Chapter 9: Bedtime

By a/k/a Simon
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It was late, they were tired, and Eddie was having trouble finding his toothbrush. A calm had settled over the Kroeger house, as Greta made up the pull out couch in the living room, Eddie and Megan were preparing for bed upstairs, and who knew what Ryan was up to in the basement, just that it was quiet.

In the rush to leave Washington Eddie hadn’t packed as best he could and he found the contents of his bag completely disorganized. He could swear he packed the blue Oral-B toothbrush he used for traveling, though it was nowhere to be found amidst two changes of clothes and a few random items.

Megan was examining her Barbie dolls. This room had been hers since she was born and it held a wide range of historical minutiae, from old academic awards mounted on the walls, faded shirts that no longer fit, and scattered sheet music from a brief flirtation with the French horn, to a collection of Barbie memorabilia that had stood the test of time. For a while the dolls had been packed and sent to the attic. By the age of eleven she had decided she was far too mature to be surrounded by such childish things. But a wave of teenage nostalgia hit her and her friends when they were seniors in high school and the toys were removed from storage and put back on display in the corner of her room. Megan earned coolness points because she was the only member of her clique to have the coveted Barbie Dream House. It was the centerpiece of her collection, situated perfectly under the window so that the late morning sun would enter her room and cast realistic shadows on the three-sided rooms of the miniature dwelling.

On this night Clean Shave Ken was being allowed to stay over in the Dream House, though he would have to stay in the spare bedroom, as Megan did not have a bed large enough for two dolls. Barbie and Ken would sleep alone, but she play-acted, a kiss goodnight between the two before putting them down to rest. It was a fun little distraction for her from the pressures of the day, a brief chance to pretend she still had the innocence of a child.

“So, that was my family,” she said to Eddie, her tone a sharp contrast to the scene of domestic bliss she was pantomiming with her dolls. “If they’re not insulting you, they’re embarrassing you.”

“You mean that scam Shane pulled?” Eddie was still searching in his bag, at this point pulling each item out for individual examination. “What’s his deal anyway? He’s a building inspector?”

“A crooked building inspector,” Megan corrected. “Greta told me that he drives around town looking for unlicensed construction, things like car ports and sheds, anything bigger than a doghouse. If he sees someone trying to put something up he goes knocking on their door, identifies himself, informs them of the penalties for illegal construction, and then not-too-subtly hints that all their problems could go away with a simple exchange of cash. He keeps track of when projects start and usually waits until the owner has invested enough time and money in it that they would rather pay the bribe than risk having to tear the thing down.”

Eddie was mildly disgusted by the story. “How does someone like that end up with a job like that?” he asked.

“He’s a Townie,” Megan chuckled, as if the answer was obvious. “He’s part of an incestuous little group of people who have lived in this town their entire lives and only like others of their kind. A friend of his he used to play football with back in high school set him up after Shane came back from college with a messed up leg.”

“The cane…” Eddie prodded.

“Oh, you haven’t heard that story,” Megan snorted vindictively. “Alright, so Shane was Mr. Hotshot football star back in school. He had some title like All-State Something Something, I don’t remember. All I know is that there was this huge buzz around him, scouts coming to the games to see him and all that. Well he ends up with a really sweet scholarship deal to go out to California and play for USC, all expenses paid, special classes just for the jocks, the whole nine yards. He gets there, manages to join a fraternity, and while walking home drunk one night, falls into an open manhole, breaking his leg something fierce. I was told there was bone poking through the skin. Anyway, he ends up in a full-leg cast, which of course prevents him from playing any football. Then he goes and fails practically every one of his dumbed-down special classes and manages to flunk out of school.”

“And that’s when he came home and became a building inspector?” Eddie presumed.

“Yeah. The same guy he played ball with was also in shop class with Shane and ended up working for the town. He used his connections, and the local celebrity of Shane’s high school football career, to set him up with the job. It was kind of like charity for him being such a high profile Townie. And he’s managed to abuse the power all he can ever since.”

At that moment Eddie found his toothbrush. It had somehow gotten tucked inside a sock, which in turn had been shoved into the sleeve of a shirt.

Getting up, Eddie announced, “I’m going to go brush my teeth.” His knees ached from having been squatting over his bag so long. It was a pain he was not used to.

“Who told you Shane was a building inspector?” Megan asked just as Eddie reached the door to the hallway.

He stopped and turned to face her. “Ryan mentioned it,” he said, soliciting an instant look of dismay and disapproval from his wife.

“It looks like you two are becoming pretty good friends,” she said sarcastically, dressing a Barbie doll as she spoke.

“I’m Primax,” Eddie said in a quiet tone. From her expression he could tell that she didn’t understand. He walked across the room and took a seat on the bed, Megan beneath on the floor, a case of dolls clothing and a variety of tiny outfits scattered around her. “You remember how Primax was sent by Abyss to be like a sleeper agent, to make friends with Earth’s heroes just so she could turn on them if her master ever needed her to? That’s kind of what I’ve been doing. I just want to be right by his side in case anything happens between you two.” He waited for a response but none came.

“At first I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off,” he continued. “Partly because our first meeting he called me a spic, but more because the story you told me about him made me so angry that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to control my emotions. But he’s got this way about him that is almost disarming. Almost. It’s enough to make me not want to tear his head off every second, but it still keeps me alert for if he tries anything.”

There was a short pause as Eddie awaited her response. He had nothing more to say on the subject and could do nothing but sit there until she spoke. Megan’s response was not what he expected.
“So what, you think playing hero now is going to make up for all the times you weren’t around during our marriage?” She was angry. Eddie’s jaw dropped at how outright angry she was. Like a new mind had slipped into her body, suddenly Megan seemed to be an entirely different person, aggressive and harsh.

“That’s not what…” Eddie tried to defend himself but he stumbled. Megan didn’t give him a chance to recover.

“This one trip isn’t going to make up for the years of neglect, Eddie.” She was using his name at the ends of sentences again. “Maybe there wasn’t a huge crisis everyday like my mom dying or a sentient black hole trying to devour the Solar system, but I still needed you there. A marriage isn’t about a single moment, it’s about the day to day. It’s about the law of averages. You can’t wipe out how shitty you treated me by being my savior this one time.”
“Look…” Eddie attempted before Megan swiftly cut him off.

“No, you look,” she ordered. “What do you hope to achieve here? What do you think you’re going to do?”

Eddie looked at her there on the floor, enraged, in a submissive position yet still dominating the moment. He thought everything had been going well. He had been trying not to push anything, to simply be there for support. He didn’t know what provoked this outburst, but he didn’t like it. And every second that past he liked it less. It didn’t take very long before he simply wanted to get out of that room. “I’m going to brush my teeth,” he announced and walked off down the hall, leaving Megan there to manipulate her dolls to her heart’s delight.


It took every ounce of composure he could muster not to slam the door to the bathroom. Eddie had to remind himself at the last moment that Greta was probably asleep downstairs and he didn’t want to wake the only member of the Kroeger family who had been nothing but nice to him that day. With a restrained hand he gently clicked the door closed.

Eddie was fuming. He stared at himself in the mirror and could feel a fire burning within him almost like his former powers. For the first time since the loss he felt a heat boiling to the surface of his skin. So hot, in fact, that he ran cold water into his cupped hands and splashed his face to cool off.

He’d been attacked before, more often than not by surprise. Being ambushed or caught off guard was something he was used to. He’d reached a point where having to compensate for a sudden assault no longer fazed him. But this was different. There was an element to this attack that was never there in any of his battles with a multitude of devious criminals and underhanded villains. With Megan it was personal. She knew how to hurt him in ways that no evil mastermind ever could. Villains always went for his body. His wife went for his heart.

The water was little help. Any minute he expected it to turn to steam and evaporate off his blistering skin. His breathing was heavy and irregular, a byproduct of the sudden anxiety. With a few deep sighs he attempted to get it under control but was only semi-successful. The tops of his ears throbbed and he could hear his pulse as the boiling blood coursed through his veins.

Then he wondered, was he mad at her for waylaying him with her anger or at himself for causing it?

Without an answer he opened the medicine cabinet to find some toothpaste. Rifling through bottles of aspirin, tubes of hair gel, bobby pins, and everything else in the cabinet, Eddie didn’t hear the quiet knock on the door, nor did he hear the knob turn and the door being pushed open. What he did hear, though, was a voice of regret coming from behind him. Megan’s voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Hearing those words he closed the cabinet door, his wife appearing in the reflection before him. At first he ignored her, starting the water, wetting his brush and applying a short line of paste before beginning to brush. “Eddie, please,” she begged softly as he stared at her through the mirror, “I didn’t mean it. Or maybe I did and it just came out wrong, at the wrong time. You’re the only one here I can depend on. I shouldn’t have lashed out at you like that.”

Eddie’s mouth was filled with blue-white lather as he began to ask, “Why do you lov…?” He thought again about asking that question and spit the rest of it down the drain with the excess paste. “Why did you marry me?” he asked, a safer question he felt.

“Why did you marry me?” Megan echoed and swerved.

“I asked you first,” he said, his piercing stare not undermined at all by the small drizzle of fluoridated froth running down the side of his chin.

Megan considered it for an instant before responding. “I married you because you’re pure,” she explained. “As long as I can remember I’ve been surrounded by people who are out for themselves, doing whatever it takes to get ahead, while screwing the other guy in the process. Look at my family. These people get off on the pain of others. Look at Ryan. He can’t feel good about himself without making someone else feel bad. I traveled almost a thousand miles to get away from that. And then I meet you, someone who spends their days making things better for people. Or, at the very least, you’re not actively trying to make things worse. You don’t have any kind of agenda.”

“Everyone has an agenda,” Eddie informed her, looking up from having spit the last of his toothpaste into the sink. He grabbed a towel from the nearby rack and began to wipe his hands dry.

“Okay,” she deferred. “So what’s yours.”

“To be your hero,” he answered instantly. He returned the towel to the rack and leaned back against the sink, looking down at the floor the entire time he spoke. “As silly as that may sound, being your hero is different than being a hero to anyone else. I grew up in a lab where a bunch of scientists ran tests on me all day long. The only time any of them touched me was when they needed a blood sample. Look at the powers I had. I could be a half-mile away from a crime and stop it just by pointing a finger. There was never any contact because none was ever necessary. I lived my life distant from everyone, good guys and bad guys. They label you a hero and suddenly you’re on this pedestal, like you’re some kind of god or something. So okay, maybe some heroes are gods. But I’m not one of those heroes. When I met you, you didn’t treat me like any big deal. I know part of that is just your way, but it was nice to have someone want to know me as a person, not as the guy who saved the world five minutes ago. I’m not used to having that kind of personal connection. And the more I got to know you, the more I saw how much you’d been hurt, the more I wanted to be a hero, a different kind of hero, to you. Unfortunately, my day job got in the way of all that.”

The bathroom was silent save for the chirping of a cricket coming from somewhere outside. Eddie’s gaze was still to the floor, but Megan couldn’t take her eyes, her slightly tearing eyes, off of him. “Where do we go from here?” she asked.

Eddie looked around the room, his posture relaxing. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

“You’re already in the bathroom,” she informed him.

“I mean…” he glanced over at the toilet. “I have to use the bathroom.”

They both had a small laugh. Megan closed the door and went back to her bedroom as Eddie walked to the toilet and unzipped his pants. Standing there, he looked out the open window that was above the porcelain fixture and out across the backyard of the Kroeger house. In the middle of the yard was an elliptic-shaped pool. Even with the little light he could tell the water was littered with leaves from lack of maintenance. Soon someone would pull a tarp over it as the world grew cold and the water would freeze.

Urine poured out of him and into the toilet, making him think about the recently deceased Mrs. Helen Kroeger. He wondered, unfamiliar with the processes of death, if they had already drained her body and filled it with embalming fluid. Maybe that was what would happen tomorrow. Despite all the death that had occurred around him thanks to his peculiar career, it was rare that Eddie had to confront a corpse. It was his experience that when people died they either turned to ash or simply disappeared. The superhuman world had a much more efficient method of interment than the regular world. But he wondered if maybe that efficiency also bred a disturbing degree of emotional detachment from the reality of death.

At the edge of the backyard was a line of trees, the beginnings of what appeared to be a vast wood behind them. In the darkness of the late hour he could only see so far past that first row of maple, oak and a few tattered birch. Whatever was beyond was a mystery, a dark mystery like the one Helen Kroeger might be learning the answer to at this very moment. On some spectral plane she might be confronting the questions that plague every living human being every day of their lives. Eddie wondered if there was an afterlife. In his travels he’d seen countless things to suggest that there was more than just this existence we inhabit, but an afterlife was something he was still unsure of.

He wondered if there was an afterlife and he wondered if it was dark like the woods at midnight.


When he entered Megan’s bedroom the lights were out. Eddie figured his wife was already asleep and proceeded to arrange a blanket and pillow on the floor for himself. Greta had offered him the chance to sleep in either Shane’s or Mrs. Kroeger’s rooms, but somehow he didn’t think the eldest Kroeger sibling would be too pleased by that, and the thought of sleeping in the bed of someone who just died that day was a bit too much mortality for him to get any rest on.

Even though their bathroom conversation had gotten some things out in the open between them, Eddie was not yet feeling bold enough to suggest sharing the same bed with Megan.

And so it was a surprise when he heard her voice in the stillness of the room. “You don’t have to sleep down there,” she said.

“I didn’t want to…”

“Come to bed,” she told him, in a tone that did not suggest sex. Eddie picked himself off the floor and slid into the bed, full-size yet snug for two grown people. He lay on his back and Megan draped her arm across his chest. Within minutes he could tell she was asleep. For the second time that night, Eddie Sanchez felt warm.


Burning. Their faces were burning, flesh melting and falling off their wailing skulls, eyes shriveling to tiny black stones. Dying hands reached out for him as finger bones appeared from underneath dissolving skin. He could hear their screams and could sense their advance, but the closer they got the faster they went away. Fire surrounded him like a blazing ocean. His mother’s charred skeleton fell on him, her stiffened grip tight on his wrists. He tried and tried to break free. Eventually the dead hands relented; he was free to run. But everywhere he ran the fire followed, almost like he was creating it himself.

Eddie woke up sweating. It was a dream, he quickly realized, happy to see it over. Looking to his left he saw that Megan was still asleep. To the right the clock told him that he had only been asleep less than an hour. He slipped out from under the covers and walked to the door as quietly as he could. In the bathroom he looked at himself and could see how white his skin had become. Even though he was sweating his skin was cold and he could feel the now-familiar shiver return.

He noticed that his throat was dry and decided to head downstairs for a drink. Softly he took each step, careful not to wake Greta, who he was sure would be asleep by then. At the bottom of the stairs he walked past the door to Ryan’s basement room. The stench of marijuana wafted up through the bottom of the door and into the immediate vicinity. On impact it aggravated Eddie’s brain and gave him an instant headache.

Standing there, feeling the mild pain from his skull, he could hear sniffling coming from the living room. He turned the corner and saw Greta sitting on the couch, hunched over a box of tissues, crying softly in the empty darkness.

A floorboard creaked as Eddie took another step, catching Greta’s attention. “Oh, Eddie,” she said, attempting to stifle her tears, “I didn’t think you were still up. Everything okay?”

“I just got up to get a drink,” he said, deciding not to further trouble her with his nightmare.

“I can help you with that,” she offered, getting off the couch and approaching Eddie. They walked into the kitchen and Greta flicked on a light above the stove, partially illuminating the room. She opened the refrigerator and listed off the liquid contents to him. He decided on a glass of milk and she poured him a glass.

“I’m sorry about the crying,” she apologized. “I’m so embarrassed.”
“Don’t be,” he comforted. “It’s been a hard day for everyone. If there’s anything I can do to help just let me know.”

“Thank you. But I don’t know if anyone can help at this point.” Eddie crooked his head slightly, unsure of her meaning. “Now that Helen’s gone I’m just so worried about what’s going to happen to this family. It doesn’t look like Murphy is ever going to get better and the children just seem to have so many problems without their parents around.”

Eddie knew he had to be careful with his response. He was an outsider and it wasn’t his place to judge. “I’m sure things will work out,” he said, putting a hand on her arm.

Greta smiled and touched his hand. “Thank you. I know you’re right. They have to work out. I have to believe that families can’t stay mad at each other forever.”

Somehow he sensed that there was more to the situation than what she was saying.

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