by LE Barbant
“I have, um, company.” While Rhett was a master with words, he inexplicably stumbled around Paul. He remembered doing this since middle school. There was something about his brother that threw him off his game. Paul saw through his bullshit.
His brother laughed. “I think everyone in the building knows you have company. She’s kind of a screamer.”
“Well, you know.”
“Do you like this one?” Paul asked.
Here we go, Rhett thought. “Yeah, I like her. I mean, enough.”
Paul shook his head.
“Stop judging me,” Rhett said. “You should try it. You might like it.”
“I just wish you knew that sex was more than this.”
“Than what?”
“A tool. It’s supposed to be a beautiful expression of love between two people.”
“How would you know? Did you read that someplace?” Rhett snorted. Rather than true debates, he easily fell into ad hominem attacks with his brother. “Don’t be so naïve. Sex is sex is sex. It’s like running. People do it for all kinds of reasons. That doesn’t make any of them wrong.”
“It’s exploitation.”
“We both got what we wanted out of it.” Rhett left the room for the kitchen. He could sway some of the most powerful people in the world with his words, but nothing he said could bend his brother. At least one argument a week ended with “whatever.”
Kate was spread out on the bed in mismatching bra and panties. She certainly hadn’t planned the escapade that morning before work—though Rhett had.
He set an opened bottle on the bedside table. “I brought you a water just in case.”
“Ah, that’s sweet. I mean, you did give me a workout. I think you broke my Fitbit.”
“I’m better than a Stairmaster.” Rhett kissed a mole on her shoulder. Her skin smelled like saffron and sweat. “So, tell me about our boss.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, I know a lot already. But there has to be more. Does he do anything weird?”
Kate looked for the answer on the ceiling. “He makes this grunting sound in his throat some times. You know, like it’s itchy in there, and he’s trying to scratch it.”
“I totally hear him do that all the time.” Paul manufactured a laugh. “What about, like, work stuff?”
“He’s demanding, but fair.”
Rhett feigned yawning. “That is so exciting.”
Kate gave a playful slap. “I probably shouldn’t talk about that.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to get you into trouble or anything…” Rhett paused. Silence spoke louder than words.
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just…”
Reticence was familiar. They all dodged at first. But Rhett could be persuasive. “Come on. You can trust me.”
“I know,” she said. “Ok, so, you did not hear this from me. Over the past six months, he’s been buying things that don’t make any sense. I mean, he’s the Mayor.”
“They all buy porn. Some stranger than others.”
She laughed and slapped him again. “No, not that. He keeps having these invoices go through for strange things.”
“Like what?”
“I shouldn’t tell you, he trusts me.”
Rhett leaned in and kissed her softly. His eyes inches away from hers, he asked, “Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me.”
“OK.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Chem collapsed on the couch across from Elijah.
Their house, though decrepit, had a spacious living room. A large mantle hung over the top of a defunct fireplace. Chem wondered if it could be restored into a working unit, offering something to its residents. But his work in the basement lab always trumped any projects in the rundown rental. Two thrift store sofas and a worn-down faux-leather recliner surrounded a beat-up coffee table. Several trash-picked lamps illuminated the room, completing the ensemble.
Elijah sat reading. He stared through his glasses, entranced by the pages. He didn’t stir.
Chem cleared his throat, louder than he had to. Elijah responded by turning a page.
“So, how’s it going?” Chem finally asked.
The historian looked up over the edge of his hardback, evidently annoyed by the interruption. “Huh?”
“Oh, good. You are here. I thought you were going to keep giving me the silent treatment,” Chem said with a smile. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about my side job. I didn’t want you to get involved.”
Elijah closed his book and set it off to the side. He ran his hands through his hair. “It’s fine. It’s not really my business anyway. But you could have told me. You know pretty much all my secrets, and it’s not like I’m completely sticking to the law either.”
Chem nodded in agreement. “It’s the life we’ve been thrust into. How has this semester been going? You making any progress?”
Elijah squeezed his eyes closed and then open again. He pulled the dark plastic frames from his face and set them on the end table. “Oh, right. It’s going great. I mean, for a while I thought I’d lost the touch. But this week was different than it’s been for a long time. I was really into it.”
Chem cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t know if I was burned out or just really tired of the classroom, but the last two years I wasn’t putting anything into my teaching—just running on autopilot, you know. But I have a renewed sense of purpose. I feel like I was made to teach again. The other day, it wasn’t like everybody was doing backflips to be there, but I was telling stories, drawing them in, and maybe even making a few people who really didn’t want to be there curious about history. It was kind of like my first days.”
“Elijah?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t really give a shit about your history class.” Something between a sneer and a smile developed on Chem’s face. “I was asking about your changes. You have some pretty powerful stuff swimming around in that blood of yours, and if you’re going to learn how to use it right—use it well—you have to learn how to focus and direct it.”
Elijah laughed. “Oh, that.” He crossed his legs and sat up straight. “Yeah…there’s been less progress on that front. Ever since February, the power has been strange. There’s a burning inside of me, it’s always around—but I’m not exactly sure how to source it completely. It’s sort of like somebody handed me a bicycle, and I’ve never ridden one before, or maybe have never even seen one before, and they told me to practice riding. So, I’m flying blind here. But I think it’s coming along.”
Chem nodded. “Good. I’m sure you’re changing the world with your lectures, Elijah, but I want to know that if something goes down, your other skills haven’t gotten rusty…pun intended.”
Elijah laughed. “I know what you mean. But I wish Willa was here.”
A rumble followed by a crash from the basement interrupted their conversation.
“Chem, come quick,” a gargling voice shouted.
He was the first to the door and Elijah was right behind him.
They pounded down the steps.
Chem slapped his hand on the support post and spun toward the sound. Fear for his experiments rushed over him. It’d taken months to rebuild what Rex had stolen, and he didn’t want to start from square one again. Although he had plenty of Elijah’s blood, the enhanced and matured compound sat in the basement, too unstable to move.
Rita’s ichthyic face struck Chem first. Her yellow rain jacket was smeared red. Blood polluted her pale, scaly arms.
A broken body was at the creature’s feet, the work boots and red flannel indicating who it was.
“What happened?”
Rita’s chest heaved. Chem was unsure if it was the weight of carrying Tim or pure fear. “The monster,” she said.
Elijah rushed over to Tim and rolled him over onto his back. His face was unrecognizable with his nose bent
and cheeks swollen. A gash laid open his face on the left side.
Blood painted everything.
“Hospital?” Elijah asked under his breath.
Chem quickly, but meticulously, cleared everything off of his lab desk table. “No. Not the hospital. I can handle this, I think. Help me get him up here.”
Elijah and Rita heaved Tim’s 200-pound frame onto the table. Chem gently placed the man’s arms by his side. Dropping his ear to Tim’s chest, he held his breath. “Breathing. He has a heartbeat. So that’s something.” He turned Elijah. “Go get my medical bag. It’s in my room.”
Chem unbuttoned the flannel and exposed Tim’s torso. Pressing on his rib cage, he felt every other rib crunch under the light touch of his fingertips. He moved on to Tim’s legs and applied pressure to the femurs and down through the tibias. The legs had been spared.
He moved back to Tim’s face. “Broken cheekbone. Maybe a fractured skull, but I’m not sure. He’s been in the shit before—could be an old wound.”
Finally, Chem attended to the shattered nose. “Sorry, buddy,” Chem said, holding the nose in one hand. He yanked it to the left. Cartilage crunched in his palm.
Tim’s eyes flew open.
“Monster…metal…fuck.” Tim spat blood and then passed back into unconsciousness.
Elijah returned with the bag and was standing by Chem’s side as the chemist wiped red from his face.
“Metal monster?” Chem raised his eyebrows.
“Don’t look at me,” Elijah said. “I was upstairs getting my geek on. What about you?”
Chem didn’t answer. He turned back to Tim’s broken form. “He sure got the shit kicked out of him. But I think he’s stable. I’ll clean him up, tape his ribs, and give him something for the pain.”
****
Chem and Elijah eased Tim into Elijah’s bed. They stripped off his boots and jeans, but left the bloody flannel on, afraid removing it would cause too much pain. Returning to the living room, the men found Rita standing in the corner with the lights off.
Elijah reached for the switch.
“No. Please,” she said.
Chem could barely make out Rita’s black eyes, but he could feel them pleading with him.
Elijah and Chem eased onto the couch, exhausted from the night’s events.
“What the hell happened out there?” Elijah asked.
Elijah didn’t know Rita, but he had no reason to distrust her. Chem, on the other hand, had ample reason for doubt. He thought of Tim’s broken body, and his first thought was that this was an act of retribution. But if that were the case, she wouldn’t have brought him back to their house. Still, he wondered how much bad blood was left from earlier this summer.
“It was that thing,” she answered. “I got there just in time. It was hitting him over and over and over again.”
“You guys rolling together?” Chem asked. “I thought you hated Tim.”
“No…I was…I could smell him.” She turned her head, looking toward the kitchen. Chem was unsure if it was a sign of guilt or shame.
“What could take on someone as tough as Tim?” Elijah asked.
The two men stared at each other.
Chem knew that the same vision of Brooke Alarawn passed through their minds.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Rays from the rising sun seeped through the living room window. It blended with the light of the incandescent bulbs, casting a hazy glow in the room. Sleep eluded the historian, but his eyes were closed as he leaned back in the recliner.
Rita crouched on the opposite side of the room. At some point during the long night, she’d slid down the wall and sat with her heels against her butt. She hadn’t moved from that position since they settled Tim in Elijah’s bed. Though mostly silent, a slight gurgle occasionally arose from her still body.
Elijah kept his eyes sealed because he didn’t want to look at her grotesque humanoid form, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep from staring. He tried to empathize with the creature sleeping across from him but, despite his own changes, the chasm was too great. In ways, the historian felt guilty that his transformations were few and far between. With his training, someday he’d be able to control it, call on it only when needed. His life wasn’t normal but by all appearances he maintained his humanity.
Rita wasn’t so lucky.
Her story remained, for the most part, a mystery. She didn’t talk much, and he hesitated to ask questions, fearful of alienating her with his curiosity. He had heard that she and Tim had a couple of run-ins before Chem found a way to broker a peace. If she could hold her own against the ex-mercenary, then Elijah assumed she knew how to handle herself in a fight.
Imagining the two of them duking it out made him wonder for the hundredth time who or what could have taken the warrior down.
“His breathing is getting worse. I can hear fluid in his lungs,” Chem said as he entered the living room. The chemist looked like he had been awake for a week. His normally sunken eyes sat deeper in his skull, bags heavy underneath. “He’s stable though. And if there’s one thing I know about Tim, he’s a fighter. He’s gonna make it through just fine.”
Although he had known Chem for such a short amount of time, Elijah felt closer to the scientist than to anyone back in Boston—their bond formed in the heat of disaster. Elijah was grateful for all that the scientist had done. But if Elijah were honest with himself, he’d admit that, deep down, he still didn’t trust the man. Chem had underhandedly developed a serum from Elijah’s blood. And the historian couldn’t help but feel as if he’d been used, or at least conveniently kept in the dark. He wondered what else the chemist had kept from him.
“We should take him to the emergency room,” Elijah said. “You don’t know what’s gonna happen, Chem. What if one of those dislodged ribs pierces a lung or stabs his heart or something.”
“Stabs his heart?” Chem laughed. “Stick to history, mate. I was trained to do this, you know. Tim will be fine. Not to mention, if we took him to the emergency room, they’ll have a few questions for him—and us.”
“We tell the truth,” Elijah said. “Selectively. But the truth.” The historian shrugged. “He got jumped. That’s really what happened.” He paused. “Or do you want to take the chance that he actually dies?”
Chem landed his feet on the coffee table, and crossed them at the ankles. “Listen, Elijah, if somebody asks about the history of the cork industry in Northeast Ohio, I’ll keep my mouth shut. That’s your area. We’re all specialists here, right?” Chem watched Elijah shrug. “This is my area. I know what I’m doing, I’ve done it for years. You’re just gonna need to trust me.”
“Trust the guy who got thrown out of med school?” Elijah regretted the words even as they passed his lips.
Chem’s eyes stared at the floor. “Screw you, man. I saved your life, and now you’re worried about my credentials. You weren’t asking about the Hippocratic Oath when you were in Tim’s situation, were you? But now, all of a sudden, you want to get all high and mighty on me. And trust? How do we know that wasn’t you out there? A big metal monster with inhuman strength? That sounds familiar.”
“Don’t be an idiot. I was here the whole time with you. Not to mention, I’m not the only monster that has shown up in Pittsburgh. How do we know that that thing out there isn’t the product of one of your experiments? Trust you? You stole my blood, distorted it, and then allowed it to get stolen. Not to mention what happened to…” Elijah stammered, leaving the thought unsaid.
The tension in the room could be cut with a knife. Rita watch the two argue, her head moving back and forth as if in the front row of the U.S. Open. Elijah knew the words that he volleyed at Chem were hurtful, but he didn’t care.
“I said I was sorry,” Chem said under his breath.
“What?”
“I said I was sorry,” Chem said again. “We can’t do this, you and me. If you’re never going to let that go…I made a mistake. But I didn’t know you then. I didn’
t betray you, I did what was necessary for science, for progress. Brooke made her own choice that night. I didn’t give anything to her. She took what she wanted, but it wasn’t ready.”
A tempest battled in Elijah’s gut—the appropriate emotion just out of reach. Anger, guilt, shame—any of them could fit the situation. He took a breath and tried to defuse the strain. “You’re right. Brooke’s death was on her. But if Tim dies because we’re afraid to accept the consequences, then who’s to blame? What if there’s internal bleeding or something?”
Chem closed his eyes and nodded. “Could be. I’ll keep checking his vitals. But there are signs, you know, just like the evidence that you hunt for when you research. Each of us have ways of seeing—methodologies. Trust that I know my way, just like I trust you.”
Elijah pushed on the arms of the chair and stood. He paced to the opposite side of the room. Rita’s gaze burned the back of his head. “I don’t know what’s happening out there, but we need to do something.”
Chem’s face went sullen. “I know.”
Rita lifted herself up into a standing position. Her raincoat looked even more absurd in the morning light. “You’re wrong.”
“What?” Elijah said, taken aback by Rita’s sudden involvement.
“Life’s full of shit. Why make it our problem? You’re not running off to battle genocide somewhere in Africa or war in the Middle East. How is this any different? We didn’t do this, didn’t start it, and we don’t need to end it.”
“We’ve been drawn in,” Elijah said. “How can’t you see that? The evidence is lying in my bed right now.”
“Yeah,” Chem said. “We’re implicated. Tim’s our friend. We can’t take this lying down.”
A low growl emerged from the woman. She lifted her hood and moved toward the door. “Tim’s no friend of mine. And he implicated himself when he decided to run around playing hero. If you follow in his footsteps you’re going to find yourself in the same place…or worse.”
****
Homestead was just waking up as Elijah hopped the last step and landed on the empty street of his new home. He wasn’t certain whether or not working out would have any significant impact on his metal form. But the doughy historian had woken up recommitted to developing his physique. He needed to become a better version of himself, even if it had no effect on the monster inside of him. At the very least, it would give him a better chance to fight or run in case his powers failed him. Fitness was something he always wanted, just not enough to ever do anything about it. The imminent fear of death was a more effective motivation. But it wouldn’t be easy overcoming the long-term deterioration his body had been experiencing for the better part of a decade.