Incidental Superhero
Part 7
My heart is palpitating. The live nuclear weapon we are about to blow up is part of it, but so is the sight of the Hudson River, the sharp peaks of its threatening eddies frozen in time a skyscraper’s distance underfoot. We each have two high powered rifles slung over our shoulders, our backpacks and pockets overfilled with ammunition as we brave the mist-slick steel of the George Washington bridge’s primary cable. We make our way up the steeply inclined path to the top of the first suspension tower.
Sonya has done an off the cuff calculation and concluded that every newton of force counted in a situation like this. Climbing to the top of the tower would bridge a couple of hundred feet between us and the target, which meant each bullet would be hitting that much harder.
We sorted through the army’s worth of small arms for the strongest we could carry – two large caliber assault rifles each – and headed up like two urban sherpas, her moving confidently into the air, hands gently resting on the handrail wires, me gripping them with white knuckled fear, certain a slow motion fall to my watery death awaited me.
Such a death had been a recurrent fear of mine all my life. What if, I’ve always wondered, I encountered one of the harms for which slowing down time accomplished nothing at all. What good would time dilation do if I found myself without a parachute falling out of a plane? Or freezing to death on a mountain top? Or, I don’t know, falling off a bridge?
No, there were certain activities I just didn’t mess with, fearing in an emergency my “power” would just make things worse rather than better, and although I hadn’t previously considered it, climbing the super structure of a suspension bridge was definitely one of those things.
“Only a little longer.” Sonya calls out from ahead of me, even having the audacity to look back toward the long, steep incline and the harrowing fall and smile. I grimace in return and nod curtly, face pale and sweaty. Just then my right foot slips on a dew of condensation and I fall toward the right “hand rail”, catching myself with both hands on the glorified wire. The movement leaves me face down toward the water, the wire shaking violently in hand, and causes a cartridge to fall out of my pocket. I watch, horrified, as it tumbles and spins, picking up speed on its long journey to the water before freezing still in space at roughly the halfway point. My head swims with vertigo and I shut my eyes to steady myself.
“You OK?”
The question strikes me as ridiculous, but I don’t want to be a poor sport about it. “Sure! Yes! Sure!” That was about all I could muster, uttered between waves of sloshing nausea. I force myself off of the still vibrating wire, stand up as straight as I am going to get, and place my right foot onto the narrow steel path.
The journey up takes about 10 more minutes, although it felt like a lifetime. I realize, as i take the final step onto the flat, solid steel surface of the tower, just how completely I hate heights.
Sonya is already standing at the edge of the precipice looking out onto the great expanse of New York City, south into the mouth of the Hudson, the Verrazzano bridge visible as a faint arch in the distance. I nearly lose my breath seeing her standing there, fearless as a perched hawk, and have to sit down as close to the center of the structure as I can get. There are no barriers up here, just a sheer man-made cliff. I close my eyes again and try to take a deep breath.
When I open them, Sonya is kneeling down in front of me. Her green eyes are some balm to my fear, but it takes her warm hand on my face to make a dent in my racing heartbeat. “Take a deep breath.” She whispers and I try cognizant of the ephemeral border between relaxation and hyperventilation. Soon my blood began to slow down, and after a few moments I can even bring myself to take a look around.
She isn’t wrong of course, we are significantly closer to the missile now. I am just building up the strength of will to stand and load my rifle when Sonya pulls my face toward hers and plants a long, soft kiss on my lips. I kiss her back and we linger there for a time, frenching on top of the world like there isn’t a thermonuclear warhead floating in the sky less than 500 feet away.
“Ready?” Sonya stands up in front of me. I watch, from shin height, looking up, as she swings one of the rifles around to her front and loads a bullet into the chamber. Then she offers her right hand to help me up and, as I was thinking it, she says “Come with me if you want to live” in an awful austrian accent.
It’s sort of perfect, and I do want to live, and I realize I would follow Sonya just about anywhere, although at the moment I can’t think of a crazier fucking place she could have led me.
I waiver at first but then get my feet underneath me, and follow Sonya toward the edge, stopping 6 inches away. Popping in a clip and loading one into the chamber of my rifle. “Where do we aim?”
Sonya stands close beside me and leans in so we’re cheek to cheek. She points one of her long, elegant fingers at the front portion of the missile, near the tip. “The payload should be there.” Then, our faces still close, she turns towards me so her lips are by my cheek and I can feel her breath on my skin. “Have you ever shot a gun before?”
A bit late for that question, if you ask me. I frown. “In an arcade.”
“What’s an arcade, geezer?” Sonya winks, part of an ongoing gag about our five year age difference.
I smile. “It’s this place where people used to pay money to pretend to do crazy shit like this.”
“Shit like this?”
“Well,” I look around, “not quite like this.”
She laughed lightly. “How bout we save the world, baby.” Then she turns toward the missile and aims her rifle. I follow her lead.
“On three!”
“One!”
I take a deep breath in.
“Two!”
Let it out through my nose.
“Three!”
And pull the trigger.
I get off one shot and the recoil takes me off guard. I guess I didn’t have my feet positioned correctly or something, and the force of the shot pushes my shoulder back awkwardly. Without thinking my body tries to compensate and takes a small step forward, only to slip on a bedewed rivet.
As my upper body swings forward off the edge of the tower my line of sight follows the arc of my head through the air, and I catch a final glimpse of Sonya, poised and firing, then the spray of bullets arcing through the air, and, finally, farther out in the distance, the first impacts on the missile.
Ironically, it seems to me that time is slowing down, that I can see every bullet moving through the air, some missing the target, others striking home in showers of sparks, some boring perfect little holes in the cone of the missile’s sheet metal casing. But then my head continues in its arc, and all I can see is the asphalt of the traffic lanes looming below me, the siren call of gravity luring my body toward catastrophic impact.
I’m pretty sure I make a sound as I fall, but Sonya is firing away and the noise is deafening.
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