The Powers That Be: A Superhero Collection

by Swardstrom, Will

  “And what exactly happens when it doesn’t work?”

  Dr. Svendsen cleared his throat. He shuffled a bit uncomfortably in place, fingering the bright periwinkle fabric of his tie. His closely cropped hair, once an icy Nordic blonde, had since softened to a pale frosted silver. “Well, we are of course obliged to calm our patients by any means necessary when they present themselves as overtaken by fits of delusion or fantasy. It can be difficult emotionally—we’re quite fond of all our charges, you see—but I assure you, our staff exercises the utmost caution and professionalism when urgent cases present themselves as such.”

  “Of course, Dr. Svendsen. It was never my intent to suggest otherwise.” Yelena flashed a buttery sweet smile at him. He reciprocated kindly. “Do you suppose there’s any chance I could speak with Isaac on camera?” He was just the face they needed for their latest feature: handsome, young, and troubled.

  “I think that could be arranged. I’ll have to ask Mr. Winters, of course. He recently celebrated his eighteenth birthday and can now by law authorize such requests of his own volition.”

  “Is that so?” Yelena detected an obvious note of pride in Dr. Svendsen’s voice as he disclosed that kernel of information to her. She pounced upon it readily. “So, technically, he can come and go as he pleases?”

  “Indeed, though he has chosen to remain with us here at the Institute through the course of his treatment.”

  “Interesting. And how many of the Institute’s other patients are here on a voluntary basis?”

  “At present, he is the only one.”

  “That’s quite a testament to the care he’s receiving, I should think.”

  “Very much so, yes. And we’re all too happy to accommodate Mr. Winters so long as he desires, especially as he has no qualms about submitting to frequent neurological examination.”

  “And what does that entail?”

  “Simple tests and exercises to chart and compare brain activity during various stages of treatment. They are completely harmless—nothing drastic or medically invasive—though some patients have been known to balk at the necessity. In Isaac’s case, it has never been an issue.”

  She considered following up but decided it wasn’t immediately relevant. At the moment, her main priority was getting Isaac in front of the camera and talking. “Assuming he agrees, do you suppose there’s any chance I could interview him in the courtyard? I think it would help humanize the work you’re doing here. Viewers see the inside of a facility like this and tend to form instant, generally unfavorable opinions of the residents no matter how cheery the decor or positive the prognosis. We wouldn’t want anyone assuming Isaac is something he’s not just because of the decor, after all.”

  “I don’t see why not, assuming, as you said, that he is agreeable. If you’ll give me but a moment,” Dr. Svendsen said. Adjusting his thin wire-framed spectacles, he nodded just a tad too self-consciously toward the camera. “I shall see if our star pupil is in a chatty mood.”

  Rapping gingerly upon the door, he turned the knob. “Isaac? Would it be alright if I joined you in your garden?”

  Isaac smiled. “Dr. Svendsen. Of course. I was just enjoying the honeysuckle. It’s in bloom. Not usually this time of year, but I tweaked it a little. You did say it’s okay to play with the rules, right?”

  “Indeed, I did,” Dr. Svendsen confirmed, “as long as you are confident you can handle the changes.” He took an exaggerated sniff. Contrary to his charge’s elaborately constructed fantasy world, the air inside the Guilfoyle Institute was filtered and recycled beyond counting and utterly flavorless by consequence. “It’s quite lovely, I must say.”

  “I really think the therapy is helping. I feel so focused and in control,” Isaac said with a kind of tentative, almost bottled enthusiasm. “I haven’t heard a single voice other than my own all day. Well, and now yours, of course.”

  Dr. Svendsen beamed proudly, exuding an almost avuncular air in the presence of his ‘star pupil.’ “That is most excellent news, Isaac, most excellent, indeed.”

  “Thanks. So, what’s up, doc?” he asked, absent any hint of irony.

  “Well, now that you mention it, would you mind if someone else joined us? I’d like very much to introduce you to a friend of mine. She’s quite interested in the treatment you’ve been receiving under our care.”

  Isaac opened his eyes. All at once, the garden vanished. “A friend? Who, Dr. Svendsen?”

  “Miss Yelena Cruz,” he announced by way of introduction. Stepping to the side, he ushered her into the increasingly crowded room.

  “Hello, Isaac.”

  Isaac shuffled to his feet quickly, his hand shooting out between them. There was an oddly stiff, almost creaky quality about the way he moved. It reminded her a bit of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. Something to do with the lotus position he’d just been seated in, she reasoned, shaking his hand gamely.

  They presented quite a study in contrast, he with his lanky, unoiled handshake and that buttery gold nuthouse finery, she with her camera-ready smile and flattering khaki pencil skirt. A barcoded visitor’s badge hung from an alligator clip secured to the left lapel of her matching jacket. Completing the ensemble in the objectified fashion of the modern newswoman were a white half-sleeve blouse and chocolate brown kitten heel boots. She was desirable, even sexy, but not so much as to be considered unprofessional. Still, her presence proved something of a minor distraction for Isaac. He had to make a consciously gallant effort not to appreciate it too obviously.

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Cruz,” he said, nodding cordially.

  “Likewise, Isaac. Dr. Svendsen has given me some indication of the remarkable progress you’ve made under his and his staff’s care. I was hoping you might be willing to talk a little about it with me on camera?” She gestured outside the room, toward her cameraman.

  An awkward beat shook the room as Isaac leveled a sandbagged look at Dr. Svendsen. Composing himself quickly, he looked straight into the camera, then to Yelena, nodding enthusiastically. “Of course! Of course, of course, I’m sorry… Yes, please. What would you like to know?” He settled back onto the bed, inviting her to take a seat at the small table across from it.

  Yelena forced a smile. Apparently Isaac didn’t know the first thing about humanizing a good shot of a teenage nutjob in an ambiguously named asylum. Deciding not to press her luck, though, she accepted the invitation. “Do you suppose you could start at the beginning?” she asked once she had seated herself. “At the very least give my viewers the broad outline of your condition?”

  “It’s okay, Miss Cruz, you can say it. The voices. I’m not that bad off.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, canting her head earnestly. “Tell us about the voices, Isaac.”

  “Well, I was a few weeks into my senior year at Athens High when I started hearing them. Voices, all the time. Sometimes one or two, other times just whole conversations overlapping. It started off slow, like someone constantly whispering behind me. That was weird, but manageable. It kept building, though. Like I said, slowly at first, but eventually it became so constant and overwhelming I couldn’t think or concentrate, eat or sleep. After a while I just shut down. Until I came here, and finally they stopped.”

  “And to what have you and the staff here at the Guilfoyle Institute attributed them?”

  “Take your pick. AP courses, SATs, ACTs, athletics and extracurriculars, community service, college prep, applications and essays, meeting with advisors, boosters, coaches; somewhere along the way I just lost my grip, I guess. Cracked under the pressure.” He shrugged almost apologetically. “I’m sure Dr. Svendsen can give you a better explanation. You know, medically speaking. I’m just concerned with getting better. And I think I am. I really do.”

  Yelena nodded, giving him her most sympathetically honeyed smile. “That’s wonderful news, Isaac. And I understand from Dr. Svendsen that you recently celebrated your eighteenth birthday, as well?”

  “I did,” he said
brightly.

  “Can you give us some insight as to what it’s like celebrating such an important milestone in a facility such as this?”

  He smiled, scratching at the light dusting of stubble framing his cheeks. “I know it probably sounds depressing on the surface, but it was actually a really good day. I knew my parents were coming to visit with a cake and some small gifts, y’know, that sort of thing, but Dr. Svendsen surprised me with a gift of his own.”

  “Oh?” Yelena looked from Isaac to Dr. Svendsen. Her cameraman adjusted to follow. “I get the feeling he’d like you to tell this part of the story, Doctor. Care to enlighten us?”

  Dr. Svendsen chuckled. “You see, as a matter of policy we generally restrict visitations to immediate family and close personal loved ones. Because Isaac had shown such remarkable progress leading up to the event, however, as well as because it represented his formal entrance into legal adulthood, we felt comfortable making an exception for his teammates from the Athens High varsity basketball squad. They put on quite a show for the other residents.”

  Isaac beamed in that elusively troubled way. “We won. My side, I mean. Fifty-four to forty-six.”

  “When you put it like that, it does sound like quite a special day.”

  “Definitely.”

  Yelena crossed her legs and shifted forward, her elbows resting atop her knees. The action revealed just the slightest glimpse down her blouse. She’d practiced the rhythm till she had it down pat. It was one of her signature moves. “I’m curious, were there any plans for you to leave the Institute’s care that day? Once you were legally recognized as an adult capable of making your own—”

  “Isaac.”

  “—decisions?”

  Isaac felt strangely weightless for a moment, like a balloon had been inflated inside his head. When he leveled out again he looked vaguely confused, disoriented. “I’m sorry,” he said, lifting his hand to his temple absently. “You were saying?”

  “Are you feeling alright, Isaac?”

  “I’m fine, Dr. Svendsen, really.” He smiled almost insistently. “It was just a flare-up. I’m still in complete control.”

  “I see.” Dr. Svendsen suddenly took on all the resolve of a very concerned medical professional. “I’m sorry, Miss Cruz, but I think at this time it might be best—”

  Yelena stiffened with almost salivating interest in response, looking from Heinrich back to Isaac. She knew she might only have minutes, maybe even seconds to get something really juicy on camera before he exercised institutional prerogative and had her ushered out. “Wait, so are you saying you just heard one of the voices? Can you describe what that’s like? The sensation? Whom or what you hear? Anything at all to help bring my viewers into your world.”

  “Miss Cruz, I really must insist—”

  “No, no, it’s okay, Dr. Svendsen. I think it might help to talk about it.” Isaac looked into his lap for a moment, wetting his lips thoughtfully. “You know how like with a dream, when you first wake up, it seems so crisp and vivid? Every word, every passing glance and blade of grass? But then the seconds tick by and within a minute or so—” He lifted his head, snapping his fingers for the camera. “—it’s gone? It’s sort of like that. I’ll hear something really faint but familiar, my name, something like that. And…”

  “Isaac Winters.”

  “And I’ll key on that.” His voice shook a little, adopting the slightest quaver. “Sometimes it’s just one voice. Sometimes it’s dozens. Sometimes they sound like people I know, but mostly not. Sometimes they run together until it’s just a bunch of gibberish—”

  “Isaac Winters. Do not be frightened. We are coming for you.”

  Isaac blinked several times in rapid, uneven succession. He hugged his sides, rocking back and forth in place. “Oh no,” he said quietly, all to himself. A hard, stuttering shiver overtook his body. “Oh, please, please, no.” Without warning he flung his arms up around his head, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing tight his forearms over his ears. The absolute futility of the act was lost on him in that state. He had regressed to a level of emotional infancy that simply could not process the impossibility of shutting out what was coming from within.

  “Isaac Winters… Do not be frightened… Isaac Winters… Do not be frightened…”

  Too late, Dr. Svendsen sprang into action. “Out! Out of the room right now!” he demanded, shoving the encroaching cameraman back into the hall before turning back. “Orderlies! Orderlies! “

  “… not again… oh, god, please no-no-no-no-no-no-NO-NO-NO—”

  All at once, Isaac thrashed back with a mighty howl, kicking wildly in all directions. He flailed a hard heel square across Yelena’s jaw that sent her sprawling off her chair. Her cameraman followed the action from the hall like a true cold-hearted bastard all the way, never once stopping to lend a hand as Heinrich guided her from the room. Just as quickly they were replaced by three of the Whitecoats, two to hold down Isaac and another to jab a knockout dose of sedatives into his neck. While he went down quietly, the same couldn’t be said for the honey-spun reporter.

  “God damnit, Heinrich, what the hell?! You said he was a model patient!”

  “Yelena, I am so terribly sorry. I—” He glanced back through the observational pane at Isaac’s slack form as the Whitecoats filed out of the room. Perhaps he had overestimated the lad’s progress. Perhaps he had been blinded by the national attention Miss Cruz promised to give the facility. Either way, it was obvious he had made a colossal professional error. “Are you alright?”

  “Yes, I’ll be alright, damnit.” She clutched at her face, giving her head a little shake as if to put her marbles back in order. With Isaac subdued, the Whitecoats streamed from the room, leaving Dr. Svendsen still doting over Yelena. “What’s going to happen to him now?” she wondered, looking back into the room. “Regarding his treatment, I mean?”

  “Well, this lapse obviously represents a significant setback. Isaac hasn’t had an episode of this magnitude since—”

  The hall resounded with two sharp pops. The sound was strange and confusing, almost like champagne bottles being uncorked. Heinrich made a weak gurgling noise and collapsed forward against the wall, tumbling face-first to the floor. A pair of fresh bullet wounds blossomed brightly through the backside of his crisp alabaster coat.

  Yelena didn’t even have time to think about turning before the next bullet caught her below the right shoulder. She landed on her back, straining for breath and consciousness as the pinched, bearded face of her cameraman appeared above her. The pistol in his hand was small enough to have been hidden in the housing of the discarded camera, which she supposed had never even been rolling in the first place. She froze as he took aim, her life flashing before her eyes.

  Her life—and something else. Some sort of near-death hallucination. A trick of her brain, the product of some lonely, basement-dwelling neuron trying to rally the troops from their collective stupor.

  The hallucination opened into a coronal flare, its rippling, outermost membrane diffusing around an amniotic, roseate lens large enough to stand within comfortably. Four figures—one of them much larger than the other three—were doing just that, framed in corporeal silhouette. They surveyed the scene bemusedly as the whole thing contracted to the size of a twinkling pinpoint behind them, then disappeared altogether.

  The dazzling, sleight-of-body display rendered Yelena’s shooter as temporarily stunned as it did her. By the time he shook himself loose, it was already too late. He raised the pistol and smirked cruelly. “You and your friends crashed the wrong party, Tubby.” Yelena looked on helplessly as he pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Nothing happened. He pulled the trigger again and again.

  Click. Click. Click.

  “Yeah, funny thing,” a leggy woman said. She had a mischievous glint in her eyes and fire-engine red hair roughly even with the point of her jaw on one side and the lobe of her ear on the other. “It works a lot better when my l
ittle bro isn’t cock-blocking the firing pin.” Snatching the pistol away from Heinrich’s befuddled assassin, she leveled it perfectly parallel to his ear and popped off a single shot.

  The man collapsed to his knees with a shrieking yowl.

  Yelena watched from the ground as the bullet sailed through the charged air overhead. Without warning she was treated to a second cinematic rendering of her life’s choices before ‘Tubby’ stepped forward. The admittedly wide-bodied man passed his hand across her field of vision once and she surrendered to the unconscious clutch of blackness enveloping her.

  “See what I mean, dick?” the leggy woman asked the hitter. “Oh, and don’t ever call my friend ‘Tubby’ again.” For good measure she gave the man a knockout kick to the face, then smelted his pistol into a molten paperweight between her bare hands. She tossed it to the floor, still glowing orange and hot, where it promptly began melting through the tile. “There. That’s from me to you. Thanks for the assist, Kerm.”

  “Anytime, sis o’ mine.”

  “Huh. Sucks about these two, though. I kinda get why he had to do the Doc, but who’s this chick? She looks really familiar…”

  “That’s because she’s Yelena Cruz, dingus. You know? That tabloid newsmag chick?”

  “Oh, yeah! Wow, it is her, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think she’s dead, though. See? Still breathing.”

  Another woman’s voice sounded from outside Isaac’s room. It was smoky and smoothly accented of Indian origin, with a distinctly impatient edge. “Edison? Kermit? We’re waiting.”

  “Oh, because it’s going to take sooo long.” Rolling his eyes, Kermit had only to touch the electronic lock securing Isaac’s room to disable it. He opened the door with a theatrical, almost mocking bow to Satya. “Ladies’ first.”