Three years ago

“Oh, God, give me a group of shotgun-wielding terrorists any day,” Jon thought, trying to ignore the pain in his bruised ribs and his own mounting terror. Lonnie, or at least the creature bearing his name, was still moving forward in his black motorcycle helmet and leather bodysuit, holding a fire ax in his left hand. He had the bulk of a competitive weightlifter, but he still moved with the liquidity of a cat.

Instead of letting Lonnie make the first move, Jon mentally pushed the power of the Mantra gem to its limits until the entire world felt like he was in The Matrix (or, at least, a Matrix rip-off). He dodged Lonnie’s feral strikes with the agility and precision of an Olympic athlete until he found the opportunity to strike back with his machete, lopping off the hand holding the axe. Without even pausing for a microsecond, Lonnie reached out for Jon’s neck with his remaining hand. Jon fell back, but Lonnie still caught the part of his costume holding the gem. The fabric ripped and the gem fell to the dirt trail beneath them with an anti-climactic thud.

Before Jon could recover, he felt himself falling back even further than he intended and the ground giving way under his feet. He was falling down a long, steep hillside, toward a dry creek bed behind him. “Please, not like this,” he thought (just before he lost his consciousness, he also realized how sad it was that this was not the first time he had that exact thought).

He did not know how long it was until he felt someone pulling him by his armpits. He managed to get out a shout for help, convinced Lonnie had actually climbed down the crevice to finish him off.

“Stop it!” a voice that was familiar but not his own barked inside his mind. “He’s still out there. Plus I have no idea if the undead have good hearing.”

He opened his eyes, looking up into a beautiful autumn night sky that he would enjoy under very different circumstances. After a while of hearing his own body making its way through dirt and dead leaves, he heard the sound of someone forcing open a decaying wooden door with a kick. By now, he could actually get his bearings. He was in an ancient, cluttered maintenance shed, illuminated by just one naked light bulb swinging in the air and smelling vividly of dust and decay.

“You can talk to me, if you want,” the voice said helpfully.

“Hello? Is this the Exile?”

“Yes. Let me help you up. There’s a chair here.”

Jon’s ribs, which had already been injured before he fell, screamed in protest, but he let the Exile prop him up on a metal folding chair.

“What’s happening? Are people…” His brain conjured up a grim scene of his teammates mangled and dead.

Exile’s voice sounded alarmed and almost embarrassed. “No! No, I swear, I’ve been keeping tabs on everyone telepathically since everything went bad. You’re the worst off, but luckily you wound up near my hiding place.”

“What happened?”

The Exile audibly sighed, exhausted in every sense of the word. As he barricaded the door with a push mower and a tool bench, he said in his mind, “Bill the Undying believed he knew a spell that could keep Lonnie under our control after we resurrected him. It didn’t work out that way, obviously. So, he and the White Witch are working together on something they think can reverse the resurrection ritual, but in the meantime everyone whose powers are of any use against an undead serial killer are guarding them as they figure out the counter-ritual. Everybody else is just hiding out, like us.”

Jon felt a flash of anger targeted against the Exile and the other Vandals. Even though it wasn’t expressed in words, the Exile quickly responded.

“For what its worth, we were just going to weaponize Lonnie and sell him to the Pentagon or, failing that, the Chinese or Russians or something.” A pause. “I voted against it.”

“That’s something, I guess. You do know that Lonnie’s murdered, like, what, 35 people since he originally died in the 1970s?”

“Yeah. And all teenagers and twentysomethings, for some reason.”

Jon realized that he could actually feel the Exile in his mind. He’d been a target of telepathic attacks from the Exile on more than a few occasions before, so he thought he should have felt disturbed by the whole experience. However, despite everything, it was comforting somehow, like a certain kind of familiarity, even intimacy.

“What about your telepathy?” Jon thought. “Isn’t it any good against Lonnie?”

The Exile, who remained positioned next to the door as if he was standing guard, absent-mindedly swept away some cobwebs with his foot.

“I wish. The way Bill the Undying put it, it’s like Lonnie’s been stuck right in the middle between being alive and being dead. So, it’s like there’s just this radio static where his consciousness should be. I can’t really do much with that except let us know he’s here a couple of minutes before he’s about to break the door down and kill us.”

After a few minutes that felt like hours, Jon heard Exile’s voice. “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“I know what you think of me, especially everything that happened…after what I did to Tell. But I really don’t try to violate people’s privacy unless…unless I have to. Still, for me, it’s the same as how you see or hear stuff without meaning to. Well, once in a while, I can sense feelings and subconscious thoughts without actually looking for them, even if I’m just lightly touching a mind, sometimes if I’m not even inside a mind at all.”

“Okay.”

“Why are you so surprised that I helped you?”

Jon, who was already struggling to get in a position in the metal chair that didn’t accentuate his pain, felt even more uncomfortable. He knew the Exile was right, even though he didn’t even actually form the thought in his own mind. But the absurdity of having this conversation with someone he violently fought with on numerous occasions was not lost on him.

“I think that’s pretty obvious.”

There was another, much deeper pause. For a second, Jon thought the Exile had withdrawn from his mind. Then his voice came, carrying a clear sense of irritation. “For starters, the Vandals and I have had plenty of opportunities to seriously injure or even kill one of you Rooks, but we never took it.

That’s something you people never seem to realize about so-called ‘super-criminals’. Would you want to piss off a whole community of hundreds of vengeful people who can stop tanks by punching them or cause the ground to literally swallow you up just by concentrating a little?”

Jon was embarrassed that he never really thought about it that way. “I guess you’re right.”

“Honestly, at least where I’m from, practically everyone is on a level playing field, as far as powers go, anyway. Here, though…” The Exile paused awkwardly as if he was having to censor himself. Then he chuckled softly. “It doesn’t really matter, sorry.”

“No, you have a point,” Jon said, without meaning to at all. That was the problem with telepathic conversations, Jon realized. There’s no filter.

“Well, there kind of can be, if you get used to it,” the Exile said, truthfully but teasingly.

“I’ll remember that for next time,” Jon replied.

“One more thing,” the Exile whispered aloud. “For Ishtar’s sake, please stop thinking of me as the Exile. We’ve been mortal enemies long enough you should think of me as Amar.”

Jon caught himself laughing aloud, and within seconds, Amar joined in.

***

Amar felt his rage simmer as he stared at the car that was conspiring with a concrete barrier to trap him in the drive-thru. The driver, a middle-aged man dressed in defiantly unfashionable flannel, had stopped to take trash out of the backseat of his car and throw it into a curbside trash can. What was especially galling was that he didn’t even bother with a pretense of hurrying. There wasn’t even an apology wave!

Amar blared the horn. The man promptly slowed his pace even more and gave him the finger.

“Don’t do it”, Amar mumbled under his breath. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Please don’t do it.”

As the man triumphantly got back into the car, Amar, with a resigned sigh, reached out with his mind. Within just a couple of minutes, the man slammed his foot to the accelerator and rammed right into a light pole. Amar gave a friendly wave in his direction as he drove past the scene of a dazed, confused man staring at his damaged car as his wife got out of the passenger side to yell at him.

Amar tried to let the sickly enticing smell of the greasy food in the two bags sitting next to him put him in a Zen state. “Old habits”, he said aloud, as a way of apologizing to himself.