Wild Cards

What the hell are they doing coming up here? TT wondered, but then, finally, a voice broke through the chaotic chatter on the radio. It was the foreman, screaming, “TT! Move the beams! Move the fucking beams!”

TT looked out at the boom. The girders were tilting badly and would soon slip free of the cable loops holding them. And if they fell, they would fall …

Right into the fucking parking lot! Right onto those fucking Suburbans! That’s what the old man is doing, he’s trying to crush that mob kid!

The old man was no longer climbing, though. He’d made his way to the slowing unit just aft of TT’s cabin and was now running along the jib like he was just running down the street, headed for the hoist unit with its drum and gearbox. Tiger man was right behind him, reaching out, then yes, catching the old man before he could do whatever he was planning to do to the cable.

Tear it right in fucking two, I guess.

Then the two aces were trading blows, hitting each other so hard that TT could feel the vibrations traveling through the crane’s superstructure. The old man staggered back, blood flowing down one side of his face from where the tiger man’s claws had opened up a trio of ugly gashes, and the tiger man closed in.

But the fall was a feint. When the tiger man kicked out, trying to send the old man off the crane, the old man caught his tiger leg and lifted the mobster high. He swung the tiger man down hard against the jib’s metal lattice, looking like a steel driver swinging a hammer down on a spike, except the hammer was a twisting, spitting, clawing ace. An ace who slumped, dead or unconscious, once he struck the crane.

The old man turned his back on his foe and walked over to the hoist unit. Then, proving TT’s prediction true, he reached out and rested one hand on the main cable array. He squeezed his fingers together, and the strands parted. Below, the load fell.

“Oh, fuck. No!”

Then, in the operating cabin of a Liebherr tower crane situated in a construction site near Chicago’s Loop, something happened that had happened thousands of times before across the world over the previous sixty years. Something that had been studied and speculated upon by the finest minds of more than one planet.

Inside Todd Taszycki, a change occurred on, at least, the chromosomal level. Some of those fine minds had theorized that the change occurred even more fundamentally than that, at the level of gluons and gauge basins, right down at the very bottom of matter, where the world becomes impossible to both understand and predict at the same time.

Inside Todd Taszycki, a card turned.

Outside, the girders surrendered to gravity and plummeted toward the parking lot below. TT saw people scattering.

He reached out.

And a superstructure of tightly spaced glowing neon-yellow I-beams came into existence below the falling steel, catching the girders in a net that bent, but did not break. TT felt the weight of the fallen load in his mind and instinctively added more support to the structure he had created.

Sweat dripped into his eyes and he reached up and pulled off his hardhat, absent-mindedly pulling the squawking earpiece out as he did so. He risked a glance out along the crane and saw that the old man and the tiger man were both gone.

Below, the Suburbans went peeling out of the lot, heedless of traffic.

The glowing yellow structure stabilized, and TT realized it was because he was getting used to the feel of it in his mind. He could sense the matter and the energy of it, he could direct the matter and energy of it.

“Well, fuck me,” said TT.

TT had a cousin, Sylvia, who was a meteorologist at a TV station up in Green Bay, and a nephew, Tobias, who edited a trucking magazine. So technically speaking, he’d been around reporters before. Sylvia and Toby, though, weren’t assholes.

“Todd! Todd! Is this the first time you’ve used your powers to save someone’s life?”

“Mr. Tad … Tatsicko! Can you do anything else besides create magic girders? Can you fly? Can you shoot rays out of your eyes?”

“Will you be keeping your job as a crane operator, Todd?”

“Are you married? Have a special someone?”

“What does your family think about your ace power?”

Oh Christ, that last one got his attention. With the way Ma kept three televisions going all the time, not to mention her police scanner, not to mention his sister Margaret the firefighter probably having heard all about this from the emergency crews who had showed up after everything had already settled down, there was no fucking way his mother and his siblings wouldn’t have heard about his “ace debut” already.

TT didn’t have a clue how to answer any of the questions, didn’t know which one to try to answer first, didn’t know which one of the many cameras he was supposed to be looking at. Luckily, Local #221 had proved again what his pops had always said when he first brought TT into the construction business: “Don’t look at dues as a cut out of your check. Look at ’em as an investment.”

In this case, his investment had paid for the services of a union lawyer, a guy named Kassam who maybe wasn’t as slick as the lawyers on Ma’s programs but at least he knew how to talk to the media.

“It’s Mr. Taszycki,” said Kassam, and he spelled it out, spelled it right and everything. “And he doesn’t have anything to say at this time, other than that he’s glad that nobody was hurt in the incident.”

The “incident,” yeah, TT guessed that’s what it fucking was. Tiger man fighting off a super-strong old guy trying to pull off a mob hit by pulling down his crane. None of the reporters had asked about any of that, though, which was kind of fucking odd, now that TT thought about it.

“Hey,” he asked the lawyer, “what about those motherfuckers in the Suburbans?”

Unfortunately, a couple of the reporters heard him ask and they started in with the yelling bullshit again. But the lawyer and the shop steward hustled TT away from the scrum and into the architect’s trailer while the foreman and a couple of the guys kept the reporters from following them.

“We don’t want to get into any details of what caused the accident, TT,” said the steward, who was, really, kind of a weaselly fucker TT had never gotten along with. “The main investor is pissed off that his son came so close to buying it and he’s not a man who likes publicity.”

“But it was a fucking mob hit,” said TT. “We didn’t have anything to do with it. We should call the fucking cops or something, shouldn’t we?”

“It would be the Feds if we were going to call anybody,” said the lawyer. “But we’re not going to make any such calls. Though I’m sure you’ll be contacted by them soon enough. Not the organized crime guys, though. SCARE or somebody like that. They’re always interested in new aces.”

“I don’t want anything to do with any of that,” said TT. “I don’t know what happened out there. I should, I don’t know, go to the fucking doctor or something.”

“What I advise you to do,” said the lawyer, “is seek legal counsel as soon as possible. I can make some recommendations. The reporters will file their stories and forget about you, hopefully, so long as you keep your head down and don’t start fighting crime or something stupid like that. But even if the government doesn’t come sniffing around, somebody will. Be careful, TT.”

And that was pretty much that for TT’s debut as a superpowered construction worker. Catching the falling I-beams then lowering them to the ground had been easy compared to all the bullshit that followed talking to the union and the construction company and the lawyers and the reporters. But at the end of the day, TT found himself in the mobile locker room with the rest of the crew, like usual.

The trailer was big enough for twelve showers and a bank of lockers, and the crew was big enough that it was always crowded in there come five o’clock. But today, TT noticed, he didn’t have to elbow his way to his locker and wait in line for the shower. The other guys kind of made way for him in a way that wasn’t comfortable at all.

Finally, he said, “C’mon, what the fuck is this? You assholes going to treat me different now? I didn’t ask to get the virus and if any of you motherfuckers had been paying attention in sixth-grade science you’d know it ain’t catching. At least I didn’t grow three more cocks or something.”

Bell, one of the riveters, said, “That’d give you a total of three, then,” and the other guys all laughed and then it was more or less back to normal until TT pulled his phone down from the little shelf at the top of his locker and saw that he had a hundred and nine missed calls and forty voice mails. Most of them from Ma.

TT lived in a room above his mother’s garage, and it would take him about an hour to get home, where she’d be fixing supper for him and for whichever of his sisters and brothers would be coming over tonight. On a Friday night, there would be more of them than usual. Hell, on a Friday night when one of the siblings had been on the local news all afternoon for being a fucking ace all of them might show up. Ma would have to put the extra leaf in the dining room table.

That piss-drunk son-of-a-bitch Father Dobrzycki would probably wander over from the Polonia Hall, too. Better stop for extra wine, then.

He was always one of the first guys to arrive on the site in the morning, which meant his truck was parked at the far end of the row. Parking was tight enough that there was a rule that you took the farthest space available when you arrived. TT had the same We Build Chicago bumper sticker that most of the other trucks and cars did on his F-250, and his wasn’t even the only F-250. So TT figured it was either just a coincidence or because his vehicle was the most secluded from the street that the old man had crawled into the plastic-lined bed of his truck.

TT thought he was just some homeless dude at first sight, but then the old man rolled over and those three gaping wounds were still bleeding on his face from where the tiger man had clawed him. The old man looked different, though. His arms and legs weren’t so heavily muscled. In fact, his coveralls hung off him like they were a couple of sizes too big. He’d actually fucking shrunk since his fight up on the crane.

Somebody yelled at him to have a good weekend and to try and stay out of the papers and TT threw up a hand, waving in response. The old man looked out at him from his hiding space, held up a finger in front of his lips asking TT to keep quiet.

This was a fucked-up situation.

TT walked over to the driver’s-side door of the pickup and stepped up on the footrail where he could lean in and open the toolbox behind the cab. He looked around, but nobody was close.

“What’s up, dziadek?” he asked.

The old man gave him a ghastly grin. TT could see some of his teeth through his torn open cheek.