Marrow

by Preston Norton

  I didn’t budge. I stared my father down like he was the real enemy—an enemy who I loved and hated all at the same time.

  “Dammit, Marrow!” he screamed. “Did you hear me?”

  “Screw you,” I said.

  That shut my dad up. He didn’t seem to know how to respond to this.

  “You think you can just waltz into my life and tell me what to do?” I said. “You may be my dad, but you don’t get that privilege until you’ve earned it. You don’t get to die for me until you’ve lived for me, okay? If you’re going to fight Fantom, I’m going to fight him with you, and that’s that. Got it?”

  Spine glared at me. His hard, heavy gaze was this furious thing, breathing fire out of his irises. And then it calmed. Just like that—like the eye of a storm. He walked toward me and placed a firm hand on my shoulder. “Marrow, I’ve lived every day of your life for you, even if you couldn’t see it. If I’m not willing to lose my life for you, how can I protect you?”

  His gaze shifted to Nightmare who was still observing quietly.

  “Nightmare,” he said, “if you’ve ever been my friend, you will get my son out of here right now.”

  Nightmare’s face was as grim as it was ugly—maybe even grimmer—which seemed like a universal anomaly considering the unparalleled level of catastrophic ugliness that was his face.

  He nodded and stepped forward.

  “Wait, what?” I said. “No. Nightmare, NO! I swear, if you—!”

  But it was too late. Suddenly, I was sinking in a tar pit—an honest-to-freaking-goodness tar pit!—except not really because I already knew this was yet another one of Nightmare’s hallucinations rendering me defenseless. A lake, thick and black and bubbling—hot but not scalding—like an immense molasses Jacuzzi. The sky was a bleak, gray slate, encompassed by a swampy horizon. Endless, rotting marsh.

  But I wasn’t defenseless.

  “No,” I said. I tapped into the intricate bone density of my skull, fluctuating it to any and every degree. I felt like I was playing with the sound functions on a car stereo. “No no no no no no no no no no no no no no!”

  I could shut it off. I had to shut it off. Because if I didn’t, my dad would die. He didn’t stand a chance against Fantom all by himself.

  “DAD!” I screamed.

  The swamp shattered—like I had taken a baseball bat to the infinite TV screen of life. The illusion fell away in broken shards. Suddenly, I was bouncing up and down, slung over someone’s shoulder—Nightmare’s, obviously.

  A short distance behind us, Spine was levitating in the air, his wrists and ankles pinned by an invisible force. He was left to squirm fruitlessly against a power that could not be overcome or defied by physical strength.

  Fantom loomed over him.

  “I’ve invested way too much time and energy in you,” said Fantom. “I’m going to save your death for later. I’m going to savor it. But, in the meantime, we need to make you fit in a to-go box.”

  One by one, Spine’s arms and legs snapped and cracked, breaking at awkward angles. He screamed. Howled. An animalistic sound that defied humanity.

  “Dad!”

  Fantom’s glowing green eyes homed in on Nightmare and me. He tossed Spine aside like a crumpled piece of trash.

  A sliding glass door zipped shut between us—but only for a second.

  The door shattered before it could even detect Fantom’s presence. He blasted through it, and broken shards rained down. Nightmare and I toppled across the floor. I hit the glass wall to the side, my armor absorbing some of the impact. Before Nightmare even stopped rolling, Fantom lifted a hand. Nightmare rose off the ground, hopelessly suspended.

  “You, on the other hand…” said Fantom. His luminescent eyes shifted past Nightmare to me. “Marrow, would you like to see what happens to people who think they can make a fool of me?”

  Fantom raised both of his hands, palms close together.

  “Marrow…” Nightmare gasped. “Run—”

  Fantom jerked his hands in a circular motion.

  Nightmare’s head snapped sideways. His eyes rolled back, and his body collapsed to the ground in a lifeless heap.

  “NIGHTMARE!” I screamed.

  Before I could even move, Fantom flicked his arm to the side. There was no time to change my density and brace for the impact. My entire body swung sideways, gliding across the ground and smashing into the glass. Shards of bone and glass flew everywhere. My armor was gone. Fantom swooped down behind me. Closing his fist and pulling his arm close, my legs were whipped out from under me. My body hit the floor facedown, almost breaking my nose against the glass. Fantom lifted his heavy boot and pressed it hard against the base of my skull.

  Was it even worth trying to fight back? Just by looking at them, Fantom had broken my dad’s arms and legs and killed Nightmare. He was like a cat toying with an insect. As soon as he was bored torturing me, I was dead.

  My head was too numb to think. My gaze shifted through the glass to a distant sphere on the opposite side of the Tartarus. I blinked when I noticed several police officers congregated on the exact opposite side of the Tartarus. They were pulling something—something humanish, with arms stretching from doorway to doorway.

  “Any last words?” said Fantom. “That’s what villains are supposed to say in a time like this, aren’t they?”

  “Flex…” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Time. I needed just a few more seconds.

  I gritted my teeth, tapping into the bones in my spine and neck. I pushed the density out as hard as I could.

  This was going to hurt.

  Spikes erupted all the way up my back and neck in a centered line. It felt like someone had just sliced a knife all the way down my spinal cord. I felt just enough friction from one particular spike to know it had sliced through Fantom’s foot.

  Fantom and all of Gaia’s voices screamed in a blood-curdling choir of bloody murder. That alone was worth the pain.

  On the opposite end of the Tartarus, the group of police officers flattened against the furthest wall of the chamber, pulling as far as they could go.

  And then they let go.

  Flex flew, feet first, breaking through the glass of the opposite sphere at a near-impossible velocity. He was on a straight path, shooting right at us.

  “I’ll kill you!” said Fantom, limping on one foot. “I’ll tear you into bloody little—”

  Flex crashed through the glass, kicking Fantom right in his snarling face. Fantom flew backwards, smashing out the opposite side of the glass hallway. He plunged down.

  Flex’s impact with Fantom had slowed him considerably, but he teetered on the edge of the jagged glass opening, flailing desperately for balance. I jumped up from the floor, pulling him back.

  “Hooooooooooly crap,” said Flex. His eyes were bulging like golf balls from their sockets. “Remind me never to do that again.”

  I had never been so glad to see Flex. I wanted to hug him and cry a whole bunch, but instead I decided to play it cool and said, “Nice aim.”

  Flex nodded, resting his hands on his knees, breathless. “Yeah, well his face is lit up like a Christmas tree. It’s kind of hard to miss.”

  Flex’s gaze shifted past me. “Nice spikes,” he said, observing the newest additions to my body. “You look like a stegosaurus.”

  I laughed. I never thought I would laugh again, but here I was laughing. It felt weird and wrong and amazing all at the same time. I took a deep breath and braced myself as I retracted the spikes. Fortunately it didn’t hurt nearly as much going back in.

  “YOU,” Fantom roared. “I’LL KILL YOU.”

  His tense form hovered beside the gaping hole in the shattered glass passageway. I jumped back. His and all of Gaia’s voices were seething with fury, green eyes blazing with equal intensity.

  “The next time you try to push someone over the edge,” said Fantom, “you should probably make sure they can’t fly.”

  The air be
hind him rippled as he blasted towards us.

  In that very instant, something new materialized, intercepting Fantom’s path. A solid fist connected with his face, throwing him off course. No sooner did the figure appear, he was gone in an instant.

  Havoc.

  Havoc materialized again directly in front of us. Unlike Sapphire, he was still wearing his mind cuff and didn’t look like he’d be giving it up anytime soon. His face was an uneasy grimace that I had never seen before. I assumed he already knew about Nightmare.

  “You two make a run for it,” he said. “I can hold Fantom back.”

  He didn’t even wait for a response, vanishing an instant later.

  “HAVOOOOOOOOOOC!” Fantom howled. “I’m going to—!”

  Havoc flashed beside him in midair once more, stringing in another swift blow to the face. Fantom spun backwards as Havoc disappeared again.

  “Come on,” said Flex. He grabbed my arm, pulling me beside him in a brisk pace.

  Wearing the mind cuff, Havoc was a formidable obstacle for Fantom. But he was hardly a match. It was only a matter of how long Havoc could keep it up, dancing with the most powerful being on earth.

  The most powerful beings merged together.

  My apprehensive gaze shifted to Nightmare’s lifeless form.

  “No,” I said. I tugged my arm out of his grasp.

  Flex turned and shot me a disbelieving stare. “What do you think you’re doing, Marrow? We have to get out of here or we’re going to die!”

  “What about Havoc?”

  “Are you kidding me? He’s a Teleporter. He can teleport out of here whenever he wants.” Flex grabbed my arm again and started to run, holding even tighter when I struggled again.

  “What about Sapphire and Whisp? What about everyone else on the Tartarus? There’s like a hundred people on here. How are we supposed to get them off?”

  Flex grabbed a handful of his dreadlocks with his free hand and groaned. “I don’t know, Marrow. What do you want me to tell you? Do you want to stay here and fight Fantom? Is that what you want? Even if we both fought him with Havoc, there’s no way we can beat him. He’ll slaughter us.”

  “There has to be something we can do to stop him.”

  “Like what? Go back to this alien’s home planet and find some radioactive space rock that we can use against it? This thing isn’t Superman. There is no kryptonite. This isn’t some comic book, Marrow, this is real life.”

  As Flex spoke, my gaze shifted past him and through the glass passageway. My focus became intent on the Gaia Comet, emanating its green glow—somehow still miraculously attached to the Tartarus.

  “The comet…” I said.

  “What?” said Flex. He turned around, following my gaze to the Gaia Comet. He shook his head furiously. “No, Marrow. That rock isn’t kryptonite. Didn’t you hear Fantom when he said that the comet is what gives him his—?”

  “I’m not talking about using the comet as kryptonite, dummy. I’m talking about destroying it.”

  “Huh?”

  “You said it yourself. The comet gives Fantom his powers. He lives on the Tartarus so he can be near it. And then, when he does something crazy like lifting the Tartarus out of the ocean, he lifts the comet up with it! I mean, it even has the same green glow as his eyes right now. This alien, Gaia, is connected to the comet. If we destroy it…”

  “We destroy Fantom,” said Flex. breathless. “But…what could we possibly hit it with that would destroy it?”

  I had wondered the exact same thing. We were inside a research facility floating a thousand feet or more in the air. Havoc was our only way off of here, and he was preoccupied in a death match with the root of the problem. We had no missiles. No bombs or bazookas.

  But we did have something.

  “Me,” I said. The single word seemed to weigh a million pounds dropping out of my mouth.

  “What?”

  “We have to do the slingshot.”

  “WHAT?”

  “It’s the only weapon we have,” I said. “If we can break the glass at the back of the sphere and I hit you full force in the opposite direction, you should be able to slingshot me back through the barrel of the Cronus Cannon fast enough to—”

  “Are you insane?”

  “I think I can cover myself in bone for protection,” I said. “I’ve been getting better at it and—”

  “Marrow, you’ll die!”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Shooting you a couple hundred miles an hour into a radioactive comet? Yes, I do. It’s suicide.”

  “So is bungee jumping across the Tartarus to kick Fantom in the face.”

  Flex snorted. “That’s different.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “We either do this or we let Fantom kill everyone else on the Tartarus. Besides…if you aren’t willing to lose your life, how can you save anyone?”

  Flex’s jaw went rigid. He stared me down for several long seconds. At first I thought he was going to get mad at me—yell at me for using my father’s words against him.

  Instead, he simply nodded. “Yeah…okay.”

  Neither of us needed any further discussion. We’d already wasted enough time. We rushed down the passageway and into the Cronus Chamber. Flex darted straight for the opening on the Cronus cannon while I dashed to the rounded glass at the back of the sphere. Spinning on one foot, my other leg flew up. I tapped into the bone structure of my foot, blasting density into my swinging kick. The entire honeycomb-shaped glass pane went white in a mosaic of tiny spider-webbing cracks. I kicked again, and the pane shattered.

  When I started back to the opening of the Cronus cannon, Flex was already gripping both sides of the rim, his arms stretched nearly twenty feet. I ducked under his thin, taut arm and continued down the barrel—a seemingly endless stretch of silver masked in a distant green glow. I continued down the stretch for a ways. I’d need all the running start I could get.

  This was it.

  “Marrow?” said Flex. His voice echoed down the barrel.

  “Yeah?”

  His voice hesitated. “I love you, bro.”

  I blinked back the acid moisture that wanted to burn through my eyelids again. “Love you too, bro.”

  Something heavy hit the floor beside Flex—a body. Twitching. Barely alive.

  Havoc.

  There went our distraction.

  “What are you doing?” said Fantom and Gaia’s multitude of voices.

  “Now, Marrow!” Flex screamed. “Now!”

  My bones became light. My feet were clouds on the ground. I was a bullet.

  I shot forward.

  I hit Flex so fast, his entire body folded around me like a ridiculous rubber tarp. We whooshed across the Cronus chamber. As my foot landed on the very edge of the chamber where I had broken the glass barrier, I launched myself forward still. I could feel the tension in Flex’s elasticity as we slowed to a halt in mid-air.

  “What the devil?” said Fantom.

  SNAP!

  I zipped through the Cronus Chamber and into the barrel of the Cronus cannon faster than I could blink. The tunnel whizzed past me in a shadowy silver blur, tinted in the ever-increasing green glow. The racing wind threatened to rip my face off. My senses were numb. I couldn’t even breathe.

  The tunnel exploded behind me. I felt the air ripple and burst. I made the mistake of tilting my head back.

  A red cape flared, gaining on me. The green glow of Fantom’s eyes was gone. Even hidden behind his black mask, the fear was evident in the way his real eyes glistened. In the sick, twisted shape of his mouth…

  I whipped my head forward again. The blazing green of the Gaia Comet was blinding now—like an alien sun. I was only seconds away from impact. Tapping into my skeletal structure, I exploded my density outward, pushing harder than I’d ever pushed before. I was the comet. Spikes erupted—not just from my joints. I felt like I was being stabbed in every pore of my body. Jagged bones splintered out from every inch
of my frame.

  I was swallowed in spikes just as I was swallowed in green infinity.

  Everything went black.

  CHAPTER 38

  I woke up in a world of white.

  Literally.

  There was no floor. There was no ceiling. There was no anything. Just an endless white stretch reaching into infinity. Blinking desperately, I struggled to adjust my eyes to the whiteness. I sat upright on an invisible surface that felt both solid and like nothing at all.

  No. There was something. A gradual golden glow that intensified around me. I was being swallowed in it. I turned both ways, thinking maybe it was coming from behind me. Then I looked down.

  I didn’t have a body.

  At least…not really. Where my body should have been, the whiteness seemed to distort around an invisible shape. I climbed to my feet and glanced at my hands, turning them back and forth. I could make out my outline, but other than that, I was just a transparent distortion. Except for one significant detail…

  The golden glow was coming from me.

  Or from my chest, at least. Floating at my core was a soft, simmering ball of effervescent energy. My invisible outline hardly contained it. The golden rays seared through my transparent form, flooding the whiteness around me. I felt like a miniaturized humanoid version of the sun.

  “Marrow…?”

  The voice was a raspy wheeze, but I somehow recognized it enough to make me cringe. I reluctantly turned around.

  It was Fantom.

  Or…it used to be. Fantom was the same invisible shape as me, but much smaller. His transparent face was gaunt with the subtle hint of sunken eyes and emaciated cheekbones—a barely recognizable shadow. He was bent over on sticks for arms and legs and seemed to be having trouble doing even that. Like me, he also had something floating in his chest…but it was black and about the size of a walnut. A subtle flicker of purple energy glazed the edges, but otherwise, the thing looked pretty shriveled and dead.