by Zack Archer
We were at another place, at another time, alone at the edge of a beach with bone-white sand. Jen was running up into one of those resort huts with the thatched roofs, and I was chasing after her. I made it through the front door of the hut to find some old-school R&B music thumping, Jen ready to greet me in nothing more than a black G-string.
Before I knew what was happening, our tanned, toned bodies were joined. Jen’s tangled hair swept across my chest and we kissed hungrily as the music throbbed and she slid her hand down my thigh.
Moving to the sound of the music, I felt ecstatic and free, really free for the first time in my life. There was no time or concerns or fears, there was just the two of us, my hands exploring the contours of her body, tasting the hint of salt water around her swollen nipples. She moaned and pulled my shorts down and took me in her mouth.
I smacked her round ass as I pulled her back to her feet, and she rocked back and forth against me before we retreated to a nearby couch. She bit my ear and told me she needed me inside of her. I leaned back and she straddled me and then and I went to work, thrusting rhythmically into her, listening to the slap of flesh against flesh, fucking at a furious pace, nearly reaching a climax before—
My vision, my dream, my delusion, whatever the hell you want to call it, ended.
Just like that.
Only I was still caught up in the moment which meant, yep, I was thrusting at the air.
“Holy–what the fuck is that, Quincy?” Harker asked.
I shook off my shock and tried to hide my erection as the girls sniggered, and I tried to play it off. “Sorry, guys, I zoned there for a sec.”
“You’re losing it, bro,” Renfro said, tapping a finger to his head. “Pretty soon you’re gonna be in a rubber room putting puzzles together.”
Jen swatted at Renfro, and I realized I needed to do something to change the vibe in the room. Quick as a reflex, I stuck my finger into an opening on the battery. This got everyone’s attention.
My body jolted.
A warm current snaked through my finger and up my arm, causing the tiny hairs on the back of my neck to stand at attention.
It was enough electricity to kill the average guy.
The others gasped.
I yawned again.
I probably forgot to mention this before, but I’m not entirely an average guy (and not only because of my periodic, vivid sexual daydreams). Besides a name, the one thing my old man apparently gifted me was a genetic disorder (thanks, pops!) the ability to be a “conductor,” a “heater,” an accumulator of electricity.
You know how I knew I had the “gift?”
I was struck by lightning.
I was ten years old, playing right field for my baseball team when I spotted the first spoke of lightning in the distance. The team scattered and me being a certified dumbass, took shelter under a tree. Suffice to say, things got hot really quickly. I’m talking fifty-thousand degrees hot, which is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. That’s the temperature of the surrounding air after it’s been heated by a lightning strike.
Anyway, a bolt crashed down, tracing the trunk of the tree like water coursing down a gutter. I looked up and I was kissed by a cone of white light. Ninety-percent of people struck by lightning survive, but they’re physically fucked up. Some lose limbs, others get badly burned, and still more are forever tattooed with a pattern of tree branch-like scars that trace the path the electricity took as it traveled over their bodies.
I didn’t suffer physically at all.
Nope, my shoes didn’t even get blown off because somehow, some way, I was able to harness the energy and expel it out of my hands like some kind of twisted magician.
I did piss my pants as a result of the whole thing, but otherwise, I was no worse for wear.
There are others out there like me, and you’ve probably seen some of them performing all kinds of crazy tricks on the internet. There’s the dude in India who can power up light bulbs and blenders by grabbing live wires, and another whack-job in Serbia who cooks food by redirecting energy from an electrical box into his stove-top. What would cause the organs and hearts of most people to fail, doesn’t faze me. Basically, I’ve got the ability to store electricity in my body and then release it.
But here’s the thing. I can’t really control the electricity which just seems to get sucked down into my body and then vomited back out.
I squinted and swung my hand down and ran it over the top of the four shots of booze, little wisps of electricity shooting from my fingertips as—
The shots caught fire!
The girls squealed with delight, and then the four of them smothered the flames and downed the shots. Jen shot to her feet again and kissed me on the cheek, which was a tad surprising since I’d been fucking the air moments earlier. “You’re so awesome, Quincy,” she whispered. “You’re so…super cute.”
My guts seized at the word “cute.”
Argh!
I would’ve preferred a kick to the nuts or an ice pick to the neck.
“Cute,” a word that I’d heard far too many times in my short life, was a puppy dog, or your kid brother, or the little old man with the high-waisted pants that you see waving at you from the bus stop. Cute was absolutely, positively, not the thing you wanted to hear from a woman who possessed many of the qualities prized by the superficial male of the species.
I summoned up a smile for Jen. “Thanks.”
Harker rose and threw a hand around me, mussing my hair. “Our boy Quincy here sure has some serious, mystical powers, don’t he?”
“Too bad they haven’t done him any good!” Renfro said, barking a nasty laugh.
I wanted to respond.
If truth be told, I wanted to go Drew Barrymore on Renfro and set him on fire, but I didn’t.
I just grabbed my shit and waved goodbye to the slackers and headed outside.
3
Our “apartment” was on the fifth story of a ten-story CHU Farm on the eastern edge of Baltimore that appeared to have been constructed from a madman’s blueprint. All of the ladders and walkways were fixed unevenly to the right side of the construct, causing the whole thing to sag toward the ground. It was only a matter of time until the entire development crashed to the ground.
I trekked down one of the unlevel and spongy-feeling walkways, then threaded down the long metal staircase that led to the ground. I looked up into the hazy sky and sighed, depressed at leaving the apartment because it forced me to stare reality right in its ugly, fucking face.
The truth is, I’d lived most of my life within ten blocks of the place and had ventured outside the city only sparingly. My old man took off on us when I was seven, and only twice was I permitted to visit him in Philadelphia before he died in an industrial accident. Could I have felt sorry for myself? Yeah, sure I could have, but in my experience that doesn’t do you any good. The only thing that pissed me off was that I hadn’t yet lived up to my potential, but I was working on that. I mean, it might’ve been delusional, but what other reason did I have to wake up in the morning, other than if I believed the next day would be better than the one before it?
At the bottom of the staircase, I thumbed in my earbuds, which were absolutely vital if I had any hope of reaching work on time. Ever since I was a kid I had issues, not only with the whole being able to conduct electricity thing but also not being able to block out extraneous sounds. Going back to the time I was six years old, I remember hearing a kind of intermittent white noise, mostly when I was outdoors, a humming that kept me up at night and disoriented me during the day.
My mom (God bless her heart) did two things to alleviate my issues: she made me wear mittens when I turned eleven (even during the summer) and slapped a set of bulky, thrift store-quality headphones over my ears.
I was forced to wear the mittens and the broke-ass headphones during the day, even when
I went to school.
Guess how that was received by the other kids?
accidentally ignited a collection of oily rags at the back of the gym which was the preferred location for beat-downs. Little wisps of blue flame shot from my fingers, sending the rags up in flames, and my tormentors scurrying for cover.
As I grew older, the noise became something I just learned to live with, although earbuds were really the only thing that allowed me to function most of the time.
Earbuds securely in place, I flipped on a pair of older model neural glasses, specs developed a few decades before that contained an internal heads-up display, a HUD. Solar panels, especially the PV cells made with gallium arsenide, had grown incredibly tiny, just one micrometer thick, so everything was coated with them, including glasses, which was cool because you could power up your stuff just by walking outside.
I waited for a stream of driverless cars to streak past, and then I walked through an alley and down the city streets where I was able, either by blinking or the use of a mini-trackball, to control the information on the HUD.
I blinked repeatedly, scrolling through the day’s news, hitting up all of my tagged sites. I scanned several sports stories, some celebrity gossip bullshit, a few porn sites, and lastly some trending news on yet another industrial accident. This one had happened only a few hours earlier in Wilmington, Delaware, a titanic blast that nearly leveled another tech company.
I was unnerved, not only because the other company was in the same business as Pythia, but because it was one more in a series of comparable explosions in labs and refineries from Raleigh, North Carolina, all the way up to Hartford, Connecticut. I scrolled through a comments section where readers were convinced that a shadowy group of industrial terrorists was at work.
Powering down the glasses, I double-timed it, sliding down streets which were deserted because hardly anyone worked anymore and most of those who did flew “hoversurfs,” which were just glorified motorcycles with wings.
Reaching the Pythia plant five minutes before my shift began, I badged my way past security into the massive building made entirely of red bricks.
The building buzzed with air handlers and other machines that blocked out most of the noise I normally heard, so I was able to remove my earbuds. Moving briskly, I headed toward my locker, threw it open, and grabbed the tools of my trade: a can of “perp spray” (pepper spray), a little yellow penlight, a security protocol card, and my “psych totem.”
It’s a little-known fact that everybody in the security biz carries with them some item that’s either been blessed or is just plain lucky. It’s the kind of trinket you keep close to your body to ensure you’ll see the end of your shift. It just so happened that my totem was a tiny stuffed rabbit with oversized teeth whose go-by was “Mister Chops.”
I pocketed Mister Chops and the rest of my crap, and strolled down a hall toward Leon Banks, the linebacker-sized African-American guard I was relieving.
Leon stood watch before a metal gate with a retina scanner that protected the building’s inner keep, the R&D lab and various secure locations where unnamed items were labored on by men and women in smocks and goggles.
Leon arched an eyebrow in my direction. “What it is, small fry?”
“What it will be,” I replied.
We slapped palms, and Leon squinted in the direction of the back of my head. He waved a hand over the tiny hairs on the back of my neck which were still ridged because of the electricity. “Shit, those roomies of yours made you do it again, didn’t they, Quincy?”
I nodded. “They made me play fire starter.”
“Was it Harker’s lady-friend? That fine ass one with the long pins and the big jugs?”
I smiled and nodded. “How come she’s the only one you ever remember?” I asked.
“Cause she’s memorable for two very specific reasons.”
“What is it with guys and boobs anyway?” I asked.
“It’s evolutionary, ace,” Leon answered.
“It doesn’t bother you that they’re fake?”
Leon grinned. “Easter Bunny ain’t real, but it doesn’t mean I don’t still love getting my hands on his eggs.”
Shrugging on his backpack, Leon winked and then turned to leave, when I called after him. “There was another one today.”
He turned and peered back. “Another explosion. This time up in Wilmington,” I added.
Leon took this in, nodding. “And?”
“And…does it ever make you nervous that somebody’s targeting places like this?”
He shook his head. “Ain’t nothing I can do about it. What’s meant to be, will be. Nothing ever happens around here, and besides, you got Mister Chops keeping watch.”
I pulled my rabbit out and held it up, waving its tiny hand.
Leon smiled.
And then the building blew up.
4
If you’ve ever been trapped in an undertow, that’s kind of what it feels like to be caught in the middle of an explosion.
Only magnify that a thousand times.
And then set yourself on fire.
Time slowed to a crawl as the blast-wave hit and lifted me literally out of my shoes, sending me spiraling through the air where I—
WHAM!
Slammed into a faraway wall, leaving an imprint in the drywall before sliding slowly to the ground.
Fucccckkkkkkkkk!
The impact hurt like a sonofabitch and I couldn’t breathe for several seconds.
My breath slowly returned, but my ears continued to ring (the howling alarms and smoke detectors didn’t help), stars were still in my eyes, and the cuffs of my pants were covered in tiny fires.
I peeled myself off the floor and smothered the fires, choking on banners of smoke and debris that veiled the hallway.
Looking over, I spotted Mister Chops lying on the ground, fire-blackened, and smoking.
I grabbed the stuffed rabbit and heard a groan.
It was coming from Leon who was alive and lying under a small pile of rubble.
Levering myself up, I gimp-dashed over to Leon and grabbed his arm. The big man weighed an easy two-fifty, so it took some effort to dislodge him from the pile of debris. I was relieved to see he was breathing and didn’t seem to be missing any pieces.
I pulled him to safety and that’s when I heard it.
A note.
A vibration in the air.
As if a thousand tuning forks had just been struck at the same time.
The sound changed, becoming more like the notes that occur when two knives are rubbed together, metal on metal. I covered my ears and winced.
I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, the quality of the air seemed to change.
The vibrations stopped and the air roiled, shimmering like it does on a hazy summer day.
I waved my hand, and the air rippled as if it had turned to water.
What the fuck was going on?
The vibrations began again, and this time I was able to spot their source.
They were coming from a figure approaching from the other end of the hallway.
A man.
A large man in a black and orange singlet with red whiskers and beard, bald except for a tuft of crimson hair that sprouted from the middle of his enormous dome like the crown on a small tree.
My first thought was that he looked like the dude who played a snowman in that ancient kid’s stop-motion cartoon about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Burl Ives.
Yep, the guy in the middle of the hall looked like Burl-Fucking-Ives…on acid.
I stepped toward him, and he turned his attention to me.
He neither walked nor flew.
He just…hovered a few inches off the ground.
The air around him sparkled with vivid colors.
He drew closer, and I noticed his eyes.
Black and lifeless.
Like the eyes on a doll.
“D-did you do t-this?” I stam
mered.
The red-whiskered man nodded. “And if I did?”
“I’m kinda pissed,” I replied. Then, holding up Mister Chops: “You hurt my friend.”
“He should consider himself lucky.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because whatever was done to him pales in comparison to what I’m going to do to you,” the man said. “What’s your name fuckface?”
I shook my head and pointed at Leon. “He’s fuckface. I’m asshole.”
The man grinned, but there was no levity in his face. “Well, today is your lucky day, asshole, because most people don’t get to know the exact date of their death. But you do.”
“Wait!” I shouted.
The man hesitated.
My shaking hand reached into my right pocket and pulled out my security protocol card. It was laminated and contained all of the principles I was supposed to abide by to de-escalate conflicts. I scanned the card, which read:
Rule Number 1: Act As A Mediator.
Rule Number 2: Use Reason.
Rule Number 3: Do Not Overreact.
My eyes fixed on Rule Number 1, including the suggestion to ask: “What seems to have caused you consternation, sir/ma’am?”
I looked at the red-whiskered man and repeated the line. He just stared at me. “What did you just say?”
I waved the card. “I’m trying to de-escalate the situation.”
“I’m going to de-escalate your fucking head!”
The red-whiskered man threw his hands up, and something that looked like a cloud of pure, white light appeared between his palms. He made a motion with his hands, the same kind of movement you make when you’re shaping a snowball.
The wave of light compressed into a ball of energy that the man hurled at me.
Reflexively, I adopted a defensive stance as the energy zoomed at me like a rocket.
I dropped the protocol card as my hands came up in front of my face, angling out like they did when I was sticking my finger in a battery, or a wall-socket, or any of the countless other things that I inserted my fingers in to get a rise out of my roommates.
