Trolley Man

The kid doesn't deserve it, of course. No one I throw in the wood chipper, literally or figuratively, deserves it.

He's just this happy little dude, one hand holding an ice cream cone, his other hand in his mom's, they're just strolling down the sidewalk on a rare glorious Minneapolis summer day. Just a happy little kid, enjoying a sunny day.

But Vanity Bonfire has gotten out of lockup again, somehow, and she's turned the corner just ahead and is walking towards me. She sees me, and recognizes me from the last time I helped put her away, and she's lifting her upturned palms. Just absolute shit luck. I've got about three seconds before she pulls down enough solar energy to flashfire most of the city block.

I whistle real loudly and the kid looks at me. Perfect. I lock eyes with him and feel my pupils blow open. Not windows to the soul in my case, more portholes into the Great Nothingness that's always eating away at the universe, and there's no airlock doors between me and the kid, whose eyes are windows to his soul. At least for me.

The kid's pupils blow open and a blast of cold that has nothing to do with physical temperature slams through me. The kid drops dead, his mom screams, people around us all start looking and yelling and screaming.

Up ahead Vanity Bonfire's hands are glowing bright and now I do feel a difference in physical air temperature, getting real warm real fast.

Last time I used the juice I pulled from an elderly woman's sundered lifeforce to throw a sort of psychic haymaker into Vanity's mind. Had knocked her right the hell out. I'd helped the cops get her cuffed and straitjacketed, and had thought that was the end of it.

Two years ago, in Berlin, she'd torched a quarter of the city.

Fuck that shit. I wasn't going to try subtle a second time.

I channel the newly-deceased kid's soul into kinetic force, pulling on Vanity's wrists.

I tear her hands right off the ends of her arms.

No flashpoint. Minneapolis doesn't become Berlin 2.0.

Vanity screams and falls and watches her twitching hands flop and skitter on the sidewalk in front of her.

Then she bleeds and cries a little and dies.

I feel the dregs of the kid's soul settle into the pit of my stomach, like a lump of ashes.

All around me, people running and screaming and throwing up and just completely losing their shit. But they're alive.

The kid's mother sits on the sidewalk, cradling his head in her hands, very quietly asking him to wake up.

I stagger away, not looking back at the real hero of the day.