Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

26: The Long Way Home

Battle Jack

Real name: Jack Kingi

Powers: Super strength, rapid healing.

Notes: Noted close-quarters combatant and ranged weapons expert. Often operated as the Wardens’ shock trooper, distracting villains and keeping them occupied while the rest of the group manoeuvered into flanking positions, rescued hostages, disabled bombs, or achieved other secondary objectives. In 1957, supercriminal group the Syndicate uncovered Kingi’s secret identity and kidnapped his wife. Kingi was lured into a trap and executed.

—Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #0310]

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The Carpenter was too heavy to carry, so in the end Niobe had to fashion a sled out of the bits of broken wood and drag him out of the meat works. She left Doll Face for the flies.

Once she got him to the car, she used the first aid kit to clean and dress the wound in his chest. She stripped off his shirt and did her best to clean off the blood. When she was done, she covered him with one of his spare cloaks he kept in the car boot and laid him down in the back seat. The car was a two-door, so it took her ten minutes of awkward pushing and pulling to get him in. The sun beat down on her, but she didn’t stop to remove her stained trench coat.

The wound in her thigh wasn’t bad. It’d stopped bleeding by the time she peeled off her bodysuit enough to expose it. She didn’t mind the stinging when she applied the rubbing alcohol. It’d leave a scar if she didn’t get stitches, but she couldn’t summon the urge to care. She covered it in gauze, wrapped a bandage around, and zipped up her bodysuit.

She didn’t know what time it was when she finally climbed into the driver’s seat. Her watch had broken sometime during the battle, but she guessed it was mid-afternoon by the look of the sun. Solomon had been driving last. When she had to pull the seat forwards so she could reach the pedals, she nearly broke down then and there.

She barely noticed the overgrown landscape as she drove south along the gravel roads. Every now and then she looked up at the sky, but she never spotted Sam. Logically, she knew she needed to find a phone, contact someone. People needed to know. But every time she passed through a village that looked like it might have a phone line, she kept driving.

When the Neo-Auckland skyline came into view an hour and a half later, it was no comfort. She thought about going straight to Met Div headquarters and trashing the place. No, that wouldn’t solve anything. Something dark was building inside her, and it needed a target, that was all. She had to stay calm. Cold. A shadow.

She turned off the northern highway and took the back streets to the Old City. Everything was quiet. A few people moved on the streets, utterly unconcerned about the world around them. They didn’t understand, none of them. Christ, she wished she was one of them.

After ten minutes, she pulled up outside their usual phone booth. How many times had she or the Carpenter used this phone? Stop it. She closed her eyes and forced the thoughts out of her head. She fished her cigarettes out of the glove box and lit one. Not even that helped. She turned to the Carpenter. She wished she could say that he looked like he was just taking a nap in the back seat, but that would be a lie. His cheeks had gone grey, his limbs were fixed in a way that no living human could replicate.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said around her cigarette.

By now, she knew Senior Sergeant Wallace’s extension by heart. She stepped into the phone booth and punched in the number, expelling a lungful of smoke as she waited.