I join Jonathan’s family and friends in celebrating who he was, even as we mourn him. I create an idea of Jonathan inside myself and cherish him, and it helps me let go of resentment I hadn’t even realized I was holding. Yes, something is happening to me, but it’s not only to me. I’m not alone, I’m not the only victim, and I can work to fix this.
I cry a number of times during the service, for Jonathan and Aaron Lovell and myself. This is different than the other day in front of Brian. You’re allowed to cry at funerals, maybe even supposed to. It’s cathartic, and no one judges me for it; no one even notices.
When it’s over and people are filing out, I suddenly really want to introduce myself to the Caraways, to let them know that I knew their son and he was important to me. They’re standing near the doors, shaking people’s hands and murmuring thanks as they leave. There’s an informal sort of line sweeping people past, and I’m about four people from the Caraways when I hear the man at the front say, “Mr. Caraway, Mrs. Caraway. I’m Sean, Jonathan’s guidance counselor. He was a wonderful young man. He’ll be missed.”
They thank him with bowed heads, while I quietly slip out of line and slide through the doors as quickly as my crutches can manage. My ears burn hot and cold as I go, and on the way out of the church, the metal of the door delivers a strong shock to my elbow, as if to let me know that my intended lie has not gone unnoticed.
In the dubious shelter of the bus stop, I ask myself how I really thought that was going to turn out, and I have no answer. The rain intensifies, finding its way through cracks and edges of the overhang. It flicks into my eyes and runs down my neck, and I simply wait for the bus and let the universe call me an idiot.
- - -
Now, maybe you’re noticing that I’ve gotten two sizeable static shocks in about as many hours – once getting onto the bus, and once leaving the church. And maybe you’re thinking, “Dan’s a smart guy, and he’s on the lookout for manifestations of weird powers. Surely he is also thinking about this?” Seems reasonable, right?
I don’t have a clue. It totally escapes my attention, and I bumble on home just glad that I didn’t cause a scene at a funeral. Once there, I sink into my usual oblivion of Netflix and delivered pizza, neither of which involve unusual amounts of electricity. The steady patter of the rain on the roof calms and relaxes me, and I fall asleep in my boxers on the couch watching a brainless comedy.
When I wake up, the movie’s over and the Netflix menu is staring at me accusingly. My tongue feels like the greasy cardboard that the pizza was delivered in, and the world’s in that grey twilight that could just as easily be dawn or dusk. I fish my pants off of the floor and fumble through the pockets for my phone to find out what time it is, but when I finally get the phone free, it’s dead.
That probably means it’s morning, though, since it had plenty of charge last night, so I figure I might as well get up and find out what the day looks like. I sit up, stretch, and click the remote at the TV to turn it off – but nothing happens. So I hit the button a few more times, just in case it didn’t get the message at first, but the TV stubbornly stays on. I open up the case to mess with the batteries, and one of them has burst, leaking a white crust all around one end. Clearly, this is not my day for electronics.
I lever my cast off of the couch, tuck my phone into the waistband of my boxers and limp-hop to the kitchen to get some new batteries. And that’s where I finally catch on to the fact that something’s up, because when I reach for the fridge door, every magnet I have on the front of it falls off at once.
My first thought is, “Power outage!” Which is dumb on so many levels that my brain basically shorts out for a second trying to process it. I remind myself that I’ve just woken up, shake off my stupidity, and get down to trying to figure out what is going on.
Whatever it is, it’s weird. I can’t get the magnets to reattach to the fridge at all. They slide off just like the fridge is made of plastic. I try tossing them at the fridge, and that works fine as long as I’m a couple of feet away. As soon as I approach, though, they demagnetize again. When I hold two of them together, they don’t repel each other, either. I’m shutting down the magnetic fields somehow.
In the back of my head, an idea starts clamoring for attention. It’s something about magnets, but I haven’t quite got the shape of it. I poke at it for a moment, hoping to get it to take form, but it stays vague. I know it’s something easy, something I should know, and probably something important, but I cannot put my finger on it. I pull out my phone to open up Wikipedia and see if it rings any bells, but of course my phone doesn’t turn on because the battery’s dead. Then it hits me – magnets! Magnets are bad for computers! My phone is a tiny computer! I’ve probably just fried my phone!
A wave of frustration washes over me as I look at the black screen. As it does, all of my fridge magnets leap off of the floor and slam into me like tiny kamikazes.
Suddenly, the absurdity of the situation strikes me. I’m standing in my kitchen in nothing but boxers and a cast. I’m furiously angry at a piece of plastic. And ladybugs and dinosaurs are stuck all over my legs.
I can’t help it; I start to laugh. And when I do, the magnets fall off, clattering on the linoleum at my feet.
That’s about all I need in terms of a hint. After a bit of experimentation, I demonstrate what I just discovered by accident: when I’m tense, the magnets stick to me. When I relax, they leave me alone. By blanking out my mind as best as I can, and thinking only of ocean waves crashing on the shore, I can even put a magnet back on the fridge and have it stay there, just like a regular person could. It’s amazing what passes for progress for me these days.
Okay, so I can attract magnets. I was never a huge science geek, but I’m pretty sure that means that I have to be a magnet. And if that’s the case, I should be able to attract metal, right? It makes sense in my head, so I put my hand palm up in front of the fridge door and tense up as hard as I can.
The first thing that happens is that all of the magnets fly off and pelt me in the face and torso, which anyone with half a brain could have predicted. As I throw my hands up and stumble backwards, though – which does nothing, since they’re all sticking to me already – the fridge door comes open and smacks into my hand, sticking solidly. I can feel a thrumming in my palm, like a cell phone on vibrate.
With difficulty, I peel my palm away from the door, then think about the ocean until the magnets drop away from me again. As I’m putting them all back on the fridge, I abruptly realize how stupid my test was. Aside from hitting myself with a dozen tiny missiles, if I’d been wrong about how strong the attraction was, I could have tipped the entire refrigerator over onto myself. It would have been the pile of rubble on my foot all over again, except this time, I would have dropped it onto my entire body.
Suitably chastened, I take a handful of the magnets and retreat off to the living room where there aren’t any large metal appliances, and sit down to continue my practice. After a few hours, I feel like I’m really starting to get the hang of it. Not only can I pull the magnets toward me, I can also push them away, or even keep them hovering above my hand. I’ve still only got an operative range of a couple of feet, but in that space, I can maintain very precise control. All in all, I’m feeling pretty good about my progress.
So basically, everything’s great until I stand up. I lower my hand to push myself off of the floor and immediately hear a loud zap as a blue bolt leaps to my hand from the carpet. I get the most painful electric shock I’ve ever had, my pinky finger goes numb and a small wisp of smoke drifts up from the carpet. I yelp and shake my hand wildly in the air, then stick my pinky into my mouth. Neither of these things help at all.
Obviously, there’s more than magnetism at work here. Unfortunately, I’m totally out of my depth. I’d like to do some research on it, but I’ve already fried my phone and I’m afraid that if I go near my computer, it’ll suffer the same fate. I could go to a library and ask someone there for h
elp, if I knew where a library was, which I don’t. I could call my friends to help, if I knew any of their numbers or had a landline phone. And since my car’s trashed, I can’t even drive around and hope to spot something.
As it is, I only know how to get to three places by bus: the church where the funeral was, my job, and the hospital. And of those three, I can only think of one that might have someone who can help me. I sigh to myself as I put on clothes and run a comb through my hair, which needless to say is standing straight up. Brian’s going to be sorry he ever met me at the museum that night.
- Chapter Eleven -
The bus comes to a stop only a few hundred feet from the hospital, but the rain is so intense that I can’t even seen the front entrance from there. When the driver opens the doors, the rain whips inside like it’s been waiting for me, chilling me immediately. I take a deep breath as I swing down the steps and out into the monsoon, my crutches kicking up water as I hustle as well as I can. If you’ve never tried moving around using two sticks shoved in your armpits while pails of water viciously seek out every gap in your coat, you can’t fully comprehend how miserable I am right now. And if you have, my condolences. It sucks.
I’m drowned-rat-level soaked by the time I’m halfway there, and I might as well not even be wearing a raincoat for all the protection it’s providing. I’ve got my head hunched into my shoulders and my eyes on the door, though, and I’m focused on my goal. I’m probably about fifty feet out when I see a welcome sight: Brian is hanging out in the covered area just outside the front doors, talking animatedly to a coworker who’s smoking a cigarette. I’d considered the possibility that he wouldn’t be on shift, but since I didn’t have any way of contacting him to find out, I’d decided to just come down and wait. Fortunately, it looks like I won’t have to! Things are finally going my way.
That’s the last thing I remember thinking before I wake up on a hospital gurney surrounded by chaos. There’s a smell of ozone and singed rubber, my shirt’s been cut open and there are doctors and nurses yelling around me.
“Clear! Clear!”
I open my eyes in time to see a pair of paddles being pressed violently into my chest. There’s a soft whump, and I suddenly get a surge of vitality. I sit bolt upright and knock the paddles away. “Whoa! I’m fine! I’m fine!”
Shock is written clearly across the faces of the hospital staff around me, but I have no idea why. I look around in confusion. “I am fine, right? What happened?”
“What’s your name? Can you tell me your name?”
“It’s Dan, Dan Everton. What happened?”
“You were hit by lightning, Mr. Everton. Twice, in fact, in rapid succession. You may be badly hurt.”
“What? No. I’m fine. I feel fine. I need to see Brian.”
“I’m right here, man,” says Brian from behind me. “You need to chill out and get checked out, you know? You’ve got some serious burns, and we don’t know what kinda damage you’ve got internally.”
Burns? I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I feel fine. That is, until I look down at my chest and see the two large, angry red and black marks on it. Red from the burns, and black from where part of my raincoat has melted right through my shirt and stuck to my chest. And as if I needed a visual cue for it to start hurting, the pain kicks me like a mule and I gasp for breath.
“Mr. Everton!”
“I’m fine!” I really am a broken record. “I just – I think I’m burned.” I sounded less stupid when I was saying I was fine.
“We’ll take a look at that, and see what else needs to be done.”
I lie back down as the doctor wheels me off into an exam room, and try to convince my chest that yes, I know it’s hurt, and it can stop reporting on that now.
- - -
Several hours and what feels like several hundred tests later, the doctor reluctantly admits that all of my damage appears to be superficial. She’s not thrilled about the diagnosis, partly because half of her machines wouldn’t work properly on me. She ends up deciding that this is due to “residual electromagnetic interference,” because saying I’ve got lightnin’ in mah bones doesn’t look good on a medical chart. Of course, that’s exactly what I do have. It’s just that it was there before I took the strike.
She gives me a tube of burn cream, instructions on how and when to apply it, and directions to the front desk to get my information sorted out before I leave. I hobble my way down the hallway, the muscles in my chest pulling at the burns with every swing of my crutches, and sing a little song of swear words under my breath as I go. It helps the pain a little bit.
As I’m giving my insurance information to the guy at the desk, I suddenly remember why I came here. “Hey, do you know an EMT named Brian?”
“Brian who?”
Man, why don’t I know anyone’s name? “Brian…the…EMT. I’m sorry, I have no idea what his last name is. He was here when I came in.”
“Blond guy, 20s, kinda long wavy hair?” he says, motioning just above his shoulders.
“Yeah! Yeah, that’s him.”
“Brian King, yeah. I can page him, let him know that you’re looking for him. It won’t get him back here any faster, but when he does get back, he’ll know to look for you.”
“So – is there a place I can wait?”
“In the waiting room, yes.”
He manages not to roll his eyes at me, but I’m not sure how; I’m rolling my eyes at myself as I make my way over to a seat. Once there, I collapse gratefully into it, and absent-mindedly reach for my phone. My pocket’s empty, and I have a moment of panic before I remember that my phone’s at home, and probably toast. I sigh, resign myself to reading printed material like some sort of a caveman, and look around for a magazine.
- - -
I realize I’ve fallen asleep only when Brian shakes me awake. Or when he tries to, technically; what actually wakes me up is an electric snap to my shoulder as he reaches down to touch me.
“Ouch! Hey, man, looks like the lightning’s not quite done with you yet, huh?” he jokes, but there’s something weird in his face, like he means that a bit more than he’d like to. That expression doesn’t bode well for me. It’s the look of a guy who’s just realizing that the water he’s swimming in is deeper than he knew, and there are shapes moving beneath him. I recognize it; I’ve been seeing it a lot in the mirror lately. And I know that if I were in Brian’s shoes, I’d bail.
“Hey, um. I had a, like a medical trivia question for you, I guess. How much electricity does the human body produce?”
Brian looks me squarely in the eye and says, “No. No way. You gotta tell me what’s going on.”
I hesitate, and he adds, “Or I walk away right now. You want my help, you tell me what I’m helping with.”
“All right, um,” I say. “So I’m pretty sure that I can conduct electricity, or something.”
Brian stares at me for a long second, then rummages in his pocket and produces a paper clip. “Show me.”
Without even thinking, I pull it towards me. His eyes get wide as it jumps out of his hands and into mine, but as he watches it float there an inch above my palm, slowly turning, all he says is, “Huh.”
“That’s all you’ve got to say?” I ask Brian, closing my hand over the paperclip. “Just ‘huh’?”
“Well, it’s kind of a lot to absorb, you know?” he says. “And plus, I think maybe I kind of expected it.”
I raise an eyebrow at him, and he continues, “Man, you didn’t see yourself at the crash cart. Doc Simmons shocked you with the paddles, and it – it missed you. Grounded down through the gurney and crackled out into the ground somewhere. I’ve never seen the paddles behave like that. Never seen electricity behave like that. No one had, you know? And then you just sat up, like everything was all right. That’s really just not how it works.”
I force a laugh. “And here I thought I was hiding it well.”
There’s an awkward pause, and then I say, “Where c
an we talk? I don’t know a lot of what’s going on, but I’ll tell you what I know, and what I think I’ve figured out.”
Even trying to condense it to the bare details, telling the story ends up taking the better part of half an hour. Brian spends most of this time staring with a semi-glazed look in his eyes, but he interrupts to ask questions often enough that I know he’s listening and taking it in. It’s clearly just sort of hard for him to believe, which is fair. Still, he was there at the museum the first night, and he’s seen my magnetism trick and whatever I did with the defibrillator, so that helps my credibility a lot.
“You gotta give me a minute to take all this in,” he says at the end. After a beat, he adds, “So what were you doing back here tonight?”
“Well, I wanted to know how much electricity I was producing, and I figured the hospital would have some kind of machine for that.”
Brian snorts. “Ha! For the amount you’re putting out? You’re on the wrong scale, man. You’ll blitz out any machine we’ve got. They’re for picking up tiny amounts, and you’re pouring it out like a power station.”
I think about the doctor’s diagnosis of residual electromagnetic interference and sigh, but Brian grins.
“Just ’cause the medical machines can’t test you doesn’t mean that there’s nothing here that can. Come down to the ambulance garage.”
As we stand up to leave, he adds, “And for the love of God, stay away from all of the electronics around here. People’s lives are attached to some of those, you know?”
Brian lopes off, and I walk gingerly down the middle of the hall after him, looking anxiously from side to side. After a few dozen feet of this, he looks back, sees me and relents.
“Just come walk with me, man. I’ll steer you around anything you need to be careful of.”
Even so, it’s a nerve-wracking walk down the corridor. I think I’ve got a decent handle on my current power, but I’m not sure enough of that to put people’s lives at risk, and I breathe a sigh of relief when I get to the garage without hearing alarms go off behind me.
The Experiment (Book 1): The Reluctant Superhero Page 6
