The Ongoing Adventures of Stupendous Girl!

Götterdämmerung (Part 7 of 7) 28 Sep 2010

Irene was too tired to react well to the second shooting she’d seen tonight. All her reserves of energy, all her survival instinct had been used up in getting this far. Though she should have seen the sudden, violent death of Lewis at some unknown shooter’s hands as yet another threat to her as well, she was just too tired and overwhelmed to do anything but collapse.

Her knees gave out suddenly, buckling as if pressed down by a massive weight. She sprawled down onto the sand, tears streaming unbidden as she fell. She wasn’t sure if she was crying for Lewis, for John, or for her own loss of power and the identity crisis that came with it. Whether she was afraid or tired or betrayed, and in what proportions that drove the tears didn’t matter to her. After a moment of this, she heard hurried footsteps coming towards her, but was beyond caring.

“Irene!”

Someone was yelling from a little way off. She didn’t recognize his voice and wondered idly how he knew her name but still did nothing in response.

Another voice called out. So there were two of them; one man, one woman, neither known to her.

“You’re safe now, Irene. We’ve been following Lewis for a long time. We’re just sorry we didn’t get to him before he acted.”

By “acted”, she assumed the strange woman meant “tried to kill you, and perhaps did kill John”. She didn’t say so, though, still not wanting to deal with the world just at this moment. She could hear the two strangers whispering to each other, and at any time other than this frustrating day when she’d decided to give up her powers she’d have clearly made out everything they said – but for now it was all a muddle. She felt the need to be Stupendous again. She needed to revisit the strange old seeress and get her powers back. That thought was just a little seed of initiative, though, just starting to winds its way up through an unfathomable depth of the dark dense soil of despair. She stayed down.

“You don’t have to get up, but you should. It’s safe now.”

“Yeah, Lewis was working on his own, and we, uh, we took care of him.”

She knew that for sure. She couldn’t stop thinking of it, seeing the way a chunk of his head had exploded, smelling the iron-rich pool of blood around where he’d fallen, mixed with something more pungent (Irene was pretty sure he’d lost control of his bladder when he died). The horror of it was a primary contributor to her lack of desire to ever open her eyes again, let alone try to stand.

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