I pause to picture that conversation. “Hello, Officer Peterson? This is Dan Everton. Yes, we met the other night at the museum. I was the one who’d just killed a man in self-defense. Good, you remember. Well, the reason I’m calling is that I think I have superpowers, and I don’t know why. Can you help?”
That would definitely go over well. In a best-case scenario, Officer Peterson just thinks I’m playing a stupid joke on him. In a worst-case, I get involuntarily committed as a lunatic. There’s no version I can imagine where he believes me.
Check me out: noticing small details, engaging in subterfuge, and considering plans before rushing into them. Seems like maybe that extra brainpower didn’t completely wear off! I’m like a whole new man, one who can use 11% of his brain now. And yeah, I know that ten percent thing is a myth, but “I’m thinking one percent harder” doesn’t have the same ring to it. I wonder if I’m one percent stronger now, too?
Instead of getting myself in trouble with the police, I allow these thoughts to distract me while I head outside and get that hot dog from the street vendor like I’d considered doing earlier. It may not get me any closer to figuring out what’s going on, but I’m pretty sure that it’s still a significantly better use of my time.
- Chapter Seven -
I spend the first several hours of work that night trying to look up obituaries on my phone. I’m faced with two major problems, though. The first of these is that I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m pretty sure that the local paper prints the obituaries, so they must be on their website, but when I pull the site up, I run squarely into the second problem: my phone is terrible. It takes at least a minute to load even a simple, well-designed site, and “simple” and “well-designed” are not words which anyone would use to describe the paper’s mobile presence.
When the site does load, navigation is a nightmare. Scrolling happens at the phone’s whim, and only sometimes goes in the direction I’d indicated. Trying to get the keyboard to pop up so I can enter a term in a search box is an exercise in futility, and of course my efforts are interrupted by the need to go on rounds with some frequency. There’s no chance that Edgar’s not going to review these tapes, looking for a reason to fire me, so I can’t afford to give him one. When I leave this job, it’ll be because I quit, not because they trumped up a reason to kick me to the curb.
Given these obstacles, it’s all I can do not to throw my phone across the room in frustration a few times, but I persevere. Finally, I’m rewarded with a completely loaded version of the obituaries page showing me yesterday’s notices, but this only sheds light on two more problems.
The first one is that no one in these pictures is covered in hair, so presumably that was a side effect of whatever made them go crazy. It means I have no way of figuring out who on this page they might be, since the hair hid any distinguishing features. Fortunately, it’s sort of irrelevant given the second problem, which is that I’m an idiot.
See, the notices printed in the paper yesterday are for people who died a week or so ago. The paper’s not some magical device that knows when people have passed away and writes up a little blurb for them. I realize that after accounting for the breaks to do my rounds, I’ve just spent the better part of an hour trying to get my phone to load a page which half a second’s reflection would have told me was useless.
I glare at my phone again, because there’s no convenient mirror around for me to glare at myself. I am no longer convinced that I have any residual increase in brain activity from last night.
I carefully refrain from throwing my phone down, and take a break to calm myself and think of a new plan. I manage one almost immediately, which is “go to the hospital and ask them.” I figure that the hospital probably isn’t keen on giving out information about corpses to people who wander in off the street, though, so I discard this plan and work on another one.
Unfortunately, by the time the end of my shift rolls around, I still haven’t come up with one. I don’t know either of the guys’ names. I don’t know their jobs, their families, or where they’re from. I don’t even know what they look like, aside from their height, since the hair obscured their faces – and given how they were splitting out of their clothes, even the height might not be right. Not that it matters, particularly, as no one bothers to write someone’s height in their obituary. Unless I’m going to funeral homes with a measuring tape and a shocking lack of respect, that’s not going to be a useful guideline anyway.
And so I find myself stepping off of the bus outside of the hospital in the early hours of the morning with absolutely no plan in mind. I walk into the lobby, figuring I'll wing it when I get to the desk. As I pass through the doors, I rehearse a few possible openers: hello, I'm looking for my uncle who passed away. Hello, I'm here to ID a body. Hello, I'm here to steal a corpse for medical experiments. Which way to your morgue?
The desk, it turns out, is unstaffed when I arrive, meaning all of my seconds of preparation have been for naught. Luckily, the hospital has convenient signs on the walls indicating the way to various areas. The way to the morgue is not quite as prominently marked as some of the others, but I take a guess that it's in the basement, and when the elevator deposits me there, I find arrows pointing me in the right direction.
I also find, on my way down the hall, a familiar face.
"Hey, Dan!" says Brian, the EMT from the night of the first attack at the museum. He gives me a puzzled grin. "What brings you down to this level?"
I open my mouth to lie to him, and accidentally blurt out the truth.
"I'm really weirded out about the guy who attacked me. The guy I killed. I wanted to see if he was down here. To find out who he is. Was." I realize I'm babbling, and stutter my way to a stop. "Sorry. I'm sorry. That's weird."
But Brian's nodding like he understands. "Yeah, no. I get it. Look, I can't let you in there, but I can tell you who he is. C'mon back upstairs."
He leads the way down the hall, and as he waits for me to catch up to him at the elevators, he says, "I've been there when people have died. Most of them I haven't known, you know? I just met them a couple of minutes before. But there's a connection. In the voice, the eyes, the physical contact. You're the last person they ever see, and that makes you responsible. And you've got to learn who you're responsible for. It eats at you, otherwise, you know? You've got a responsibility to remember them. It's built in."
Upstairs, Brian motions me into an empty patient room and tells me to hang out for a minute. I take the opportunity to sit down and take my weight off of the crutches; I never knew that breaking my foot could give me bruises under my arms. I do my best to look like I belong here, without looking so much like I belong here that someone will check on me.
Apparently it works, as Brian gets back before anyone else looks in. He's got a Post-it note in his hand, and as he hands it to me, he says, "His name was Aaron Lovell."
I look at the note, and that's all it says, too, in all-caps handwriting: "AARON LOVELL." I realize that this conversation is about to get awkward, and I take a deep breath.
"There's another name I need you to look up."
- - -
Five minutes later, I've caught Brian up with the same version of the story that I told the police. He takes it pretty well.
“Jesus Christ, man. Who are these guys?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “And to be honest, that’s part of why I’m here, too. I’m hoping that maybe if I find out who they are, I’ll find out what they want. Breaking into my work, stealing my car – if I don’t figure out what’s going on, I’m gonna find one of them in my house next, maybe. And I can’t keep doing this.”
All of a sudden, I realize I’m about to cry. And there is no way in the world that I’m going to do that in front of some random dude. So I stop talking and look away, and Brian, to his credit, doesn’t say anything about it. He gives me a second, waits for me to look back, and pretends that nothing happened.
“I’ll go dig aro
und later, check the records, see if I can find who got carted in last night,” he says, and produces a phone. “Gimme your number, and I’ll call you when I know who he is.”
“Thanks, man. I appreciate you helping me out.”
“Hey, I’m not telling you anything you couldn’t learn from the paper in a few days, right? Names are public knowledge. And a guy’s got a right to understand what’s happening to him, you know?”
I can tell from Brian’s slightly nervous rambling that he’s going a little bit out on a limb for me, but just like when he saw me near tears, the right thing to do is ignore it. So I just thank him again, shake his hand, and make my way back out to catch the bus home.
When I get back to my bedroom, something feels wrong. I look around warily, trying to spot anything out of place, anything that might have tipped me off to someone being in here, but everything seems normal. I run through some of my quick power tests, too, but get nothing.
After a few minutes, I finally realize what’s different – for the first time this week, I’m not freshly injured and bone-tired from fighting for my life. I’m tired, sure, because it’s bedtime, but I’ve got the energy to take off my clothes and watch some TV before falling asleep. Right now, I can’t imagine a greater luxury.
- Chapter Eight -
The next morning, I discover that there’s a disadvantage to not simply collapsing into unconsciousness: my brain has all the time it wants to sift through everything that’s happened and cudgel me with it. All night long, an endless parade of ape-men cowered before me and begged for their lives as I killed them in a hideously inventive number of ways. With many of them, the hair fell away from their faces just before I landed the final blow, and I looked into their human eyes and human expressions and saw fear there. It made me feel sick, and it made me feel good, too – which made me feel sick as well.
So my sleep wasn’t exactly what you’d call restful. On the other hand, waking up to no voicemail from Edgar is extremely refreshing, and another long shower does a lot to clear out the nightmares. I try wrapping my cast in a trash bag for this shower, and rubber-banding it shut at the top. It basically works, but if I try to put any weight on it, the trash bag slips on the wet tub floor, and my leg starts to go pins-and-needley by the end of the shower. It’s differently obnoxious than taking a shower with my leg sticking out, but not necessarily better. I conclude that the whole situation stinks and resolve to simply heal as quickly as possible.
That reminds me to start my power-checking regimen. I prick my finger with a sewing needle in case the super-healing has kicked in, but no dice; it bleeds like normal. I cross “invulnerable” off the list with that one, too. The whole list takes about half an hour to come up completely negative, during which time anyone watching would have had me committed to an asylum. I’m pretty sweaty by the end, too, and I realize that superpowers or not, I should really get out of the house more often and get some exercise.
The cast gives me a decent excuse to put that off for a bit, at least, and instead I boot up my computer and start looking for Aaron Lovell. I find a bunch of stuff that’s clearly not him, based on location. One of them is a mixed martial arts fighter from England, and I consider how much worse off I would have been if I’d had to deal with that Aaron Lovell. These guys haven’t seemed that smart, but muscle memory alone probably would have let him lay me out.
A few entries down, I come across a LinkedIn profile for an Aaron Lovell in my city, and learn that he was an advertising executive. He looks like your standard late-forties suit: glasses, bald head with a fringe of short hair at the sides, pressed shirt and tie, slightly weird smile. Absolutely nothing like the monster that came at me, in other words.
I dig around some more and find his Facebook page, though, and people are posting “I’ll miss you, man” messages, so it’s definitely him. His profile picture is him with a woman of his age and a young teenage boy standing in front of them, smiling at the camera with familial obligation.
I’d really been hoping that he didn’t have a family, that he was some renegade weirdo living off in the woods alone. I knew it wasn’t likely, but still, seeing that photo hurts like someone’s just slapped me. My face goes cold and my whole head rings, and I can hear my blood in my ears as my heartbeat spikes for a few seconds. Weirdly, the sensation isn’t that far off from the all-over ice cream headache I got right before the attack. It’s definitely not the same, though. That was just physical discomfort. This is guilt. Guilt mixed with fear.
I’m not usually an emotional guy, so maybe I don’t deal with this as well as I should. I guess a good technique would be to take some time to analyze what I was feeling, consider the root causes, examine where they have rational bases versus irrational ones. But given that it took a dose of genius juice for me to realize that the reason I didn’t like my boss was that I was afraid I was going to become him, you can probably figure that that is not how I handle the situation.
No, I get angry. Angry at myself for feeling scared and guilty, angry at whomever is doing this to me, angry at the universe for allowing it. I slam my laptop shut and stomp around my house for a while without the assistance of the crutches, enjoying the ache in my foot in a perverse sort of way. The pain is satisfying. It’s got a tangible, addressable source, unlike everything else I’m dealing with right now.
I’m just about to progress from banging around to yelling rhetorical questions at the furniture when my phone buzzes. I check it to see a text from an unknown number that says only, “Jonathan Caraway.”
This is the thought process that follows: What on earth? Oh, this must be Brian. That’s the name of the second guy. He’s got a stupid name. Geez, man, you killed the guy, you could show some respect. Not my fault he’s got a stupid name. Shut up and go look him up.
That all flashes through my head in about the span of a second, and it serves to dump metaphorical cold water on my rage. I’m abruptly calm, I’m a little bit ashamed of how I was acting, and also my foot hurts a lot more than it did while I was worked up. I limp back to my bed and open up my laptop again to do some more googling.
This one is, if anything, worse. Jonathan was a local high school student, just turned 18 this year. His Facebook pictures show him with friends and parents, looking young and vital. He looks like a great kid, someone his parents would have been proud of. I don’t see anything at all to connect him to Lovell, nothing to indicate that he’d ever even heard of the ad man. That’s not to say that there is no connection, of course. I’ve still got to hope that there is one, as otherwise I’m back to the plan of just waiting for these things to happen. But it’s nothing obvious.
At the top of his wall is a post from Sharon Caraway, presumably his mother. It says that a funeral service will be held for Jonathan in a week’s time. I make a note of the time and location, although I’m not entirely sure why. It seems deeply unlikely that I’ll learn anything useful at a funeral service. Maybe it’s like Brian said: I just need to know more about the kid. I was the last person to see him alive. I owe it to him to know who he was.
I poke around on the internet for a while longer, though I’m not really certain what I’m looking for now. I check out the ad agency that Lovell worked for. I scope out Caraway’s school website. Nothing jumps out at me, and eventually I realize that I’ve given up clicking on links, and am just staring at a paragraph of text, not even reading it. I take that as a hint that I’ve absorbed about as much information as I’m going to today, and close the laptop again.
A Netflix movie and a pizza later, I’m back at work. Edgar is gone by the time I get there, so I assume that the drug test didn’t show any evidence of whatever’s going on with me. I could probably have guessed that by the fact that he didn’t call to tell me that I was canned, but I wouldn’t put it past Edgar to wait for me to show up just so he could fire me to my face.
Work is back to being the quiet, boring job that I had grown to quietly loathe, a fact for which I am profoundly grate
ful today. I’m able to shut my mind off while I’m doing my rounds and let my thoughts settle for a while. I spend my down time staring at the dimly lit street outside, watching the occasional car go past. Several times, I notice a police car cruising by, and I can’t blame them. There were two weird deaths here in as many days, and even if they don’t know that the second one was sort of a homicide as well, they’ve got to believe that it’s something worth keeping an eye on.
I think again about Officer Peterson, who had come by to ask Edgar about me. Obviously he’s working the case, or however that actually goes. All I know about police departments, I’ve learned from procedural dramas. Maybe I can talk to him, see if he knows of any connection between Lovell and Caraway. There’s got to be a way to ask that doesn’t sound suspicious, like I’m fishing to see if he knows anything about me. After some consideration, I decide that the “trying to understand” angle is probably the best, especially since I really don’t have any idea why this is happening. My definition of “this” just has another facet that the police don’t know about, is all.
I briefly consider going to see if Edgar’s office is unlocked to get the number off of the card, but think better of it. “I wanted to call the police officer who was asking about me” is not likely to be viewed as an acceptable excuse for going through my boss’s stuff. I can probably just call the police department and ask for him, anyway.
There is no way I would have thought an idea and its consequences through that well last week. There’s definitely been a residual positive effect. I’m not saying that the attacks are worth it, but at least there’s a silver lining.
The Experiment (Book 1): The Reluctant Superhero Page 4