“Jackie?” came his mother’s voice from the living room as he shuffled in the door. “Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me,” he said, his voice a harsh, rasping whisper that was nonetheless loud enough to be heard in the next room. “Good morning, Mom.”
“You’re not working today?”
He shut the door against the early morning sun. “No, the ticket I was on ended yesterday, and they didn’t give me a new one today. Do you want some breakfast?”
“Yeah, make me some eggs.”
He halted in his shuffle toward the kitchen and slowly raised a hand to rub at his eyes. “Are you sure you don’t want some cereal? Or a steak?”
“Why the hell are you always trying to fix me a steak in the morning?” she asked. “It’s breakfast. I want eggs.”
“Okay, fine, eggs,” he said. He suppressed a groan (as he suppressed everything he did, truth be told) as he shuffled toward the kitchen. He felt so old, lately. He was too young to feel this old.
“How’s your arthritis, honey?” his mother asked.
“It’s not bad,” he muttered as he shuffled ever so slowly toward the refrigerator. It was getting harder to maintain his pace lately. It was getting harder to maintain everything. He could sense it all getting ready to come apart, and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.
“That’s good,” his mother said. “I worry about you, you know.”
“I know,” he answered. He opened the refrigerator door painstakingly and stared at the egg carton within as if it were a deadly enemy. He scooped the egg carton out of the refrigerator, cradled it in trembling fingertips as he turned toward the stove. He pulled out the butter and let the refrigerator door swing closed by itself. At one time, the refrigerator had been leveled properly, so that the door would stay open, but he’d called someone in to unbalance it, so that the door would swing closed on its own. One less thing he had to worry about.
Who was the idiot who’d decided eggs would make a perfect breakfast food, he wondered as he set the carton down tenderly beside the skillet. He turned on the heat, spooned in some butter, then nudged open the egg carton.
He could handle steak; it was fibrous and resilient. He could even handle cereal. Though the cardboard was as flimsy as tissue in his hands, it at least had some flexibility. If he was slow enough and careful enough, he could pour out a couple of bowls without incident. He reached down, let his fingertips just graze the egg’s shell. So far, so good. He arranged his fingertips so that they surrounded the shell like the points of a star, just barely touching it. He lifted.
He might as well have tried to lift a soap bubble. The shell shattered, leaving the foam cup beneath full of goo, a cloudy mixture of clearish white and yellow, semen and pus.
He hated eggs.
He used the butter spoon to ladle the egg into the hot pan. “Can you make them over easy this time?” his mother’s voice called from the living room.
“They’re already scrambled,” Jack said as he tried, and failed, to pick up a second egg without breaking it.
“You always make ’em scrambled,” his mother said.
“It’s the only way I know how,” Jack said. “If you want ’em another way, you can make them yourself.”
“No need to be rude,” the voice said from the other room, but Jack wasn’t hearing it. He felt that tingle in his mind, that special unique tingle that he’d been waiting to feel for a while now.
Lopez.
“Hey, Mom, I’m getting a page,” he said. “You’re going to have to finish these yourself.”
“But Price is Right just started,” his mother complained.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’ve got to get to work. I’ll see you later.”
When Mrs. Anders stepped into the kitchen moments later, Jack was already gone. Under normal circumstances, he shuffled like a turtle, but when he got one of his last-minute fill-in calls, he could disappear pretty quickly. Mrs. Anders moved to the stove and made a disgusted sound.
“That boy,” she said as she used the spatula to dig fragments of egg shell out of her breakfast.
***
The ground erupted in a shower of sand as Digger and Angar surfaced inside a shipping container. Digger turned back to look at the tunnel they’d just surfaced from; a gout of dust from the collapsing opening made him turn his head. The dust made the sunlight slanting in through bullet holes in the sides of the container look almost solid. “I told Val it wouldn’t work. I can’t get the tunnel walls to fuse right out here.”
“It’s better this way,” Angar said. “They’ll figure it out soon enough and come in from above ground. One thing Val knows how to do is adapt. Besides, it gives me a chance to talk to you about something.”
“What?” Digger asked, though he had a sinking feeling that he knew.
“Val was gone all night,” Angar said. “She didn’t come back to our room until five this morning.”
“So?” Digger asked, not bothering with a denial.
“So give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kick your ass,” Angar said, brandishing the pick-hammer that was his weapon of choice.
“Dude, nothing happened,” Digger said. “I mean, yeah, we flirt, but you know it was over between us before she ever even met you.”
“Well, she certainly seems to be paying you a lot of attention, and you don’t seem to mind,” Angar said.
“No, I guess I don’t,” Digger said. “But come on, dude, Val loves you. You know that.”
“Yeah, but…” Angar sagged. “It’s just, things have been weird since she got on this super-team kick again.”
“Since she got on it? Didn’t you want to come back?”
Angar shrugged. “It’s fun, but I’m not really here to fight crime, you know? I came here for her, and for the sun. And I know I’m supposed to have a more… sophisticated view of fidelity, being immortal and all, but… Damn it, Digger, you’re my friend. It’s not right.”
“I agree,” Digger said. “It’s not. What do you want to do about it? You want to get in a fight here in the heat?”
Angar smiled. “No. Just turn around and bend over.”
“No way, dude. I’m not that sorry.”
“Not like that,” Angar said. “You haven’t really convinced me not to kick your ass, so turn around and let me kick it.”
“Really?” Digger asked. “That’s it?”
“Cross my heart.”
Digger shrugged and turned around, resting his hands on his knees. Angar kicked Digger’s ass a little harder than was strictly necessary, knocking him not only through the wall of their container but straight through two more. By the time Digger limped back to join Angar, Val and the rest were waiting for him. Val cocked her head at Digger.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“We… ran into some unexpected opposition,” Angar said.
Val looked at Digger for further explanation. Digger just shrugged.
“Okay, whatever,” Val said. “It’s obvious that approach didn’t work as well as we wanted, so I want to try something different…”
“Why are we messing with this stuff?” Rev cut in.
“You don’t think you need training?” Val asked.
“How to enter a building? I know how to enter a building,” Rev said. “I’ve been entering buildings all my life. Through the door or through the wall, it makes no difference to me.”
“It will make a difference when there’s someone waiting on the other side of it,” Doctor Jolt said. The smoke rising from his head mixed with the swirling dust in the sunlight slanting in through the hole they’d just knocked in the wall.
“Not really,” Rev replied. “Mister Rusk said it the other night. We’re the most powerful group of heroes ever assembled. Which isn’t entirely true, but close enough.”
“Who said it’s not true?” Val asked, insulted.
“Well, I think he means the First String,” said X-Tron from where he knelt outside the hole in the wall. Rev nodded.
“What’s the deal with the First String, seriously?” Val asked. “Angar and I had never even heard of them before we came to Earth.”
“Well, we all remember them,” Digger said.
“Dude, I wasn’t even born then,” Whiz said.
“Me neither,” Rev added,
“Okay, the point is, we’ve all heard of them, and they were seriously legendary,” Digger said. “I mean, before they left Earth, they saved us all, the entire world, from who knows what?”
“And that’s exactly the point, nobody knows what,” Val said. “I mean, the only thing that seriously threatened Earth back then was…”
Angar interrupted her with a raucous coughing fit. “Sorry. Dust.”
Val shook her head. “Yeah, well, they had nothing to do with that, anyway. But the point is, aside from some legendary group that everybody’s heard of, but nobody knows anything about, we’re the strongest ever. So just stick to that and don’t even mention the First String. Especially not to reporters. Agreed?”
She stared at Rev, who finally looked down (after a quick glance at her chest) and said, “Okay.”
“Good. Now let’s…” She cut off suddenly and put a hand to her ear. “This is Val… You’re sure? We’ll be right there.”
She turned back to the group. “We’ll have to come back to this later. There’s an emergency we need to respond to in Phoenix.”
“Are you sure we’re ready?” Digger asked, glancing at Rev. “I thought we weren’t official until next week.”
“Okay, everyone who thinks they need some kind of certificate to respond to a disaster, raise your hands,” Val said. No hands went up. She smiled at Digger. “I guess we’re official starting now. Come on, there’s no time to argue.”
She waved a hand, and the familiar rainbow-hued portal opened up in the air before them. “Oh shit, seriously?” Digger asked.
“Move,” Val said and shoved him through. Reality and Digger’s stomach whirled in opposite directions.
