Tormented

by Robert J. Crane

  I paused, staring at him, and chewed my lower lip. “I … uhm … kinda … can’t … at the moment.”

  Jake maintained that eye-raised look. “… Can’t? Admittedly I don’t know much about you or your, uh, powers … but don’t they work on command?”

  I felt a pained expression spring onto my face that I couldn’t quite control. “Most of the time, yes. But … I’m on vacation, and my powers are tied to some … uhm … metahumans that I … uh—”

  “Absorbed, right?” Jake asked. He ran a hand through his grey hair, and I caught a whiff of concern that seemed genuine. “During the war? You took in some villains?”

  “Mostly villains, yeah,” I said, clenching my wounded hand tight to try and stop the blood drip. “Anyway, they, uhm …” I rolled my eyes. “They’ve kind of been arguing the last couple weeks. So I decided to shut them up for a little while … uh, chemically.” I flushed.

  “You drugged … yourself?” He looked amused and perplexed all at once. He was amuseplexed. Permused. Something. “Drugged them?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “I used to use this chemical called chloridamide to suppress them temporarily, and I take a shot every now and again if I need to quiet them.” I glanced at my rental car. “I took a big dose before I drove up.” I swept a hand over myself. “Hence the driving, not flying.” Flying was generally more soothing, but it wasn’t ideal for carrying a suitcase. Besides, the drive had been kind of leisurely and scenic and peaceful and stuff. Which I … needed. Or something. I’m still trying to convince myself.

  “So … you’re not going to heal lickety-split?” He nodded at my hand.

  “Without Wolfe it’ll take a few hours,” I said, trying to figure out where I could mop up the blood. I’d usually just wipe it on my clothes because … well, when you’ve ruined as many wardrobes as I have, you don’t get attached to your outerwear.

  “Come on,” he said, after a moment of chewing it over, “my wife’s clinic is on the main street. I’ll take you to Sarah and she’ll get you patched up.”

  I stole a look at my rental car. The horn on the ferry blew once, loudly, as we approached the dock, the sense of movement through the water slowing. I was tempted to blow him off, say I’d just deal with it myself, grab some paper towels from the local store and just be on about the business of locking myself away so I could start my solitude, but …

  There was something really warm and inviting about his manner, about the way he asked, about his … genuine concern … that took me off guard. I don’t get genuine concern that much anymore. In fact, I was on a starvation diet of it lately—that, and the milk of human kindness, and what I got mostly came from Ariadne or Augustus Coleman, whenever he was actually around. Guy went home a lot. Which I couldn’t blame him for, because I’d go home a lot, too—if I had one with family in it instead of an empty house in south Minneapolis.

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. “Let me get my car.”

  “Smart thinking,” Jake said with a smile. “I’m parked right in front of you, so just follow me off?” The horn sounded above us again.

  “Sure thing,” I said and headed for my rental car. It was a silver sedan, sporty but not as cool as my brother’s new car. I usually went everywhere in government sedans since I didn’t own my own vehicle, but for this trip, I’d planned ahead. I got inside, shifted in my seat, and closed the door behind me. I looked around, fumbling in the arm rest before finding a packet of tissues that someone had left behind. Hallelujah. I wrapped one around my wounded hand, then another, clenching them tight against my palm.

  It took a few minutes for the ferry to dock, but they passed quickly. It felt like I closed my eyes for a second, and the next thing I knew the rumble of car engines filled my ears. Jake’s car flashed its brake lights. He had a big SUV, the kind that was probably required for navigating the snow banks of Bayscape Island during the winter. Daylight flared ahead of us as the ramp came down, and Jake was the first to drive off the boat. I followed behind him, and my eyes gradually adjusted, painting the scene before me in lush color as I reached the bottom of the ramp.

  It was a small town straight out of a Norman Rockwell calendar. Or maybe Jaws. Lake Superior’s waters lapped at the docks to my right, and an enormous American flag flew over a town hall at the end of the quaint main street. The street was lined with both trees and stores, the trees already turning beautiful shades of deep red and burnished gold, while the stores were trafficked with a few customers wandering here and there, dodging windswept leaves that had already started to fall. I smelled hot apple cider and realized there was a drink stand just by the end of the dock, steam piping out in little white puffs. I didn’t even know apple cider needed to be heated or wafted or whatever they were doing, but it was a marvelous marketing strategy because I instantly wanted a cup.

  Jake’s SUV lurched forward as it came off the ramp onto the road, and he eased forward, waiting for me to catch up. I wasn’t the most practiced driver and my reflexes tended to be dangerously fast, so I took my time cresting the small separation between the ferry ramp and the road. The car groaned a little as I rolled onto shore, and then I gunned the engine to cut the distance between Jake’s car and mine to ten feet or so. I followed him at a crawl for all of a block and a half before he whipped into a parking space right there on the main street.

  I took like ten minutes trying to parallel park my car before giving up and taking my next right. There were pull-in spaces there, which were a little more suited to my talents. I know when I’m beat, okay?

  The sun was still shining when I met Jake on the sidewalk outside the building. The sign said “Clinic.” It was a two-story red brick building that blended perfectly with the quaint main street. There was a bar next door, a grocery store a little down the way, and a host of other touristy places in between. I took another breath of that fresh air and felt a world away from where I’d started my day.

  “Right through here,” Jake said, leading me into the clinic. I stepped through the glass door that he held open for me, listened to the ring of a bell above my head, and saw a dark-haired woman in a white lab coat step out from a door in the back.

  “Hey, honey,” Jake said. The woman was a little taller than me with hair that fell below her shoulders. At the sight of me, her expression went … pinched. “Brought you another stray.”

  “Really?” she asked and didn’t sound amused. She walked toward the front desk with measured steps and spun a clipboard around to face me. “You look unmistakably familiar.”

  “Need me to sign in?” I gestured to the clipboard with my bleeding hand, and flipped my palm up so she could see the red-stained tissues.

  Her frown deepened. “Maybe later. Can you—”

  “Not today,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t have my powers at the moment.”

  “Uh,” she said, looking up at me, “I was going to ask you if you could follow me. Doesn’t really require much in the way of power, just using your legs for locomotion. Basic stuff.”

  “Oh,” I said, a little embarrassed. “Yes, I can do that.”

  “Good,” she said without a trace of levity. “Follow me.”

  “See you later, babe,” Jake called, seemingly anchored to his spot by the door. “Nice to meet you, Sienna.”

  I glanced back at him. “You too, Jake. Thanks for … well … everything.”

  He smiled, again. “See you around. Unless you’re too busy hiding out.” With a wave he headed back through the door, and I turned to see his wife waiting for me, arms folded. Her whole manner said she was no-nonsense. I didn’t have to work hard to guess who was the party person in their relationship.

  I stepped into a treatment room, and Sarah closed the door behind me. She stepped around me nimbly, opening a blue-grey cupboard that looked like it had been there since the nineties, at least in its current form and color. She pulled out a plastic tray and nodded toward the exam bed behind me. “Have a seat.”

  “Thanks, nurse, uh …
Terrance?”

  “It’s Nelson, actually,” Sarah said, still buried in the cupboard.

  “Oh, uh, sorry,” I said. “My bad. You know what they say about assuming.”

  “No,” she said, coming out of the cupboard with bandages and sewing … stuff. “What do they say about it?”

  I tried to find a way to spin the old saying uniquely. “That you shouldn’t,” I said, giving up. It’s my vacation, I’m allowed to give up if I want to.

  “Sound advice,” she said, putting one of those sets of magnifying glasses on her head and spinning her stool up so she could sit level with me. She put her tray on a rolling table and raised the top of it so her implements were in easy reach. “How long is it going to take you to heal from this cut?”

  “It’ll be gone by tomorrow,” I said. “Bleeding should stop in a couple more minutes.”

  She glanced at her tray of supplies. “I’m just going to bandage it, then. No need to waste your time and mine with sutures.”

  “Good call,” I agreed. I wasn’t that keen on feeling a needle moving its way in and out of my skin anyway. She picked up a bottle of alcohol and started soaking a piece of gauze with it. “Get much business here?”

  “Lots in the summer, yes,” Sarah said, looking down at her work and not up at me. “Not much in the winter, though.”

  “Cool,” I said. An uncomfortable silence settled over us. It persisted for five minutes.

  Finally, Sarah looked up at me. “You don’t mind sitting in utter silence?”

  “Nope,” I said, shrugging without moving the hand she was working on—with two sets of rubber gloves, I realized a bit belatedly.

  “Hm,” she said, “most people complain. Or try to make small talk.”

  “Complain?” I asked. “About what? That you don’t make small talk while you’re focused on stitching up their boo-boos?”

  “Bedside manner is the most common complaint,” she said, focusing on what she was doing again, which, now, was applying some medical tape.

  “You’re a beautiful summer’s day compared to my last doctor,” I said. “You know how people tell horror stories about losing their doctor to an insurance change? In my case, it would be a ‘happily ever after,’ even if my new one was named Kevorkian.”

  “The co-pay on that next visit would be killer,” Sarah said dryly.

  “But you wouldn’t feel a thing afterward,” I said, continuing our little riff.

  She didn’t laugh, but I saw one corner of her mouth curl in amusement. “Not bad.” She looked up, shifting the magnifying lenses up so she could look at me. “You’re all set. I taped the bandages in such a way that you’ll be able to just tear them right across the center here,” she ran a finger across my covered palm, “tomorrow, when you’re done healing.”

  I lifted my hand and flexed it experimentally. “Thanks, uh—” I caught myself before calling her ‘Doc,’ which is what I habitually said to Dr. Perugini, my present torturer—I mean, practitioner.

  “You’re welcome,” Sarah said, and she said it slyly enough that I could tell she was thinking something snide. It’s exactly how I sounded when I was holding back something snarky. “And just so you know, Jake is going to be waiting outside for you.”

  “Huh, what?”

  “He’s waiting outside,” she said. “Right now. Guarantee it. It’s not a stalker thing, he just wants to help you.” She surveyed me with appraising eyes. “Where are you staying?”

  “Cabin,” I said. “Out of town a little ways.”

  “Better than the main street hotel,” Sarah said, starting to clean up the mess of bloodstained gauze on the tray. “At least, if you’re the type of person who likes to have a moment of peace.”

  “Just what I’m looking for,” I said. “Moments of peace, as many as I can gather unto me.” I almost sounded sincere.

  Her eyes settled on me. “You really think you’ll find it?” There was a piercing quality in her look, a soul-deep gaze that made it feel like a challenge, a harsh, discordant quality to her voice that was the equivalent of pushing me back a step.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, trying not to leap to any conclusions.

  “I said I think you’ll find it out there,” she said, inclining her head toward the wall, a vague indication of the direction the woods lay, I guess.

  “I don’t think that’s what you …” I let my voice trail off. Maybe she just misspoke. What was the point of pursuing it? She had her head tilted at me quizzically, no hint of guile. People misspeak all the time. Like that time I meant to call my boss, Andrew Phillips, a knucklehead but slipped up and called him an ignorant jagoff prick instead. “Guess I should let you get back to … whatever you were doing before I got here.”

  “Just shutting down for the day,” Sarah said with a forced smile.

  “It’s like … noon,” I said.

  She shrugged. “If no one shows up before eleven, it’s going to be a slow day. Island is quiet, so if you can refrain from cutting yourself, I’ll probably be ready to leave at two. All the residents have my number, and we don’t have much in the way of tourists at the moment.”

  “Thanks for your help,” I said, not offering her my hand.

  She smiled tightly and nodded her head. “Don’t forget, Jake’s waiting in ambush. Don’t show weakness.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. “What happens if I show weakness?”

  “He’ll tour you around the whole island, regaling you with history you probably don’t give a damn about,” she said, dropping the bloody gauze in the waste basket. I watched it fall, the crimson catching my eye. “It’ll get in the way of your hunt for inner peace. Take care.” She made a motion toward the door. “I’d hate to see you have to come back here on your vacation.” She said it in an ambiguous enough way that she could have meant she didn’t want to see me because she didn’t like me or because she didn’t want to see me injured. I wondered if the people around me spent as much time decoding my sarcasm as I was spending on hers and decided that no, I was much more straightforward when people annoyed me. Wasn’t I?

  I walked out of the exam room and passed through the lobby, exiting onto the sidewalk to find the sky covered in clouds. It wasn’t dim grey or anything; more like bright white, the sun making its presence known with a healthy glow from behind one patch. Still, it wasn’t exactly blue skies.

  “Hey,” Jake said, right on command. He was standing to the side, against the wall, arms folded. “Sarah take care of you?”

  “Yes,” I said, taking a couple steps toward him. “Though I can’t decide if she was happier to see me or to be rid of me.”

  Jake shrugged. “That’s Sarah. She’s … prickly.”

  “But warms up once you get to know her?”

  He grinned. “Not really, no. But I love her anyway.” He came off the wall. “Need a tour of the town?”

  I regarded him with amusement. “How long will it take?”

  “About two seconds,” he said, and with one sweeping gesture encompassed the main street. “Here’s the town … and this concludes our tour.”

  “Wow,” I said, “that was really thorough.”

  “Sadly, it was,” he said. “There’s not much to it. If you want, though, I can give you my contact information so that in case you have any questions, or need help with anything, or just want to get together to have a drink or dinner with Sarah and myself, you can. Wouldn’t want you to feel completely isolated while you’re here—unless that’s what you want.” He held up his hands and smiled. “No pressure. Whatever you want.”

  “Uh, sure,” I said, not really sure how to turn him down. I pulled out my phone and unlocked it. “What’s your number?”

  He sidled over beside me and blinked when he saw my contact list. “You, uh … only have like five people in there. And one of them is your carrier’s customer service number.”

  I jerked my phone away, like I could make him unsee what he’d just commented on. “It’s new,” I said, cover
ing quickly. And so it was … two years ago.

  “Right,” he said and gently took the phone out of my hands. I watched him nimbly program in his contact info. He was done in a fraction of the time it would have taken me. “Like I said, up to you. If you enjoy the peace and quiet and I don’t ever hear from you, I will not take any offense to it. But if you get lonely, call me up, and Sarah and I can have dinner with you. You know, if you want to hear another human voice.”

  “Thanks for the offer,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Then this is where I leave you,” he said, bowing slightly. His smile just seemed so … genuine. “I hope you have a wonderful day, Sienna.”

  “I hope so, too,” I said as he walked away. I turned and started to head for my car, but a peal of thunder far above stopped me. I looked up; the sky had grown a deeper grey, the cloud covering the sun suddenly dark. I felt a droplet splash on my forehead, then another. Little taps from cold fingers as the sky started to drizzle.

  “Well, damn,” I said as the cool autumn rain started to fall. For a brief moment, I stood there, hoping this wasn’t a sign of things to come before I spied the restaurant next door and broke into a run, figuring I’d weather the adverse weather while I fed myself.

  5.

  Reed

  I listened to the phone ringing through the car’s speakers as I drove up interstate 35E in St. Paul. The low roar of my Dodge Challenger’s engine was sweet music to my ears. A hell of a lot sweeter than the phone ringing, anyway.

  “This is Phillips,” came the answer at the other end of the phone as the ringing ceased with a click.

  “Hey, boss,” I said, glancing over at Augustus in the passenger seat. He was nodding his head along with music I couldn’t hear, staring out the window. The speed limit here was an extremely lame 45, the only place in the entire federal interstate system where it was that low. There was a story behind it, but it was extremely predictable and dealt with local residents who didn’t want an interstate in their back yard. “Got a report for you.”