Crossover Earth '98
Electric Blues
By
Scott F. Couchman
From the journals of Cecilia Sonada:
I know, I know. I should be working on the debugging routine for the VR gear from the company, but I'm just too worried about Mark.
When that initial call to arms was sent out, Mark felt it was his duty as a hero to respond. I won’t go into the argument we had that night. Let's just say, after a lot of tears, he still won. With the circumstances as they are now, I don't know if I can forgive him for winning.
The conference was in Los Angeles, and Mark didn't want to try to get there with that alien ship hanging over the city, so he asked me to rig up a setup for him through the computer. I was still mad at him, but agreed. I bounced the connection off of a few different sites, so it would be hard for anyone to trace the connection. I set him up on the spare computer, and draped a sheet behind him, so the teleconferencing wouldn't see our apartment.
I keyed in the commands and secretly watched the show from Finnegan. There was an impressive group of heroes at the conference, including Mark Battle, Old Glory, and that Blur person we read about before we left LA for Seattle.
Everyone brought up good points on how to handle the alien threat. Mark, or I should say, Dynamo, kept trying to stress that without an actual attack the aliens should not be considered a menace. This was one of the things we fought over the night before. I almost laughed when I heard him simply rehash Mark Battle's ideas and call them his own. Oh, sure, he may have laid them out a little neater, including on-screen graphics (I taught him well), but the ideas were still Mr. Battle's. My Mark's managerial skills were showing.
And I did cry when he volunteered to stay at home to protect Seattle. He knew how much it scared me to think of him leaving me, to fight and maybe die fighting aliens with power so much greater than his. That stupid bastard was trying to make up with me while he showed his brave face to the other heroes. Have I said how much I love him recently?
It broke my heart when Battle asked Dynamo to join in the team to take on Armature. I knew it! He'd go off and fight and die, and no one would know where Mark Swift was. I'd have to cover his tracks and mourn for him all at once. This was the heart of our fight.
But Dynamo was called, and as a hero, he felt obligated to oblige. To cover himself at work, Mark called Mr. Jenkins to send a team to study the Kansas ship. He, of course would head it up. I gathered, from this end of the phone call, that Jenkins thought the idea was great. Even better, when Mark Swift turned up missing and Dynamo turned up dead, it would be even harder for me to cover up the facts.
The tears in my eyes were flowing freely, just like they are now. Mark and I went to bed. I had intended to make love to him one last time, but my sobbing and our mood didn’t really call for it. So Mark just held me until morning. I don't think I ever stopped crying.
Of course, it was raining that day. Just the thing for my mood. I drove him to the airport and watched him board the plane to Los Angeles. He'd convinced Mr. Jenkins that he could do some preliminary work in LA and meet the team in Kansas in a day or so. Of course he was actually going to LA to meet with the other heroes.
I couldn’t stay to watch the plane take off. I hurt too much. Mark called me when he landed in Los Angeles. He sounded horrible. His lack of sleep and the turbulence on the trip made him quite queasy. I should have told him something like "It serves you right. You should come home now." But instead I only told him to be careful. That was the last time I talked to him.
When the team of heroes fought Armature, the Super Hero News Network gave us normal folk only snippets of the fight. There was a news blackout shortly after the fight began and the feds only allowed a few shots to be shown. They zoomed in on Mark Battle as he flexed and showed his might. I don’t care what anybody thinks, that guy is gorgeous! Then they showed my Mark, smiling as he protected the others. Battle may be gorgeous, but Mr. Swift has won my heart. The whole news piece was more propaganda than it was news.
And that's what worries me. What are they hiding? They showed the heroes in their best light, it was next to impossible to not feel good about what they were doing. So what really happened? I haven’t heard from Mark yet. Maybe I should just try to sleep. Things will work themselves out tomorrow.
Now if I could just stop crying.