Chapter 10: Managing Mayhem

"Kansas City Star Subscription Desk, This is Cef,"

"Keith Graham here Spider, how are you?"

"I'm good Doc, how are you?"

"Good as well," he told me, "Listen, we've got two open spots where we can insert you for the management program, and I thought I'd give you your choice."

"Okay," I agreed. Meantime, my real thoughts were on Becka, and what it would mean to both of us.

"Alright, the first one is Flint, Michigan, the Flint Journal." Doc paused there, to let it sink in, I guess.

"Okay..." I offered, hoping he would continue.

"Second is Des Moines, Iowa at the Des Moines Register."

Wow, Des Moines," I said out loud. "That's pretty close."

"Yes it is, just up the highway. But its still almost 200 miles. Is that an issue?" Doc asked.

"It is a consideration these days," I answered. "I uh ... I have a girlfriend."

"We're talking six months," Doc reminded me. "Are you thinking of backing out of the program?"

"No, that's not it, and particularly not since you've dangled Des Moine in front of me. That is a far more workable location than I had been thinking was possible. I think we could work around that."

"Would your girlfriend move with you?"

"I think we're getting close to that kind of commitment, but we're not there yet, and she's a very traditional girl from a very traditional family. I don't think she'd agree to living in sin. Besides, she works at the Star too, and might not want to quit her job to move away for six months without a ring on her finger."

"Some might, some not, but it sounds like she's not the type, and that's probably a good thing in the long run."

"Yeah," I agreed with a sigh. Doc could hear it, and laughed, but with plenty of sympathetic warmth in his voice.

"Trust me, I'm on the road a lot, and I've had to deal with very similar issues. I know what you're feeling."

I thought to myself how unlikely that was, given my alter ego, but kept it to myself. The same conditions that presented problems also provided some beneficial factors that I couldn't share with Doc. Particularly if, as Serenity had hinted, she might be able to help.

"Let me have a couple days to think on it and talk it over with Becka?" I asked.

"Of course, I'll check back Thursday morning then?"

"Sure," I agreed.

Dinner that night was ... well, not pyrotechnic exactly, but it was loud and lively. Becka was all for walking in the next day and quitting her job so she could move to Des Moines. Not to live with me, mind you, that would be too much for her parents to bear, but to live near me, as she did now; to spend her nights with me, as she did now; to keep loving me from as close as possible, as she did now. The heated discussion led to a heated adjournment to the bedroom, as tangled clothes and limbs and lips became brief hindrances, or sharp spurs to other events. To be honest, in the cold light of day I'm still not sure which function they better served. Did we reach a decision? Several of them, and each was amazing and wonderful. But no, not a decision on anything we'd begun discussing over dinner.

I spent some time the next day researching the housing situation in Des Moines. Like Kansas City, it was a crossroads community and another outpost from the previous century that had been reborn as a city of commerce. For some reason it was also a larger media market than Kansas City, or at least a more competitive one. I would be a small fish in the managerial sea in Des Moines. The Flint Journal in Michigan was a much smaller operation than Kansas City or Des Moines, though it was, as in Kansas City, the sole player in the field. The smaller operation would mean I would stick out more. For an ambitious man, that might be an important factor.

Okay, I was an ambitious man these days, but my ambitions lay elsewhere. Flint didn't seem to be a good fit in my mind for that very reason, even before I added Becka to the equation. Added, ha! Becka was not an addition. Addition was too simple an operation to describe her impact on my life. She was the calculus of my existence, the trigonometry of my future.

The cold light of day brought Becka back to her senses, or part way back at least. At lunch she told me that while she'd love to move to Des Moines with me for the six months I'd be there, she wouldn't do that to her parents.

"They know I'm an adult, Spider, and I'm on my own now, but it would be a complete rejection of how they raised me."

"I understand sweetheart, and don't forget, I was the one arguing that very point."

"Yes, you were," She said, taking my hand and pouting. "Thank you for remembering who I am for me."

"There's more than who you are to remember," I said, raising her hand to give her palm a soft kiss. "There's who we want to be to remember as well."

We'd been hinting around the edges of making a more public, formal commitment to each other. I had some plans in that regard, and just needed the time to make them work. Fortunately for me, Becka was going to visit her parents for the weekend, for what I think was a preliminary event intended to prepare them for meeting me. That gave me the window of opportunity I needed to do what I had in mind without raising any suspicions.

My window of opportunity got blown away by a nasty bastard known as the Tulsa Tornado. He blew into town just before midnight, Friday night, and spent the next four hours taking out a row of tenements in the river district and killing fifty people, including fifteen eight year old boys who were spending the night on a real life river tugboat, sponsored by their scout troop.

Midnight met me at the fortress, and briefed me as I suited up. It wasn't just that the Tornado was a powerful super villain, he was, but he had a team of henchmen, I guess you'd call them, and they had weapons, very nasty, very deadly weapons called cyclone cannons.

"I'm going to take care of the henchmen and their toys," Midnight told me as I was going through my self diagnostic routines. "There's too many of them, and they're too mobile and independent for you to be able to handle while old 'TT' is still on the loose. Those cannons can punch big holes in things, but the Tulsa Tornado can punch big holes in Kansas City itself."

While I was en route, I got a quick education on the Tulsa Tornado himself. He too wore a metal suit, and his was bulky, almost like a tank. From that suit, he spun a shell of sonic force that he wrapped around himself. Just moving from place to place with the field engaged and fully powered up, he could destroy everything within a hundred feet of where he walked.

"Will I have trouble getting close from the air?" I asked Midnight.

"Probably," she admitted. "The very gravitic manipulation that lets you fly will let the sonic winds he stirs up toss you around pretty good. You'd be better off landing outside his main area of effect and running in."

"Yeah, once I'm down I can boost the gravities some to remain stable," I said out loud as it occurred to me.

"Good. That's good thinking Iron Man. Keep it up. We're close enough, I'm taking off."

With that, Midnight wrapped herself in a field of black force and disppeared. Funny, I knew she didn't need the special effects, but she was fully in her Midnight persona now, and the maneuvers were automatic for her. I hoped I could develop the same mind set.

"Wing, open the drop bay door," I called. A few seconds later, I dropped into the night. In my display I could see the sonic fields that Tornado had wrapped around himself. I let myself freefall for a few seconds before kicking in the jets and edging myself south of his location. AS I approached the ground, I braked at maximum thrust and planted both feet on the concrete, landing with some serious crunch.

The Tornado's overlapping layers of sonic fields may have been his comfy cocoon, but they sure made him easy to find. I let the tracking system peg him on my display and then began working my way towards him. Most of the buildings between us were in ruins, but I didn't want to risk any survivors who might still be in them, so I headed for the nearest cross street that led his direction.