by Paul Collins
Medusa screeched with joy. The pompous fool thought that he controlled her power! Ha! This monster was no target for her anger. It was gorgonslaying Perseus that she hated.
Her wreath of snakes lifted their heads, all at once, and fastened their fangs on Perseus' vulnerable wrist. He let go of the snakes and screamed, but he kept his eyes squeezed closed. It made no difference. Medusa's head, released from his grasp, hung in mid-air and she watched with glee as the snakes' venom stopped the hero's heart, and his face went slack and empty.
As delicate as a cat, the monster took Perseus' limp body between her gigantic jaws, and crunched. Soon, a hero-sized lump was moving down the sea monster's sinuous throat.
‘Bravo!' the princess cried, and the monster put her great head down to nuzzle the girl. Then, before Medusa's eyes, the monster blurred and shrank into a green-grey mist. Princess and monster merged.
The gorgon, far-sighted daughter of the gods, had known the truth, even from inside the bag where Perseus had thrust her severed head. Together, princess and monster were whole.
‘Now,' the princess said, her head held very high, ‘it's time to deal with my father.'
Medusa laughed and laughed.
My brother's dying and they won't let me see him.
I haven't seen Mum and Dad for a week, either. The hospital cops came and took me away because they said I had the same virus that's killing Dan. Which is a load of garbage because Dan reached me with a Touch and told me to run.
We'd always been close, him and me. I can remember when I was really little and I fell out of the old pine tree in the backyard. My arm was bent all funny and it hurt so much I felt sick. Mum and Dad were inside, but I couldn't get enough breath to shout or even cry. Everything was going all wobbly, like I was looking underwater through a back-to-front telescope, then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. A little tap, like a single finger, then Dan whispered in my ear, ‘Hold on.’
I gritted my teeth and looked over my shoulder, but he wasn't there. Then I saw the back door of the house open and Dan hurried over to me. He picked me up but I don't remember much after that.
It was like that. We always knew where the other was. Sometimes I could tell what he was doing. Once in a while – usually in a sticky situation – one of us could Touch the other. It happened half a dozen times that I can remember. Dan said it was because we were so alike, even though he was ten years older than me.
When the Touch came I tried to run, but the hospital cops were at the door and they stunned me and hauled me away anyway. So I'm stuck in the same hospital as Dan – I can tell that – but I'm all alone. Except for the nurses and they don't say anything.
Now I'm working on my backup plan to get away. Always have a backup, Dan says. Always have a backup.
Of course, escaping from a prison hospital isn't easy when a spy-eye is hovering near the ceiling, watching every move I make.
I might sound suspicious, but I think I have plenty of cause to be. Having a genius for an older brother makes you a bit sensitive to stuff like that, I suppose. Not that Dan is a problem or anything. We've always got on fine. It's good to have a big brother who's a hotshot doing government stuff. It makes life a bit more comfortable. Our water ration, for a start, lets us shower every second day if we're careful.
But that'll all be over, I suppose, when Dan's dead. I feel sorry for him – for myself, too. Twenty-three years doesn't seem like long enough.
Finally I decided that lying in this bed was too much of doing nothing, but that spy-eye followed me wherever I went in the room. The closer it came, the more its high-pitched whine set my teeth on edge. It had a little red light, too, that blinked all the time. Even when lights went off, it was there.
I hated that thing.
Lying on the bed, I realised my backup plan wasn't going anywhere. The room had nothing to work with – no TV, no data connection, not even an outside window. The door's always locked. The nurses have special electronic keys they wear around their necks and they never speak anyway, so it's a nightmare.
I considered crawling under the bed.
The bed was one of those proper hospital beds – all steel, powered, with wheels. Like a little kid, I decided to drape the blankets over the sides to make a cave. When I crawled in, it was dim and close, but it felt good. For the first time in days, I had some privacy.
Then that stupid spy-eye nudged through the blankets and followed me in.
I was sitting there, bent over, knees pulled up to my chest, arms wrapped around them, when I saw it. Smug, it looked, blinking away, whining and hovering like it owned the place.
I couldn't stand it. I flicked at it, backhand, not really thinking. After all, everyone knew that spy-eyes have object avoidance circuits built in, and they're pretty good at dodging. It must have been the close confines under the bed, or maybe it was the lack of light, but I smacked the thing out of the air.
I stared. It tumbled backwards and hit the underside of the bed, right near the wall. I threw up my arm at the flash of light that erupted, followed by a sizzling crackle that didn't sound good at all.
When the spots stopped jumping in front of my eyes, I saw the spy-eye on the floor. It was charred and dead, no blinking light, and it was right underneath a tangle of melted plastic and wires hanging from the bed. Some sort of fuse box, I guessed, and then I was scrambling out from underneath into the darkness of the room.
The lights were out. The only illumination came from a small emergency lamp on the wall. It was enough for me to see that the door had popped open, its electrical lock undone by the power surge or whatever had happened when the spy-eye had collided with the fuse box under the bed.
It looked as if I suddenly had a backup plan.
I knew I wouldn't have long. A place like this would have standby generators or warning systems. So I grabbed my clothes from the drawers by the bed and slipped out of the room.
At first, I didn't really know where I was going. I just wanted out of that cell and I wanted to see Dan. The corridor was dark and quiet, with little patches of white thrown by the emergency lights. Stripping off my hospital gown, I pulled on my clothes. No socks, but my runners felt good on my feet. Dan bought them for me only a few months ago. He said they had some special feature, but I never found out what it was and I couldn't be bothered reading the manual.
I could hear noises: shouts, mostly, not sounding happy, then footsteps running and I decided to get away from my room. I turned right. It was as good a direction as any.
I wanted to see Dan. You know, one last time and all that. I knew he was here somewhere. It was just a matter of finding him. And not being rounded up myself, of course.
I turned a corner and nearly crashed into a trolley or something in the dark. It was a bit of luck because at that moment a security drone came into the corridor ahead. ‘DO NOT BE ALARMED,’ it bleated. ‘STAY IN YOUR ROOMS. POWER WILL BE RESTORED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.’ I crouched behind the trolley and the drone drifted past, the big brother of the spy-eye, with monitoring equipment, and sonic stunners and restraining grapplers, too.
The doors all looked the same. I didn't want to just start barging in at random, so I looked for signs where the corridors intersected but they didn't help. ‘Ward 6’, ‘Ward 10’, stuff like that. Useless.
There were four corridors in front of me, shadowy and silent. The emergency lights were yellow and feeble, hardly holding back the dark. Sirens sounded in the distance.
‘There he is!’
The shout made me whirl around. Two shadowy figures were running towards me. ‘Stop right there!’ one of them called out.
Hospital police. That was enough for me. I ran.
I was looking for a fire escape. They'd be sprung open by the power surge and if I could get to the basement or carpark or something, I'd be okay. But all that faced me was closed door after closed door. I raced from pool of light to pool of light, glad for the new runners. Behind me, the cops weren't exactly observing the ‘Quiet – Hospit
al’ rule. They kept shouting at me to stop. I was getting worried someone would appear and box me in, but the place was quieter than any hospital I'd heard of. Where were the nurses? The orderlies? The emergency department?
I skidded to a stop on the shiny floor as I realised that I'd nearly barrelled past a gaping fire escape door. I darted through and from behind me came a different voice: ‘Stop kid! Organ Squad!’
The Organ Squad. It was worse than I thought.
I slammed the door shut. The whole concrete shaft of the stairwell boomed and echoed. My mind raced as fast as my feet as I went down the stairs. The Organ Squad? No one wanted to be stopped by the Organ Squad. Living people had the habit of ending up not alive when the squad got them. They were supposed to be the squad that made sure road fatalities arrived at the hospital in time for their organs to be used in transplants. At least, that was the official story. Rumours said that they were paid by the organ, so some of them figured that waiting around for vehicle crashes was too chancy. Why wait around when you could cause a few accidents when it suited you?
When I reached the next floor down I stared at the sign. Special Ward. I knew then, as sure as I knew anything, that Dan was on this floor. When I wrenched open the door and darted through, the lights came back on.
The hospital was suddenly full of whines and snaps and humming as it woke up again. The fire door behind me snapped shut with the sort of sound that meant it wasn't opening again easily. The lights overhead blinked on and the place wasn't a nightmare of shadows and shapes any more. It was a perfectly ordinary hospital corridor running away to my right and left, with another opening straight ahead.
I dropped my head, closed my eyes and pinched my nose. I thought about Dan, remembering the way he stared into space when he was working on a really hard problem, and then I had it. He was in the corridor to my right, seven doors down, and I knew I had to grab the key from the nurse's station and that I had about twenty seconds to do it before the nurse came back.
Desk, hooks, key and I had it, one, two, three. I slapped the card into the slot in the door and it opened. I threw it shut and stood with my back against it, breathing heavily. I'd made it.
‘You idiot.’ Dan's voice came from the single bed in the room. ‘Of all the places, you had to come here.’
The room was bigger than mine, but that was about all. Still no window, no TV, nothing warm or homey. Concrete, all round.
Dan was stretched out, the dark hollows under his eyes making them look enormous. He was surrounded by machines, plugged into him all over. He looked like he weighed about forty kilos, and all his hair was gone.
‘I came to say goodbye,’ I panted.
‘I'm not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘But you are.’
I went to his bedside. The steel rail around the bed was cool and hard as I gripped it. ‘What?’
He stared at me and it took me a while to realise he was crying. ‘I should have warned you,’ he said. ‘You could've run, lost yourself. Been safe, for a while, maybe.’
‘It's okay,’ I said. I figured that was the sort of thing to say to a sick person. ‘I have a backup plan. I'm getting out through the emergency department.’
He stared at me and he looked old, ancient, and tired. When he answered, it was as if he hadn't heard me at all. ‘And don't blame Mum and Dad, either. It wasn't their idea. The government made them do it.’
I could hear voices outside the door, rushing past. ‘Looks like I don't have long.’
He laughed then, but it was a laugh that was full of horror. ‘No, I guess you don't.’ He lifted one hand, and it had no fat on it at all. It was like a bunch of sticks as he grabbed my arm. His skin was hot and dry. ‘Do you remember that red bike you had? The one with the gears?’
I patted his hand. ‘I remember.’
‘And you remember how you were always riding over those dirt hills and running into trees and coming back with wheels that were bent and wrecked?’
Sure I did. I did it for weeks back a few years ago, before Mum and Dad found out and took the bike away. ‘It was fun.’
‘And you remember how you'd drag the bike back home all mangled, and then the next day the wheels would be all straight and ready to go again?’
I frowned. ‘Yes.’
‘I had a shed full of spares – spare wheels, spare brakes, spare cables. Anything I needed, I had all racked up and ready to go. Any spare part your bike needed, I had.’
I stopped patting his hand and looked into his eyes. I tried to say something, but my voice wouldn't work.
‘I'm sorry,’ he croaked. ‘The government says I'm too important to let die.’
I held up an arm and closed my eyes, hoping it would all go away. From behind me, I heard the door open. Rough hands grabbed me.
Dan sat up in the bed. Before the doctor could get to him, he held out a hand. ‘You'll always be a part of me.’
It is definitely not cool to be bullied. Only one thing might be worse, of course, and that's for it to happen in front of a girl. Barry Panner and his gang were good at bullying. They did jiu jitsu at the youth centre, and they knew about agonising wristlocks and arm locks that could have a person squealing like a pig having a really painful operation without anaesthetic.
The first that Peter knew about Lyndel arriving was soon after the pain stopped. He was huddled against a wall in the park with his hands over his face, and was only aware that nobody was touching him any more, and that everything had gone quiet. Footsteps approached, but he did not look. Barry and his boys had ways of making one think that it was all over just before they really laid in.
‘You can get up, they have gone.’
The voice was female, and had an accent that might have been French. Peter lowered his hands. Lyndel was looming over him, her hands on her knees. She was wearing black. She always wore black. She was tall and thin, and was barely touching puberty. She was also a class above him, and he was fourteen.
In the distance he could see Barry and his gang. They were sniggering. Lyndel followed his stare. Now that Lyndel was looking at them, Barry and his gang decided that they were late for jiu jitsu and hurried away. She extended her hand to Peter. He cowered back against the wall. Lots of girls fancied themselves as the class witch, but though Lyndel never said anything like that, one got the feeling she didn't have to.
‘Don't you want me to help you up?’ she asked, smiling quite sweetly.
This is it, I'm gone, I'm gonna be a frog before dinnertime, thought Peter. Lucky they don't eat frogs’ legs in Australia.
Her hand was clammy, like she had been rubbing moisturiser into it. Peter found himself back on his feet, and he didn't even have green skin and webbed fingers.
‘Thanks,’ he mumbled.
‘For what?’ Lyndel asked as they walked slowly through the park.
‘Like, er, putting a spell on Barry and his bashers.’
Lyndel laughed. It was not a sarcastic laugh, more like a polite laugh because she had heard something really funny.
‘Spells do not exist,’ she said.
‘Then why did Barry's gang back off when you arrived? They never back off.’
Lyndel clasped her hands, except for two fingers, which she pressed against her lips as she thought.
‘I applied scientific principles to them.’
‘Science?’ asked Peter, wondering if he had heard correctly.
‘I am a mad scientist, after all.’
‘Mad scientist?’ he echoed, feeling really worried again.
‘Oh yes. Would any sane scientist dress in black?’
Peter considered carefully. Without her, Barry and his gang would still be doing things to him that Amnesty International would not approve of. He decided to be polite and play along with her.
‘So how did you do it?’ he asked.
‘Training and conditioning. Long ago, last century, there was a Russian scientist studying behaviour,’ she said. ‘He put a dog in a room, then shone a circular light
on the wall and fed it. Hours later he shone an oval light on the wall and gave the dog an electric shock. Gradually he made the oval more and more like a circle. After a week the dog ran around in circles and howled whenever any sort of light was shone on the wall, and it bit anyone who tried to feed it.’
‘Awesome.’
‘That's what I did to Barry and his followers.’
‘Awesome. But … how did you do it? Like did you put them into a room, wire them up to the mains and feed them dog food?’
Lyndel laughed again, a sort of tinkling laugh that sounded like it came from someone smaller. By now they were out of the park and walking down a street. Lyndel waved in the direction of one of the houses, and Peter followed her through the front gate. Barry and his boys would soon be in the gym for their jiu jitsu class. He just had to stay out of reach until then.
‘Coffee?’ asked Lyndel as she led him into her room.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ he mumbled.
Peter could not stand coffee, but it did not seem a good idea to be unsociable. He looked around. The room was lined with shelves that were jammed with powders, liquids and text books. A large table was crammed with glass tubes, beakers, flasks, gas burners and other laboratory materials. In one corner was a bed made up with black sheets, blankets and pillows. Her wardrobe was open, and the stuff inside was so black that it looked like space without the stars.
He watched as she began to heat up coffee in a flask over a Bunsen burner.
‘So what do you think?’ Lyndel asked.
‘I've never seen so much black gear in one place.’
‘I meant of my laboratory.’
‘Oh, cool. Just like you'd expect from some weirdo scientist girl.’
There was a short but exquisitely awkward moment, then Lyndel said, ‘I like you, Peter.’ She poured his coffee into a mug with a picture of Einstein on it. ‘You make me laugh. You amuse people without being cruel.’
‘Thanks, I think.’
She took his hand in hers. It still had that wet, clammy, moisturised feel.
‘So I am going to do you a favour.’