A Hero At Midnight

The explosion hits me like a freight train. I can feel the pavement rush up around me as I plunge into a crater of my own making. My insides liquefy, but there’s no time to linger on that now. I bound onto my feet. No doubt I’ll be feeling the aches by morning.

Steel and cement shower the city street. I can’t stop it. The best I can do is gather the onlookers to safety. It hardly matters that it’s the middle of the night, there always seems to be a crowd at the foot of disaster.

        The citizens shout and cheer, crying in fear and adoration. They grab onto me as though clutching me will steady their own racing hearts. They never see time as I do. They have time to linger, time to be thankful to be alive. I have no choice but to push them away. They’ll have nothing to be thankful for if I don’t.

        The chase continues. We’ve played this game of cat and mouse for over ten years now. I’ll come out worse for the wear, but the reporters will hail me as a hero, leading the villain they love to hate to his seventeenth consecutive arrest. It’s getting old. Or at least I am. If he’s feeling it too, it certainly isn’t showing. Then again, if I could get around on a rocket-powered hovercraft and slam other people into skyscrapers, maybe I’d have more energy, too.

        Three empty hangers and the old bridge. Aside from the bank downtown, I’d say that our damages to the city have been quite minimal. Maybe he is slowing down. I could use a little rest.

        The helicopters circle overhead. The spotlight is blinding. The police flood in now that the scene is safe. The hovercraft is still sputtering, but it won’t take him far now that I’ve remodelled it into a mechanical pretzel. It serves better than the straight-jacket they’ll try to stick him in tonight.

        “I’ll see you Monday!” His groggy voice is still too lively, even after I’ve winded him. Or maybe that’s just his cockiness I’m hearing. He knows he’s wearing me down. Worse, the bastard knows he’ll be back on his feet in no time.

        I flee the spotlight. I hobble the rest of the way. My knees. My ankles. I wonder how I’m even walking.

It’s the internal pain that won’t let me stay upright. When I said my insides liquefied, I didn’t mean into piss. It’s all molten lava in there. It stirs, it billows, it ruptures. I can hardly see straight. At least my feet know the way.

        I know it’s been a bad day when I’m seriously debating between leaping up and just taking the fire exit. There are so many stairs. I hold my stomach as if it’s about to fall out. I don’t need to wait until morning to feel that one. I catch the rail and let myself perch against it for a moment. Nothing really does settle down. I climb through the window.

She’s a peach for always thinking of me. I fall into the armchair against the wall. How many times have I fallen into this old thing? Every year she inches it closer to the window. At this rate she might just have to leave it outside for me.

        She’s awake. She’s working. She’s always working. I swear this woman never sleeps. “Anything I should worry about?”

        I smile, though it probably isn’t my best one while my teeth are clenched.

        She gives me a quick look over. She hasn’t believed a word out of my mouth since removing a rail line from my torso that I claimed was “fine”. The extraction was easy enough, and I healed in no time. Those pains are fleeting. I never worry about those ones.

        She rolls up my sleeve. I catch her arm. “No. Not here.”

        She wants to protest. She has a whole lecture at the ready. I can see it puff in her cheeks. She doesn’t let it out, though. We’ve had this argument before. I know she worries about me more than I do. I wonder how much of that is because she still sees me as her patient.

        I’m too young to use a walker, but at this time of night, I’m not too proud. I just want to get there.

        Children’s Ward.

        I swear they put this wing further down the hall each time.

The night staff are courteous. They pretend not to notice my stumbling. I’ll have to remember to thank them for giving me a little bit of dignity.

        I enter quietly. Even with all of the monitors beeping, it still seems peaceful. All I can hear is their dreaming. Their breathing is almost in sync – or maybe that’s just my own. I do tend to get a little choked up among my little heroes.

        Now I let her roll up my sleeve. I’ve used the dialysis machine in this room so many times now, it’s almost like seeing an old friend. Well, maybe not quite.

        “You’ve got to stop this, you know. Slow down at least.” She’s cute when she fusses. I can’t explain to her that that isn’t an option. I can’t quit. Not while my heart is still beating. Though I suppose that’s the joke, isn’t it? It’s everything else that’s decaying on me. At this rate my heart will outlive the rest of me. Almost poetic, isn’t it?

        I fight off the exhaustion. It’s only a few hours away from morning. I want to be with them when they wake up. They don’t mind if I’m hooked up to tubes and wires. They seem to like that I’m just like them. “We’re in this fight together,” I tell them.

        Their little bodies, fighting each day with a strength that puts my own to shame. Their eyes on me, mine on them. I can’t quit. They don’t. And what would I be protecting if they did?