The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  He picked a direction and set off down the corridor, but he’d barely taken half a dozen steps when he heard the sound of booted feet running behind him, and when he turned he saw six or seven men in military uniform blocking the corridor. They were all pointing assault rifles at him. He put his hands in the air.

  “Sir!” barked one of the… not soldiers, the uniforms were wrong. Airmen? “Stand down!”

  “What?”

  “Stand down!”

  “My name’s Alex Dolan,” he said, a little startled by how calm he felt, considering. “I think I’ve been in an accident. Who are you and what am I doing here?”

  “This is your final warning, sir!” the airman yelled. The airman did not seem calm at all. “Stand down and stop doing that!”

  “Doing what?” He looked down at his body and it seemed that there were two parts of his brain, one of which understood what it saw and the other of which did not. “Oh. That.”

  “Open fire!” the airman shouted.

  He let go, and felt himself fall in all directions, and somewhere in an impossible distance he thought he heard gunfire and screaming.

  TIME PASSED. OR did not. Like all the other dimensions here, it seemed either impossibly complex or absent altogether, or a combination of both. He imagined himself sitting very still, but that didn’t work very well, so he allowed himself to drift, or everything to drift around him.

  He thought he must have been severely injured in the explosion—surely it had been an explosion. He was in a medically induced coma and he was hallucinating all of this. It was the only explanation that made any sense.

  Once he had that straight in his head, it gave him a perspective to hang on to. There was nothing to fear here; it was all a construction of his subconscious, a Pincher Martin simulation, and keeping that in mind he could set out and explore.

  Having said that, there wasn’t much here to see, or at least to understand. The space, which could still not make up its mind to be infinitely large or infinitely small, was empty until he looked at it in a certain way, at which point it became crowded with an impression of objects which he could not understand. He trekked across the space for a length of time which had no meaning.

  Remembering how he had returned the first time, he paid more attention to some of the structures around him. He picked one, turned it over in his mind, slipped inside, and found himself standing in the middle of a field.

  He was naked again, which was annoying, so he imagined clothes for himself. It was late afternoon or early evening, the light beginning to fail. He could see, in the distance, a line of trees, but no buildings, no sign of habitation. He had no idea where he was.

  The air was full of blue sparks.

  He turned slowly, looking around him, and was startled to see someone standing behind him, a couple of yards away, a middle-aged man in old-fashioned work clothes.

  “Hello,” he said as unthreateningly as possible. “My name’s Alex. What’s yours?”

  The man turned and fled.

  Alex watched him go. He stumbled and fell a couple of times, but he was running as if his life depended on it and presently he was just a little speck in the distance.

  Alex sighed. “Bollocks,” he said, and stepped back.

  The next time he tried it, he imagined clothes first, and found himself standing in someone’s living room, surrounded by sparks. A very fat man was kneeling in front of him, eyes shut and hands clasped together. Alex knew who the man was, and where he was, and that made sense. That was how dreams worked. He stepped back.

  He thought he knew what to expect the next time, but he found himself standing at the side of a road at night. There was a full moon, and from the fields behind him he could hear small creatures moving around. From the chill in the air, he judged it to be early autumn, and looking up he could see the blinking lights of an aircraft crossing the sky. This was all entirely unfamiliar to him, and he wondered where it had come from. He stood where he was for quite a while, then he went away.

  He thought perhaps he was beginning to get a handle on it. The howling silence of that blinding white darkness was still a shock, but it was becoming more familiar the longer he spent there, and he no longer panicked when he tried to move between it and what presented as the real world.

  When he was five years old, his father had decided it was time he learned to swim, so they went over to the pool at the local leisure centre in Leith. Alex remembered being really excited to be going on this outing. They took the bus, which in his memory suggested that this was one of his father’s long periods of unemployment, when he couldn’t afford to run a car, and that was exciting too.

  At the leisure centre, everything was new and wonderful and confusing. In the changing rooms, his father helped him into his swimming trunks, then held his hand while they walked barefoot along the textured tiles, through the footbath, and out onto the edge of the pool.

  He remembered it was hot and humid in there, and the air stank of chlorine and that made him feel a little queasy, but that didn’t matter because before him was the pool, and it was huge, like the Atlantic, and full of people splashing about and enjoying themselves. He was virtually vibrating with happiness as his father blew up the little inflatable armbands and slipped them over his hands and up near his armpits. Then they walked right to the edge of the pool, and without warning his father picked him up and threw him in.

  That was where his memory of the trip to the pool ended, with a baffled impression of weightlessness, hanging above the pale blue surface of the water.

  His next clear memory was of sitting beside the fire in the living room, his nose running and the smell of chlorine still on his skin and hair. In the kitchen, his parents were arguing in loud voices. There were no more trips to the swimming pool with his father.

  He learned to swim, eventually, in his own time. At the beginning he still felt a rising sense of panic when he got into the water, but it passed. This was like that. After the initial shock, he was learning that there was nothing to be afraid of. Each transition was smoother, more confident, as he tried to work his way bit by bit back to where he wanted to be.

  So he stood in his backyard, and in his kitchen while Pam Shanahan screamed her head off behind him, and outside a hotel door, and in his spare bedroom looking at himself, using each of these things as waypoints to anchor himself before moving on, and finally he found himself standing outside the main building of the SCS.

  Except everything was wrong. The building looked shabby and dirty, its paint peeling and a couple of windows broken. It seemed to be deserted. He turned in a slow circle. The lawns around the building were overgrown and the trees had grown wild and unpruned. He tipped his head back and looked at the upper floors of the building. And looked up. And up.

  “Fucking hell,” he said.

  Hanging directly over the building was an immense slowly turning spiral of cloud, like a slow-motion tornado. It rose into the sky until it pierced the cloudbase. He watched it, mouth hanging open, as it turned silently above him.

  And all of a sudden he was writhing on the ground in agony. He tried to step away, but he was in too much pain to be able to focus. He was dimly aware of someone walking up to him, bending down, and thumping his fist down on his thigh. When the figure took its hand away there was a thin plastic tube sticking out of his leg and then there was a wild roaring in his head and a wave of blackness broke over him and washed him away, and that was how they caught him the second time.

  HE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS sitting in a chair. No, not a chair. A wheelchair. A wheelchair parked in the middle of a small cement-walled room with a single door and no furniture. It was featureless apart from an armoured light fitting in the middle of the ceiling and the black bubble of a surveillance camera set high up on one wall. His wrists and forearms were bound to the armrests of the chair with about a dozen cable ties each, and it felt as if his ankles were similarly fastened to the footrests. He could feel restraints across his chest an
d forehead holding him upright, and there seemed to be something on his head, like a metal bowl. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, and over that some kind of waistcoat with wires trailing from it and away out of sight. An IV line had been inserted into the back of his hand. He couldn’t move his head to see where the line went.

  Well.

  A voice behind him said, “Good morning, Mr Dolan. Please remain calm.” He couldn’t sense anyone else in the room with him, so presumably the voice was coming from a speaker.

  He said, “Who are you?”

  The voice continued, “We have you under light sedation, for your own safety. You’ll notice you’re wearing a vest and a skullcap. We’re monitoring your heartrate and brain activity, and should either or both of these deviate from certain narrow parameters, the equipment you’re wearing will administer an electric shock powerful enough to stun you. If you continue to misbehave, it will kill you. Please indicate that you understand this.”

  “If you want me to remain calm, you’re going about it all wrong,” he said.

  “Please indicate that you understand,” the voice said again.

  He thought about it for a while. Then he said, “I understand.”

  “Very well,” said the voice, and a moment later the door opened and three men stepped into the room. One was in late middle age, wearing the uniform of an Air Force general, while the other two were younger and in civilian clothes. A distant part of him noted that it was actually rather brave of them to be in the same room with him.

  “We apologise for this, Mr Dolan,” the general said. “We couldn’t risk you… leaving again.”

  Alex sat looking at them. He said, “I have questions.”

  “So do we,” said one of the younger men. “How much do you remember?”

  “There was some kind of accident,” he said. “I remember a flash. Then I was… somewhere else.”

  “Do you know where you were?” the other civilian asked. “Can you describe it?”

  He tried to shake his head, but it was too firmly restrained. “I can’t put it into words.”

  “Can you remember what you’ve been doing since the incident?” the general asked.

  I’ve been having a dream. Except I haven’t, have I. He felt a shudder of panic go through him, waited for the electric shock, but nothing happened. “I’ve been trying to come back.”

  “Were you in Cairo?”

  “Cairo? No. Why would I be in Cairo? What the fuck happened at the SCS?”

  “We don’t know,” said the first civilian. “We don’t dare go into the control room. We sent in bomb disposal robots with remote cameras and there’s… something there, but there are no people, no bodies.”

  “Something?”

  The civilian shook his head. “We don’t know. The cameras won’t image it. It’s just a dead point in the middle of the room. Can you remember anything of what happened?”

  I was busy attacking Larry Day. “They were doing a full-scale run,” he said. “Everyone was counting down and then there was…” He looked at them. “Sorry.”

  “Did anything seem out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

  Yes, I’d just found out Larry Day burned my house down. “No, everything seemed normal. But I’m not a physicist, I’m a journalist.”

  “Where do you… go?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere. Nowhere. Anywhere.”

  The general said, “We’ll go now, but others will want to speak with you. Thus far, you’re the only survivor to whom we have access, and we want to understand what happened at the SCS as much as you do. If you continue to cooperate, I don’t see any reason for unpleasantness. But for now, I think we’ll leave the vest and the sedation in place. Please don’t try to go, um, anywhere.”

  After they’d gone, he sat quietly in the chair—after all, there was nothing much else to do—and tried to address the probability that this was not a dream. Something really had happened at the SCS, and it really had done something to him. Which meant that everything else was real too. And what was that only survivor to whom we have access about?

  HE THOUGHT THE IV must be remote controlled, or at least on a timer, because he drifted away periodically into a dreamless sleep, and when he woke there were usually a couple of people in the room with him asking questions. They were mostly the same questions, and he mostly gave the same answer: I don’t know. But they broke up the monotony, and he gradually, bit by bit, learned stuff himself.

  The accident had happened over a year ago, which was a shock. He had… reappeared? manifested? eight months later at Fort Bragg, where he had caused some unspecified emergency before disappearing again. Quite why he had appeared at Fort Bragg was a mystery to him; he didn’t even know where it was. The entire facility had been evacuated and was under quarantine; a patrol had spotted him and brought him down. Nobody would tell him where he was. They kept asking him about Cairo.

  Time passed, he supposed, but there was no way of telling how much. He woke at one point to find an IV in his other arm, presumably to feed and keep him hydrated, and occasionally he regained consciousness wearing fresh coveralls and a feeling that he had at least been sponged down. Apart from that, nothing changed.

  One day, he woke up and he was being wheeled along a corridor. Someone in all-black combat gear was walking in front of him carrying an automatic rifle, and he could hear the footsteps of perhaps four more bringing up the rear.

  The lead guard stopped at a door and opened it, and Alex was wheeled into a room with a desk and several chairs. There were two men in the room. One was tall and thin and in late middle age, with a face that was all hard angles. The other was younger, with dark curly hair, wearing chinos and a polo shirt and a windbreaker.

  “Mr Dolan,” said the older man. “My name is Flynn. This is my colleague, Mr Maserati.”

  “Dominic.” The younger man raised a hand in greeting. “Everyone calls me Dom.”

  Flynn looked at the guards. “Get those things off him,” he said.

  “Sir, we’re under orders—” began one of the guards.

  “Yes,” Flynn interrupted. “You’re under my orders. Now get them off him.”

  There was a moment’s pause, then the guard who had spoken came round and cut the cable ties attaching Alex to the chair. Alex sat where he was for a moment, then allowed himself a delicious slouch.

  “And the rest,” Flynn said.

  The guards unbuttoned the execution vest and helped Alex out of it and all the other paraphernalia. They left the IVs in place.

  “Okay,” Flynn said. “Dismissed.”

  “Sir—” said the first guard, but the look on Flynn’s face changed his mind. The men left the room, then it was just Alex and Flynn and Dom Maserati looking at each other.

  “It might be best if you sit where you are while we have this conversation,” Flynn said. “You’ve been in that chair for over a week and you’ll probably pass out if you try to stand up.”

  “I feel fine,” Alex told him.

  “You feel fine because you’re under sedation. We’ll get you off that, presently.”

  “Who are you?”

  Flynn and Dom glanced at each other. “There has been something of a turf war going on over you, Mr Dolan,” Flynn told him. “A turf war which I have won, for the moment.”

  “We’re the good guys,” said Dom. “The other guys are good guys too, I guess, but we’re better.”

  “You’ve been treated badly,” Flynn said, “and I apologise for that.”

  Alex looked at them. “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You’re in Quantico, Virginia,” said Flynn. “At the FBI Academy.”

  “That’s one of the reasons why we’re better,” Dom said. “We don’t mind telling you where you are.”

  “Are you the FBI?”

  “I was CIA,” Flynn said. “Now I’m without portfolio, so to speak. Dom here comes to us from the DEA. His career’s been much more interesting than mine.”

  Dom gr
inned and shook his head and said, “Nah.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Alex. “Are you comedians or something?”

  Flynn sighed heavily, pulled a chair round, and sat down almost knee-to-knee with Alex. “Your little visit to Bragg caused two fatal heart attacks and put six people into comas, Mr Dolan,” he said evenly. “Two of them still haven’t recovered. So, no, we’re not comedians.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Alex. “I’m sorry.” He tried to make it sound convincing.

  “We’ve been tasked with working out what to do with you,” Flynn went on. “Whatever happened at the SCS, it seems to have left you with certain… abilities. We don’t know how it happened, and we don’t know the extent of those abilities, and that has made certain authority figures somewhat excitable. I see my job, chiefly, as trying to get everyone to calm the fuck down.” He looked Alex in the eye. “Are we on the same page here?”

  Alex nodded. “Calm is good.”

  “All that fancy paraphernalia,” said Flynn. “The portable electric chair. It wasn’t a problem for you, was it.”

  Alex didn’t know for sure, but he suspected not. He put a finger to his lips. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  Flynn nodded. “So, we can’t confine you. And bearing in mind your… unique situation, exploring the limits of your mortality might prove counterproductive.”

  Exploring the limits of your mortality. Alex liked that. He said, “I think you could probably kill me. If you took me by surprise. I’m still exploring limits myself.”

  “Duly noted,” said Flynn. “So, we have something of a problem. Here you are, with certain abilities, the parameters of which we’re all still uncertain.”