The Subatomic Kid (19 page)

***

The sound of the gun going off freaked John out completely, and with a flourish of technique reserved only for castrati and young boys whose voices are breaking, he upped the pitch of his scream by two full octaves.

Along with his vocal proclivity, his face, which until now had managed to remain within the confines of his skeletal structure, began intensifying in color, and huge boiling lumps leapt and danced in the air. The pieces twisted, folded, stretched, and contracted, his hair grew enormously long and stood straight out from his head, and his eyes shot sparks like molten metal exploding from a crucible of fire.

Seeing the terrible face dancing in front of them, his friends upped the pitch of their screams almost into the realm of dog whistles. They cowered in dread and panic. In their short lives none of them had ever encountered such an awesome display of teenage angst. They each wanted to dissolve into the floor or the woodwork.

It was odd though, they weren’t scared for their lives; they were scared in sympathy for John, who in turn had been scared by someone or something they couldn’t see. They recognized his outward manifestation for what it was—utter and extreme frustration at being confronted with something he didn’t understand. Somewhere deep in their hearts, they all knew they had felt the same way at one time or another.

***

Ron was so frightened he had wet himself; the warm bodily discharge had run down his leg and collected in a pool around his knees on the concrete. His mouth was as dry as a bone lying on desert sand, and his heart was beating like a conga drum in a cheesy 1950s B movie. He was so distraught with panic he would have sold his soul to the devil just to be somewhere else, but the trouble with the devil was, he was never around when you needed him.

A sudden and unexpected wave of feeling rushed through his body like a bursting dam; he dropped the gun and the flashlight to the ground and they clattered away on the concrete. His body began to shake as the earthquake of emotion surged through every fiber of his being, and his consciousness collected into a disheveled assembly of his former self.

Howling like a wolf at the horrifying face beyond the glass, he realized he was almost hypnotized by the ghoulish juxtapositions of form it underwent. He was deep inside a nightmare, and needed to tear himself away before this hideous thing drove him completely insane.

Raising his hands to stop the madness that assaulted his eyes and flooded his mind, the vision was cut off, allowing him to suck in a huge lung full of air. How long was it since he’d last taken a breath? Memory failed him.

He shook his head, the revolting chimera he had witnessed etched into the back of his mind; he would never escape its ghastly grasp. For the rest of his life he would be spellbound.

Standing up, being careful to shield his sight from the monstrous apparition, he turned away in utter revulsion and ran, and ran, and ran. His detective days were over, washed up on the rocky shores of a neurotic coastline. He was a broken man, a confused man, a lost man—the hapless victim of a confused teenager.

SUBATOMIC BLUES

John was completely perplexed as he watched the security guard turn and run away like a bat out of hell. He could think of no rhyme or reason for the guard’s aberrant behavior; he had them dead to rights, but instead of arresting them he had dropped his flashlight and gun, and left.

There was no earthly reason for the guard to run away, unless there was someone, or something standing behind John. He turned to take a look and the motion of his head sent familiar ripples throughout his being. Waves of energy ebbed and flowed around him and he stretched out to infinity. He was surfing the subatomic stream.

Propelled by strange electricity, he bathed in the river of change. But it wasn’t his physical being, it was his emptiness, that essence of himself, that nothing in which everything was contained. It was no less than a subatomic vacation; he was replenishing his solidity. But the pieces of the puzzle didn’t add up to a picture, this normally happened when he was about to change. Why would he be changing now? There was no reason he could think of.

He was everywhere, and nowhere, and nothing, and something, all at the same time. It was an experience he could never explain; it was the antithesis of being himself and yet he was himself. It was a riddle in a loop, its end was its beginning and its beginning was its end. He could play with it happily for eternity and it still wouldn’t be solved.

He imagined stopping the world and getting off; he imagined playing in this fantasyland forever. It was a dream, but he could make it into a reality. It was such a tempting thing to do, just turn off the world and turn off time. Forget the whole thing with all its jealousies, aspirations, lies, tears, and dramas. He wouldn’t miss any of it; he wouldn’t miss anybody or anything. He had always felt like a cardboard cutout, living in a world of cardboard cutouts, doing the same things day in and day out, dodging bullets and pretending to be happy doing it.

“Where are you going with this?” asked the Master of the Perfect Word. “You are chasing the blues, and it will only lead you into disharmony.”

“Chasing the blues!” John echoed. “No, I am waking up.”

“You may think you are waking up, but you are riding the tail of a dragon back to its lair. Before you know where you are, you will be imprisoned in a cave with a million other useless shiny objects.”

“It’s a pointless question,” the Master quipped. “You cannot refuse to go back. You are here in thought time; it’s the in breath of a moment. Your quest is to fill it with as much as you can, before you are drawn back into yourself.”

“I don’t like myself anymore,” John whined. “I’m too complicated.”

“Well, you are what you think, and if you wish to indulge yourself in self-pity and pessimism, go ahead—I cannot stop you. But remember this; when you have finished gorging yourself on dish after dish of negative pie, you are still going to have to work hard at continuing the illusion that you are useless or complicated. Is it worth all that energy to create someone you are not proud of?”

John grunted. This guy had a way with words that just cut to the heart of every situation. “Well, it was only a small thing. I just wondered.”

“There are no small things. If the beating of a butterfly’s wing can affect your whole world, imagine what one single thought can do.”

John felt stupid, and tiny, and ungrateful. He had allowed his thoughts to run away with him. Instead of guiding them and shaping them into a useful emotion, he had very nearly followed them down a crooked path to nowhere.

A thought by itself is actually capable of charming you into believing it, because it is a product of your own mind, and we are all predisposed to believe in what comes from ourselves. History is peppered with deluded despots who fell in love with one idiotic thought, and then proceeded to inflict that thought, and its bastard progeny, on others. Thought is a weapon that can cripple and maim both ourselves and those around us; we need to aim it wisely.

He had never thought about thought; it had always been there ever since he could remember. But from now on he would always bear in mind the power of a single thought and its effect upon others. As he contemplated the strange and tangled web of intrigue he had become embroiled in, he felt the now familiar swirling rush through the tunnel of time, and he turned his head back to find Tex, Cal, and Kate cowering in front of the door with their hands over their eyes.

DESTRUCTION

As Hunter got out of the car he could smell the trouble. It drifted on the wind and assaulted his olfactory nerves like a mugger in a dark alley. Even though he had prepared for it, the harsh reality always came as a shock, and he knew with certainty that once he discovered its true nature, he would have a mess to clean up.

All of his senses went into high alert, and just as he was about to close the car door, he hesitated and listened. There were a lot of things going on. He felt a subtle shaking accompanied by a low hum in the ground beneath his feet, and somewhere off in the distance he heard screams of fear and panic diminishing into the night. He wondered if this was the same orderly building he had left only a few hours ago, but he knew it wasn’t; it didn’t take a genius to figure that out.

He slowly walked across the schoolyard to the front door, reviewing the elements he had in play. He had four kids imprisoned in the subbasement, one of whom possibly had a special talent, and he had Doctor Leitz, the mastermind behind the machinery, who had supposedly given the kid that special talent, and nothing else.

What could have gone wrong?
he wondered as he approached the front door, slipping the card from his pocket that would allow him to gain entrance. Simultaneously, he gripped his revolver, slid it out of its holster, and holding the gun up vertically he swiped the card. As the door swung open, he grasped the gun in both hands and held it straight out in front of him. He aimed it into the darkness, rapidly moving it from place to place to cover all of the spots where someone might be waiting to attack him. But there were no assassins; there was only the palpable throb of the scientific equipment reverberating throughout the building. He stepped inside and began a long creep down the hallway.

***

John stared down at his friends, “He ran away!” he said with astonishment. It was perplexing; they didn’t move, they didn’t say anything. It was very uncharacteristic behavior, and they were too old to believe that if they covered their eyes, he couldn’t see them.

“The one on my head?!” John echoed, feeling his hair and glancing up above him. “There’s nothing here,” John assured them. “Just us.”

The three of them removed their hands from their eyes and stared at him strangely.

“What?” he asked. It was embarrassing; they were scrutinizing him in minute detail, he could see it. He felt like a sideshow freak and a lab rat, all rolled into one.

“How do you feel?” Tex asked.

“Okay,” John replied. “But when I looked out of the window, that security guard was already there. He was holding his flashlight under his chin, and when he switched it on, it made the creepiest face. It scared the heck out of me, and I just lost it.”

“Yeah, we saw that,” Cal said, staring at him so oddly that John began to feel acutely uncomfortable.

“That was when the melting monster appeared,” Kate added.

John gazed at them blankly. They weren’t making any sense; it was as if they were concocting a bold tale just for his benefit. That was when he caught on; it was a joke, an elaborate hoax they were playing on him. They had threatened as much just a short while ago, and this was just the time they were likely to do it, directly following a crisis.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said, smiling, suddenly feeling relieved from his burden of embarrassment. “You’re putting me on. Well, I’m not falling for it.”

John laughed; it was pathetic. Why were they going on with this charade when he had already uncovered their ruse? “Nice try, but I’m not falling for it.” He cracked the bar that released the lock on the door, and pushed it open. “We’re free,” he said, stepping outside.

Tex, Cal, and Kate couldn’t believe it. Had they lost the power of coherent speech? They had explained the phenomenon as literally as they could under the circumstances, and yet, it had sounded silly.

“We have to look after him,” Cal said. “He can’t go doing that in the middle of a supermarket; he’ll scare some poor old lady to death.”

The implications were astounding, and such was the price of fame…or infamy. John was no longer an ordinary kid; along with his newfound molecular talents came a tremendous responsibility.

To avoid the scrutiny of government scientists, secret agents, and petty hustlers, he would have to live an impeccable life. He would have to cloak himself in normalcy, and seep ordinariness. Displays of the type they had just witnessed were completely out of the question.