Incidental Superhero
Part 8
One second I am beginning the plummet toward a messy impact with the pavement, my worst nightmare coming true, the next I am back on top of the suspension tower, my back flat against the chill of the steel. From my perspective the transition is instantaneous, so much so that it catches me mid scream.
Sonya is over me again, her face a frenetic mask of worry, eyes flitting back and forth between me and something behind her. She reaches down and grabs my forearm.
“What just happened?” I ask, but she doesn’t respond, just lifts me to my feet. My legs feel like jelly beneath me and I am shaking violently from adrenaline.
Sonya gives me a worried look. “We need to go, now.” She looks back and this time I follow her eyes and almost collapse again.
The missile is gone. In its place is a fireball so intensely bright that I can’t look directly at it for more than a second. To make matters much worse, the orb of cataclysmic energy is expanding, growing in size as plasma arcs and flares, burgeoning in fits and starts, almost as though whatever power was holding time in place struggled to control the conflagration.
Sonya and I make quick eye contact, each of us sharing an “oh shit” look, before swinging around and racing for the main suspension cable and the long walk down.
Sonya makes it there first, her steps fast and assured. She had started down by the time I reach the top of the cable, both my hands desperately grasping the inch thick handrail wire, the long, terrifying slope of the thin path expanding away and down before me. I take a quick glance at the expanding nuclear fireball and know immediately I would never make it in time.
“Sonya!” I call after her and she turns around, already a few meters down the length of cable. “I can’t.”
“Come on!” But even as she waves me towards her, Sonya’s eyes betray the same truth: I was not going to make it down that cable in time. There was no way. My legs were visibly shaking already and I could barely hold firm on the handrail. I felt light headed from my recent, inexplicably aborted near death experience, and all the while the orb of fire was growing a couple of hundred feet beside us. “Come on.” She said it again, without conviction, tears welling in her eyes.
I shoot her the best smirk I can manage and resolve myself to the choice. “Get out of here. I’m OK. I’m OK with this. Just, if you see my family.” Whatever strength was holding the explosion at bay faltered for a moment just then and the ball of chaos expanded in a microsecond by almost 20 feet, with a brief roar of light and sound, before going silent again and slowing down. Sonya pays it no attention and marches up the cable until she is beside me. I clear my throat and continue, quieter now, “When you see my family, tell them I tried my best.”
Sonya wipes a tear from her eye and kisses me, quick and fierce on the mouth. When she pulls her face away from mine she wears an almost crazed look of determination. “Do you trust me Henry?”
Every surface of her face is highlighted by the warm glow of nuclear annihilation. “More than anyone.” I answer.
She briefly looks down at the street far below and then back at me. “Then let go.”
I don’t have much time to think. As the word “what?” comes out of my mouth Sonya already has her hands around my midsection and she’s pushing me hard off the edge. Instinct brings my hands up to stop her, which was a bad idea, because in my weakened state they aren’t much help and, without the handrail to hold onto, I soon feel my feet give way and go airborne for the second time in as many minutes.
Time does that weird perceptual thing once more and seems to slow down as I fall, really fall, the g-force of acceleration alive in my guts. I watch, my back to the ground, as Sonya’s sad face fades into the distance above me, her eyes red and swollen with tears, a miniature sun raging in the sky behind her, silhouetting the structures of the bridge so that all the wires look like solid black lines on a background of pure light.
My flailing body swings around in midair until I am facing the ground, my eyes widening in horror as the asphalt races up at me, getting closer, until I can see the cracks in the pavement, until my right cheek is mere inches from the unforgiving rock, until the wet surface of my left eyeball is so close to utter devastation that the ground tickles my eyelashes.
I’m in the car and it’s speeding away down the length of the George Washington Bridge. I don’t understand at all. My heart isn’t even palpitating anymore, I can hardly feel it in its preternatural slowness. My mind feels like its a thousand miles away. I take stock. Sonya is driving, her attention split between the road and something in the rear view. My head feels like a sack of soft rocks encased in fresh flan and its drifts off to the left, hanging loosely over my shoulder, then forward, trying to drag my upper body with it but coming up against the seat belt.
Sonya notices the movement and beams a smile towards me. “Henry! You’re awake!”
I hear her voice as if its many miles away, and as I raise my sloshing head to look at her I catch a glimpse in the side view mirror. Keeping pace behind us is an epic fireball, an Akira-esque globe of expanding destruction. It fills nearly the entire side view mirror, its boundaries quickly rising up to devour the tower Sonya and I had been standing on top of, and then continuing onward, the bridge disappearing into its fiery embrace.
“Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”
It’s like an old Far Side comic or some cheap sight gag in an action film. I look up and see the empty road through the windshield as it speeds past us, as we leave it behind to die in the great cataclysm of our creation. My mind goes to the millions of other people I have failed, all of those frozen human beings, soon to be nothing more than ash as we make our final dash for freedom.
I might have cried if I had even the slightest energy for it, even a single calorie to spare. But after surviving two falls off the same bridge in under five minutes, and then waking up being driven through the end of the world by my lover cum attempted murderer, it was a metabolic tight rope just to remain conscious: a tight rope I fell off of moments later, back into merciful oblivion.
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