In the face I could still see bits and pieces of my Eric, but they had obviously been put through the most drastic Photoshop face-lift I had ever seen. In the lens of all the research I had done this morning, I could only see Eric as a comic book character given real form. Every bit of it screamed unnaturally to my senses, exactly as it had during the Push Battle earlier.
“No, you shouldn’t.” I tried to keep my will totally focused on what approaches to take, but I couldn’t help but be a little distracted by the pain starting to develop in my eyes. It was like I was continually forced to try to focus on a double image: this new heroic Eric superimposed over the Eric I knew. I ignored the pain. “If you thought I would sit at home and go about my routine like a good little girl, you never had any idea who I am.”
“You are right, of course. I did expect to see you sooner as opposed to later.” He folded his arms behind his back. Though his expression was pensive with a pleasant smile, both Erics had a slight tick of an eyebrow, as if he was having a troubling thought. “I am pleased that you are here now, though.”
“Look, Eric - ”
“No, that was the old me,” he interrupted. “I think I should be called something new now. Maybe I will let the media come up with a name for me. Like they did for Superman.”
“No matter how much you change on the outside, you’re still Eric Flynn to me.” I took a step towards him. Every inch forward made my skin crawl, but I suppressed every nervous impulse. “Do you have any idea what your experiment is doing out there?”
His brow was knitting together, his eyes (all four of them) focusing on me as if seeing me for the first time. I thought, for a moment, he was going to react aggressively as I saw those outward signs of a fight-or-flight reaction pop up like streetlights at dusk, but he didn’t move. The fear, already locked in it’s box, grew stronger, beating at the box lid. I hadn’t just seen his muscles tense. They were so unnaturally powerful I actually felt the vibrations in the air as they flexed.
“Of course I do.” He turned his gaze away from me towards the graves of his parents. I barely caught the motion as a blur. “Everywhere around the world, people are being given great power and a chance to use that power to make the world a better place. In a few days, I am going to travel the world, find the people who were Pushed, and make them the greatest force for good this world has ever seen. No one is going to have to fear for anything ever again.”
“What? What's wrong with you? This is the big plan? This is the best idea that the smartest man I’ve ever known can come up with?” I don’t know why I felt this growing anger in me. I wasn’t sure if it was another alien impulse or whether it was the sheer ignorance Eric had on display. “Your Whiteout has already killed two hundred people! In thirteen hours! This isn’t one of your damn comic books, Eric, this is wrong.” Calm tones, Irene, be calm, Rational Irene said like a mantra.
“You do not even begin to understand what is going on, dear.” The double Eric’s voice had an edge to it. I couldn’t identify it; it was an alien tone. “This new world, it came from me. My thoughts, my beliefs, Pure and untainted. There is no way that, once the changes finish taking hold, when consensual reality settles, that things will not be perfect.” He waved a hand dismissive in my direction, still not facing me. “All of this violence and death, it is the death throes of the sad, corrupt world that was here before. A world that let good people die for no reason. That let innocent children starve and let corrupt men grow fat.”
“So this is better? I can feel what you did in my head, trying to make me into a good little cog of your new reality.” I clenched the hand still gripping my helmet and reached out for Eric’s shoulder. He was going to look me in the eye if we were going to talk, no matter who he thought he was now. “You have no right to change me or anyone else into something they aren't.” Before my hand could reach him, there was another blur and he was staring at me. His eyes were entirely inhuman now, solid orbs spilling out pure white light.
“Why do you want to fight this so much, Irene? Why can you not be happy? Everyone is going to be happy, I swear!” Gone was the timbre of a god-made-flesh, this was the pleading of the all-too-flawed Eric I knew. “Give my new world a chance. I spent days calculating the exact brainwave patterns to emulate. I thought of everything!”
Eric moved forward, almost reaching out for my embrace, but he hovered barely out of reach. The closeness made all of my senses scream. I wanted to either run or lash out in some primal fashion. I wasn’t going to do either, I told myself.
“Are you sure? You said yourself that belief is what powers this whole God particle thing.” I pushed against the atavistic stew of emotions in me to concentrate on the rational and the willful. “The fact that I am fighting off this change, how many other people like me are there? What about the psychos and criminals out there, how many of them got the Push? Jesus, Eric, think about how your comics go. How great is the world in most of those books?” I couldn’t tell if my words were having any effect, but dammit, I was on a roll and wasn’t going to stop.
“It’s a great place if you have powers, but to be the everyday man stuck in the middle of a never-ending conflict? Sure, the heroes and villains never seem to die and if they do, they come back, but what about all of those innocents you don’t see when the building collapses or the bridge explodes or one of a million other tragedies? Even now, our world ... your world ... isn’t so antiseptic.”
“No. There is nothing I have left to go back to.”
“That’s your stubborn side talking, Eric. You’re smarter than this. Stop letting Mr. Hero do the talking and think like a scientist.”
“NO!” The sudden shout was like thunder in a crystal-clear sky. One downside to being a physiologist is having an intimate understanding of your body’s signs of distress. The sudden pain in both of my ears and wave of dizziness was obviously caused by the immediate rupturing of both of my eardrums. The exclamation was followed by a sudden look of fear? Apprehension? Shame? I wasn’t sure. “Irene, I - ”
I hit him with the only thing I had that wasn’t soft squishy mortal tissue: my motorcycle helmet. I don’t even know, in hindsight, why exactly I wanted to hit him. I had a sackful of valid reasons at this point. Whatever the precise reason, my intent was razor focused and my will was unwavering: I wanted him to feel a little bit of the pain he just inflicted on me. A part of me knew, deep down, that he only let himself get hit because Eric was absolutely sure there was no way he could be hurt by mere-mortal Irene.
Right before impact, I felt it for the first time. It was sweeter than adrenaline and more addicting than endorphin. It was like my entire mind and body was in complete and total agreement for the first time ever and every muscle and fiber of tissue fired at exactly the right time to make this the most perfect movement a human body could make. It was like hysterical strength only a thousand times more extreme.
The helmet exploded into a million pieces as the vibration of the impact added another peal of thunder to the growing storm of sounds. It was like the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object with all the side-effects such an impact would cause in the real world. His perfect Grecian head spun to the side with a look of utter surprise (a first for Eric, no matter the face) and the rest of his body followed, corkscrewing twice in the air before landing heavily in a black marble monument, cracking it in two.
Shards of plastic and bits of metal exploded like shrapnel, gouging into my leathers and, in more than a few places, my skin. I didn’t feel the pain, at least not at that moment, but in addition to all those little pinpricks of injury, I knew I had sprained at least half the muscles in my arm. I may have even broke something. I will still, though, riding high on whatever was going on in my mind and body.
Despite the impact and the rough landing, Eric wasn’t a normal man anymore. My initial thought of a god-made-flesh seemed fairly accurate as he righted himself instantly, suspended by whatever force let him fly in the first place. I expected that I was
about to be splattered like a red mist across the graveyard and tensed. If I was going to be killed by a crazy ex-boyfriend, I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to at least bloody a god’s nose in the process. A second passed and I didn’t explode. Instead, Eric looked puzzled as he hovered there, one massive hand rubbing his perfectly-sculpted new chin.
“You are not Pushed but still you actually caused me discomfort.”
“Hurt me again and I’ll show you a lot more than discomfort, Eric!” I was going for tough, but whatever I had just experienced was fading, replaced by wholly insufficient adrenaline and conventional human pain.
“I did not mean to. Irene. I am sorry.” God Eric only looked sad, but Real Eric looked like he was crying. “But you must trust me. You will see.”
“I can’t trust you. Not anymore.” I was coming to the realization that I had hurt myself more than I thought. The world was getting gray around the edges from the mounting agony. I found myself leaning against Heinrich Flynn’s headstone for support, my strained arm dangling funnily to one side.
“Eric ... Schuller. Don’t kill him.” Maybe if I could keep Eric from crossing that moral event horizon, I could still reason with him later.
“Why would you ever think I wanted to kill him? That would never bring back my parents.” The sadness in Eric’s eyes was gone again. The inhuman confidence of before had returned. It was an ugly sight.
My body was sending every signal of imminent collapse. It wasn’t the pain or the bleeding, it was something more. It was as if I had spent every bit of energy my body could muster in those few seconds of glory. I know I must have been starting to slur when I replied.
“But ... no ... you can’t.” Again, the last puzzle piece fell into place a little too late. He wasn’t going to kill Schuller. He was going to try to bring his parents back from the dead. To me, that seemed even more twisted than the murder I thought he had been planning.
I wanted to tell him so but I finally succumbed under the black blanket of unconsciousness.
Chapter 6 Rise
Of all the things to rouse me from unconsciousness, it had to be my cellphone. Maybe it was the fact that the ring tone (The Year 1812 by Tchaikovsky) made my dormant brain realize it was the dean calling. Maybe it was simply a Pavlovian response ingrained in modern First world citizens to answer anything that was ringing.
Either way, I was awoken to the most complete full body ache I had ever experienced. I had no desire to open my eyes, so I sent my left arm in search of the offending noise. It felt around pillows, sheets, eventually finding the nightstand and its ultimate goal. Cracking my eyes open, I brought the phone to me, stabbed the answer button, and forced sound out of my mouth.
“Hello?” That’s what I attempted to say, but I don’t know if I managed to get it quite right.
“Dr. Roman?” Yes, it was Dean Reginald Tyson. My boss. “You really don’t sound well.”
“Mmmhmm.” My mind, still not even sure where I was or how I got here, tried to grasp what was going on. “ ... bad flu. Dr. Flynn too.”
“Yes, Mr. Louis informed me.” The older man tried to erase any notes of concern for my condition from his voice. “Well, it was irresponsible not to call me directly, especially before the original meeting. Frankly, you should feel lucky that this Whiteout thing has occurred.” Some shred of joviality returned to his voice as the events of the past day started coming back to me.
“Hrm? Why?” Yes, I was dazzling him with my vocabulary today.
“Isn’t it obvious? This is the greatest scientific event in modern times. Every aspect of the Whiteout and the Push need to be analyzed and understood.” Dean Tyson seemed almost jubilant. “We’re getting word that both the federal and state governments are about to flood the scientific community with money to get to work on this.”
“That’s great, Dean,” I replied, my command of speech slowly returning. “Back to the meeting, when do we reschedule? This won’t last more than a day or two tops.”
“Well, Irene, I’m afraid to say that your current project is going on the back burner for the moment. Low priority.” My stomach sank. Even though my machine was an accomplice to this disaster, I still wanted it be acknowledged, important even. “Don’t worry though, it’s only because I have a much more important and prestigious assignment for your research group.” He paused, as if waiting to be prompted.
“I can’t wait to hear about it, Dean Tyson.” I hoped my lack of enthusiasm was masked by the pain in my voice.
“I’ll have all the details some time tomorrow, so I suggest you concentrate on getting better. Tell Eric hello for me.” While I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with Reginald, he wasn’t a bad person.
“I will, Reggie. Hopefully I will see you in your office tomorrow.”
The dean made his goodbyes and hung up. I lay there, still on my side, with only the barest illumination from the cellphone’s screen. The time was 8:23 p.m. Six hours had passed from when I had my discussion, if that was even the right word, with Eric.
What worried me is that I had no idea how I wound up here in our, no, my own bed. I had no idea what kind of shape I was in other than ‘pain’. What happened to Eric or what he may have done at the graveyard after I passed out, all unknowns.
I chided myself mentally. If I was so worried about it, I just had to find out, didn’t I? With that in mind, I forced myself to slide out of bed and turn on the lights. Now that I could see properly, I could tell someone had changed me out of my cut and bloodied motorcycle leathers into one of the over-sized T-shirts I preferred to sleep in.
My forearm was in a walking cast; I suppose I had been right in my initial thought that I had broken something. The uncovered part of my right arm had a line of splotchy bruising, self-inflicted from whatever I did to myself and the backlash from impacting a physical god’s face. The rest of my body was dotted with scabbed-over cuts. Someone had taken the time to attend to all of my injuries carefully.
What wasn’t so obvious was how I was in such good shape. Even if I had been given immediate medical attention, I should still be hurt worse than this. It had just been six hours after all.
Everything ached, yes, but, from the muscle exertion and the impact alone, I should be feeling more sprains, have more bruises. Where I had the protection of the leathers, sure, scratches and scabs from the shrapnel would make sense, but, especially on my unprotected face, there should have been some serious lacerations and punctures. The cast on my arm was far too light for a serious fracture, which was what I was sure I should have.
Maybe in the heat of the moment everything seemed worse than it did. I could have simply been fooling myself. It’s not like I wasn’t under excessive amounts of stress at the time. Just as likely, I could have wound up excessively lucky. It’s not like I had been able to examine my injuries before I passed out. No matter how well I know my own body, it doesn’t take the place of proper observation.
I shuffled into the living room, trying to both accept my good fortune and be suspicious of it at the same time. Everything was as it should be, just as I had left it before going to the graveyard, with only a few exceptions: my keys were on the kitchen counter, not on the key hook as they should be, there were a few dirt and grass spots in the carpet that made a vague trail to the bedroom, and there was a brand-new motorcycle helmet sitting next to the keys. On the top of it was a Post-It note, filled with instantly recognizable handwriting.
Irene: Please forgive me for what happened today. I had no intention of causing you pain or discomfort. I can see that, logically, I must give you time to adjust to the new reality we all find ourselves in. I am sure that, once everything settles, you will see that what I did was necessary and will be better for the world as a whole than the course we were embarked on. I hope that when that time comes we can forge a new relationship built with the trust you desire.
I have always worked all my life to be in control. Not controlling of other people per se, but in control of myself. It w
as in the interest of that control that I clamped down on the raging anger in me.
How insulting was it for the guy who had been manipulating and lying to me for a year to go on about how, if I only stood back and accepted everything, it would turn out he was right and then we’d simply get back together, all the better for it? What was that about the trust I desire? What relationship can be built on anything other than trust?
My hands clenched into fists, knuckles white as a ghost, and I counted backwards not from ten but from a hundred this time. After a few minutes of counting, I could feel my body relax as I wrangled control away from my raging emotions. If I let my anger go unchecked, I was being manipulated by him as surely as when he was lying to my face. He would be the one being the genesis of my actions, not me.
Angry or not, the one thing I was sure on was that I wasn’t going to sit back and accept this. Even if the rest of the world was ready to let the Whiteout rewire their brains, I wasn’t going to give in. A surge of strange thoughts tried to crowd into my brain, but I would not allow it. For whatever reason, I still knew the truth and I wasn’t going to let my world be dictated by lies.
It may have been a pointless gesture, but I snatched the note off the helmet, tore it into as many pieces as I could and tossed the paper into the air. I was about to spur myself into action; turn on the TV, fire up the computer, and find out what was going on so I could plan my next move; when I felt strangely faint. Not from pain, but from the greatest feeling of hunger I ever had in my life.
I leaned against the counter for a moment, trying to figure how I would possibly be so hungry. It's not like I had skipped any meals today. I had no answers. It didn’t make any scientific sense but, for now, I gave in to my body’s needs and opened the refrigerator.
The Push Chronicles (Book 1): Indomitable Page 4
