The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  He remembered Delahaye saying something similar, in a rare moment of candour back at the SCS, something about riding off across the wild frontier of physics and into a strange new world. Well, he’d certainly managed to do that.

  He said, “You’re doing okay, Prof. I wouldn’t still be here if it wasn’t for you and Art and Dom and the others. There wouldn’t be any point in staying.” He saw her glance at the door at the mention of Flynn’s name. Maybe she was expecting Flynn to turn up to see him off, as he had on the previous occasions he had crossed into the Manifold. But the door stayed closed.

  “Ah well,” he said, and he stepped away.

  THE HYPOTHESIS THAT the structures in the Manifold somehow represented the people who had been in the control room on the day of the accident had never been tested, but here they were, eight new structures, Lieutenant Bowman and her squad of would-be superheroes. Alex did it by the book, counting them twice, assessing them as closely as he dared, conscious of Professor Sierpińska’s fears about waking them up. There was no way to identify them as individuals—they were just objects, insofar as anything here was an object—but they had been people, and it made Alex angry to see them here. There was still no coherent theory about how he had avoided the same fate, and until there was one it seemed criminally reckless to try to repeat the experiment. He should, he thought, have sent Senator Pulver here instead of New Zealand. See if he liked being an all-American superhero.

  “Can we retrieve them?” Flynn asked when Alex had returned to the Situation Room.

  The question raised a Mexican wave of sharply indrawn breath from the techs around the table. “It’s dangerous to even look at them, Arthur,” said Professor Sierpińska. “I was telling Alex this earlier. At the moment they’re not dead or alive; they don’t even exist as we understand it. If we drop them into a rest state it could be one in which they are not alive.”

  “The president wants them back,” Flynn said.

  “The president can go and get them,” Alex said. This earned him a sharp glance from Flynn, but he was past caring.

  There was a knock on the door and one of Flynn’s staffers came in. He bent down and whispered in Flynn’s ear, handed him a folded slip of paper, and left again. Flynn unfolded the piece of paper, read it, and looked around the table.

  “He’s in Sioux Crossing,” he said. “The other one.”

  “When?” said Dom.

  “He’s still there. At the SCS. Stetson and her team have pulled out; they say the place is full of static electricity.”

  There was a silence, around the table. For a moment, nobody seemed to know what to do. Alex said, “I’ll go.”

  “No, Alex,” said Flynn.

  “By the time you get there, he’ll be gone again,” Alex told him, standing up.

  “No,” Flynn said, but Alex was already gone.

  IT WAS LATE afternoon in Rosewater County, the great spiral cloud twirling up into a low dark overcast that promised rain. Alex looked at the building. Blue sparks were running down the walls like electrical raindrops. He felt the hairs all over his body stand up. In the distance, beyond the fence, he saw figures moving around, and a little further away what looked very much like a tank.

  There was the sound of breaking from around the corner of the building, and he walked towards it. Rounding the corner, he saw the moke garage, and hanging in the air beside it… well…

  He’d been expecting someone like himself, a person with weird new abilities, but the thing beside the garage was not remotely like that. It looked like part of a comic strip illustration of a man blowing up. Here he was in Frame One, a solid, whole human being. Here he was, at the end of the strip, nothing more than a widely distributed scattering of bone and meat and other tissue. And here he was, three or four frames in, the explosion just getting going, his body flying apart, impossibly caught in the middle of detonating. His body looked repugnant and absurd all at the same time, an animated human-shaped cloud of meat and blood, about three times normal size.

  Alex took one step towards him. Then another. The air smelled of electricity and burnt sugar. Part of the garage had been demolished, lying on the ground in smouldering fragments. Alex took another step.

  “Hello,” he said.

  The figure—the djinn—made no sign of having heard him. It changed position slightly, the whole exploding cloud moving as one, and another part of the garage puffed smoke and flame and collapsed.

  Alex took another step, and it crossed his mind that this was possibly the bravest thing he had ever done. It might actually be the last thing he ever did. He said, “Hello,” again, and this time the disgusting meat sculpture turned and looked at him.

  “Alex,” it said. “Dude.”

  Oh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  “What happened?” the voice asked. It issued from somewhere other than his exploding larynx. It sounded as if it was coming from an enormous distance.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  “Larry?”

  “What happened? I feel weird.”

  Alex felt himself take a step back, prepare to drop back into the Manifold. He said, “There was an accident.”

  “I feel weird,” Larry said again. “Like…” He seemed to raise a hand and look at it. “Wow, that’s horrible,” he said. “Why don’t you look like this?”

  “I don’t know. Larry, you’ve got to stay calm and stop breaking stuff.”

  The cloud of flying meat seemed to tilt its head to one side. “Why?”

  Alex took another step back. “We don’t know what happened, but you’ve been hurt and you need help.”

  The exploding body was silent a while. “It doesn’t feel as if I need help,” Larry said. “It feels pretty good, actually. Weird, but good.” It was impossible to read the expression on what passed for his face, but he made a noise that might, if one were psychotic enough, be mistaken for a laugh. “It’s like something from a Marvel comic. You think I’ve become a superhero?” When Alex didn’t answer, he said, “You’d think I’d get x-ray vision or something, not… this.”

  Alex felt something moving around him, a sensation of billions of tiny teeth in an invisible swarm. “What are you doing?”

  The cloud of body parts suddenly twitched and drew closer together into a more obviously human shape. “Yeah,” Larry said. “That’s better. How long has it been, Alex?”

  “Quite a while,” Alex said, standing very still. “Almost two years.” It occurred to him to ask why Larry had tried to kill him, but it seemed the very last thing he wanted to remind him of.

  “That is quite a while.” He pulled himself a little closer together. “You look well.”

  Alex had an extremely unpleasant feeling of being examined at some very deep level. “I’m doing okay.”

  “Better than okay, I’d say.” He looked around him. “Do you think this is what it feels like to be God?”

  Alex felt the storm of teeth try to take him apart. He did the only thing he could think of. He stepped forward, plunged his hands into the centre of the exploding man, and pulled. Larry was too surprised to resist, and they both stepped into the Manifold.

  He found himself standing in that screaming notlight beside a structure which had once been Larry Day. It seemed perfectly inert, to the extent that anything here was inert. That awful sensation of disassembly had stopped. He looked around him, trying to work out what to do next.

  “JESUS,” DOM SAID when he finished his debrief. Flynn sat looking stonily at him. Professor Sierpińska regarded him with an expression he hoped was not pity. “It can’t be that easy, can it?”

  “It could be the shock of being returned to the Manifold forced him to aestivate like the others,” said Professor Sierpińska.

  Flynn looked down at his notes and said, “You should have waited for backup.”

  “He’d have killed anyone else,” Alex said. “He almost killed me.” He remembered that sensation of disassembly, and shuddered.

  Flynn grunted
. “I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do now? Can we kill him while he’s in this inert state?”

  “I don’t think I can sanction that,” the Professor said. “Anything Alex did to him would almost certainly collapse him into a rest state. It could conceivably make things worse.”

  “I think we’re all in agreement that he’s probably the worst possible person to get bitten by the radioactive spider,” Dom put in.

  “I don’t know if I could kill him, over there,” said Alex. Everyone looked at him. “The rules are different; it’s hard to explain.”

  “He could be in that state indefinitely,” the Professor said.

  “But you can’t guarantee that,” said Flynn.

  “I can’t guarantee anything, Arthur,” she said. “We’re dealing with a physics we still don’t understand. If it’s a physics at all.”

  “Could you kill him over here?” Flynn asked Alex.

  “I don’t know. I took him by surprise.” I took myselfby surprise. “He felt strong, and he’s very smart.”

  Flynn wrote something on the notepad in front of him, and he sat back and looked at them. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know about you, but the prospect of a murderer with the powers of a god scares the living shit out of me. We can’t just sit here and wait for something to happen.”

  But that, of course, was what they wound up doing.

  The Return

  THE CLOUD LOOKED eerie and frightening, hanging above the SCS, but it was just an edge effect, harmless water vapour in the atmosphere gathered by what was going on below. The really scary stuff at Point Zero was invisible.

  The young lieutenant sitting across from Alex looked tired and ill. They burned out quickly here on the Perimeter—the constant stress of keeping things from getting through the fence, the constant terror of what they would have to do if something did. A typical tour out here lasted less than six months, then they were rotated back to their units and replacements were brought in. Alex sometimes wondered why they were bothering to keep it secret; if they waited long enough the entire US Marine Corps would have spent time here.

  He leaned forward and raised his voice over the sound of the engines and said to the lieutenant, “How old are you, son?”

  The lieutenant just looked blankly at him. Beside him, Alex saw Former Airman Fenwick roll his eyes.

  “Just trying to make conversation,” he said, sitting back. The lieutenant didn’t respond. He didn’t know who Alex was—or rather, he had been told he was a specialist, come to perform routine maintenance on the sensors installed all over the site. There was no way to tell whether he believed that or not, or if he even cared. He was trying to maintain a veneer of professionalism, but when he thought nobody was looking he kept glancing at the windows. He wanted to look out, to check on his responsibilities on the ground. Was the site still there? Was there a panic? Had a coyote got through?

  It had been a coyote last time. At least, that was the general consensus of opinion—it was hard to be certain from the remains. The Board of Inquiry had found that the breach was due to gross negligence on the part of the officer in command. The officer in command, a colonel Alex had met a couple of times and rather liked, had saved Uncle Sam the cost of a court martial by dying, along with seventeen of his men, bringing down the thing the coyote had become. You could tell, just by looking at the lieutenant, that he had terrible nightmares.

  The animals had been unexpected, although there were reports going all the way back to the very early days of the emergency. The control room had been sealed off, but some edge effect occasionally affected small mammals outside. Alex had been shown photographs of a bobcat that looked like something dreamed up by HP Lovecraft. Nobody knew why it happened, or why it didn’t happen to plants and birds and insects. There was nothing they could do to stop it; the best they could do was carry out periodic culls of wildlife on the old SCS campus, and try to stop anything getting out.

  The Black Hawk made another wide looping turn over Sioux Crossing, waiting for permission to land. Looking out, Alex thought he saw East Walden Lane pass by below, but it was hard to tell, everything was so overgrown. The town itself, a little further away, looked deserted. The government had finally lost patience with the Montana militia, and had handled the situation with a typically heavy foot. The militia were gone now, but there had been casualties.

  THE PILOT EVENTUALLY got permission to make final approach and they landed at Camp Batavia. The place had grown, over the years, from a temporary fortress of prefabricated modules to a full-scale military camp complete with a PX and a cinema, offices and barracks and mess halls and control rooms and armouries and garages. If you looked carefully, you could still spot, from the air, the original buildings of Rosewater High, repurposed into barracks and workshops. The lieutenant jumped down as soon as the door was opened, and the last Alex saw of him was his back as he strode away from them towards the control centre.

  “Talkative fucker,” Former Airman Fenwick commented, hopping down from the helicopter beside him.

  Alex sighed. A figure in fatigues was coming towards them from the control centre. The figure passed the lieutenant, and they snapped salutes at each other without breaking step.

  “Welcoming committee,” said Fenwick. “Nice. I approve.”

  “Shut up, Fenwick,” Alex muttered.

  The figure was the base commander, Colonel Newton J Kettering. He marched up to them and saluted. Fenwick returned the salute sloppily, as usual. Alex didn’t bother.

  “Sir,” Kettering said smartly. “Welcome to Camp Batavia.”

  “Well thank you kindly, Colonel,” Fenwick said. “Looks like you’re running a tight ship here.”

  “Sir. Thank you, sir.” Unlike the lieutenant, Kettering didn’t look tired and ill. He looked alert and bright-eyed. He looked alert and bright-eyed to the point of madness. He was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and he’d done three tours here, and Alex didn’t want to spend a minute longer in his company than he had to.

  He said to Fenwick, “I’d better supervise the unloading.”

  Fenwick gave him his big shit-eating grin. “I think that sounds like a fine idea, Mr Dolan.” Alex wanted to punch him. “Perhaps Colonel Kettering could give me the guided tour while you’re doing that thing.”

  “Sir, I was hoping you could join me in the Officers’ Club,” Kettering said. “We have a luncheon prepared.”

  Fenwick’s grin widened. “Colonel, I would love to.”

  “We need to get onto the site as soon as possible,” Alex said to them both, but mainly to Fenwick. Kettering regarded him with a keen look of hostility. Fenwick pouted; he hated to miss a free meal. Alex said, “Colonel, it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to unload my gear—”

  “Hell,” Fenwick put in amiably. “That’s plenty of time for luncheon. Right, Colonel?”

  “Sir. Yes, sir.” Kettering gave Alex that hostile look again. His carefully groomed routine had already been interrupted; he wasn’t about to let Alex ruin lunch too. Neither was Fenwick.

  Alex looked at them both. “Half an hour,” he said. “No longer.”

  Fenwick and Kettering exchanged a knowing glance. Civilians. Then Fenwick clapped Kettering on the back and said, “Lead the way, Colonel,” and they walked off. A few yards away, Fenwick looked over his shoulder and called, “Would you like us to send a plate out for you, Mr Dolan?”

  Alex shook his head. “No thank you, General, I’ll be fine,” he called back. Fenwick flipped him the bird surreptitiously and turned back to Kettering. The two of them, deep in conversation, walked towards the nearest buildings.

  Alex watched them go for a few moments, then went back to the helicopter, where, in the style of bored baggage handlers and cargo men the world over, half a dozen Marines were throwing his metal transport cases out onto the grass.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Careful with those things! They’re delicate scientific instruments!”

  Actual
ly, the cases were full of old telephone directories, for weight, but he had to keep up the charade.

  HE HAD THE Humvee loaded by the time Fenwick and the Colonel returned from their lunch. In the end he’d told the Marines to go away, and done it himself. Down the years he’d noticed that Marines tended towards a certain disdain for people who were not themselves Marines. Alex was a civilian specialist. To most of them that was a euphemism for CIA, which was a direct invitation to dick around and try to get a rise out of him, but he wasn’t going to play that game.

  “How was your lunch, General?” he asked when Fenwick and Kettering arrived.

  Fenwick looked at Kettering. “I think I can report that this camp is not lacking in creature comforts, Mr Dolan,” he said, and Kettering smiled in relief.

  Alex looked at his watch. “We really should be making a start, General,” he said. “I’d like to be out of here before nightfall.”

  Fenwick snorted. “You and me both.” He turned to Kettering. “Newt,” he said, “if you’re ever down at Bragg, I’ll throw a party for you at the BOQ that’ll make your head spin.”

  Kettering grinned. “Sir. Yes, sir.” They shook hands and Kettering stood to attention while Fenwick and Alex got into the Hummer.

  Alex said, “I do hope you didn’t breach any security protocols in there, Airman.”

  Fenwick grinned and tapped the stars on his fatigues. “General.”

  Alex put the Hummer in gear. “Oh, fuck off, Fenwick,” he said. “You’re no more a general than I am.” And he drove the Humvee out of the gates of the camp and onto the road to the site.

  AT GROUND LEVEL, fifteen years of abandonment were more obvious. There were Green Berets stationed at the main gate, and they spent a good half hour checking documents and establishing their bona fides before letting them through. As well as animals, the world’s Press were always trying to sneak through the fence. Nobody had made it yet. Nobody they knew about, anyway.