“Sit down, please, Dan,” Edgar says icily, and I do. Edgar gets up as I sit down and walks over to close the office door behind me, then comes back to stand behind his desk. He pushes a binder over to me and, leaning forward with both palms on the desk, says, “Could you please explain this to me?”
I take him at his word. “It’s a binder collecting your memorandums of the past week, organized for easy reference.”
“I can see that. Why have you done this?” The tips of Edgar’s fingers are white where they’re pressing hard against the desk, but otherwise, he’s got his anger completely controlled. I’m impressed that he’s holding it in this well, but also a bit confused. I’m honestly not sure why he’s still so furious about this, days later. Sure, I made fun of him, and I knew he’d be mad about it, but this seems over the top.
For the time being, I continue to play clueless. “It seemed like a much more convenient system than having memos taped up all over the desk. Sitting out like they, they were subject to wear and tear, potential spills, even vandalism.”
Edgar slams his hand down on the binder, index finger pointing at the “DOBSON’S DOs AND DON’Ts” cover. “Enough! This. Do you think this is funny?” He’s reaching into his pocket, and for a split-second I am completely certain that he’s going to pepper-spray me, but he pulls out his phone instead. Stabbing in the unlock code, he turns the screen to face me. It’s showing a picture of the same binder that’s in front of me.
“I found this on Instagram!” Edgar hisses, his control slipping. I look again at the picture, and sure enough, it’s an Instagram photo captioned “ha ha Dobby’s at it again #phb” It has an impressively large number of likes, but I don’t have time to read the comments before Edgar whips the phone away.
“I will not be the subject of mockery!” Edgar insists, his voice rising. “I am not your joke!”
Now Edgar’s anger makes sense. I’ve embarrassed him publicly. He’s probably had that Instagram picture up on his phone all weekend, refreshing it and seething over each new comment. But he’s not the only one who’s tired of having his life made miserable, and so I drop the innocent act and respond with some fire of my own.
“You know what is a joke, Edgar? These memos. They were specifically and transparently designed to harass me. Every one of them is a cartoonish attempt to give you cause to fire me, or to make me give up and quit. And yes, I put them into a binder as a joke, and do you know why it’s funny? It’s because I’ve treated them as if they were serious and worth referencing, and the fact that you’re angry proves that you know that they are not.
“If you want to fire me without cause, then do it. I’ll walk out of here right now and file an unemployment claim. Or find an actual reason to fire me, something legitimate I’ve done wrong. If you can. But I am tired of these pathetic attempts to trip me up.
“I do my job. I may not ‘go above and beyond,’ I may not be a ‘go-getter,’ but I do my job. If that’s not good enough for you, fire me. Otherwise,” I stand up, forcing him to look up at me, “I’m going to go get dinner. I’ll be back in time for my shift.”
We lock eyes for a long moment. I can see the hate and rage in Edgar’s eyes, and I wonder if he will fire me after all. But after a couple of seconds, he’s still said nothing, and so I incline my head, say, “Mr. Dobson,” and walk out of his office. The effect’s spoiled a little bit when I catch the tip of one crutch on the doorframe, but I recover without too much of a fumble and keep going.
I go into a coffee shop across the street for dinner, more to hide from the rain than anything else. I order a sandwich and sit down to pick listlessly at it, thinking about the fight with Edgar. I feel like I should feel good, like I’ve won, but I don’t. I’m still a little jittery from the adrenaline, but more than that, I just feel sort of unpleasant. I faced Edgar down, stood up for myself, and what did I get out of it?
Nothing new, that’s for sure. Edgar resents me more than ever, and this won’t fix anything. It’ll just crop up in a new way down the road. I wanted to deliver a knockout punch to win the fight, but it turns out that behind the guy I knocked down was one more waiting to take his place.
These morose thoughts tag along with me from dinner through the start of my shift at the museum. Edgar’s gone before I get back, and so is Dobson’s Dos and Don’ts. I take this to mean that I can go back to reading on-shift, so after my first set of rounds I take 1984 back out and compare my problems to those of Winston Smith. His problems win pretty handily.
I’m about halfway through my shift when I hear what sounds like a faint knocking at the door. Puzzled, I put my book down and wait, and shortly it comes again – several sharp knocks in quick succession. I free my flashlight from my belt and walk over to check it out.
As I shine my light out of the door’s window and press my face up to it to see out, I don’t really have any expectations for what I’ll see outside. But whatever I thought I might see, it absolutely was not a face right up against the other side, staring back at me. I leap back in surprise, having had time to register only two things. The first is an impression of tangled, sodden blonde hair. The second is that the storm outside has really intensified.
I put these two facts together just as the first lightning bolt hurtles into the door, smashing the glass all over me. I fall backwards, reeling from the shock and the noise, as two more bolts hammer home and the door swings open, the metal smoking and charred. The stormraiser – Regina – stands in the doorway looking down at me triumphantly.
The wind howls behind her, and hail begins to beat insistently on the domed skylight far overhead. “Time to end this!” she cries, and the skylight shatters into a deadly rain of ice and glass cascading onto us both.
I try to scuttle away, but with my cast slipping and sliding on the wet floor, I can’t move particularly fast. In desperation, I make a magnetic grab for the door, and just have time to think, “That’s not magnetic, it won’t work,” before I go sliding wildly across the floor towards it.
I’m covering my face to protect it from the daggers of glass showering around me, which is why I don’t realize that I’m magnetically dragging myself directly into Regina until our legs tangle up and she topples onto me. She howls her outrage, and the storm shrieks in sympathy. A pair of lightning bolts crashes outside, adding to the ringing in my ears, as she pummels my already bleeding arms and head with her fists.
“Vermin! Cockroach!” she spits, scrambling free of me. Clearly, the intervening week has done nothing to raise her opinion of me. I roll out of range of her kicks and stagger ungracefully to my feet.
“What did I ever do to you?” I ask, and although I meant for it to be accusatory and maybe indignant, it really comes out sounding plaintive and even kind of whiny.
Fortunately, Regina is indignant enough for the both of us. “You got me fired! When I came back from dealing with you, Darryl had someone else working and a note saying I was no longer an employee! A note!”
This strikes me as more than a slightly unfair edition version of events. “Even if you think the fight was my fault, which I do not, it didn’t get you fired. Maybe if you had gone back that night, instead of running off and leaving the store unlocked, that wouldn’t have happened!”
She gasps and covers her mouth, as shocked as if I’ve just sworn in church. “Have you been stalking me, you cretin? How would you know that? You’re disgusting!”
And with that, she rushes me, shoes squeaking on the rain-slick tile. I tense to block a punch, but at the last second she loses her footing and slips, slamming into my chest shoulder-first in a perfect tackle. My cast betrays me again and I go over backwards, landing painfully among shards of glass and lumps of ice, with more hail still coming down around me.
I feel dozens of tiny needles digging into my skin, burying themselves in my flesh, but before I can even really process that, a piece of hail the size of a kiwi slams directly into my forehead. The spike of pain that produces is instantly joined
by its twin as the impact bounces the back of my head off of the floor.
I didn’t know that you could literally see stars outside of a cartoon, but bright lights explode in my vision and for a second, everything else greys out. I don’t lose consciousness, though, which is good, because Regina is pressing her advantage. She clenches her fists and squeezes her eyes shut, and lightning strikes barely five feet behind me, reaching through the ruined skylight. In its aftermath, the hail intensifies. I feel like I’m being beaten with billiard balls.
I magnet-grab for the door again, heedless of the razor cuts I’m receiving by pulling myself across the floor; anything is better than the bludgeoning I’m getting right now. Regina snarls, though, and the door is lanced by another lightning bolt, making me lose my magnetic grip on it.
“At least I’ve made it out of the hail,” I think, right before another chunk of ice wings me in the shoulder. I look up to see Regina advancing on me, scooping up another ice rock the size of a baseball and chucking it at me. This one connects, too, and if it doesn’t hurt as badly as the ones from the storm, that’s probably only because she hasn’t gotten me in the head yet.
I’m at a total loss for what to do, so to buy time, I copy her: I grab the nearest lumps of ice and scramble to my feet to face her. I’m starting to feel the damage now. My head is throbbing from its abuse and my entire back is a symphony of razor pain. The glass shards stab me when I move, so I just stand stock still, glaring at Regina.
She glares back at me, her diatribe stopped for the time being. For a moment, we hold that pose, two combatants locked in the world’s highest-stakes snowball fight. It’s a ridiculous image, and even through the chorus of injuries, it still conjures up a half-smile from me.
This raises a fresh rage in Regina, who shouts wordlessly, hurls her iceball at me and scrabbles for a fresh one. I dodge, offering sarcastic thanks to whoever set this up for at least not giving her precision control over the winds. Her power, like mine, seems to be largely intuitive, and her control is broad-based but difficult to direct precisely.
In fact – I dodge another thrown ice missile and sling one back, scoring a hit and earning a yelp from Regina – in fact, it’s never occurred to me to wonder exactly how she can do what she does. I put it down as superscience or magic and went about dealing with the effects instead of thinking about the cause. And right now, the tiny bit of smarts I have left over from the intelligence boost is shouting at me internally.
It’s got its work cut out for it. In addition to not being all that quick a thinker ordinarily, I’m also currently under attack, in quite a bit of pain, and possibly suffering from a concussion. The funny thing about pain is that it really focuses the mind sometimes, though, especially if it’s clear that an unfocused mind will lead to more pain. Not getting hurt any more is a spectacular motivator. My brain grabs all available processing power to solve this problem, momentarily dampening the pain as it works to show me a solution.
It’s not instantaneous, though, and there’s a lot going on, so here’s how it plays out. As Regina and I are trading off with iceballs, I’m thinking about the weird way her lightning messed with my magnetic grip on the door. When she slams a solid hit into my good knee and I drop onto the floor again, I barely feel my cast cracking, because I’m remembering that every time she cranked up the storm’s fury, it was accompanied by a blast of lightning, even after she knew that that was completely ineffective against me.
And so when she sees me lying prone again and presses her advantage, racing towards me with a chunk of ice in one hand and a knife-sized shard of glass in the other, I don’t even try to get out of the way. I just raise my arms to catch her on the way in, guiding her weapons past my head to smash uselessly into the floor. And as her weight crashes down on me, driving me onto the constellation of glass embedded into my back and awakening a new cacophony of screaming nerves, I focus everything I have into making the strongest magnetic field I can and applying it to her, sticking it to her like a web.
The only visible effect of this is that my name badge strains upwards from my shirt, touching itself to Regina's chest. Since she's already lying on top of me, this is an almost imperceptible motion. Despite this, Regina goes wild the instant I magnetize her.
"What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO?" she yells, slashing at my face with her remnant of glass. Panicked, I pull my arms in to protect myself, and she lays open the back of my left forearm almost to the elbow. As I push her away, I can feel the glass shattering against the bone.
I risk a shocked look at my arm, and weirdly, there's almost no blood in the gash. The walls of it are corpse-white with fine beads of blood and shiny with slivers of glass, and at the bottom is an even whiter glint of bone. I have enough time to think, "Is this a new power?", and then the blood pours forth, as if it was waiting for me to notice. There's a frightening quantity of it, mixing thirstily with the rain and ice and staining it all pink.
Regina, meanwhile, is writhing on the floor like she's being electrocuted, grinding glass and ice recklessly beneath her. She's screaming, too, and tearing at her clothes as if they're burning her. Clutching my forearm, I just stare, until I realize it's not just her clothes she's ripping. It's the skin of her arms, too, and her stomach and face. She's raking her nails across all of it as if she's trying to flay herself. And judging by the blood that's appearing, she might succeed.
"Stop!" I shout uselessly. She ignores me, of course, continuing to tear at herself in the spreading puddle of blood and water. "Stop it!"
She's beyond hearing me, but I can't watch her tear herself to pieces in front of me. Without a plan, I pry myself off the floor and lurch towards her, blood spurting through my fingers as I grip my torn arm to my chest, part of my cast flapping against my calf. In two steps, I'm next to her, and I reach down with my bloody hand to grab her wrist. "Stop!"
Her eyes snap open and lock onto mine, and she hisses like a cobra. "Pus!"
She scrambles backwards across the floor, leaving a bloody trail as she goes. "Your rot! Infected me! Clean it off! Rain!"
She's heading for the circle of the ruined skylight, but as she approaches, lightning begins striking in a furious onslaught. Bolt after bolt crashes into the tile, turning the hall of the museum into a deafening, blinding inferno. It's reaching for her, the fingers of the storm groping blindly and greedily across the floor. Regina skids to a halt, the fury ebbing from her face and being replaced by fear.
"I can't touch the rain," she says in bewilderment. "I can't feel it! You took it from me!"
Rage suffuses her features again, and she reverses direction, clambering to her feet and launching herself at me. And I, completely out of tricks and dangerously light-headed, wrap my fist around a chunk of ice and clock her in the side of the head.
Regina crumples at my feet, and I sway over her, dropping my ice and willing myself to stay upright. The lightning has stopped, and it sounds like the hail has, too. My back is stinging with a hundred different cuts, my head is crashing in a whirlpool of pain, and I can feel loose flaps of skin swinging back and forth from my forearm, heavy with blood. I have so many problems that I can't figure out where to start to fix them, and so my brain focuses on one that it can solve: I don't have my crutches.
I make it about three shuffling steps towards them before I realize that there's a figure standing in the half-melted doorway of the museum. My eyes are still dazzled from the lightning and all I can be sure of is that it's human, or at least human-shaped. So I say, "Help," sag to my knees, and then pass out.
- Chapter Seventeen -
I open my eyes again in a hospital bed. I've got wires running to a heart monitor on my finger, tubes taped to a needle inserted into the back of my hand, and I’m wearing enough bandages to wrap a small mummy. I can feel a dull ache in my left arm, and my back feels like I've been very carefully placed on a bed of nails. Neither of these bother me particularly, though, which I figure is probably due to whatever's in the IV bag that's d
raining into my hand.
It's not until I attempt to sit up that I realize that I'm also handcuffed by my right wrist to the hospital bed. Even after I hear the clank and my arm stops short, it takes me a minute to figure out what's happened: am I stuck on something? Tangled in equipment?
I'm just processing it as handcuffs when someone clears their throat in the corner of the room, and I look over to see Officer Peterson straightening up from where he's been slouched in the visitor's chair. He looks like he's had a rough night – not compared to mine, but rougher than he'd expected when he headed into work, and probably several hours longer, too, since it's light outside now. He regards me tiredly.
"We're going to talk for a minute. Because there's a lot that I don't understand about what's going on here, and I don't like that. At all. And I think that I'm not going to be any happier after we talk, but at least I'll be differently unhappy. And I can work with that."
He pauses, looking like he wishes he could light a cigarette, then says quietly, "I want to know what happened last night."
My brain's not up to telling a good lie, so I just stick to the most basic truth. "The storm smashed in the skylight. That woman and I got cut up pretty badly by the glass." I shrug, but halfway through the shrug I discover that I've apparently got stitches in a lot of random places in my back. So while I mean to convey that the world is a funny place sometimes, I instead convey that I'm an idiot who should learn to lie still and convalesce.
Peterson fixes me with a gimlet stare. "While I'm sure that is technically true, it doesn't actually answer any of my questions. Not even the simplest one, which is: what was she doing in there in the first place? And definitely not the harder ones, like: why does she appear to have self-inflicted claw marks? And why did lightning strike each time we tried to take her outside of the museum?"
The Experiment (Book 1): The Reluctant Superhero Page 10
