Wearing the Cape Read online

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  PART THREE

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  PART SIX

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  PART SEVEN

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  PART EIGHT

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  PART NINE

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  PART TEN

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Epilogue

  WEARING THE CAPE

  by Marion G. Harmon

  To Vicke Denniston, who told me I could write it, Mark Williams, who convinced me I could sell it, and my parents, who inspired it.

  Copyright© 2011 by Marion G. Harmon

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Cape (plural capes): literally, a sleeveless garment hanging from the neck over the back and shoulders; figuratively, a superhuman who has chosen to act as a superhero. Synonyms: hero, mask, super, superhero. Connotations: 'cape' is used as both a familiar and derogatory term for superheroes, who often casually refer to themselves as capes but generally consider it a demeaning term when applied to them by the press.

  Barlow's Guide to Superhumans

  * * *

  I was driving east on the Eisenhower Expressway when the Teatime Anarchist dropped the Ashland Avenue overpass on top of me, using enough C4 to bring the whole southbound span down at once.

  My day had started normally enough. I gulped coffee and grabbed scorched toast, exchanging kisses with Mom on the way out the door. The September chill nipped around the edges of my coat and at my legs, making me glad I'd worn tights under my skirt. Driving one-handed, I scanned my schedule with the other: I'd be playing Mom's Girl-Friday at the gallery, getting ready for Thursday night's foundation event. Julie had texted; she planned for us to take the University of Chicago by storm our freshman year, and wanted us ready by Orientation Day. We'd ruled Oak Park High till graduation, and she didn't see any reason our college years should be different.

  I passed a gray Suburban with a red-headed munchkin in the back seat, and she waved at me while her mom talked business on her hands-free cell. I stuck out my tongue, making her laugh, and my pad launched into Julie's new call theme: the UofC fight-song. Wave the flag of old Chicago—

  Bang.

  Overhead explosions shattered my thoughts and I looked up to see blooms of blasted concrete and falling bridge. I screamed and ducked, lost control. The car slid. A flash of yellow and I hit something hard. I screamed again at the second, world-ending shock as falling roadway flattened my car. The tires blew. The buckled roof hit my head and flying glass stung my face as my vision exploded in fireworks. Choking off the scream, I found myself lying stretched across the front seat, the gearshift digging into my stomach, in smothering darkness. I tasted blood on my tongue.

  Alive. I was alive.

  The car roof pushed down, inches above my head as I lay there in the dark, my seat belt cutting off my air. Lightheaded, clawing blindly, I unbuckled but still couldn't breathe without choking. Cement dust. Pulling my coat open I yanked my sweater up, taking shallow, sobbing breaths through the wool and fighting to think around the rising fear.

  Twisting around, I felt my legs, wiggled toes. Nothing broken? Emergency kit under seat (thanks Dad!). Pen-light—I almost wept with relief. Broken e-pad, damn it. Still, breathing okay, not bleeding out. Help. Help would come.

  But would it come in time?

  What about the munchkin and her mom? Were they under the road now? Could they wait, if they were alive? I choked on panic as thick as the dust. I had to get out. I had to know. They had to be alive.

  Gasping, pulse pounding, I pushed against the roof above me and felt something deep inside me change. Cold fire ran through my bones. I shrieked and my next breath filled me with the whole world. Tearing through the crushed roof of my car, I heaved aside the chunk of roadway above my head as easily as clearing cheap drywall. I stood, blinking at the disaster around me, and saw what had saved me; I'd slid into a huge earth-moving machine traveling in the next lane and it shielded me. Around us, cars had fallen with the span and lay broken among shattered chunks of road and twisted steel frame. Dust-clogged air carried the smell of spilled oil and gas, the first bite of burning rubber. A white sedan screeched to a sliding stop at the north end of the broken bridge. The world went far, far away as I looked at my shaking hands, unable to believe what I'd just done.

  Oh God. Oh God.

  I pushed the screaming panic down. Okay. Deal now, freak later.

  I started digging.

  I started behind the earth-mover, pushing broken roadway back as easily as wading into fallen leaves till I found the munchkin's car. They were there but not alive, and I crawled out of the hole before vomiting into the dust.

  After that I focused on what I could do, scrambling over the shattered chunks of road to check the passengers in the cars that had fallen between the wrecked spans. I ripped open one crumpled family van to gently remove a baby seat and its wailing occupant. Then I dug for more buried victims. Wherever there were cracks in the fallen overpass I could actually see their body-heat and hear them breathing, crying. Screaming.

  I worked hard to ignore the awful details, tossing concrete slabs aside and pulling out anyone I thought I could move safely. A few I didn't do more than quickly examine. Very quickly. News footage of disasters and battles hadn't prepared me for an up-close view of what tons of falling concrete could do to flesh and bone, and I tried not to think. I barely heard the wailing sirens and the air-beating percussion of the police and news helicopters; only when the capes arrived, moving me out of the way to get to work themselves, did I begin to take stock of myself.

  I hadn't broken a single nail, but cement dust and spattered engine oil covered my coat, hair, and face, mixed into a black grime. My tights were in no better shape, and my boots... weren't touching the ground. The concrete slab I'd been standing on had shifted lower while I took stock, but I hadn't. I "stood" a few inches above the unstable surface. I looked around, carefully stepping down. Nobody seemed to notice.

  Breakthrough, I thought. I'm a breakthrough. I realized I was laughing like a loon and cut it off quick.

  Atlas found me there atop the ridge of rubble. His dirtied costume and cement-dusted hair matched mine, but he still managed to look
impossibly noble.

  "Atlas, ma'am," he said with that famous Texas drawl, as if the whole world didn't know him.

  "I know. I mean—" I shook my head. "Hope. Hope Corrigan."

  His gaze sharpened, as if I had suddenly become more interesting, and he extended his hand.

  "Will you come with me, ma'am?"

  When I took his hand he shifted his grip, pulling, and I followed, rising again.

  "We've done all that we can here with muscle," he said when I looked down. "And I'll be back for the cleanup. But we need to get you out of here and away from the cameras until you decide what to do."

  Later I saw news footage of us, Atlas in his blue and white leather jumpsuit and cape, me an unrecognizable disaster victim, flying away from the fallen span. That was the last time I'd be unrecognizable.

  Chapter Two

  On August 18th, for 3.2 seconds, every human being simultaneously experienced total sensory deprivation—no sight, hearing, or physical sensation. A small percentage of individuals did later claim to have heard something, what one person described as "the sound of God striking a cosmic tuning fork." However, when people remember the Event, what they most remember is not the sensory blackout or the worldwide power failure that came with it, but what happened next. They remember where they were when the first superhumans appeared.

  Prof. Charles Gibbons, The New Heroic Age

  * * *

  Hand-in-hand, Atlas and I flew out over the Loop and descended on Grant Park. I had to be the most improbable breakthrough he'd ever seen. I hadn't grown an inch since my débutante ball and was always being told I could use a milkshake. A soon-to-be college freshman, I still looked—when not covered in grime—like an underdeveloped teenage Tinkerbell. Well, now I could fly like Tink, but it had nothing to do with thinking happy thoughts.

  I remember the Event; it caught me out on the playground in the middle of a game of Red Rover (I'd been racing to break the opposite line). Falling over onto grass, I didn't even get stains. Others weren't so lucky.

  With no power, they closed the school and sent us all home. The blackout caught Dad on the other side of the city restoring some old building, and he didn’t make it back home till the next morning, just long enough to see us before heading back into the city to help where he could. When our power and cable came back on we saw what was happening, the smoking craters left by planes falling from the sky, starting fires across the city, car crashes spreading death on the highways. Mom turned it off, but not before we saw the footage the rest of the world saw. We watched, with wide-eyed wonder, a man in airport worker coveralls leap into the sky to catch a private jet headed straight for O'Hare's tarmac.

  That was Atlas, aka John Chandler, eighteen at the time and just a few months younger than I was now. A cowboy from Texas working as a baggage-monkey at O'Hare Airport, he was the first breakthrough caught on film and shown to the world. Others appeared in the disasters that followed the blackout and most of them helped any way they could, but some just added to the chaos.

  Like Aftershock, the sonic-powered gangbanger who turned bank robber the very next day.

  Being eight meant that to me a flying man catching a plane was amazing but not impossible. The news that Air Force One had made a crater and that the newly sworn-in President Kayle had declared a State of Emergency didn't mean much to me at the time, either. I did see the news clips of Atlas and the others who followed, and later the TV shows, movies, and even comic books fictionalizing their adventures. We had real live superheroes now, and we gave them codenames if they didn't hurry up and pick their own.

  And now I flew with one. The first one.

  Atlas brought us down outside the Chicago Sentinels Building. It looked like a giant, half-buried baseball, and we Chicagoans just called it the Dome. We landed at the columned portico on the west side, the entrance facing the August 18th Memorial. This early on a cold September morning there weren't any tourists or protesters around as we walked through the tall bronze doors into the great public atrium. I suddenly felt like the kid in braces who'd come here on one of the first public tours.

  But then it had been an adventure; now I so didn't want to be here.

  Atlas marched us across the polished flagstones to the reception desk, staffed by a colorless man in dark suit and glasses.

  "Morning, Tom," he said. "This is Astra, and she'll have full guest clearance until further notice."

  I blinked. I had a codename already?

  "Ma'am," Tom replied, giving me a quick but close inspection before looking back down at his screens. If he thought my disaster-victim appearance at all unusual he didn't show it. Past the reception desk at the back of the atrium Atlas led me to an elevator bay, all brass and glass.

  "Astra?" I whispered, distracted from my jittering thoughts. "Where did that come from?"

  "I'd assumed this morning was your breakthrough," Atlas said. "Do you already have a name picked out? Keep it if you like it; Astra is Latin for 'star' and all I could think of on the spur of the moment. If you decide to take up the life, you can pick your own."

  The elevator arrived and we stepped in.

  "Just be careful what you choose," he added, voice dry. "I'm not so sure about Atlas."

  "Why?"

  "Because I named myself after a Greek titan whose sole job was to stand there and hold up the big blue sky. Got so bored with it he conned Hercules into taking his place, and Hercules—hardly the sharpest crayon in the box—tricked him into taking it back. Good thing most folks don't know their mythology."

  "I'll be careful," I promised uncertainly, not sure if he was serious. "Where are we going?"

  "Our actual headquarters is downstairs. The Dome itself is plenty tough, but we buried the most important stuff under enough concrete and armor to take a nuclear attack. Some of the folks we've tussled with swing mighty serious firepower, and of course we need to worry about A-class Black Hats coming around to shoot up the place, try and make a point. So we made darn sure any attack like that will fail and folks know it. Saves fuss and bother all around, don't you think?"

  I flinched away from the thought. If someone like the Teatime Anarchist (I'd heard a reporter throwing his name at the cameras before we left the scene) thought he could blow up the Dome, or even seriously damage it... I shivered. Was I going into shock? Could I now, with what I'd become?

  The doors opened into an underground lobby, all white marble and columns, with smart-panels and sliding doors that made it look like someone had thrown Caesar's Palace and the USS Enterprise into a blender. Friezes depicting the Sentinels battling supervillains decorated the walls, and despite everything I laughed and felt a little better. I'd had a good art history teacher, and the frieze of Atlas fighting Aftershock copied the classic pose of Hercules vs. the Hydra.

  The lobby receptionist, Bob (who looked so much like Tom I couldn't have picked between them in a line-up), greeted us with a nod and an "Atlas, Astra." Beyond the lobby we went through a set of doors and down a hall past the most high-tech gym I've ever seen, finally going through a big door labeled "Medical."

  On the other side I found my personal nightmare: a doctor who wanted to know all about me.

  Chapter Three

  Although we can measure and quantify them, we will probably never know how superhuman powers work. They are supernatural in the literal sense; they appear to have no cause in nature. Science's greatest minds have been wrestling with it since the Event, and the best they've come up with is the statement that there is obviously an immaterial phenomenon at work that we can only observe and measure through material means. It's not the first time this has happened; for example we know how gravity acts, but we can measure it only by its effects and we still don't know why mass creates gravity. Although of course we have some theories we like for their consistency and elegance.

  Dr. Jonathan Beth, Science and Superhumans

  * * *

  I texted Mom just in case she'd seen the news, telling her I'd ski
pped the gallery and wasn't feeling well. They let me shower, and as the oil, cement dust, and blood circled down the drain the fact that I wasn't even bruised freaked me out all over again. I stayed in the shower till I stopped shaking. The cotton jumpsuit they gave me itched, and I rolled up the sleeves and legs before coming out to face Dr. Death, the fiend from Hell Atlas left me with.

  Dr. Beth's eyes sparkled with kind humor and he promised me a lollypop when we were through, but the sensors he stuck to my skin were chilly, aggravating my tendency to shiver. I focused on the tasks he set me to, putting a wall between me and the lab and the memories screaming behind my eyes. He tested my new strength, toughness, super-senses, even my ability to fly, playing with his monitors the entire time and humming to himself when he wasn't chuckling or telling me to do something. By the time we were through I felt like I'd rolled down a hill in a barrel of rocks and run a marathon with bricks strapped on. At least he was happy.