A Once Crowded Sky Read Online Free Page B

explaining that it would help contain the virus or help us all remember or some such nonsense.
    But all that doesn’t matter. Point is, all the villains, all them threats, are just as gone as the powers, just as gone as all of us. Pull the trigger.
    Which was good in the end. Just as the heroes faded away, all their opposites went right along with them, leaving a world at rest, a hushedpeace that finally went undisturbed by the constant clash of bionic swords against oversized reptile tails.
    Soldier pushes the gun deeper into the grave. He rotates the barrel, collecting a few grains of sand along the metal lip of the weapon. Closing one eye, he tries to focus on the front site, letting the side sites fade away into his unconscious, as he’d done a thousand times before, a thousand other men locked in their place before him and his guns. Eventually all he sees is the dirt, slightly interrupted by a small line of metal.
    Until next time. Survivor’s down there now. Buried for now. And he could be down there now getting it together. He’d done it before. Pretended to be dead and come right back. He could be down there getting it all back together again. Waiting to pop up and start it all again. All those dead. All those dying in the game. It all can start up again. Survivor fighting Soldier. Coming back from the dead and fighting again and again. That’s the game. That’s how you play it. Month after month. Until next time, until next time. Pull the trigger.
    “Doesn’t matter what you do.” A voice from behind Soldier. “They all come back.”
    Soldier turns his head and finds a bald, pale man huffing on a cigarette. When he talks, the man’s voice comes out as a loose, low crackle.
    “Soldier of Freedom, you know me, I’m the Prophetier. I see what’s to come, and we will all come back. And you will save us.”
     
    The Soldier of Freedom #519
    Soldier gets up from the ground and holsters his weapon. “I’m sorry,” he says, wiping dirt from his pants. “I’m sorry.”
    “The game will come again,” Prophetier says.
    Soldier arches his back. He’d stood up too fast, embarrassed by it all, and now that newly familiar ache was coming up from his hips into his spine. Soldier rubs into his back with his clenched fist.
    “I didn’t see you here when I walked up,” Soldier says. “I didn’t hardly see anyone. I’m sorry. I would’ve said something.”
    “You heard what I told you? The game’s coming back.”
    Soldier twists his torso, tries to stretch away the pain. The stretch takes enough of the edge off; he can live with the rest of it.
    “Did you hear me?” Prophetier asks again. “It’s coming back.”
    “Yeah, I heard you.”
    Prophetier stares at Soldier, looking for a while at Soldier’s face and then at Soldier’s guns; after some time waiting, Prophetier looks around, smoke from his cigarette following his eyes. “My father’s buried here.” He points over the headstones into the distance, toward a hill at the edge of the cemetery. “I came to visit.”
    “I didn’t know your father was a villain. I’m sorry to hear it.”
    Prophetier shrugs. “He built something he couldn’t control.”
    “Lot of them were that way. Not bad men. Just let things get away from them.”
    “I suppose.” Prophetier removes his cigarette and throws it onto Survivor’s grave. “Your villain there, he was a father too.” He reaches in his pocket and lights up another.
    “Yeah.” Soldier picks up the cigarette, tosses it off into a nearby clearing. “Survivor and his kids, The Nefarious Nine.”
    “All dead.”
    “Yeah.”
    Prophetier’s gaze sticks on the northern edge of the cemetery, where the last row of graves butts up against the surrounding tree line. He grunts and twitches his nose back.
    “Something wrong?” Soldier asks.
    “All except Runt. He survives, makes the sacrifice. The son of Survivor who became a hero. The son of the villain.” Prophetier laughs. “None of our