Expansion (The Accidental Heroes Chronicles Book 2)

by S. E. Cyborski

  “Yeah, tiger to the rescue, right?” I joked weakly, chuckling even though it wasn’t even remotely funny. The tiger was still my favorite form to shapeshift into but it wasn’t the only dangerous one I’d tried. It also took the least amount of time as I’d turned into it often. “All right, want me to tell him we’re in?”

  “Sure, that would be great,” Billy nodded, blowing out an exhausted breath. “I’ve got finals coming up and the professors are piling on the work. I’ve got to talk to one of my lab partners and work out when we’re going to do an autopsy. I saw he left a note for me. I can only say I’m glad he’s waiting for summer.”

  “I need to get to work myself,” I said, checking the time on my watch. While Jack didn’t mind if people were late once in a while, I tried to make it a rule never to be late. I’d had a horrible time being on time for things when I was a teenager and had actually been fired from a job once. “I’ll let Dr. Carnesby know afterward. And hey, if nothing else, we can both work on improving our chess games with Jane.”

  Billy laughed distractedly as I stood up. I could tell his mind was already somewhere else, probably on the cadaver he and his lab partner would be doing an autopsy on. I let myself out quietly and shut the door. I didn’t know exactly what medical students had to deal with for finals but my own were difficult enough. Not that I thought I would continue on the path I’d chosen before the trial. After all, how likely was it that I would remain free to pursue anthropology when I was basically a lab rat? A lab rat with special abilities? But it was enough for now to continue my classes and pretend. Maybe the longer I had my freedom, the more likely I’d be to keep it.

  I passed laughing people in the stairwell, people excited to be free from classes for the day. A flash of jealousy burned through my chest as I walked. These were normal people, people who only had to worry about their grades and student loans and what job they could find when they graduated. They didn’t have to worry about things that should have been impossible.

  But the jealousy faded as quickly as it had come. It wasn’t their fault that I was different now. It was my own choice to participate, as reluctant as I’d been. I knew the whole time that it wasn’t a good idea but had allowed Amy to convince me. There was nothing to be done now. I made my way across campus, listening to birds chirping in the trees and other students talking on the grass. Now that the weather was staying consistently fine, many people were taking blankets and their homework outside and studying in the sunlight. The warmth actually felt good after the rainy spring we’d had. Yet I didn’t have time to enjoy the warmth and the cooling breezes. I had a job to get to.

  Chapter 3

  “I suppose we’re as ready as we’re going to get,” Dr. Adam Carnesby muttered to himself as he walked through the warehouse. It was nearly silent now, only the quiet humming of the lab machines in the back of the building breaking the silence. He’d restocked the food and straightened up a bit. While Michael had destroyed the wall in Sandra’s room the day he, Sandra, and Amy had escaped, that had been fixed quickly. The warehouse was a valuable possession and the Corporation was nothing if not frugal with valuable possessions. Even now, looking at the wall, one could barely tell anything had happened. Only the slight difference of the paint on the walls from the other rooms gave it away. That wasn’t the extent of the renovation, however. The brains behind the trials wanted more people participating. A team of workers had been working for a couple weeks, turning the extra space left at the end of the hallway into extra bedrooms. They now numbered twelve which gave Adam a room to himself, rather than having to sleep in his office. That had been rather uncomfortable. That was one of the great things about the space in the warehouse and having bought it as a giant empty space: complete ability to redesign.

  “But you still don’t think it’s a good idea,” Jane broke into Adam’s thoughts. Her mellow voice had a mechanical tinge to it, coming through speakers as it did. “Why do you allow them to push you?”

  “Because I have no choice,” Adam replied tiredly, rubbing a hand over his forehead. The beginnings of a headache were starting to pound just above his eyes. He finished the walkthrough and settled in the chair in his office, tipping back and staring at the ceiling. “They pay me, just as much as the university does. I can’t exactly say no.”

  “They weren’t here, though, Adam, they didn’t see,” Jane persisted. “What happens if someone develops truly terrifying abilities? What happens if the drug drives them insane?”

  “Then we’ll have to deal with it,” Adam replied heavily, sighing. He turned to the camera in the corner of his office and smiled at it, making sure Jane could see. “The Council has assured me they have every faith in my abilities. All the while thinking I couldn’t hear the sarcasm under their words. I’ll need your help even more this time around, Jane. I need you to monitor each person as closely as you possibly can.”

  “Of course,” the AI replied, a note of offense in her replicated voice. “I never give you less than my best. That’s not going to change now, not with so much on the line.”

  “Thank you, Jane,” Adam told her, smiling again at the camera. While he considered the AI a friend, someone he could bounce ideas and worries off of, none of the subjects had even seen her as more than a regular computer. At least until George had befriended her and Billy had followed in his footsteps. Perhaps there was more to the reason why Gnotret worked on those five people and not any of the others. He sat up, a look of dawning surprise on his face.

  “Jane, what can you tell me about Gnotret?” Adam asked suddenly, pulling a notebook out of the stack he kept on the corner of his desk. “Specifically how the drug works.”

  There was silence from Jane for several minutes but he’d had learned to take those in stride. They didn’t mean she was ignoring him or not paying attention, merely that most of her memory was being applied to his question. Taking the time to leaf through his own notes, Adam made a startling, and more than slightly disturbing, discovery: he honestly had no idea how Gnotret worked. Before it had given George, Amy, Billy, Sandra, and Michael their new abilities, everything about the drug had been theoretical. At least on his end. Adam wasn’t naive enough to believe that the Corporation, and the Council that ran it secretly, wouldn’t have scientists of their own researching the drug. And keeping what they learned a secret from him.

  But one of the things the Corporation had suggested he look for was quicker healing, healthier bodies, increased strength. Nothing that would spark his suspicions and nothing that indicated Gnotret might grant superhuman abilities. Nor was there anything in his files about where Gnotret had come from. There was a chemical formula and it looked legitimate. Yet, Dr. Carnesby had worked for the Corporation long enough to know that what looked real and what really was could be vastly different.

  “There is a firewall in place to prevent me from digging too deeply,” Jane’s voice cut into his increasingly worrying thoughts. “The only thing I have found that we didn’t know was that the first trials were conducted on people who’d been incarcerated. While they were somewhat willing participants, none had been told exactly what it was they were being injected with. There was one death, a woman. Other than that, someone with a greater proficiency at hiding information than I am at digging it out secretly has kept everything hidden. I’m sorry, Adam.”

  “Which doesn’t make me feel any better about being forced to continue trials,” Adam grumbled, closing his notebook with an annoyed snap. What else would happen, whose life would be ruined next? “It’s all right, Jane. No need to apologize. But can you get me information on the Council? How many people are on it, what their names are, anything that you can discover about them? It’ll be protected but perhaps not as protected as the information on Gnotret. Not many people even know the Council exists so they wouldn’t think to look for them.”

  “I can try but it will take some time,” Jane said, a note of curiosity entering her voice. “Care to share exactly why I am looking for this?
”

  “I agreed to continue the trials because they have the power to ruin my life,” Adam said grimly, pulling out a new notebook and opening it. He had some things to restock in the lab and wanted to write them all down. Plus, he had some plans of his own to make. “Seems only fair that I have some sort of ace if and when this all goes to hell doesn’t it?”

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  My shift at By The Stack started out rather quietly, the bookstore nearly completely empty when I entered. The little bell rang as the door opened and Jack came out from the back room as he heard it.

  “Welcome to By The Stack how can I...,” Jack was already saying before even looking at the door. When he saw me, he broke into a smile and waved. “Hey, George. Slow day today so I’ve had everyone working on restocking. Feel like setting up a display on the second floor for me?”

  “Sure,” I replied, shrugging and walking into the back room he’d come out of. I clocked in on the little computer he kept there for that purpose and grabbed one of the yellow aprons that hung on hooks above it. The bookstore’s name was embroidered in black with an open book stitched below. Jack had bought the aprons not long after I’d started working after a few of the regulars had mentioned people asking them questions as if they worked there. Jack wanted to make sure everyone knew who the employees were as we didn’t wear uniforms, hence the aprons. I walked back out to see Jack talking to one of the other employees. “What kind of display you want me to set up?”

  “I want a horror theme,” Jack said, clapping the other employee on the shoulder before walking towards me. “I know Halloween’s not for a while but we’ve had an influx of horror novels from people trading books in. Let’s get them moving right back on out there. There’s a box upstairs next to the table I want you to set them up on. If you need more, feel free to take books from the shelves to fill out the display.”

  I nodded and headed upstairs. I actually liked horror a lot and putting together a display of horror-themed books was going to be fun. I hadn’t been working when people had brought in books so I had no idea what might be waiting for me. Which, honestly, only made it all the more interesting.

  Upstairs was divided into two rooms with bookshelves lining the walls. There were some couches and chairs in the smaller of the two rooms while a table surrounded by chairs took up the center of the larger one. There was also a table with little book stands, currently standing empty and bare. Every month, Jack set up a new themed display on that table trying to draw interest to those books. It worked, too: a lot of the people who bought books often bought at least one from the display. I saw the box sitting underneath the table and pulled it out to sort through the books.

  There was an interesting mix in the box and I made a mental note to actually read a few that I pulled out. One of the first books I saw was Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. Digging through the top books, I found the second book The Lost World. The movies were some of my favorites and I decided to put these two books in a prominent place. I also found some H.P. Lovecraft, a book of Poe’s poetry, and World War Z by Max Brooks. Someone must have gone through their library and decided to get rid of their Stephen King books as I found several of those. There were also classic horror stories, which I particularly enjoyed. Dracula by Bram Stoker was resting on top of a copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. There was even a copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, which I didn’t really consider horror. But there were a few tense scenes and everyone had their own definition of horror, I suppose. Then I came across Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and had to stop for a few moments as I stared at the cover. It was my favorite horror story, one of the first I’d ever read. But staring at the cover, at the stitched-together monster that was the experiment in the book, I felt a stirring of familiarity.

  Wasn’t I now an experiment, a horror to be looked at in fear and scorn? While I may not have been stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, was I still even human anymore? The drug had changed me completely, altered my fundamental being. How else could I transform into so many different shapes? And if I really wanted to, I could become the monster. It would take only a little effort to shapeshift into the picture on the cover. Would that be the true reflection of what I had become? We’d kept our abilities a secret mostly because I didn’t want the police to go after the others and maybe kill them. While Amy could throw fireballs and take away the air around someone and Michael could completely change the gravity around people, that didn’t make them immune to harm. The monster in the book only wanted to be accepted, to have a friend in a life he hadn’t asked for. He was reviled and hated because of how he looked while his soul was the opposite. Was I a mirrored reflection of the monster, still appearing human while my soul turned dark?

  I tried to shove these troubling thoughts away, concentrate on setting up the display. But they kept intruding, kept poking at me and reminding me that I wasn’t really all that different from the monster now. Would I, would we, have to do something as drastic as running away to the Arctic Circle and hiding from humanity? I put Frankenstein in the middle of the display, prominently shown. If it gave me such frightening thoughts, it deserved to be given pride of place and the best chance of being bought. The other classics were clustered around Frankenstein while more current books filled out the bottom tier of the display. It didn’t take very long to put together at all; I’d had plenty of practice in the past doing similar displays.

  After getting Jack’s okay on the display, I headed downstairs and started restocking and organizing the shelves. Sometimes, people didn’t put books back where they belonged. Especially if they were carrying a book through the store then decided not to buy it. I found a few cookbooks in with the comic books and a science fiction book in the world history section. Usually, I got a kick out of seeing the connections people made with their books but not today. Today, I drifted through my duties with a worried frown and a preoccupied air. The new trial and Frankenstein dominated my thoughts. Knowing how things had changed for us, how could I help a new trial and see it happen all over again? But if it did happen again, how could I not lend my own knowledge and experience in the hopes that no one went rogue?

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  The next few weeks passed quickly, finals stressing everyone out. Walking from class to class, I’d see students with their heads buried in books or staring off into space mouthing words. Every table in every free area was filled with people drilling themselves or their friends in facts and figures, memorized dates and places, or famous artworks and artists. It was nothing new to me but everything still felt different. This was the first year I wasn’t really me anymore. I didn’t see Billy at all during these last weeks as he was busy cramming for his own finals. Mine were fairly uneventful since I’d been fairly well prepared for them. I didn’t have much else to do in the apartment anyway. When the grades came back and I’d done well on all my finals, I wasn’t surprised.

  About a week after finals, just before the grades came in, Billy moved into my apartment with me. The dorms were closing for the summer and he didn’t want to head back to his dad’s house since he was going to be helping with the new trial. There was a spare bedroom in the apartment that either my parents or Amy’s had used when they came to visit that he took over. Billy was a nice houseguest, quiet and doing his part of any chores. It was pleasant to have someone else in the apartment again, someone to fill the silence that had been far too pervasive since Amy had left. I introduced him to Tales From the Crypt and he introduced me to Firefly, so we spent our free nights having movie marathons.

  But the Corporation was pushing hard for a new trial and they weren’t patient people. Dr. Carnesby hung fliers during those last few weeks looking for new students. And, as the trial would begin after school ended, he had a lot more interested people. He held the same information sessions that the five of us had gone t
hrough what felt like a lifetime ago. This time, Dr. Carnesby had to actually pare down the list of willing volunteers. Though, he finally settled on eight as he now had twelve bedrooms in the warehouse. With him, Billy, and me taking up three, eight seemed like a reasonable enough number for us all to watch over.

  “I still can’t believe I agreed to this,” I grumbled to Billy as I parked my car in the little lot next to the warehouse. It looked absolutely the same, weathered gray concrete and high, small windows and all. “You know this is just a time bomb waiting to explode, right?”

  “Of course I do,” Billy said quietly, nodding as he stared at the building. “But we aren’t the powers that be. Those powers have decided that they want more superhumans. What can we really do, George?”

  “We could always go to the police or something,” I suggested though without any real confidence. I got out of the car and pulled my duffel bag out of the backseat.

  “You already know why that’s a bad idea,” Billy replied, grabbing his own bag and slinging it over his shoulder. I locked the car and walked to the door, nodding in agreement as Billy kept talking. “Anyone we talk to is going to want to know how and why we know what we know. And then our secret will be out. We may be considered just as culpable, especially for any damage Sandra, Michael, and Amy might do. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison for violating FDA guidelines or in a lab as someone’s pet project.”

  “Those might not be our only options, Billy,” I argued, more for form’s sake than from any real belief. I pressed the button on the intercom immediately, remembering how we’d gotten in before.