Enhanced

by Cosca, Paul

  I was crying. I had no idea what I was gonna do. My whole life was falling apart. Every single piece of my family was coming apart at the seams. Why? Why was this happening to us? I heard the truck start. I could hear it because the cabinet had stopped banging, but I didn’t even think about that at the time. I was listening to that truck...listening to my husband about to drive out of my life. My heart was walking out the door, and I heard the tires squeal. Jerry didn’t do that, not even when he was mad. He was always a safe driver. But I could hear the tires spinning in the mud, and a few seconds later there was a big crash. Glass and metal. Hissing. Steaming. There wasn’t anything the paramedics could do...even before they got him out of the truck they could tell his neck was broke. No seat belt, and he’d been going 40 miles an hour when he hit the tree. The pedal must have been all the way to the floor. I wasn’t even thinking about Chloe right then. I was just looking at Jer. I was screaming. Just...completely out of control. That man was my life. Jerry and the kids...my whole life.

  When it was daylight, and Jerry and the truck were both gone, I made breakfast for the girls. No one was going to school that day. And maybe it’s terrible to think about making pancakes when your husband has just died, but you can’t just starve. Your girls have to eat. Krissi and Jessica were down at the table, pushing food around on the plate, and I went upstairs to get Chloe.

  It had been months since I’d been in her room. Maybe close to a year. Most times the door was sealed shut. But this time it opened right up. Just like any other room. Just like it had been before. I called her name, but there wasn’t any response. I looked around. No one in her bed. Or under it. Then I looked in the closet and there she was.

  She looks at the picture again, then turns it so I can see it.

  Look at her. She was beautiful. And not just...you know every parent thinks their kid is good looking, but Chloe was really beautiful. She would have grown up to be an absolute bombshell. Sure as heck didn’t get that from me.

  She laughs lightly, but there are tears slowly rolling down her cheeks. She erases them with her sleeve.

  That pretty face was so blue when I found her, with the belt wrapped around her neck. She’d hung herself in the closet. The look on her face was so full of pain. And with everything that happened...with all the terror and anger and overwhelming grief I’d experienced in that previous twelve hours, I felt something I’d never imagined I could feel right then: relief. I didn’t know why she did all those things to us, and right then, I didn’t care. I was just glad to see it done.

  We’re happy now. As happy as you can be after something like that, anyway. Krissi’s real close to graduating college. She wants to go on and get her master’s degree in psychology. Jessica is engaged to this really great guy named Steve. He’s in the marines. Jerry would have liked that. And we go on. We live. I have plenty of little joys to help me get through the day. But...I’m going to hell. I mean that. There are people who joke about it. Like, they do something bad and make a joke about going to hell. But I really am. Because there was no better feeling in my whole life than looking in the closet that morning and seeing my baby girl dead. I was so relieved. I felt so free. So, I know I’m going to hell. I’ve never really grieved for her. Never really cried. Not…not really. So one day, I’ll go down to hell and I’ll see Chloe again. Maybe I’ll cry then.

  October 10th, 1988

  Cyrus Foley was seventy-six when I first met him. I was only nineteen and looking for an interesting interview for a journalism class I was taking. I’d loved superheroes (both real and fictional) ever since I was a kid. Idolized all the classic heroes. And none were bigger and more important than American Justice. He was the first (and many say the best). He existed as both a real hero and a fictional one whose adventures have continued for decades after his death in comic books, TV shows, and movies. There is no greater symbol of the early American superhero than American Justice, and though I’d heard Cyrus’ name from time to time in connection with my favorite hero, I had no idea how important he really was.

  As it turns out, Cyrus Foley was the acting manager to American Justice as well as quite a few other real life superheroes in the first half of the 20th century. He’s the man responsible for taking superheroes from a curiosity to a national icon. Being in the room with him is a sobering experience.

  Cyrus, in the twilight of his life, is now living at Blue Manor Assisted Living in upstate New York. Certainly this isn’t just any regular old folk’s home. The amenities are fantastic (do senior citizens need an Olympic sized swimming pool?), the staff is warm and friendly, and they make a really great cookie in the cafeteria. When I first enter Cyrus’ room, he’s just come back in from his deck. “They’re uptight about smoke in the rooms” he says, “Had to wait for some old fart from Massachusetts to die before I could move into the room with the balcony.” He still smells vaguely like cigar smoke. It’s not an unpleasant smell.

  CYRUS: His name was Patrick John O’Donnelly. See, that was gonna be the first line to the book I never ended up writing. If I had some kind of...wisdom or something, something like that to pass on, it’d be to write the damn book if you’re gonna write it. I thought about writing a memoir or something like that for...hell, forty years? Never did do it. And that was gonna be the first line. You gotta hook ‘em, you know? Gotta hook ‘em right on the

  first page, and that would have done it. There wasn’t no one...at least not officially, who ever said who American Justice really was. But Patrick John O’Donnelly was his real name. Patty. Hell of a guy.

  Anyway, I was twenty-two when I got going with the whole...situation. The deal. Goddamn that was a long time ago. That must be around how old you are, yeah? Yeah, I was young. But I didn’t feel young. Twenty-two don’t ever feel young to nobody. You hit twenty-two and you say...hell, I been an adult for four years now. I know what I’m doing! But lemme tell you something. There ain’t never been a twenty-two year old in the whole history of the earth that knew what the hell he was doing. You don’t start being an adult for years after. Some folks don’t ever hit it at all.

  But I was twenty-two and I was working for the Times. And more than anything, that made me feel like I had something going on. I was lucky to have any kind of job at all, much less one at a rag like that. It was 1934. Some places were starting to recover from the crash, but we were still right in the middle of the hard times. The Great Depression, you know? By then, even the farmers were getting it. But I got lucky and kept up my job with the times as a cub reporter. Everyone needs the news, even when the news is no good.

  It was actually that right there, good news, that started the whole deal. We’d gotten a tip about some kind of local hero in Brooklyn, and I get sent out to grab an interview with the guy. You can’t just fill the papers with rapes and murders, ya know? You gotta throw in a feel-good story once and awhile. Gotta show people that the whole world isn’t just goin’ down the can, even if it is. Especially if it is.

  I took the train out to Brooklyn and started askin’ around. Seeing if people knew about the local hero. And boy they sure did. Everyone I talked to knew about him. I asked them what he looked like…how I’d find him. They all gave me a funny look and told me I’d know him when I saw him.

  “You can’t miss him,” they said. And when I got my first look at him...by god those folks were right.

  Patrick John O’Donnelly, see I can use his name all I like now ‘cause all the folks that might’ve gotten hurt by him being known are all dead, he was a great big giant of a man. He stood six feet, six inches and was as wide as a goddamn doorway. If he’d been born fifty years later, they would have him playing professional football. Or maybe he could have got a job workin’ as an anchor for a battleship or something. But he was also a real sweet guy. He’d come over with a bunch of other Irish on a tugboat or something. Didn’t have a nickel to his name when he showed up, but he had a pretty wife and a good pair of workin’ hands. He was pretty handy, so he found himself some
work as a car mechanic (that’s when cars were simpler, ya know?), and like any good Irish family, he had a whole mess of kids.

  Lucky for Patty, he was damn good at his work, ‘cause he was about the only guy left working at the shop by ‘34. But while he was keeping everything going, the world around him was going to pot. The neighborhood they’d moved into started filling up with all kinds of rough types. Pimps. Alkies. Riff raff lying around in the street. Beggin’. Fightin’. Hassling folks just trying to get back and forth to work. It got to be that Patty and his wife were even worried about the kiddos they had. So he decided he was gonna do something about it.

  Later on, Patty told me that he’d heard a little bit about superheroes, but that wasn’t really the idea when he got started. He just knew he wanted to do something to help clean up the streets. Do what the cops couldn’t...or maybe wouldn’t. But Patty was no dummy. He knew he’d need a few basic things. He’d need protection. And he’d need anonymity. That’s how it started and that’s how it’s been all the way up to today. Protection and anonymity. Remember that, chief. No matter what kind of costume you get, you gotta have protection and anonymity.

  You remember White Spider? That poor girl. She forgot the basics and she paid for it.

  Patty talked it over with his boss at the auto shop and got his permission to start working on a side project. He used bits of scrap metal and a welder to put it all together. It was impractical as could be, but you couldn’t say it wasn’t effective. By spring of ‘34, it was all ready to go, and Patty hit the streets.

  Patty’s first stop was a pimp who’d set up shop down the street from their place. He was drunk. Aggressive. And he’d made some rude comments towards Patty’s wife, which I think was the straw that broke the camel up, ya know? He put on that big suit and headed out the door.

  Now, can you imagine what that pimp must’a saw? He was probably half drunk before noon, and up walks this...giant. Six and a half feet of shiny steel, gleaming in the sun. I tell ya, chief. If I had been that pimp, I would have needed a new pair of pants. No kidding. The whole scene was building a crowd. Everyone around knew about this guy and knew what a son of a bitch he really was, so they wanted to see what would happen. They say that the pimp opened his trap to say something, then got a big mouthful of steel fist for his trouble. BAM! Knocked his lights right out. All the folks cheered and Patty clanked away.

  And that, chief, is the same kinda sight I got that day. Minus the punching. After knocking out the pimp, he spent his off days walking the streets in that big metal suit. He didn’t have to go around punching people, but everyone felt safer with him around. I mean, who’s gonna commit crimes when you got some huge metal giant walking the streets? Even the repo men stopped coming around. Hell, you probably don’t know what it was like. Repos were messy...sometimes even violent back then. He really became the knight in shining armor for his neighborhood.

  So anyway, I turn a corner and then I see him. Good god, chief. It was amazing. I know it’s tough to see in this stupid chair I’m stuck in, but I’m only five-foot-four. So seeing Patty for the first time...it was like seeing Everest. But I was twenty-two. Bold. I was a cocky little shit, so I walked right up to him and said “Hey fella, what’s your name?” He looked real nervous and said “Patrick,” and I said “No no, chief. Not your real name. I’m saying what’s your name for...this? The whole getup?” He just shrugged, so I said “Listen, chief. My name is Cyrus Foley. And the first thing you and I are gonna do is get you a name.”

  August 8th, 1993

  About six months into my serious digging on the topic of the Enhanced, I come home to find a note taped to my door. The inside of my door. The note simply says that if I want some real information, to come meet them. The address leads to a hotel on the west side. I’m terrified, of course. And my fear isn’t helped when I check all the locks on my door and find them intact. But my fear is tempered by curiosity and excitement. After all, it’s not every day that you find yourself living inside a spy movie. I dress up as best I can and head out.

  I don’t have long to wait. As I nurse a drink at the hotel bar, a woman walks by and I feel an object drop into my coat pocket. My heart races. Keeping my eyes forward, I reach in and feel that the object is a key. Ten minutes later, I use that key to enter a dimly lit hotel room.

  I can’t give her name or describe her looks. She’s not a superhero, but anonymity is just as important to her as it is to any of Cyrus Foley’s protégés. What I can say is that she is fit, athletic, and very attractive. But she also carries a weariness the likes of which I’ve never really seen before. She’s my twenty-fourth interview subject, and I can tell right away that my research will be much different from twenty-five onward. For now, I will just call her “Mel”.

  MEL: I apologize for the cloak and dagger. I think you’ll appreciate soon that it was a necessary precaution. I’ve been waiting. Not necessarily for you, but for someone. There’ve been other books written. Articles. Documentaries. But they were all superficial bullshit. It’s easier that way. Easier to find the simple headlines than to really dig in for the truth. I applaud you, but I also caution you. The easy stories are also the safe ones. The truth is a dangerous creature. You grab the dragon’s tail, you still get the dragon.

  You contacted my point man. I won’t say who it was, but I will say he wasn’t all that difficult to find. Even so, you’re only the second person to reach out to him. When he was last contacted, I looked into it, and found

  they weren’t really looking for the truth. But you and your project are different. If you’re really looking to tell the whole history of the Enhanced people, you’re going to need a little classified intel. Are you prepared for that?

  I have to think about this a moment. If Mel is telling the truth...if the information that she has really is classified, then my investigation may be heading toward dangerous territory. What could be so bad about the history of Enhanced people that it would be made top secret? Whatever trepidation I might have is squashed by a singular desire: If I am going to bother writing about this, then I am going to write about it completely. I give Mel a nod and she smiles. She looks relieved. She grabs a bottle of white wine out of the tiny fridge in the room and pours us each a glass. I’m thankful for the bit of liquid courage, and I think she is too.

  I was in Alaska eleven years ago. My objective there isn’t important. What’s important is that I met a man named Dr. Nathan Grant. Have you come across that name in any of your research? No? I’m not surprised. They’ve done an incredibly efficient job of wiping his name from the books. Classifying anything that couldn’t be scrubbed or redacted. When I was there, I realized that he was far more important than anything I’d been up there for. Grant, and the files he had.

  She lays down a manila folder on the table between us and I start to flip through it. The look on my face as I leaf through it all must be very easy to read.

  I’ve taken bits of the documents...signatures, insignias, things like that, over to experts. From what I can see, everything in the documents is legit. And from what’s already in the public record, it fills in the pieces in horrifying fashion.

  So, what’s in the public record is that the US Army started working with the RGR virus in soldiers to create the Enhanced Special OPS during World War II, right? But just a little bit of digging tells you that there were people who already had the virus over a decade beforehand, and there has never been an accounting of where that discrepancy comes from. I’ll admit,

  before I encountered Dr. Grant I hadn’t put too much thought into it. But look at this.

  What you’re looking at is a medical record from 1927. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. A young woman, her name redacted out of history, brought her infant son to the hospital on base. She’d woken up that morning to find her baby dead, and in a very peculiar fashion. The baby’s skin had grown tough and completely inflexible. He wasn’t just dead. It was like he was made of stone. Like petrified wood. The doctors immediately
took the child to a room for treatment, but there wasn’t much they could do. For twenty minutes they tried opening an airway, but they didn’t have a scalpel sharp enough to pierce his skin. Finally, they declared the boy dead. But as they were cleaning up, something incredible happened: the boy cried. When they lifted the sheet off him, they saw a pink, healthy baby boy. His skin was soft. His heartbeat regular. He’d been dead and as hard as a rock for at least an hour, and now he was right back to normal. At this moment, someone in command, though that name too is redacted, issued an order. And that order was faithfully carried out.

  The mother, that forgotten name, took the news of her son’s death very badly. She had to be sedated and driven back to her home on base. She was told an autopsy needed to be performed, and months later she was given a small urn and told that the boy needed to be cremated to stop the spread of any contamination.

  It was an easy enough lie to give to a grieving woman. But in reality, the boy was alive and well, and became the basis of the most fascinating, horrifying experiment in our country’s history. This little boy became the genesis for the world as we know it. After him, nothing is the same. His name is not known. Nor, I think, will it ever be. Dr. Grant, who quickly became my friend, pulled every string he could think of to get a hold of these files. And having them resulted in his death.

  So, knowing that, are you ready to hear the truth?

  I take a moment, take a drink of my wine, check my tape recorder, and nod. Down the rabbit hole we go.