At the light of dawn, Matt Weller picked up Bridget to go with his family up to the Moosehead Lodge near Moosehead Lake thirty miles north of Toronto. Still clad in her robe, Cate waved her daughter goodbye after words of maternal guidance. Two sons, two daughters and his daughter's friend with him, successful lawyer and entrepreneur Mathew Weller drove to the private airstrip he owned with two colleagues and flew his small Cessna across the bay and landed with an uneventful arrival. The plane ride had been five hours, the shuttle trip into the high elevations. Becca's younger brothers were annoying, but she and Bridget had talked about their world with each other as Lisa Weller played hostess and mediator between feuding sons and her tired baby . Moosehead Lodge was up in the higher elevations where the sky was bright and clean. The land was virginal, untouched by the devices of mankind. Rocky landscapes dotted with woods and open rolling pasture nearly covered all year round by ice, snow and frozen water of varying degree. On arrival, Becca's father made a crack about Bigfoot sightings and the embarrassed daughter rolled her eyes. Bridget's breath steamed up in the mountain hideaway. It really was much more quiet up here. Less sounds coming to her senses, less to diffuse up here. Returning home to the multitude would be a shock.
Dinner was eight o'clock and the family was feeling the strains of the effort of arrival. Their three-bedroom cabin was fifty yards from the main lodge and already prepared on an opposing slope. Skis rented and wardrobe prepared, Becca was ready to sleep, but Bridget was still inexplicably active. A brief excuse and she claimed to be ready for bed. Or not. At ten o'clock that night, a figure secreted from the cabin and ascended back to the heavens.
Bridget liked the idea of hitting New York City. In the comic books, it was supposed to teem with superheroes and people needing help so she was sure she'd fit in there. It was the Big Apple, the city that never slept, the greatest city on Earth where one could find anything or do anything and there was a lot of people there who tried doing what they wanted regardless of the law or the rules of human civilization. Groups of kids roamed the street looking for fun, confusing a life of crime for simple mischief. High school dropouts blaming society for their own mistakes robbed gas stations to fuel disgusting poisonous habits to bring themselves to the brink of suicide. Young s who once had futures became disposal humans to flout their flagging looks for and then to carelessly and effortlessly take lives without thinking twice. This was the underworld of the city that the wealthy and middle class tried to deny and ignore, but it kept coming back, blaming society for its continuing mistakes. Elliot Johnson sniffed and brushed his nose of the powder his body was trying to reject. He tossed aside the tools of his fix and stood up in the alley he lived in because of his parents. Just because he had robbed from them and disrespected them didn't give them any cause to throw him out of the house and move away for elsewhere. It was their fault for what he turned himself into today. He snorted his nose and wiped the blood from it as he looked out on to the busy Brooklyn street then noticed the young woman coming toward him and grabbed her off the street to assist in his personal degradation. A knife to her throat, if he was going to be disposable, she was going to feel it as well. He dragged her backward into the alley, her voice screaming, her legs kicking and screaming, and pounded her head into the trunk of his car. That made her dizzy enough to stop screaming and he shoved her into the decrepit car barely conscious and slammed the lid on her. It was just business to him. He dashed into the driver's seat, slammed his door shut and hit the gas pedal at his foot.
The rusted and junked 1989 Monte Carlo wasn't moving. The engine was running, the wheels were spinning, but he wasn't heading down the alley. Curling his lip disgustedly trying to form a thought, his eyes caught the reflection of a red "S" on yellow in his rear view mirror. It had to be the heroin; it had to be a bad batch. Was there such a thing as a good batch?
Bridget held up the back of the car with one hand, her right hand ripping the trunk lid off and letting eighteen-year-old Denise Bobbitt race home in terror and grateful to be alive. When Elliot tried to run, Bridget turned the car over him. The would-be serial killer stepped out of his car and watched it coming back over him like a giant cup pinning a fly to the ground. The Detroit beauty had no patience for these creeps and she showed it by pounding his vehicle hard enough that it would take him hours to get out from under it.
"Give me the money!!!" Brothers Scott and Walt Snedeker had everything handed to them. They had been good students, they rode into college on football scholarships and they had a lot of friends, but their parents never knew about their hobby of attacking and robbing Jewish delis and Catholic bookstores spouting Anti-Semitic hatred or painting Nazi swastikas on health clinics. Walt shot out a camera and his brother pounded the elderly Auschwitz survivor with his own baseball bat. They forgot the law that for every force there was a greater and equal reaction. Scott bolted for his van first pulling off his ski mask and looked back to see his brother racing out to meet him, but then a red blur whisked him off the sidewalk. He blinked once, heard his brother screaming from over his head and looked up to see him hanging by the band in his underwear from the stoplight. The van started turning over next as Walt and his two hesitant accomplices found themselves turned over and trapped inside the wrecked van, its doors mysteriously welded shut.
"Young man…" Several blocks over, the creator of Spiderman flagged down a hot dog vendor down on Broadway. "One with the works." Stan Lee reached into his pocket for some money.
"This is on me, sir!" Ralph Herold grinned excitedly to meet the famous comics creator. This hot dog was going to be his best. "You know, if you got a moment, I've got a character I'd like to tell you about. It's about this guy…." The paper wrappers on his cart flew up around him in a mess. The umbrella caught a powerful breeze and they looked up to see the blonde one soaring down toward Times Square, her cape flapping behind her and her hair wafting in the breeze.
"Did you see that? Did you see that?"
"If Spiderman goes by next, I'm getting his autograph!!!"
Down off Lexington, police cars were pursuing Craig Lionel Jardigan for beating up his wife. She had issued a restraining order on him seven months ago and had revealed he'd been molesting their daughter and her friends. Police now had the evidence they needed to put him away for a very long time. If their suspect's tan Citation made it across the New Jersey Turnpike into the next state, they could lose him. The State Police were closing in as well from a few blocks behind, but someone else was even faster. When the police reached Jardigan, they found his car flipped over in the intersection, and a hundred witnesses all describing the same blonde presence who had hung him up to dry by the Fruit of the Looms.
"Hey, Sam…" Over in the theater district, Tobey McGuire had been starring in a Broadway play of "Romeo and Juliet." Pulling his jacket on, he talked on his cell phone and looked and waved for a taxi cab. "Yeah, I read the script for Spiderman Four. Who are you getting for Electro?…. Tim Allen? That sounds cool. Only thing is, I don't know if I want to do it yet. No, it's not a scheduling or money thing, it's just… I don't know. I can't make up my mind. I guess I'm looking for a sign or…" He looked up and over and saw a beautiful blonde girl in costume dropping down to earth. She had long hair, a red cape and the symbol of her Kryptonian cousin flashed across her chest. She carried a young of fourteen to the steps of her apartment house as cars stopped and people turned to watch the spectacle. Watching the incident, McGuire's jaw dropped and he fell in love with the incredible flying beauty. Passing overhead, Bridget blew the handsome young actor a kiss.
"Tobey? Tobey, are you there?" Sam Raimi called through the cell phone.
"Sam," Tobey responded with an infatuated look on his face. "Get the paper work ready, I'll do it. I just had the mother of all signs…"
"She's not real!!! She's not real!!!" Ted Watterson and his in-laws had been operating an illegal and highly dangerous PCP and marijuana garden in a deserted and condemned church basement near the Twenty-Third Precinct for over eight years. It had made him wealthy several times over, enough to buy and collect an army's worth of illegal weapons, but nothing was stopping this blonde young lady. Bullets, shells, armor-piercing rounds, anti-tank grenades – nothing stopped this in the superhero costume. She had incinerated his illegal garden, flooded his lab and blown up his escape route through the old tunnels to the subway and was still coming. His wife's brother was floating trapped in the basement. His cousin had been hung up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Their best friend was never going to sound normal after having his underwear pulled over his head. Refusing to go to jail for years of illegal activities, the last five men of this illicit organization refused to accept their indubitable fates for their activities. It sounded like a war zone in this church basement and the girl just kept coming!
"Why can't we kill her?!!!"
Bridget noticed a support column and punched it out. There were several brief screams before the upstairs floor collapsed bringing down the altar and a few pews, and then brief groans and moans. Outside the church up on the street, the police had arrived and were racing inside.
"Idiots…" Bridget referred to Watterson and his employees.
"Sergeant," Captain Ed O'Neil closed his office and moved through booking to the front admission desk of the Thirty-Fourth Precinct. "If my wife calls, tell her I'm on my way home."
"Cap…" Sgt. Mike Finnerty looked to his superior. "You can't go. She's here!"
"Who?"
"Her!!!" Finnerty picked up the Detroit newspaper describing the sightings in the Motor City. "Everyone all over the city is getting calls about her. Everything's going nuts! Twenty-seven…" The phone rang again. "Twenty-eight here alone." He produced the unsolved case file from the Captain's desk. "Go get her!!!"
It took a moment for O'Neil to realize this was on the level. He flung his coat off, grabbed the file and raced up the staircase for the roof. His peers who had once so good-naturedly ribbed him for believing in the female powerhouse now believed him. The station had been buzzing with incredible phone calls of the all over the city. Squad cars were stretched thin as traffic slowed around rescue teams moving flipped over cars and pulling down felons and drug-pushers off light poles. A mugger was hanging from the radio tower on the next block. Sightings were coming in from people on the forty-eight floor of the Empire State Building. State police were starting believe it was an epidemic of schizophrenic hallucinations. How could so many seeming rational people claim to see sightings of a flying in a red cape?
"Everyone back to work!" Captain O'Neil cleared the roof of on-lookers and curiosity seekers. "We're not scaring her off. I'm meeting her alone!" There was a collective gasp of disappointment.
"Cap," Meter maid Marcy Bundy held up her pad. "Get her autograph for me?"
"What is this? A Hannah Montana concert?" He took the pad from her. "Down the steps!" He waited for the last off-duty assistant to leave his sight and slammed shut the door to the roof. Lifting up a wood two-by-four he wedged it against the door to keep from being disturbed. His breath freezing on the lofty roof over the streets, he clenched his unsolved murder case in his left hand and turned to look over the edge of the building. Seven flights up, he wondered what was going to happen next. He shuddered from the cold entering his bones and looked over the side and up to the sky. Police sirens and fire engines were busy tonight. Where was she?
"Sorry, I'm late, Captain." A voice came behind him and strolled around the searchlight on the roof. An attractive young lady with long hair strolled down from the helicopter pad and slammed down a broken Uzi. "Illegal chop shop with illegal weapons three blocks from here. They won't be going anywhere for a few hours." She folded her arms before her chest emblazoned with the large red "S" on her chest. Bridget leaned her weight to her left leg and tilted her head back. She was younger than he expected.
"You look like my daughter, Kellie." O'Neil gasped at her. "You can't be what? Fifteen?" He paused. "Is this a joke? Scott over at the Twenty-third put you up to this, right?"
"I'm seventeen." Bridget admitted freely. "But my spirit is at least four thousand years old." She raised her eyebrows intriguingly.
"Who… what are you?" The police captain asked the question everyone wanted to know. "How do you do this stuff?" Bridget looked away a second having prepared for this answer.
"I'm…." She theatrically responded. "The daughter of Thor and Aphrodite. The gods are distressed by what's happening to mortal man. You're finding new ways to destroy each other." She paused a moment, her soul laughing at her deception. "I'm not the only one." She riddled.
"This has to be a…"
"Did you want me to help you on something?"
"Yeah…" O'Neil flipped his file open to photos, notes and forensic files, the wind on the roof nearly blowing it way from his hands. "I need help catching this guy." He showed the file to this would-be young goddess and revealed to her the clues. "The year I made Captain, this guy attacked, raped and murdered seven young girls within the span of three weeks using the same M.O. within Central Park and then vanished. One psychic said he had committed three other murders not yet discovered and another psychic said he was out of the area, possibly a truck driver or traveling salesman…."
"Psychics are only as good as the information they get." Bridget answered. "They resonate on separate energy levels and wavelengths. Mortals have enormous psychic potential, but they're not capable of omniscience."
"Where is this guy?" O'Neil shivered in the cold. "Who is he?"
"He's out of the area." Bridget reacted as if she were hearing the whispers of the murdered women. "He's a drifter without family, without ties… He changed his M.O. That's why he hasn't been caught. He's dealt with police before, but…. Not here."
"Who is he?"
"My psychic visions aren't that far yet." Bridget answered with decisive authority and closed the file. "I need to return to Nashville and talk to my Aunt Athena." She was playing the role meant for an actress. "She stays close to the Parthenon there, but she's not crazy about Country Music. She keeps up with crimes around the world for Uncle Herc."
"Please tell me you're kidding with this mythology stuff." O'Neil looked into her godly features. "Oh, one of the girls here wants your…" He reached for Bundy's pad and looked back to empty space. He had turned away from her in less than a second. The young lady in the cape and short skirt was gone! How did she vanish so fast? He arched his head back and saw a flitting red glimpse shoot round and over the direction of the Empire State building toward the East River. In the pad, O'Neil read in large red letters, "To Marcy, S."
The sound of Manhattan resonating around him as echoes and vibrations, Captain Ed O'Neil collected the pad and case file in his left hand and kicked the wood block away from the door. Behind the door, the descending stairwell was full of cigarette smoke from waiting detectives and eavesdropping female officers.
"You heard her…" He started down. "Illegal chop shop over on Broadway. Let's go pick up those chowder-heads." He flipped Marcy's pad over his shoulder into her hands.