We have a cool story today. Think of one of the all-powerful superheroes. What would happen if they just gave up—gave up on humanity, on decency, on life? What do you think would happen, and how might someone pull them back from the brink?

That’s what this story today explores, and we think it’s one you simply need to read! Out hero has suffered some pretty detrimental losses, and he wants it all to just end. We don’t want to give too much away, so we’ll just say…

Enjoy!

(PS - Premium Subscribers can scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to download a short audiobook of this story!)

No one recognized me. Why should they?

The half-inch of stubbly hair growing from my cheeks and chin worked almost as well as a mask. Standing next to a poster, praising my exploits, I never would have imagined I could go out without someone pointing and shouting, “It’s him! It’s him!” But even on this crowded subway platform, with people staring directly into my vacant eyes, they couldn’t see the man they once looked up to.

“The man they still look up to,” I corrected. Even after all I’d done—or hadn’t done—they all, each and every one of them, saw me as something I wasn’t.

I looked so much younger on that poster. It must have been an old photo, taken by some fool reporter putting himself at risk to get the inside scoop. Or it could have been the events in the last six months had really taken their toll on me. Either way it didn’t matter, the man on the poster wasn’t the same man that was standing in front of it anymore. It was who I used to be, not who I was now.

The headline on the front page of the paper crunched between my fingers read, “Where Has Powerman Gone?” For months they’d wondered. For months they’d tried to coax me out of hiding. I resisted the urge to throw the crumpled paper through the wall.

I didn’t want to be bothered. I didn’t care anymore. Why couldn’t they see that?

I’d thought about this moment since that fateful day. No matter what I did, it was never enough. Save two people from getting hit by a train, only to have a bank robber shoot two others on the other side of the city. Prevent a river from overflowing its banks, but miss the mudslide that destroys a few dozen homes. It never ended.

They never blamed me for not being there. Never questioned how I could save one person and leave another to die. Even after a major tragedy, when half the city was set ablaze, they still cheered when I walked the streets.

No, the accusations didn’t start until I stopped showing up altogether.

I jumped off the platform in front of no less than a hundred onlookers. A few murmured, but no one tried to stop me. Why should they? All they saw was some haggard looking man in a trenchcoat walking into the dark subway tunnel, not their once great hero. For all they knew, I lived down there.

I didn’t of course, and I didn’t really have a good reason to venture down into the tunnels. That wasn’t always true. Once I’d come to uncover a devious plot by Rex Reed to create mutant sewer gators. Another time had been to discover the origin of the mysterious disappearances of teenage girls seemingly ripped from their seats in the subway cars and vanishing into the darkness. Much like I was.

I’d go into the dark, and I wouldn’t come back, not ever again. I had nothing left up there. That’s what the people who looked up to me didn’t understand. When you take everything away from someone, they are but a shell of who they used to be. And an empty shell is brittle. It is easily broken.

They’d never know what happened to their hero. All they would find was the dismembered body of a crazy man in a trenchcoat. I’d purposely left my uniform at home. These people still had hope that one day I would return and be their savior once again. I couldn’t rob them of that hope, not even now, at the end.

Hope. I’d once had it when I was young and fresh, when I’d first joined an elite league of other super-powered men and women. I was going to change the world. I was going to usher in an era of peace and prosperity this planet had never even imagined.

The planet was still imagining.

Every time it seemed that peace was in my grasp, every time it looked as if it were going to be the last battle to save life on this planet, another threat would rise. And each threat was worse than the last. The villains were more powerful and the monsters nastier. And who did they look for to stop them all? Me.

I couldn’t handle that kind of pressure anymore. Not since…

No. I wasn’t allowed to dwell on that memory. Superheroes couldn’t have tragedy in their lives. It was against some unwritten law. If something did come to break our spirit, we were supposed to dust ourselves off and finish the job, then move on and pretend like it never happened.

But how? I’d like to see an investment banker, or a train operator deal with what I’ve been through. Let them feel my pain for even one hour. They would crack under the stress. None of them, not a single one could possibly understand what I’d personally lost.

No more. Even a hero has to fall sometime. Even a hero can fail.

And fail I did.

No one blamed me. No one even saw it as my failure. They kept me high on that pedestal—a position I didn’t deserve. I’d been too late to save them, and in almost the blink of an eye they were wiped out—gone. Five million people vanished in a cloud of fire and smoke. And all I could do was watch it happen.

I should have been there to stop it. I should have been quicker. It wasn’t right I was allowed to live while all their lives were snuffed out.

With all my power, I couldn’t save them.

I couldn’t save her.

That was the day the futility of my profession hit me. If I couldn’t even save the woman I loved and who loved me, then who could I save? Life wasn’t worth living without her, so why should I bother?

I stopped at a dark curve in the tunnel where not even the rats could see. The train wouldn’t see me either, until it was too late. Laying down on the tracks, I let my head rest on the cold metal as if it were a hard pillow. Then, I closed my eyes and waited to be thrown into the final oblivion.

Her dark hair was the first thing I saw, waving as if in a breeze. Then her eyes faded in, the gray circles gazing at me. Her dainty nose and her full red lips followed. She smiled at me. The upward curve of her lips was just like I remembered. She would look at me like that whenever I’d come home after a long day. I would always smile back to let her know everything was okay, even if it wasn’t. The last time I saw her, she’d worn such an expression.

She extended her arm out to me, her long fingers reaching toward me as if she were silently calling for me to join her.

“Soon,” I said to the image. “Soon.”

“Who’s there?” a startled voice yelled.

My eyes snapped open and I sat bolt upright. Was there someone in the tunnel with me?

“Get out of here!” The voice continued. “I’m not going back!”

I closed my eyes again, her image already fading back into the darkness. Opening my eyes and groaning in frustration, I stood. At that moment, the C-train came rumbling through the tunnel, scraping along the very track my head had been resting on only a few seconds before.

I sighed as I watched the people through the passing windows of the lighted car. All of them were totally oblivious to what I had attempted. Few even saw me in the flashes of light the train produced as it flew by.

Another failure. I couldn’t even kill myself properly.

Anger boiled up in me. My fists clenched and I smacked one of the tunnel’s support beams. It bent, but didn’t break. “Where are you?” I shouted after the last train car had passed.

“I told you to go away!” came the voice from the opposite side of the tunnel.

I charged in the direction of the voice. “I’m going to kill you!”

Without missing a beat, the voice said, “Good, it’ll save me the trouble.”

I stopped. My hot anger instantly cooled. This man wanted me to kill him? Where was the sense in that? I turned my head from side to side, scanning the dark tunnel. “Sir, where are you?”

“I’m right here.”

The voice couldn’t have been more than another few meters in front of me. I continued forward until the shadowy image of a man in an incredibly dirty business suit appeared as if out of nowhere. His eyes were wide as he looked down at the tracks in terror. His back was pressed firmly against the wall as if he were standing on the ledge of a tall building, yet his legs were tensed like he would jump at a moment’s notice. Drool dripped from his open mouth onto the collar of his jacket.

The scraping noise of another train came rumbling up the tunnel a few seconds before the bright light washed over us. The man tensed further, this time intending to throw himself in front of the train. A second before the car reached our position he pushed from the wall.

On pure instinct I pressed a hand into his chest and slammed him back against the wall a little harder than I’d intended. I’d knocked the wind out of him, and as this second train past by, he attempted to recover his breath.

For the second time, the passing commuters on the train had no idea how close they’d come to having their whole morning ruined. They would honestly be amazed if they had any idea how often they were seconds away from tragedy.

“What did you do that for?” He pushed my hand from his chest. His eyes tried burning a hole in my head, but he didn’t have heat vision, so it was pretty ineffective. “I’d finally gotten the nerve up.”

I stood in front of him. Ironically, seeing as I was there for pretty much the same reasons as this man, I asked, “Why would you want to throw yourself in front of a train?”

He chuckled, but it wasn’t a happy chuckle. “Because I have nothing left to live for.”

“It can’t be that bad.” At the very least, his story couldn’t have been any worse than mine. “Surely, you can think of something.”

There was a glimmer in the man’s eye, as some memory took him far away. He was thinking about someone—a wife, a child, maybe even a sibling, I don’t know. No matter who, there was someone whom he felt warranted living for.

He scrunched his eyes shut and shook his head. “No. They’d be better off without me.”

“Really? How?”

“All I ever do is mess everything up. I’m a complete failure.”

“You couldn’t have failed worse than I have, buddy. What’s your name anyway?”

“Frank… ummm… Frank Reynolds.” He tensed again, and his skin paled as the rumbling of another approaching train filled the tunnel.

I pressed him against the wall, in case he made the attempt again, but I needn’t have worried. The train passed on the opposite tracks.

He relaxed a little after the train had gone. “How… how are you a failure?”

I let go of the man—Frank Reynolds—and I stepped away, turning my back on him. It was my turn to have a far-off look on my face as I once again remembered the tragedy that had befallen me. I hadn’t ever spoken of it in the months since it happened, not even to my closest friends in The Squad. Who would have thought this man would be my confessor?

“Do you remember Crystal City?”

“Sure, it was all over the news. Wiped out in a heartbeat by some aliens.”

The words stung, and I’m glad my back was turned, because as I winced, a tear rolled down my cheek. “It was all my fault. I let my guard down. I allowed them to come. They claimed they were peaceful, and everything seemed to check out. If I’d been more vigilant, if I’d been quicker to realize their true intentions, they’d all still be alive. I failed them all.”

There was silence, and though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was judging me. Without my Powerman personae, looking like an ordinary man, there wasn’t any way he couldn’t blame me. He’d condemn me like every other person in the world should have. Frank wouldn’t be possessed of some hero-worship where he’d tell me...

“It sounds like a simple mistake.” Frank placed a hand on my shoulder. “You can’t blame yourself because of something someone else did. Those space-terrorists fooled us all, even the President trusted them.”

“But it was my city they destroyed. It was under my watch that they committed their murders.”

“It’s not your fault.”

I spun on Frank and flung him back into the wall. “Yes it is! Why can’t anyone else but me see this was my failure. It’s my responsibility! It’s my burden!” With each sentence, I punched the hard cement next to him, causing chunks to fly in all directions. “I could have stopped it! I could have sent them back the second they arrived! And now, five million people are dead! If I’m not to blame, who is? Give me the blame I deserve!”

He stood motionless, his head turned away and his eyes squeezed shut while my tantrum ran its course. The fact that he didn’t run away while a madman pounded the wall next to his head truly did show his bravery. That, or how suicidal he truly was.

With no strength left in me, I sank to my knees into the muck beside the tracks, and sobbed. A fourth train whipped through the tunnel, passing mere inches from me. All I needed to do was lean back and let it take me. But I didn’t.

Frank kneeled down next to me a few moments later, after the initial shock of my rage had worn off. He lowered my chin and looked me in the eye. “I blame you. For everything. Feel better now?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“And not just for Crystal City. I blame you for the wars in the Middle-East, the starving people in Africa, the earthquakes in China, Japan and Haiti, those tornadoes that wiped out all those cities in the Midwest. You’re to blame for them all.”

“How am I to blame for all that?”

“You seemed to want to take the blame for things beyond your control, so you might as well take the blame for these things too. Shouldn’t you?”

“Those things are different.”

“No, they’re not.” Frank stood up and now towered above me. He looked like a god to my lowered form, and I appeared to be kneeling before his feet in reverence. “Unless you can predict the future, there’s not a thing you could have done to prevent what happened to Crystal City. You couldn’t have stopped it.”

“But my wife…”

“Is gone. And I’m sorry for your loss, but you need to pick yourself up and move on. There are other people out there…” He chuckled again. This time is was an ironic kind of chuckle, as if he’d just realized this very thing himself. “There are people out there who need you.”

I gazed up at him as he held out a hand to help me back to my feet. I accepted it, and stood.

“Are you ready to go back out there and face the world, Powerman?”

“How… how did you know?”

“Punching a hole in the wall was my first clue.”

“Oh.” I looked at the spot I’d hit on the wall a few minutes before. There was a gaping hole where my fist had landed several times. “Right.”

“Thank you, by the way.” Frank, still holding my hand, shook it with vigor.

“For what?”

“Saving my life. You truly are a hero.”

An infinitesimally small dot of warmth sprang to life in the pit of my stomach. It was something I hadn’t felt in months, and it was as if I’d never felt it before in my life. This new sensation didn’t spread, but it remained constant. “You’re welcome.”

He nodded and smiled. “Now can we get out of here, before either of us does something stupid?”

I looked down the dark tunnel, still wishing never to come out. The tracks looked enticing to me, but Frank was right. The world still needed me. Maybe I could find it in myself somewhere to save five million lives to make up for the ones I lost. Only four-million-nine-hundred-ninety-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine to go.

I looked up at the grimy ceiling, not noticing the dirt and graffiti on it, but instead seeing her face again. “Sorry, honey, I’ll have to see you another time,” I thought.

“Sure, let’s go.”

We walked along the side of the tunnel, back toward the platform. The light at the end of the tunnel, felt good to my eyes. It grew with every step we took toward it. It was like my beacon, and my guiding light. It was a symbol of hope. My hope, and theirs.

“So, you’re invulnerable right?” Frank asked.

“Yeah. Mostly,” I responded.

“So, just out of curiosity, how exactly were you planning on killing yourself by jumping in front of a train?”

“I guess I really hadn’t thought it through.”

The End

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Even Heroes Have the Right to Bleed

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