There was a Lydia-shaped empty spot on my wall when I got home.

My friends had always complained about the blank gray cell I lived in, begging me to add some color to the room or hang something on the walls, but I had always resisted. I never said it out loud, but something about doing that, decorating my shithole apartment in the Zone, felt like a kind of giving up.

As long as the walls were bare, this was just temporary; just a place to work and sleep while I went back to school. But the minute I put pictures up, I had to admit this was home. I had to admit this was the place where life had taken me, and this was the best I could do.

But now I really needed something on that wall, so I would stop remembering why Lydia was gone, every time I looked up. It took me forever to find it, rolled up in a cardboard tube in the back of my closet.

It was a tattered, brittle poster of the most popular photo in the world, the iconic photo of Captain Cobalt, taken by a naval officer on the USS Nevada with a telephoto lens. It showed Larry Friedrich, still in his soaked and burned uniform, soaring through the sky, holding one wing of a Japanese Zero in each hand.

The Captain was never a handsome man, but there was something majestic about him here, the first true superhero, saving his friends from a terrible death at the bottom of the North Pacific.

My version of the poster had been taped together by my ten-year-old hands, the day I got back from the hospital.

My dad hated hero stuff so much, it was like he had a personal grudge against one of them. He threw a fit every time he caught me reading a comic book or watching a superhero drama on TV. He told me fantasies like that were for losers who couldn’t handle the real world. He told me I would never get a girl watching shit like that, and he didn’t want me to end up living in his basement, fat and useless at thirty years old.

Dad wanted me to care about real things - cars and sports and working with my hands. He had no patience for fantasy of any kind, including fantasies about God, which was how he classified all kinds of religion.

My grandparents were deeply religious people, followers of some obscure Protestant sect that believed Jesus was just as important as God. Dad said they used God as an excuse for everything. They gave God credit for every good thing that happened, but somehow let him off the hook for everything bad.

Dad only let me watch documentaries and stuff from history channels. I eventually learned to access old stuff in the public domain and ended up raising myself on a diet of old sitcoms and movies from the last century.

But every night, I dreamed about Captain Cobalt, dreamed about punching through the ceiling of my bedroom, and flying away from everything I ever knew.

Me and some friends from school would meet every day at the comic shop down the street and browse through books and posters we couldn’t afford. I didn’t really get a formal allowance, but every so often I would spend my lunch money on a poster and bring it home.

Posters of robots, mostly - stylized schematics of HDI Panthers and bipedal combat bots - all stuff my father would approve of. But I always wanted that classic poster of Captain Cobalt, and one day, I decided I had to have it.

I hadn’t saved quite enough money for it yet, so I stole ten bucks from dad’s wallet and snuck it home after school.

I thought I would have plenty of time to hang it in my closet before dad got home, but he came home early and caught me hanging it on the inside of my closet door. My ten-year-old brain thought that would hide it, somehow, as if dad didn’t know where my closet was, or how to open the door.

Dad shut me down every time I tried to talk about Captain Cobalt, rambling on about super-powered hit squads and secret experiments conducted by the OSS.

Just seeing the poster made him mad enough, but when he saw the price tag on the tube, he immediately realized what had happened to his missing ten dollars and knew that his son was a thief.

He hit me so hard, I lost my balance on the books I was standing on and fell backwards. Trying to somehow fall away from him, I cracked my head on the doorknob of my closet and woke up in the hospital with dad, a doctor, and two cops standing by my bed.

A nurse gave me some water, the doctor checked me out, and the cops asked dad to leave while they spoke with me alone.

“Just tell them the truth,” Dad said, in a tone that made it absolutely clear what he wanted the truth to be.

I told the police I fell while I was hanging a poster and bounced my head off the closet door on my way down. Dad bought me ice cream on the way home.

Fifteen years later, I unrolled the poster that put me in the hospital, and put it back up, in the place where Lydia used to be.

* * *

I had put two interlocking magic circles around Veazey’s collection of little homes. One hovering projector that had to be recharged every couple days, and a semi-permanent one applied to the grass and dirt with a paint sprayer.

The circle was working when Veazey got a visitor, but the tattoo on his arm still woke him up. A lot of military guys went Norse during the war. Started as a fun thing, everybody getting the same tattoo, after a series of movie reboots made Thor cool again.

Veazey had a tattoo of Mjölnir high on his left arm, but it was never a “religion” to him. Just a bonding thing with his team, a reminder to be brave, and a reminder of the better world they were fighting for, stuck in a war with no rules at all.

Veazey never prayed to anybody. Never went to church. But he’d remember that hammer sometimes, when he heard gunfire getting closer, and knew he had to keep working. Or when he heard the shuffle of not quite dead feet closing in around their camp in the middle of the night.

He paid one visit to the Asgard Brotherhood in Boston when he first arrived but got suspicious when the congregation was nothing but white guys. They weren’t full on fire and brimstone racist, but it was pretty clear who was welcome and who was not.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Veazey started covering up the tattoo after that, though he couldn’t bring himself to have it removed. It pissed him off more than anything, to see something innocent and cool turned into something evil. A dozen guys in his unit got a tattoo of that hammer, and nobody gave a fuck what color skin it was on.

Veazey had been raised Christian, more or less, but he’d never been the type to pray. He knew gods were real, but the actual God had fucked off before he was born, and if the human race felt abandoned, well, maybe they had it coming.

The hammer was just a symbol to him, so he was surprised when it started to burn and throb in the middle of the night, bad enough to wake him up. Timmy said the demons might try to brute-force the circle, might even try and send a succubus, to see if Veazey was lonely enough to make a truly world-class mistake.

Veazey found it a little insulting, the way Tim broke it down: “Look man, if you see anything female walking outside that circle, do not try and talk to it. Do not get closer to try and get a better look at her tits. You don’t have a contract or wizard rules to protect you, so these assholes can do anything they want.

“She can look like your first crush, or your last one. She could look like your favorite porn star, or the anime girl you drew in your notebook when you were twelve. So, if you see anything cross that circle, just shoot it, no matter what she looks like.”

But they didn’t send a succubus. They sent the walking corpse of an old friend.

“It’s good to see you, man,” Rob’s ghost said. “Congrats, you’re finally prettier than me.” Rob’s face was still half gone, just like the last time Veazey saw him, zipping him up in a bag fifteen years ago. The nicest guy Veazey ever met. The guy who belonged on the recruiting poster, the guy who never met a rule he would break or a buddy he would turn his back on, shredded by a god damn possessed baboon.

The whole camp had been ambushed by those little jumping shitheads, moving too fast and dropping too close to get hit by the autoguns. They lost three guys in that attack, including Rob, the guy that everybody liked.

“They told you I was a hothead, right?” Veazey said. “They told you I would lose my shit and charge you, if I saw you wearing my friend like a skin suit? Somebody told you I would break the circle if you got me mad enough. And that somebody would have been right, if I only had twenty years to my name, instead of almost forty.”

“I’m just here to talk,” the figure said. “I know you’re not scared to fight, but you need to make sure it’s a fight you can win, before you end up like me. Do not bet your life on this kid, Easy. Yeah, he can juggle cars and take a bullet, standing in a safe place with a buddy by his side. But you and I both know he’s gonna freeze, the first time he sees some real shit.

“He’s gonna freeze, some demon is gonna yank his soul out, and then, after a few weeks of getting his eyelids peeled off, he’s gonna come back with a whole new perspective on working for the bad guys; and for his first mission, they’re gonna make him kill you.

“I’m not asking you to hurt him or betray him. You don’t have to raise one finger. All you gotta do is stay home, and let this kid have the heroic death he’s been planning since he was ten. Your little magic buddy’s got a death wish, and I don’t want to see him take you down with him.

“He’s talking tough because somebody told him that’s how men talk. That’s how men talk when they’re scared, when they’re trying to keep their shit together in the middle of some fucking jungle, or when they’re starving to death on some godforsaken ranch. The men he admired most in the world taught him to talk like that, but all those men are dead now. Just like me, and just like you’re gonna be.

“I know you’re trying to be a good friend. That’s the whole story of you, tryin’ to be a good friend. But you’ve already seen what I’ve seen. You know he’s weak. You know he’s gonna crack. And all the magic in the world can’t keep a man together, when something inside him wants to die.”

Veazey scoffed and put a fresh pinch of contraband between his cheek and gum. “I wouldn’t have to explain this, if you really were the man you’re pretending to be. Funny that you showed up as Rob, since Tim and Rob are kinda the same this way.

“I never seen anybody work harder to avoid a fight than Tim Kovak. He spent his whole life, from about the time he could walk, learning to duck, dodge, hide, and keep his mouth shut, no matter what the world was doing to him.

“I saw it up close, every day for a month, when our company got bought out, and this giant gaping asshole from HDI got assigned to supervise us. His title was ‘company liaison’ but everybody knew what that meant. It meant this little piss-ant was senior to everybody in that building, because he worked directly for the guy who owned us.

“He called a meeting the first day he got there and pulled everybody into the big room to kiss his ass and listen to his bullshit about how great our lives were gonna be, after he took away some holidays and cut our bonus schedule in half.

“Everybody went to the meeting and put their happy faces on, except Tim. Tim had a deadline, and you do not come between that boy and a deadline. Tim had zero tolerance for corporate bullshit, and zero tolerance for wasting time. His real bosses loved that about him, so of course, when they called an all-hands meeting, he figured that meant all hands but him.

“Word got around to this piss-ant that Kovak had skipped the meeting, and he made Tim the first name on his shit list. Every day, Tim would go to eat his shitty frozen dinner in the break room, and every day, no matter where he was sitting, piss-ant would say, ‘You’re in my seat.’

“And Timmy would get up, apologize, and move to another seat, like it was no problem at all. I watched him put up with that shit every day for a month. Well… almost a month.

“It’s not like Timmy didn’t have pride, but Tim knew this guy was just looking for an excuse. Maybe he really was still pissed about the meeting, or maybe he was trying to cut his budget, and get rid of the only guy smart enough to take a salary cut to stay on the old bonus schedule.

“Every day he fucked with Tim, and every day Tim just took it. It got worse when Tim started smiling, making a joke out of it. He started making little remarks like, ‘I can’t believe I keep doing this!’ and ‘Why can’t I get this right?’ It didn’t even sound sarcastic. But bullies hate it when you blow them off. It was so childish; our supervisor didn’t even believe it was happening. Nobody could do anything until Tim complained, and there’s no way Tim would complain.

“Tim was goin’ home to a girl every night, and that girl wanted a house. Timmy described it like they had a deal. She was still pissed about him dropping out of school. Wanted him to go to law school or some shit. Thought he was wasting his life with this stupid tech job. So, she gave Tim an ultimatum, expecting him to fail. She said, ‘You get a house for us, then we get married, then you get kids.’ In that order.

“Timmy knew if he so much as twitched at this guy, he was done. He had his whole future riding on that job, and he was pretty sure he would get blacklisted if he pissed off a liaison from the biggest company on the planet.

“So, Timmy just smiled and took it, like he had no pride at all, for twenty-nine days in a row. Until the week his dad died. Timmy was allowed two hours to go to the funeral on a Wednesday afternoon. Cleared it with his supervisor, no big deal. But when piss-ant heard about it, he came over to Tim’s table, leaned in close and said… something. We didn’t hear what he said. All we saw was the result.

“Tim will tell you he’s never thrown a punch, and that is technically correct, because it was a chair. Here’s what we saw. Piss-ant says something, Tim goes red in the face, stands up, picks up his plastic piece of shit chair, and proceeds to beat the dog shit out of this man, in front of everybody.

“We had to pull Timmy off this asshole three times, and it took four of us each time. We had to do it three times because Tim kept fooling us. We would pull him off, Tim would say, ‘I’m fine. I’m done.’ But as soon as we let him go, he would charge that motherfucker again, until I finally had to drag him out of the building.

“I’ll admit, it takes a long time to find the ‘On’ switch on Timothy Kovak. But once you hit it, that boy only got one speed, and that is full speed ahead. And if Tim can put a man in the hospital for fucking up his lunch? I can’t wait to see what he does to you.”

The ghost may have been a demon in a skin suit, but he still had to hear the end of the story. “So, what did the guy say? What did he say to set Kovak off?”

“He asked if Tim had been approved for the afternoon. Tim said the funeral was at one o’clock, and the piss-ant said, ‘Is there any way they could push that back?’”

The ghost laughed and vanished, leaving Veazey alone to finally relax, and rub some ice on his arm.