Solstice Survivors (Book 1): Superhero Syndrome

by Larrinaga, Caryn

  Unlike the last time I’d come into the diner looking for help, everybody in the place leapt out of their booths and dashed to my side. A hundred voices seemed to speak at once.

  “Oh, my goodness!”

  “Your face!”

  “Quick, somebody get Helena!”

  Someone helped me into a booth and tipped my head back slightly. I allowed my eyes to close and heard a familiar voice a moment later. It was the same woman who’d helped me the day before.

  “What happened?”

  “I fainted,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to speak so softly; I’d wanted normal, but my voice box opted for church mouse.

  I opened my eyes, and Helena’s round, concerned face filled my vision. It reminded me a bit of an owl—a big, fluffy brown owl with walnuts for eyes—and I wondered if she could turn her head all the way around. Wouldn’t that be nice? I could see behind me all the time. Never get snuck up on. No need for rearview mirrors. Maybe I could look down and check out my own butt… hey, I look pretty good in these sweatpants.

  “Stay with me now.”

  My eyes flew open. How long had they been closed?

  Helena patted my cheek. “No sleeping. Now let me see. You’ve got to move your hand.”

  She tugged at my fingers, and I allowed her to lift them away from my wound. Pain immediately stabbed into me again. I cried out, and she pressed something warm against my forehead.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not very deep.”

  “But the blood…” Thin rivulets of it ran down my arm and dripped onto my jeans. I focused on Helena’s face so I wouldn’t have to see the deep red streams.

  “Head wounds just bleed more. Nothing to worry about. Now relax. My daughter is bringing the car around. We’ll get you to the hospital and—”

  “No!” I struggled against her, but she gripped my shoulders too tightly for me to get away.

  “Honey, you need stitches. There’s no two ways about it. Here’s Angie with the car.”

  Two men with thick, shaggy beards appeared at Helena’s side and helped me out of the booth. They gingerly walked me to the curb, where an old green station wagon was waiting, and buckled me into the passenger seat. Before I could thank them, the door was closed, and I was being sped down Palaemon Street.

  “How far is it?” I asked, trying to turn my head to look at the girl beside me. Pain jolted through me, and I decided maybe I should just stick with facing forward. Her head remained a fuzzy blob in my peripheral vision.

  “Not far,” she said. “Just a couple minutes. You need to stay awake, okay? Do you need the radio on?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  I focused on the white lines in the road as we drove, forcing my eyes to stay open until they began to feel dry. Then I blinked, slowly, making sure my eyes opened again. Angie kept up a steady stream of conversation, but most of it flowed over and around me without actually making it into my ears.

  “That used to be a great little bookstore… You’re from around here right… Remember the St. Patrick’s Day parade… my mom always used to… Here we are.”

  The station wagon screeched to a halt in front of the emergency room doors, and a man dressed in teal scrubs helped me out of the car and into a wheelchair. Angie scurried along on at my left side, jabbering to the guy as he wheeled me through the blessedly empty waiting room.

  And then there was pain. Doctors leaned over me, poking around in my head wound. They draped something large and white over my face, and I watched the light filter through the cloth as they poured water into the gash on my forehead to clean it out. Then, the pain stopped. A few stitches later, and Angie and I were left alone in the exam room. The pounding in my head had subsided, and I could hear my own thoughts again.

  This sucks.

  My irritation at the whole situation burned inside my chest. I’d been in Weyland less than forty-eight hours, and I was already at South Weyland General. Hadn’t I spent enough time in hospitals over the last month? At least the research facility in New York had been pretty new, and they’d made an effort to make it a pleasant place to be, painting the walls in gentle pastels and flooding each room with as much natural light as possible. Whoever designed North Weyland had apparently never even heard of a window, and their favorite color was a too-bright pea-soup green that managed to clash brilliantly with everything from the bold colors in the abstract-patterned carpet to my faded hospital gown.

  Silence hung in the air around us, and I vacillated between struggling to find something to talk about and wishing Angie would just go away. She just sat there, digging around in her spaceship-shaped backpack, not looking up at me as I stared at her. She looked a lot like her mom—dark skin, brown curls, and deep-set brown eyes. I didn’t know what to say to her. I hated that a stranger had driven me to the hospital, that she’d probably watched while the doctors sewed me up. I would’ve preferred to endure that indignity privately, and I’d have liked some time to try to figure out what in the hell had happened with my hands. The business with the plaster around them had been real. And aside from looking slightly more pink than usual, they were completely healed from my fall in the streets. I’d only ever heard of something so weird happening in comic books, and I wasn’t ready to go down that line of thinking yet… wasn’t ready to think words like “mutation” or “powers.”

  I shivered. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to poke at my hands and see if I could get whatever had happened to happen again, but Angie had repeatedly said she would stay with me until they let me go home. So here I sat, trying to imagine what someone with good social skills might say right now.

  Angie pulled a bottle of lotion out of her bag, squirted some into her hands, and saved me the trouble of coming up with something to say by breaking the silence herself. “How are you feeling?”

  I shrugged. “Not too shabby, now that they’ve given me the Frankenstein treatment.”

  She cracked a smile. “Atta girl.”

  “Thanks, by the way. For driving me.”

  We fell into another awkward silence that lasted until a short, thin woman stuck her head through the door. “Miss McBray? Do you have a moment?”

  “Uh… I guess so.”

  “Great! I just need to get some financial information from you.” Her high, chipper voice felt completely at odds with everything about the current situation. She bounced to my side and held a pen over a clipboard. “Employment status?”

  “Um…” I glanced over at Angie.

  “Do you want me to step out?” she asked.

  After a few moments of thought, I shook my head. It didn’t really matter. She’d seen my naked skull. We were past shame now. “Unemployed,” I told Mrs. Clipboard.

  She scribbled something on the sheet of paper. “Do you have medical insurance?”

  “No.”

  More scribbles, plus a brief frown from Angie.

  Clipboard asked me a few more questions before thanking me and turning to leave.

  “Wait!” I called. “Did they say how much longer I’ll have to stay?”

  She glanced down at her papers. “They want to do a CT scan. Someone should be in shortly to take you to Radiology.”

  “A CT scan? Why?”

  “You blacked out in the diner for about a minute,” Angie put in. “I guess after a head wound that’s not a super great thing. They want to check for any swelling or bleeding in your brain.”

  My stomach twisted and hugged itself. Swelling? Internal bleeding? Great. The hospital employee slipped out of the room, leaving me alone with Angie and my fears.

  “Hey, don’t stress out.” Angie cast her gaze around the room. “Umm… oh! Here. Let’s watch some TV. Distract you a little bit, okay?”

  I shrugged. I doubted anything on television would be able to overpower the voice in my head that was screaming about concussions and how I might die in my sleep if I closed my eyes, but at least I wouldn’t have to make any more small talk.

  Angie grab
bed the remote control on the tray beside me and turned on the television. The end credits from some sitcom were rolling across a black screen. Then, the opening sequence of the nightly news began, and a tsunami-sized wave of nostalgia crashed into me.

  The same face that had manned the news desk since I was a kid stared at me from the television. Jim Jenkins’ jet black hair and severe widow’s peak gave him an ominous look. When I was five, I’d thought he was a vampire. I figured he’d taken a job as a nighttime news broadcaster because it was the only thing he could find where he didn’t work while the sun was out. I hadn’t understood until I was much older why my mother insisted on telling everyone she met—literally every single person—about my theory, and why everyone seemed to think it was hysterical.

  “Good evening, Weyland,” he began in a deep, sonorous voice. His sentence ended on a faint tremble, and I realized with a start that he had to be in his sixties now.

  How much does he pay his hairdresser to keep quiet about his dye jobs? I wondered.

  Mean-spirited questions aside, I relaxed against my pillow at the sound of his voice. I loved the news, but I’d been so engrossed in dismantling my life in Albany and moving back to Weyland that I hadn’t listened to or watched anything since my drive to Thatcher Park. I hadn’t even bothered to read anything online. Watching a broadcast made me feel just a little bit normal.

  “Good idea,” I told Angie. “Thanks.”

  “Our top story tonight: another young woman has gone missing from the Trident.” A photograph of a thin black girl about my age faded in beside his face. “Chelsea Thomas was last seen leaving her family’s apartment on Athens Avenue earlier this evening. When she failed to meet a friend at a coffee shop near her home, her mother initiated a search. Miss Thomas’ purse and one of her winter boots was found beside a dumpster at the corner of Palaemon and Triton, but there has been no other sign of her in the area.”

  A pulse shot through my body, and my heart stopped. An age passed as a terrifying thought formed in my brain, and then my heart began to beat once more.

  Palaemon and Triton. That’s the corner I turn down to get home from the station. Did I pass her?

  And then the question I hated to ask: Did I pass whoever took her?

  I doubted I’d have noticed anything suspicious. I’d been too wrapped up in thinking about Bruce. I crossed my arms, digging my fingernails into my biceps and leaving tiny half-moons in my skin.

  That guy… I wouldn’t be here right now if not for him. I could be at home, reading comics and maybe drinking a nice hot cup of tea before bed. But nope! I’m here instead, waiting to get wheeled into a radiology bay.

  From her chair beside my bed, Angie murmured something and made the sign of the cross. It occurred to me that she might know the missing girl.

  “Friend of yours?” I asked.

  “No. We’ve been lucky. Nobody we know has been taken. But still… it’s heartbreaking. I hope they’re all okay.”

  I was about to ask how many other missing girls there were when a knock sounded at the door. A man in pale khaki scrubs entered, head bent over yet another clipboard as he walked toward my bed. At first, all I saw was a mess of sandy blond hair. Then he lifted his head and stared at me, brown eyes going wide in his lean, too-familiar face. He looked as stunned to see me as I was to see him.

  It was my stalker from the day before.

  The words shot out of my mouth before I had any hope of stopping them. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  My stalker’s expression darkened, and his mouth twisted into a deep frown. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Angie stared back and forth between us, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to fill her in. I preferred to leap into an argument.

  “You’re the guy who was following me yesterday!”

  “I wasn’t—!” He huffed out through his nose and gripped the clipboard, knuckles whitening around the flimsy plastic. He glanced at Angie, but she just frowned and shrugged. He stepped forward and lowered his voice. “You don’t seriously think I was following you, do you?”

  I didn’t, but I also didn’t know how else to classify him in my brain. ‘Guy who wasn’t following me and was probably really trying to help me up’ didn’t have the same ring to it as ‘Stalker Jerk.’

  A tiny hum of pain skittered across my forehead, and I was reminded of what I was doing here in the first place. I elected to answer his question with one of my own.

  “Are you here to take me to the CT scan?”

  He stared at me for a moment, eyes narrowed as he seemed to consider his next move. I was giving him an out, and I crossed my fingers at my side and hoped he’d take it and let me just pretend I wasn’t being an irrational freak.

  A moment later, he nodded. “My name is Reed. I’m a radiology technician, and I’m here to take you for your CT scan.”

  His voice was cold and flat. All the heat and defensiveness from a moment before were gone, as though he’d flipped a switch and become HealthBot5000. He set his clipboard down on my legs and raised the sides of my bed before wheeling me out into the hallway, leaving Angie behind us. If someone had asked me two minutes before, I’d have been certain I wouldn’t want her to come with me for the scan. Now, however…

  Reed pushed my bed down a long hallway lined with exam rooms. I resisted the urge to peek into any of them. Before my stint at Hudson, I’d had a bit of morbid curiosity about what other people were being seen for. But after seeing the curious looks on the faces of people who passed my room day after day, I’d lost the taste for speculation.

  That is, I’d lost it for speculating about strangers. When it came to making wild guesses about my own condition, my brain was in fine form this evening. By the time we reached the room with the radiology equipment, I’d swung entirely the other direction on whether or not the plaster around my hands had been real. It became obvious to me that the Solstice Syndrome was back, and it’d brought a new friend: hallucinations! Hooray!

  When we reached the room with the radiology machinery, Reed bent over to help me stand. He gently grabbed my right arm and an electric pulse ran through me, just as it had in Palaemon Street. This time, however, only the muscles in my arm twitched. I stared down at it, my eyes wide.

  Reed noticed and frowned. “Do you have any history of convulsions? Epilepsy? Tourette’s?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm.” He picked up his clipboard and flicked through a few pages, then stopped and stared at something. His dark eyes widened, and something tightened in his cheek. At last, he looked back up at me. “You’re a Solstice Syndrome survivor.”

  I didn’t like the way he said it. It wasn’t a question. He wasn’t looking for confirmation. His tone was almost accusatory, like I’d done something wrong just by being alive. I shrank back in the bed, my defensive walls snapping up around me.

  “Says who?”

  “Says you, when you filled out your medical history.”

  “Is that a problem?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. I failed; the last word came out in a squeak.

  Reed’s expression softened. “No. I mean, it shouldn’t be. I assume you haven’t had any symptoms since the meteor shower?”

  I hadn’t, but it seemed like a big assumption to make. “How’d you know?”

  “It’s been all over the news. Everyone who was hospitalized for it just suddenly got better the night of the shower.”

  “Oh.”

  For some reason, my response made him smile. He held up a single finger and, very slowly and deliberately, brought it toward my arm again. I braced myself for the jolt. This time, it was a miniscule spark, barely more than being touched by someone who was rubbing their feet on a rug to build up static electricity. I met Reed’s eyes, and we both shrugged in unison then laughed at the same time.

  “Well,” he said, “You might be part electric eel, but we’ve still got to scan you. Come on.”

  He helped me stand and guided me over to the
CT machine. I eyed it warily; this wasn’t my first time in one of these things. I’d been scanned more times than a barcode at the research hospital. At least this was just a CT scan, and I wouldn’t have to spend an hour getting shrieked at and deafened by an MRI. But the whole process still felt sickeningly familiar, and I hardly needed Reed’s instructions as he completed the process.

  Something occurred to me as he was pushing me back to my room.

  “Did you guys have any Solstice Syndrome patients here?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, and I’m glad. A hospital in Chicago had four patients, and somebody there leaked it to the press. A few days after the meteor shower, when the patients were released, reporters and cameras were all over them. I’d hate for that to happen to anyone here.”

  The thought of getting caught in a media frenzy just when I’d finally gotten out of the hospital made me sick to my stomach. If I hadn’t left Hudson when I did, would the same thing have happened to me?

  Reed pushed open the door to my room and wheeled me inside. Angie was gone, and I wondered for a moment if she’d left me before realizing she’d probably just gone to the bathroom. Reed eyed her empty chair then turned to me.

  “Your doctor should be in with your results in a little while. And…” He paused, then sucked in his lower lip. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean to freak you out, I swear.”

  He looked so genuinely contrite that I felt a little guilty for how much vitriol I’d mentally hurled at him over the last day.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m uh… I’m sorry for assuming you were trying to attack me or something.”

  Reed shrugged and said, “Better paranoid than dead.”

  On that upbeat note, he left me alone to wait for the doctor.

  “Your scar is looking less gnarly,” Angie told me. “Your hard work is paying off.”