I didn’t want to believe it was you.
When the ‘Code M’ rang overhead and we prepped to triage the civilians, I would never have imagined it was your face beneath the mask.
They wheeled you through the decontamination doors, a shimmering lance through your chest. The mutantologist checked your disguise against the database and sprinted for the Vault while your eyes stared unflinching at the brilliant lights.
We did what we would do for a human. Pushed epinephrine, attempted to ventilate you. Useless things, we knew, as you weren’t human. The blood on my gloves was too hot, too thick.
The vial the mutantologist pressed into my hand was icy and the solution murky green. Whatever it was, this elixir potent only for you, took immediate effect. The monitors erupted into life, the flat lines spiky and screaming. You bucked on the table and men in black tactical gear strapped you down.
We dumped grams of sedatives into you. Grams, not milligrams; neuromuscular blockers, benzos, narcotics. Enough to kill the humans fighting to stabilize you.
Finally you stopped writhing and we intubated. The surgeon cut the lance from your body right there in the emergency room and left a jagged suture line the mutantologist told us would heal in a matter of days.
I wiped blood from your face and I saw it. The scar on your chin from a boyhood tussle with your brother. You had bitten through your lip and your mother had rushed you for stitches on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I never admitted to you I thought it charming, the way it danced with your smile.
I never admitted I thought you were charming. You were already so confident, so sure of your victory. I tolerated you and your persistence, morning after morning. When you asked me for drinks, I was ready to refuse, weary of yet another cock-sure hipster cluttering up my favorite coffee shop, making small talk when I wanted to caffeinate in peace.
But as you asked, you looked so suddenly anxious, shy, that my heart unaccountably ached for you.
I agreed to that first date out of pity. I never told you I agreed to the second because you were so winsome. Boyish. Funny. Kind.
You held the door for me and pulled back my chair. We talked about our work. You asked intelligent questions and gave thoughtful answers.
I loved meeting you and just talking. I loved going to a matinée after my shift. I would fall asleep tucked safe under your arm until the credits. I loved our evening walks, wrapped securely against the chill wind. I loved the way you smelled, the line of your nose, when you kissed my neck just below my ear.
I loved you.
I watched them wheel you from the decontamination room, blank, denying it, knowing it had to be true. Someone called my name, pulling me back to the present, to the injured streaming through the ambulance doors. Casualties of the battle you had just lost.
I worked until I was exhausted, long past my shift and into the next.
There were reporters. There always were, in a seething mass beyond the barricades. Their demands for details, the jeers of the protesters, were like the hum of a refrigerator. I think I would only notice if they were gone.
But they had never screamed for you before. Never demanded your blood, the blood staining the work shoes I had dumped into the M-Hazard biowaste bin before I clocked out.
Baby-killer, they shrieked. Traitor, devil, heartless bitch. I had heard it all and had grown weary of explaining to those who demanded why.
Why did I help men like you? Why did I heal those who caused so much pain?
Everybody has a family, I would say. Who am I to judge when I know nothing about you, hard-eyed woman breathing hate in my face. If you were on my gurney, if you drank one too many and plowed through a storefront, wouldn’t your children want me to save you? If it was your wayward child in that cold harsh room, his life in my hands, what would you have me do?
I went to our coffee shop the next morning. The barista greeted me with a wave, looking pointedly at the empty seat next to me. I shrugged, unable to make my face move, frozen still in blank disbelief.
I clung to the desperate hope it was a coincidence. Surely hundreds, thousands, of sturdy little boys wrestled their siblings every day. I hated that I had imagined our boys doing the same, you surrendering to their giggling attack, tickling them as they shrieked with glee.
You never showed up. Your phone went endlessly to voicemail, the texts never read.
I called in sick for my next shifts. No one thought anything of it. A ‘Code M’ could knock you back, no matter how many you experienced. One never knew which would be the one, the one to make you question what you were doing, why you were doing it. Why you helped those who hurt others, why you got into this profession.
You told me you were a scientist. Perhaps you were, of a sort. Not the kind I had envisioned. How much of what you told me was a lie? Your life, your job, your name? Your love?
A week of sleepless nights and I found the courage to face you. It was illegal, but with my clearance and my friends in the Vault, I got into the Mu-ICU. I told lie after lie, each successive guard more suspicious than the last until I stood before you.
You told me you had fallen in love the moment you saw me. That I had seemed so powerful, so graceful, so beautiful. I had never attributed those qualities to drinking lattes while half-asleep, but I gave you some leeway for infatuation.
Now, I understood. I remembered when I had first seen you, too. In real life, not a sound bite and file photo on the news.
I had been out shopping, just wasting a summer afternoon. A shriek and thunderclap, the air shuddering and pedestrians scrambling for cover. You and some hero, demolishing the street as you fought.
People screaming, crawling to safety, panicking. It was my other life thrust messily into reality. I found a men injured on the sidewalk, hemorrhaging from his thigh. I used his belt to compress the artery, flames searing my face.
I stood with the man’s arm across my shoulders and I saw you. The real you, across the street with a crater between us.
You saw me. I felt the pressure of you gaze, the intent behind the mask.
Like a bolt of lightning, you told me one night. You had given me a lopsided grin as you said it, that cursed, charming scar moving with the quirk of your lips. I had thought it a cliche, a cheesy line to cajole me into kissing you.
The flash had blinded me, too, leaving spots in my eyes and a shrill whine in my head for days. Galactica had won that battle. My fault I suppose, as you stood still and surprised, your proud wreckage around you.
I imagined you looked as you do now: shocked, scared, yearning. How long had it taken you to find me? How many hours did you wonder those streets, searching?
The Collar around your neck is heavy and black, glinting LEDs like a row of gems. I can’t hear you through the plexiglass, but I can see the words on your lips.
Please.
Explain.
Forgive.
Love.
The bandage on your chest shows you were more injured than I thought. Which hero had vanquished you? Which one had cast you into this prison deep in the earth? I hadn’t tried to find out, knowing I would hate them.
Please, you beg. You are up against the barrier, trying to be close to me. I want to hold you again, one last time. But I can’t. We can’t. We should never have done this.
I can’t hear you as I turn away, but I can feel the floor shudder as you punch the barrier. The four-inch-thick plate flexes under the pressure, angry dimples where your knuckles strike.
I can’t hear you calling my name, but I hear your screams when they activate the Collar. They echo inside me as I ride for aching minutes to the surface. As I drift through the bustling emergency department, full of normal humans with normal complaints. As I pass the churning mob outside, your name harsh on their tongues.
I sit in my cold car, dew frozen to the glass, enclosing me in chill solitude.
Can you hear my sobs, my heartbreak as I shudder with ugly grief? As tears and snot soak my gloves, my throat ripping and hot?
There is nothing to do but leave. Start my car and go home. I can’t. I curl up on the seat, my head on my knees. Pleading that it will stop. That I could just stop and not have to face tonight and the morning and the morning after that.
No one knew who you were, the real you. You will be locked away in some prison, forgotten. They will experiment on you, hurt you, claim it a just punishment for the pain you caused others.
No one will know who we were. No one will understand. If they discovered I loved a villain like you, they would be disgusted, horrified, pitying. They would despise me, thinking I condoned what you had done.
There was nothing to do but leave. I wiped my face, gasping to catch my breath. The swell of the engine drowned out my ragged hiccups. The protesters were a blur outside my window, the hospital a tower of steel and glass, a monument to suffering and death.
I waited at the light, half hoping you would escape. Come to me. Flee with me into the life now lost to both of us.
The light turned and I drove on.
My first book, Archer 887, is a 2022 Indies Today Awards Contest Finalist, and is on sale now through online book retailers. Pick up a copy, leave a review, and let me know what you think!
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Installments from my full-length fantasy novel, The Lost Hero, post each Saturday, for paid subscribers only. I am also on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
(I also write about my work as an RN on my Substack: This Is My Nurse Face. Crazy stories, advice, and vents about inpatient nursing.)
Thanks for reading! Anna
But I am going to publish the first chapter of Archer next month sometime. Next month's posts are in the works!
Short story I entered in a contest here on substack. Thank you for reading!