“I can’t do anything about it.”

The Editor-In-Chief was a big man; his presence loomed over his desk with an ease earned by decades of experience. The tight shirt with rolled up sleeves, loose knot tie sprinkled with patterns, and his signature Members Only jacket hanging from the back of his chair put him in direct contrast with the young reporter squirming in front of him: skinny, bearded, sporting glasses and a number of piercings. He wore thrift store clothes with a sense of irony, especially the T-shirt with the faded graphic of the Mayan deity, Buluc Chabtan bearing the inscription “My God beats up monsters.” The only thing they had in common was their full heads of hair; the reporter sported a 50s hairdo with enough product to open his own salon, and the older man’s graying anchorman style hadn’t changed in forty years.

“You want to do investigative journalism, you go work for Vice or something,” said the older man.

“This is a solid piece, Neal. Four billion purchase? Imagico wants to get into the VR game—badly!”

“So? Imagico buys a smaller competitor? That’s what they do. You want to stop the presses for that? Please! You cover local issues, so go local. What happened to that article on—” Neal snapped his fingers. “That Latino teacher helping pay one of her student’s college tuition? That’s a good story. Go write that.”

“Really? A fucking philanthropy piece?”

“Cursing is the recourse of the inarticulate, Christian. You’re a journalist; have some self-respect. You know how much a high school teacher makes in this country?”

Chris looked at the ceiling for a moment trying to collect himself; he hated that Neal used his full name. The frustration of his boss’s impasse was compounded by his tedious predilection for censorship.

“Don’t get me wrong. I think that’s great and all, but I didn’t become a journalist to do human interest fluff.”

Neal smiled that perfect smile of his and said, “No, you became one hoping to pay the rent doing something you love. So get cracking.”

“Come on! You’re the guy who loves to tell the story about being a reporter during Water Gate. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah, I’m also they guy who has to keep working in his seventies. It’s a different world, Chris. I hav—”

Everything exploded in front of Chris. Neal disappeared in a trail of falling debris. Chris stood frozen, blinking slowly, facing a jumble of broken pipes and exposed cables. A wave of hysterical screams sweep throughout the office and from the horrified people in the floor above, looking through their shattered floor. Chris turned his head to the side and saw a man rise from the rubble. He was an imposing figure with dark skin, draped with ancient Mayan ornaments made out of ivory and human bones. Spikes pierced his fierce mien along with his signature black tattoos. He was Buluc Chabtan, the God of War, known to the world as Warrior.

Chris couldn’t process what he was witnessing, when suddenly the light was extinguished. Darkness slithered outside the smashed window like ink poured on water, from which emerged a legion of ephemeral tormented faces. A pair of pale, glowing orbs glared from within, amid a cacophony of indistinguishable whispers. A voice formed from the sinister noise and said, “It is time for all mortals to embrace their death.”

Chris recoiled in fear, and was immediately startled by the gust of wind left in Warrior’s wake as the God of War plunged into the darkness, tearing through Angra Mainyu, the Abyss, with his magical Macuahuitl. The obsidian blades of the wooden club tore strands of shadow.

“Everybody calm down! Calm down! We need to make it to the stairs in an organized fashion!” somebody said inside the office amidst the chaos, but it was useless. People ran to the emergency exits in a frantic effort to reach the street as fast as possible.

Chris ambled towards Neal, who was lying at the foot of a damaged column. He couldn’t see any injuries other than the unnatural way his body was contorted but the editor wasn’t moving. Chris’s pulse was beating hard in his ears, muffling the sobbing and cries around him.

“…Chris we’ve got to go! Chris?” somebody was saying.

He hesitated asking himself what was the right thing to do.

“Chris, let’s go!”

Chris drifted towards the female voice, leaving Neal’s corpse behind. Forget it, he’s dead. He told himself. Marsha, a woman from accounting, guided him towards the exit while helping a couple of other colleagues. They reached the stairs, where Marsha kept them from dashing off in the grip of panic. Throngs of frightened office workers hurried down the steps. Some helped their peers, others made their way on their own, and a few pushed their way ahead of the crowd.

“It’s OK guys. Everything it’s going to be OK,” Marsha said. “Keep heading down nice and slowly. I’m going to—”

A slab of concrete pierced through the wall hitting Marsha, Chris, and one of the men with them. A second chunk of concrete came through the wall, demolishing the staircase below them. Time had stopped for Chris; he and coworker Fadi looked at each other and the carnage the surrounding them. Their other coworkers were sprawled over the steps, bleeding. Chris tried to reach for Marsha, but he couldn’t get up. When he looked at his hands, they were covered in blood and his pants were ripped, revealing a long gash down his thigh. He began to shake. Despite his small frame, Fadi helped Chris limp inside another office, as far away from danger as he could.

“How are we gonna get out?” Chris said.

Fadi eased him on top of a desk. “It’s all right buddy. It’s all right. You just rest here; we’ll find a way out. Don’t worry.”

“What’s going on?” the people in the architecture firm came over to get some answers.

Fadi couldn’t believe they were people still there. “It’s a Supra Strike! You didn’t see it?” he said using the street lingo for a superhuman event.

The word passed down throughout the floor in a series of murmurs. Somebody asked which Supras were involved. The answer came in the form of a crash, more screams of terror, and people running away. Fadi ducked behind a cubicle trying to see what was going on. He hastily cleaned his glasses in time to see a mass of darkness snaking in his direction.

“Fadi?” Chris said anxiously.

Everything turned eerily quiet for a second. Anyone touched by the misty tendrils erupted with uncontrollable rage and rushed to attack the Warrior. Those who were too far away from the Supra resorted to assaulting each other. Chris fumbled his way to an office chair and used it to move back to the stairway. Fadi turned around and glowered at him.

“Fadi?” Chris tried to move faster.

The man he knew as Fadi—who always kept his distance at the office and acted condescendingly whenever he had to interact with him—was gone. What was left was more akin to a wild animal ready to pounce on his prey.

Chris lost his footing and bumped against a cubicle wall to avoid falling.

Fadi tackled him right over the partition and onto a drafting table. Chris struggled to push him off, but Fadi’s hands closed around his throat with unnatural strength. All that Chris could focus on was his coworkers’ deranged stare. He palmed the area around him, searching for something with which to defend himself. His hand touched something metallic— a compass—and stretched his fingers to get a hold of it, but he was blacking out. Chris managed to clutch the compass and mustered the remnants of strength.

“…Fadi…I’m…sor…”

Chris woke up squirming and screaming, and he immediately sat up. The memory of Fadi’s eyes was still uncomfortably vivid. His head was closely shaved and the piercings where gone from his face. He coiled back against the wall, hugging his knees. It took him a few moments to recognize he was in his studio apartment. The light of the bathroom was the only source of illumination. He reached for a notepad on his nightstand and ran his thumb across the corners of the pages.

“I’m calm, in the present, and I feel safe. I’m calm, in the present, and I feel safe. I’m calm, in the present…” Chris slowly regulated his breath as he repeated his mantra. The feel and sound of the flipping pages had a calming effect on him. The panic attack ebbed eventually.

Chris produced a tin can from his neatly arranged drawer with six pre-rolled joints inside; four of them were missing. He lit one with a zippo in the shape of a pack of mint gum, and rubbed his face as he gathered his thoughts. It struck him that everything in his apartment was organized, except his thoughts. Once again he felt the absence of Terry. Chris had reorganized the gaps left by the move as soon as Terry left to ease the blow. Sadly, he couldn’t do the same to the gaps in his soul. He took a toke and checked his smart watch. He had two hours before the meeting. He got up, tattoos and underwear, and got ready. He turned the TV on to keep him company.

“…Nothing but a pernicious, systemic racism that reinforces negative Native-American stereotypes,” the African-American woman said. The card below read, “Louise McFarlane. Author/Activist.” “Tomahawk is not Native-American. He’s just another example of white savior syndrome and culture appropriation.”

“I think you’re missing the real issue here,” said a sixty something, white man identified as Marc Portacio, Attorney at Law. “We’re talking about a man who roams the city at night attacking its citizens.”

“Criminals you mean,” said News Anchor Rahil Jarwar. 

“People have rights, even criminals.”

“The people that Tomahawk targets are caught red-handed at the crime scenes.”

“Who deputized him to take the law into his own hands? Police officers are trained to handle these kinds of situations within the rule of law.”

“So what? They’re criminals, they should have weighed the consequences of their actions before they made the decision to break the law,” said Rob Valentino, a middle-aged Caucasian man who was the head of Iron Shield, a neighborhood watch group. 

Portacio said, “There’s a thing called ‘use of force continuum,’ which provides law enforcement officers with guidelines in the escalation of force. Tomahawk has sent people to the ICU for stealing printers.”

“Escalation of force,” Valentino shrugged. 

“The only reason we’re having these conversation now, is because Tomahawk beat off a bunch of rich, white criminals in the financial district,” McFarlane said. “Nobody was saying anything when he was operating in black and Latino neighborhoods. So now we have to do something about him? Where were they ten years ago, when he came into the scene?”

“And crime went down!”

“Because the police were happy to sit on the sidelines and let him do their work for them!”

“Crime. Went. Down.”

“And white collar crime will go down too if we let him keep hunting down folks like the ones in Hartstone and Blackwell.”

“We can’t let a vigilante play judge, jury, and executioner,” Portacio said. “Look at what happened at City Hall less than a month ago. Nobody is talking about that.”

“Because the shooter was a white man,” McFarlane said.

“What are you talking about? If Tomahawk didn’t intervene it would have been a bigger massacre!” Valentino said. 

“He did hurt innocent people,” the anchor weighed in. 

“A small price to pay for a greater good,” Valentino said. “Nothing is perfect.”

“Would you feel the same way if those people were your family?” McFarlane said. 

Chris turned off the TV.

He dressed in high water skinny jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and hoodie under a blazer with the sleeves a few inches too short. He swung a backpack over his shoulders and took to the stairs as he fixed his earbuds, and placed shades over his regular glasses. That plus the hood over his head served as an armor that isolated him from the outside world as he navigated through the streets with his hand in his pockets. The streets were already bustling with people. Chris made his way to the crowded elevated train towards the center of the city. He left the station at his stop and noticed people looking up, and point at the sky. Chris froze. Whoever it was, he was long gone. He moved away from the multitude, finding refuge under a bus stop. Chris took out a small notebook from inside his jacket and thumbed its pages, while murmuring his mantra. The woman sitting by him moved away to the end of the bench. Once he calmed down, Chris continued to walk trying to shake off the sense of paranoia, until he finally arrived at an old community center.

The Collateral Support Group gathered once a week in a small classroom under the guidance of Karen Lieber, a psychologist who specialized in treating trauma. Karen was thin, pretty, and wore wireframe glasses. She swept her golden locks tied in a ponytail, always dressed in a turtleneck sweater with a long scarf. The circle was comprised of sixteen people of all ages and walks of life. They all had one thing in common: a Supra Strike traumatized them at one point in their lives.

Chris went straight to the snack table. Karen believed in the benefits of a healthy diet as part of psychological recovery, so instead of donuts, they had energy balls, dried fruit, oats, honey, and ground flaxseed. Some in the group snuck into the AA meeting next door to satiate their sweet tooth. Chris was advised to avoid caffeine due to his anxiety, so he begrudgingly settled for a cup of decaf and found his place in the circle of chairs.

The meeting went like any other of the sort, new people were introduced, and Karen asked who had something they wanted to share. As usual, they were those who hesitated, while others were ready to unload. Chris was in the latter group. He wasn’t paying much attention to what was being said by others. His mind wandered between sharing the new nightmare about his tragic experience, and chastising himself for drinking the watered down decaf to satiate a habit that soothed his social anxiety. At this point I’m better off just pouring sugar in a cup of creamer, he thought. By the time his attention returned to the meeting, Garth was talking about the steps he had taken in dealing with his trauma.

Garth was talking about how he was volunteering with a local group to clean up the Kurtzberg River. He used to work at a paper mill by the shore, which was attacked by the nature entity known as Eco. The National Guard eventually made Eco retreat, but Garth was never the same. The company moved the mill overseas and Garth found himself without a job and living on disability. Hitting the bottle hard became his favorite pastime, which only fueled his anger and resentment. Garth eventually found a job servicing air-conditioning units, and became an environmentalist.

Chris volunteered to go next. He said he was still not ready to go back to work, he talked about Terry moving out, and he finally told the group about his dream. Karen explained how important it was not to rush things, but that it was equally vital to normalize life. The group thanked Chris for sharing.

“Does anybody else have anything they want to contribute,” said Karen, looking around. “Anyone?”

The silence was long enough for her to assume that the session was over. Someone raised his hand.

“Well, seems like one of the new faces. Welcome,” Karen said. “Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself and share your story with the group.”

The man was five foot eight, attractive, in fairly good shape, and dressed in expensive work out gear. He had the usual apprehension all newcomers have the first time they spoke, even though he wasn’t a fresh face among them. The guy was one of those who sat in the circle listening. A lot of people did that until they felt comfortable enough to speak. The one significant difference about him was that everybody knew who he was and why he was attending the meetings.

“My name is Gil Texeira.”

The group uttered the obligatory greeting.

“I have been coming here for a while—siting among you, listening to your stories.” He paused for a second. “I have to say—like many of you have said—I didn’t know if I wanted to be here at first. But I’m grateful that, listening to your stories—I think I can finally talk about what happened to me—” He struggled with his emotions for a few seconds.

“It’s all right, brother,” someone said.

“We’re all here for you,” a woman said.

Gil nodded. He felt dumb for stating the obvious. Gil took a deep breath and continued, “The reason I’m here is because—Well… I was at the City Hall mass shooting a few weeks ago. And I don’t care what the media says.” It was obvious to all his thoughts weighed heavily on him.  “Things didn’t go down exactly the way they say they did—I was there.” Gil was getting visibly upset. “Let me tell you what happened.”