Tormented

by Robert J. Crane

  “Ma’am, I’m Reed Treston of the, uh … Metahuman Policing and—”

  “I know who you are,” she said, staring out at me from behind a screen door. “Why are you here?”

  My reputation preceded me. It often does; people seem to know my face from all the splash exposure I get with Sienna, but they get me mixed up with other people. Someone even asked if I was Scott Baio once. I wasn’t impressed.

  “We’re here to talk about the incident at the airport this morning, ma’am,” Augustus said, leaping right in. “I’m Augustus Coleman, by the way.” He shot me a pointed look for not introducing him, I presume.

  “Oh, God,” she said and pushed open the screen door. “Benjamin.” Her face fell, eyes welled up. “Is he … is he one of the …?”

  “We’re looking for him now, ma’am,” I said carefully.

  “That means he’s … he’s … dead, doesn’t it?” She swallowed heavily and swayed back toward the wall behind her. “Oh … oh no …”

  I turned my head to look at Augustus and caught a humorless expression in return. “Uh, no, ma’am,” I said, stepping up to deliver the hard news, “we think he’s the one who caused the explosion.”

  Suddenly, she didn’t look like she was going to faint anymore, and her eyes snapped right to me. “Say what?” She’d gone from worried and concerned to more than a little pissed off in the course of one revelation.

  “Can we come in?” I asked.

  “No, you damned sure may not,” she said, letting the screen door snap shut right in her—and our—faces, as though it afforded some measure of protection. “You’re accusing my son of being a damned terrorist?”

  “We don’t think what he did was intentional—” I started.

  “You think he’s one of you,” she said with contempt, “that he’s some … some weirdo with powers straight out of a—”

  “Hey,” Augustus said, nonplussed, “watch who you call a weirdo.”

  She made a small snorting noise. “Benjamin is twenty-seven years old. If he were a …” she made a motion with her hand right at me, but not Augustus, “… you know … I think he’d have shown some signs before now.” She looked right at me. “I mean … don’t you people exhibit some sort of super strength—”

  “You people?” Augustus said. “Really? You’re going to go with that, like it’s better than weirdo?”

  “Didn’t mean it that way,” she said, waving a hand from up to down, like she could just bat away what she’d said. “You know, metas.”

  “Ah, typically yes,” I said, trying to steer around what was rapidly becoming a contentious conversation.

  “Well, that settles it,” she said, shaking her head, “Benjamin could barely lift his own suitcase. He wasn’t one of your—”

  “Careful,” Augustus said.

  “But, he wasn’t!” she said. “He just wasn’t.”

  “Ma’am,” I said, “we don’t know the full facts of the case, but the photographic evidence was clear. Your son burst into flames, exploded, and then walked out of the airport afterward, got in his own car, and drove off.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said in a huff.

  “I’m sure it’ll be on the internet in a day or two,” Augustus said. “Everything else is.”

  “If he wasn’t a metahuman before he went on this trip,” she said, still snotty, arms crossed in front of her, “then he couldn’t have come back as one.”

  That tickled the old brain, causing me to look at Augustus, who gave me a look in return. You know the kind; wide-eyed, oh-shit type stuff.

  It would have been hard to miss. Ms. Cunningham certainly didn’t. “What?” she asked.

  “If you have anything else to share—” I said, starting to wrap things up.

  “I don’t have anything else to say to you,” she said.

  “You people, you mean?” Augustus asked. She grunted in frustration and slammed the door in our faces.

  “That was not helpful,” I said as we started back toward the car.

  “The hell it wasn’t,” Augustus said. “You think Cunningham got a shot of Edward Cavanagh’s Magical Meta Tonic somewhere in his travels?”

  “Possibly,” I said, feeling the thud of the concrete with each heavy step I took. This case was getting weirder by the minute. “But I thought Cavanagh’s formula and stuff ended up in government custody.”

  “Where none of it could possibly ever see the light of day again,” Augustus said. “I’m sure they boxed it all right up like in Raiders, and it’s probably sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting for me to conveniently knock it over in a sequel.” He shook his head. “No, man. Cavanagh was connected everywhere, not just here in the U.S. His companies were international. Who knows where he sent that stuff? He was planning to ‘activate’ the whole world at some point, after all.”

  “This is a weird string of coincidences, though,” I said. “Cunningham gets on a plane to Minneapolis? And just happens to be a newly transformed meta? Who goes nuclear at the airport? I mean, any link of that chain could have fallen apart. What if Cunningham hadn’t lost control in the line?”

  “What if he’d lost it on the plane?” Augustus asked as he got in the passenger seat.

  “What if he’d never lost it at all?” I asked.

  “Fifty-odd people would still be alive,” Augustus said, “and Cunningham’s cheap-ass shoes wouldn’t have been ruined first by dog crap, then by unseasonable thousand-degree temps.”

  I slipped behind the wheel, let my fingers slide across the faux leather. I loved this car. “I wouldn’t tell that joke in public if I were you.”

  “Too soon?”

  “Little bit,” I said. “I’ve had to hold back a few myself. If Cunningham’s gotten ‘activated,’ as you put it, I don’t think there was intentional malice behind this incident.”

  “So you’re not calling it an attack?”

  “I shoot someone in the head, it’s an attack,” I said. “Sienna shoots someone in the head, it’s Tuesday.” He didn’t laugh. “You give someone meta powers and put them on a plane to Minneapolis? Kind of a half-assed way to go about it. I mean, if you want to cause chaos, sending Cunningham to a bigger airport would have been a start. JFK, LaGuardia, Atlanta? MSP is small fish—”

  “Small pond,” Augustus said then, when he caught my eye, looked chastened. “He’s the fish. Your analogy was crap. I fixed it.”

  “Point is,” I said, “this is so clumsy it makes a nerdy rom-com trope heroine look as deft as a ballet dancer by comparison. I don’t think this was an attack. It’s a misfire at best, an accident by any other name.” I waved my hand at the house. “I’m forming an opinion of this guy based on the file and his mother, and it reads like this: Benjamin Cunningham wouldn’t say shit if his lips were overflowing with the stuff. If he hadn’t had these powers, what do you bet he would have just imploded emotionally and sat down for a good cry?”

  “I don’t know this dude like you apparently do,” Augustus said. “Thought your talent was controlling the wind, not reading minds.”

  “I knew a mind reader for a while,” I said, smirking. “Dr. Quinton Zollers. He taught me some things.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Augustus looked jaded, wasn’t biting with much enthusiasm. “Like what?”

  I started the car, listened to the Challenger’s engine give off a throaty roar. “Like that you should never ascribe to malice what could better be attributed to stupidity.”

  “That’s called Hanlon’s Razor,” Augustus said with a frown. “Sounds like your friend didn’t have an original thought of his own.”

  I waited, just a beat for it to set in before I delivered the punch line. “Well, that is kind of what a telepath is known for, isn’t it?” He didn’t find it nearly as funny as I did.

  8.

  Benjamin

  From down the block, Benjamin watched them leave in their yellow Challenger. He could see the other government car, too, the sedan that was staking o
ut the street. It was a weird feeling, seeing elements out of a spy movie plopped down into his own life. Benjamin had lived on this street his entire life. He knew every car, every neighbor, and most of their friends. A black town car would have stood out around here even if he hadn’t known the area this well.

  Benjamin had parked in this driveway earlier and had sat slumped down, figuring he’d be out of sight. He wanted to go home, wanted to clean up. He’d had to dress from the dirty clothes in his suitcase, and it felt … filthy. He was wearing a green dress shirt with khakis, and the wrinkles alone were driving him mad. He’d had black smudges from the soot on his face and had stopped in St. Paul to mop them up. His stomach was unsettled. He’d drunk an iced tea in silence, staring at the cream-colored walls of the fast food restaurant. He didn’t even remember which restaurant it was now.

  Sitting here was not going to be a valid strategy long-term. Sooner or later someone would realize that he was parked in front of the Snyder house while they were up north at their cabin for the week. A law enforcement officer would realize he was in the car, would realize that the car possessed license plates that could be traced back to him. No, sitting here was not a valid option for long.

  But Benjamin didn’t know what else to do.

  What he really wanted to do was go back to work, go home, to wake up tomorrow in Amsterdam to find that this whole day had been one long, nightmarish fever dream that had never actually happened. He’d gladly sit through the nine-hour flight, even the allergies again and all that followed, to take the day back. He could replay the events at the airport in his mind, but only from a distance, as though they were happening to someone else.

  Yes, Amsterdam. That was where it had all gone wrong, wasn’t it? Everything before that had been fine.

  He could remember what it looked like as the blast hit, as the skin melted off the face of the man behind him who’d been so unkind. He watched it happen in his mind, over and over, revolted, afraid, disgusted. What kind of monster could do such a thing to other people?

  Benjamin stared at his hands. They shook for no apparent reason, and he clamped them on the steering wheel, watched the plastic leather bend under the strength of his grip in a way he’d never seen happen before.

  But this day was not a dream, was it? He’d done … what he’d done—but it wasn’t his fault, was it? This wasn’t something he’d known about; he’d never had powers before. Now the government was after him. He’d seen the lead man, remembered his face, even with the beard. He was Sienna Nealon’s brother.

  Benjamin was stuck in a loop of needing to do something, anything, but feeling absolutely like he couldn’t. “I have to leave,” he said, “but I can’t. If I do, they’ll catch me. But if I sit here, they’ll catch me.” And it had played in his head exactly like that for the last several hours.

  “Where else can I even go?” he asked. “Where they won’t see me? Where they won’t …” He took a breath. Maybe it all was a dream, after all, and it was culminating in him losing his damned mind. Metahumans may have existed in the world, but he thought of them the same way he thought of Hollywood celebrities—they were out there, but he never saw them, so they might as well not have existed. Seeing Sienna Nealon’s brother in real life, in front of his own house …

  It finally let the train on the loop jump the track.

  “They’re coming for me,” he said. “Looking for me. I have to leave.” He looked up in the mirror, saw fearful eyes. “I don’t want to be caught by them.” He’d read the articles about what happened to metas—or what was suspected, in any case. No one knew for sure, after all. There were no trials, no word, and those people never saw the light of day again.

  Whatever happened to them, it wasn’t for him, that was certain. After all, he hadn’t meant to. It just … happened. It was an accident.

  “I want my life back,” he said, leaning back against the cloth seat in his tiny car. “I just want … my life back. I just want …”

  He opened his eyes. He was still in the Snyders’ driveway.

  Benjamin took one last mournful breath and started his car. Maybe they’d forget. Maybe it’d be all right tomorrow. Maybe it really was just a nightmare. These sorts of things didn’t happen to real people. He’d just …

  He’d just wake up tomorrow and go on living. Things like this didn’t happen to him. Exciting things didn’t just happen to him. And he loved that about his life. It was steady. Predictable. Stayed well between the lines.

  Yes, perhaps it was a dream. It was certainly too surreal to be reality.

  Though that thought wasn’t much in the way of comfort, he clung to it with everything he had. Benjamin put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway. He needed to sleep. To sleep, to wake up refreshed, and possibly somewhere else. Then, maybe, he could get back to the business of living life. Go to work tomorrow, come home, put everything else behind him.

  Yes, that was what he needed to do. With unsteady hands, he turned the wheel at the end of his street and headed off to find somewhere to sleep, perchance to dream … of a better tomorrow, one in which today had never happened.

  9.

  Sienna

  When I made it back to my barstool, there was a sweet drink waiting for me with pineapple and a maraschino cherry speared together in the middle of it. I wanted a sip but I held off, still a little put off by my experience in the bathroom. I’d peeked into the men’s room as I came back out of the hallway and found nothing—no sign of a mirror looking through into the women’s room or anything creepy like that, just a normal looking bathroom. Or, as normal-looking a bathroom as you can have with urinals. They sure as hell don’t look normal to me. Or private.

  “Hey,” Brent’s face looked out from behind the curtain separating the bar from the kitchen, “burger’ll be ready in a few.”

  “Is that so?” I asked coolly.

  His forehead creased, but he mostly maintained his smile as he answered. “That is so. What’s up with you?”

  “Why? Do I look like I’ve just seen a ghost?” I asked, trying to mask my irritation.

  “Not sure I’ve ever seen anyone who’s actually seen a ghost,” Brent said, still sticking half out of the curtain like an actor trying to get a look at the crowd before a performance. “You mostly just look cranky to me. Did we run out of toilet paper in the ladies’ room again? Because if so, I’m sorry. Someone keeps coming in and stealing—”

  “No, your toilet paper supply appears to be quite robust,” I said. If he was guilty of pulling this crappy prank on me, he was playing it cool in an epic way. Dude must have antiperspirant like a desert, because most people tend to quiver a little at the knees when I get mad at them. One time, at the Target returns counter, I sent a teenage clerk running into the back room when I “gently” (and accidentally) dropped a malfunctioning tablet through their wooden countertop. I thought it was a very savvy move on her part, actually.

  Strength. I haz it. Control? Eh. Working on it, still.

  “So what’s up?” Brent asked, emerging from behind the curtain. “In thirty seconds or less, please, unless you like your burger well done. Which is a funny way to say ‘burnt to a crisp,’ I always thought. I would have gone with, ‘poorly done—’”

  “Playing pranks on me is not cool,” I said. “And by ‘not cool,’ I’m understating it like ‘well done.’ I actually mean, ‘potentially fatal.’”

  “Whoa,” Brent said, hands in the air in utter surrender. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I would not prank you, and not just because of the fatal thing. I have not pranked anyone since primary school, and it was tossing a worm on Berrie Jansen’s dress in hopes that she’d notice me.” His voice diverged into a strange, quasi-European accent, and he sounded … stressed.

  “Okay,” I said, in measured tones, lifting my head to look at myself in the massive mirror that stretched above the bar, “well, I just had a ghost-story type experience in your bathroom.”

 
He frowned. “Like … full torso apparition? Would it spike the PKE meter?”

  I sighed. “Why do I encounter geeks everywhere I go? Yes, Egon. The mirror went dark, a shadowed shape told me I wasn’t supposed to be here—”

  “That sounds more like a slasher movie.” Now he was frowning like he was mulling over what I was saying. Still no sign of deceit or trickery, and I was reasonably good at knowing when people were lying to me.

  “Whatever it was,” I said, “it was clearly meant to freak me out.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “it doesn’t seem to have done the job on you. I, on the other hand, might need a change of undershorts after that oblique reference to you killing me.” He leaned forward on the bar. “Do you still want your burger and drink?”

  I thought about it for a minute. He seemed guileless, but that could have been a disguise. I’d been fooled by clever liars before, but … dammit, I was hungry, and it wasn’t like my cabin was going to be stocked with food. “Yes,” I said, “I still want the burger.”

  “Then let me get that for you before it becomes not just poorly done, but shittily done.” He disappeared behind the curtain and a moment later his voice wafted out. “You can come watch me if you want, make sure I’m not … I dunno, lacing it with hallucinogens or whatever it is you think I might do.”

  “I’d be more concerned about a hearty spit from you at this point,” I said, slipping up and behind the bar in a couple seconds, quietly moving aside the curtain. He glanced over his shoulder from where he stood at a prep station, plating my burger and made a hocking noise in his throat while smiling. I shook my head. “Gross.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Not for accusing me of … uh … whatever you accused me of. Rallying ghosts against you or something.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said. “I was … probing.”

  He held up a plastic-gloved hand. “You might need one of these if you’re going probing.”