Brian motions me to wait against the wall while he digs through a collection of confusing wires on a metal shelf, then emerges with a triumphant grin on his face. “Multimeter!” he says, advancing towards me.
I eye the small plastic box with suspicion. “What’s this supposed to do?”
Brian presses what looks like a red chopstick into my right hand and a black one into my left, wires trailing back to the multimeter. “We’re gonna measure your voltage. Do – whatever you do.”
I grip the two probes and concentrate. Brian turns the dial a couple of times and says, “Cool, almost twenty volts. Can you do more?”
I think about Edgar and his stupid drug tests and ratting me out to the police, and Brian whistles and cranks the dial another notch. “Looking good! Is that it?”
I frown, and picture finding the person doing this to me, and zapping them with their own stupid electricity. Brian grins again and shows me the digital readout, which just says “1.”
“What does that mean?” I say, disappointed. “I’m not generating electricity?”
“No, man,” he tells me. “It means you maxed out the meter. It can’t measure higher than 600 volts, and you’re still going.”
“And what’s normal?”
“I don’t know, like a tenth of a volt? Man, this is so cool!”
Brian puts his hand up for a high-five, and I slap him one without thinking about it. The obvious spark results, leaving both of us sucking our fingers. “Okay, maybe we should just stick to thumbs up, yeah?” he laughs.
Outside, thunder rolls, sobering both of us. “Yeah. So. This isn’t all good, huh?” Brian asks.
I shake my head. “The powers are cool, but they’ve always come with an enemy. And I’m thinking that this one is worse than a souped-up hairy guy.”
Lightning flashes outside of the windows as I say that, which is awesome for a dramatic background, but not really great for my state of mind.
“Yeeeaaaah,” says Brian, drawing it out. “So, how do we get you back to your car without another dose of Zeus juice?”
- - -
The answer, it turns out, is to practice inside. Brian wheels a defibrillator into a spare room and, ushering me in, closes the door behind us. He hands me the paddles, and I hesitantly move them toward my chest.
“Do I need to take my shirt off or anything for this?”
“Nah, man, we’re not trying to restart your heart. We’re just seeing if you can conduct the energy. Shock yourself in the calf or thigh or something. Take off your pants.”
I look to see if Brian’s serious, but he’s fiddling with the machine like he hasn’t even said anything weird. I guess maybe working on an ambulance crew screws with your sense of what is and isn’t appropriate behavior around other people. If he’s not going to be bothered by it, though, then I’m game for it. I put the paddles down, unbutton my jeans and work them down over my cast, and hold the paddles on either side of my knee, just below my boxers. “Fire when ready, captain!”
“Charging to 200,” Brian says, stepping back. “Whenever you’re ready!”
I clamp the paddles on my knee. Judging by the leg spasm and the intense pain, I wasn’t ready.
Still, though, I think I’ve got the basic idea, and as Brian recharges the paddles, I work on finding my inner calm. I think about letting the electricity pass through me, using me only as a conduit, and this time when I blast myself, I barely feel it. Compared to the last time, anyway. My leg’s still a tingly, semi-numb mess for a solid minute afterward, but there’s no pain, and that’s a big step forward. I look up to find Brian watching me questioningly, and I nod. “Again.”
The paddles whine as they charge up, and there’s a zap as they discharge. The current courses through my other leg. “Again.”
Whine, zap! That one I honestly don’t even feel. “Again. Increase the charge.”
Whine, zap! Nothing! I’m getting the hang of this. I move the paddles up to my chest, pushing the hospital shirt they gave me out of the way. “Again!”
When the paddles trigger this time, I can almost understand the electricity as it flows into me. My catching and redirecting is still intuitive, but I understand what I’m doing now, if not quite how. And it gives me an idea. “Again, but stand clear, in case I’m wrong about this.”
The paddles whine their way up to a full charge, but when I press them to my chest, nothing happens. I tap them lightly, then press hard, but they still act like they’re not in contact with anything.
“How are you doing that?” Brian asks.
It sounds dumb when I say it out loud, but: “I’m thinking of rubber,” I tell him. “I think I can make myself nonconductive.”
Brian whoops. “All right! Lightning’s got nothing on you now! Time to get out there and mock that storm!”
“Almost right,” I say. “Time to get out there and find out who’s behind the storm.”
- Chapter Twelve -
Bold words like that sound great, but they turn out not to be all that helpful at actually getting things done. Here’s what I do manage to do: I successfully make it out of the hospital and into Brian’s car without getting struck by lightning. Like I said, it’s amazing what passes for progress for me these days. All things considered, though, I’m willing to call that a great success. And not having to wait for the bus is a pretty great bonus, so basically everything’s off to an excellent start.
Unfortunately, that’s as far as it goes. On the way back, Brian asks me, “So what’s the, you know, game plan?”, and I stare at the windshield wipers and try desperately to come up with one. Nothing springs to mind, so I just start thinking out loud.
“All right, what do I know? I’ve got electrical powers, and lightning hates me. Um. Well. That’s – sort of it, really.”
I kind of wish I’d kept the thought process internal. This worked out so much better when I had super-intelligence. I can remember making the charts in my head, one point leading effortlessly to the next, but all I’m getting now is a bunch of question marks. How do I find the guy doing this? What do I do once I find him? Why is he doing this?
I’m veering from introspection into a pity party, so I put the brakes on that train of thought and try again. “Okay, so maybe I can use that to lure him out or something. I could get hit by lightning again, and play dead until he came to investigate, maybe.”
“There’ll probably be a lot of people coming to investigate. Even if he does come, how will you know which one is him?” asks Brian.
“Yeah, okay. Maybe I could just take the lightning strike instead, take like a bunch of them and shrug them off, and then wait for him to come find out what’s wrong with his lightning.”
“How will he know you’re doing this? I doubt he can, like, see through the lightning.”
“Fine, I’ll just keep taking lightning strikes until a camera crew comes to film me, and then I’ll challenge him to a duel,” I say, grinning.
“Come, Wizard of Weather! Face your nemesis, the Electrode!” says Brian.
I make a face. “The Electrode, really?”
“What do you want to be called?”
“Nothing! I’m not keeping this power, anyway. But I mean, like, The Volt would be cool. Or Amperage or Live Wire.”
“Livewire’s a kind of Mountain Dew, man. I think you should be The Conductor.”
“Man, you are banned from names,” I tell Brian.
“Whatever, Code Red.”
We banter all the way back to the house, and when I get out of his car, I’m smiling despite the rain that’s threatening to disintegrate the hospital shirt. Inside, while I peel out of my soaked clothes and go in search of dry ones, I realize that I haven’t had a friend to just goof around with in a while now, maybe even a couple of years. I hadn’t even realized that I’d been missing it, but it feels good.
- - -
Over the course of the next week, my good mood slowly evaporates, beaten down by the relentless rain. I have to stan
d out in it every night on my way to work, huddling under the bus shelter while the rain discovers new ways to defeat my bundling and run down under my clothes and inside of my cast. The cast is the worst, since the trails from the rivulets of rain itch for an hour after they’ve dried, an unreachable nuisance. And Edgar has taken to glaring at me on his way out of the museum each night, as if he blames me for the rain. Admittedly, he’s sort of right on that score, but since there’s absolutely no way he could know that, I’m not willing to count that as a reasonable reaction.
And so when next Sunday arrives, I’m sitting gloomily on the floor of my house, charging up bottlecaps and making them stick together. I’ve learned how to leave the charge attached to them, so when the phone rings and I demagnetize my hands to pick it up, the sculpture I’m building still holds together.
That’s the one good thing that’s happened this week: it turns out that you’ve really got to go to town on a phone with a magnet to do permanent damage to it, so once I charged my battery back up, my phone was fine again. I don’t recognize the number on the display, but it’s an in-town area code and I’m not doing anything, so I pick it up.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Everton? This is Sam Peterson.”
My stomach lurches for absolutely no good reason. Apparently I’m just always going to feel guilty talking to this guy. “Officer Peterson! What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to give you a courtesy call to let you know that I’m pulling the patrolmen off of your case.” He doesn’t sound happy about it.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing, Mr. Everton, which is the issue. With the two similar attacks in rapid succession, I was able to justify sending an officer by in hopes of catching a third attempt, but with nothing happening for weeks, it’s just not feasible. As it is, everyone’s overworked with this storm. We’ve got half of the force out directing traffic, rescuing flooded motorists, and dealing with the problems that come along with all of the blackouts we’ve been having.”
An idea occurs to me. “Hey, where are the blackouts?”
A pause. “Where trees are down on power lines, mainly. That’s a strange question.”
“Yeah, I was just wondering if they were centered in one main area or anything,” I say, artlessly.
“I can’t imagine why they would be.”
“No, I mean, probably not. I was just thinking. It’s probably dumb. I’m sorry.”
I exchange pleasantries with Officer Peterson and hang up, my mind racing. I rush to the computer and load up the power company’s website, where I find exactly what I was hoping to see: a map of the outages in the area. Grinning with excitement, I start scanning the outages, looking for a pattern and a central location that they stem from.
Half an hour later, all I’ve got for my troubles is a screenshot drawn over with a hundred intersecting red lines in Paint, all of which stubbornly refuse to make any sort of coherent picture or point to any area. It looks like Peterson was right; they’re just spread randomly throughout the city. I heave a frustrated sigh and glare at the computer, which sits there impassively.
My phone beeps, and I flip it over to see the message. It’s another weather alert, which is unsurprising. Those have been coming in fairly regularly. This one, like many before it, warns of increased chances of flooding due to the excessive rainfall.
“Yeah,” I tell my phone, “I just about figured that. Until the storm moves, there’s probably going to be –”
The answer hits me, blindingly obvious. I pull the web browser back up and load up the animated weather radar map for the city, and sure enough, there it is. The storm that’s been camped over the city hasn’t just been sitting still. It’s been rotating, turning in a slow spin. And right in the center of it, I’m willing to bet, is the guy I’m looking for.
- Chapter Thirteen -
It’s not quite as simple as that, of course. Nothing ever is. There’s an afternoon of mapmaking, a series of bizarre plans invented and discarded, and a bunch of texts to Brian. I don’t feel great about dragging him into danger, but he seems fine with it, and I’m pretty sure that when we find the storm guy, his focus is going to be entirely on me.
Besides which, my plan to find this guy calls for driving in an expanding spiral starting from roughly where I’ve figured the storm’s center to be, and there’s really no way I can do that without a driver. It would take way too long on foot, and I’m pretty sure there’s no “spiraling outward” bus route in the city. Convenient though it would be in this case, I think it would be a hard sell in general. “Do you need to get one block away in the least efficient manner possible? Is walking just too fast for you? Try the spiral route!”
Anyway, even if the storm guy does go after him, cars are basically big Faraday cages, plus I could probably catch the lightning if I were near enough. And it’s not like there’s likely to be enough water to flood the car, or enough wind to flip it, so it’s basically safe. I recognize that I’m rationalizing a decision that I’ve clearly already made in order to make myself feel better about it, but like I said: I really need a car for this.
When Brian shows up that evening, it’s pretty clear that I couldn’t have kept him away even if I’d wanted to. His eyes practically sparkle when I answer the door, and he’s all but hopping from foot to foot.
“All right, man, you ready to go? Let’s go find this guy!”
I eye him skeptically. Brian is wearing a big yellow raincoat, orange rain boots, a floppy green rain hat and a pair of thick black elbow-length rubber gloves. “You look like a mad scientist who dressed up like his grandmother for Halloween,” I tell him.
Brian scoffs. “Sorry for my fashion sense, but we’re not all proof against lightning, you know? And this is what my roommates and I had in the house that was rubber.”
As I’m putting my crutches into the car, I say, “I’m not sure if I want a sidekick who looks like that.”
“Sidekick?” Brian exclaims. “No way! I’m like your handler, if anything. I get you where you need to go and point you at the target.”
“Sorry, not my sidekick, then. My chauffeur.”
“I’m gonna sidekick you right out of this car if you don’t start showing some respect.”
“Very sorry, oh floppy-hatted one.”
- - -
Downtown, our jokes fade away, and as we reach the point I’ve marked as the center, Brian asks, “So what are you gonna do when you find him?”
“I don’t know,” I admit, rolling down the window enough to put my hand out. “I’m gonna try to talk him down, I guess. Assuming he’s not hairy and roaring like the other guys.”
“And if he won’t listen?”
“Then I tackle him. I am a security guard, you know.”
“Yeah? When’s the last time you were in a fight?”
“I train! Sometimes. I have a gym membership. Hsst!”
That last noise is because the hairs on my arm have begun to stand up. I wave my hand frantically at Brian as I roll the window back up. “Stop, stop!”
He obligingly slides the car over to the curb, and I open the door into driving rain. “Stay in the car,” I tell him as I’m retrieving my crutches. “No heroics. I can do this. This guy can call lightning, and I don’t want you anywhere near that.”
Brian raises both hands. “I’m staying! Who wants to be out in that rain, anyway?”
I can still feel that electric charge in the air, stronger now that I’m out of the car. I look around, trying to pinpoint the source, but the rain is pelting me in the face, making it hard to see. I lean back into the car.
“Hey, can I borrow your hat?”
Brian grins widely, takes his floppy green hat off of his head and looks at me in mock surprise. “My grandmother’s hat?”
“Shut up. I can’t see out here.”
“I just don’t know if I want a minion who would wear a hat like that,” he says doubtfully.
“Give me the hat!” I growl, a
nd he hands it over, laughing. I jam it onto my head, slam the door harder than is necessary, and make my way through the river that the sidewalk has become. The air around me is charged with potential, and I’m focusing hard on rubber thoughts to keep the lightning from targeting me.
I can feel the energy. It’s almost like a living thing, something unseen watching me. The guy causing this has to be nearby, but it’s hard to pinpoint a direction. I wander maybe half a block away from the car, trying to feel for changes, but it’s surrounding me, and I can’t follow it to its source. I close my eyes to see if removing the distraction of one sense helps, and I immediately hear a “ding!”, as if I am a cartoon character who’s just had a good idea.
Confused, I open my eyes to see a woman emerging from a convenience store across the street, the automatic doors sliding shut behind her. She’s heading across the street towards me, so I step aside to let her get to her car. She moves her path to keep straight at me, though, and as she gets closer, I can see that she’s angry. Not just angry: furious.
“You!” she hisses. Her hands are clenched into fists at her sides, and there’s murder in her eyes. I attempt to back away, a maneuver not well suited to crutches.
“Sorry, do I know you?” I ask.
She ignores my question and continues to approach. My back hits a wall and I raise a crutch to keep her at bay, but she stops right at its tip and levels an accusatory finger at me. “You come here and infect me with your presence? Do you have any idea what you feel like, what it’s like to be near you? You’re a wound, an abscess, a pustulant hole oozing rot and maggots. You are wrong, you are filthy! It’s bad enough from half the city away, but you come here? To rub my face in your filth?”
She’s screaming now, pressing me back into the wall by the crutch, leaning into it like she’s forgotten it’s there and she’s just trying to walk through it to get her hands on me – and I still have no idea who she is or what she’s talking about. I can’t even get a good look at her face through the rain, which is coming down hard enough to hurt now, and the sense of energy is crawling all around me like a physical force.
The Experiment (Book 1): The Reluctant Superhero Page 7
