I slammed through the door. A middle-aged couple stood on the other side. The force of the door opening knocked them apart, and made just enough space for me to push through.
The crowd beyond them was a solid wall.
I had to trust my luck. I couldn’t lose my momentum. One person stepped forward just in time for me to, with some quick contorting, slip past.
Past them, an elderly man was stricken with an abrupt coughing fit. A woman who must have been a relative or caretaker shifted closer to pat his back – opening another space.
Next, a tired-looking two year-old sat perched on an older man’s broad shoulders. The kid saw me rushing toward them, shrieked, and grabbed at the man’s hair. He shifted to turn toward me, opening a narrow gap just behind him.
And on and on like this – past a dozen more people moving at the right moment, and into spaces that shouldn’t have been there. Ducking, dodging, weaving through gaps just large enough for me, and some a little smaller. I stumbled around an unaccompanied child, fighting for space among the crush of people. I didn’t have the breath to mutter apologies. Someone’s elbow landed in my face while I knocked past, but I hardly noticed.
Impossibly, I kept going. There was only one place I could go. The one clear space in the church was around Pearson’s podium.
Even in circumstances like these, Pearson’s people stayed away from his spaces, like they were afraid that he would come back.83
One woman up front was bent over a child, trying to lift him up. I tripped over someone’s ankle. I careened into the woman’s back, rolled over it, and stumbled gracelessly onto the raised floor by the podium. By luck alone, I stayed on my feet. I grabbed the podium’s edges just at the right moment to halt – and to look like I’d meant to do that all along.
A few people close had noticed me, were pointing. But the mass of people were looking elsewhere. The crowd was surging, trying to press toward the main entrance.
To the few people looking at me, I must have been terrifying. Torn clothes. Wet hair. Battered, bruised, and bloodied by my fall from Pearson’s office. I’d lost track of how many ways and places I’d started to hurt.
But I wasn’t the kind of threat that Pearson’s followers had been told to expect. He’d spun them tales of CIA and S.H.I.E.L.D. infiltration, assassins, and super-spies84 and massive conspiracies. From this angle, most of the audience couldn’t even see my pistol. I hastily unholstered it, stashed it beneath the podium, just in case.
The bulk of the space under the podium was taken up by controls and equipment. Pearson had had a sophisticated professional AV console. So many of the people here looked malnourished and exhausted, and were dressed in torn and fraying old clothes, but the equipment behind the podium was pristine.
The controls were dense and impenetrable, but one label caught my eye. “Bell.” I hit that button.
The tremendous clang from overhead briefly made me forget the ringing in my ears. The noise was amplified by speakers all around the church, and probably all around the compound. It screeched with feedback. I’d done something wrong. It didn’t matter.
Pearson had trained them to respond to that sound. He’d had so many sermons every day. The press of people against the front doors halted. Several people in that direction cried out, yelling for people to get back. So many people near those doors must have been getting crushed, the breath squeezed out of them.
I fumbled for the microphone, found the switch that controlled it. I hoped I’d gotten here in time. I only needed to hold their attention for a few minutes. Long enough for a more orderly exit to start. And for the police officers outside to reach us.
I racked my mind, trying to think of what to do now. “You’re safe,” I stammered. “Nobody’s going to hurt you or your families.”
That did not convince them.
Some of them started to turn away. The nearest had gotten a better look at me, at my blood and scrapes, and had started to push back toward the doors. Those by the doors were still shoving back, fighting for breathing space. The crowd clashed in the center, like two waves smashing together. Before long, it would break down into a scrum.
• • •
When I finally found a door out of the Project Armageddon facility and stumbled out into a deeply humid night, I’d started talking to Lazarus. He couldn’t hear me, but I felt it was important that I keep talking.
Maybe it was all for my sake. But I needed him to understand what I’d done, and what I was doing. I needed to pretend I wasn’t alone.
Moonlight guided my path, and clouds obscured it more often than not. I stumbled along between the facility’s buildings, blind, and half deaf.
Eventually, I had broken down. It had all caught up with me – the knives in my bones, the endless isolation and stress, the fact that I had just shot my mother in the face. By the time I found the empty truck sitting on a dirt trail, I’d just kept repeating the same words over and over. The only words I could think of that might have been comforting.
I buckled him into the passenger seat and started driving. After he’d woken, and could understand me, I’d tried to explain what I’d done, why I’d had to do it. I might as well have just tranqed him again for all the difference it would have made. He looked at me like I’d looked at every adult when I was his age, if not worse.
He hated me. And he always would. He was closed to me.
• • •
I couldn’t explain myself to Pearson’s people either. I couldn’t tell them that Pearson was dead, or that his closest associates were trying to murder them. They’d refuse to understand. They weren’t in a space where they were capable of it.
It didn’t matter if they understood. I hadn’t done it so that they would understand. I’d done it to save them. Whether they’d wanted to be saved or not. I was here – and I would do it.
So I told them the only thing that, driving in that truck along the dirt trail, I’d been able to tell Lazarus. The same words, again and again. The only ones I’d thought he’d really want to hear.
“It’s over.”
They looked so tired. It was the first thing I’d said that got them to listen to me.
I had to keep going from there, but those words had been the ones they wanted to hear, the ones that kept their attention. Pearson had kept them on their feet for weeks. Interrupting their sleep. Feeding them poorly. Keeping them crammed together, isolated, under his thumb. Constantly terrified of the world. They couldn’t have borne it forever. More than anything else, they wanted it to be done with.
They would hate me when they found out what I’d done. If they didn’t hate me already. Didn’t matter.
Funny thing: I’d spent so much of my life thinking of myself as a merc and not a hero, but some deep down, dirty part of me had still craved the kind of recognition I’d imagined heroes got. I hadn’t been aware of that part of myself until well after I’d found Lazarus. But it had always been there.
One of the things that made heroes heroes was how much they were willing to sacrifice for their causes.
If Lazarus hated me because of what I’d done – that was just one more sacrifice I would have to make.
I wouldn’t have to make it alone. Shoon’kwa’s lights again shone through the stained glass windows, turning the people near them all kinds of new colors.
When I was young, living in the Church of the Sacred Heart and trying to forget where I’d come from, I thought the past never changed. That’s not true. You don’t need a time machine to change the past.
Memory isn’t a window into the past. It’s not even a lens, bent and distorted around the edges. It’s a prism. It changes every time you pick it up and look at it again. The light bends and twists, splits and refracts and blends with the light you’re shining in on it.
I knew more about what I had done. About why I’d done it. About who I was.
And knew I could live with all of it.
I held the congregation’s attention until Black Widow and her police officers arrived, and could start safely shepherding them outside.