Jackson Pollack in Red
Stay still. Stay calm. Don't move.
Ashley sat on a bench outside the committee room, ankles crossed, hands clasped in her lap, her face immobile. The one movement she'd made after she reached the bench and sat was to find a clear patch of skin on one of her hands and wipe the blood off her mouth. The last thing she wanted to do was taste Shockwave's blood, or the blood of the other person who'd died next to her. I'm in shock, she thought, but right now that was a saving grace as it could pass for calm. She needed calm to try to figure out what had just happened.
The stasis in the room when the first head exploded vanished with the murder of Jonah Vogelbaum. She'd shouted, "Do something! What the fuck?" at Homelander, but he hadn't seemed to notice. She hoped he wouldn't remember her doing that because God knows what he would do in retaliation. Then people started dying rapid-fire, like someone had opened up with an AR-15 in the conference room, and the spectators turned into a howling, shoving mass, desperate for escape.
The panic had infected her too and she'd tried to run, with the result that she'd been close enough to Shockwave for his blood to splatter her, along with that of someone else nearby that she hadn't been clear-headed enough to identify. She couldn't stop screaming. She had never been in the middle of death before. What she'd seen, she'd seen from the sidelines.
A distant voice in her mind said, "Line of sight." It didn't penetrate the terror. That voice kept repeating until she heard, "LINE OF SIGHT! The supe needs line of sight to kill! Hit the deck!"
The mass of people left in the room had bottlenecked at the doors, so Ashley dropped to the floor and began leopard-crawling underneath the benches toward the exit. A woman stepped on her hand and Ashley struck the woman in her ankle tattoo with her forearm, knocking her off-balance and sending her to the floor. I don't care if it was an accident, she thought wildly. Nobody hurts me.
She pulled herself up behind the last bench and caught her breath. The assault seemed to have stopped, so she got to her feet and slipped through the crowd of people into the corridor. Security frantically tried to restore order as she moved to an empty bench and sat down. She stayed there, regaining her composure, letting her breathing and pulse slow as her body accepted the attack was over and she had survived.
Homelander and Stormfront stood at the other end of the corridor, talking. Both of them seemed relaxed but alert, as if they didn't realize the supe who murdered Shockwave and all the other victims could kill other supes. But they surely believed themselves too superior to be harmed by anyone, even another supe. Watching people in that room die probably interested them in the same way that killing ants with a magnifying glass would interest a certain kind of child. Fuckers.
Ashley saw Stormfront's head move in her direction and she turned her eyes front again. Who was the primary target of the attack? Had the murderous supe chosen all the targets or had some of them been distractions to hide the real purpose of it all? If the supe had only wanted to kill, there would have been a lot more dead. Plus, if the supe had a decent sense of tactics, Homelander and Stormfront would have been the first to go, as the only ones who could possibly stop the attack.
"Ms. Barrett? Ashley Barrett?" She looked up at the uniformed police officer who'd just spoken and caught the wave of disgust passing over his face before he schooled it into a professional mask. She wanted to tell him she knew what she looked like—as if she'd gotten a blood bukkake, which was essentially what had happened. Maybe a Jackson Pollack painting. She'd noticed Homelander didn't have any Jackson Pollacks in the ostentatious art collection decorating his apartment. He seemed to favor representational art.
"Yes." It surprised her how normal her voice sounded.
"We need to get your statement now. Are you all right for that? Have you had medical treatment?"
"I'm not injured. None of the blood is mine. I happened to be close to two people who-died." She refused to say "had their heads popped." Mind-blowing, Homelander quipped in her memory and she mentally screamed at him to shut his fucking mouth, the way she did every day when he said something inhuman.
"Could you tell me what your connection to the hearings is?"
"I'm the Director of Talent Relations at Vought. Basically, I'm in charge of the heroes." This uniform didn't need to know she had no real power in her job and existed to make things run more smoothly for Homelander.
"Could you tell me what you remember about the incident?"
She gave him a cut-and-dried recounting while she kept an eye on Homelander and Stormfront. Neither of them seemed in a hurry to take any action, which didn't surprise her. Useless as tits on a bull, both of them, except when it came to murdering innocent people; then they were golden.
"Do you know of any supes who have this ability?"
"No." That question she could answer with total confidence. "No supe under Vought's umbrella has this ability." Unless there's a deceitful supe who has powers they haven't disclosed. But how would we even go about finding them if they have no record of having the ability to murder people in this way? And if this is a supe that isn't with Vought, how did we miss someone this powerful? She put the questions aside for later.
The uniform finished taking her statement and said, "That will be all for now, Ms. Barrett. We have your contact information in case there's anything else. You can clean up if you want."
Seriously? He thought she might not want to wash the blood off her face? But Ashley kept her expression smooth and thanked him.
"Do you have transportation?"
"I have a driver, thank you." He was probably playing games on his phone and smoking inside the car, but she didn't care at the moment. When the uniform left, she took another look around and caught Homelander looking at her. She couldn't read his expression, so she kept hers blank and pushed open the door to the ladies' room. He was probably disappointed she wasn't dead.
In the mirror above the sink, under the drip pattern of blood, her face was white with shock. Her hands trembled as she passed them under the faucet to get the flow of water going. The movements of washing her face suddenly seemed complex and impossible; for a few moments, all she could do was stare at her hands, the water washing away the blood on them in thin pink streams. A shudder went through her entire body and she had to grab the sink to steady herself. You weren't a target. You didn't almost die. You didn't almost die. The words didn't help.
When Ashley got herself under control, she waved her hand under the dispenser for soap and began washing Shockwave and the other dead person's blood off her face. It was a woman. The memory came back to her. A woman in a black-and-white blouse. I didn't know her. And she wouldn't have known me if I'd been the one who died.
She removed the gauze overblouse she wore, which was ruined, and used some of the unbloodied fabric to wipe her face dry, as all this restroom had was hand dryers. There were some bloodstains on the white camisole she wore under it, but they weren't too noticeable. John Woo always had people wearing white in his movies so the blood squibs show up best. Blood pops against white. Heads pop.
Stop that. Ashley threw the overblouse in the garbage and put her hand on the ladies' room door. Vought's supes were blunt instruments, not tools she could use to figure out who and why, and she had no particular Holmesian deductive ability herself. It seemed that all she, and anyone, could do would be wait until the supe killed again, as they surely would. As usual, the supe had all the power.