Tough Love

She looked up the tall, burly man—a veritable giant compared to her tiny frame—with eyes wide, round and damp with terror. She didn’t know him. She didn’t know where she was. She wanted her Mommy and Daddy. She just wanted to give them the Valentine’s Day card she had made for them in her first-grade class today.

“I love you so very much,” the man told her in a voice that seemed too chirpy and high-pitched for someone so gruff looking and titanic of stature. Still, despite the voice’s lack of baritone character or rumbling bass notes, it was threatening. And it sounded especially wrong to her. Odd. Dangerous. Wicked.

Like the Wicked Witch of the West, maybe, but a man’s version.

“I wanna go home,” she whined.

He struck her across the shoulder, knocking her down. “No one loves you there. I love you,” he almost screeched. “I don’t want to mark your face. But I’m going to have to hurt you to make you understand, won’t I? To make you understand how much I love you. To make you love me back.”

* * *

Another man in another place shook his head, wrapped all around with thick brown cotton strips except for his eyes, nostrils and mouth. He tried to shake out the clinging toxic nature of the words he had just heard and the images he had seen but they wouldn’t come loose from his mind.

Was that happening now? Or did it happen already? Or is it still yet to happen?

He knew he had to find her, regardless. The big man might have done so much more to her already, or might not. But whatever level of harm had been done, Doctor Holiday would need to be there to clean up the mess. To punish.

But most of all, Doctor Holiday hoped he could be there to save. Last Valentine’s Day, he’d been anything but a hero. He’d done things to a woman not much less worse than what this little girl in his thoughts faced right now—or had faced already—or had yet to suffer. He’d been a ravager. Tonight, in the space between twilight and darkness, his faces of love and justice were mostly aligned. The darker faces were obscured. This year he could be a saint on Valentine’s Day. Or at least far from a sinner.

He felt he was getting closer to the girl; the visions were becoming clearer and clearer. Proximity to her would be the most logical explanation for that.

Doctor Holiday saw a street thug, who turned as his peripheral vision caught the play of light from the digital display on Doctor Holiday’s chest, festively declaring that Valentine’s Day was here with a flourish of exploding hearts and kissing lips and spinning chocolate boxes and blooming roses.

By the time the street-tough could even make sense of who it was he was dealing with, Doctor Holiday had him by his collar and lifted him off the ground.

The thug started talking immediately. He need no prodding to answer Doctor Holiday’s questions. He spilled responses out; he even gave answers the transhuman didn’t need and didn’t want. But he didn’t know anything about the girl.

Doctor Holiday had been through 23 guys like this already in quick succession, with none of them being any help but all of them unwilling to be silent when he questioned them—unwilling to challenge him. His reputation preceded him.

A pity I can’t always be a hero, because no one dares to anger Doctor Holiday unless they’re as insane as I am.

As it happened, though, the two-dozenth time was the charm.

* * *

Just a little while earlier, she had been holding the construction-paper heart of fuschia with red lace around the edges and little plastic gems glued to it and the “I Love Mom and Dad” scrawled in her own hand with purple marker and her own name signed in white crayon.

She had been walking to the bus when the ground fell away from her and she was whisked away in sweaty arms with a crone-like voice stridently telling her he would make everything all right.

The card she had made fell the ground when he took her.

She could just barely see it fluttering away on the wind as he carried her away against her will.

Fluttering away like all her hopes.

* * *

The vision hit Doctor Holiday hard. He was close. He must be. But this vision was out of sequence. Did that mean he was looking for the girl and her abductor too soon? Had she not been snatched yet? Or was he grabbing random thoughts from her mind?

It was all so confusing to him, all the more so because he had to get used to a whole new palette every time a holiday awakened his mind—or a threat to him did. Did he have clairvoyance? Telepathy? Both? Right now, he’d rather have super-senses to track her scent and Speedster powers to move him along more rapidly toward her, but they seemed not to be in his list of options.

So many people thought of Doctor Holiday almost as if he were a god. He appeared, and seemingly had whatever power he needed. He’d never been captured, hindered or substantially harmed. No one could track him. No one could stop him.

Hell, it makes me feel like a god sometimes, and even more so the darker faces inside me, who relish that sensation. But I’m not a god. On the other hand, I am more than just a man. Or even more than just a transhuman.

“Please…” came a ragged voice.

Doctor Holiday realized he had drifted in mid-interrogation of this 24th street-tough he held in his iron grip. Even when he didn’t have Brute powers, he was stronger than most people; whether or not the man knew who held him he couldn’t tell—he’d temporarily stashed his chest display somewhere safe to travel lighter.

“You said they went west down Butterwood,” Doctor Holiday said. “How far?”

“I don’t know. I was doin’ business but I think they got as far as the Citibank. Maybe the wetback store.”

“You mean the bodega? I don’t need racism confusing my information,” Doctor Holiday said with a warning note.

“Yeah, the bodega. The Mexican market. The Hispanic store. Please don’t fuckin’ kill me!”

Doctor Holiday tossed him aside, and went to find someone closer to the information he needed.

* * *

The girl’s clothes were in a ragged heap. She hurt. She was beyond crying or screaming. He’d touched…he’d…Momma! Her heart was slipping into a dark pit and her mind into a sea of agony and fear. She was lost. She wanted her…she wanted…she finally found her voice, but could only sob raggedly. Screams were beyond the power of her throat to form, though they echoed loudly inside her skull.

* * *

Doctor Holiday shook off the vision, feeling a panicky surge in his chest—at the thought of his chest, he realized the display was there again but could not recall having retrieved or why he would have wasted the time to do so. He cursed himself silently.

Too late too late too late too late.

He snatched up a woman by the bodega whom he knew possessed a substantial amount of crack cocaine and crystal meth, though he wasn’t sure how he knew she was holding.

“Did you see a man carrying a girl? Where did they go? Tell me or I will shove your crack rocks into your sinuses and break all your limbs.”

He felt unease making the threats—it reminded him too much of last Valentine’s Day and another woman. But there was no time to waste, and this woman was no innocent by any measure. He was certain of that.

“They went into the closed-up jewelry store over there Mister Holiday! I swear! I don’t now ‘im and I don’t have anything to do with ‘im.”

“But you watched him drag a girl into that place,” Doctor Holiday said as he dropped her roughly, adding loudly as he walked away: “If you have children, give them up. If you don’t, never have them. You’ll destroy them.”

Now that he had a location, Doctor Holiday could feel the truth of it. He could hear the terror in the girl’s mind and follow it as surely as any piercing scream through crisp winter air. He moved quickly and he tore the boards away from the door and front window, even without Brute-level strength. His fingers bled a bit but it felt like the wood was being ripped away almost before he even yanked at it. He was frantic and rough—there was no time to figure out exactly how the man had entered or where. Demolition was needed her, and demolition he performed with rapid efficiency.

He barged into the tiny, abandoned storefront and saw the scene by the light of an electric lantern. The girl, just as he had seen in his mind—just as frightened as she had been then, but made all the more heartbreaking by the proximity to her reality as well as his connection to her mind and his knowledge of what the man who held her was willing to do to her.

She was holding her shoulder, but her clothes were intact.

He struck her down, but he hadn’t gotten to the rest. Not yet. I saw the past, the present, and the future. She can be saved, not simply salvaged.

Doctor Holiday snatched up the startled man without hesitation and regarded him in the dim glow of the lantern, with the pinks and reds and purples of the display on his chest reflecting off the man’s skin and giving him a sickly pallor.

Sick, yes…but knowing how wrong what he does is to the world; how wrong it is to his victims. Sick, but not a victim himself. He knows. He’s culpable.

Rage surged inside Doctor Holiday and he almost crushed the man’s windpipe. Almost tossed him against the wall. Almost got ready to beat him to a bloody pulp and beyond that. Voices were crying for punishment and pain inside him. Retribution and repayment. Justice and…

Justice.

Doctor Holiday was a hero tonight. He intended to remain so until Valentine’s Day was over, and perhaps a bit beyond it if he could, even if he took no heroic actions but simply held them dear for a while yet into his travels.

“You claim you love her,” Doctor Holiday snarled. “You claim you have her heart in mind. I have your heart in mind, too, you sick freak.”

The same telekinesis that had helped him wrest away the wood now took hold of the pumping organ in the abductor’s chest. Behind the breastbone the heart struggled and sputtered against a crushing force—an invisible fist.

“This is what a heart attack feels like,” Doctor Holiday said, with an almost clinical tone now. Professional. Calm. He released the pressure. “You’ll probably know what it feels like many more times in the future, if you live long enough in prison.”

Doctor Holiday reached for another power—Necro abilities that had been awaiting this moment—and he undermined the physiology of the muscle tissues of the heart and degraded the arteries and veins that connected to it. He ravaged the man’s cardiovascular system, secure in the knowledge the abuser had a nigh-incurable heart condition now. But in prison, no one was going to work that hard to fix it with major coronary bypass surgeries, and no transplant would ever be in his future.

This large and powerful man, who would have been Doctor Holiday’s physical equal if not for the transhuman powers arrayed against him, would be weak and sickly in prison.

“Even hardened cons hate men like you—most of them do,” Doctor Holiday noted. “And you won’t be able to fight them off. Your life will be short and brutal, I think. Justice served. And served in the way it should be intended. I apprehend. Others will judge. Others will serve you the punishment you deserve.”

When Doctor Holiday picked up the girl in one arm and lifted her to his hip, she surged up and hugged his neck hard, crying softly into his neck. The tears broke his heart but her tight squeezing of his neck was nothing but gratitude and love. He wondered how long since he’d felt something that pure, or if he ever had. Wondered if he had a child of his own somewhere who had hugged his neck once and missed doing so.

Doctor Holiday lifted the big man easily with his other arm, with the telekinetic powers to aid him. Then he broke the embrace of the girl just long enough to give her a brief warm kiss on her forehead, and walked toward her home, miles away—never doubting for a moment that his mind knew the path and would guide his feet true.

* * *

Three police cruisers were at the girl’s home, so the play of pink, red and purple lights from Doctor Holiday’s chest-mounted digital marquee were joined by flashes of darker red, as well as blue and white.

The police and parents were both aghast at Doctor Holiday’s approach, until the girl turned her head and smiled at them. Everyone still eyed him warily, but more gazes were now locked on the limp man in his custody, whom he simply dropped to the grass.

Doctor Holiday set the girl down gently on the lawn and said, “Be safe.”

As she turned to go to her parents, he suddenly said, “Wait!”

She turned, startled. Her eyes looked worried for a moment, as he reached inside his coat.

His hand returned with the Valentine’s Day card she had created. “I found this,” he said, and pressed the slightly battered but largely unmarred piece of handcrafted art into her hands. She smiled and ran to her parents, giving them the gift of the card and more than that, Doctor Holiday thought: The gift of her safe return.

Doctor Holiday endured a few minutes of nervous questioning by the police, and then 10 minutes later, tired of it and simply walked away without a word. He wasn’t needed here. The police didn’t try to stop him.

He glanced back once, to see the girl looking through the window, away from the police officer speaking with her inside and toward him instead.

She smiled, and he smiled back.

It was a happy day this year.

He prayed it would be a happy Valentine’s Day next year as well.

He walked for a long time, hours until midnight struck, and then his digital display began to count down to Easter Day—and he was Doctor Holiday no longer but simply a wanderer without a history and a vagrant without a name.

No memory of having saved a girl.

No recollection of giving her back what she had lost.

No memory of the warm arms embracing his neck.