by Tim Kring
For some unfathomable reason the cashier had to record each purchase in a notebook.
“Pa-a-ants,” she said, drawing out the word as she scrawled it into her spiral-bound notebook. “Twen-ty-fi-ive cennttssss. Shi-i-irt, twenty-five cents. Sho-o-oes, fifty. Ca-a-ap, fifteen.” BC felt like a barbarian standing in front of a Roman tax assessor tallying up the worthlessness of his life.
The woman held up the belt, which, though not snakeskin, was every bit as wrinkled and cracked.
“I’ll just give you that,” she said. “Will that be all?”
BC was about to nod his head when he stopped.
“Just one thing. Where’d you get your wig?”
San Francisco, CA
November 8, 1963
At 10:36 p.m., Keller made a final note in his log:
“BOTH SUBJECTS SLEEPING.”
Sidewalk Steve had ripped hundreds of shoe boxes into confetti, which he’d burrowed inside of like a hamster or gerbil. There was some interesting theta wave activity on Chandler’s EEG, which Keller suspected was some kind of deep dreaming: a fantasy taking place at a level before cognition, before consciousness even. Tomorrow the doctor would hook Sidewalk Steve up to the EEG to see if, as he suspected, Chandler was somehow able to produce his images in other people’s brains, as opposed to a peripheral stimulation of the optic nerve. If that was indeed the case, they would be irresistible. You wouldn’t be seeing them (or hearing them or feeling them): you would be thinking them, and your mind wouldn’t be able to distinguish them from reality, no matter how fantastical they seemed. Fire would seem to burn you, bullets to pierce your skin. It was quite possible that Chandler could kill you with his thoughts—with your thoughts, rather, manipulated so that your body couldn’t tell the difference between an imaginary knife in the heart and a real one. How Melchior’d come out unscathed was anyone’s guess. “I’m used to living in a fantasy world” was all he’d said before he left, and, well, he was CIA. One was tempted to take him at his word.
But all that was for another day. Right now the doctor’s brain felt stuffed with cotton batting. Conducting scientific experiments while on Thorazine was difficult to say the least. Among other things, he needed to see if he could add some kind of amphetamine to the Thorazine to improve his own functionality. But for now he needed to sleep. He could examine the data with a clearer head in the morning.
Chandler could feel Keller moving outside his room, but the doctor’s brain remained closed to him. He was like a finger pressed against a taut scrim, discernible in outline only. But at least Chandler knew when he was there—and when he left.
He waited twenty minutes to make sure. Only then did he attempt to fire himself up again. It was difficult. He was so tired. All he wanted to do was sleep. In fact, he was sleeping. What he wanted was to be in a coma. But he had work to do. And it was the doctor who had shown him how to do it. It wasn’t going to be easy, however. Not on him. And not on Sidewalk Steve either.
Deep inside his paper cocoon, warm, sweating, safe, Sidewalk Steve felt his body start to change. His muscles, grown slack from a diet of scavenged sugars and starches, began to firm, to bulk. His bones, soft from years without calcium or protein, hardened, lengthened. He had known the dark man and the mad scientist wanted to change what he was. He had thought they wanted to make him into a monster. But now he realized: they wanted to make him a hero. A superhero. A super soldier, to be precise.
Captain America.
He’d been Sidewalk Steve’s favorite hero when he was growing up, not least because they shared a name, but also because Steve Rogers had been a bullied weakling like Sidewalk Steve, only to be transformed by the Super-Soldier serum into an avenging angel. Now he, Sidewalk Steve, would take up that mantle.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been in the stasis capsule. Several months, no doubt: it would’ve taken a while for the serum to achieve its full transformation of his body. But when the capsule’s cover hissed open, Sidewalk Steve felt as though he was emerging from a single restful night’s sleep.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror mounted in the wall. His muscles bulged through his rags—a bit more Incredible Hulk than Captain America, but hey, this was a new era, right? Men in tights probably wouldn’t be taken seriously by the average American.
Now, to get out of this cell.
The door appeared to be made from tempered steel. It looked like it wouldn’t budge if a speeding truck rammed into it. But he was more than a speeding truck. He was Sidewalk Steve.
He slammed a foot into the center of the door. It rattled on its hinges like an alarm clock, but remained in place. The vibration traveled up the bones of his ankle. For one brief moment it felt painful—it felt like tibia and fibula were splintering along their seams—but then the sensation passed, was nothing more than a tingle, a tickle. He was Sidewalk Steve. He was indestructible.
Again he kicked. He felt the door give, just slightly. A small dent appeared in the steel sheet.
He set his mouth in a scowl of grim determination. This was going to take a while.
On the other side of the wall, Chandler heard the dull thuds of Sidewalk Steve’s foot striking the door. He also felt the stress fractures in the man’s ankle, the multiplying microbreaks in his tarsals. It took all his concentration to keep the image of the invincible hero front and center in Sidewalk Steve’s mind, to suppress what would have been paralyzing agony as the bones of his foot and leg splintered and ground against one another.
It took fifteen minutes for Sidewalk Steve to kick down the door, which was in fact made of steel, but was fortunately hollow. When, finally, it buckled on its hinges, Sidewalk Steve’s leg also buckled—or, rather, snapped just below the knee—but as he fell to the floor Chandler managed to switch the image in the vagrant’s brain: he was a werewolf now. The full moon was shining down on him through a skylight, causing him to transform into his half-human, half-lupine state.
On all fours, Sidewalk Steve crawled from his cell. He sniffed at the locked door next to his, smelled the imprisoned damsel on the far side of the wall. He hoped his strange appearance wouldn’t frighten the poor maiden out of her wits.
He didn’t want to admit it, but his leg hurt. Well, heroes felt pain too, but they kept going anyway. That’s what made them heroes.
Nevertheless, he trotted down the hall in the opposite direction. No need to kick down a second door if he could find a key.
The hall spilled onto a large open space crowded with tables piled high with lab equipment. He went from table to table until he found a set of keys that he picked up in his mouth, then galloped back to the other locked cell. Once there, he realized he needed a hand again, to open the door. As he transitioned back to his human shape the pain in his leg hit him. He wobbled, spots danced in front of his eyes, his spasming fingers dropped the keys.
Concentrate, Chandler! a voice screamed in his brain. He didn’t know who Chandler was, but there wasn’t time to worry about that. A damsel needed saving.
It took both hands to lift the key chain, and they were shaking so badly that it took a dozen tries before he managed to slip the right key into the lock. It turned. He pushed.
The door fell open and Sidewalk Steve collapsed on the floor. Chandler could just see the man’s ruined right leg, the foot trailing off the ankle like a fish on a line.
The LSD was almost completely out of his system now, but he was still strapped to the table. If he couldn’t get Steve to free him, all of the pain he’d inflicted on the vagrant would have been for nothing.
“Steve, please. You have to get up. You have to untie me.”
On the floor, Steve moaned.
Chandler gathered his energy. He had seen the damsel in Steve’s mind—a gypsy-looking girl with ridiculously large breasts bursting from her ludicrously low-cut blouse—but he didn’t have the energy to sift for something more believable. He pushed. The walls melted into a mountainous vista, the hospital bed faded away, replaced b
y railroad tracks.
“Hurry, Steve!” the gypsy girl pleaded. “The train is coming!”
Steve lifted his head. When he’d pushed open the door, an image of the fire demon who’d attacked him earlier had floated before his eyes, but it was gone now. The damsel—a very masculine-looking damsel, with a jaw like Steve McQueen’s—lay trussed on a pair of gleaming railroad tracks. He couldn’t see the train but felt its rumble in the ground. He didn’t have the strength to move, but he had to find it. Had to save her, even if she wasn’t quite as pretty as he’d first thought. It was still his duty. His purpose in life.
He pulled himself up with his hands. Each moment was an agony. Spastic fingers pulled ineffectually at the ropes.
“Hurry, Steve!” the damsel called in her curiously deep voice. “Don’t give up!”
But he could only free one of her hands. He looked up to see the train barreling down on them, then slumped atop the damsel’s unfortunately flat chest. At least she wouldn’t die alone.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, just as the train ripped through their bodies.
It took another ten minutes for Chandler to work himself free from the table. In the course of searching the factory-turned-laboratory, he found a bottle of morphine, and he shot ten ccs into Sidewalk Steve’s arm in the hopes that it would keep him unconscious. He also found an ampoule of LSD, which he pocketed.
Melchior and the doctor might well kill Steve if Chandler left him here, so he hitched his hands under the unconscious man’s arms and dragged him toward the door. For a big guy, he didn’t weigh nearly as much as Chandler expected—and, as well, he, Chandler, wasn’t nearly as tired as he thought he’d be after four days on his back. He suspected his freshness was somehow related to the changes LSD had wrought in him, but he wasn’t sure how. After all, increased physical constitution and the ability to project images into other people’s minds didn’t seem to be related, unless there was some kind of physiological connection he didn’t know about. It would have been fascinating to investigate, if it wasn’t his own mind he was contemplating, his own body.
He lowered Sidewalk Steve to the floor to unlock the outer door and push it open. He’d just bent over again when something caught him in the small of the back. He heard it, actually, just before it struck, but couldn’t dodge fast enough to avoid the blow. A sharp pain erupted in his lumbar spine, needles of pain strobed up and down his legs, and he fell head-to-feet on top of Sidewalk Steve. He had the presence of mind to roll, though, and the next blow—a baseball bat, he saw now—slammed into Sidewalk Steve’s stomach. The homeless man was so drugged up that he barely flinched, but Chandler didn’t have time to worry about him. His legs, still tingling from the blow to his spine, were sluggish as he pushed himself backward, but with each inch he felt the pain recede. The whole time his eyes never wavered from his batwielding assailant. A short Spanish fellow, with shoulders like softballs beneath his tight jacket. Chandler pushed at the guard’s mind, but there was nothing: his reserves had been depleted, and, as well, he guessed that the guard had been dosed with Thorazine like the doctor, because Chandler didn’t even sense the man’s mind. This would have to be a physical fight. One on one—no, one on two, he saw, as a second guard, armed with a length of iron pipe, stepped into the door behind the first.
All this had taken a second, perhaps two. Now, as the thugs advanced toward him, Chandler held up his hands.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
He was still sitting on the floor when he spoke, and all the two men did was look at each other and laugh.
“We was told that if you managed to get out, we could do everything short of killing you,” the guard with the bat said.
“Three days we been hanging around,” the second guard threw in, smacking his pipe against his palm, “just waiting to have a little fun.”
“Please,” Chandler said, looking around for something to use as a weapon. “You know this isn’t right.”
The room was filled with broken-down factory machinery too big to move, let alone use as a weapon, but here and there were a few beakers and test tubes and pieces of lab equipment. Rubber tubes, metal pans. Nothing resembling a scalpel.
The man with the bat lunged. Chandler rolled, avoiding a blow to the head—the guard had a generous idea of what he could live through—then shot his leg out, knocking his attacker’s feet from under him. Even as he reached for the bat he noted how differently he and his assailant moved. The guard seemed ever-so-slightly slowed down. Chandler could almost believe it was the Thorazine making the man groggy, except he fell to the floor with the same slowness. Chandler’s limbs, by contrast, darted from his body like striking snakes. He snatched the man’s bat before he’d even hit the ground, used the fat end like a pool cue, slammed it into the guard’s temple. At the last instant he pulled back slightly, afraid of shattering the man’s skull, but there was still a sickening snap, and the man went limp on the ground.
Chandler whirled to face the second guard, bringing the bat up to protect his face. The pipe smashed into it close to the handle, and Chandler found himself holding four inches of splintered wood. Another inch and the fingers of his right hand would have been shattered.
“I thought you were told not to kill me,” Chandler said, dodging a second blow, then a third. The guard aimed for his head every time.
“We’re not paid enough to care,” the guard said, swinging fiercely again—but carefully, Chandler saw. The man was making sure not to leave himself exposed as his partner had.
By now, Chandler’s backward movement had taken him to the nearest table, and he put it between him and the guard. He tried to push the table but it was bolted to the floor, so he started grabbing objects and throwing them. His aim was good, but so was the guard’s, and he smashed one beaker after another with his pipe, seemed almost to enjoy the spray of glass and liquids, smiling grimly through gritted teeth and slitted eyes.
“Best hitting practice I’ve had in a while.”
“Yeah?” Chandler grabbed an alcohol burner, aimed right for the guard’s strike zone. “Hit this.”
Glass and liquid sprayed into the air in a sparkling mist. Chandler’s fingers had already sparked a match on the slate tabletop. He threw it, and the air erupted in flames.
“My face!” the guard screamed.
The alcohol from the burner had mostly flown away from the guard, and his skin was nothing more than singed. But the flash had blinded him long enough for Chandler to leap the table and clock him with a fist to the jaw.
He stood there a moment, panting, not from exertion, but adrenaline. The whole fight had taken perhaps a minute. Finally he turned back to Sidewalk Steve, still sleeping on the floor.
“All right, Steve. Let’s get you back outside where you belong.”
Washington, DC
November 9, 1963
Melchior got the call just after 3 a.m.
“I’m sorry to disturb you at such an ungodly hour. I’m trying to reach Thomas Taylor. Tommy.”
“Sorry,” Melchior mumbled. “Wrong number.”
He dressed without turning on the light. Keller’s use of the word “ungodly” meant the situation was urgent; a man’s name meant the call concerned Orpheus; the addition of a diminutive meant something had gone wrong. It was just after midnight in San Francisco, which suggested Keller had been contacted by the guards. Either that or the doctor was working after hours. Neither scenario boded well.
Funny he should use the name Tommy, though. Melchior would have to ask about that.
Melchior had no doubt that anyone listening in would spot the call—the wrong number was a staple contact protocol. As a field agent with twenty years’ worth of contacts, it would be easy enough for Melchior to explain it off as any of a dozen different people. No doubt the Company wouldn’t believe him, and depending on just how suspicious they were feeling, they’d probably trace the call back to Frisco. But none of that mattered, as long as they didn’t find out what w
as really going on before he took care of Keller’s problem.
Melchior used the building’s rear exit (whose light fixture kept mysteriously shorting out no matter how often the super repaired it) and hurried up the tree-shadowed street to the Chevy the Wiz had given him. He took four consecutive left turns to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then drove randomly for eleven minutes before pulling over at the next pay phone he saw. He dialed the rendezvous number exactly thirty minutes after Keller had called his apartment.
“He’s escaped!” the doctor screamed into his ear before the phone had finished its first ring.
Melchior swallowed his fury. He’d prepared himself for news of Chandler’s death—Keller’s time experimenting on Jews in concentration camps hadn’t exactly left him with a delicate hand—but escape was unacceptable.
“What happened?”
“He got Steve to break down the door. Then he overpowered those thugs you hired.”
Melchior wanted to know how, exactly, Chandler had gotten Steve to break down a steel door, but there wasn’t time for that now.
“Did the guards say anything?”
“Only that Orpheus was very … unusual.”
“We already know that.”
“I mean physically. They said he moved with incredible speed.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t the Thorazine?”
“I don’t know, but …” Keller paused, and Melchior could hear the doctor’s mind racing.
“What?”
“It’s probably nothing. But assuming that the guards’ perceptions were accurate, then their testimony suggests that Chandler’s power is less mental than neuronal.”
“In English.”
“CIA theorized that the Gate of Orpheus would activate some specifically mental ability. But Leary felt the Gate was a processing station that would affect all the senses. He believed LSD didn’t so much activate a dormant part of the brain as increase the central nervous system’s ability to process stimuli that the senses weren’t normally aware of.”
