No. No, I am not going to die on this rooftop, not when I am so close.
The latch turned. The skylight swung in and down.
Yes!
I put one hand on the window edge, rolling onto my stomach. My wounds split. Fresh hot blood smeared against the tiles.
Can’t be helped. Push on.
My boots scraped as I fought for purchase. Inch by tortured inch, I pulled myself up and over the lip of the skylight.
As I toppled through, I focused enough to slow my descent, enough, at least, that the fall didn’t finish me.
The Cabinet was across the other side of the room.
If I can just…
But it might as well have been on the moon. The last of my strength was spent. I could lift buses, but now I could barely lift my head.
“Cody!” My voice rattled in my throat, my call no more than a whisper. I tried again.
“Cody!”
“Come on, Professor Hartwell, it’s this way,” he shouted his reply, beckoned me on.
No, wait, this isn’t now, this was before.
The day was bright, the sky a broad endless blue overhead. The jagged cliff face fell away to the sea on my right and rose sheer and imposing on my left. The ledge was wide enough to walk but narrow enough to require attention.
“In here,” Cody said. He squeezed himself through a narrow cleft in the rock face.
I approached more tentatively. My research assistant was younger, fitter, thinner than me. If he struggled to get through, I was likely to be sacrificing skin to the sharp rock. “You’re sure this is worth it, Cody?”
“Oh, yeah.”
The gap was much wider near its base. I knelt on the ledge, steadying myself with my hands. I ducked down, got on all fours and crawled into the cave.
The space inside was bigger than I’d expected, much bigger, and lighter too, as shafts of daylight pierced cracks all along the wall. At the center of the cave, a vast tree grew, one unlike any I’d ever seen. The massive trunk was oak-like, but its leaves were thick and meaty with a purple sheen to them. The tree held my attention only until I realized what it was growing out of—something mechanical, metallic, manufactured. It was hard to tell what it had been, but whatever it was, it was big. The size of a house, easily, but collapsed in on itself.
“It’s a spaceship,” Cody stated, grinning broadly, running a hand through his shaggy sandy hair.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
“Don’t believe me? Come inside, you’ll see.” He clambered up the side to where two panels of its shell didn’t quite meet. “We can get through here, but careful, there’s some sharp edges.”
“Cody, wait!” But he had vanished from view.
Inside, it was hard to dispute Cody’s supposition. The interior, though broken, twisted and distended, was utilitarian and hard-edged. Though it might be dangerous to impose our cultural view upon its creators, it didn’t feel very homey. A vehicle then, or something industrial. There was no sign of anything identifiable as an engine, as such, but glimpses of the technology in the walls, on the ceilings—it was like nothing I’d ever seen before, so perhaps I was simply not recognizing it. More than once, I stopped, my attention arrested by some device or other, but I didn’t want to lose Cody, and his footsteps echoed on ahead.
I caught him up in the central chamber, its contents buckled and ruptured by the trunk of the strange tree. Cody was standing by a box, or cabinet or… it looked like a coffin to my eyes, but again, I shouldn’t prejudge a culture I didn’t know.
“It’s alien, right?” said Cody.
“I don’t think we can be certain, yet,” I said. “Although, yes, I’ve seen nothing like it before. It’s certainly suggestive, but we shouldn’t draw conclusions before we have all of the data.”
Cody nodded. “Uh-huh, sure. Makes sense. Would this datum help?” He lifted the lid of the cabinet.
“Professor!” Cody rushed to my side. “Professor? Tom? Are you… alive?”
Oh, that’s right, I’m bleeding out in his loft.
I choked out a laugh.
“Funny the things that slip your mind,” I rasped.
“Oh, thank God. What happened?”
My head was like mud, slow, memories wallowing out of reach, or surfacing unbidden. I’d discovered something important. Why was it so difficult to… “Loviatar!”
“That witch?” Cody asked. “Don’t you worry, Professor, we’ll get you in the Cabinet, sort you right out.”
“No.”
Why does that feel wrong? Isn’t it why I'm here?
“I can’t leave you like this. I can call an ambulance, but…” He trailed off. He didn’t have to say it. I knew. The Cabinet could save me. Again. But each time I went in, I came out different.
“Best guess,” I said, “it was supposed to help the explorers adapt to new environments.”
“How?”
I brushed takeout containers off the schematics, sifted through them until I found the one I wanted. There were far too many question marks.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That is, if you mean, what does it do, I think it fundamentally overhauls the genetic code of the occupant to let it breathe the local air, survive the local bacteria, heal wounds and the like. Probably makes the explorer stronger and more durable too. If you mean, how does it do any of that? It might as well be magic. The principles involved here are beyond me.”
“I wish the other one had survived the crash,” Cody said for the thousandth time.
There were enough fragments in the wreckage to be sure there were originally at least two of the Cabinets on the alien craft. And there was no question now that it was alien. The technology was like nothing of Earth, and the desiccated corpse in the Cabinet had never been human. It’d crumbled to dust moments after Cody had opened the case. I wished now… but there was nothing to be done about that.
“We’ve taken this as far as we can,” I said. “We need other people to look at it. Fresh eyes, other disciplines, to see what we can’t.”
Cody’s shoulders slumped. “I know. I wish we’d been able to do more.”
“We’ve made good progress, Cody. Laid important groundwork, but it’s time. Don’t worry, the world won’t forget our efforts.”
“There is one thing we haven’t done,” he said. “Something that would get our names forever associated with this discovery…”
“No.”
“Oh, come on, Professor. Just once. You said you’d isolated the inputs, I have faith. I trust our work. Just once. To prove it does what we think?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “We are years away from animal testing, I’m certainly not putting a human in that thing until…”
“Professor?”
“Do you hear sirens?” I asked.
“There aren’t any sirens.” Cody dragged me across the loft, toward the Cabinet. It was his only choice, and I knew it.
“There are! There’s a fire. Some kids trapped on the top floor,” I said.
“No, Professor, that was years ago. Remember? It’s why you went into the Cabinet the first time. The firefighters couldn’t reach them.”
“Can’t let you, Cody, my responsibility. My risk.”
I heard his voice, but not his words, he was talking from a long way away. Or the headset was on the blink again. I tapped the earpiece again. “… confirmed, it’s Loviatar,” said Cody, through a crackle of static.
I gunned the throttle, swerved around the police car. “Where is she?”
“News puts her at the near side of Robinson bridge,” said Cody, in my earpiece. The new headset was smaller and much more comfortable under my mask but still needed work. “She’s ripped the top off an ambulance.”
I pulled left, hard, fought to keep the back wheel under control. “I see her.”
The dusty gray rags she wore hid her shape. As she crouched on what was left of the roof of the ambulance, one black-wrapped hand reaching inside, dust or smoke billow
ed forth. Her black mask and deep hood hid her face but didn’t block the manic, gleeful laugh.
Loviatar, Mother of Diseases. There was no telling what hideous plague she was dousing the ambulance crew with; I had to take her down fast. “Sorry, Cody.”
“No, man, not the bike again!”
I accelerated, arrow-straight towards her. She raised her head. I slammed on the brakes, the back of the bike bucked, and I let the momentum carry me, away, towards her. I flipped, tucked into a ball, then snapped out a kick. My foot buried deep into her mask, and the two of us tumbled off the ambulance together.
We rolled over and over on the asphalt. Fell apart, as we both came to our feet, then faced each other.
“You are interfering with the natural order, Bastion,” she sang. “All must decay, all must die. This is my calling. You called me.” She flexed her fingers, and her claws extended.
“Your ideology is twisted, your actions horrific. I must stop you, Loviatar.”
She vaulted towards me, claws green and glistening, but I stepped forward, caught her wrists before she could bring them to bear.
“Sorry, Loviatar, you need to be quicker than that.” She fought me, twisting her shoulders, trying to throw me off, but fast and deadly as she was, I was the stronger. If I could just keep hold until the police could catch us up…
“Nothing can resist my children,” she cackled, her voice distorted and cracking.
“We’ll see about that.”
She took a deep breath, then exhaled a cloud of smoke, caught me full in the face.
My stomach turned. My strength vanished.
Loviatar laughed, slipped her hands from my suddenly feeble grasp, bent her knees, and leaped upwards.
“Cody?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Cody, she just flew away.”
“Flew? With a plane, or… jetpack?”
My stomach heaved, my skin felt cold, then hot, my knees buckled. “No, just… flew.”
“Get back here, let’s send you through the Cabinet again. Maybe I can find a setting that can duplicate that so you can chase her next time.”
“Yeah… soon as I… can.”
I was suddenly very glad my mask didn’t cover my mouth.
“Stay with me, Professor,” said Cody.
This time was different. I felt weak, certainly, and the blood loss wasn’t helping, but there was something in my head.
What had Loviatar done to me? Why couldn’t I think straight? Was I experiencing now? Then? Was the time with Cody in his loft reality or another layer of memory obliterating any sense of the true now? Why was I so sure I’d learned something about Loviatar, something important? Why wouldn’t it come?
“How did she beat you, Professor? What do you need? More speed? Strength? We need to up your toughness again, looks like.”
The Cabinet was a miracle. I’d long since abandoned any hope of understanding it. It had done things to my body that defied explanation, not merely adapting to dangerous environments, but granting powers that could not be. The sonar I’d gained to fight Invisior could be construed as an adaptation like bats have, but nothing could explain my ability to defy gravity and fly. Or the ice beam I could generate since facing Therminal… even my enhanced speed seemed simple enough, but if you stopped to think about the physics of it, I should have been burnt to a crisp or crushed like a bug when I used it. I was a walking, no, flying, catalogue of impossibilities.
“My mind…” I said.
Cody hesitated. “We can’t. We agreed. You made me agree. There’s no telling what happens if we let this thing affect your brain.”
“No avoiding it. Loviatar did something.” The edges of my vision darkened. I shivered at the sudden chill in the room.
My powers had gotten stranger to match my opponents. I was the first powered being on the planet, but it seemed like my debut had opened the floodgates. More and more supervillains and the occasional superhero had emerged in the five years since I’d first stepped into the Cabinet.
“Do you ever worry you might be the cause?” asked Rebecca, her microphone thrust towards me. She was wearing her professional face, perfect make-up, her dark eyes flashing, her hair falling in bronze waves to her shoulders.
No, wait, I didn’t even know her name then.
I hovered a few feet off the ground, as the Police bundled Lobstrosity into a paddy wagon.
“I’m sorry, Ms.…?”
“Rebecca Randall, Falcon City News. Do you think The Lobstrosity would have terrorized the city if you hadn’t been here?”
“I’m just glad I was here to help, Ms. Randall. And I want the people of Falcon City to know that Bastion will always be here to look out for them.”
“And what the people of Falcon City want to know is did Bastion just refer to himself in the third person?”
I stifled a laugh. “I think perhaps he did. Nice to meet you, Ms. Randall.” I saluted her, and flew away, grinning like an idiot.
I let myself into Cody’s loft through the skylight.
“Hey, hey, Professor,” said Cody. “I just saw Bastion on the news. Did I see some sparks there, between him and that reporter lady?”
“I’m sure he has no idea what you mean,” I said.
“Haha, you go, Prof!”
I sobered. “The bad news is: we were right.”
“Oh, no. The Lobstrosity?”
“Was really David Bruce from the Marine Biology department, yes.”
“He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”
I screamed my throat ragged. The Cabinet was always painful, and worse when I was injured, but this, this was like nothing I could explain. My muscles spasmed. My skin burned, as flesh knit together again, joints popped, bones cracked and reset. Agony tore across every nerve-ending, electricity and lemon-juice, the smell of sulfur.
Cody stepped back from the controls, protecting his eyes with an arm as the Cabinet sparked and strobed. His clothes were covered in my blood from man-handling me into the Cabinet.
After an eternity, the pain subsided.
I stood in the Cabinet, panting, exhausted, but each breath of sweet air was painless. My mind though… my thoughts still hung about me like lead weights, pulling my mind into the past.
We stood atop the cliffs looking out to sea, feeling alone in the world. The moon hung gibbous in the sky, the night air was warm, but we huddled together anyway.
“I’ve been practicing,” I said.
“Oh, yes?” Rebecca asked, snuggling close. “Does that mean Main Street might survive your next battle with Lord Negativity?”
“I expect not. No, I’ve been practicing with my ice beam. Watch.” I held out a hand and focused. Tiny particles of ice coalesced mid-air, sparkling in the moonlight. I bit my lip, twisted my hand, and more ice formed, connecting, spiraling, folding in and around itself, forming a three-dimensional shape.
“Impressive,” she said.
“Wait, almost done.” This was the tricky bit. I needed to do more than create ice, I needed to play with the crystal structure just… so. In a blink, the ice transformed from a rime-frosted indistinct shape to an intricate, fragile, crystal-clear rose. I reached out, plucked it from the air and passed it to her.
“Wow. Thank you.”
She shifted, leaned forward, her lips seeking mine, but I put a hand on her shoulder. She retreated, confused.
I lifted my hands to my mask, pulled it up and over my head. “Hello. My name is Tom Hartwell.”
She smiled, achingly beautiful. “I know.”
I laughed, and we shared our first kiss with honesty, in the moonlight above a cave with an alien spaceship in it.
The perfect moment slipped from my mind, and the Cabinet closed in around me again.
Cody snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Stay with me, big guy. What’s wrong?”
“Can’t think. Can’t focus.”
“She really did a number on you, eh?”
My vision blurre
d, made his face melt and twist as he spoke, my grip on the moment loosening. My lucid moments were growing shorter. “Fix me, Cody,” I pleaded.
“Listen to me,” said Cody.
I hovered above the city, listening for the screams. The troop was staying together for now, which meant I could concentrate on keeping people out of their way. But it was a short-term solution at best. “Talk quickly,” I said. “The vampiric chimpanzees are on the move again, and if they stick to this course, they hit downtown in about twenty minutes.”
“Our lives will never be normal again, will they?” Cody asked.
“Probably not.” I could create an ice wall, block off a street here or there, slow them down, divert them, but if I wasn’t careful, they could just go over.
“Fighting the whole troop would be crazy,” Cody said. “Fast as you are, it only takes one monkey fang to find its mark, and we have a superpowered primate vampire. I don’t know if the Cabinet can bring you back from that or not, but I do know I have no idea how I would get you into the Cabinet.”
“So, what do we do?”
“If the vampire lore holds true, maybe all we need is to take down the Sire. The Vamprimate? Count Chimpula?”
“Not helping.”
“Right, sorry.” Cody composed himself. “Is there any obvious leader in the troop itself?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
“I figured. I think we need to backtrack, work out where the troop came from. My money says that’s where we find Vlad the Chimpaler.”
“Ouch.”
“You do know that letting the Cabinet work on your brain might hurt even more than bodywork?” Cody asked.
“Might not though, we don’t know.”
“For God’s sake, Tom, we don’t know anything about this. The person that comes out of the other end of this process might not even be human anymore. It could change your memories, your attitudes, you might not care about people.”
“Set the controls, Cody, or I will come out there and set them myself, and right now, I have no confidence in my ability to set them correctly.”
“But that’s the point, we don’t know what ‘correctly’ might look like. Even our best guess, you run the risk of losing your mind, your emotions. Think of Rebecca.”
I roared. “She’s already gone.”
Somebody, Save Me! Page 6