Kid Ballistic: Smoke
"I can make the rain go, anytime I move my finger…"
Kid Ballistic stood on the brown brick wall of James Harmon Hospice Center, peering back at the flower bed four stories down. Moonlight muted the colors, and the garden was like a dark green pond of vegetation, waving and rippling in the evening wind. The Boy in Blue hummed the next verse of the Sinatra hit as he walked, backwards, towards the ground, away from a black, star-spangled sky.
No, Sid hadn’t acquired superpowers. The ancient art of rappelling enabled this death defying feat: an orange rope, doubly fed through the belay device on his harness, held KB stable by friction, which he controlled by tightening or relaxing the rope’s angle. There were at least a dozen methods of insertion other than by rappel, all more efficient. But rappelling was easily the coolest.
"Life is a beautiful thing, as long as I hold the string…"
KB pushed off the brick wall, his blue boots crunching against the old wall, his left arm tilting to let the rope pass through unobstructed; it raced across his back, sounding off with a long ZOOP. He landed a story down, and repeated the procedure to finish at the third floor.
"I’d be a silly so-and-so, if I should ever let it go."
Cool wind from the lakes blew over rural Wayne County, and whipped Sid’s black hair about. Masked as he was, his eyes honed in on the window to his right. It was a contemporary piece, thick, probably soundproof; a strange flourish on a building that was easily late nineteenth century. Sid drew his combat knife.
As he jammed the blade between the window and the sill, the cool breeze somehow found his spine underneath the costume, running a sudden sensation from his tailbone up to his skull. "Hoo!" Sid shivered, and his skin bristled at the feeling. Tingling aside, he pried the window open, and the wind whistled and wailed through the gap like a banshee. KB put a stop to it quickly, sliding the glass further. A little swaying on his orange rope, and he was in. Little Sid Mason was doing a fine job at ignoring the butterflies in his stomach.
The third story room was quite unlike the exterior: inside it was warm, white-walled, and well-lit in a soft yellow glow. The walls, where Sid expected ancient oil paintings and glossy oak bookshelves, were bare, save a few canvas-wrapped frames of post-modern art. Their non-patterns and colors made a fuss in Sid’s brain, and he had to focus just to ignore the onslaught of crimson, tangerine, and turquoise.
The only two relics of a bygone era in the room were a brown brick fireplace, cold and black, and Sid’s target, an old silvermane sleeping in the hospital bed towards the room’s entrance, opposite the window where Sid swung in.
Wind raced in and out of the window, blowing the plastic blinds about as Sid, with careful handiwork, released himself from the orange rope. His eyes never left the old man, and his hands knew what to do. They tossed the double-fed rope out of the window, and there it remained. KB turned from his target briefly to pull the glass lid shut on this post-modern sarcophagus. The wind was silenced. The room now felt suspended, separated from all things. He, and his Rip Van Winkle, were alone.
Kid Ballistic hesitated to turn around; the silence was so serene he dared not mess it up. Because, at this moment, it felt like the oil paintings he imagined. If he moved, it would become one frame of many, and the scene would begin. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he was ready for it.
So it began rolling without him. The silence broke when Sid realized the two heartbeats in the room: his own, and the one signaled by the heart-monitor at the other end of the room. The rush of the wind and the rappel had now fully washed off of his nerves, and each time the two heartbeats failed to synchronize, his own fought to compensate. Now there was only anxiety.
This was the pounding heart Sid hated the most. There was no sick beat or rolling gunfire to match. There was no flash of caffeine or nicotine to explain it. Tonight death wasn't in the room, staring him in the face. The facts of life were far more difficult to look upon, and they were in this room with him and his target.
Kid Ballistic finally turned to face his target, and began, almost involuntarily, stepping towards the hospital bed. Since he could remember, there were only two people he needed to meet. It took him a year to pull this trigger, to go through with it. “See what happens” was his new rule; more a corollary to the existing edicts drilled into him by his father. Sid had begun making his own rules, and tonight felt like a new testament in the Mason Family canon.
For just in front of a young, trepidatious Sidney Mason, slept a gray, wrinkled, still-as-stone Marcus Mason Sr.. Reputed Naval Commander, West Point educator, and by all accounts, two parts badass and two parts hardass. Sid’s research hadn’t turned up much more. But he knew that this was his grandfather.
Sidney could only gaze at him. He knew, he saw in the man’s features that he had the right man, never mind the medical and military records that led him here. Good sense aside, it felt like he was seeing his father again, in some far-flung future. Time-machines be damned; Sid didn’t like the feeling.
After another long intermission between thoughts and movements of the clock’s hand, Sid inhaled, and realized he had been standing over this man for some time. He swallowed, his throat struggling to obey him, rough and dry from nerves. Kid Ballistic didn’t know what to do. He had never met another member of his family, small as it was, and old folks seemed to have their own protocol. He was at loss.
"Uh…" Sid cleared his throat twice over, and scratched on his forehead. "Grandfather? Marcus?" The man didn’t even twitch. Sid might have feared for being lost in some wax museum if his grandfather wasn’t breathing steadily. "Commander?" Sid felt stupid, and exhaled, already exhausted by his nerves, wracking in the wind of the occasion.
KB felt cheated. Already the old man was in hospice. As Sid looked upon his grandfather, that fact sunk in for the first time. The pang of dread he felt when he read about his grandfather’s location was but a prelude. Now it was washing over him in a wave.
He wasn’t about to shake an old man awake, callous as he could be. Instead, he searched for some meager answers to his questions. The monitor told him that Marcus’ heart rate was steady, if slower than normal. He breathed normally. Sid took a breath, and reached towards the man’s face, gently and carefully pulling back his eyelids.
Dark brown irises stared forward in a state of rest. But each pupil was dilated differently. That - was strange. The dread bubbling in Sid’s guts only churned faster. His hands had grown sweaty and he wiped them on his ballistic vest. Something was wrong. Was it cancer? Pneumonia? Heart attack?
The door unlatched suddenly, and Sid kicked himself for not hearing the intruder sooner. His father would have tore him a new one. As quick hands went for his guns, Sid stifled the reflex. This was a hospital. Grinding his teeth, he wondered if his grandfather would yell at him if he could.
A young man briskly entered the room, seemingly without regard for the sleeping patient. Sid put a stop to his interruption with a quick-drawn "Who’re you?"
The youth stopped in his tracks, and seemed more taken aback than afraid. His brown eyes scrutinized the young crimefighter, and they lingered warily on his weapon(s). "I’m his nurse. Who’re you?"
Sid almost replied, but knew he couldn’t shoot from the hip. Keeping his identity secret was a smart move period, let alone an essential to this superhero gig. He swallowed, feeling the situation begin to spiral in sync with his guts. That is, persistently out of control. His eyes narrowed in a display of focus and intimidation, and sweaty hands dug deeper into the grips of his pistols.
"Are you here to kill him?" The question warped the ground at Sid’s feet even further. "What!? No. I’m - " The nurse shut the door behind him, scanning at Kid Ballistic further, his eyebrows knit together in confusion.
"Then why are you about to shoot me?" Sid bit his tongue in anger and made a point to show his intent, fingers fanning away from his weapons. "Nobody's gettin' shot. I just came to see him." The young newcomer looked at Marcus, and some of that suspicion waned from his face.
The nurse peered behind KB and frowned. "How did you get in here?" Sid exhaled and spit back at him, "Just - nevermind - dude. What’s wrong with him!?" Sid nodded in the silvermane’s direction.
The intruder’s eyes traced back and forth between Sid and Marcus, disbelievingly. "He had a stroke. He’s been in a coma for two weeks." Now Death was in the room. Sid wasn’t looking him in the eye, either; the specter was watching over his grandfather instead, ignoring the defiant Kid Ballistic. "He has a few weeks, maybe a month. Are you family?"
The butterflies in Sid’s stomach became bullets and played ricochet. The stillness returned, filling the vacuum left by time’s departure. In an instant, like tinder, his family, thin and meager though it had been, became smoke all over again, and it choked just like it. He was alone.
