“See ya, Mr. Pople,” I say as I run up the stairs. I go to his bedroom and grab the small piercer gun from a drawer. It’s the first gun I ever shot. It’s a small black thing with a smooth kick. It makes almost no sound when you pull the trigger. It kills in whispers, which I like. Or used to like. There’s an extra clip in the same drawer. I grab both.
“Hello, Ama,” says Mrs. Pople, who’s still in bed, a cover up over her head.
“Hi, Mrs. Pople, gotta go,” I say.
“Tell your brother to come see me soon.”
“He’s a little caught up today,” I say, and I don’t mention that it’s been a very long time since she and Ike were life partners.
“I see. He prefers Jen. Still?” Jen was a teacher at the school. But I don’t know if Ike prefers anyone right now.
“You’d have to ask him, Mrs. Pople. But maybe your husband is interested? Or maybe Xander is. I think I heard him say he thought you were interesting and physically very attractive.”
“You’re a nice girl, Ama,” Mrs. Pople says.
“We’re all supreme and infinite. We might as well act like it,” I say as I zip my fanny pack closed. I really am settling well into becoming a better person, I think. I’ve really come a long way from what I was, and I was once a true terror. The kind that probably never existed ever before. But now here I am, being called nice.
Kennedy Street is down on the other side of the grid, so it takes a little while on the bike. Days are short. Soon it will rain, and Ike wants to be inside before the rain. “Bye, Mr. Pople,” I say without looking at him doing whatever he’s doing.
“Goodbye, my liege,” he says.
My bike is on the side of our house. I run back in to tell Ike I’m ready, then wait for him outside. I do my kicks and my punches and some tumbles to get loose. I jump some jacks. I give the maple in our yard two good punches and a roundhouse kick to the trunk, and it crashes down. The sound of splitting wood excites me, I admit. It’s different from the sound of snapping bones, but it reminds me of that kind of breaking. Then my father comes outside and looks at me. He has a glass of water in his hands.
“Thirsty?” he asks.
“Yeah, a little bit,” I say. He extends his arm to me, and I walk toward him. I take the glass. It’s cold, nice.
“Where are you going?” he asks like he might have before the Flash. Like he wants to tag along.
“Just riding around on the bike,” I say. His eyes narrow a little, then he takes a deep breath and relaxes.
“Okay,” he says. He turns around, and Ike slides past him outside.
“You too, Ike? You’re out of bed? You’re going outside?”
“Yes, I’m looking forward to some fresh air,” Ike says.
“That’s spectacular,” my father says. It’s been a long time since Ike has been outside. “You riding with Ama?” my father asks. He sounds so excited that it’s almost like he’s the father I had when I had a mother—that person I only sort of remember. The one who would hold me by my feet and tickle me until I couldn’t breathe. I remember that fun, breathless struggle. I also remember, always, that he didn’t treat my mother well. He used to yell and scream. I used to hide in my room with Ike, and to distract him we’d play hide and seek. Back before Ike was a genius. Before I was a murderer. That I remember.
“See ya, Daddy,” I say, and give him a hug. I keep my eyes open all through it.
“Have fun, ginger root,” he says as he touches my hair. And I close my eyes for a half second to feel the simple good of his hands on my head. Then I’m on the bike, and Ike is sitting in front on the handlebars, and we’re riding in the wind like we’re unstoppable beings who truly have all anyone could ever hope for.
Our street is Harper, and then we ride down Flint to get onto Conduit AB-14, which we stay on for a while. Conduit AB-14 is framed by trees full of drone birds and dirt. It’s four lanes of empty road. Naked road for miles and miles, and if it didn’t mean the end of the world, all that empty might be beautiful, maybe.
On the way we see a group of men and women beating down some other man. When I ride by, they stop to look at me. I smile and wave. When they see me, their eyes go wide, then the group of them run off in the opposite direction. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” I call out. They don’t believe me. They don’t stop running. The one who was getting beat on gets up. His face is mashed pretty good. “You’re still magnificent and supreme. Nothing can change that,” I tell him. He picks up a rock. Turns from me, unbuckles his pants, and shows me his butt cheeks. Then, when his pants are back on, he goes running after the group.
“Meatheads,” Ike says, trying to keep me from feeling bad.
“Yeah,” I say.
It takes us almost an hour to get there. I stop two streets before Kennedy to catch my breath, and we walk the rest of the way. Carl’s cluster looks pretty much like ours, but it’s quieter. People mostly stay inside here because of Carl.
“I think the furthering of variance might truly suggest the dissolving of consistency we’ve always expected,” says Ike.
“Hope so,” I say. And we walk more.
When we finally do get to Kennedy, the heads of two women, Patricia Samuel and Lesly Arcor, are stuck onto the street sign. Carl’s set the two heads up to look like they’re kissing. Patricia Samuel is Carl’s mother.
“I guess Carl is still Carl,” Ike says. Looking around, curious, kind of scared, almost like how I imagine a real little kid might look. There are no more real little kids. Even the babies know they’re stuck. Most of them don’t cry at all. Some of them never stop crying ever.
It always looks like World War VI over on Kennedy because of Carl. Two houses are on fire. There are dark spots that show where Carl’s victims bled out on the streets. He’s a real terror. Still. It’s easy to judge him because, I mean, he does the absolute worst stuff to people. I once saw him use his body and various household objects to physically violate eight people, who were all tied up at once. He was fourteen when the Flash came, like me.
It’s super-easy to think he is the Devil himself because of all the things he does and because sometimes he screams, “In this hell, the Devil, the Lord, and everything in between is named Carl,” but I’ve been there. Being strong can make you like that. Carl is my protégé. He’ll never admit it, but it’s true. He’s the protégé of Knife Queen Ama. The Ama who started with one knife and ended with three blades and two guns, who could kill all 116 people on my cluster in one hour and twenty-two minutes. I’d take a shower and change halfway through because my clothes got so heavy. Every inch of my black skin painted the maroon of life. The old Ama would murder everyone because when everyone was gone, she got to feel like she was the only one in the world and there was no one who might ever do her wrong again. Sometimes she’d just sit in the grass and feel supreme and infinite. She’d try to stare at a single blade of grass, or dance in the empty streets, or sing at the top of her lungs, until the Flash came. Sometimes she’d cry and cry as she washed the blood from her hair and eyes. Sometimes she wouldn’t wash it off at all.
Imagine the worst thing anyone has ever done. I promise, I’ve done it to everyone. More than once.
When I realized I was faster and stronger, at first I didn’t know what to do. I thought that maybe I was supposed to be on top now. I thought I was getting rewarded. And so I did what I wanted. Before the Flash, Carl was not nice to me. He liked to call me “nappy-headed bitch,” or “dumb-ass cunt.” He liked to make me cry back when we still had school. Then, when my mother left us, when I saw him, he said, “Guess your mother didn’t want to be alive, knowing she made you.” That, well, I know he regrets saying that. Because after the Flash, once I realized what I could do, I hunted him. He was the first person I ever killed. He was the first person I’d kill every day. The hurt I’ve pulled out of that boy could fill the universe twice over.