I’ve Got A Sweeter Song

Mandy has visions. Like, fingers to the temple, somebody catch her, there’s a girl in a place and oh the horror. I know we’ve established this before, I just wanted to remind you.

The Capes, we get to put on costumes and go out and be seen by crowds and news cameras and little kids holding their Mother’s hand while looking up and pointing and saying,  “I wanna be just like him.”

Mandy doesn’t get to experience that. She only gets the terror, and gets it secondhand.

Now that we’re hooked up with Project Dreamland, Mandy’s visions tend to act as second-source confirmation of D1’s scary accurate Hari Seldon-style computational predictions. But she’s still vital.

Sometimes she feels left out, though, especially when she hasn’t had a vision in a while, or when her vision doesn’t give D1 any new information; when that happens I try to take her out, have some fun, get in some us time. We’ll have a meal, get a hotel room, pretend we’re still young and naïve. It usually helps.

It’s not like we’re not young. Mandy’s not even twenty-six.

It’s been a long few years.

We were out on one of these dates, after Panix, after Berlin, after the big knock-down-drag-out with the Speaker that almost killed me, after the Nephilim. Mandy likes Thai food, so I took her to this place in the city.

We sat down, we talked anything but ‘shop’, we ordered. She made fun of me for ordering something safe. She grinned, excused herself to go to the ladies’, got up, kissed me on the top of the head as she went past towards the back of the restaurant.

I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

There was a commotion, like someone dropped a tray full of dishes, and so I turned around to see if I could help.

Crone had Mandy by the throat, long black fingernails digging into her ear. “Well, look what I have here,” she cackled. Crone, not Mandy: Mandy doesn’t cackle. Anyhow...

Crone had never really been a problem before, barely on Dreamland’s radar. She doesn’t have powers, she doesn’t have gadgets or money for gadgets. She’s just smart and evil and borderline insane. We usually leave her to the police.

“You look so handsome in your street clothes, Fleet,” Crone hissed. “And this must be your girl. So pretty, so young. I’ll bet you were looking forward to having her later.”

There are rules to what we do. I didn’t let Rapture kill Micro, even though he’d killed White Dragon and they’d been, I don’t know, at least screwing on the side, maybe more than that.

I don’t know what Crone intended. I didn’t wait to find out. It was Mandy. I can move fast, but that doesn’t just mean I can run; I can throw, too. I put a salt shaker through Crone’s head at ten feet.

Maybe Rapture would have stopped me, had she been there. She wasn’t.

I’m not sorry.

Fantasy Drabble #337 “Restrained”

I found her at the fence, where I always do.

“Any luck?”

She didn’t bother looking at me with hatred in her eyes, or spitting recriminations, or crying or begging. She’s gotten over all that. “Of course not.”

It must be difficult for her, to want to escape so badly but to have been rendered incapable of doing something so simple as crossing a fence-line. A deer could jump it easily; she cannot climb it or slip between the boards.

“Why not come inside?”

She just stared across the marsh into the mist. Perhaps she’ll try to kill me again.

Zombie Drabble #417 “The Super”

It’s quieter than she can remember it ever being. The sirens and panic and gunfire that replaced the normal sounds of city life have themselves been replaced by an intense smothering silence. The power is out, there is no phone service, and her windows, which overlook a narrow alley, reveal nothing.

Because it is quiet, she is quiet. She tiptoes in stocking feet from the couch to the door, puts her eye to the peephole. He’s still there, blood caked around his mouth now turned brown, staring at her door with dry dull eyes.

She tiptoes back to the couch.

Zombie Drabble #416 “Divisions”

“Well.” I looked around, but nobody was making eye contact. “Everyone satisfied with how we’ve divvied up the supplies?”

Reese looked pained, said, “I’d’ve thought there were more twenty-two rounds.” Everybody tensed up, looked back and forth between him and me and Big Jim. Reese eventually continued, “But whatever, it’s fine. Let’s just do this.”

The Reeses and the Macauleys and a few of the teenagers were heading West. Selma and I were going North, to see if the cold was an ally.

Big Jim was staying put. “Seems a shame.”

“It’s done.”

“Well,” I echoed, “good luck to you.”

The Past Is A Foreign Country

He was sitting, staring into space, not outwardly troubled, seeming like any other man in the middle of a day of cares. But it was him, certainly, the spitting image of the picture, the very same. Thirty years old, the oldest he would ever get. She approached quietly, ignoring the unfamiliar surroundings, the strange clothing styles, the sounds from passing automobiles — actual petroleum-powered automobiles — until her fingers came to rest on the cast iron end of the bench.

“Don’t do it,” She blurted, artlessly, and then winced before the man could even turn and react.

“What?” He asked, as if he hadn’t quite heard, before continuing after it had registered, “Don’t do what?” He looked at his sandwich as if wondering if she’d seen something wrong with it.

She sat on the bench next to him, careful not to disturb the detritus of his almost-complete sack lunch. “Sorry. I’m Etheline.”

“Etheline was my mother’s name. We almost named our daughter that. Funny.”

“I know. She won’t shut up about it, in fact.” She forgot herself for a moment, caught up in a memory. “I used to complain about my name all the time and she would go on about how it was almost hers but her mother wouldn’t let…”

He was looking at her with confused eyes. He hadn’t started glancing around for a security guard yet, which was a good sign; or maybe it was a side-effect of the problem at hand.

“Sorry again.”

“That’s okay. I’m just not sure I follow you…”

She’d rehearsed it. There was no reason to abandon a plan of words carefully chosen, but now, sitting here next to him, it all escaped her. “How are you feeling?”

He shrugged. “Fine today, I guess.”

Fine today. “But you haven’t been fine?”

He paused. “Did someone from HR send you to find me? Are you a counselor?”

“Nothing like that. But I did come to talk to you.”

“You said ‘don’t do it.’ What is it you think I’m going to do?”

“You tell me.”

Now he was glancing around, shifting his weight, arranging his feet so that he could get up at any time. “Listen—”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to freak out.” She leaned in, not close enough to make him more uncomfortable, but enough so that she could lower her voice. “People have noticed you’re having a hard time. Jeannie has noticed. She didn’t… she hasn’t said anything because she didn’t want to embarrass you. She regrets that now. So much. You should talk to her.”

A security guard passed, an honest-to-gosh firearm in his belt, but Gramps didn’t flag him down. After a minute, he said, “She’ll think I’m weak.”

“She won’t.”

“But how do you know?”

“I could prove it to you. How I know, I mean. But then you’d never be able to convince yourself I was just some socially awkward lady from HR.”

He nodded, slowly, and then gathered up his trash and walked away.