"You made this gun, right? Modified it. Chose to carry it. You chose to go around the regs. Far as I can see, what happens now, you did this to yourself." From his pocket Tashjian took a pack of gum. Wrigley's Big Red. Spicy stuff. Carefully he selected one, tweezered it out with his fingers. Undid the wrapper. Chewed it. Setting the pack on the table, he flicked it to Soledad, who flicked it right back.
Tashjian: "It's a little hard to understand, that's all I'm saying. You can see that, can't you; it's a little hard to understand this obsession you've got."
"It's not… So is every cop on the force obsessed? The second you put on a uniform and try to uphold the law, does that make…" Soledad trailed off, not seeing the point in trying to state her case to the top of Tashjian's head. His face was down, buried in Soledad's jacket, which was apparently too engaging to put aside.
"That's just such an unusual way to spell 'O'Roark, '" he fascinated."Never seen it spelled that way before."
Soledad stared at Tashjian.
Stared at him.
She said: "I screwed up. I know I did. So if I've got to, I'll take what's coming to me. But meanwhile, there're freaks running around free as they please, and you'd rather fuck with me than go after them. So do your job, do what you have to. But I don't have time for this, I don't have time for your bullshit questions or your bullshit games." A hand whipped out to the file. The papers inside flipped up, snowed down."I got work to do."
By the time she heard the door slamming behind her Soledad was well down the hall. Then Soledad was pressing her forehead to the wall, holding herself up. Catching air. Soledad could feel her body shaking. She could talk tough all she liked. Truth: That plain guy she'd just left behind; sitting across from him, knowing the kinds of trouble he could cause for her, truth was he put a hell of a scare into her.
A hand on her shoulder. Bo's.
"Howzit?" he asked.
"I'm good." Still shaking some, sweat on her palms; Soledad wasn't even in the neighborhood of good.
Bo saw but said nothing about Soledad's state.
They walked.
"IA come at you hard?"
Soledad looked to Bo: "You know?"
"Tashjian's been around. He asked me some about you."
"Could've warned me."
"IA asks questions, you're not supposed to talk about it."
"And I'm the only one around here who breaks regs."
"You just have to be careful about things."
"Careful why? Careful because I'm going down and nobody wants to get caught up in my wake?"
"You don't know how things are going to work out. You've got me backing you… Soledad." Bo caught Soledad by the arm, turned her to him."You're good cop. If you weren't, I never would've wanted you on my element. I'm backing you, Rysher's backing you. This is gonna get worked out. You were trying to do right and this… it's gonna get worked out."
It sounded good anyway. At least Bo knew how to put confidence into things when he wanted to.
He said: "Well, now maybe I can talk to Rysher; get you back on the job. Your leg's healed up, and you sitting on a desk isn't doing anybody any good."
Soledad appreciated that and told Bo so and thanked him in advance for whatever he could do.
And then Bo offered: "Maybe sometime you could come by the house. My wife's fierce in the kitchen, loves having people over to cook for. Don't know if you cook much for yourself."
Soledad looked up, over. A couple of detectives, older guys, staring at her. She turned some, shut them out.
To Bo: "Thank you, but I don't think I'd be good company right now."
Soledad thanked Bo again for trying to help out.
Bo walked away.
Walking away. Suddenly that seemed, to Soledad, like a right idea. She thought about bagging the rest of the day. Hell with it. Just walk away, go on home and veg. It was just paperwork waiting for her. But paperwork was now Soledad's responsibility. Hate it or not, she didn't know, honestly didn't know how to ditch her responsibilities. That, or work was all she had in her life. In a fashion it had been her life since San Francisco.
Either way, she headed back for her desk.
Bludlust was the worst of them. There were others, all bad. Thrill Kill, Death Nell, Headhunter. Even The Liquidators managed to snuff the Giggler, but that was mostly luck. Bad luck for the Giggler. But Bludlust was the worst of them.
We should have known.
The moment Nightshift first showed up we should have known if there were these… heroes with supernormal abilities, sooner or later there would have to be super bad guys. And there were. Plenty of them.
At first they were just a better class of perp; ripping off the US Treasury or Fort Knox instead of a 7-Eleven or a liquor store.
It got worse.
Kidnapping the pope, holding the entire UN General Assembly hostage, pointing a death ray at St. Louis. You believe that? A death ray? That's what Hatchetman called it.
Hatchetman and his death ray. Funny except the thing could actually kill people. Could but didn't, because Nubian Princess stopped him.
They were like opposite sides of a coin, the heroes and the villains; the names, the costumes. So very much alike except one side was virtuous and the other side would kill without a thought. It was all so unreal, good and evil going at each other, like watching theater. It was all so far beyond us. And every time the battles between the two sides would escalate, the weapons of destruction became more absurd as they got more deadly. Geothermal devices, antimatter projectors, chrono-temporal displacement units. Forget the freaky names, the mad science that went into them. Those things could wipe out thousands in one swipe. But always at the last second of the eleventh hour, from out of nowhere, in
would swoop The Stylist or Pronto or Nightshift or Civil Warrior to save the day.
Routine it got to be. And, sure, maybe a few people would get killed along the way—a few of us lowly nonendowed normals—but there was nothing new about that. When weren't people getting killed by criminals? How much difference did it make if it was a junkie with a dull knife, a banger with a MAC-10 or Body Count with a sonic resonance device? Dead is dead, and that's as bad as it gets. And at the end of the day the heroes always, usually, beat the villains because the heroes were smarter than them. Better than them.
Better than most of them.
But Bludlust, he was the worst of them. A genocidal serial sociopath.
Shrink mumbo jumbo.
He got off on killing lots of people. Lots and lots of people at the same time. And with his freak supernormal brain he had the smarts to do it. He'd go after a bus, an airplane, a city block or a building. Usually he was nick-of-time-stopped by Pharos, the best of the metanormals. Handsome with his blond hair, golden suit and white cape. He was iconic, angelic. He was the perfect foil to an inhuman beast who could barely keep fed his appetite for destruction. Their battles raged back and forth so commonplace we got used to them in the same way you get used to earthquakes or tornadoes. Nothing you can do about them, right? You just live with them. Besides, the superheroes would take care of us.
Right?
San Francisco. Symbolic. It was where Nightshift, the original meta-normal, first appeared. Bludlust—with some kind of crazy megaweapon— was holding the whole city hostage. Again. Barely rated live coverage on CNN. And at the last moment Pharos raced to the rescue. Again.
And then something happened that had never happened before. The thing, the device, weapon: it went off.
The first day of May.
One second San Francisco was there, the next, half, three-quarters of it was a burned-out, scarred-over, heat-fused piece of rock that looked as if
nothing had ever existed there before. Like nothing would ever exist there again.
One second, one fraction of a moment in time, and the world changed.