“You did this…” I growled. “Not me…” My eyes burned white. I could feel it pouring from my left eye socket. Feel it enveloping my whole body. “Not me.”
“Jason…!” Sam cautioned, holding my arm with his hands. He couldn’t hold me back though, I was much stronger than him now.
“You don’t deserve this power,” I muttered, my voice guttural and broken. My breaths heavy and sporadic. “You don’t deserve it…”
“Jason, please!” Sam croaked. “If…If you take this f-from me… you’ll kill me.”
My vision went fully white. My whole body felt like it was engulfed in flame, radiating cosmic light. My hand burned his throat, and I refused to let him speak. It felt like the air around us was being sucked away from him as we rose up into the sky.
“I know.”
I punched at his face, his chest, his everything. I let go of him, still flying up into the air, screaming, and blasted him with massive beams of cosmic energy exploding from my hands, sending him further up. I’m not even sure where this new adrenaline came from, but I used it to its full effect.
We went farther and farther into the sky, and of what little I could still see, I noticed the golden light in his eyes fade away. He lost his grip on his powers. I didn’t. In fact, something new happened.
We floated high up in the clouds, and I stopped suddenly, freezing both he and I in the air. I swung at him, and as I did, he didn’t fall back down. There were massive gusts of wind with each blow, yet he was almost locked in place by a whirlwind of my own creation.
The clouds around us grew pitch black, and thunder cracked with every hit I landed on Sam. I reared my hand back into the sky, and propelled it down at him. When it landed, lighting carried from the clouds, through my arm, and into Sam’s face, decimating it.
Rain dropped like bullets, and felt hot as fire. It felt like all of the sky belonged to me. Like I controlled it’s every fine detail. Like the whole damned world was wrapped in my storm. And right now, I was bringing the sky to its knees.
I ceased for a moment, as I heard him try to utter out his last few words.
“Jason, I…I’m sorry,” he said.
I grabbed him by the sides of his head. With each hand placed, the thunder roared for me. Lighting spiraled around us strike after strike. Cosmic energy shot from my hands as lighting coursed down my arms. The wind propelled us further and further up, at higher and higher velocities, until it swiftly spun us upside down. Just as we made our descent, I snapped Sam’s neck, and sent him careening toward the ground in a corkscrew. Golden light escaped his falling body, and leapt back into mine.
There was maybe half a moment of stillness, and then, I screamed at the top of my lungs. My eye as open as it could be, and my arms stretched out to God. The sky around me seemed to explode with commotion and hatred and rage. It burned like hell, and it felt like the planet’s very atmosphere was about to collapse at the seams.
And then, suddenly, as my cry bled out, and my consciousness dissolved, it all just… stopped.
And then, I fell.
The people found me in the street, and for a long time, no one made a move; they just watched my body steaming. The crowd grew to upwards of five hundred before they acted.
The clouds had parted, and the storm had passed. The air was sticky, humid, but clear. The sun shone back down onto the city, just as it began to set. It glistened my wet, bloodied, bruised and burned body, as I lay unconscious in the city of Boston.
A handful of strangers– some cops, some civilians– cautiously picked me up, and carried me off the street. Those in the way cleared a path, and all silently watched as that small ensemble delivered my body to the nearest hospital.
When we got there, they immediately put me on a stretcher, and wheeled me to the emergency room. Any of the surgeons that weren’t already dealing with patients came to either assist or watch as the doctors all tried to figure out some way to save me.
Patients that weren’t badly injured and most of the crowd that had followed my voyage in tried to get inside to watch. Still, nobody knew how to heal me. Nobody knew what to do.
They worked tirelessly for at least a week straight, calling in professionals from around the world to try and understand what was going on with my body, inside and out, and if anything could be done. Nobody knew.
In time, a more or less recovered Bell had given the direction to place me in a hospital bed, and “just wait.” So they did, and they waited for almost two weeks before anything happened.
And then, I woke up.
17
Best Friends
It was odd, waking up in a hospital bed. Surrounded by monitors and wires and IV’s. I wasn’t used to it, compared to the usual ground, bathtub, or random friend’s bed.
There were also a number of cards, flowers, and balloons littered throughout the room. Some of them said “Jason,” but most of them said they were for “the Wanderer.” I glanced around the room slowly, still in tremendous pain, and I noticed: I had company.
Alannah sat curled up on my left side, asleep. She wasn’t hooked up to anything, but she was wrapped up more than when I had left her. My eye shot open wide, and I grabbed for her with my right arm.
I did manage to tap her shoulder briefly, but it hurt like all hell to move at all, especially so quickly. Still, it woke her up. She turned around and faced me, shocked to see me awake.
“Jason…?” she asked, still waking up. “Jason!” She flipped around and leapt on top of me. “Jason! You’re okay! Oh my God, thank God! I love you so much! Thank God you’re okay!” She was already crying, and I was just trying to hold in the groan of pain from her jumping on top of me.
“Yeah, I’m okay… I’m okay,” I muttered, holding her to me with my left arm. That still hurt too, but it was worth it. “Are you?”
“Am I!? Don’t worry about me!” Alannah said, smacking me on the chest. That made me moan a little. “Oh, sorry!” she apologized. Then she rubbed my chest curiously, and looked down at it. I wasn’t wearing a hospital gown, in fact all I had on were some white– I guess probably hospital– pants, so it was obvious what was missing. “Where’s your chestplate?”
“It’s… inside of me,” I answered. She shot her gaze up in confusion, unsure she had heard me correctly. “Yeah,” I confirmed. “Hard to explain.” She just nodded, not wanting to press me, I’m sure.
“Oh, the others are all outside! Is it okay if they come in?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’s uh… that’s fine,” I muttered, my mind wandering off, trying to replay what had gone on however long ago.
The whiteboard with my vitals said July 8, 2017 in the corner. Last time I was awake was June 24, so I guess it had been about two weeks. I remembered fighting, time pausing and playing, saving the helicopter, banging on Alannah’s chest, and then flying up into the air with Sam. It was hard to remember much after that, but it was coming to me in waves. I did know this much for certain though… Sam was dead.
Alannah walked back in a moment later with Alex, Julia, and Will, all cautiously following behind. I feigned a smile, and they all reciprocated solemnly. The tension in the air sliced through every balloon, flower, and card in the place. Despite all the color, the whole room seemed to flush grey in anguish.
“Hey guys,” I greeted.
“You okay man…?” Alex asked. “I…I mean two weeks is a new record, right?” I let out half a chuckle, and he grinned a little.
“I think so, yeah,” I agreed. “I’m alright. Down an eye, though.” I pointed to the side of my head, which I only now realized was wrapped in bandages. Sort of useless, the socket would heal itself enough to not rot or infect, but it was a nice sentiment.
Julia was clearly choked up, as was Will; he held her supportively by his side. I knew what they were thinking about. What they didn’t want, but needed to know all the same.
And I wanted to tell them, really. I just… I didn’t know how.
“Jason…
what uh…” Will attempted, looking away to try and compose himself. “What happened with, uh… you know?”
Everyone grew more grim than they already were, which was saying a lot. The whole place grew more and more enveloped in a world of misery and sorrow with every passing second. Every inevitable tick and tock that counted down to the hard truth we’d have to face together.
What happened to Sam?
Part of me was unsure I had it in me to tell them. How could I, after all? I killed their friend, my friend– my best friend– with my own two hands. Still, they had a right to know. They were his friends… and they were mine.
“Sam and I started fighting, and at one point we landed on a building. I called his suit back onto my own, and he ripped it off and sent it at me. Then he phased my chestplate into my chest, and stabbed my eye out with a shard of his own chestplate,” I said. They all looked mortified, but I had to keep going. “Then I blew up, in a kind of cosmic energy explosion… the building collapsed, the suit came back on through my skin, and I called out for him.”
“Yeah, that was the last anyone really saw of you two on camera,” Will said in hushed tone. “Where did you go…?” I gazed down at the bed, and tried to come up with a simple way to explain it.
“You remember how Sam could manipulate time, just a little bit?” I asked. They all nodded. “He found a way to maintain that much longer. Only a handful of minutes, but still, longer than Malek ever could,” I explained. “He didn’t want the public to see us fighting– he thought they were already rooting for me… I mean he lost his–!” I stopped myself, growing rampantly emotional thinking about it all. Without the adrenaline, it wasn’t as easy to stay as stoic as I was then.
They all gazed at me, heartbroken, and Alannah put my hand in hers, squeezing tight. We’d all known each other since we were kids. I don’t know why, but I realized in that moment. Dumb, stupid teenagers, who only ever had each other. We lived normal lives, good lives. And now one of us was gone.
I closed my eye, and took another deep breath.
“Imagine time works like a camera roll. Every instant of an instant is a frame– a single picture. We’d fight in a frame until he couldn’t hold it, and then he’d release. When he would, the air we’d cut through would slam back into place with a force. Then he’d pull us back in.”
“That would explain the sound of bombs going off all around the city over the course of a few minutes,” Alex said. “You only fought for minutes?”
“To you guys, I guess so. For us, it was almost an hour,” I said. “Every time Sam stopped time, it was draining him, but somehow– I guess from all the secret and isolated training he did– he could handle a lot more strain than usual… Eventually, we caught sight of uh…” I paused again, pointing over at Alannah. “We saw that– saw them– and uh… He…” I trailed off again.
My chin felt like it was about to shake right off of my face. Alannah masked her own with her hand, and immediately cried; I guess she didn’t really know what had happened, herself.
“Sam disintegrated the back half of the helicopter, and he tried to get rid of more, but… using that much power pushed him over the edge, I think… I lunged at him, and he basically passed out,” I continued, tears freely falling sporadically down the right side of my face. I could feel the bandaging around my left getting damp, as well. “I was totally drained of strength from fighting like we were– it felt like I was weighed down by megatons whenever I was locked in time– so I struggled to catch it, you know… And I-I did, and I landed as best I could on the roof of another building. I ripped Alannah out, and could barely hear her heartbeat, so…so I started doing compressions. And then…” I stopped, my jaw clenching up, and my gaze focusing out into nothingness. “And then he–”
“He died,” Alex finished my thought. I looked up at him; he was crying. They all were.
They knew what Alex meant, and they knew what I couldn’t bring myself to say. That, thinking Sam had killed my fiancee, I killed him, by whatever means I had to. Arguably worse.
“Yeah…” I barely got out, now almost falling once more into tears. I tried to hold strong for the rest of them, but it killed me inside.
They all sat there crying for a good few minutes, not saying a word. After all, what in God’s name could be said, by anyone there? We were all a part of a group– a family– that Sam and I were probably closest in, and I had just killed him.
They knew I had to, none of them would argue otherwise. Even if they hadn’t been there for every moment and conversation he and I had, they saw him that day, being broadcast to the world. They knew that Sam was gone long before I did anything to stop what he had become.
“Well…” Alex struggled to continue, staring down at the ground, with his hands placed firmly in his pockets. “We uh…We found him, a day or so later, and uh… We were going to wait on a funeral until you woke up, but his parents refused, so they had it last week. He’s buried in the graveyard, back home.”
“Most people said he didn’t deserve it, b-but… Bell helped us get it authorized, and done quietly,” Julia said between her sobs and heavy breaths.
“Oh… Okay…” I said quietly. We were silent again for a few minutes, and everyone slowly composed themselves.
“Jason, are you, you know, feeling better?” Will asked.
“I will, soon enough,” I said. “I think it’s just going to take longer than usual. I’ve never really been pushed that far before, even with Malek.”
“Well, when you are feeling better, do us a favor?” Alex asked. I looked at him curiously, he was still choked up. “Give us a call. Let’s all just, make time and…and get together, yeah?”
He put his hand on my shoulder, and I placed my own on top of it, giving him a light, reaffirming squeeze.
“Definitely,” I agreed, nodding my head. He nodded back, and slowly made his way out of the room, with all but Alannah following suit. Then it was just me and her again.
“Jason… I had no idea that you–” she said. “I just remember spinning out of control, and then waking up on the roof with Bell and Bentley–”
“How are they?” I asked, cutting in on her realization.
“They’re both okay. Bell’s walking with a cane, but other than that he’s good, and Bentley’s totally fine. They had pretty bad concussions, but they’re wearing off,” she assured me. Good, I don’t what I’d do if I lost either of them too. “They’ll turn up soon, I’m sure,” she said, burying herself back onto me, laying her head on my chest.
Having her there… it didn’t stop the pain, it didn’t dull it, but… Somehow, despite our shared silence and tears, I didn’t feel so alone, I guess. I felt like part of me, maybe the best part– whatever was left of it– was holding me up, because right then, she was by my side. My girl. My Alannah.
“So… are all of these for me?” I asked, gazing at all the cards and flowers and such again. She made a small attempt at a laugh, and nodded.
“They’re almost all from the people of Boston. Some are even from across the world,” she pointed, myself only just noticing the handful of cards written in other languages. “After they saw you save me and that other woman, and then fighting Sam, who they all found out pretty soon after was your best friend, and surrogate brother… A lot of opinions changed,” she explained.
“Really…?” I wondered aloud, still looking over all the gifts and messages.
Some were drawings, others notes, and most all of them just said “Thank you.”
“Remember when I told you, that day on the roof of my house, that you could be a hero to people? Something to inspire hope?” she recalled. I did. “I think you’re finally there.”
I didn’t really have the heart to tell her I disagreed. Sure, people may have started changing their minds about me, but after all of this…? I didn’t believe I had it in me to be anything anymore, let alone a hero.
Then again, after what I did to Sam… He thought we could be heroes. That we
could save people from people; be some kind of guiding light toward a better path. Maybe I needed to find that way now, for him.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I should be, or what I even could be. Right then, I just wanted to be Jason Rhodes, with his fiancee Alannah Daniels, sitting in a hospital bed, alone together.
We laid there for a few hours, just resting, and talking softly to one another about the past two weeks events. When the doctor came in, and saw I was awake, a number of strange things happened.
They got more doctors to come and look, they started peppering me with questions about my body, and my healing factor, and all about my abilities. Alannah only let that fly for about four questions before she barked them all out of the room. She was so easy to love sometimes, I have to admit.
There was even a crowd of patients and civilians starting to form outside the room who all wanted to come in and see me. I told Alannah it was fine, and in small handfuls they all entered, talking to me, thanking me– some of them had even left some of the cards and flowers. That probably took another hour or so before most everyone had come and gone, and Alannah ordered them all the leave again.
It was all so strange. It was like I was a celebrity or something. Not everyone who came in loved me, but they at least came in to give their thanks, which was still something.
Later that night, Bell and Bentley arrived, and Alannah went back to her house. Bell insisted that one of his men drive her there, to get her back faster, but she told him it was fine, she had her own car.
“So, you didn’t die,” Bentley said, sitting down in one of the chairs. Bell locked the hospital room door, and shut the blinds, for security’s sake. Seemed kind of useless now, but whatever.
“Not yet,” I replied, though it didn’t have the same zest my normal responses to Bentley came with. He noticed, I think, because he sulked a little. “I’m glad you two are okay.” I said.
“We feel the same,” Bell said, sitting at the foot of my bed, and placing a hand on my leg supportingly. He paused for a moment, and was, I assume, trying to decide how to go about finding out information.
The Wanderer (Book 2): Stranded Page 19