Neutrinoman & Lightningirl: A Love Story, Season 1 (Episodes 1 - 3)

by Robert J. McCarter

  “Thank God,” I said. At this point the cell phones were out taking pictures and video of me and the wreckage. I walked towards him and took his elbow, gently pulling him forward. “There is a woman, badly injured. I am afraid she is going to die. Can you help?”

  He nodded as we started our way back.

  ~~~

  “I am sorry, sir,” the solider said. “I cannot allow a civilian through.”

  I studied him. He was tall, lanky, young, and looked scared. They only had enough personnel so that each soldier was guarding about twenty yards of the perimeter. The soldiers on either side were eying us.

  “He’s a doctor,” I said. “The woman over there needs medical attention.”

  “I am sorry, sir, orders.”

  My anger was growing, about to boil over into fury. A life was at stake, a doctor was needed. It was really that simple. “Do you know who I am?” I asked. The solider nodded his head. “Then you know what I am capable of. Out of my way, son. I don’t want to hurt you.” I felt silly calling him “son,” I was maybe six or seven years older than him, but I was trying to establish some kind of authority.

  He looked truly terrified. I felt bad about it, but what could I do? He stood there staring at me and I yelled, “Now!” He stepped aside and I pulled Dr. Romero forward.

  “Look,” I whispered to the doctor, “do you trust me?”

  He nodded, his eyes wide.

  “We are going to meet more resistance,” I began. “I am going to have to play the only card I can. What I need you to do is go to her and keep her alive. The fate of our planet may just rest in your hands, my friend.”

  He pushed his glasses up onto his nose, his eyes widening as he nodded. Once again, I felt silly invoking such language, “the fate of our planet,” and such. But this was turning into a huge drama and I needed the alien to survive. Looking back, I am not sure what gave me such certainty that day, but I am glad I acted on it.

  “Don’t be surprised, but I am going to turn into Neutrinoman soon. Don’t listen to anyone but me. Your objective is to keep that woman alive no matter what. Understand?”

  He nodded, licking his lips. Sergeant Mills and two other soldiers were on their way to intercept us.

  “I need to leave you now,” I said pushing him forward. “Go straight to her, listen to no one but me. Now, run!” He ran towards the woman, while I ran directly towards Mills. I summoned forth my neutrino form. After one step the coat was smoldering, after two steps, it was on fire and I was flying, five seconds later I stood between Mills and Dr. Romero in my full neutrino form, the coat continuing to burn its way off of me. I heard shouts from the crowd gathered back by the train.

  I held my hand out, palm forward. “You will not interfere with the doctor.”

  “I have orders,” Mills said, the soldiers next to him pointing their rifles at me.

  “And you have done your best to fulfill them. Now, stand down. I don’t want to see any of you hurt.”

  Interview, Part 4

  Late Winter 2005, WNN Studios, Los Angeles

  I learned an important lesson that day with Diane Madison. It’s not like it was a new thing, or that I hadn’t heard it before. But then and there under the hot lights of the studio, on live TV with hundreds of millions of people watching, I learned an important lesson: your opponent’s home turf is not the place to make a stand.

  Obvious, right?

  “We’re back on Real Life with Diane Madison, today we are talking with none other than Neutrinoman,” she said to the camera before turning to me. “So Nik, I was thinking over the break. Maybe there are some skeptics out there, some folks who might doubt that you are who you say you are. You know, real people who know what can be done with a special effects budget today.”

  Was she going to suggest… she couldn’t. “There was no special effects there, Diane,” I said.

  “Well, just to reassure the few that are still in doubt, maybe you could do an in-studio demonstration.” Her smile was innocent, but her eyes were hard. This is what she meant by “Let’s play.”

  “I’m sorry, Diane, but I am not safe to be around when I transform into Neutrinoman,” I said.

  She nodded thoughtfully. “I have heard—and you can tell me if this is true—that it is possible for you to do a partial transformation. Maybe you can do that for us.”

  “While it’s possible, it is quite difficult.” I didn’t want to do it. If people believed, they believed. Those that doubted my existence, and still doubt my existence, weren’t going to be fooled by something done on live TV. I mean, didn’t some magician make the Washington Monument disappear on live TV?

  “Please,” she said with a smile, “for those real people out there. Just a brief, unplanned demonstration.”

  I nodded, placing my left elbow on the glass desk and pointing my index finger up. I concentrated, slowly transforming the tip of my finger. It went from normal flesh to a glowing, swirling yellow. I looked at Diane and a trace of flickering yellow light illumined her. She had a look of awe and wonder on her face, like a young girl coming downstairs on Christmas morning to a tree with a stack of presents underneath.

  I believed that look, I thought it was genuine. It’s what inspired me to do what I did next. My motives were not pure. She had maneuvered me into this. I was hoping to do something that would make her regret doing that. I slowly moved my glowing fingertip to the top of her desk and placed it to the glass there.

  It melted and glowed where I touched. I slowly moved my finger up, and then down and to the right diagonally and then up again, forming an “N.” I then continued on drawing a circle that started at the top right of the “N” and looped around stopping just before the bottom right corner.

  While I did this, a cameraman came in close and filmed the whole thing. The glass glowed a bright yellow-orange and moved aside like I was dragging my finger through honey. He stayed there filming it after I was done, as the glow slowly faded and the glass cooled.

  I looked up and Diane was beaming at me, slowly nodding her head. I was hoping I was doing something she didn’t like, but I had done exactly what she wanted. She would take my feeble attempt at thwarting her and use it to advance her career. That desk, branded by me, by Neutrinoman, would be part of her shows for the rest of her career. My little act of defiance had reinforced our link. The last thing I had wanted to do.

  “And we’re clear,” I heard the voice say.

  “That was perfect,” Diane said to me. “Just perfect. As if we had rehearsed it. The two of us are quite the team.”

  Chapter 15

  A Changed Man

  Late Winter 2005, East of Flagstaff, Arizona

  We had an uneasy truce. I was pacing, in my neutrino form, in a circle around Dr. Romero and the alien. Sergeant Mills and several of his soldiers were positioned in a loose circle around my circle.

  I looked at the doctor and the alien. He had propped her legs up with his jacket and applied some makeshift bandages. “I need a first aid kit,” he said to me. “Something. What she needs is a hospital, but even a first aid kit would help.”

  I nodded to Dr. Romero and walked to Sergeant Mills. I stopped when I was about five yards away, my neutrino reaction low. “Can you get the doctor a first aid kit?” I asked. He didn’t answer, so I continued. “Look, she’s dying. You have to understand how valuable she is alive. We are facing a threat we don’t comprehend, a threat we need to learn everything we can about. We’ve never had this opportunity before. Please, help me.”

  His eyes flicked from me to Sarah and back again before he nodded and shouted at one of the soldiers who went running to the helicopter and then ran back to the doctor with a large first aid kit.

  As I watched I had this uneasy feeling. I was embarrassed. I knew what I was doing was the right thing. I had no doubt about it. But the means I was employing didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t tell the doctor what he was getting into. I didn’t tell him I needed him to treat an alien—al
though with the wrecked craft and her odd dress, he might have figured it out by now. I bullied and threatened a soldier to get the doctor and me through. And just then I had left out my main real reason for wanting to save the alien: my own guilt over the one I had killed in Wyoming. The vision of that alien with its burnt chest still haunted me.

  “Thank you,” I said to Mills as I continued my perimeter walk over the blackened and blasted earth, praying that this time the alien would survive.

  ~~~

  Colonel Williams was furious, his green eyes flashing. I expected him to be, but the volume of it caught me off guard.

  “Who the hell do you think you are, Nichols?” he yelled as he approached me. His face was red and his hands were balled into fists. He was dressed in camo-wear, pants, and a winter jacket. I watched as the rest of the personnel spilled forth from the three Huey helicopters. “You have interfered with my orders. You brought a civilian into this situation and you have bullied soldiers. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  I took a breath and considered my words. What I wanted to say was, “I am Neutrinoman and once you start giving better orders, I won’t have to interfere with them.” But I didn’t say that. I knew what I wanted, and I knew that wouldn’t get me there.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel,” I said, as I let my neutrino form go and stood naked in front of him. “The alien was dying, I had to do something.” I gestured to the alien and Dr. Romero behind me. I was glad to see two medics jogging towards her with several large cases. “We need her, Colonel.” Again I marveled at how much I left out. At how I didn’t assign the blame for my actions on him, although it would have been easy. I was being who I needed to be to get what I wanted. It occurred to me then that the time I spent with Tom Tyree had rubbed off. And that thought was terrifying.

  His mouth was opened, as if to fire off a retort, but my words seemed to disarm his anger. He brushed at his short salt-and-pepper hair, nodded, and yelled to no one in particular, “Someone bring this man a blanket or a coat!”

  ~~~

  They stabilized Sarah and loaded her into one of the helicopters. Dr. Romero, Colonel Williams, two medics, the pilot, and I were also in the helicopter.

  I sat there wrapped in a scratchy blanket, watching the alien, watching Sarah. She was sleeping and looked peaceful and not at all alien. Her head was properly bandaged and her abdomen was bandaged. The medics hovered over her and Dr. Romero sat next to me looking scared.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” I yelled, so he could hear me over the sound of the helicopter.

  He shrugged, but it didn’t set my mind at ease. He was trying to be relaxed in his body language, but his eyes told a different story. At this point I am sure he had heard enough to know that Sarah was not normal.

  “I’ll get you back to your life as soon as I can,” I said.

  He smiled. It was a fleeting twitch of his lips, soon replaced by a worried frown.

  ~~~

  The helicopter flew us to Luke Air Force Base. Sarah was rushed into surgery, and I was rushed into a debrief session with Colonel Williams and General Marcus. Marcus had been flown in to deal with the alien.

  I won’t go into details about the debrief, except to say it was long and exhausting and I was irritated enough that I gave them the alternate GPS coordinates for LoVE’s lair. It felt wrong to me to lie to them like that. I didn’t like it. But the thought of having access to that uranium ore was just too much. I had to keep it to myself.

  There is one aspect of it that is worth recounting, though. They were rather puzzled as to why I called Licia after Tom Tyree and the gang had left me next to the wreckage of the alien ship.

  “Why did you call Ms. Lopez first?” General Marcus asked. Marcus is somewhere in his sixties, looking like he was once fit but carrying about fifty extra pounds. He had snow-white hair and blue-green eyes.

  “Were you never young, General?” I replied with a weary smile.

  He paused, his eyes going distant, before he said, “I was never that young, son.” And then realization dawned on his face. “Are you and Ms. Lopez…” he looked at Colonel Williams. “Are they?”

  “According to Ms. Lopez,” Williams said, “they are not.”

  “It’s complicated,” I offered.

  “Well, it’s inappropriate,” General Marcus said. “The stakes are high, son. You need to have a clear head when you are out there, not get distracted by… by…”

  “By a contained electrical reaction in the shape of a beautiful woman,” I said.

  “Yes, that,” he agreed with a nod of his head.

  “Too late, sir,” I said. “The damage is done.”

  The conversation went on from there. It was like the lecture a father would give to his teenage son. It was just as clich�d, and just as effective (which is to say, not at all).

  Well, it was effective, but not in the way Marcus and Williams intended. They were hoping to dissuade me from my romantic pursuit of Licia. They used logic and reason. It was laughably ineffective. I was in the throes of passion and romance, how is logic and reason going to contend with that? What was effective was diverting the discussion to my love life. While it wasn’t fun or comfortable, they forgot to dig further into why I called Licia first and not them when Tom and company departed.

  As the debrief went on, I marveled at how I was continuing to manipulate those around me. I was shocked at how easy it was. I had watched Tom do it and somehow that had jumped to me like some contagious virus. My motives, of course, were much more pure than his (or so I told myself), so the manipulation was justified.

  The truth was I called Licia first to give Tom and company time to get away. Tom had successfully convinced me that they were going to be needed in the coming days as we fought the alien threat.

  As I write this from my current perspective and think back to that time when Tom Tyree tried to recruit me into LoVE, I realize that this shift in my personality was his intention the whole time. He wasn’t trying to recruit me; he was trying to prepare me—in his own twisted way—for what was to come.

  And that meant giving me a power supply independent from the military and a willingness to manipulate people to get what I believed in. It also meant sowing seeds of doubt in my mind as to the capability of the military to wage this war.

  He infected me. He changed me. I’m not sure what would have happened if he hadn’t.

  Chapter 16

  The Right Thing to Do

  Late Winter 2005, Luke Air Force Base, Arizona

  General Marcus looked like he had just eaten a lemon. His round face was pinched and sour looking, his cheeks flushed. “The alien won’t talk to us,” he said. We had been at Luke Air Force base for two days, a boring stretch of debriefs, medical exams, and waiting around.

  “Okay,” I said with a shrug. My disinterest was feigned. There was obviously something going on. I sat in a small conference room reviewing the statement and other documents that had been produced by my debrief. I turned back to the laptop I was working on.

  Marcus cleared his throat and I looked up.

  “It says it will only talk to you,” he said, his face puckering even more.

  I wanted to lecture him. To tell him that if he thought of the alien as a “she” instead of an “it,” or, better yet, thought of her as “Sarah,” maybe he would get better results. Instead I said, “How can I help, General?”

  “Son,” he began, “I need you to talk to her. I need you to find out what she knows. I…” His voice trailed off and his face fell. I could see the bluster and energy just draining from him. He suddenly wasn’t a hard-ass, but a chubby, scared kid. I didn’t want to, but I felt for him. We were up against an unknown enemy of unknown power with unknown motivations. This wasn’t the kind of war we had ever fought.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  His blue-green eyes met mine and he nodded sharply. “Thank you,” he said as he pushed himself into a standing position. He stood up straight and
all the bluster came flowing back in. “Our people will be right in and get you ready for your time with the alien.” With that, he turned and left.

  Two other officers entered as he was leaving, and they spent the next four hours telling me what I could and couldn’t say around her, what I could and couldn’t do, and what information I was to try to get and how I was to get that information.

  I let all the crap flow in one ear and out the other. No wonder she wasn’t talking to them. It was early evening when they escorted me in to see her.

  ~~~

  “Hi, Sarah,” I said when I entered the room. We were in the infirmary in a small hospital room. It looked just like the one I awoke in after taking on the asteroid the aliens hurtled at us. There was one significant difference. She was strapped to the bed at her wrists and ankles, like some mental patient they were afraid might try to hurt herself.

  She smiled weakly. It was a totally human gesture, and totally disarming. “Hello,” she answered.

  I was at a loss as to what to say. There was a guard right outside the door and several cameras watching our every move. This wasn’t a private conversation, although I wished it was. I walked over to her bed and undid the Velcro strap on her left wrist. I didn’t really think it through, I just acted. The restraint seemed excessive. She wasn’t going to go anywhere. She smiled a “thank you” at me as her hand went to her face, probing the bandages on her forehead, and then to her abdomen. She grimaced, her hand finding mine as she pulled me close.

  Her breath was warm and smelled a little rotten, like someone who hadn’t brushed their teeth for way too long. “Free me and I will help,” she said very quietly, her exhalation tickling my ear.

  “Help?” I whispered back.

  “I am nobody, but my people will listen if I speak. They have to. For you I will speak.”