His phone buzzed near the subway steps. It was a text, from Pete: “BROTHER,” it read. “Need you! ASAP.” An address followed, a few blocks north and a lot of blocks west, along the river.
Pete needed him, now? They hadn’t seen one another in weeks. The big freak must be seething that we’re still over here, Jean-Jacques thought, smirking to himself. And I’m the reason why. Still, he heeded his sergeant’s call. It was nice, running super on the streets of Empire City, leaving bedlam in his wake. Screams of panic, shouts of confusion, an overturned hot dog stand or two, all in the span of thirty seconds. Speed like his could not be rationalized by human minds, nor could it be reasoned with. It could only be experienced.
Sure, someone might call the police, he thought. And say what?
The texted address led to a low-roofed, stand-alone building made from slate. To the south, the Global Trade tower shot into the above, illuminating the night’s licorice tint with white celestial light. To the hard west, across a bleak strip of highway, the river toiled away in its infinite work. The air here was wetter, Jean-Jacques noticed, but not colder. His heart was still battering from the short use of his power so he took a moment to collect himself. A large tiki mask carved from wood covered much of the building’s door, some sort of spiked rainbow crown shooting from its head. He knocked twice on the mask’s brow. When no reply came, he pushed open the door.
The wide bay of a space designed for packing in throngs of young bodies raced up at Jean-Jacques. Christmas lights covered the ceiling like kudzu and the smells of clean sweat and spilled beer stuck to tile swamped the air. A glowing fish tank in the near corner guided him to a coatrack. A couple of booths were filled with the hunched silhouettes of drinkers still clinging to their plans but most of the bar had gathered in the back, cheering in sloppy rhythm. Jean-Jacques found Pete there, the epicenter of it all.
He was chugging a full pitcher of beer, donned in a thick white headband and shirtless. An oversize American flag framed the wall immediately behind him, a large death skull in the blue canton instead of stars. Most every onlooker held a phone in front of them, filming the scene. Thick veins and full muscles twitched as Pete gulped along to their cadence, a medley of old battle scars dancing under the Christmas lights. But it was the mismatched tattoos that demanded the most notice: an M-4 carbine, barrel down, sprayed itself across his rib cage. The North Star with blue flames shooting from it rested above his left pec. The words “Sua Sponte” wrapped around the top of his chest in a scroll, from shoulder to shoulder, an homage to their simpler days in the Rangers. A long, silver Roman numeral I cleaved his sternum from the bottom of the neck to the navel. At first glance it looked like the length of a sword blade but Jean-Jacques knew it represented something else, an old quote Pete revered: “Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there. Eighty are just targets. Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior. He will bring the others back.”
Pete had been that one, once upon a time. Before the cythrax bomb, before they became Volunteers, before they become celebrity super-soldiers, Pete had been that one. The warrior. The man who brought others back. He’d lost it, though, somehow, somewhere along the way. He didn’t think he had but Jean-Jacques knew so.
His power had diminished him.
Pete finished the pitcher and threw it against a wall, shattering it to bits, much to the crowd’s delight. Two white girls with little waists and large chests emerged from the mass and settled under his arms.
“What is this?” Jean-Jacques asked the person next to him, a skinny white kid who was dressed like most everyone else in the bar, in a pastel button-down and khakis.
“That’s Justice!” the kid shouted. “Like, the famous soldier dude. From the wars. He just made a movie about capturing that terror chief, you know that? He’s chugged twelve pitchers, what a fucking freak! Better than the circus.”
Something about how the word “freak” inflexed off the kid’s tongue caused Jean-Jacques to punch him in the gut. Not too hard, he thought, though the young man did double over. Jean-Jacques used that word for Pete out of love. It sounded different coming from a nobody citizen.
He pushed through the crowd and shouted to get the other man’s attention. Pete smiled wide, his dissonant eyes blazing like candlelight, and drew Jean-Jacques into a group hug with the white girls.
Jean-Jacques also liked drinking. He also liked the pursuit of sex with large-chested females and he too liked being beloved by the masses. But this was too much. They needed to be getting ready for the Mediterranean; they needed to be getting ready for the wogs. Too much America, he thought. Way too much.
Pete unwrapped himself from his admirers and motioned Jean-Jacques to a corner booth. “Fear not!” he called out behind him, voice slurring. “Promise to return.” Shouts of drunken cheer followed.
They settled into the folds of the booth across from each other. Pete’s eyes churned, one hyper-black and one hyper-green, trying to focus, his face blank as a puddle.
“I like your necklace,” he said, pointing at Jean-Jacques’s turquoise pendant. “Where’d you get it?”
Jean-Jacques ignored him. “You texted that you need help.”
“I did! I do.” The superman force-chuckled and yanked at the headband around his temples, as if surprised to find it there. Jean-Jacques suddenly regretted not checking in more. Soldiers of all kinds could get lost in the homeland. Even this one. “I’m in deep with some shit, Dash. Big government stuff. Politics stuff. They… it’s hard to explain.”
Jean-Jacques asked him to try. Pete shook his head.
“I’m good. When I texted I needed to vent but now I’m good. For real.”
Jean-Jacques asked if it had to do with the Mayday Front.
“Those guys are terrorists. Trash fuckers. But I’m talking, like…” Pete sighed and closed his eyes, raising an arm toward the ceiling. “People up high. I just miss the war. Once we get back there, everything will be fine. For sure. Need to pull the trigger on men who deserve it again.”
All of Pete’s schemes, all his long chats with the three-letter-agency types, all his contacts—it was bound to catch up to him, eventually. Power did crazy things to people. Pouvwa. Anything to get it. Anything to keep it. Should’ve kept to soldiering, Jean-Jacques thought. Should’ve kept to the mission. Though maybe that wasn’t fair. He’d been allowed to keep to soldiering because Pete hadn’t, because Pete wouldn’t. And Jean-Jacques understood all too well what a man wanting to get back to combat was willing to do.
For friendship, for duty, he asked again. Pete yielded more this time.
“Those people up high. They need me a little too much, you know? ’Cause I’m Justice. ’Cause I’m super. ’Cause I’m hero.” He paused again and cleared his throat. “And I’ve been okay with it. It’s fine. For a bigger good. I don’t know. I mean, it is sorta about those trash veterans. Mayday! Whiny bitches. That night in the ballroom? You weren’t there.”
Jean-Jacques nodded to convey he knew about the night in the ballroom.
“Hypothetical. Let’s say it was done on purpose. By both sides. Wouldn’t that be fucked up? They keep using you and using you and using you, holding the Mediterranean over your head like a piece of cheese. So you go along with it. That night, I mean. Play your part. Things go haywire for other reasons but you play your part. That was it, they said. Then you and your boys can deploy again. But now there’s another thing they want. Stand up with them at this damn parade. Help them look good. Which, whatever. It’s small. Easy. ’Course, they said the same thing about the political bash. Small. Fucking easy.”