A Very Good Man

by P. S. Power

  Brian thought about that, “Um, could I get a razor? I need to shave this growth off. Not really something I can do, grow a real beard. This fuzz on my face looks ridiculous.”

  Ken chuckled and told Brian that he'd see what they could come up with. The man did better than that, even helping him shave, since Brian couldn't hold a razor yet. It felt awkward, but nice to have the itching mess gone. A doctor, one he didn't recognize really, but who felt familiar if that made any sense, came in and asked some questions about how things were going. Brian asked some of his own when the other man had finished.

  “So, I'm not trying to be a whiner here or anything, honest, but are my hands permanently crippled? I mean, can I get use of them back maybe?” Flexing his hands he tried to show the man what he meant. Working them feebly, barely getting them half closed.

  The doctor didn't tell him that it would all be normal again, but he sounded hopeful about him regaining most, maybe even all normal use of them. Enough for playing video games and... other things young men were known for.

  Brian gave him a look. “Dude... I'm lying here asking you if I'm crippled for life and you make a masturbation joke?” He smiled after about ten seconds, it hurt on the right side still, but he did it anyway. A small snort escaped him. “Funny! Well, it can't be that dire then, can it? As long as all the important things come back. After all, that's pretty much my love life we're talking about.”

  They were both laughing when the woman that gave him food – and might be beaten by the police – came in. His head had cleared enough that he realized that had been a hypothetical beating not a real one. She smiled when she saw them talking so happily.

  The doctor he'd been talking to excused himself, his smile leaving suddenly, replaced by a more professional look and nodded to the woman as he passed her on the way to the door murmuring, “Doctor Tull” as he passed. The woman, wearing a pale pink dress today with a tan sweater over the top called the man Doctor Richards and moved past him toward Brian with an intense focus.

  “Mr. Yi? I don't know if you remember me, my name's Diane Tull...” Her hair had streaks of gray in the sandy blond he saw now that his head had cleared a little, and she wore gold wire-rimmed glasses that either she hadn't before or that had been there the whole time and he just hadn't noticed. Drugs, at least the good kind they'd been giving him, apparently could do that. Make you not see what was really there.

  He smiled. “The woman the police were coming to torture in my place?” Brian made his voice wry, feeling more than a bit embarrassed about the whole thing. “I'm sorry about that... Obviously I get the hypothetical now, I was just really out of it at the time. I blame the drugs personally. You know so I don't have to accept responsibility for looking like a total freak like that? It's a good plan, don't you think? Though talking about it like this now probably shows a little too much insight to really sell that one.”

  The woman grinned. “Don't let it worry you. It was actually kind of touching to tell the truth, nice to know that someone would try to protect me like that, even if they weren't really coming for me.” She asked if it would be all right for her to sit, since they had some things to talk about.

  He gestured to the chair, a soft looking cloth covered thing with a thick tan cushion on the seat and a shiny silver metal frame. It must have been there the whole time, people had been sitting after all, Lancaster the government agent had been in a few times, this lady, and Ken the nurse who'd come and read to him, even if he couldn't recall what the man had said. Something about a woman named Gwen stuck in another world? Just having someone there had made him feel better.

  As she sat he spoke again. “We need to talk? Are you sure? Every time a woman in my life has said that it meant that we were breaking up.” He tried to keep his face straight as he teased the woman gently. “If that's the case I promise I can fix whatever it is I've done wrong. I'll be more romantic and lose weight, I promise.”

  Brian managed to keep his face deadpan for a while as the woman chuckled and then winked at him.

  “Just the opposite in a way, Brian. I actually think we should start seeing a lot more of each other...” Her own face had lost expression, but she watched him closely. He knew his eyes had gotten wide.

  Really it was the best offer he'd had in almost two years... She was older than him, a trace of wrinkles around the edges, thin... but cute enough. Given that she'd seen him beaten up so much when she'd seen him each time, she must be a saint to even consider it.

  Her smile let him know that she was just playing back, so Brian sighed and shook his head dramatically.

  “I should have known that it would be too good to be true. Sigh oh sigh.”

  Leaning in she touched his hand briefly, which didn't hurt, he realized, the bruises there having faded over the last days, leaving discolored skin now, but not the black and blue mottling that had been there from when he'd hit the guy with the gun.

  The idea of him having tried to take on an armed man and that Infected guy at the same time boggled his mind for a moment. Then he felt a crushing wave of anger. At himself. He'd failed and that innocent woman had died because he wasn't... enough. Not even close.

  The look must have passed over his face, because the doctor asked him what was wrong, probably afraid she'd insulted him or something. Brian didn't want her to feel bad, it wasn't anything to do with her, so he explained quietly.

  After a while she pulled out a yellow pad from the bag she carried, a beige or cream colored thing, Brian didn't know the exact name to call the shade. Much past primary colors his names for things started to get more than a bit creative. Then she pointed at something on the paper.

  “Her name, the woman, was Barbara Dorn, Barbie to her friends, she worked as the counter person at a mechanics shop in the same town the bar is located in. She's the sixty-eighth victim of a serial/spree killer known as the Jackal. You fought with him and his accomplice, a non-infected man. We don't have a name for him yet. In the last fifteen days they've killed twenty-seven more people, including five members of a CERT team in Houston Texas. Five armed men, wearing body armor. I know it won't help, telling you that it wasn't your fault, your first modality won't let that be enough for you. But I wanted you to know that no one else, not even professionals with training for this, have been able to do any better than you did.” She put the pad down on her lap, out of view as he laid in the bed.

  Brian worked the white control lever, raising the bed as far as it could go.

  Once sitting all the way up he swallowed, “I know that I couldn't really be expected to win, intellectually. I mean, if they'd been two girl scouts hitting me with boxes of cookies and pillows it would have been a tossup as far as a who'd come out on top, so putting me against some super-powered psycho and his even crazier armed buddy is just... insane. I really know that, I swear!” He shook a little, the anger at himself coming back as he thought about the fight. “But if I could have just gotten her away somehow... Run or something. Run better... I tried and it didn't work. Or fought them harder or... something, maybe she could have lived? I don't even know what they did to her...”

  Doctor Tull just shook her head, but Lancaster spoke, walking in just in time to hear the question.

  “They... raped her for several hours, then the Infected known as the Jackal killed her, literally eating her alive. His friend then sodomized the corpse – what was left of it – and relieved himself on the other dead bodies. Most of this hasn't made the news, Brian, and just shouldn't, not ever, so if anyone asks about it, don't let it out. The fact that these fucks are killing so many people already has the country in an uproar. We have to stop them.” The agent had dressed in a black suit again, but this time with a deep green shirt on underneath.

  Maybe he had a date, Brian mused.

  Then the thought made him wince. Barbara Dorn wouldn't have any more dates now. Brian would have traded his life for hers, but he'd had that chance and left her there for them to... He couldn't even make himself
think all the words. They were monsters of a kind that shouldn't even be able to exist, much less be allowed to.

  What those men, those things, he decided, because no one human could to something like that, had done, horrified him and made him angry again. Brian worried out loud that anger seemed to be that strong emotion thing in him. He'd felt it so often since all of this had happened, building slowly, but there. It almost had to be his thing, didn't it?

  Next to him the doctor looked down for a moment, checking her notes again he saw, not looking down in embarrassment or anything.

  “Not at all, Brian. That anger, even the rage you've felt, is normal and even healthy. Some bad people have done some really awful things and you should be angry about it. Agent Lancaster had to stop some of his fellow agents from hunting down and killing the police that tortured you last week, which I know was hard for him because he probably wanted to kill them himself. As for what happened to Barbara Dorn and the other victims of these killers... Anyone hearing about it should feel either anger or fear. That you picked anger doesn't mean you're bad or that you'll feel that kind of thing all the time, it just means you're sane and probably willing to try and stop them, rather than just hiding. Both would be normal though.” She waited for him to say something, Brian noticed, as if there would be some question she expected from him, even wanted.

  He didn't have a clue what that would be.

  Finally Lancaster broke the silence, a small grin on his face. “Your first mode, the primary emotion that you display, isn't anger or anything negative at all, Brian. I don't know if it will shake out differently over time, sometimes things like this do, but it seems to be a kind of focus on protecting other people, a type of self-sacrifice. Obviously you're not stupid about it, you'd kill those pricks if you could, so it's not just compassion, and it's not blind, but you'd put yourself in front of anyone in danger. Basically like a mother would with a child only to an extreme.” The large, powerfully built man waved his hand. “Or maybe like a father willing to do anything to protect his family. I'm not calling you a chick or anything.” His expression looked halfway between a smile and a smirk when he said it.

  Brian shifted uneasily and put his hands down carefully, making sure they were flat on the bed before trying to push himself back. He slid and Lancaster looked like he might try to help, but the doctor gave the man a look with a small head shake, making him back off so that the younger man could do it himself. It took about a minute to get comfortable, having slipped further down twice, the sheets a bit slippery under him for some reason. It was the plastic under the cloth that did it.

  The woman sitting by him finally saw he'd finished and resumed talking. “Brian, the thing is, as near as our experts can tell with limited data, your ability doesn't have any conscious control mechanism, which leaves us with two main options to explore. The first is what we've been doing already, keeping you drugged into insensibility, which fools your subconscious mind into thinking you're asleep. Apparently you're safe then, as far as we can tell from the readings and tests we've done. Drugged or sleeping. If you want we can keep you that way indefinitely, so that you never have to go through something like what you have again.” Her lips tightened going slightly white around the edges, making little wrinkles appear. It wasn't a happy thing at all.

  “The other option is to get you training. We think, and this is tentative, that if you're in enough pain or discomfort, your ability won't put you into danger. That level seems pretty extreme, but we believe that if you train hard enough, the muscle soreness and discomfort should be enough to buy you some time to learn what you need to survive.”

  Going silent, the woman took a deep breath, it caught on the way out, as if she didn't want to speak the next words. After a minute of this she looked at Lancaster and shook her head, telling him that she just couldn't say the rest of it, or so it seemed to Brian. The big agent took a single step closer to the woman and put a hand on her shoulder for a moment before taking over.

  “The thing is, Brian, both of these options have massive problems. If you choose the drugs, you're basically going to have to be kept so stoned all the time that you won't have a real life. After a while these things will permanently impair your ability to reason. We might as well lobotomize you, which has also been considered, since no kind of drug therapy would leave you any clearer in the long run.

  “If you choose the training... The lab boys have run some projections on it and give you an expected life span of eighteen months to two years at the outside, sooner or later you'll run into some Infected that you can't escape from in time, or you'll keep fighting, trying to protect people when you should be running. To make it worse, in order to give you a chance to learn first, in the first few months or so, we have to work you nearly to death. You can be drugged at night, sometimes, so that you can sleep, but during the day you have to feel the pain, at least be really uncomfortable, all the time.”

  Both the people next to him looked down then, which Brian got. No matter what he did, he'd have a death sentence hanging over him. One a virtual death that could take decades, but wasn't living at all. The other, well, it sounded sucky to him.

  His body had been carefully honed over the years to excel at eating Twinkies and sitting on a sofa playing video games, maybe stand and pack toilet paper into boxes, the job he'd kept for the last three years. He couldn't even imagine what kind of training they meant and felt a little afraid to ask. How hard did you have to work to stay in constant discomfort, much less pain?

  Brian shrugged, thinking as carefully about all this as he could. He had two paths, either one led to death of a sort, one had a lot of pain, the other might as well just be putting a bullet in his brain for all he'd be able to know about the world around him. Really, neither one was all that attractive, even considering that he personally valued being able to think over not hurting. For now at least.

  Pain... bit monkey balls. Brian knew that one first hand, and didn't really want any more if he could help it.

  It really only left one thing for him to ask. Pretty much the only thing that mattered in the end.

  “So, if I do it, this training thing, do you think I can help anyone? Can I learn enough to even save one person?” He didn't say this to the doctor, but to the agent, an obviously tough guy that didn't soft peddle his answers. Brian held his breath, because if he couldn't help anyone, there wouldn't be any point to taking either option. Then a bullet to the brain would help everyone more than anything else would.

  The tall man shrugged.

  “Yeah. I mean, look kid, there's no guarantee here. You could go out the first time and have to fight the toughest Infected on the planet. If that happens you're just dead. Anyone would be. Then again, you might go years without facing another infected at all. You could be knifed, shot, who knows what the fuck all, but against people like that, low level Infected or regular people, you could do a lot. You're young, and balls-out tough. I know you don't think that's true, but I've seen the tape of you fighting in the bar. You suck, sure, but you didn't stop trying, even when most people would have quit fighting and just curled up crying. I think that if it had just been the gunman you might have even won, Brian. Untrained against an armed man, he was reeling a few times there and if his buddy hadn't bailed him out... With training? Yeah, hell yeah in fact. I think you can do it. The guys from the lab, the number crunchers... They think, given everything so far that you can save between twelve and eighteen people before you buy it.” He spread his large hands, his face looked sad, like he was telling Brian that he had to take the suicide mission... or else everyone else paid for it.

  That sounded about right.

  Well, twelve to eighteen people anyway. Still...

  Looking down at his hands on the covers Brian asked for some time to think about it, knowing that there wasn't a real choice. He suffered and tried or other people died because he didn't. What else could he do really? He just wanted to take a little time to mourn for his life, as stupid a
s that sounded. No matter what, he was functionally dead.

  Brian had to accept that.

  They left, saying they'd be back in a few hours. He nodded and tried to give them a smile, which made the doctor wince. She obviously got some of what would be going on in his head. Of course, she also knew that he didn't have a choice in this, Lancaster had to know too, working with people like him all the time. He'd try to save people if he could. It was his thing, his “first mode” the agent had called it.

  Brian didn't cry, having lost all his tears days ago. In its own way, the beatings and pain the police had put him through were kind of a blessing, weren't they? He'd already known and accepted he'd die. Going back to the idea felt a lot easier now than it had the first time.

  Brian just sat with the idea. He was dead. Nothing would change that. He couldn't run from it and no one in the world could bail him out. But he had a chance to make his death mean something, which was a lot more than most people got. Wasn't it?

  Yeah, it really was. What was he doing with his life anyway? Eating himself to death?