The Triumphant Return of the Red Marvel
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, as the Red Marvel expected and feared she would. “The shelter is full.”
He nodded to reassure her. She was kind. She was as much a prisoner in this false world as he. “There are other places,” he lied, and he turned away.
“Wait.” She handed him a card. “Try here.”
“The cathedral?”
“They’ve got cots and blankets. On such a cold night — ”
He chuckled, though he was not sure if he did that for her or himself. “You call this cold? In Russia, we would cut a hole in the ice and jump in to cool off on such a pleasant evening.”
Her smile made him feel young again. He wished he could tell her about the time he fought the Mad Mogul’s Skyscraper Men, constantly retreating northward until they froze within yards of the North Pole, but he knew she thought he was an addled old man. He did not want her to worry even more about him.
She said, “I wish someone could drive you — ”
“It’s fine.” He smiled despite his weariness and the old pain in his hip. He would not beg for a place that someone weaker might need. He was sure the Duchess of Deceit had a device to watch him struggle on this twisted version of his home. If so, she knew she had trapped him, but she had not crushed his spirit.
Stepping back into the night, he thought, Chicago’s ice demons are as formidable as any the Ticker Tape Man sent against me. The cathedral was two miles away. In the universe where he belonged, he could have flown there in the time it took a child to cry, “Help!”
The wind was behind him. That was a mercy. He did not know how cold it was. That was another mercy. What more could anyone want than two mercies? He squeezed his fists together in his mittens, plunged them into the pockets of his tattered coat, and began to march. He had hiked halfway around the Burning Planet to reach a Trans-dimensional Taxi Stop. Walking a few blocks through a harsh Illinois night should be easy.
With each step, his hands and his feet grew more numb, and his hip hurt more. He could bear that. What hurt most was what his hip reminded him of, the night in the car with his wife and dog beside him, and his pregnant daughter and her husband in the front seat. He knew what his nemesis had based that false memory on. When the Comrades of Justice — he and the Blue Amazon and Laika the CosmoDog and Universal Girl and Doctor Tomorrow — were returning from Jupiter in Doc Tomorrow’s Omnimobile, a comet hurled by the Tyrannosaur Tycoon had struck them. But in that true world, he and Laika had flown the Omnimobile home, and then the Comrades had defeated the Tycoon once again. In this false world, the Corolla holding everyone he loved had been hit by a drunken driver, and he alone survived.
He did not count the blocks as he trudged down the empty streets, so he did not know how far he had gone when he slipped and fell. He lay on the icy sidewalk for a long moment, assessing his pain and wondering if he should sleep there. When Queen Kapital froze him solid for a week, he had thawed as easily as waking from a nap.
But without his powers, frostbite was inevitable. When the Purple Plutocrat had dropped a mountain on him, even he had doubted that he could rise again, but the sound of a baby crying for aid had made him do what he must. Now he could only hear the whispering wind. Without another person’s need to inspire him, standing seemed impossible, but still, he stood and walked on.
When he heard a siren, he stopped. The RoboThugs of the Iron Imperialist had made that same shrill sound, but this was only a police car on a late-night call. He waved — even a moment in the back of a warm car would revive him — but the police did not slow as they raced by. Perhaps they never saw him. He hoped their siren meant someone would get help tonight.
He made himself walk another block. Did the numbness in his legs make the pain in his hip worse? Passing an alley, he saw a dumpster. Maybe there was a tarp or blanket inside, something he could wrap around himself while he walked. But when he pushed the top open, he only saw full garbage bags and flattened cardboard boxes. He sighed, looked again at the empty street, and knew he had to rest. How many times had he fought the Martian Meritocrat and won after resting and returning to fight again? There is no shame in resting. Taking time to restore your strength is how you win.
His arms and legs were so weak that he feared they would fail him, but he pushed himself as hard as he had every time the whole world depended on him, and he tumbled into the dumpster. It did not smell. It was too cold to smell. That was another mercy, his third of the evening. He smiled as he burrowed under the cardboard. He would make a den, a tiny version of his Subsea Retreat, a quiet refuge in the cold where he could prepare for the next battle to save the people of the planet he loved.
Was the Duchess of Deceit watching? This was not the greatest indignity he had suffered on this cruel mirror Earth. “You’ll never win,” he whispered to her. “Never.”
He was close to sleep when he heard voices. He could call for help, but he did not know if he wanted it. He had slept through many cold nights in worse places. He could sleep through another.
Then he heard one voice clearly.
“Red Marvel!” she called. “You’re needed!”
His strength returned, filling his body with a warmth that was almost more painful than the cold. He flexed his limbs, and the dumpster exploded away from him, and his filthy clothes fell in tatters as he flew upward in his red and gold uniform, and the Omnimobile came speeding down from the sky with Doctor Tomorrow at the wheel and Universal Girl beside him, and the Blue Amazon smiling and crying as she reached out for him, and speeding ahead of the others, flying as fast as possible to lick his face, came Laika the CosmoDog.