Page 4 of Antihero

Flashing-light projections come visible on the main street ahead, throwing patterns against the storefronts.

Orphan X returns to Lesandro, checks the saline bag and the infusion. The boy stares up at him, his sclera pronounced. “Wh-what’s gonna happen … me?”

He looks so scared, so lost.

Orphan X wonders what will happen to this young man. Will he be able to handle what he needs to in order to repair himself? Can he afford the medical interventions necessary to put himself back together? Do Orphan X’s responsibilities to Lesandro end once he is out of sight?

These are not the kinds of questions Orphan X has been trained to contend with. Nor are they ones he welcomes.

He crouches over Lesandro once more.

“There will be pain,” Orphan X tells him, “and it will be hard. But you will be whole again.”

Lesandro nods, tears leaking.

Orphan X rises. The wind tunnel of the narrow street plasters his shirt to his torso. You might make out the outline of his appendix carry holster and the ARES 1911 ghost gun it contains.

All this time he had a pistol. He just never bothered to draw it.

The sirens are close enough now that they sound like a scream. The red-and-blue strobing on the main street grows more intense. Orphan X ducks through the shattered window near Lesandro’s curled form, vanishing into the building. As the emergency vehicles sweep around the corner, their approach masks the sound of an F-150 engine turning over and coasting invisibly away.

If you could check Orphan X’s vitals, you’d find them normal. Body temperature 98.6°F, heart rate 60, respiratory rate 14, oxygen saturation 99 percent, blood pressure an athletic 105 over 55. He has not broken a sweat.

He is all fight. No flight.

You might wonder if he is real.

You might wonder if anything scares him.

You might wonder if he sleeps and, if he does, what nightmares haunt him.

2Still He Refused

In the beginning it was dark.

Four concrete walls, concrete ceiling, concrete floor. Windowless.

Evan Smoak had been taken. He didn’t know how. The circumstances of his capture hovered back in the haze somewhere before this present flash of consciousness.

It was not entirely unexpected; perhaps it was inevitable. In defiance of the law of man, country, and more, he had killed.

And killed and killed and killed.

He’d been chased from a fugitive’s hide into the blinding light of day. Taken hard to the ground, rending the flesh of knees, chest, and chin. Blindfold cinched tight, spit hood over his head, manacles binding hands and feet.

He’d been interrogated. Called to account for every aspect of his sordid past, pressured by fist and fiat to justify his very unsanctioned existence. Each trespass magnified to eclipse whatever humanity he had retained. Each fact decontextualized. Each choice filtered through a prism of worst-imagined intentions, transformed into something worse than a lie, an untruth. Demands were made—to apologize, to affirm what he didn’t believe, to bend the knee. To consent to a false story of himself, a hammered-flat narrative far removed from the actual sins he carried in the chinks and fissures of his heart.

But he refused to yield.

He refused to break his code.

He’d been enclosed in this concrete box and questioned with greater enhancement. Fingernails and car batteries. Cattle prod in his side. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, static blaring through headphones duct-taped to his head, a crown of anguish. Sweat wrung from his pores spattered the concrete, matching spots of a darker hue.

Still he refused to break his code.

His face, released to the media, shot through the veins and arteries of the known universe. Orphan X revealed, exposed. Salacious and damning details propagated through roaring algorithms. War criminal. Terrorist. Fascist. Islamophobe. Killer of Jews. Murderer of Christians. Deep-state operative. Alt-right. Radical left. Anarchist. Instrument of the irredeemably corrupt. Enemy of institutions. Deranged psychopath. Traitor. Committer of high treason. Unraveler of order.

An endless, continuous, exhaustive public accounting of his soul was undertaken. Every act imagined or real was spun and bastardized and toxified. The filth of the world pulsed in quickening waves, a feeding frenzy of escalation, of projection, of insanity itself.