“Oh, heh,” I say, “I don’t really know who I’d call, anyway. Probably would’ve gotten a taxi. But I mean, thanks for not making me do that.”
I follow the cop – Officer Peterson – to his car, and he gives me a lift back home. Along the way, we chat about the job, and my home life, and about living in my parents’ house – it’s not like that, I rent it from them and keep the property up, it’s a good deal for everyone – and when he drops me off, I’ve almost forgotten he’s a cop. So it’s a bit of a shock when I’m getting out of the car and he says, “Don’t leave town for a few days. Everything looks pretty clear cut, but we’d like to have you accessible in case we have any more questions.”
And then I realize that this whole ride back, he’s been profiling me. I’ve been telling him about my friends, my family, my job, the whole nine yards. I’ve even taken him straight to my home address. But I look in the open car door at him, and he looks genuine, just like he has for the entire drive. So either he really is a good guy, or he’s really good at faking it.
I can’t tell, and standing here isn’t going to help, so I say, “Sure, no problem. Thanks for the ride.” Then I limp inside, flop down on my bed, and fall asleep in my clothes before the bed’s even finished settling.
- Chapter Three -
I wake up early in the afternoon to a voicemail from Edgar, my direct boss at the museum, asking me to come in an hour early to discuss the events of last night. I’d filed a report before I got hustled off to the hospital, which is a good thing, since by the time I got home it was the furthest thing from my mind. I bet I would’ve had a much more frantic voicemail if the morning shift showed up to find a crime scene with no warning or explanation.
I dawdle my way through breakfast, watch Netflix for a while, noodle around on my guitar and generally waste the afternoon. This is a pretty standard day for me, except that I enjoy it less than usual today with this sword of Damocles poised to drop when I get to work. I mean, it’s technically possible that they want to give me a commendation for my heroic actions and quick thinking which saved all of the exhibits, but I know full well that a reprimand is more likely than a raise.
So I screw around until it’s a little past when I should be leaving, then get my act together and head out. I hobble my way out the front door and suddenly realize two things: my car’s still at the museum, and there’s no way I could work the pedals with a cast on my right foot anyway. No legal way, anyway. I could probably manage it. Stick my foot off to the side, use my left foot on the pedals, and I bet I could swing it. Of course, if I get into an accident like that, I’m likely to have a really ugly encounter with the shifter, and that’ll be a fun one to explain to whoever shows up at the crash.
This line of thinking is not helping me, because even if I were stupid enough to try driving with my left foot, my car’s still not here. So I crutch my way down the sidewalk for three blocks until I find a bus stop, then try to manage my phone without losing my crutches to figure out if any of the buses that come here will go anywhere near where I’m going. In the end, I get to work about a half an hour before my shift starts.
The place is pretty nicely cleaned up; there’s a “Please Use Other Door” sign up over a piece of plywood where the main door was last night, and the back half of the desk in the main lobby has been replaced with a sign reading “WE’RE RENAVATING! PARDON OUR DUST.” It’s a lot less concerning for the patrons than the “Police Line: Do Not Cross” tape that was up last night, and is probably a good call. The misspelling bothers me, though. We’re a museum; we’re supposed to be educating people. Physician, heal thyself!
Edgar greets me by looking pointedly at his watch. Edgar does a lot of things pointedly. He’s a very angular sort of guy. He’s thin, bony and dour. He’s in his fifties, probably been balding since his twenties, and is definitely unhappy about it. Both the balding and being in his fifties, I mean. Edgar likes things organized, and what I left him last night was anything but.
“I asked you to be here half an hour ago,” he says.
“Yeah, but I’m not supposed to be here for another half an hour, so let’s just call it even,” I say. This attempt at humor goes over about as well as you’d expect, which is to say, not at all. Edgar just gives me a lizard stare before motioning me to follow him to his office.
Once there, I get read the riot act. Edgar has reviewed the tapes, and I have apparently done everything wrong. I should have been more alert and noticed the man outside. I should have called the police immediately, instead of attempting to resolve the problem on my own. I should have used verbal commands to tell him to stop, and used the company-approved pacification techniques – seriously, he said “company-approved pacification techniques”; the guy’s a walking training video – instead of brawling.
Although it’s probably not the best idea, I interrupt at this point. I can’t help myself; I’m being unfairly maligned, and that really gets my hackles up. “I wasn’t ‘brawling,’ Ed. I was fighting for my life.”
“Please don’t call me Ed. If you cannot remember my entire first name, please call me Mr. Dobson.”
Another lizard stare, while I consider needling him with a “Sure, Ed.” I decide that discretion is the better part of valor and simply nod.
Satisfied, Edgar continues listing my misdeeds, ending with, “And please don’t consider filing for worker’s compensation for your foot injury. It’s clear on the tape that that was sustained outside of your standard duties. Had you not been clowning around with the marble, your foot would be fine.”
He’s got me there, dead to rights, so I don’t even protest. I can see a tiny muscle twitch in the corner of his left eye, going in sync with his heartbeat, which relaxes when he realizes I’m not going to argue the point. He swivels his chair away from me and says, “That’s all. You can go.”
“You got it, Ed gar,” I say, with just the briefest pause between the syllables of his name. He’s in profile to me as I stand up, but I can see that twitch start up again, and all of a sudden I feel lousy. A quick glance around this guy’s office tells you that he’s not in control of his life, and he makes up for it by compulsively straightening the small things that he can control. And here’s me, making things just a little bit worse for him, day after day. I’m a symbol of the uncaring life that’s crushing him. No wonder he’s such a jerk to me.
I walk out of Edgar’s office, wondering when exactly I got so insightful, and see that stupid “RENAVATING” sign again. In the last ten minutes before I go on-shift, I track down a marker and scrawl a thick O over the offending A. If Edgar notices when he leaves, he doesn’t say anything about it.
- Chapter Four -
I’m sitting at my desk, counting the hours like normal, but they’re passing even more slowly than usual. At first, I figure that maybe I’m just keyed up over last night, but it’s got to be more than that. The seconds are actually going by at a decreased rate of speed. I mean, obviously they’re still moving at the rate of one second per second, but I’ve got more time to think during each one, and how else do you measure time? Time is what you’ve got to live in. If you can live faster, it’s the same as time going slower.
Those little details that I’d been noticing all day – the misspelled sign, the twitch in Edgar’s eye – I’m seeing those sorts of minor things all around me now, in the quiet of the museum. I can tell where the drafts are coming from by watching the dust patterns in the low glow of the nighttime lighting in the lobby. On my rounds, I see every handprint smear that the janitors missed, every uneven bit of wear on the floorboards.
I run some calculations in my head as I finish the rounds, figuring out the difference in height of the wood at the edges of the room, where few people walk, and the center, which gets the most traffic. I crunch that number against the thickness of the planks, make an estimate as to how thin the wood could get before it would crack, and come up with the approximate number of years until the museum will need to replace the floor
ing. All of this takes me about eighteen seconds, and as I mentioned, I’m not a college guy.
This is obviously unnatural, so I devote some of my new hyperprocessing power to figuring out what’s causing it. Result: insufficient data. I come up with a number of entertaining screwball theories, ranging from last night’s impact trauma having caused rewiring of some mental pathways, to some sort of gas leak in the museum interacting with the preservatives in the microwaved food I’d had for breakfast, to a sinister hospital plot involving a secret cabal of doctors injecting unwitting patients with strange drugs. None have the slightest evidence to support them, but they’re still a lot of fun to construct.
This is good, because they’re about the only thing that is fun in my evening. Back at my half-a-desk, I realize I’ve never been bored before in my life. I’ve often thought I was, but those moments were sheer joy compared to the utter soul-sucking endless seconds I’m suffering through now. When I was walking around, at least there were new stimuli. Now, sitting still, there’s nothing but what’s in front of me, and I can only amuse myself counting the number of identical tiles in the marble floor for so long.
I make it through my first half-dozen rounds before I can’t take it anymore. I’ve come up with plans to improve the efficiency of the floor plan of the museum, some of which use existing doorways, and some which call for restructuring walls to allow new doors to be placed in superior positions. I’ve analyzed the issues in my own life, addressing the fears of failure that have allowed me to settle into a dead-end job like this for the better part of a decade, and I have admitted that the main reason I dislike Edgar is that I’m certain I’m going to be him in twenty years – and also that, if I continue to change nothing, this is an entirely rational belief.
I’ve balanced my budget in my head, come up with excellent suggestions to help the country balance its budget as well, and have made pretty good strides towards peace in the Middle East. And as I sit down at my desk and contemplate the same still life with monitors in front of me, I absolutely have to do something else right then. It’s more than just a desire. It’s a physical need, like oxygen.
I’ve got twenty minutes until my next rounds. Even on the crutches, it won’t take me more than five minutes to get to the parking lot. Allowing for five minutes back as well gives me ten minutes to try out the idea I had earlier: driving the car with my left foot.
If you think that sounds like an idea that’s too dumb for someone of my suddenly elevated intellectual caliber, then you’ve clearly never met a really smart guy. The smartest people I know have done some of the dumbest stuff I can think of, just because they were creative enough to think up really stupid ways to get themselves into trouble.
It totally makes sense, though. I figure I’m seeing everything around me, completely aware of my surroundings, making sense of it all, and it’s a mostly empty parking lot. What can go wrong? So I maneuver myself out to the car, throw the crutches in the backseat, and climb in through the passenger’s door in the front. I manage not to clock my head on the rearview mirror as I shuffle my left leg over the shifter, which is already an accomplishment. I get as comfortable as I can on the armrest between the seats, make sure I can reach both pedals, and start the car up. At six feet tall, I’m a little hunched up under the ceiling, but it’s not too bad. I wouldn’t want to take a long car ride like this, but I could manage to and from work if I had to.
I start out slowly, getting adjusted to the unusual angle and to the tendency to support my weight with my left foot, which of course makes it hard to shift quickly between the pedals. Even in an empty parking lot, that seems like a bad habit to fall into. I’ve only got ten minutes for this, though, and even with my perception working overtime, the seconds aren’t creeping by anymore. As the saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun.
Pretty soon I’m doing doughnuts in the parking lot, whooping like a maniac and enjoying myself immensely. My speed’s inching up as I get more confident, and I’m coming up on thirty miles an hour when there’s a godawful bang from behind me. The car lurches and makes a metal-tearing sound, and my head ricochets off of the rearview mirror.
My first thought is that I’ve hit something invisible, because I was looking straight through the windshield when it happened, and there was nothing there. Microseconds later, the details drop into place. My head went forward; that means something stopped the car briefly. The tearing noise came from behind me, so the back of the car hit something the front didn’t. Therefore, either something burrowed up, or something jumped down.
These thoughts flash through as pure concepts. They haven’t even made it to words yet before I’m looking in the now-askew rearview mirror, where I see the crazy guy from last night rolling to his feet and waving a polearm at me. That’s my immediate impression, which quickly corrects itself in two particulars. First, this isn’t the guy from last night; he’s got the same sort of matted hair sticking out all over, but it’s a different color, and the guy is taller, probably close to my height. Second, it’s not a polearm. It’s the back bumper of my car, which he’s just torn off.
It looks like the guy jumped down from the brick wall marking this edge of the parking lot and tried to land on my car, but missed and just got the bumper. Despite having been sent tumbling by the car when he ripped it off with his bare hands, he’s already running at me and swinging it like an enormous bat. He’s got a decent shot at catching me, too; I instinctively stood on the brakes when all this started to happen, and he’s making the most of my reduced speed.
I jam on the gas immediately and start to leave him behind, but I can see I’ve got a problem. I’m going to run out of parking lot pretty quickly, and he can cut diagonally and narrow the distance between us. One good hit with the bumper could take out both headlights of the car, and the lighting isn’t good enough for me to be comfortable driving fast enough to avoid him using only the parking lot lights for illumination.
And that’s if I’m lucky, too. A low swing could shred one or more tires. Worse, a high shot could put the bumper straight into the windshield. If he’s got the strength to tear the bumper off bare-handed, I’m betting that he’s strong enough to bash it straight through the windshield and flatten my face. These are all scenarios I’d like to avoid.
So just like last night, I’ve been ambushed at work by some sort of testosterone-boosted mutant. Unlike last night, I’ve got a busted foot, and no super-strength, as far as I know. I spare a second to try to tear the glove compartment door off – it’ll cause the least structural damage to the car in case I have gotten strong again and haven’t noticed – but it stays firmly in place.
Okay, so those are my disadvantages: surprised, hobbled, outmuscled. What do I have going for me? Speed, as long as I stay in the car, and brains. The speed’s taking care of itself for the time being, so it’s time to engage the brains.
I examine my options. Option one: take the car out of the parking lot and to the open road. I can definitely leave the guy behind there, as long as I don’t screw up driving from the wrong side of the car. It gets me clear, but it potentially puts other people at risk. As a lesser consideration, it also leaves the museum unguarded. The fact that the current attack is coming at me in the parking lot suggests that I’m the target, not the museum, but it’s still a possibility. Not that I intend to give my life for this job, but if I can avoid getting fired, that’d be preferable. Option one tabled for now, then.
Option two: circle the parking lot until the guy’s body gives out like the last one’s did. Taking a guess, he might be managing twenty miles an hour right now, and surely he can’t sustain that for long. If he gives up the chase, great! If he collapses entirely, that’s fine, too. The problem here is that I don’t know how long he can hold out, and the longer this goes on, the bigger a chance there is of me making a mistake. Keep going, brains!
Option three: ram him. Callous but effective. It would end the situation in a timely fashion, on my terms, and without end
angering others. Drawback: I’d have to explain to the police how I came to run a man down with my car. “He attacked me while I was driving in circles” doesn’t sound like the sort of line that they’re going to regard as a satisfactory explanation. Given my current precarious driving posture, they might even believe that it was an accident, and I made up the attack entirely to cover my own lethal mistake.
Option three is clearly not the way to go, but the idea of an accident leads me to option four: trick him into the car and crash it with him inside. It involves a certain level of risk, since I’ll have to let him get close enough to me to get into the car, and the whole procedure will require precision timing – but I think I can see how to pull it off.
The first thing I do, still accelerating away, is open the glove compartment and again try to break the door off. This time, I raise my plaster-encased foot above the open door and kick down as hard as I can. It’s an awkward angle, and it takes me three extremely painful hits to break the hinges, but I manage to snap it off just as I reach the far side of the parking lot. I swing into a U-turn and hit the brakes, tapering off my speed as I head back toward my assailant.
Next, I grab the driver’s side seatbelt, pull it to its full extension, and loop it through the steering wheel, letting the buckle catch on the belt to hold it in place. It’s a bit awkward to keep steering at this point, but my position on the center armrest actually helps right now. My attacker is about forty yards away and closing fast now, so I pop open the passenger door and shove both feet out of it. With my feet off of the pedals, I’m only doing about ten miles an hour right now, but the pavement is still going by way too fast for comfort.
As the car coasts forward, the hairy guy roars, swings the bumper in a massive arc, and smashes out the driver’s side window. Glass shatters around me as I use the broken glovebox door to wedge the accelerator to the floor. The car surges forward. The guy roars again, drops the bumper, tears the entire door off of its hinges and leaps inside.
The Experiment (Book 1): The Reluctant Superhero Page 2
