In the two weeks since my emergency room visit, I’d been regularly and obsessively caking anti-scar ointment on the little gash over my right eye. In the right light, it looked almost like a second eyebrow. But I’d take it, because it was literally the only thing currently wrong with me. My CT scan had been clear, my stitches came out without incident, and not a single Solstice symptom had come calling.
That hadn’t been the only good news. My shipment of furniture had shown up, so I’d been able to unpack and sleep on a proper mattress again. On top of that, Angie had put in a good word for me with her supervisor at the car rental call center where she worked when she wasn’t helping her mom at the restaurant, and I’d landed a job. The work was repetitive—I mean, there’s only so many times you can help someone reserve a car at Weyland International Airport before you could probably automate it with a series of recordings of yourself—but the hours were consistent. And I even got to sit right across the aisle from Angie. I was surprised how nice it was, having a friend at work.
Today we’d turned around in our chairs so we could toss a miniature Nerf football back and forth between phone calls.
“Hey, do you have plans tonight?” Angie asked. “I’ve got this new deck-building card game, and a few of my friends are coming over to try it out. Want to join us?”
“That sounds super fun.” It didn’t; I loved a lot of things about Angie but couldn’t figure out why she was so obsessed with card games. “But as it happens, I have plans.”
“A date?”
I had to suppress a bitter laugh. “Yeah, right. No, I’m meeting my sister at some place called Tavern for a drink.”
Angie wrinkled her nose. “Tavern? Isn’t that the yupster joint downtown?”
“I’m not sure. She picked it out.”
She pouted a bit, but I’d learned she never stayed down too long about any one thing. By the time her face had arranged itself into a sad expression, she was already over it. She tossed the football back to me. It went wide, sailing over my head and landing in the next row of cubicles.
“Man, that was a crap catch,” she said. “Go get it.”
Before I could stand, the phone on my desk began to jingle. “Ah, would if I could. Guess you’ll have to fetch it while I handle this important grownup stuff.”
Grumbling, she heaved herself out of her chair while I talked someone into paying for a GPS upgrade in their rental car. The caller was the type of indecisive person who feels like choosing between a compact and a sub-compact to save a total of five dollars is as important as naming their firstborn child, so it took me all the way through to the end of my shift. By the time I was able to hang up, Angie had retrieved our ball and was engrossed in something on her computer.
“Hey, you on a call?” I asked.
She didn’t turn around to face me. “You have to see this.”
Pulling on my coat, I walked up behind her and peered at her computer monitor. She’d been reading the news, and her screen displayed a headline I never thought I’d see outside of a comic book.
Masked Vigilante Cleans up Weyland South Side.
“No way,” I breathed.
“Cool, huh? Wait’ll you see him.”
Angie clicked a link, bringing up a security camera video. There was no sound, and the footage was choppy—a series of still images set a second or so apart—so the result was like a flipbook with most of the pages torn out or poorly done stop-motion photography. A stooped old woman wearing a heavy coat walked into the frame. A moment later, a skinny kid ran up to her and grabbed for her purse. The two of them wrestled with it for a few seconds.
“Here he comes,” said Angie.
From the top of the camera’s field of vision, a third figure appeared. He was clad head to foot in black and was wearing a fox mask with long, pointed ears. He raised a leg, and in the next frame, the mugger was lying in a heap and the old woman’s purse was airborne. Within two more frames, the masked man had secured the mugger to a barred window and returned the bag to its owner.
Even with the choppy video footage, the masked man seemed incredibly fast. It was possible to track the movements of the mugger and his victim from frame to frame, but the guy in the costume seemed to flit from place to place, disappearing from one side of the video and reappearing on the other in an impossibly short amount of time.
It took me a moment before I could produce actual words. “What in the literal hell?”
“It’s crazy, right? They’re calling him The Fox. The article says he cleared out a brothel last week. When the cops went in to check it out, they found the guys who were running the place all zip-tied the same way as that mugger. And get this—there was a fox face spray painted on the wall.”
I gripped the back of Angie’s chair. “He’s a vigilante?”
“Yup. And I’ll tell you something else—I don’t think he’s human. Did you see how fast he moved? That’s not right, man.” She clicked the button to replay the video, and the footage started over. “I think he might be an alien or something.”
My hands began to tingle, and suddenly the rough texture of Angie’s office chair seemed amplified. Every strand of thread in the fabric pressed against my palms, growing so warm it felt like it might burn me. But I couldn’t let it go. My fingernails dug into the cheap padding so hard that my joints ached.
I looked down. My hands were turning the exact same shade of navy blue as the chair.
Gasping, I stuffed them into my coat pockets.
Angie turned away from her computer. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said quickly. My heart was pounding. I could feel my skin tightening, just like it had when I’d punched a hole through my wall. I needed to get out of there. “It’s… just crazy, that’s all. But listen, Ang, I’ve gotta go.”
Not bothering to wait for her reply, I dashed out of the office, weaving between cubicles and pounding down the concrete steps in the back stairwell. I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the faux-marble floor of the lobby.
Nodding at the security guard who manned the desk by the doors, I speed-walked to the lobby bathrooms and locked myself inside a stall. I almost didn’t dare look, but I had to know. It’d been two weeks since the last time, long enough that I wasn’t sure if it would ever happen again, or if it’d even really happened in the first place.
Shaking, I pulled my hands out from my pockets and lifted them to my face.
Yep. They were blue.
Not only were they the exact same color as our chairs, they had the same texture. Fat threads crisscrossed each other in a tight, square weave. My hands were covered in crappy office furniture upholstery.
Covered? I wondered. Or…
I curled my hands into loose fists and then released them. It was a little difficult. The fabric was thick and stubborn, but it wasn’t as impossible as the plaster had been. Turning my hands over, I examined my fingernails. They were there, molded into the fabric as though they were part of the design. Squinting down at my thin fingers, I could even just barely make out little curved lines on the backs of my joints.
My hands weren’t covered in the fabric. My hands were made of the fabric.
The thought was like a sucker punch, and I plunked down onto the toilet, heedless of the fact that I was sitting on the seat while still wearing my work slacks. I reached out a hand to steady myself, resting it on the muted pink tiles next to the toilet paper dispenser. The wall felt cool, at first. Then something wet soaked into me and I yanked my hand backward. There was some kind of liquid splashed on the wall, and I’d absorbed it with my fabric-y skin.
Bathroom water. In my skin. Not on it.
In it.
My gag reflex responded the instant I’d fully processed that thought, and I retched. Spinning around and dropping to my knees, I managed to get my face above the bowl just as my bean burrito from lunch spewed from my mouth. Heaving, I rested my hands on the seat before remembering they were made of upholstery. Could I even wash them?
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“Oh, God,” I croaked, and a fresh wave of nausea hit me.
It took several minutes for my stomach to settle. I rocked back on my heels, trying to balance myself so I wouldn’t have to touch anything with my disgusting hands but wouldn’t fall over onto the bathroom floor. I held my hands out limply in front of me, arms bent like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
I had to calm down. The plaster hadn’t lasted forever; neither would this. I tried to remember how I’d made it go away, but all I could think about was how much bacteria was in my hands right now.
Stop it! I ordered myself. Close your eyes. Focus.
It was impossible. In my mind’s eye, I saw tiny, infectious organisms crawling all over my blue skin. My hands tingled. I could feel them! Then, abruptly, my mental image switched, and the bacteria was on my actual skin. My normal, human, fleshy skin.
As soon as I imagined my own skin, the tingling stopped. I opened my eyes. My hands were back to normal again. Unlike the last episode, they were even back to their regular shade. There was no redness.
I threw open the stall door and rushed to the sink, scrubbing my hands with vigor for several minutes. The feeling of warm water and the vaguely floral scent of the cheap powdered soap washed away the mental images of germs crawling all over me. Then I bent forward, resting my hands on my knees breathing deeply until I was sure I wouldn’t faint and bash my head again.
Emotions churned inside me as I left the building and hurried down the block to the train station. What was happening to me? For the second time in two weeks, I’d… absorbed something I’d been touching—first the plaster, then the chair. It was like I’d sucked them inside of myself through my hands.
I stopped walking and approached a red newspaper box. Experimentally, I brushed my fingers across the cold metal. I raised my hand to my face, watching and waiting for my skin to change color.
Nothing happened.
Gritting my teeth, I wrapped both hands around the handle of the box, squeezing it with all my might, and waited.
Still nothing.
“Uh, Miss?” A pretty woman in a long coat touched my arm. “You have to put money into that slot to get a newspaper.”
Heat flooded my face, and I released my death grip on the handle. I’d been so lost in my thoughts, I’d forgotten I was in the middle of a busy sidewalk.
“Right.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”
She inclined her head and moved on, but she cast a quizzical glance over her shoulder at me once she’d put a few paces between us. She looked concerned, and I worried she might come back and try to help me get a cab or something, so I started walking again.
Despite being surrounded by hundreds of other people, I felt isolated. They were looking forward to normal things, a date at the movies maybe, or just a quiet night in with a beer. They weren’t trying to get something terrifying to happen to them again. They weren’t struggling to figure out, for the second time that year, what in God’s name was happening to their body.
Was this a disease? Or something different? I hadn’t fallen into any giant vats of chemicals that I could recall, or been exposed to any freaky kinds of super-radiation.
At the top of the stairs to the Fishbone platform, a new piece of graffiti covered the station marker. Bright-orange paint glowed in the fading light of day. It was the unmistakable silhouette of a fox face with pointed ears and jagged cheeks.
The video of the vigilante apprehending the mugger played in my mind. I saw him leaping across the screen at impossibly high speeds. There was something off about him. As Angie had said, it wasn’t normal.
He was different, too.
And I knew, instinctively, that we were different in the same way.
I wanted to find him, to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and demand to know if he had any idea what was going on. But I didn’t know how to do that. I wasn’t any more tech-savvy than anybody else; I couldn’t hack into the police computer system and find out what they knew about him. There was only one thing I knew how to do, one thing I was good at.
The second I got home, I rushed to my bedroom closet and dug out a battered cardboard box. The rest of my apartment was beginning to feel like home now that my comic books and collectibles filled the tall, narrow shelves in my living room, but this was one box I hadn’t bothered to unpack yet.
Beneath the lid, I found my pencils, paints, and other art supplies. I hadn’t felt the urge to do more than sketch since coming back to Weyland, but I was suddenly inspired. I carried the pencils and paper to the drafting table in my living room, brushing aside my mail and some empty soda bottles to make room for the large sketchpad. For the hour before I had to leave to meet Bethany, I worked in a frenzy. My hand moved across the page like it had a mind of its own, laying down lines and shapes in a rush. When I was finished, I was panting, but I felt elated. It was the high I felt any time I created something.
Before leaving for the bar, I tacked the drawing up above my drafting table and stood back to take it in. The face of an anthropomorphic fox, its eyes hidden in shadow, stared back at me from the wall. Sure, there was a chance it was an elaborate marketing campaign for some new superhero movie, or maybe it was just clickbait and the guy who made it was making a fortune off the views.
But I could feel the truth in my gut. This guy was real, and he was special. Just like me.
I wanted to start pulling comics off my shelves and pore through them. He’d leapt right out of their pages, a costumed hero come to life. And then it hit me: he was inhumanly fast. There was definitely something weird going on there. So he wasn’t just a hero.
He was a real life, honest-to-Pete, freaking superhero.
The more I thought about The Fox, the less terrifying my own situation felt. I stared down at my hands. They weren’t diseased. I didn’t need to go to a doctor to find a cure. This could be a gift. I pictured myself jumping out of windows and rolling across the sidewalk, then leaping up and punching some criminal in the face with a concrete fist.
“Holy crap,” I muttered to myself.
I was tempted to cancel my plans with my sister so I could stay in and think some more about this. How would I even research it? Could I Google “superpowers” and come up with anything more applicable than a list of comic books and movies? I highly doubted scientists at MIT were studying something like this.
I gripped the pencil in my hand. There was one thing I could do. I could design my own costume, something to wear while I roamed the streets, looking for bad guys and kicking some ass.
My phone buzzed on the table. I picked it up and saw a brief message from Bethany.
Just got on the train, she wrote. Can’t wait to see you!
She’d punctuated it with four smiley faces and three hearts.
Guilt squeezed my heart. I couldn’t bail on her. Not again. Plus, there were a huge number of flaws in my plan to follow The Fox’s footsteps and become a costumed crime fighter, not the least of which was that I’d never even thrown a punch in my life. Well, aside from the one I’d thrown at my living room wall. I wasn’t even confident using a can of Mace. Was I crazy?
On top of that, I had no idea how to make my hands change. Zero clue if I could make more of my body change, too.
Shaking my head, I tugged on my coat. I’d been trying for weeks to get Bethany to meet me in the city. She’d kept inviting me out to her house, but I wasn’t going to spoil a perfectly good get-together with my sister by risking a conversation with Bruce. She’d finally agreed to have a night out with me, she was excited to see me, and I’d been considering ditching her to spend the evening fantasizing like a little kid.
I opened the door and took a last look at the drawing of The Fox. He was amazing, but I had my own life to deal with.
A blast of warm air greeted me as I stepped into Tavern, drying out my face. The bar was a long, narrow room with a high ceiling and whitewashed walls. The structure had a classy feel, which was reflected in their cocktail prices, but their gari
sh holiday decorations made me want to pound some cheap booze. Garlands made from paper hearts wrapped around the exposed beams above my head, and little Cupid statuettes topped every table, reminding everyone that Valentine’s Day was just a couple of weeks away. I would’ve preferred a snug hole in the wall with a happy hour beer special, but Bethany had read that Tavern was “the place” to hang out in Weyland right now. After weeks of lobbying—unsuccessfully—to get her to come out with me, I’d just been happy there was somewhere she was willing to go.
I found her at a tall table at the back, waving to me with a martini glass in one hand. She’d ordered me a Stella—my favorite—and was bouncing up and down on her barstool.
“Can you believe this place?” she asked when I sat down.
The bar was packed with college kids, all carefully groomed to somehow look scruffy yet well-to-do at the same time. Colorful scarves, sport coats, and vintage liquor T-shirts abounded. It wasn’t really my scene, but Bethany looked like she was already having the time of her life. She fit in, too; today she wore a slouchy purple beanie over her long golden hair and a brown knit dress with sleeves that covered her hands. I felt a little out of place with my loose-fit jeans, Marvel sweatshirt, and comic-themed messenger bag.
“It’s great.” I smiled and picked up my beer. “To more outings like this one.”
I left the real toast unspoken: To you finally being willing to ditch that mutt you’re married to for one night.
She grinned back at me and clinked her glass against my bottle. “Deal.”
We each took a sip, and I contemplated the mystical ability of a Stella to drive my worries right out of my mind. Suffering from mutant hands? No idea where they came from or how they work? It’s all good. Plenty of time to worry about that later. I leaned back on my stool and relaxed against the cinderblock wall.
“So how was your day?” Bethany asked.
Those five words undid the magic of the beer, and all the stress came flooding back into me. What if I told her what happened to me today? It was an absurd thought. She’d never believe me; she’d just worry I’d lost my mind. Besides, I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about it yet. It was all still a mess in my head, and I wouldn’t know how to answer a single follow-up question she might have.
Solstice Survivors (Book 1): Superhero Syndrome Page 6
