Against My Will 17

There were a hundred things Ricky Flanagan knew he was scared of.

About a month ago, that became a hundred-one.

The Hulk — green, gray or whatever else the fuck color he went with — was just another nightmare, though…

“Shit—shi-shit!”

This was a reality, and right near the top of the list too.

Both hands fought the wheel as a whole twenty thousand pounds of delivery truck slid across the intersection. Ricky knew it was done for, all fucked to shit and gone to hell the second the back end came round.

Still, he tried hard as he heard the tires screaming louder than he was across rain-slicked asphalt. Cab shuddered around and beneath him, all the load he was carrying in the box shifting with a slam he could feel through the seat.

Left.

No, no, right— “Come on!”

He spun the wheel, stomped the brake, and screamed like that would help, but the truck kept going no matter what.

“Fuuuuu-!”

The passenger-side wheels took the curb in a jump, lifting high enough Ricky felt his stomach drop clean into his ass. He could see the crowd through the windshield, everyone outside the corner shops real and screaming as they scattered; a mom dragging a little girl back while somebody went right to the floor on wet pavement.

Ricky yanked the wheel again, the cab leaning anyway as he went over.

“No—nononononono!”

Then something flashed in front of his windshield.

Greener than a traffic light, it was bright enough to change the color of the whole cab in a single wash over. The truck slowed down, so carefully and gently that Ricky didn’t even feel the seatbelt dig into his chest. “Wha… what the hell?”

All six wheels settled back on the ground as Ricky Flanagan sat there, both hands gripping the wheel like he couldn’t imagine holding anything else. Rain kept on beating the glass, wipers just now deciding to work again.

“Hey there.”

A kid floated up in front of the windshield and Ricky was sure as shit he’d died or this was some kind of dream. Skinny and black, he looked young enough to be in high school almost; leather jacket settled on his shoulders while a pair of Timberlands glowed an impossible green.

Ricky just blinked as the kid grinned his way and touched two fingers to his forehead.

Then he turned in the air, the air he was standing on, and gave one to the crowd.

All those screams from a few seconds went quiet now, everybody on the street just staring up at the green guy — mouths open and eyes wide — just like Ricky.

“Don’t worry.” The kid winked all around, smile wide and unbothered. “Just remember. Green Lantern’s got you.”

What… Before the old truck driver could figure out if he was coming down with a concussion, riding high on a religious experience — or both — the green light flared around the kid’s boots and he shot straight up — completely vanishing right into the sky.

It took another five seconds — enough time for the sound of sirens to hit his ears — before Ricky finally forced his fingers free and off the wheel.

Even still, he could only find one thing to say by the time the cops pulled up. 

“…what the fuck?”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

“Holy shit, that was too close.”

Maybe six hundred feet up over Flatbush and breathing like he’d run somewhere, Orin stared back down as police officers and ambulances gathered around the delivery truck he’d just saved from a messy end.

That could have gone waaayyyyy worse. It honestly could have, especially considering his original plan involved a real simple grab-and-stop of the runaway truck. It seemed like a good enough idea, considering it had been going almost full speed toward a whole crowd of people on the corner.

But that would have sent the driver straight through the windshield at a good forty miles per hour. Physics, man.

He could cheat physics, sure, but that was if he knew what he was cheating. Just because the light was green and magic and came out of his finger, it didn’t mean much past that. You stop tons of moving vehicle in zero feet and everything inside it has gotta go somewhere. That was just freshman high school physics— the egg and the cardboard, you know?

And, even if Orin had caught the guy on his way out before he got a (possibly terminal) case of road rash, that would still have been a trip to the ER for the truck driver.

So, instead, he’d first matched the truck’s speed and put a bubble field around it, a little plumbob doing its slow spin above the truck itself, before slowing the whole thing down over a few feet of asphalt before anyone could get pancaked.

And, just like that, he was done.

Truck stopped, windshield intact, and the driver was in there; mouth open, eyes wide, and hands on the wheel where they belonged.

Deceleration over distance. Orin turned that over in his head as he turned over in the air, sirens still whooping like usual beneath him. Not force.

A lesson to learn.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

The rest of the week ran about the same, the whole of New York City big enough there was always something going wrong in the five boroughs.

A scaffold came off a six-story on Bedford and he was there just in time; a single big hand under it to catch all the mess. The hand was starting to become his thing — a cheap, simple construct he was getting a ton of practice with — but the whole structure didn’t care about his thing as it folded around said hand like wet cardboard, one section dropping especially hard as it took out a parked Camry.

“Damn…” Okay, another lesson. One contact point under several tons of irregular bullshit was looking like it was a terrible idea. I’m a software guy. I don’t do structural engineering. This shit is really not my wheelhouse. 

Unfortunately, he was quickly learning he was going to have to make it his wheelhouse.

Distribute the load. The lesson he learned on the second go-round was locked deep into his skull but even still… write that down.

A lot of other lessons were learned that week, most of them on-the-job.

Like the gas thing in a ground-floor apartment in Crown Heights that went up like a firestorm by the time he pulled up. “WALL!”

Green flared out in a panel between the blown-out front and the sidewalk before the shrapnel shot out, but the shield held strong; every piece of brick and glass stopped cold.

The five people behind the wall construct went down anyway.

He checked up on them as quick as he could, confused by what happened. All five of them were rattled, ears ringing and one lady on her hands and knees. They weren’t hurt bad, but they were down, because the wall had stopped the shrapnel but that didn’t stop the blast.

Another lesson to learn; wall’s gotta account for the wave, not just the stuff in it. Just another one to add to the list. Thing’s getting fucking long.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

A few days later, after a hellish weekend of pulling save after save and blinking at cops who thought a gun would do something to him— “Like, seriously, stop…” — Orin had been walking through the city aimlessly.

As any vagrant would be doing on a random Tuesday in the middle of the afternoon, he had his cap down and hoodie up, a duffel on his shoulder, with a bacon-egg-and-cheese in hand.

Basically the good life.

He’d barely been three bites in when screaming came out of the bank on the corner, a bunch of voices going up and up and up; each one competing to be heard over another while several men’s voices went on top of those.

Orin heard all of it perfectly clearly, but his legs just kept on going.

They’ll call it in. Cops are like four minutes out in this part of Brooklyn. Half a block down and he was still walking. It’s a bank. They’re insured.

He stopped on the sidewalk just past the halfway point, fingers clenched tight underneath his gloves as something pressed tight against his middle finger; a familiar warm band that flared with every focused thought in his head.

…if you don’t think you’re a good person, what if you just try and ask yourself ‘what would a good person do?’ Over a year of therapy before college and Dr. Adeyemi had ended up giving him the ‘WWJD’ talk. A solid eighteen months of ‘catch the impulse before you have to catch yourself’ and he had starting getting reworked Christian morality like he hadn’t grown up with a Catholic mom.

Even still, green eyes crawled back to the bank as a sigh slid out of him. “…fuck.”

The rest of the sandwich was swallowed fast enough he almost had to worry about choking as he ducked into an alley. “Hero Time!” A split second later, he was all Green Lantern’d up and came back through the front door shining like a spotlight.

Seven guns aimed his way — two shotguns and five handguns — by a whole crew with ski masks on, each one a different color and spread out through the whole of the bank lobby. “Little bit late for Pride, isn’t it?”

A gun went off, the shot aimed too low.

Orin barely blinked as the marble floor gained a hole in it — the kneeling crowd of hostages on the ground shouting and screaming for him — but he did raise a hand.
HIT.

Five fast pops of green left his ring, none of them any bigger than a baby’s fist — wrist, wrist, wrist, wrist — and in just a single second, five weapons went skittering across once-pristine marble.

Another two shots went out with a thought and number six and seven got their guns clipped so hard out of their grip that the shotguns actually hit the opposite wall, both weapons falling to the ground out of anyone’s reach.

Now scoop it up. 

A big blocky hand formed — all square knuckled and pixelated — and swept five of the seven up together, clean off their feet as a box formed on the other side of them. A green cube, eight feet by eight feet with bars on the front like a little cartoon jail, held the majority of the criminals together.

Number six was on the floor, hands empty, as he tried not to make it look obvious he was crab walking backwards to the door. Number seven, though…

Orin glanced his way, the guy with a revolver out that he pulled from somewhere. “I wouldn’t do tha—”

Two rounds went into Orin’s chest from just a dozen feet away, both plinking off his aura like someone had flicked peanuts at him. “Bro…”

He tipped his head at the shaky guy in the green mask. “One greenie to another, I could kill you right now. Be happy I’m not even trying to hurt you.”

The Green Robber stayed exactly where he was, unmoving with the revolver still up, but that breathing suddenly got loud and shaky.

“I’m putting effort in on my end not to slam a hundred tons of green anvil on your head. Do you wanna go out like Wile E. Coyote?”

The bank robber shook his head.

Orin held two fingers out and lowered them. “Put it down.”

The revolver went down on the marble.

“Thank you.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

“Yeah, O-Dawg…” Nine hundred feet over the middle of Brooklyn with the sun already dipped down over the edge of the horizon, Orin Hunter Kelly stared up at the half-moon above him while the whole city grid was lit up bright underneath him. “You’re getting the hang of this superhero shit.”

Thirteen days after his debut on Wall Street, the Green Lantern was cutting hard left though the sky in a backstroke.

Then another hard left.

Then just as hard a right before he dropped a few hundred feet and them came right up.

Nothing straight about his lines, no repeated stops and his movement entirely random; he was doing the same thing he did on the way back to wherever he chose to rest his head for the night.

The green trail lasted for a bit but he was doing his best not to leave a pattern anyway.

A zig.

A zag.

A bank; right and left.

And then a drop.

Two weeks ago, every single construct had been a fresh act of invention, him standing there going okay so what shape stops a bullet. But by now, he’d figured out defaults and standards and densities.

And all that meant every single construct came out the same way unless he wanted to tweak it in the first place.

His path took him in a curve around the north end of Central Park, Manhattan opening up across the river. By the time he went near Midtown, he spotted the biggest tower in New York, a building with the name on the side in letters you could read from Queens.

STARK.

A monument to your ego. The words of Pepper Potts from a movie he hadn’t seen since he was twelve sounded off in his head, but Orin still grinned at the sight of it. Respect. 

He’d have done the same thing.

The smile sat on his face for about a few more seconds of flyby before he remembered how the rest of that movie went, a giant hole in the sky over Manhattan with a lot of stuff coming out of it and wrecking the city.

Except that hadn’t happened here. None of it had happened here. And might not, because nothing in this world had matched up with anything yet — not even the decade.

Nobody here has anything looking up. He cut right and dropped a hundred feet. Not for that.

“Ring.”

[QUERY]

“Remind me in eighteen hours to set up an earth-space intrusion macro.”

[AGREEMENT]

“Yeah.” A sigh slipped out of him as he aimed a glowing fist up, a classic Superman pose taking him northeast. “It’s gonna take me all day to figure it out.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

It had taken them almost two months to figure out.

And wasn’t that just downright shameful? Shameful and disappointing for all the money and resources SHIELD had to throw at a problem. We’re trying to find a goddamn green flashlight here.

It really shouldn’t have been that hard but, unfortunately, tracking some anomalous form of ‘energy’ that wasn’t ‘energy’ was almost impossible to do in real-time.

All the most advanced technology the new millennium had to offer and they were stuck tracking those green manifestations through satellite imagery.

Another spot of green lit up the north wall of the hub, the oversized board littered with point after point. Fury had been standing in front of the thing long enough Terminal Nine had already brought him coffee three times already, the director too busy watching dots go up to even request a refill.

Queens.

Brooklyn.

Long Island. Hempsted, of all goddamn places.

Manhattan.

Yonkers right into fucking Ridgefield — as if that made two bits of sense — and then right down to a rooftop in Massapequa two days later that connected to absolutely fuck-all.

“Sir, we’re still trying to fit a vector to—”

“You won’t.” Fury raised the cup to his lips, the director cutting off the analyst with just two words and a grunt. “Not the way you’re going about it.

“…sir?”

“I said, you won’t, son.” He didn’t bother to even look at the young man, eye still on the map in front of him. “Because he’s not moving toward anything. He’s already past that, moving away from having moved.”

A different animal altogether.

It had taken him a couple days of his own to get an eye on that animal and another two to stop baing annoyed about it. Rather hard, what with Rogers and Pym fucking up his mood in an entirely different way.

Somebody’s taught this boy tradecraft. Nineteen years old and he was running a route discipline better than most of the case officers Fury had buried in the eighties. Which tells me a little something about his daddy.

If the man ever existed in the first place. 

Fury still couldn’t say for certain if that was just another lie.

Speaking of lies, the other half of the operation was proceeding as expected. The phrase ‘according to plan’ was never something he liked using because, superstition aside, that was just asking for it not to. But with Betty Ross no longer breathing heavy over footage of the Hulk in her room, the woman had managed to get public affairs hard at work feeding the same five phrases to every outlet they had locked down tight; escaped detainee, unidentified posthuman, insidious, dangerous.

And of course— terrorist.

Barely eleven months after 9/11 and just a year after Magneto’s first round of terrorist attacks on the Capitol, you couldn’t ask for a better trigger word to send the American public into a feeding frenzy.

Fox and CNN were already hard at work at calling the kid all kinds of jihadi, even down to casting aspersions on his hair of all things. It was downright funny, or at least it would have been if they could catch the kid already.

Because he was somehow fighting his own bad press with sheer word-of-mouth and physical presence.

A scaffold on Bedford, a gas line in Crown Heights, and a bank where he put seven armed men into what the official report described as ‘a green cage with bars on it, like out of a cartoon.’

None of them planned in the slightest and no pattern to the type of intervention

Pulling a damn toddler out of a lake upstate. “I thought you were supposed to be an alien space cop.” Fury couldn’t help but grumble under his breath. “Not a damn boy scout.”

Terminal Nine looked up.

“Nothing, son. Go back to work.”

On-the-ground footage and personal accounts did not care what the news had to say and, apparently, the kid wasn’t even staying on the ground long enough for people to throw hate his way and get a mob riled up.

Kid’s out here campaigning. That’s just what it looked like from Fury’s chair. Six weeks out of a cell and he was running a press operation all by himself. No spin or anything, as maddening as that sounded. No cameras arrangement. No statement.

Honestly, at this point he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the green trouble-maker out there kissing babies.

But none of that was the part he actually cared about.

All he cared about was how difficult the kid was making the job of tracking him.

Fortunately for SHIELD, difficult was far from impossible.

One eye stared at the dots in front of him, forty-one of them staring right back at him. A solid eleven of those forty-one clustered inside a six-mile circle. Far from tight or obvious, but still enough of them to get his attention and too many — too close together — when a random selection would have spread them out wider.

Psi-Division had been hard at work, of course, and the heads of the division hadn’t complained too much when he sequestered fourteen out of sixty-three Psi-Agents just for this purpose.

“General Fury.”

The Director of SHIELD turned at the sound of his name, one eye on an agent in the black-and-purple bodysuit of the Psi-Division standing there a little straighter than the hour called for.

“Director, we’ve got him.”

“Alright.” If Fury trusted himself one bit right now, he knew his face would have been lit up in a grin bright enough to match the flyboy he’d been after for over a month. “Operation Smash and Grab is a go then.”