Superhero Fiction: Gods of the American Wild
Andromeda merged her portals into an orb at the center of the room and then the pull began. A miniature black hole tugged at Grant, Apache and Carnegie. The glasses and table cloths in the room swirled in a current like being sucked out of an airlock. Grant gritted his teeth as he tried to resist the pull and push his sword toward its target, but the pull overcame him and the sword was sucked into the black hole as with everything else.
Broken glass from the window whizzed by them, cutting a thick gash into Grant’s cheek. Apache, with his enormous strength, managed to keep himself grounded, and reached Carnegie as the hulking assassin began to try to throw a punch at him, assisted by gunfire from his wrists. Before the bullets left the chamber, Apache clamped down on the gauntlet with his meaty hands and crushed it, then grabbed the gauntlet on his other arm and ripped it off, tossing it casually aside into the currents of the black hole.
Grant turned his attention to Andromeda, still putting the majority of his energy into keeping himself planted on the ground. He narrowed his eyes at her, displaying a semblance of irritation as he phased out of sight, almost instantly reappearing beside Andromeda. She startled, and the black hole fizzled out. The raging storm of glassware and furniture subsided as quickly as it began, and all the various minutiae of the room fell to the ground.
Apache, too, turned his attention to Andromeda and began to rush to her aid, but Carnegie used his remaining good arm to grab him by the neck and tug him back down. He threw Apache to the ground with a seismic crash that rattled the entire floor. The next thing Apache saw was Carnegie’s fist barreling down toward his face. Rolling away just in time, Carnegie’s fist hit the ground and left a plate sized crater behind, but the next fist came down soon after, striking true. Apache felt the force of a mach truck hit him and his vision began to blur, but he retained his composure. As Apache tried to dodge as many of Carnegie’s blows as he was able, Andromeda was on her own to deal with Grant.
Grant reached his arm back and prepared a thrust toward Andromeda, who fell backwards, losing her footing as she dodged. Grant slowly walked up to her and loomed over her, pointing his blade toward her. “Relent,” he said.
Andromeda looked up at him, confidence betrayed by fear. For a moment, she was just Amanda — in over her head, scared, shaking. She scurried backward, away from the blade, but Grant followed with confident, firm steps. Grant touched his slit cheek and looked at the blood, then back at Amanda on the ground. “It’s over. Relent, and I’ll make it quick,” he said.
Amanda looked away for a second. I’m letting everyone down, she thought. She saw death approach her, and in that moment, she clenched her eyelids shut and thought about all the places she would never get to see. The stars she wouldn’t be able to visit, that she’d visited so many times in her mind. Kepler 22b. Titan. Gliesce Red. Then, she was there, flying through the astral showers with transcendent wonder. She pictured herself on the ground of an alien world, holding a mysterious, beautiful blue flower nearby a glowing backwards-flowing waterfall.
“-ent,” a hushed voice interrupted her. “Relent,” it said again, muffled through the lens of Amanda’s distracted imagination.
When Andromeda opened her eyes, a twinge of surprise washed over Grant before he quickly masked it. “Relent!” he repeated more urgently.
The tone in his voice weaved in notes of desperation as he looked at the eyes staring back at him, no longer the soft, brown eyes of a young woman, but black doorways that held behind them an ocean of stars and swirling, purple, white, blue and red nebulas. Grant felt fear, and drove his blade forward, but despite his lightning speed, it simply stopped a few inches from Andromeda’s face. He felt a force tugging on his arm, and pulled out a second blade, a smaller dagger, with his free arm. He thrust that forward as well, only for it to meet the same frozen state. He looked around in a light panic as he noticed two small black holes behind each of his hands, grappling them with a narrow, targeted force.
Andromeda slowly stood up. Her face was soft and full of joy. Grant narrowed his eyes, confused. She hadn’t struck him as a sociopath, but, indeed, he was not what Andromeda was seeing at all. Amanda was still there on the alien world, seeing the current reality through an overlay of mesmerizing sights. She smiled at Grant, recognizing him in the same way a human might recognize a puppy. “I wish you could see it,” she said.
