Finally it hits me, much later than it should have. “You’re the guy!” I say, interrupting her rant. “You’re the storm guy!”
She glares at me, the pure hatred clear even through the cascading rain. “You are FILTH!” she shouts. “And I am going to wash you away!”
Every hair on my body stands up, and abruptly I realize that no amount of rubber thinking is going to stop this bolt from finding me. Instinctively, I try to back up, but the brick wall behind my back is unyielding.
It’s unyielding when I push against it, anyway; when the lightning hits me a split second later, it yields just fine, shards of brick exploding outward in a stinging shrapnel cloud. The concrete under my feet crackles, too, and I’m briefly enveloped in a painful flash of steam, but despite all of this I feel triumphant. I did it! I conducted the lightning without being hurt by it!
Across from me, the storm lady is gaping. The rain mats the brick dust thickly onto her, giving her blonde hair the world’s shoddiest dye job. Rivulets of mud run down her face as she points her finger at me again. “Impossible!” she howls, and I shrug, grinning.
“Well, it’s only –”
My witty retort is drowned in a deafening crack of thunder as another bolt of lightning strikes me, and then another. My ears are starting to ring, and I push myself off the wall, scowling.
“Would you just –”
Another bolt strikes me, and I’m starting to get scalded from the repeated steam clouds. She’s shouting incoherently at me, and I yell over her, “I’m trying to –”
I’m zapped again, and this time, instead of letting it course through me and into the ground, I thrust my hands out towards her and push the lightning forward. “KNOCK IT OFF!” I bellow, and the bolt knocks her off of her feet and sends her skidding on her back across the asphalt.
For a second, I’m horrified, but she’s already sitting up before I can take even a single hobbling step towards her. Relief washes over me, but it carries with it a foul taste of guilt. I just blasted a lethal amount of electricity at another human being. One who was trying to kill me, admittedly, but I didn’t do it out of desperation or because I was backed into a corner. She wasn’t in danger of harming me. I was just sort of annoyed.
I lashed out like a toddler throwing a tantrum because she wouldn’t let me talk to her, except that I did it with deadly force. Not that it killed her, or even hurt her particularly, but I didn’t know that when I swatted her with it. I didn’t think about it at all. I just reacted, and I’m lucky she’s not dead.
I’m feeling repentant, but clearly, the feeling is not mutual. She’s sitting up in the street now, propped up on her elbows in the sluicing water, hurling invective at me as I limp over to see if she’s okay.
“Don’t you come near me, you canker! You pus-bucket!” She’s scrabbling backwards as I approach, keeping the distance steady between us. It’s not that hard for her to do; I’ve lost my crutches somewhere in the crescendo of lightning strikes, so I’m not advancing with any particular speed.
“Would you please listen?” I ask her, exasperated. “Why do you have such a problem with me?”
She sneers up at me. “Don’t even talk to me, you unnatural freak.”
This surprises a laugh out of me. “Says the woman who’s calling down lightning!”
“You deserve to be struck down! Nasty festering sore on the city!”
I’ve never felt hate like this from anyone before. It’s clear that she’s got it in for me just as much as Caraway or Lovell did. The technique is different, but the goal is the same. She’s spitting her words like weapons, and they’re starting to hurt. It’s clear that I’m not going to get through to her by pleading my own case.
“What about everyone else around here? The people who are losing their cars? Their homes? Their lives in your storm?”
That one lands. She stops her tirade mid-word, stops scooting backwards and stares up at me – still with vicious hatred in her eyes, but at least we’ve opened a tenuous channel of discussion. I see a flicker of uncertainty, and I press my advantage as I continue walking towards her.
“If you have a problem with me, then let’s talk about it, but let go of the storm. Stop hurting everyone else.”
“Oh, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare turn this back on me. You don’t get to play the good guy here. You don’t get to make me the villain. I’ll end the storm when I end you. If you’re so worried about everyone else, then just lie down and take it.”
“Your lightning doesn’t work on me,” I point out. “What are you going to do, dampen me to death?”
Her leg shoots out, whip-quick, and kicks me squarely in the shin of my good leg. Pain spikes up it and I instinctively pull my leg away, leaving me briefly balanced on my cast, before I topple heavily over into the street. I land on my right side, and she vaults over me, rams a knee into my back and shoves me onto my stomach. Clenching her fists in my hair, her nails dragging into my scalp, she kneels on my back and starts slamming my face into the asphalt over and over.
She’s probably half a foot shorter than me and might not even weigh half of what I do, but I’m totally helpless in the face of her onslaught. The stars exploding across my vision every time my forehead meets the ground are shattering any thoughts I try to assemble, my nose is a burning torch of pain in the center of my face, and I’m breathing in the running water in the street about as often as I’m breathing in air. I can’t coordinate my arms to lift myself up or roll myself over, and all I can think is: I’m going to die right now.
Suddenly, I’m dazzled with light, and it takes me a moment to realize that it’s external and not just another blow to the head. I twist my head to see the twin beams of a car’s headlights bearing down on us, preparing to run us both over. It’s Brian behind the wheel, playing a game of chicken with the stormraiser to try to force her off of me.
Instead of jumping for safety, though, she just glares and a bolt of lightning slashes down from the sky, blasting the car. The headlights flare brightly and shut off, as does the car’s engine, but the car’s still rolling and I can see that she’s about to send another bolt.
In a wild effort to break her concentration, I summon up all the anger I can and attract every bit of ferrous metal I can reach. This has a dual effect. First of all, it calls a cloud of all the tiny bits of metal that litter a street towards me, all of the bits of disregarded detritus, pelting both me and the stormraiser with a stinging cloud of metal. She yelps and flails her arms, an automatic attempt to shake off whatever’s attacking her.
At the same time, my magnetic summons also attempts to pull Brian’s car to me. Since it outweighs me by an order of magnitude, what I actually do is haul myself harshly across the asphalt towards the car, with the stormraiser on my back coming along for the ride. I hear the brakes squeal as Brian stomps on them, and I end up magnetically pinned to the car’s bumper as it skids to a stop.
The stormraiser rolls free and climbs to her feet, slightly unsteadily. She points a hand at me and opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, another set of headlights spears out of the darkness, traveling towards us, and this one is accompanied by the pulsing blue of police lights.
She narrows her eyes at me. “This isn’t over,” she hisses, and darts off down an alleyway. I know I should probably chase her, but the most I can manage right now is to roll onto my back and watch her go.
The blue lights of the police car wash over me as Brian gets out and hurries over to my side. “Are you all right, man?” he asks, but before I can answer, I’m interrupted by a familiar voice.
“What happened here?” asks Officer Peterson, stepping out of the police car into the pouring rain and surveying the scene.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I say, levering myself painfully to a sitting position. “He didn’t hit me with the car.”
I see Peterson taking in the shattered brick wall and the scorch marks on top of Brian’s car, my discarded crutches on the sidewa
lk and the stupid floppy green hat lying ten feet away in the road. His gaze returns to me.
“How about you come back to the station with me and tell me what did happen?”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Don’t make me answer that right now, please. Just come back to the station and we’ll talk.”
I quail under Peterson’s steady gaze. “Do I need a lawyer?”
He relents. “No. I’d just like to hear your story, and if at all possible, I’d like to do it somewhere out of the pouring rain.” The rain’s let up a little bit since I was nose-to-nose with the stormraiser, but that just means that it’s coming down in gallons instead of in buckets. I’m soaked to the bone and my cast is looking dangerously soft around the edges, so getting inside somewhere warm sounds like a pretty good idea, even if it is a police station. Besides which, even if I’m not under arrest right now, I’ve got the feeling that that could change if I tried to deny Peterson’s request.
I clamber up off of the ground, using Peterson’s hand and the front of Brian’s car for support, while Brian retrieves my crutches for me. As he helps me settle them under my arms, he shoots me a look that I can’t quite read. It’s somewhere between concern and pleading, so I take my best guess and say, “Do you need Brian, too? He’s had a long day at the hospital.”
Peterson hesitates, clearly thinking it over, then shakes his head. “No. Sir, let me just get your contact information and have a quick look in your car, and you can be on your way.”
I clomp over to the police cruiser while Officer Peterson copies down Brian’s information, then wait awkwardly outside like a girl who’s not sure if her date’s going to open the door for her or not. Peterson looks at me quizzically when he joins me at the car, and I ask, “Ah – am I riding in the front or the back?”
He smiles, coming around to the passenger side of the car, and does in fact open the door for me. “Sit in the front, Mr. Everton. I think you’ll be happier that way.” He stashes my crutches in the trunk as I carefully angle my cast into the car and get settled.
Before we get moving, Brian rolls past. I’m glad to see that the lightning didn’t do any lasting damage to his car. We make brief eye contact and he waves his phone at me. I check mine to see that I’ve got a text from him reading only, “You good?”
I send back a terse “Yeah,” which probably isn’t the most reassuring message, but it’s all I have time for before Peterson gets into the driver’s seat. There’s no reason why I can’t be texting when he’s in the car, I suppose, but it just feels like it’d be inviting trouble somehow.
We drive in silence for the first several minutes, and I watch the defroster fight with the steam rising from my clothes in the car’s heat. At first, the silence doesn’t bother me, but as it stretches on, it starts to feel uncomfortable, and I look for a topic of conversation to fill it.
After casting around for a minute, I ask Peterson, “So how did you end up out here tonight, anyway? Just a random coincidence?”
“No,” he says without turning towards me. “I was following you.”
As is evidently the norm when I’m talking to Officer Peterson, I panic for no apparent reason. “I – what for? I thought you pulled the watch on me, because of, because of everyone being too busy. That’s what you said earlier, right?”
“I told you that I was taking the patrolmen off, because the department could no longer commit resources.”
“So what changed?”
“I’m not a patrolman. And I’m off-duty right now. This was just a private whim, not sponsored or paid for by the department. I was playing a hunch, and if it didn’t work out, I’da wasted no one’s time but my own.”
“What hunch?”
“Your question, Mr. Everton. About whether the blackouts had a central location. What made you ask that?” Peterson’s eyes never leave the road, but I can feel him staring at me all the same, which is an impressive trick. Despite the chilled water drenching me from head to toe, I’m starting to sweat, too. It’s a good thing I’m not a criminal. I’d crack in the first ten seconds of questioning.
“I don’t know! It was just an idea. Something I read once.” I’m thinking as fast as I can, trying to figure out how to spin this into a story that makes sense within the standard bounds of reality. “I’d heard that lightning can, lightning does strike twice in the same spot, kind of a lot, really. That a spot can get charged by a strike and therefore be more likely to get hit again, because of the, the polarity change.”
Peterson listens skeptically, but I press on, warming to the subject. “So Brian and I went out to see if we could find it – well, I wanted to see if I could find it, but I needed Brian to drive because of my foot – anyway, we wanted to go see if there was one of these, these supercharged spots and, you know.”
‘Talk her out of it,’ though that was the actual plan, is not really an answer that fits with the allegory I’ve been constructing, but I don’t have a good parallel. I finish lamely, “Maybe figure out where it was and get someone to, I don’t know, demagnetize it. So it would stop getting hit and this storm could break up.”
Peterson asks, “So did you find this spot?”
“Sort of? Maybe? I mean, we thought we did, but we kind of lost it, I guess.”
“That’s strange,” he says calmly, without so much as a sidelong glance at me. “Losing it, I mean. While I was around the corner, I saw five bolts of lightning strike at what looked like the same basic spot, all within a couple of seconds of each other. That sounds like you found your mystery spot, right?”
“Right,” I say guardedly.
“So how did you lose it again?”
“The um, magnetism of the storm can, can shift and so sometimes the polarized spot will, will, um – look, I’m not a scientist, I’m not explaining this very well. I can link you to the articles I read later, if you want.”
“That would be nice,” says Peterson, increasing my sweat level. He takes his eyes off of the road to catch me with a steady gaze, pinning my eyes on his. “Because it’s really not making a lot of sense to me right now.”
I start to stammer another explanation, but he dismissively turns his attention back his driving, then cuts me off. “Frankly, when I came around the corner, I expected to see you with some sort of a contraption set up to attract lightning. I can’t imagine why you’d do a thing like that, but I thought that maybe it would be more clear when I saw it.
“Instead, I find you in a pedestrian-vehicle accident with the man who drove you there, claiming that everything is fine. I find nothing more complex or metallic in his car than a tire jack, and I find that the lightning which was pulsing down so freely before has suddenly completely dried up.”
“Well, but the magnetism of the storm –”
“Completely dried up, Mr. Everton. Have you heard any thunder at all on this entire ride?” He’s right; there hasn’t been any. “So if the lightning was so prevalent before, what made it stop so abruptly and completely just as I got there?
“You’re asking me to be suspicious of nature, Mr. Everton. But I’ve found that nature isn’t half as suspicious as people are. I don’t know what you’re hiding, and I don’t know why you’re hiding it. I want to help you, and I think you want my help. But I can’t give it to you if you don’t trust me and let me know what’s going on.”
For a long, tense moment, we stare at each other, with my thoughts racing fruitlessly around a loop. Should I tell him? He’d never believe me. But if he did, he could help. Help how? Bring in people to catch the stormraiser, maybe. They could take her out of the city, away from everything. But if I don’t tell him what’s happening, he’ll never know to look for her. So should I tell him?
Peterson sighs and looks away. “You can get out now.” Abruptly, I realize that the car is stopped, and what’s more, that we’re outside of my house, not the police station.
“I thought you wanted me to come downtown to talk?”
“We managed
it well enough in the car. I’m ready to listen when you’re prepared to talk more, Mr. Everton.” He gestures wearily at the door handle, and I let myself out. As I get my crutches from the trunk, I can’t help feeling like I’ve disappointed him, but I still can’t think of any way to tell him the truth.
My crutches slip and slide on the sidewalk as I make my way up to my door. When I get inside, I find out why: the rubber on the feet has mostly melted off, leaving bare metal to skid against the rain-slick surfaces. I peel my clothes off and hang them in the shower to dry, then I towel off and limp my way to bed. When I headed out this evening, I expected to be going to bed tonight triumphant and exhausted. As it turns out, I was half right.
- Chapter Fourteen -
The next day dawns with no new revelations. Aside from some decent scrapes and a little bit of fraying at the edges, my cast doesn’t appear to be too badly damaged by the previous evening’s activities. Judging by the way my leg itches, though, some kind of rain ants have taken up residence. And as for progress in fixing things: it’s still raining, I still have to think about being rubber when I go outside, and all I’ve really learned is that this is apparently not a problem that we can solve like reasonable adults. I guess the presence of superpowers should maybe have clued me into that to begin with, but I’d been holding out hope.
About an hour into wasting my day with Netflix, I realize that the usual distraction of bad horror movies isn’t cutting it. The itching on my leg has died down, but I’m still feeling restless. I haven’t got any idea what I could be doing, though. My brilliant idea from yesterday was a bust, and I’m all tapped out on fresh thoughts right now. I need some time to unwind and let the problem percolate, and watching brainless movies is usually the best way to do that.
The Experiment (Book 1): The Reluctant Superhero Page 8
