Subject 624

by Scott Ferrell

  “But it wasn’t steroids,” Carina said.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “It was something else,” she continued.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “But that’s around the time I noticed something weird going on with me.”

  “What?” Nathen asked.

  “This.” She grabbed a fork and held her left hand flat on the table. Her skin hardened and she jabbed the pointy metal hard into the back of her hand. She held it up to show the tines bent out at odd angles.

  I looked at her unmarked hand. As I stared at it, her skin softened, leaving it smooth and perfect.

  “That is so messed up,” Nathen said.

  I nodded in agreement.

  She tossed the fork aside. It clattered across the table. I stared at the metal bent in different directions.

  “What’s going on?” I muttered, not expecting an answer.

  “You ain’t seen the half of it, though,” Nathen said.

  “What do you mean,” Carina asked.

  He snatched the bent fork off the table and tossed it over his shoulder. It clattered on the fake tile floor. The sound boomed and echoed around the empty cafeteria. Carina and I winced.

  “What the hell?” Carina belatedly slapped her hands over her ears.

  I stared at Nathen as the sound died out.

  “What?” he asked. “You think my car has that good of a sound system? Please. That’s all me, son.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You’re not the only freak in the room, Catman,” he replied.

  I winced at the moniker I had briefly thought of giving myself.

  “Head count,” he went on. “Your girlfriend here can make her skin hard as a rock, yeah?”

  She nodded, picking at a spot on the table with a hardened fingernail.

  “You’re like Superman Junior, right?” he asked me.

  I laughed. “Not even close. I’m definitely not faster than a speeding bullet.” I grabbed my shirt collar and pulled it to the side to reveal the white scar on my shoulder that was the only remnant of being shot.

  “Wait.” Carina’s eyes widened as she looked at the mark. “You mean, that’s a…”

  “You’ve been shot?” Nathen asked.

  I nodded.

  “When?” Carina asked, still staring.

  “A couple nights ago.”

  “That looks old,” Nathen said.

  “I heal quick.”

  “Wait!” Nathen snapped his fingers. “The ball game when you hurt your shoulder!”

  “It was already hurt and healing.” I fiddled with an unopened fruit cup on the table. “I just re-aggravated it during the game.”

  “And they almost shot you again today,” Carina said.

  “A regular bullet magnet,” Nathen put in as he grabbed a granola bar. “I amplify sounds in case anybody was wonderin’.”

  “This isn’t real. This can’t be happening.” Carina tapped her hardened fingertips on the table. “What is even happening?”

  “No idea.” Nathen took a large bite of the bar.

  We sat in silence around the table, not looking at each other. My mind was still pretty blown from the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one with these weird powers. Well, I guess I knew from my encounters the past couple days, but my two best friends were different like me. Just in different ways. If that makes sense. I couldn’t tell what made sense anymore.

  Nathen’s chewing grew louder with each munch.

  “Will you stop that?” I snapped.

  “Sorry,” he said around a mouthful of granola bar. “Can’t stand quiet.” His chewing resumed at a normal decibel.

  “What are we going to do now?” I asked to avoid another silence.

  “We need to get to my dad’s work,” Carina said. She glanced up at me. “And yours, too.”

  “Aren’t you curious what’s going on? Why every kid in Salt Lake is either freaking out or turning into an X-Men reject?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t care. We’re just kids. What are we supposed to do? You’re not Harry, I’m not Hermione, and Nathen’s not Ron.”

  “Thank you!” Nathen said. “Wait, why can’t I be Harry?”

  “We can’t just run around until we stumble on some answer to what happened to us and everybody else out there. That’s not how the world works. We find our parents and we let the adults figure out what’s happening. We don’t be stupid.”

  “I mean, Hermione and Ron end up together, so that means you two and I’m Harry.”

  “Shut up, Ron!” Carina and I said at the same time.

  We all bust out laughing. The noise echoed around on the walls without Nathen’s help. It lasted for a while, but when it died down, an awkward silence settled over us for several long minutes.

  “I need to find my dad,” Carina said quietly.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Conor said. “We should go.”

  “How are we going to get there?” Nathen asked. “You forget my car is toast.”

  “Maybe we can walk,” Carina suggested.

  “Maybe you forgot the part where the city is crawling with creeps who are more than willing to lighten our load by removing our heads for us,” he said.

  “We could steal a car,” I said. “I’m sure the police are too busy to worry about a stolen car.”

  “Oh, and you know how to jack a car?” Nathen raised an eyebrow at me.

  “We can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

  “Just being a realist here.” Nathen shrugged.

  “Since when are you the logical one?” I asked.

  “Since both of you apparently lost the ability to think. It’s like both of your brains were replaced with Jell-O.” He wiggled a Jell-O cup at us.

  I propped my elbows on the table and rubbed my stinging eyes with the heels of my hands. Carina clicked her fingertips on the table with increasing force.

  Nathen was right, of course. We had to think before we acted, but what good was sitting around doing nothing?

  I watched as Carina’s rock hard nail dug a deeper hole with every tap.

  “Let’s go have a look around,” I suggested. “Maybe we can figure something out.”

  Carina stood and headed for the cafeteria exit without a word. Nathen and I followed.

  Walking through the deserted school halls was a surreal experience. The whole vibe was pretty creepy. Our footsteps echoed along the tiled corridor. The lockers lining the walls felt ominous like there was a kid in each one waiting to lose his mind and jump out at us.

  I caught up to Carina.

  “You okay?”

  “No,” she answered. “I can’t just stay here. I’ll go crazy.” She glanced sideways at me. “You two can stay here—”

  “No way,” I cut in.

  “I’ll be fine,” she went on. “They can’t hurt me.”

  I glanced at the hole in her shirt. “You don’t know that. What if there’s a limit?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, what if you can only take so much damage before your, er, skin gives out?”

  “It hasn’t yet,” she said.

  “And how many times have you been shot?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said again, ignoring the question.

  “You don’t know that,” I repeated. “I thought I was pretty invincible myself until a few nights ago when some kid drew a gun on me.”

  “I’m not like you. That bullet didn’t faze me. The only damage it did was to a semi-expensive shirt.”

  “There are others out there, Carina.”

  “Others? Who?”

  I reached out and grabbed her hand to stop her. “Others like us. Not just those…those kids from earlier. Kids with powers like us.”

  Nathen caught up to us. “Like what?”

  “Strength, like me. One could move stuff with his mind.” I pushed back the memory of pain that had heal
ed already. “And, there’s somebody else.”

  “Who?” Carina asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said with a shake of my head. “A guy. Not like the others. An adult. He’s the one who gave me these.” I touched the rapidly fading dark ring under my eye.

  “He won’t hurt me,” Carina insisted.

  I grabbed her arm again as she turned to walk away. “This isn’t a game,” I hissed. Blooded start to thud in my head.

  “Conor…” Nathen started.

  Carina’s eyes traveled down to my hand holding her upper arm, then back up to me. “You’re hurting me.”

  Before my quickly clouding head could comprehend that statement, I felt her arm harden under my hand. I let her go.

  “You two should stay here,” she said, her eyes locked onto mine. “It’s safer. I’ll be fine.” She turned to walk down the hall.

  “What the hell, dude?” Nathen whispered at me before following her. “No way, chica. I’m going with you.”

  I watched them walk down the hall for a moment before looking down at my still outstretched hand. I could still feel her arm in it, soft at first, but then turning as hard as rock. The clouds that had crept in from the outskirts of my vision retreated. My fuse was getting shorter and shorter. I needed to find Dad and get my family out of this stupid city before I ran out of fuse and exploded.

  6:56 p.m.

  “This can’t be good,” Nathen said.

  Understatement of the year.

  We stood at the doors we had broken into, staring out the window at a large clump of teens across the parking lot. They milled about, talking loudly and laughing. At times, they would point at the school and laugh even louder. Even at a distance, their faces looked wrong—elongated and distorted. I thought it had been a weird illusion from looking through the glass, but the strange looks didn’t change as they moved.

  When we had first spotted them, we made a quick circuit around the school to find we were more or less surrounded.

  “What are they waiting for?” I asked.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Nathen said. “Picking a time I guess.”

  “A time for what?” Carina asked.

  “To come get us.”

  I turned from the door and looked around for some kind of answer to the problem. All that greeted me was a hall full of lockers. I briefly considered hiding in lockers but dismissed the idea as desperate idiocy.

  “How many entrances are there?” I asked, staring at the lockers.

  “Five? Six?” Carina guessed.

  “Stand away from the door,” I said.

  “What are you—” she started.

  I crossed the hall and grabbed a combination lock on a locker. It gave way with one good pull. I tossed the lock away. It clicked down the hallway until it bumped against a trash can.

  “Dude,” Nathen said.

  I opened the locker and reached inside, grabbing the lip with both hands. I yanked hard. Bolts ripped out of the wall, releasing three lockers. I adjusted my grip and pulled again. The line of ten lockers came free from the wall with a loud metal clank. Students’ stuff fell out to the floor.

  “You’ve been hiding that from us for over a year?” Carina asked.

  I flashed a quick “sorry” smile and dragged the string of lockers toward the door. The metal scratched on the floor like a thousand forks on a chalkboard. Dislodging them from the wall had bent the lockers out of shape, so I bent and crumpled them against the door, wedging it the best I could. I stepped back to admire my handy work.

  Nathen stepped beside me. “That should hold them,” he said. “For a few minutes, anyways.”

  “It’s something.” I shrugged.

  I circled the school, ripping out lockers and jamming them against whatever doors I could find. It didn’t really solve all our problems. It was only a matter of time before they thought to get in the same way we had— through the windows—but it did give me a small sense of security. If they ever decided to just stop standing out there and come for us, I hoped it would slow them enough to be able to…well, whatever we could think to do next.

  When I came back to the main entrance, the sun was sinking somewhere off in the distance. I found Nathen and Carina watching outside, peeking through gaps in the crushed lockers. The clusters of kids hadn’t moved.

  We hunkered down against the crushed lockers. It was the best place to watch out of the front door and down the halls to the left and right. If they came for us, we could beat a hasty retreat through the library at our backs.

  Nathen volunteered to keep a watch out for a bit, so Carina and I found a spot to sit in the hall with our backs against the library doors. She pulled her legs to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. I sat with my legs crossed, watching Nathen tap out a rhythm on the destroyed lockers.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Carina murmured.

  “Something’s going on with me.” The words popped out of my mouth before I knew they were on their way.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m starting to lose myself.”

  She glanced at me with a quizzical look.

  “I get angry. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.” I sighed. “I don’t know how to explain it. Things are setting me off and the anger clouds my thinking until all I want to do is punch things. I’ve never been like that—not until recently.”

  A wry smile twitched at her lips. “Conor smash!” she said in a deep voice.

  “Ha. Ha,” I drawled.

  The smile faded from her face. “I saw it in your eyes,” she whispered. “It scared me.”

  My heart sank like the Titanic. “I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  She looked at me for a long moment before nodding her head once. “Good. Not that you could, though.”

  “I killed a kid the other day.” Again, with the words popping out all on their own.

  “What?” Her voice rose with surprise.

  “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t even angry when it happened.” I hesitated. “At least I don’t think I was.” I put my head in my hands. It felt like it weighed a ton. Carina put a hand on my arm and I blew out the breath I hadn’t realize I was holding. “It was the kid who shot me. I threw a bat at him. I didn’t mean to throw it so hard.”

  “It’s okay,” Carina said. “You were protecting yourself.”

  “Protecting myself?” I asked. A flash of anger ripped itself into my brain. “He was only fourteen,” I said through clenched teeth. I lifted my head, surprised to feel a tear slide down my cheek. “I don’t want to hurt anybody else.”

  Her grip tightened on my arm. “I’ll help you.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, but I will.”

  The confidence in her voice made me smile. The rolling thunder clouds hanging around in the back of my mind receded just a bit.

  “Heads up, lovebirds.”

  Carina and I looked at Nathen.

  “They’re coming.”

  Chapter 18

  7:54 p.m.

  The sun sank behind the mountains to the west. I couldn’t see it through the front doors, but the oncoming twilight shifted everything to a dull gray color. Somehow, that gave the advancing kids a more menacing appearance. I blinked a few times to be sure my eyes were not playing tricks on me. With their drooping faces and leering smiles, there was nothing human in the way they looked.

  Nathen sucked in a breath between his teeth.

  “What’s happening to them?” Carina asked.

  I shook my head, but she didn’t see it. She was too intent on staring out the window.

  “This isn’t good,” Nathen said.

  “This hasn’t been good since we left your house,” I replied.

  “That was your idea,” Carina added.

  “I told you two to stay.”

  “You’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for her.” Nathen jerk
ed his head towards Carina. “I love you, Bruh, but I wouldn’t take a bullet for you.”