dove. Pouring on all the speed I could, I went in low and fast, aiming below its ribcage and off its bony ridge with my huge and ungainly spear.
It saw me coming, opened its jaws, but I was in and the impact ripped the pylon lance out of my hands. The stricken monster gave a deafening roar, its armored tail smacking me out of the air as it spun about, and I hit the parking garage roof as the sagging structure finally collapsed under the enormous weight it had never been designed to carry.
Then the lightning hit with a world-ending thunderclap as Lei Zi let go of everything she’d been pulling in and storing up. She put it right down the steel spike I’d driven into the creature, and discharge washed over me. Deafened, stunned, I barely felt the beast fall on me but I heard more crashes as we fell through each level of the garage.
“Astra! Astra! Dammitall Hope, talk to me!”
Shelly. Right. I couldn’t see a thing, and realized I’d been buried. Bright side, the jolly green giant was dead—lying under the still-twitching thing, I wasn’t hearing any heartbeat or breathing. Its ass had been waxed.
Poor ‘zilla.
Chapter Two
After helping to save the President of the United States, I got to be America’s Sweetheart for a week. Then word got out about my little Hollywood Boulevard shopping trip to Forever 21 and Victoria’s Secret and my three-day getaway with Atlas. The tabloids had always claimed I was a minor under the mask. Add to that Atlas’ playboy reputation, and suddenly I was America’s Scandal, at worst a skank, at best a Cautionary Tale. Mal Shankman used the scandal to blacken Atlas’ reputation and the California quake to attack all “false idols.” Chicago’s very own racial hate-monger, he got his start going after whites and Jews; after the Big One, it was our turn.
Astra, Notes From A Life
* * *
Godzilla blood ruined my costume, not that I didn’t have lots of changes back at the Dome. After I dug myself out we spent the rest of the day getting the injured medical assistance, working to unsnarl traffic—harder than it sounds with all the dead cars—and otherwise assisting the other CAI capes and the Chicago Police Department in getting the city back to normal.
Navy Pier wasn’t a complete loss. Riptide smothered the fires before Dad showed up as Iron Jack along with The Crew, and he said the pier itself hadn’t been structurally compromised. Of the three godzilla attacks so far—New York, Tokyo (of course) and now us—ours had done by far the least damage. Being number three, we’d learned from the mistakes of others, so nobody had died although there were a lot of injuries, mostly from trampling.
Thankfully the rest of the weekend remained routine, but Monday morning I arrived at the Dome and barely had time to change before Shelly sent me right back out. “That cute Detective Fisher just called,” she whispered in my earbug. “He wants you at First Chicago on a robbery.”
The First Bank of Chicago is a grand marble temple to money just off Michigan Avenue. Detective Fisher greeted me when I landed on the steps, ushering me inside past the news crew already on the scene. I didn’t think he was that cute: narrow face, long jaw, thick eyebrows, and the kind of mouth that made any smile look sarcastic. A cigarette hung from his lips at every opportunity. Sometimes I thought he’d been created by Central Casting to be the perfect gumshoe detective.
“Morning, Astra,” he said, looking down at me from his six foot four height as he ground out his smoke. “So how long are you going to wear black?” Everyone was taller than me, but Fisher loomed.
“Black is the new black. Those things will kill you.”
“Not me they won’t. I’m going to live forever, sweetheart.”
I liked Fisher. He didn’t care about the media-scandal swirling around me, and he didn’t tiptoe around. After Atlas’ death I hadn’t felt right wearing his blue-and-white colors. Black was dramatic and, like my sewn-in wonderbra and the wig that lengthened and darkened my short platinum bob, it helped me look older. I needed all the help I could get, since without wardrobe tricks I looked like an underdeveloped teenage pixie, but in hindsight it hadn’t been a good color-choice; the scandal-sellers took it as a sign of mourning for my “lost lover.” If only.