other side of the glass, a doctor looked up at him, then turned away.
He went to her room.
Sarah Kontis Gray was sleeping in her white hospital bed. The room was oddly silent now that the respirator had been removed.The nurse by the bedside, a thin black woman with streaks of gray in her hair, rose as he entered.
“She’s been sleeping well,” she whispered.
He nodded. In truth, though, he didn’t believe the words. In the three years they’d been together, he’d never seen Nubile sleep on her back. She always slept on her side, with her head pressed up against his shoulder. She looked so wrong on her back, with every muscle slack. The crisp white linens lay neatly across her. Normally when she slept, she was murder on blankets, tugging and tucking and stuffing them under body parts until everything was just right.
“Thank you,” Eric whispered as he turned away.
If he wanted to find comfort for his aching soul, this was not the place to look for it. He walked to the library, activated the hidden elevator, and rode down to the quiet room. He tossed the robe aside and pulled on his mask. The door slid open on the stone-lined chamber.
Lawrence David Rambo was slumped on the stone floor, snoring. His ankle was red and raw where the iron manacle held it. He was naked save for the leather bands around his neck and wrists. His body was covered with welts and purple bruises haloed in yellow.
Lawrence David Rambo wasn’t a supervillain. He was a petty scoundrel, seventeen years old, from a suburb near Baltimore. He’d discovered it was easy money to wave a gun around in small mom-and-pop stores out in the boonies, where he’d get away with a hundred bucks if he was lucky, a case of beer, maybe a roll of scratch-off lottery tickets. He’d never shot anyone, but he’d pistol-whipped a sixty-year-old woman who hadn’t been moving fast enough, and had once pointed his gun at an eight-year-old boy who’d been coming out of the restroom, forcing him to lie down and count to a hundred, shouting that if he stopped counting he’d die.
Lawrence David Rambo was white. His parents were middle-class. He’d been arrested twice for trivial crimes, but never even spent a full night in jail. He was the sort of kid the broken justice system would allow to slip through the cracks until he killed someone.
Retaliator doused him with a bucket of cold water.
The young man gasped awake, trembling.
“Ohgoddon’t,” he whimpered as he curled into a fetal position. “Ohpleaseohpleasedon’t.”
Retaliator looked down through his zippered eye-slits at the very worst of humanity. When other men thought of evil, they thought of villains like Hitler, or Osama bin Laden, or Prime Mover. But Retaliator saw the truth. The true evil of the world was insidious in its smallness, the petty, pointless meanness that would pistol-whip a grandmother or badger a crying child. The big evils of the world were easy to manage. Armies were sent after men like bin Laden. But the same governments that raised the armies would provide lawyers to men like Rambo, subhuman scum who had hurt people not for any grand plan of world conquest, but simply because it was easy to bully those weaker than him.
Save for his rebuilt heart, Retaliator possessed no superpowers. What he did possess that allowed him to stand beside demigods like Atomahawk was clarity of vision. He could see through the veil of excuses and justifications that society wove to hide the reality of the evil in their midst.
Eric Gray’s great power was his ability to see the world in black and white.
He selected a bullwhip from the wall, its tip studded with shards of broken glass.
His prisoner released a series of incoherent whimpers that Retaliator recognized as pleas for mercy.
Retaliator dropped his voice to a cold bass rumble. “Begging will only make me beat you harder.”
The young man slowly stilled his voice in a series of choked sobs.
“Or perhaps it’s silence that will
He went to her room.
Sarah Kontis Gray was sleeping in her white hospital bed. The room was oddly silent now that the respirator had been removed.The nurse by the bedside, a thin black woman with streaks of gray in her hair, rose as he entered.
“She’s been sleeping well,” she whispered.
He nodded. In truth, though, he didn’t believe the words. In the three years they’d been together, he’d never seen Nubile sleep on her back. She always slept on her side, with her head pressed up against his shoulder. She looked so wrong on her back, with every muscle slack. The crisp white linens lay neatly across her. Normally when she slept, she was murder on blankets, tugging and tucking and stuffing them under body parts until everything was just right.
“Thank you,” Eric whispered as he turned away.
If he wanted to find comfort for his aching soul, this was not the place to look for it. He walked to the library, activated the hidden elevator, and rode down to the quiet room. He tossed the robe aside and pulled on his mask. The door slid open on the stone-lined chamber.
Lawrence David Rambo was slumped on the stone floor, snoring. His ankle was red and raw where the iron manacle held it. He was naked save for the leather bands around his neck and wrists. His body was covered with welts and purple bruises haloed in yellow.
Lawrence David Rambo wasn’t a supervillain. He was a petty scoundrel, seventeen years old, from a suburb near Baltimore. He’d discovered it was easy money to wave a gun around in small mom-and-pop stores out in the boonies, where he’d get away with a hundred bucks if he was lucky, a case of beer, maybe a roll of scratch-off lottery tickets. He’d never shot anyone, but he’d pistol-whipped a sixty-year-old woman who hadn’t been moving fast enough, and had once pointed his gun at an eight-year-old boy who’d been coming out of the restroom, forcing him to lie down and count to a hundred, shouting that if he stopped counting he’d die.
Lawrence David Rambo was white. His parents were middle-class. He’d been arrested twice for trivial crimes, but never even spent a full night in jail. He was the sort of kid the broken justice system would allow to slip through the cracks until he killed someone.
Retaliator doused him with a bucket of cold water.
The young man gasped awake, trembling.
“Ohgoddon’t,” he whimpered as he curled into a fetal position. “Ohpleaseohpleasedon’t.”
Retaliator looked down through his zippered eye-slits at the very worst of humanity. When other men thought of evil, they thought of villains like Hitler, or Osama bin Laden, or Prime Mover. But Retaliator saw the truth. The true evil of the world was insidious in its smallness, the petty, pointless meanness that would pistol-whip a grandmother or badger a crying child. The big evils of the world were easy to manage. Armies were sent after men like bin Laden. But the same governments that raised the armies would provide lawyers to men like Rambo, subhuman scum who had hurt people not for any grand plan of world conquest, but simply because it was easy to bully those weaker than him.
Save for his rebuilt heart, Retaliator possessed no superpowers. What he did possess that allowed him to stand beside demigods like Atomahawk was clarity of vision. He could see through the veil of excuses and justifications that society wove to hide the reality of the evil in their midst.
Eric Gray’s great power was his ability to see the world in black and white.
He selected a bullwhip from the wall, its tip studded with shards of broken glass.
His prisoner released a series of incoherent whimpers that Retaliator recognized as pleas for mercy.
Retaliator dropped his voice to a cold bass rumble. “Begging will only make me beat you harder.”
The young man slowly stilled his voice in a series of choked sobs.
“Or perhaps it’s silence that will
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