

I shrugged and turned away, intent on leaving, but he persisted.

“Hey, I want to know,” he said. “Was it the camera?”

I shook my head.

“It’s okay, man. You can tell me.”

I nodded. “I guess I just don’t want to be an a*shole.”

He laughed. “I can dig that.”

“You have a nice day,” I said and went towards the door again.

“What size are you, anyway?”

“Huh?”

“Waist. You’re a big’un. What, thirty-six?”

I stood at the doorway, feeling the street beyond, noting each passing car, each pedestrian.

“Shoes I can’t help you with,” Will said, starting away from me through the aisles. He found what he was looking for and dug out a pair of dark gray combat pants from the rows of clothes. He threw them over his shoulder and turned back to me. “I got thirty-four, too, if that’s what you need. You look a lot thinner than when I last saw you on TV.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

Will put on his glasses. “No, I don’t. Not in one way of thinking about it.” He looked out the window, his gaze losing focus, his mind drifting before he smiled, “But in another way, I do.”

“I guess you have a soft spot for hard cases,” I said.

He laughed. “Son, if you could see yourself right now, I mean, really get a good look at yourself, then maybe you’d know why.”

I looked down at my ragged jumpsuit, the beat up boots that left a trail of dust wherever I stepped.

“That’s the thing about hitting rock bottom. You never know how far you’ve fallen,” he said, shifting through a wall rack of T-shirts. “You usually go for black up top, right?”

Will let me use the shower in his upstairs loft, a modest one-bedroom apartment that was sparsely decorated with a small television, a full-sized bed and a mahogany bureau on which were a series of pictures of his wife and a daughter at several periods of their lives. In one photo, he was standing over his wife, moments after a delivery, both teary-eyed at the child he carried in a bundle. Others showed the child at a spelling bee, and yet another was a group picture, shot candidly, of the three at a birthday party as Will’s daughter blew out four candles. The pictures showed a gap there, of about two decades, which is when he must have lost his way and found himself homeless. Later photos were just of Will and his child, one of college graduation, another of Will handling another bundle, this one his granddaughter.

I was careful to not make a mess, but the layers of crud that came off my body and swirled down the drain were like a grainy oil spill, and once I had scrubbed my body clean with scalding hot water, I had to crouch on the floor and wipe clean the tiles at the base of the shower.

The clothes fit beautifully, and Will even threw in some boxers and a new pair of socks, though he wasn’t able to find anything big enough to fit my huge feet. Other than the weathered boots, I looked like new.

I saw a small red toolbox and decided to sit on the floor and make some minor adjustments to the rocket boots. I repaired the broken rocket pack (just compression damage from the crash landing), and was tweaking the flaps when Will knocked on the door behind me, peeking in to see me on his floor. I jumped, startled, making him laugh.

“It ain’t the cavalry coming to the rescue. Just me.”

“I saw you had some tools and–”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said, coming up to me and watching me at work as I put the whole thing back together. “Bet those are a lot of fun.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s like flying a rocket, without the rocket.”

“I bet,” he said, just as I smelled the wafting aroma of eggs and bacon that had followed Will up the stairs back to a plastic bag with styrofoam containers that he held.

“I figured you were hungry,” he said, putting the bag on the bed and walking back toward the door.

“Will, I’m going to pay you back.”

He paused, one foot out the door.

“It’s not about paying anything back,” he said.

“Paying it forward?”

Will gave that some thought and shook his head

“It’s about a reckoning,” Will said, looking down, his eyes focused on something just out of sight. “We make amends our own way. You take care of yourself, Blackjack,” he said, and then he left.