Supervillainess (Part One)

by Lizzy Ford

  ***

  Hours later, he ended his double shift with a headache of epic proportions and the urge to sleep for two days or more.

  The first thing he did after returning home from the gym, close to midnight, was drop onto his bed and lie there until his tired brain had a chance to catch up with him. Wriggling out of the straps of his backpack, he spotted the cell phone he had left on his pillow. He had seen two more calendar alerts earlier this morning and didn’t remember what they were for. Whatever he had missed today, he hoped it wasn’t important.

  It was not until Kimber forced himself up, plugged in his phone and went to the bathroom for a quick shower that he recalled last night. The sight of blood jarred him into awareness for the first time since his failed attempt to discuss Keladry Savage with his supervisor.

  He walked through the apartment to the guest bedroom, dreading what he was certain to find. With his luck lately, the woman would be dead, and he would be stuck explaining to the police why he had a bloody bathroom and dead criminal in his house.

  Upon reaching the doorway of the guest bedroom, he paused.

  Keladry Savage was alive, or had been earlier today. She was sprawled in the middle of the floor, passed out, wearing one of his black t-shirts and a pair of his boxers. And … a makeshift mask. She had ripped one of his t-shirts and tied it over her head.

  A box of band-aids was clutched in one of her hands and a butcher knife in the other. The blinds of the window were closed and splattered with blood, as if she touched one of her wounds before reaching up to close them. A trail of blood led from the window to one of the boxes, which she had apparently pried open to find clothing before staggering towards the bathroom for band-aids and the knife he had used to cut away her clothing. She had returned and collapsed in the middle of the guest bedroom.

  That she was able to get out of bed surprised him, and he tried to piece together what she had been trying to do. Blinds, mask, butcher knife, band-aids.

  “I have no idea what this is,” Kimber said. He didn’t have the brainpower to figure it out and crossed to her. Plucking the contents of her hands free, he placed the items on one of the boxes and picked her up.

  Setting her back on the futon mattress, he tugged her mask off. He donned latex gloves and checked her wounds once quickly and then a second time.

  And a third.

  Then a fourth.

  This isn’t possible. Sitting on another box, he stared at her, registering her features for the first time while he was deep in thought.

  She was in her early twenties with straight, dark hair, a pretty face and a toned body. Around five and a half feet tall, she was a full foot shorter than him and likely a hundred pounds slimmer. He inherited his linebacker stature from his father, who had been a pro football player in his time before the accident that left him a quadriplegic.

  Keladry was asleep. Some color had returned to her pale features today – but it was the absence of color Kimber noticed more. The bruises on her ribs were gone, as were most of the other contusions on her body. The right forearm, whose damage Kimber feared even a plastic surgeon couldn’t correct, had healed to the point the torn muscle tissue had regrown and her skin was starting to repair itself. Her bullet wounds remained open, as did the deepest of the stab wounds.

  He expected those to remain as they were for a few days, but the rest of her body?

  How was this woman alive at all?

  “I’m losing it.” While true, he hadn’t slept much in the past week, he was usually much better at assessing a person’s condition. Was he so tired he saw more damage than was actually there? Was his head that messed up from lack of sleep?

  What if his faulty judgment got him into trouble again, gave his boss reason to look more thoroughly into why he was fired in Chicago? What if he endangered the lives of the children he triaged and treated today with incorrect prognoses?

  With a shake of his head, Kimber stood and went to the bathroom to begin the arduous task of cleaning it. He could not doubt himself, not when his ability as a physician was all he had anymore. He feared what would happen if he lost this job, whether he’d mentally shatter again.

  An hour later, he sat with a glass of wine next to a microwaved meal at the card table where he ate when he wasn’t running out the door.

  Leaving the news on, in case they mentioned his patient again, he paced back to the doorway of the guest bedroom and rubbed the back of his head. Keladry Savage was unconscious, completely vulnerable to any decision he made. In a hospital, this type of dependency was routine. The most gratifying part of his job was witnessing someone in a similar state recover and leave, healthy and alive. The people he worked with felt the same – they wanted to help others, or they wouldn’t be in such a grueling field of employment.

  Could helping someone who needed it ever really be bad, even if the hospital’s largest donor didn’t want them to do it? Would his coworkers draw the line here, at the feet of Keladry Savage, as his supervisor had?

  “This is the only hospital that would hire me. Don’t ruin that,” he whispered to the sleeping woman before leaving the doorway.

  Whether he was too tired to see her wounds well last night, or she was a healing miracle, he had to do his best to keep her hydrated and healing. He warmed up the contents of a can of soup and returned to the guest room. Propping her up, Kimber settled on a box beside the futon and spooned soup into her mouth.

  Just as he finished and sat back, bleary eyed and exhausted, the woman stirred.

  Keladry Savage’s eyelashes fluttered open. She gazed at the ceiling for a moment before looking at him with large, dark eyes.

  “Hi. I’m Kimber. Well, Doctor Kimber –” he started.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  He blinked. Concerned about her more serious wounds, he hadn’t thought to double-check her ears after his initial assessment. Kimber reached for the first aid kit tucked under the futon.

  “Did you drug me?” Keladry demanded quietly.

  He straightened. “I gave you morphine.” Realizing she wasn’t going to understand him, he pulled the bottle of pills from the first aid kit and held them up.

  “That’s why I can’t hear,” she said with a frown.

  Kimber pulled an otoscope free from his kit and fitted it with a disposable tip. He gripped her ear and slid the instrument into it, flipping on the light to see her eardrum.

  The woman batted his hand away. “There’s nothing wrong with my ears,” she snapped.

  He leaned back, studying her pupils. She showed no signs of fever, and her pupils were the correct size, indicating the morphine he’d given her twenty hours ago had worn off. “So you can or can’t hear?” he asked, lowering the instrument.

  “Yes.” She shifted away from him as far as possible and reached up to touch her face. “Where’s my mask?”

  Raising an eyebrow, Kimber lifted the t-shirt she’d put eyeholes in from its spot on the floor. She reached for it, but he held it away. “Why don’t you keep it off for now?” he suggested, beginning to wonder about the state of her mental health. “Until you’re healed. You shouldn’t have anything restrictive anywhere on your body.”

  She considered him, as if the decision were one of the more difficult ones in life, before relenting. “Very well. You’ve already seen my face.”

  “Guess you’ll have to kill me now, right?” he teased.

  “We’ll see how it goes. Did my father send you?”

  “No.”

  She scoured her surroundings critically. “What is this? A safe house? Prison? Am I under arrest?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s my apartment.”

  “Really?” She raised an eyebrow. “This shit hole is where you live?”

  “Shit hole?” he repeated. “Do you have any idea what rent is in the city? This is nice compared to what my other options were.”

  “I’ve never been somewhere where blood on the floor actually improves the carpet,” s
he said.

  Not expecting her sarcasm, Kimber’s tired mind was too surprised for him to form a response. The carpet was old and smelled musty when it rained, but he hadn’t cared when he moved in and didn’t care now.

  At least I know she can hear me. He caught sight of the blood seeping from her abdomen onto her blanket. While he didn’t know how to take her frankness, he easily slid into doctor mode. “You need to be still. You’re healing, and I don’t have a spare set of bedding.”

  Keladry glanced down then at him, brow furrowed. “Who are you?”

  “Kimber Wellington, ER physician at Sand City General.”

  “So I’m a hostage,” she said.

  “Uh, no.” Kimber said. “I found you in the alley. No one else would help you so I did.”

  “Right. You’re something even worse than my captor.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re an alleged do-gooder.”

  “No alleged about it.”

  “There’s no such thing, Kimber Wellington from Sand City General.”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?” he retorted.

  “If that’s what you call this,” she snapped back. “I’ve seen torture chambers with more amenities.”

  Did she just say what I think she said? Kimber opened his mouth to respond when his patient swung her legs over the edge of the bed and tried to stand.

  “Hold on!” he exclaimed and rose. “You can’t be doing that. You have a puncture in your -”

  “I’m fine.” But her voice was faint, and she wobbled the second her feet touched the ground.

  Kimber caught her as her legs gave out, and he lowered her back to the futon. “You’re not fine,” he said firmly. “You need to rest.”

  She sighed and pushed him away.

  He released her. “Okay? Doctor’s orders.”

  Keladry squinted at him, as if trying to see through him. “No more drugs, Doc,” she replied.

  “You don’t move, and I won’t drug you. Deal?” Kimber sat down as well, uncertain what to expect from his patient.

  “All right,” she said reluctantly. By the lines of pain beneath her eyes, her attempt to stand had caused some level of pain.

  “What hurts?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she muttered.

  “Come on. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”

  “You’re the doctor! You figure it out!”

  Kimber drew a steadying breath. The past month was a blur of double shifts, punctuated by a few hours here and there to rest. For the sake of his patient, he swallowed his frustration when all he really wanted to do was curl up in his bed and sleep.

  He glanced up, feeling Keladry’s intent gaze.

  “Where’s your accent from?” she asked.

  “Chicago.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A year.”

  “Did you call my father?” she pressed.

  “No.”

  “Police?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “So no one knows I’m here.”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Keladry studied him hard again, as if suspecting he was lying to her. Finally, she allowed her head to fall back onto the pillow.

  “We good?” Kimber asked. “Or would you like to interrogate me further?”

  “Tomorrow, Doc. I’m pretty sure you won’t kill me tonight, though I can’t promise the same for you after I’m healed.”

  “We’ll call it a draw for now.” He had never met anyone quite like her. Keladry was beautiful, candid, brutally direct – and mentally unstable. “Do you need anything?” he asked.

  “Cheeseburger.”

  “Your body can’t handle that right now,” he replied.

  “Then put it in a blender,” she returned.

  “I’m a vegetarian. I don’t have meat in the house.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “This is hell, isn’t it?”

  A laugh burst from his throat before he was able to stop it. “You’re welcome for saving you.” At his limit with her after his week, Kimber rose. “I’ll bring you soup in the morning. You have three bottles of water on the nightstand. Get some rest.”

  “Villains are nocturnal, Doc. Does hell have books, or am I supposed to lie here and stare at the ceiling all night?”

  Keladry Savage was kind of an asshole, he decided. Kimber ignored her and flipped off the light to her room. Closing her door, he heard her muttering beneath her breath.

  As tired as he was, Kimber found himself too curious after the interaction to lie down quite yet. He retrieved his laptop from the living room and returned to his room. He began searching for information on Keladry Savage.

  To his surprise, she had her own wiki-page.

  Supervillain in training, fraternal twin to Jermaine Savage and daughter of General William Savage. The Savage family’s territory is limited to Sand City. Keladry Savage is said to run the eastern part of the town and her brother the western. Little is known about her unique superpower, likely inherited from her mother rather than her father, but Keladry is said to be among the most tenacious villains to cross.

  Superpower?

  Kimber read the first paragraph again and then rubbed his eyes. “Maybe I do need a weekend off,” he decided. He stretched for his charging phone and gazed at the date. Tomorrow was Saturday, his first day off in a month, and the day his stepmother and father had chosen to visit. “Here I thought life was already complicated.”

  His headache worsened at the idea of entertaining anyone. He hadn’t seen his friends or family since leaving Chicago and dreaded the initial meeting with anyone from his past life.

  Closing the laptop, he left it on the pillow beside his and lay down to sleep.