Ex-Heroes

How Am I Supposed to Live Without You? THEN

They’re going to kill me for this. I was one of the most important heroes on this coast. When I first started out I was the Immortal, the man who couldn’t be killed. A regular Jack Harkness, for those of you who watch BBC America. I’ve been shot, stabbed, beaten, crushed, impaled, and even eviscerated. And I don’t even have scars. Everything I was—everything I am today—-is because of Meredith. She was the love of my life. People say shit like that all the time, I know, but there’s just no other way to put it. I thought I was in love twice in college, once with a foreign exchange student, and once because I mistook phenomenal sex for love. There was one time in my early twenties when I wanted to be in love, wanted so bad to make this woman happy, but I just couldn’t. It wasn’t there. Not until Meredith. Stupid and clichéd as it may sound for Hollywood, we met at a wrap party for a movie. Some low-budget Sci-Fi Channel thing. She was dating a grip. I was with a makeup artist. From the moment I saw her I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Black hair, blue eyes, and a set of mismatched earrings. She’d lost one of each and just decided to make a set with what was left. We started talking at the bar, chatted all night, and pissed off both our dates. A month later we were both single. Two months after that we were together. And two years after that she died. It didn’t happen quite like that. There was a lot more to it.

Finding a Beverly Hills–adjacent place we both liked. Buying furniture.

Teaching her how to drive a stick. Rescuing a pair of stray kittens we named Lewis and Clarke. Proposing to her while we were getting lawn-bowling lessons. And then there was the oddness of me developing superpowers. Meredith helped with that, too. She was there for every part of it, keeping me sane. That first time, straining noodles, we both thought it was just dumb luck the boiling water didn’t leave me with red skin and blisters.

Then there was the broken glass we thought slashed my hand, but there wasn’t even a hint except for the cut in my shirt cuff. Of course, the one we couldn’t ignore was the kid with the green bandanna stabbing me in the gut. I know now he was a Seventeen.

Then I just knew he was the punk who made Meredith scream by trying to kill me. We’d just seen Eddie Izzard at the Wiltern and were walking to where we parked, a few blocks up Oxford. She never liked parking in structures and called it a scam. The kid grabbed her arm, shouted for my wallet, and then he twisted her arm and she screamed. I lunged and pounded him until he was unconscious, and that’s when we realized he’d stabbed me six times during our fight. Six bloody holes in my shirt, but not a mark on me. When we saw the news reports about the Mighty Dragon, Blockbuster, Zzzap, and the rest, we both knew what I had to do. Meredith bought a full-body motorcycle suit and stitched on a logo, and for months I was the Immortal, the man who couldn’t be killed. I was hit by cars and shotgun blasts. Threw myself off buildings. One night after a gang shoot-out I got home and pulled twenty-three bullets out of myself. And then we made another discovery. Mere cut herself with a kitchen knife while chopping broccoli.

Nothing deadly, maybe a stitch or two. We laughed—it was bound to happen someday, she was so clumsy. And I held her finger and felt a tingle, a flow of my power, and she gasped as it closed up. The skin sealed together without so much as a pucker. A medical resident who could heal with a touch. My success rate at the hospital went up. My popularity with my fellow heroes and police did, too. It took another month for my codename to change to Regenerator. I teamed up with most of the heroes at one point or another.

Midknight. The Mighty Dragon. Cairax. Even the police during a few standoffs. I was the ultimate support guy. With me backing you up, nobody could fail. Heck, with me there everyone was an immortal. And then, with all this going on, then she died. It was stupid. A stupid way to die. She’d been safe. So safe. It wasn’t fair. That’s what’s important to remember. It wasn’t fair for her to get taken away from me like that. That’s what they’ll need to understand. What happened wasn’t right, so I didn’t do anything wrong. A broken finger. She died because of a broken finger. Mashed in a car door, broke the skin, heavy bleeding. If I hadn’t been out playing hero I could’ve fixed it in ten seconds. Instead the neighbors called an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital. And once she got there, the emergency room staff screwed up a test and gave her the wrong type of blood. She was A-negative and some idiot nurse misread a chart and gave her Rh positive blood. Blood which should’ve been screened out of their blood banks to start with, because it was tainted with hep-B. The mixed symptoms confused them and they spent hours pumping her full of poisons to deal with misdiagnoses, and filling her with more of the wrong blood. The odds of it happening are a million to one.

I know this. Two horrible, freak mistakes that both fell on one person. As someone in the medical profession, I know this and I understand why they could’ve been so baffled. Hell, anyone who watches House knows why they were baffled. It still wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Meredith died in agony just as I got home and the neighbors were telling me she’d gone to the hospital for something minor. And so I did what anyone else would. What anybody with my abilities would’ve done. It didn’t take long to claim her body. The hospital staff knew how bad they’d screwed up and were willing to agree to anything. I talked about religious beliefs and they let me walk out the door with her body. I kept my hands on her the whole time, willing life into her nerves, every fiber, each individual cell. My power let me see what had gone wrong. Let me reach in to fix her. But there was so much that needed to happen. Even more than I could do. I had to rebuild her, redesign her, so she could fix herself. Twist and tweak her blood cells to let them restore her nervous system and replenish her and fight the problem. Make them multiply faster. Make them stronger.

Tougher. More aggressive. Like a virus. Sixteen hours after I got her home her eyes fluttered. An hour later her right hand twitched. I collapsed from sheer exhaustion after fortytwo hours of forcing every bit of my energy into her, but not before I saw her lips move and heard her body shift. I slept for thirty hours. It wasn’t her. I could see that as soon as I woke up. It was just a thing, still strapped to the gurney. The eyes were wrong. Flat. Meredith was gone. Dead. I’d just brought back her body, like some superpowered lifesupport machine, its jaws snapping at me. I should’ve destroyed it, but I couldn’t. It had her face. So I kept hoping one morning her eyes would be normal again, that her skin would be warm. And she never was. I had a funeral with an empty coffin. I went to work. I went out on patrol. I went to counseling. People everywhere told me how sorry they were for my loss and assured me things would get better if I just gave it time. That’s all I needed was time. And then I’d go home and feed the thing that had been my wife. One day, after six weeks of this, I came home and it was gone.

Mrs. Halifax, our neighbor from two doors down, was dead on the dining room floor. She had a key, in case we needed her to feed the cats. There was a casserole dish near her right hand. Her right hand was six feet from her body, along with the rest of that arm where it had been gnawed through.

She’d been gutted and eaten, by the look of her. I called the police. I think that was when the denial kicked in.

I’d been at work the whole time and dozens of people could vouch for me.

There was no evidence, so I couldn’t’ve done anything. Nothing but an empty stretcher in the living room, which a grieving doctor could explain with no problem. I did nothing wrong. The police agreed I’d done nothing wrong. That Saturday I heard about the woman attacking some Seventeens outside a movie theater. The woman who clawed and bit and ate an ear. The Channel 7 reporter said they put over twenty rounds into the woman before she stopped. They brought the body to our morgue. The face was gone. Most of the left hand had been shot off. But it still had Meredith’s hair, and the little scar under her right breast. I made sure she stayed a Jane Doe. Two weeks later I heard about another attack. Nine days after that the Mighty Dragon told me Stealth had called in Zzzap to help search the city for “some kind of infection.” By month’s end we had an uprising. The month after that it was a war. Then the war was over. And Meredith was still gone. And my powers were all but gone. And most of the world was gone. They’re going to find out. I try to slow down the tests, contaminate the samples, corrupt the data where I can. But there’s only so much I can do. Julie Connolly is a smart woman. Very smart. If the world hadn’t fallen apart she’d be a top doctor by now, I have no doubt. I think she suspects. She doesn’t know why I’m dragging my feet, can’t believe I’d be messing with results. But it’s nagging in the back of her mind. I can see it in her eyes when she looks at me. They’re going to find out. And when they do, they’ll kill me.