An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Please,” he said, “just leave me alone.” He lowered his eyes to the newspaper and set his hands flat on the table. He could feel his veins pulsing in his temple. She was giving him a headache.

  He could see her in his peripheral vision. Her head was bowed, and he thought she might be trembling. He wasn’t sure what kind of outburst could result from that. He could guess a few possible ones.

  Instead, her pale hand reached out again. It came to rest on the front-page headline. The one about the President.

  “Did he talk to you?”

  He shoveled another mouthful of salad into his mouth. It tasted foul. The lettuce was slimy and the tomato was acidic. He forced himself to chew it.

  She tapped the picture of President Smith. “George, did he talk to you? Did he ask you anything? It’s important.”

  “George!” called someone else. Kathy, the crazy girl’s roommate. “Hey, how are you?”

  He pushed his fork through another lettuce leaf, but he couldn’t eat it. His stomach was churning after the last mouthful. On the plus side, his nausea was overwhelming his headache.

  Kathy stopped a few feet from the table. “Are you guys fighting about something?”

  George shook his head.

  Madelyn ignored her. “Smith gets into your head,” she told George. “I told you, it’s what he does. If he talked to you, we’re back to square one here.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” said Kathy. “Sorry.” She gave a meek wave and walked away.

  Madelyn opened her mouth and the Nextel cut her off with a chirp. “George,” called Jarvis. He sounded tired.

  He wrested the phone off his belt without looking at Madelyn. “Yeah, boss.”

  “Where are you right now?”

  He shot a glance at her. “Lunch.”

  “Finish up and come on back to the office.”

  “Did you want me to deal with that broken mirror?”

  “I put Mark on it. Come back to the office.”

  George loaded his tray. He thought about taking the newspaper, too, but Madelyn still had her hand on it. He stood up. “You need to get some help,” he said.

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?”

  He felt her eyes on him as he dropped off his tray and left. He tried not to think about her. His nausea was gone, but his head was pounding again.

  “I think I need to give you a couple of days off,” said Jarvis. “Just ’til this all calms down.”

  It was a kick in the gut, even though he’d felt it coming. “No,” he said. “Come on, Jarvis, you can’t.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t have a choice.”

  “I did what you said,” George told him. He wondered if someone had seen him talking to Madelyn. “What happened?”

  “That bitch from HR came looking for you. The lawyers wrote up some sort of disclaimer for you to sign, something to show parents. I said you were over working in the chemistry labs and her head almost exploded.”

  It took a moment to sink in. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Jarvis shook his head. “They’re suspending you while they ‘investigate.’ ”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Yeah, but you can’t prove it,” his boss said. “Did the feds give you a letter or a number to call or anything?”

  “Well … no.”

  Jarvis threw up his hands. “They’re paranoid, George. You and I both know there’s a few thousand parents who’ll be calling in if they find out there’s a suspected terrorist working here.”

  “I’m not a—” George bit his lip. He clenched his fists. “This is bullshit.”

  “I know, buddy. I know. But my hands are tied.” He paused. “I need your ID. And your keys, including the keycards.”

  George stood in front of the desk for a few more moments. Jarvis studied something on his computer screen. Then he grabbed a pen and tapped it on the desk. It click-click-clicked for almost thirty seconds before the fight went out of George and he pulled the lanyard off his neck.

  “You’re still going to get paid,” said Jarvis. “Won’t be any overtime or anything, but it’s something.”

  “Thanks.”

  It was clear there had been people in George’s apartment while he was at work. Books were shifted on the shelves. Some of his DVDs were out and opened. Half his clothes were on the floor and the closet door—

  What did he keep hidden in the closet?

  —the closet door was wide open. The cabinets were ajar and a few drawers left open an inch or two. He wondered if the government hired two types of agents—the ones you sent in when you didn’t want any sign they’d been there, and the ones you sent in when you wanted someone to know they’d been there. Maybe they were trained for both options.

  He tossed his phone and wallet on the kitchen table, kicked off his shoes, and started to clean up. He did easy stuff first. Pushed in drawers. Shuffled books and DVDs back into place.

  He shoved all the clothes in the hamper. They looked okay, but he didn’t like the idea of wearing clothes a lot of other people had been handling. Plus he’d seen enough CSI shows to know they could have been sprayed with different chemicals to show blood or gunpowder or chemical residue. Lots of stuff he could’ve told them they wouldn’t find.

  His laptop was open and on. The password probably hadn’t slowed them at all. For that matter, he realized, what about all his other online passwords? Bank of America? His e-mail? Facebook? Amazon? He’d need to reset them all.

  Although, would it make a difference? The President had seemed straightforward, but George still didn’t feel like trusting the blonde who’d snatched him off the street. He was probably being monitored somehow. Despite what he’d told Jarvis, it was a good bet his name was already on tons of Homeland Security lists. There might be cameras or microphones in his apartment, too.

  He was annoyed to find the browser history had been wiped clean on his computer. Half his bookmarks, too. It wasn’t a real surprise, it just felt kind of petty for them to erase stuff like that. Even if he had no plans to look up any of those sites again.

  After two hours George decided his apartment wasn’t any messier than it had been when he went to work. His stomach grumbled. There wasn’t much in the way of food in his apartment, but he knew he couldn’t blame that on the CIA or the Secret Service or whomever the blonde had worked for. He ate out once a week, just at the Mexican place up the street or the Thai restaurant a block over, but after missing a day and a half of work he wasn’t sure he should be spending any money he didn’t need to.

  There was a knock at the door.

  He felt more cautious than usual and checked through the peephole. He didn’t see anyone for a moment, then saw the little girl’s head in the bottom of the fish-eye view. He unlocked the door and swung it open.

  Not a little girl. A girl in a chair.

  “What are you doing here?” George asked.

  “Looking for you.” Madelyn rolled the wheelchair forward a few inches, but he didn’t open the door any wider or step out of the way.

  “How’d you find out where I live?”

  “You pointed the building out to me once,” she said. “While we were out scavenging.”

  “No more games,” he said. “I’m done. How did you get my address?”

  She sighed. “I had wild wheelchair sex with a guy in the university’s payroll department. Is that what you want to hear? Let me in.”

  He shook his head. “You need to go home. Or back to the dorms. Just go away.”

  “I’m trying,” she said. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t our life. We’re supposed to be somewhere else.”

  Her words made his head ache again. “Please,” he said, “just stop.”

  “You’re super-strong, George,” she insisted. “You’re invulnerable. You can breathe fire. You …” She took a breath and stared him in the eyes. “You can fly.”

  He closed hi
s eyes and counted to five. The pounding in his head faded. When he opened his eyes again, she was still staring at him.

  “You need to go,” he said again.

  She sighed. “Okay, then.”

  He waited for her to turn and head back down the hall.

  She didn’t move. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we need to get past this, and I can’t think of a better way to convince you once and for all.”

  Madelyn pulled something out from between her hip and the arm of the wheelchair. It seemed to swell in her hand as George realized what it was. She pointed it at him.

  “Whoa!” he said. He put his hands up. “Hang on. You don’t want to—”

  The gunshot rattled the window at the end of the narrow hallway.

  AMID ALL THE jostling and the shock, it crossed George’s mind he’d never been in an ambulance before.

  The oxygen mask and the gurney straps limited his movement, so he couldn’t get a good look at his chest. The woman with him—he wasn’t sure if she was a paramedic or an EMT or something else—kept asking him questions. His name. What year it was. Who was President. He was pretty sure they were supposed to distract him.

  The woman had strapped an oxygen mask over his face and stabbed at his arm with three different needles. She cut open his shirt and probed at his chest with her fingers. She pushed a wad of gauze against him and held it with one hand. The driver said something and she turned her head to talk over the sirens.

  She looked worried.

  He’d been shot. Madelyn had shot him at point-blank range. He’d seen enough cop shows to know what that meant. He was maybe an hour from death, crippled if he was lucky. He tried to wiggle his toes, and it felt like they moved, but he couldn’t see them. He knew amputees felt phantom pain and itches in limbs they hadn’t had for years.

  He also remembered reading somewhere people never felt extreme pain. The human body had some kind of built-in system for deadening nerves. People never felt the full pain of broken bones or other severe injuries.

  George felt a dull throb in his chest. Nothing else. Combined with the woman’s worried expression, it had him on the edge of panic. He tried to talk but she pressed the oxygen mask against his face.

  They pulled the gurney out of the ambulance and rolled him down a hallway. There were white panels and fluorescent tubes, just like the endless ones he changed at work. A new woman and two men leaned over him. He glimpsed a police uniform on one.

  The gurney slipped through another door and came to rest inside a circle of curtains. The police officer had vanished. The new woman moved her hands around his chest. She was younger with dark hair tied back in a short ponytail. She pushed and prodded and asked if he could feel any pain. Then she vanished, too.

  Had they given up on him? There was a word for it, when they stopped wasting resources on hopeless cases. His heartbeat felt strong. He wasn’t having any trouble breathing. He couldn’t feel anything in his chest. Even the dull ache had passed. He guessed it was all the shots they’d given him in the ambulance, even though his mind still felt very clear.

  The dark-haired woman reappeared. “George,” she said, “I’m Dr. Velez. We need to take some X-rays. It’s just going to be a few minutes. Don’t worry.”

  She was gone before he could ask anything. The gurney moved again, through the curtains and back into a hallway. It was chilly without a shirt on. A few minutes later a new face loomed over him. “George,” the man said, “we’re going to shift you.” They didn’t wait for him to respond, but lifted him onto a separate bed. It was cold, and a machine like a cannon loomed over him. The cannon made a loud click, he heard things clack beneath him, then another clack as the man switched something out.

  Then he was back on the gurney and moving through more halls. He settled back inside the curtain just in time to hear people arguing. Velez reappeared. “We’ve got to do this again,” she said. “Sorry.” The ceiling shifted and he went back down a familiar hallway. They slid him under the X-ray machine again, the plates click-clacked below him, and then he was headed back to the curtain room.

  His hand felt its way across his torso. He couldn’t feel any stitches or bandages. He wondered if he was numb.

  He was there for twenty minutes before he heard a voice. “You,” said Dr. Velez, “are a very lucky man.” She patted him on the arm and unfastened the strap across his hips.

  George looked at her, then craned his head to look at his bare chest. “What do you mean? Am I going to be okay?”

  The doctor smiled. “You’re going to be fine,” she said.

  He tried to think what “fine” could mean. “It missed organs,” he said. “I’ve seen that on television, when the bullet goes through you but misses everything. Is that what happened?”

  “Not exactly.” She pulled an X-ray from an oversized folder and pushed it up into the light box. The black and gray image flared to life. In real life, an X-ray was a lot darker than they looked on television. She looked back at him and her stubby ponytail swished on her collar. “You the morbid type?”

  “What?”

  “Do you read about attempted suicides? Darwin Awards? That kind of stuff?”

  “Now and then,” he said. “No more than anyone else, I guess.”

  “Ever hear any of those stories where somebody gets shot in the head in just the right place, at just the right angle, and it bounces off?”

  He looked at the X-ray, then back at the doctor. “What?”

  “It’s rare,” she said, “but it does happen. Bones are strong. A lot stronger than people give them credit for. Think about the punishment you can put a body through, and figure the skeleton’s taking most of it.”

  “I … I’m not sure what you mean.”

  She pointed at the gray skeleton on the light box and traced a line down the center of the rib cage. “You were shot, but the bullet hit you right on the sternum, between the fifth and sixth ribs.”

  His fingers pressed against the thick bone in his chest. It felt tender, but he couldn’t find the wound. “What do you mean?”

  “It bounced,” she said. “Hit dead center against the bone and flicked off. No breaks, no fractures. Didn’t even break the skin. You’ve got a bruise where it hit, but that’s it.” She tapped the X-ray with her pen. “Just the right place at just the right angle.”

  The temperature in the room seemed to rise three or four degrees. A wave of relief washed over him. “I’m not hurt?”

  Velez shook her head. “A bit of shock, understandably, but I can’t see anything. No fractures, lungs are clear, your heart’s in sinus rhythm. We could do a CT scan, but if you’re not in serious pain I think it’d just be a waste of time.”

  He tried to sit up, but she’d left the one strap across his chest. He bent his arms back to fumble with it. She walked back over and released the clasp. George sat up and looked down at his body. A faint purple-blue spot sat at the center of his chest. It was a little smaller than a quarter. It ached as he moved, just enough to remind him it was there.

  He waved a hand at the dull X-ray. “You’re sure there’s nothing?”

  “Positive.”

  “It’s really dark.”

  “Yeah, we did two sets. The first films were dark and we thought it was bad stock. Turns out our machine needs maintenance, the levels are really down. Or maybe X-rays can’t get through your skin, either.” She smiled and winked. “Seriously, though, don’t start thinking you’re bulletproof or you’ll end up right back here. Just be happy you can tell the coolest bar story ever. I can give you a prescription for some ibuprofen. Or just go home and have a good stiff drink. In a day or two you won’t even feel it.”

  Dr. Velez pulled the curtain aside. Doctors flitted around the rest of the emergency room. George glimpsed what looked like a dog attack victim before another curtain was yanked shut. He heard the click of instruments on trays from the other side of the green cloth. “I don’t mean to sound harsh,” said Velez, “but if you feel wel
l enough to walk, we could really use this bed for someone who needs it.”

  “Yeah, I see that,” said George. He looked down at his stocking feet. “Do I have shoes somewhere?”

  The doctor shook her head. “I think that’s how you came in. Sorry.”

  He slid off the bed. The cold floor reached up through his socks and prickled his feet. He patted his backside. No wallet, either. It was still sitting back on his kitchen table with his phone.

  He followed a line that led him to a set of wide double doors. No shoes, no shirt, no wallet, and he needed to get home from whatever hospital they’d brought him to. After he’d been shot. This was not going to be one of the better nights of his life.

  He pushed through the doors into the waiting room. It was a large, antiseptic chamber with rows of blue plastic chairs and a television showing an episode of Seinfeld. The far wall was all windows and a sliding door to a glassed-in foyer that led out of the hospital.

  The woman by the door was Karen Quilt. She stared at him from across the room. Her arms were crossed over a dark trench coat that looked made for substance more than style.

  They looked at each other for a moment before she crossed the waiting room in eight long, precise strides. She settled less than a foot from him. “You were supposed to meet me for coffee.”

  “Yeah,” said George. “I ended up meeting the President instead.” A vein pulsed behind his eyes as the words left his mouth.

  Her lips flattened out. “It is a very rare thing for a man to miss an appointment with me.”

  “I wasn’t really given a choice.”

  “You also did not return my calls.”

  “Yeah,” said George. “I was busy being shot.”

  “You did not return my calls before you were shot.”

  “Sorry. What are you doing here? It must be close to midnight.”

  She crossed her arms again. “I have been waiting for you. I heard the shooting reported on my father’s police scanner. I went to your apartment to investigate, then came to make sure you were uninjured.”

  He patted the bruise on his sternum. “Pretty much, yeah,” he said.