Do The Work

I was tired, tired like I hadn’t been since before the powers. It was dark, but something inside me told my pupils not to dilate, to stay ready for the light.

It was midnight up on the side of a mountain in Colorado you’ve never heard of. It took me almost two hours after I got the call to run down there from New York. There wasn’t a road, just an unmarked helicopter pad, and a hatch on the forest floor with NORAD painted on the side in bright yellow Helvetica.

I could smell the guns coming for me, and I could hear soldiers snapping twigs in the underbrush even if I couldn’t see them. I was tired, but I still had a million and a half New Yorkers wishing for me. That’s how the power works. Psychic energy. They have to want me to have it.

I should have known why I was tired. Kids with machine guns are easy, but I was slow, and before I finished cracking their skulls, the hatch opened up. I was glad my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness then; the nuke left a trail brighter than the sun, knocked all of us on our asses. Probably killed most of the soldiers trying to kill me. And when I tried to get up, I couldn’t. Too tired.

as the nuke trailed off into the sky, the dark settled back in and the red glow of the dial on my arm was all the light I had left. It read 1.00, the strength of one. I was tired because I was on my own. They were gone. New York was gone. Even we couldn’t stop Nuclear war.

I crawled over to the silo and laid there, and I looked down. It was deep, maybe deep enough to die in, quicker than cancer at least.

But I’m afraid she might be here, for just a flicker, on her journey through the time stream. She can move backwards and forwards, loop around to try again and again, but I know she feels every second. I know how tired she is. I know how much work she did just to give me this shot.

I can’t see her face, but if she saw mine I couldn't live with myself. So I get up, even though I’m tired.

I go back to work, gathering wishes for the next fight, not so I can win, but so that after I lose, I can get back up.