Hero (Gone 9)

Simone packed some things—clothing, toiletries, a book—in her backpack, then stood at the foot of her bed and looked around at walls and furnishings that now seemed alien.

“I’m never coming back here, am I?”

Her voice found no echo in the room. Her bed. Her desk. Her computer with some of the short films she’d made. It was painful to say goodbye to those original files. “Oh well, they’re on YouTube,” she told herself.

She went back into the kitchen and hugged her mother, forcing smiles and reassurances that she did not believe. Her mother still lived in a world of the expected, the predictable, the normal. Her mother had not heard the brutal chatter of machine guns. She had not seen men stripping bodies of wallets and watches and anything else that might identify them. She had not seen burning bodies.

She had not been soaked in a dying man’s blood as she lay with her face in the dirt waiting for death to find her.

Simone went for the stairs, but instead of taking them down to the street, she walked up to the top floor, then climbed the metal staircase leading to the roof. A small wood-framed deck had been built atop the roof, and people often sunbathed there on good days. Today the roof was abandoned.

Simone walked to the edge and looked down at the tree-lined Sixty-Ninth Street nine floors down. Looking to her right she saw a strangely abandoned segment of Columbus Avenue with far less traffic than normal. New York City was traumatized and scared, but New Yorkers had been through bad times before, so there was no panicked evacuation of the city. On the other hand, few people felt like going out for a stroll. It was hunker-down time in the Big Apple.

Simone closed her eyes and focused. Morphing was easy once you’d done it. Convincing yourself you could fly was harder. Even after she’d morphed, even after she had risen three feet off the roof, it still took an effort of will to zoom away and see that the ground was now a dizzying hundred feet down.

But once she got past the fear of heights . . . well, then it was amazing. It felt unreal, like she was in a movie. Like the world was all a green screen and she was an actor being held up by wires. Unreal. A fantasy. And yet, she was in the air. Flying! She felt a chilly breeze, saw a starling go careening by at eye level, read the numbers on the tops of police cars, caught glimpses into apartment windows.

Simone genuinely laughed aloud as she discovered that she could hover in midair. And it was effortless! She knew intuitively that there was more at work here than the physical force of the wings—they couldn’t possibly support her weight, let alone allow her to zoom over the rooftops. And she knew that her body, which was capable at its best of running two, maybe three miles, was in no way capable of generating the energy required for this.

And yet: flying!

Despite the horror that weighed on her soul, she might have played around, had some fun with this astonishing ability, but within seconds of her tiny wings appearing came the oppressive sense of being watched. More than watched: spied on. Probed. She wished she knew others of her kind; she’d have liked to ask them about this. It made her feel wrong.

Made her feel violated.

Simone flew above Central Park, heading for her father’s apartment, aided greatly by Manhattan’s gridwork, which allowed her to navigate fairly easily, keeping track of numbered streets and named avenues. She landed on the very balcony where she’d stood with her father. She de-morphed and went inside.

“Simone, is that you?”

Simone screamed and backed away, nearly tripped on the carpet, and banged into an ottoman.

The thing before her had roughly the shape of a man, but with nothing solid about it and nothing that was still. It was like a tornado of insects trimmed into insect topiary, an insect cloud buzzing and chittering and whirling but keeping itself to a sketch of a human body.

That this bizarre thing spoke was astonishing. The voice was a breeze of insect noises modulated into speech. It sounded like a bad phone connection.

“Sweetheart, it’s me. It’s Dad!”

“Oh, God,” Simone whispered, backing away. “Oh, God. Daddy? No! Daddy?”

The bug man spread vibrating arms wide and twirled as if showing off a new suit. “Look at me! I’m one now, a mutant! And so are you, I see. Ha, ha, ha!” Like it was an accomplishment. Like he was happy about it. Like he expected his daughter to say, Well done, Dad!

“Change back!”

Markovic frowned. “Don’t be scared. If you knew what I can do now. I mean, wow! Watch this!”

Markovic floated upward and flattened himself against the ceiling, becoming a single layer of tiny creatures, like a silhouette of a man. Then he re-formed into a single thick line, maybe six inches across and seven or eight feet long, and this bug-spear went racing around the room in a circle, faster and faster until he was just a blur, and Simone actually felt a breeze.

“Dad, change back! Okay, just . . . just . . .”

Markovic re-formed himself into a human shape. “Can’t do it, sweetie. I tried, but the thing is, the old me? I think he died. When I tried to change back, it was like a wall. Like I was trying to open a door that was locked tight.”

“You can’t change back?” Simone’s voice shook and she made no effort to conceal her disgust or her pity.

“Hey, I’m not so gross, am I? I’m still your dad!”

“You’re like some insane ad for an exterminator. You’re . . . you’re a cloud of bugs! What are you even talking about?”

“Actually,” Markovic said, in a familiarly pedantic tone, “I’m still me, but . . .” He stopped talking and sounded discouraged.