Mutation (15 page)

I groaned in response.  We waited a few more minutes, but when we didn’t see any more of our friends I teleported us back to the main building – into one of the underutilized stairwells Adam had shown me.

“Okay, we gotta go,” Glacia said and started to exit the stairwell.

Electra gave me a quick smooch on the lips.  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, grabbing her hand.  “Won’t you get in trouble if the faculty or staff see you?  Do I need to get you guys to your rooms?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.  “We won’t get caught.  We’ve been sneaking out for a long time.” Then she ran to catch up with her friend.

I stood there for a moment thinking about the last thing she’d said, and wondering if I should be thankful or bothered by it.  Putting it out of my mind, I teleported back to my room, took a quick shower, and hit the sack.

Chapter 20

I woke up the next morning drenched in sweat.  My sleep had been wracked by horrific nightmares, and I had awakened screaming more than once.  The worst part was that I really couldn’t remember the dreams themselves – just random images, sounds, and sensations:  lakes of blood, bloodcurdling screams, mounds of bodies…

I stood up - and almost swooned as the room began spinning.  I massaged my temples and waited for the feeling to pass, then staggered into the bathroom.  I took a towel and wiped the sweat from my face.  Looking in the mirror, I saw dark circles under my eyes.  Moreover, my skin looked pale and my cheeks pinched.  In short, I looked like death warmed over.

But as bad as I looked, I felt even worse.  My mouth felt like it was full of cotton, my stomach was doing somersaults, and my hands shook with painful spasms.  Out of nowhere, I began experiencing agonizing constrictions in my chest.  I started wheezing loudly as it suddenly felt like I couldn’t get enough - or
any
- air in my lungs.

My training took over.  I took a deep breath (or as deep a breath as I could) and held it.  I focused, trying to clamp down on my body’s autonomic systems and take conscious control.  Slowly and deliberately, I stopped the chest constrictions, relaxing the muscles around my lungs so that they stopped trying to squeeze all of the air out of my body.  Turning my attention to my stomach, I tried getting it to settle down by balancing stomach acids, altering the rate of digestion, and more.  After becoming convinced that the contents of my belly were going to stay there, I concentrated on my hands, normalizing the nerves so that the tremors would cease.

When I finished, I was sweating profusely again.  I turned on the faucet, splashed some water on my face and then swished some around in my mouth.  I wiped my face again with a towel.

This was new territory for me.  Outside of what occasionally happened when I delved into mindreading, I really couldn’t recall ever being sick a day in my life - presumably the result of exceptionally hardy genes from either my alien grandmother or my extra-dimensional father.  I had generally thought I was immune to communicable diseases but obviously I was mistaken.  Something, maybe a pathogen inherent to this particular dimension, was clearly affecting me.  I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, trying to think.

“You look terrible,” said a voice that was oddly familiar.  I opened my eyes.  My reflection in the mirror was staring at me, shaking his head in disapproval.  “This is what comes of hanging out all night and not getting enough sleep.”

“What?” I asked, stunned.

“You heard me,” my reflection replied.  “You had no business out there cavorting at the lake at all hours!  It was past curfew anyway!”

“This can’t be real,” I said incredulously.  This had to be a joke, some other prankster like Adam using an unknown ability to yank my chain.  Or else I was going crazy.

“Oh no, it’s real alright,” the reflection said.  “But it is a little crazy.  Hmmm…I wonder how Electra feels about dating a guy who has conversations with his reflection.”

Suddenly I was angry.  “You leave her out of this!”

“And if I don’t?”

Rather than reply, I screamed and flew at him, phasing in an attempt to imitate Alice and go through the looking glass and into the world of my reflection.

There were flashes of color and sound as I went through the mirror and my head swam for a few seconds.  When the feeling passed, I was sitting on a park bench under the shade of a tree near a large pond.  Dozens of ducks and geese swam on the water, honking and quacking loudly in a great cacophony of sound.

Something brushed against my ankle, swift and agile.  I looked down, and saw that my foot was actually bare.  In fact, I wasn’t wearing anything except a pair of boxers.  Something small, brown, and furry - a tiny rodent - twitched in the grass next to my foot.

“Mouse!” I shouted, making the small animal jump.  Presumably this was what had brushed against me a second ago.  It squeaked and then pressed up against my leg, trembling in fear.  That’s when I saw the snake.

It came slithering through the grass, heading towards the mouse.  It was light blue in color, reminiscent of a swimming pool, with a single black eye on top of its head and one deadly silver fang centered in the roof of its mouth.  I had never seen a serpent like it before.  It slid through the grass with the fluidity of water, hissing evilly as it closed in on the mouse.

I reached for it with my hand, intending to grab it and toss it away.  However, before I could get too close, it lunged.  Its fang sank deep in my forearm, drawing blood.  I screamed, both in pain and in anger, and teleported the snake away - where, I didn’t know.  The ducks and geese, having gone silent when I yelled, suddenly took off into mad flight in all directions, still honking and quacking loud enough to wake the dead.

My arm started throbbing almost immediately after the snake bit me.  I stood up, not sure exactly where I was about to go, then collapsed to the ground.  I drifted off into mindless, dreamless slumber.

Chapter 21

I woke up lying flat on my back on a cold, hard surface.  I groaned and started to rise, realizing with a bit of a start that my back was actually bare.

It was pitch black, so I switched my vision over to infrared.  One look around and I immediately knew where I was:  the IV drip, the oxygen tank, and - most of all - the wheeled, adjustable hospital bed all let me know that I was in some type of infirmary.  The cold, hard surface I had been sleeping on was actually a tiled floor.

I went over to the wall and turned the lights on, then switched my vision back to normal.  At that point, I noticed that there was a dull, monotonous droning noise in the air.  I quickly traced it to its source - a heart monitor.  Although it was turned on, it wasn’t connected to anything; that being the case, the machine was of the opinion that the patient had flatlined.  Hence, the noise (which ceased when I turned the machine off).

I yawned, stretched, scratched my stomach.  I was wearing a hospital gown, which someone had forgotten to tie up in the back.  Thankfully, though, I still had my boxers on.  I was absolutely famished, but other than that I felt a hundred times better than when I had last awakened.  I rubbed my eyes and started walking towards a door that I believed was the entrance to the bathroom.

“Can you hear me in there?” said a disembodied voice unexpectedly.  I looked around, surprised, but didn’t immediately see the source.  “Can you hear me?”

It was when the voice asked the question a second time that I noticed an intercom system on the wall next to the hospital bed.

The better to page you with, my dear…

I walked over and pressed the intercom button.  “I can hear you.” My voice sounded hoarse.

“Good, good,” said the voice.  “Listen, can you tell me where you are?”

“I’m in a hospital room,” I said.  “I don’t know how I got here but…can you tell me what’s going on?”

“Yes, but I need you to answer some questions first.  Now, can you tell me your name?”

I thought about simply ignoring the voice - just teleporting out of there.  But I didn’t know what had happened, how I had gotten here.  Also, I remembered feeling sick in my room, and I’d had perfect health up to that point.  In short, I needed answers.  I needed to play ball.

“Your name, please?” the voice asked again.

“Jim,” I said.  “Jim Carrow.”

*****

I spent approximately ten minutes answering basic questions - my age, where I go to school, who’s the current president, and so on - until the person on the other end of the intercom achieved some level of comfort from my answers.  Shortly thereafter, a medical team entered the room and I began to receive some of the answers I’d been wanting.

I was still at the Academy, and apparently I’d been in the school’s infirmary for three days.  I’d been brought in with an earth-scorching fever and completely delirious after someone found me wandering the school grounds in nothing but my boxers.

The docs had tried to get me set up in the hospital room where I’d woken up.  However, after they attempted to inject me with something to help the fever, I’d teleported the needle somewhere unknown and then telekinetically flung an orderly against the wall.  Everyone had then fled the room, deeming me too dangerous to try to help at the moment.  Someone had also turned off the lights when they left, presuming that I might hallucinate less if I couldn’t see much of anything.  (On the flip side, it was me turning on the lights that let the nurses on duty know I was conscious again.)

Now that I was lucid, the staff of the infirmary were able to safely fuss and fawn over me, and they did so.  They took my temperature, tested reflexes, and so on before finally giving me a clean bill of health.

“You seem to be fine,” said the doctor in charge, looking over my chart.  He was young - probably late twenties, with “Manish Prasad, MD” on his name tag.  “There were a few anomalies in your blood and physiology, but as best as we can tell, you are back to normal.”

“Anomalies?” I muttered, eyes going wide.  Outside of BT, almost no one had been privy to any type of medical diagnosis concerning me.  I didn’t need people knowing that I was part alien, because I had no intention of ending up spending the rest of my days as a government lab rat.

Dr.  Prasad must have noted the look of concern on my face.

“Don’t worry,” he said.  “Supers tend to have metabolisms and physiologies far different from normal people.  A few anomalies are expected.”

My relief was probably tangible, but I don’t think he noticed.

“Your recovery, though, is good news in more ways than one,” he said, continuing.

“How’s that?”

“Well, we’ve had a number of other cases since you came in - none as severe as yours, you understand - but we can probably expect them to safely recover now.  After you were brought in, we were on the lookout for an outbreak, so we probably caught it early in those other cases.”

He was about to say something else when we both heard the rhythmic stomping of feet outside the room.  Through the door, which was open, I saw four men go by in two-by-two formation, decked out in full riot gear.

“What’s with the SWAT team?” I asked.

Dr.  Prasad stepped over and closed the door before responding.  “As I said, we didn’t know what we were dealing with, and we really didn’t have any infectious disease experts here, so we brought in help from the outside.”

It took a second for the full ramifications to hit me.  “You mean Earth? 
Our
Earth?  You brought a Gestapo unit over to help fight an illness?”

“No, we asked for help from the Centers for Disease Control.  The team from the CDC - who will want to talk to you, by the way - brought the soldiers.”

“Why?  What do we need soldiers for?”

The doctor shrugged.  “Crowd control, I guess.  There was a chance that we’d have to quarantine people.  We still might, so we’ve got a squad of soldiers setting up temporary barracks in the main courtyard.”

I thought about that for a second, then remembered a question I’d had earlier.  “I meant to ask, who brought me in?”

“A buddy of yours - a guy.”

“My Campus Buddy?  Adam Atom?”

The doctor suddenly looked like he had sat on a hot poker.

“What?  Did I hurt Adam when he brought me in?  Did I do something to him?”

The doctor seemed to be struggling to find his voice.  He swallowed, then spoke.

“No, it wasn’t Adam who brought you in.  It was Smokescreen.”

“But something’s happened to Adam.  What?”

The doctor swallowed again.  “You’ve been out the past few days, so I guess there’s no way you could have known…”

“What???!!” I screamed.  It was all I could do not to grab him by the collar and shake him until he told me everything.

“Adam Atom’s on lockdown, in a nullifier cell.  He killed somebody.”