Triathalon in…

THREE TO GET READY…

By Steve Seinberg

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story takes place before the “Empire” story-arc, which began in AVENGERS #9.

I’m not really sure how many killings it would have taken before the case got picked up by the Avengers data nets.

The first dozen or so occurred in homes and cars and parking lots scattered across four southern states, so it didn’t strike anyone as a pattern at first. Too many local law agencies dealing with isolated incidents, with no one to put them together and see them as points making up one big constellation. These were just some fairly unsavory, unlovable characters being treated to some of their own hate-spewing medicine here and there, and it wasn’t like they probably didn’t have it coming. The Klan affiliations were noted in some of the cases, but no one made it as a pattern that early on.

Most of the men were beaten to death. Three had their necks broken, and one had died from blood loss suffered when his jugular vein was severed. Scum of the earth, these men, and the various law agencies involved didn’t seem too overly anxious to bring the perpetrator–or perpetrators–to justice. Some might even have allowed that the victims did in fact receive actual justice when they met their respective killers…

But then the first rally was hit. Rural Mississippi, only a few days after the advent of the New Year. Of the nearly forty sheet-wearing, torch-brandishing Klansmen in attendance at this particular rally, a full two dozen were murdered that night. Seven of the survivors were left wounded and unconscious, and the rest fled. None were able to report much of anything about their attacker except that it had been a lone figure posing as one of them who had then turned into a blur of motion, and started tearing the Klansmen apart. Almost all of the witnesses agreed that this infiltrator was a female, although none could recall any specific features or distinguishing characteristics. “It happened so fast,” they said. Over and over again. “Just a blur.”

That of course made the news–strange that one lone woman could kill that many notorious specimens at one go-round–but with everything happening in the world, the loss of a few hate-mongers didn’t really make a huge impact on the national consciousness.

Life went on, and other things captured people’s attentions: celebrity breakups, global crises, superhero secret identities being revealed, the floundering economy… Klansmen…who cared? Who would miss them?

But then the second rally was hit. This one just over the Alabama line three weeks later. A smaller crowd, but an even higher kill rate at this one, and definite signs that the attacker was something other than human. Limbs torn from sockets, rifles and torches broken in half, signs that blood had been spilled and drunk and then spat out to distances human lungs most probably could not achieve. One unlucky man had been set aflame with a Klan torch and then thrown through the air a distance of nearly forty feet to crash-land in the windshield of a Ford pick-up truck, and then lie there helplessly embedded in the hole created by his arrival, unable to move, his back broken by the impact. The medical and forensics people all agreed that the man must have burned to death before he would have bled his way there or succumbed to the trauma of his other injuries. A horrible way to go, they all muttered…but then, he was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. It was hard to feel too bad for someone who had probably inflicted worse upon others in his time.

And then, since the killer seemed to be superhuman, the various law agencies all got together and punted the whole mess up to the Avengers. They all insisted that it was the super-powers angle of the case that made them want to bring in Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and it had nothing to do with this whole issue of whether or not it was moral or desirable to help the poor Klansmen and find the mean and nasty person who was thinning out their ranks with such gusto.

And in the aftermath of the Kang War, and with the new arrangements with the United Nations regarding the status of the Avengers as an independent world power, the major Avengers players were all just a little bit swamped. Captain America, Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Namor, Warbird…they barely had time to get to the bathroom, let alone investigate some vaguely understood Klan-killer. Not that the Founders and long-timers wouldn’t value all life, even the life of a black-hearted, death-dealing, fear-peddling dreg of humanity like a Klansman…they would. It was just such a pressing time, that circumstances forced them to delegate.

And in this case, they delegated to me. I suppose Cap and Warbird figured I needed a case to sink my teeth into, to really get back in the saddle. After all, I had just returned after my own small sabbatical, a time-out period I’d needed to call for myself after finally unraveling the whole Triune Understanding situation…learning my mentor was nothing but a liar and a betrayer, and having my consciousness bonded with those of two other men, being elevated to something like minor godhood…and then being returned to my former levels of still considerable ability and power, the levels I had enjoyed in my costumed identity as the hero and Avenger, Triathlon. I had been through a lot in a very short time, and they were wise to want to toss me back into the fray before I could think too much, and freeze up.

But why this particular case? Why would Cap and Warbird assign me–a black man!–the task of tracking down and apprehending a person who had killed members of the Ku Klux Klan?

Of course, it’s not like I was rooting for the killer. I don’t condone murder of any kind, and I think my teammates know that. But still, I had to wonder why one of the other Avengers couldn’t have taken the point on this one. I wondered if Cap was testing me for some reason, or forcing me to confront something in my own character that he was afraid might be buried within me somewhere.

I asked Warbird about all this, and all she would say was “We’re short-handed, Delroy. I could ask Namor to do it, but then you’d have to take over his courier run to Atlantis, and somehow I don’t think you could manage as well on the ocean floor as he can.”

She had me there. I can hold my breath for a lot longer than your average citizen, and I can take a little bit more pressure, but I wasn’t exactly ready to book on down to Atlantis for a two-day palaver with the king at Jules Verne-type depths.

The Vision gave me a lift down south in one of the Quinjets. I love that cat. He is the kindest, most caring, most concerned and considerate–the most human–person I think I’ve ever met. Doesn’t matter that he’s a synthetic lifeform. He’s awesome. He’s like Zen and chivalry and a touch of Edward Scissorhands without the Goth packaging all rolled up into one. He wants so much to belong. What he doesn’t realize is that it’s the rest of the world who haven’t yet learned to be as human–and humanitarian–as he is, not the other way around.

He said something interesting to me as I was taking my leave, stepping down onto Mississippi soil.

“Killing them will not kill their hate, Delroy. Allowing these murders to continue puts an end to nothing. All you can do is what is right in the big picture, even if it may not be gratifying in the short-term. You are a hero. You are a good man. I think our leaders may be using this case to remind you of that, in the event that you should need reminding after your recent tribulations.”

“Maybe,” I allowed. “Thanks, Vision. I’ll call in once I have some sense of what’s happening here. Don’t let them rent out my room.”

The corners of his mouth twitched so slightly that only extra-human vision would have caught it, but I logged it mentally as a smile won from the Vision, no small success.

I made for the room Jarvis had gotten set up for me, wondering if the Vision was right. Maybe Cap and Warbird didn’t assign me this case to see if I could handle the emotional challenges of it…maybe they assigned it to me because they already knew I could handle them! Maybe this was just their way of letting me know they knew.

The crime sites were old and cold by this time, and picked over by legions of cops who had trampled any evidence I might have spotted with my enhanced senses deep into the rich southern soil, so I spent the next four days going over case files and interviewing officers. The picture of the killer remained vague, out of focus. A few of the surviving Klan members had said she was a white woman, as white as the phony Klan sheet she’d been wearing, but two others had said she was a black woman, seeking revenge on them all because of their hateful proclivities. How could she be both black and white, I wondered?

She was undoubtedly strong, and fast, and clearly possessed of great ferocity, but there were plenty of known superhumans who could claim those things, and probably plenty more who just kept lower profiles, who simply hadn’t merited an entry into the Avengers files yet. I needed something tighter, something more identifying that would nail down who she was for me. I couldn’t catch or fight what I couldn’t even define…

And then on the fifth day, I realized that I had already gone as far as I could with the files, and with accounts gathered from sources a step or two removed from the action, like the cops and the coroners. I realized that I needed to talk to some of the first-hand witnesses…and I was stalling.

I was blessed with great natural physical gifts, and then these were boosted even further, to become amazing, rather unnatural gifts. The easiest way to describe my abilities, oversimplified though it may be, is to say that I am roughly equivalent to the finest human male specimen one could find that could still be called human…multiplied by a factor of 3. Three times faster than the fastest human, three times stronger than the strongest, triple the endurance and resilience and resistance to harm. I am a formidable creature. I could decimate a Klan gathering probably just as effectively as the killer, could possibly bring down the killer myself…yet despite this abundance of gifts, I was afraid to interview the Klansmen.

I needed to talk to the two who contradicted the rest, the two who claimed the killer was a black woman in their statements, but I was afraid of facing them. And I needed to talk to one of the higher-ups within the Klan hierarchy, to try to figure out where and when the killer might strike next, find out if any more meetings were planned that she might want to hit, or activities, or who might be on her list of targets…and I was even more afraid of talking to these higher-ups. The police could give me some names, I knew, and even set me up with some interviews, I just had to ask them…but I was afraid.

I was afraid of what I might feel when I saw them, stood before them. These men who would hate me, even kill me, because of the color of my skin, and here I was, trying to stop a person who would cut their hatred out from the world like an infection. Did that make me even more of a fool than the Klansmen? Helping those who would kill me if they could?

I thought about what the Vision had said, and then I called the facility where the two injured witnesses were being held for medical treatment after that second bloody gathering.

And I will admit to feeling some actual relief when I was told that one of the men had died during the night. No loss, I thought, just like some of the clean-up crew personnel that I’d talked to about the killings had said. No loss…and then I hated myself for thinking it.

No, I corrected myself, again picturing the Vision in my mind like a talisman, picturing his true love, the Scarlet Witch, and Cap, and all the others–and I forgave myself for being human, and I made a fist around my fear and clenched it hard, and I went to interview the last witness.

It was not a cheery task.

The man lay swathed in bandages, battered, deprived of several of his teeth, and even more drastically, his left arm. A blood-stained compress was taped over the place where his shoulder once dwelled, and one of his eyes was hidden beneath another clutch of thick white gauze that enwrapped his skull. He rolled his good eye over at me when my shadow fell on him, and then he rolled it up toward heaven.

“It had to be one of you,” he whispered. Two broken ribs and a scraped lung apparently precluded much in the way of volume, but my hearing was plenty good enough to make out what he was saying.

“One of who, Mr. Eldred?” His nurse hovered just outside the door, as his condition was still precarious, but he and I were alone in the room.

“Three dozen-plus Avengers they got runnin’ around, and they naturally have to send down one of the only one of you they was dumb enough to let on board.” He breathed with some labor, and I glared at him, hard enough almost to set his bandages on fire, I thought, and then he spoke again. “Why didn’t you bring your animal buddies with you? Panther-Man, the Falcon…hell, why not bring all of Africa in here with you?”

“You obviously know who I am, Mister Eldred, and you know why I’m here. The Avengers are going through an extremely busy time right now, and the Black Panther and the Falcon are busy elsewhere. So is Photon. So are Silverclaw and Firebird and the Living Lightning, our Latin members. Captain America felt that I would be sufficient to handle this case, and I think he’s right.”

“Tell him,” he bleated, “to come down here hisself. I’ll talk to him…an’ tell him what a sickening mistake he’s makin’ here with his membership.”

I stole a glance toward the door and saw the nurse peering in anxiously. I crouched down and whispered into the Klansman’s ear: “I wouldn’t soil Captain America’s aura by bringing him into the same room as you, you human filth. Now I know you’re uncomfortable. I know this isn’t the kind of sheet you normally prefer, and the hospital does put them on a little differently than you and your Klan buddies do, but if you can just answer the few questions that I have for you, we can be free of each other’s objectionable presences in no time at all…and believe me, Mr. Eldred, you can’t possibly object to my presence as much as I object to yours.”

He said something profane, and then began coughing and wheezing. The nurse poked her head in, but I held up a hand to stop her. “He’s okay,” I told her, “just got something caught in his throat. Please give us another moment.” I smiled at her reassuringly, and she backed out with obvious reluctance.

“Okay, Eldred, I’ll make this quick since I can see you’re not at your best. The killer. The woman who broke up your little hate-fest. Almost everyone else told the cops that she was a white woman, white as a ghost…but you said she was black. How can that be, Eldred, how can she be both?”

His eye rotated back toward me, red and wet from his coughing fit. “She was white-colored, alright. But not like one of us, not like what we mean when we all say “white people.” Her skin wasn’t natural, it was about as white as chalk. But she was one of you,” he insisted. “She said so. Said it was her people that we hunt, and she aimed to pay us all back”

“A black woman who looked white,” I said, testing the information, seeing how it sounded. “A black woman changed by outside forces or mutation to look white.” I supposed it was possible. My own experiences had shown me that the impossible was just something no one had managed to get around to doing yet.

“Well, okay, Eldred, that might be useful,” I told him. “Anything else you can remember?”

He started hacking again, and fighting for breath, and this time the nurse did come in. She began fussing with him and checking his vitals and connections, but there wasn’t all that much she could really do.

“Eldred?” I insisted. “Anything else you can remember?”

“Yeah,” he told me, anger and loathing blazing red out of his one good eye, “she kept…on…yelling hate.” He coughed more, with increasing violence.

“What? She shouted hateful things at you? So what? You can hardly blame her, considering the circumstances.”

“No…she…” And that was all he was able to manage before he totally succumbed to the coughing fit. It reached a crescendo, and then he passed out, his body still shuddering. The nurse rang for help and told me that it would probably be best if I left.

I had just exited the room and stepped into the hallway when she stuck her head out the door and called me back.

“Ah, sir…” she began, clearly nervous about talking to me, “I don’t mean to contradict or to stick my nose in where it doesn’t belong…but I don’t think he was trying to say that the woman you were talking about was yelling hateful things.”

“You don’t?”

She shook her head. “No, sir. I know I missed most of the rest of your conversation, but it seemed to me like he was saying that she was shouting the word “hate” at him and his…friends. Just shouting that one word.”

I stared at her, and she blushed furiously. “Well, that’s what I thought he was trying to tell you, that’s all,” she mumbled, and went back to her patient.

I pushed the door open and caught her eye. “Thank you,” I said, and then left the hospital.

Talking to one of the regional heads of the Klan was my next step. Getting a name was easy. Getting to talk was not.

To be fair, the local police did their best. They truly did try. Still, this was the deep south, and I believed that they would only try so far, and only out of respect for the Avengers organization itself. Beyond that, I was on my own.

The Klan leader I needed to grill was named John Decker. He was a horrifying man with a file that would have delighted a Nazi. Of course, he didn’t get to be leader by being stupid, and most of what the cops had in his folder was based on lots and lots of hearsay and speculation. Decker had only been in prison once, for car theft as a youngster of eighteen. As far as the authorities could unequivocally state, he had been clean ever since. What they suspected was another story, but there was never any proof of Decker’s involvement in Klan activities.

When the police called him to set up an interview for me, he refused.

When they paid him a visit at his home to ask again, he refused.

When they tried to get tough with him, one of his goons jumped one of the officers, and a scuffle ensued. They hauled Decker and a couple of his boys downtown and let me have a moment alone with him…but a moment was all I got before his lawyer showed up to spring him. I got no information out of him, only some truly colorful and inventive racial slurs.

Still, I pegged him as the man, the cops were right, and if I could find that out, then so could our killer, who seemed to have a pretty good line herself on the comings and goings of the local Klansfolk. I had no idea what her sources might be, but they hadn’t led her astray yet.

Decker hadn’t told me anything about any upcoming Klan events. I can’t say I was surprised–I hadn’t really expected him to–but if I couldn’t learn the direct way, I was willing to try something a bit more roundabout.

Meaning, I camped out near his home, a huge cabin set off by itself on twenty acres of unspoiled woodland.

I sat in a tree about a hundred yards from his front porch, and waited. I am adept at the stakeout. I can endure long periods without food or water or sleep. I can hold my body perfectly still for hours at a time, not a flinch or a tremble or a single twitch to betray me. My eyes make mockeries of such feeble things as binoculars. The foliage provided plenty of camouflage for me, and I knew Decker would never spot me, even if he knew to look for me and I had told him which tree I’d be in. I was well-hidden, and in the zone.

Two hours’ watch made it clear to me that a guard came out of the house every thirty minutes to make a circuit of the place, and then, satisfied, went back inside. He made the good faith effort, to give him his due, but he was really just going through the motions. His lackluster attempts at actual vigilance, though, were pathetic. A girl scout could have snuck up on him and sapped him with a sockful of cookies, and he’d never have seen it coming. I concluded that Decker’s homestead had never actually seen any action, or the security would have been a bit more up to speed.

After the guard had run through his fourth circuit of the house and then slipped back inside to watch TV, or whatever it was low-rent flunkies did when they weren’t in the middle of their grunt work, I got out my Avengers ID card and activated the comm.-link that would put me in audio contact with the Mansion.

I was patched through to Warbird almost immediately.

“Delroy. What have you found out so far?”

I gave her a summary of the killings, the conclusion reached by all, that a female superhuman was behind everything. I told her I’d spoken with all the relevant cops and medical personnel, and I’d interviewed the Klan witness at the hospital, but had crapped out with Decker, the big cheese. I told her that I had decided to trail him for a while, as I still thought he might lead me somewhere helpful, and she approved. Then I told her about the two odd things I’d learned:

I told her how this was possibly a black woman we were after, but one whose skin was white, maybe abnormally so.

And I told her that during the second big massacre, this black-white woman had been shouting the word “hate” at the Klansmen.

Silence from Warbird for a moment. And then she said, “Oh, Delroy! I know who it is! But I thought she was dead…”

“You know,” I said, “it was you who once told me that only heroes and civilians have the decency to stay dead, but the bad guys never do.”

“I guess I was right. And this looks like another case in point.”

She went on to fill me in on who our killer was. She gave me the killer’s background, her history and a description of her abilities and methods. She talked for twenty minutes, and then a big vehicle began lumbering up the long road that served Decker as a driveway. It came around a bend and revealed itself to be a big SUV, painted green as the forest. Decker’s lawyer was at the wheel, and Decker himself sat in the passenger seat grinning from ear to ear, obviously pleased with the events of the day.

They parked the car and went into the house, greeting the clumsy guard at the door when he opened it up to meet them. They all went inside, and I addressed Warbird again. “He just came back home,” I told her in a whisper. “I’ll stay on him for a couple of days, and if nothing comes of it, maybe we can think of another approach.”

“Look, Delroy, that’s a pretty tough customer you’ll be dealing with by yourself if you find her. Why don’t I send someone else out to link up with you and watch your back. Most of the others are involved in things, but I think I can get Cannonball down there…”

“Well,” I began, and then froze. A shadow had detached itself from the trees on the far side of Decker’s house, and was drifting slowly toward the front porch. It was a black-haired woman with an incredibly pale face, wrapped in a long black coat or cloak of some sort. It was our killer.

“Never mind, Warbird,” I hissed, “it’s too late for that. She’s here. It’s on.”

“Delroy,” she began, but I cut the connection.

Across the big yard, the killer set one foot on the stone walkway that led up from the driveway to the front door. I was down the tree, across the grass, and barring her way before she could set down her other foot.

She looked up at me in surprise–her senses were not as keen as mine, then. She hadn’t known I’d been there. Then as she took in the color of my skin, her eyes widened.

“I can’t let you go in there,” I told her.

“Why would you want to stop me?” she asked, wonder and disgust both vying for control of her tone. “Look at yourself. How can you defend scum like that?”

“I can’t let you kill him,” I said. “I can sympathize with maybe why you feel such anger…but I can’t let you kill him.” I borrowed from the Vision. “It won’t kill his hate.”

“Do you know who I am?” she asked me. “Do you know what you face?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I know who you are. And I know what you are. Your name is Nekra.”

She nodded and grinned, vampiric fangs in ghastly evidence. “Then you know that I am a mutant, fueled by hate. Hate gives me strength. Think of the irony. The poetry! I use their very hate to destroy them. How can you not approve of this, “hero?” You among all your kind?”

“You just said it yourself: because I am a hero.”

Behind me, the front door to the house opened, and I heard the hammer of a pistol being cocked, and a thick voice said, “Hey, just what in hell’s goin’ on out here?” The lame rent-a-hoodlum guard.

He took two steps down from the doorway, and his new angle allowed him to see Nekra beyond my wide shoulders. I heard his sharp intake of breath as he saw the stark, snow-colored flesh, the midnight hair, the coal-black eyes and the taloned fingers and evil-fanged grin.

“Stay out of this,” I said over my shoulder, and then turned back to the self-styled “priestess” before me. “We all thought you were dead, Nekra. Word is, you were killed by the Grim Reaper.”

“I was,” she laughed, “but I guess it didn’t take.” Her grin widened even further, became almost obscene. “Look at me, hero,” she said. “Don’t I look like I’m on at least a first-name basis with death? I am even named after the concept! Think of me as a citizen of the realm of death now, but one with unlimited travel privileges. I come and go as I please, hero, spending time on earth gathering new souls for the land of the dead in exchange for my freedoms. I suck the hate out of these hellbound few, and send them on to their well-deserved damnations. I rid the world of their evil, cleanse it from this earth. Isn’t that at least as heroic as what you do here?”

“Look, you two freaks,” the guard said behind me, “you’re on private property, and I’m givin’ you until the count of one before the hot lead kisses start flyin’. You get me?”

And then “HATE!!” shrieked Nekra, and it sounded like many voices all crying out at once, and she leaped past me, almost as fast as I am, and before I could react, she fell upon the guard and with a grotesque cracking sound, broke his neck. His gun clattered to the pavestones of the walk, and beyond Nekra, I could see Decker and his lawyer looking out in open-mouthed shock through a big bay window in the living room.

Nekra turned, and flashed a sickening grin at me, and then like a bolt of white lightning, she crashed right through the window, glass flooding inward in a great crystal splash, and I tackled her from behind before she could reach Decker.

“Run!” I yelled at him, my voice excessively loud, carrying, capable of three times the volume that our finest opera singers can attain. He and his lawyer turned and fled further into the house, and hopefully out the back, I thought, and then Nekra practically exploded beneath me.

Her black claws raked at my face, slashing my cheeks and putting a spider-web crack in one of the lenses of my goggles. Her knee pistoned up at my groin, and when I shifted my weight to dodge the blow, she threw me off of her and into the wall behind her.

I came up fast and swept her feet out from under her as she tried to get by me in pursuit of Decker, and when she scrambled up again, I was right there in her face. We danced. She swung out at me with a brutal right-handed jab, but I blocked it, and sent two of my own answering jabs crashing into the porcelain white curve of her jaw. It was like hitting a statue carved of stone. I scored on a kick to her midsection, but she seemed even less affected by the impact than I was.

“This could take quite a long time,” she told me, almost confidentially, or perhaps like she was flirting with me. We each attempted a roundhouse kick, and we each missed. “And meanwhile, that scum is escaping. How can you do this? You call yourself a hero, and yet you defend the lowest of the low.” I dodged another overhand haymaker. “And if you and your network of self-righteous friends manage to defeat me, what then? What will you tell the ghosts of the people this scum will murder beyond this day?” I punched her hard, connecting with one slender cheekbone. She grunted slightly, and continued, circling me. “Don’t you know that by stopping me, by protecting him…you are killing them. Your brothers and sisters. You. Hero.”

“No,” I told her, missing with my next blow, but scoring with the kick that followed it, rocking her midsection like a charwoman beating a rug. She might have been stronger than me, but I was definitely faster than she was, quicker. “I’m just stopping a murderer: you. If he kills anyone else, that’s his burden. He killed them, not me.”

“Do you really believe that?” she asked me. She hit me then, but only a glancing blow. What was I doing? Was she partly right? Did I want to stop someone from killing Klansmen? I had to admit, a part of me had been glad when I heard about that first group of them being killed, Nekra’s first rally. I hated them, too–even if my powers granted me three times the compassion and forgiveness that a human could normally hope to possess, even that wasn’t enough. I still hated. I hated the Klan, and I hated myself for protecting them, and I hated her for putting me in this position. Then a flurry of blows mushroomed up between us, almost as if happening of their own accord, like the battle took on a life of its own and began dictating the moves to the two of us, who just collected our paychecks and did as we were told. I landed about eight blows for every one that she managed to connect on, and it finally began to take its toll on her.

Meanwhile, outside, I could hear Decker’s lawyer’s SUV being fired up, and so I knew the Klansman was getting away. “There goes your quota,” I told the hate-filled alabaster mutant before me. “I don’t think you’ll be able to hit your monthly numbers now.”

“HATE!!” she bellowed at me again, and made a new desperate charge at me, her efforts redoubled.

I rolled with her, went down on my back and took the momentum of her charge with me, and then planting my feet in her abdomen as we went, I catapulted her backwards, straight into the big stone fireplace whose upper reaches rose up a full two stories above us. She crashed through it, through the outer wall, and landed in the yard outside. Property damage was starting to mount up.

The stone structure groaned audibly, weakened critically by her passage through the center of it, and then the top half of the chimney fell down on top of her, all but burying her in masonry. I went out through the gaping hole left by the collapse, and watched her white, white arms flutter ineffectually beneath the rubble while the shadows got long, and the air got cool.

When the first stars began to twinkle down at us, and the first sirens appeared at the fringes of my hearing, she finally managed to crawl free. She called me a hypocrite, and told me I was damned three times over, cursed by her to suffer thrice what she wished on these Klan scum. She tried to run, but I tackled her and brought her down, and then unloaded on her, about twenty rapid-fire blows to the head. She stayed down, only semi-conscious, if that, and muttering.

She was still muttering when the line of police cars arrived eight or nine minutes later. And she was still muttering ten minutes after that, when the Quinjet materialized overhead. The Vision and Cannonball disembarked, and wrapped everything up with the cops, and arranged transport for Nekra to a holding facility designed to accommodate transgressors with special gifts and strengths, such as hers.

On the flight back to New York, the Vision commended me for the job I had done. Cannonball agreed.

“I don’t know that I coulda done what you did, Triathlon,” he told me.

“What do you mean?”

“To save a man like that…and to take down the one who was destroyin’ his sick group. I know what this Nekra woman did was wrong, there’s no question about that…but I’m glad that I wasn’t the Avenger assigned to this particular case.”

“It wasn’t easy,” I told him.

“But that is why the Captain and Warbird sent Triathlon,” the Vision said, I think as much to me, although he was technically addressing Cannonball. “They knew that he was up to the rigors of this job, which had some extraordinary moral complications and quagmires attendant to it, much more so than many of our cases–and now we all know it. And you, Cannonball, would have done the right thing as well, do not fool yourself to the contrary. You both have something…to me, you represent the future of the Avengers, the heart of what might be tomorrow’s team. You are young and fierce and brave and powerful…and you both stand for the greater good above all. You know what is right, and you never give up. You didn’t save a killer, Delroy, when you rescued John Decker; you stopped a killer when you apprehended Nekra. That is the truth in what you did this week. You stopped a killer.” We flew on in silence for a while, and then the two of them got off on something about tactical applications of Cannonball’s blast field or some such, while I stared out the window and tried to get my head around what I had faced in the south.

And later that night, when we arrived back at the mansion, the Captain himself met us in the hangar.

He didn’t say much. Just asked if we were all okay, and then as the others filed on out, clapped me on the shoulder, and looked me in the eye, and then broke into a real slow, but almost captivating smile. He nodded at me once, crisply, but with something like real admiration in his demeanor, squeezed my shoulder once, hard, and then followed the others on out, back toward the mansion proper.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I guess if that’s so, then sometimes a gesture or a sign from a man like Captain America is worth at least a thousand pictures.

After a long, long, hot, looooong, shower, I went to bed feeling much better, about myself, and about my place in the world, back on earth as Triathlon, and as Delroy Garrett, Jr., Avenger and man. I slept for many, many hours after a week of deprivation, and when I finally awoke, I went downstairs to the kitchen, and I had a breakfast about three times larger than even the most voracious eater of human proportions could manage.

And even Jarvis–who has fed the likes of Thor and the Hulk and Hercules–even Jarvis was impressed…