Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

3: The Night Belongs To Me

The Pilgrim

Real name: Gordon Whitman

Powers: Teleportation.

Notes: The youngest member of the Manhattan Eight. When the radiation of the Los Alamos explosion struck him, he became metahuman and instantly teleported to Santiago, Chile. He was consequently assumed dead until several weeks after the incident when he returned to the US. Although he occasionally engaged in direct combat, his main role in the Manhattan Eight was to insert other members into danger zones.

—Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #0008]

***

Solomon finally emerged from the house a few minutes later, looking calm but walking a bit too briskly away from the front door. He got in the passenger side and glanced at Niobe behind the wheel.

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea to let a woman drive,” he said.

She pushed back the lapel of her trench coat to reveal the butt of her gun. “Try feeding me that line again. Try.”

He grinned and pulled his hat low over his eyes. Niobe took a swig of water from her canteen, then pulled the choke out and gave it some pedal.

The car was a black 1949 Ford two-door sedan. Or it had started out that way. Gabby had made so many modifications to the thing Niobe doubted there was an original piece left. The dashboard was outfitted with a dozen knobs and levers for gadgets that might come in handy. A police radio scanner was tucked under the dash on the passenger side, tuned to the local Met Div frequency. It was silent now. A little strange, but not entirely unexpected. Few metas got themselves into trouble with the law these days. They must’ve been smarter than her.

The streets were deserted. They made their way out of the Old City the usual way, taking the barely-policed route through the bomb-damaged streets to the east and then travelling south past the Mangere Inlet. The roads looked worse than they were. The cracks and collapsed buildings that remained in place nearly two decades since the bomb hit turned the route into a maze if you didn’t know where you were going. But it was navigable, if bumpy, and kept them free of checkpoints.

Officially, metas weren’t forced to stay in the Old City. They were still human after all, and could go where they pleased. But probable cause wasn’t hard for the coppers to manufacture, and if Niobe and Solomon got caught driving around after nightfall where they weren’t welcome, a quick search would turn up a dozen things that weren’t strictly legal. Her gun, for one, not to mention the road tack deployment system in the boot of the car. But the checkpoints and police dirigibles were well to the west, so the law didn’t bother them.

The Neo-Auckland skyline cut a jagged line through the night. The guys who’d designed it had been fond of tapering towers and spires that glimmered even in the darkness. Above the streets, the upper highways and monorail tracks swooped between apartment buildings and offices, suspended on the impossibly thin support struts originally conceived by the metahuman Green Tornado. Billboards dotted the skies as well, advertising Coke or the new electric Toyotas or rocket-plane trips to the sunny Gold Coast. And in the middle of it all, the Peace Tower stood tall, its spire piercing the sky; a monument to the destruction of the Old City, and a promise of something greater.

Thinking of the Old City brought her mind back to Gabby, and the argument. Gabby always worried when she went out on a job, and lately it had been getting worse. Niobe tried not to bring her work home with her, but it was never enough to keep the pain out of Gabby’s eyes.