House of Dolls 3

by Harmon Cooper

  The Ferris wheel started going even faster.

  Then it slowed, and Roman figured that the ride was over, that they would disembark soon, that he could give the Ferris wheel operator a dirty look as he walked by.

  The structure started trembling, going back and forth, a spark causing a fire on a few of the spindles.

  “What do we do?” Celia asked, looking to Roman with fear in her eyes. They were still about twenty feet from the ground, but at least they weren’t completely at the top.

  He stood, glancing around as the operator screamed for everyone to stay put, to sit back down and wait for exemplars to come.

  “Let’s just wait,” Roman said, his voice no longer his own, his voice that of a man who had no idea what to do, who just needed to be given an order rather than think for himself.

  They heard a loud creaking noise as one of the cabs split overhead, a child falling out, the young girl’s hand catching a beam just in time.

  Rather than stay put as she had been instructed, Celia reached her hands out for the child, telling the young girl that she would catch her, that she wouldn’t let her fall.

  “I’ll save you!” she shouted, and everything shifted into slow motion.

  The young girl let go of the beam. Celia just managed to grab the young girl, the force sending her over the edge of the cab as Roman tried to maneuver to Celia to stop them both from plummeting to their death.

  The next sound he heard was Celia and the young girl hitting the ground below. His wife had fallen a good twenty feet as the plumes of the fire picked up and exemplars appeared on the scene.

  And that was how unfair the Centralian legal system was when it came to non-exemplars.

  There had been a full investigation, and even though it had been Celia who had reached out for the girl, the blame had been placed squarely on Roman’s shoulders, investigators arguing that he had tried to save the girl, and in doing so he had knocked his wife out of the cab of the Ferris wheel, the girl dying and Celia never coming out of her coma.

  Fast-forward to present day Central Park, Roman lying with his back on the grass, Casper asleep in his pocket, Roman just waking up from a dream of Celia falling.

  The cyclical nightmare continued.

  And even now, there was nothing he could do about it.

  Chapter Six: No Head Room

  “I am not a superpowered individual. I am not an exemplar. I have never had a superpower. I am not a hero, nor will I ever be a hero. I am not a superhero. I am half-powered. I will always be half-powered. I am a non-exemplar. There is nothing about me that is extraordinary. I am not a hero. I am not a superhero. I am half-powered. I will always be half-powered. I am a non-exemplar.”

  Roman said the familiar words, ready for the Heroes Anonymous meeting to be over with.

  The crowd was larger today than it had been the last time he’d attended a meeting, but he didn’t see any familiar faces, no Paris and no Sam, the weird non-exemplar who claimed to have a heightened sense of smell.

  Roman had actually sent a message to Paris yesterday but had yet to receive a response, and he wondered briefly why she was ignoring him.

  Maybe she was dead.

  Roman didn’t really know, and it wouldn’t bother him if the Western spy had somehow ended up in someone else’s crosshairs. She had tried to kill him, and even if they had a shaky alliance, he wouldn’t put it past her to double-cross him.

  Roman’s stomach grumbled, and he wished he had eaten something back at Central Park.

  His nap had gone on for too long, and part of him wished he had the ability to speed up time rather than wait for yet another meeting he didn’t actually need to attend.

  The thing was, Roman could have stopped attending a year ago, but it was Bill who made the recommendations to the Centralian authorities of who had attended enough courses and who was making satisfactory progress.

  And Bill still hadn’t made this recommendation.

  So here he was, still going to meetings that didn’t apply to him, especially with the fact that he was now an exemplar.

  Boredom already setting in, Roman focused on the corner of the room, noticing how the light didn’t quite reach it, how a shadow held its territory. He stared at that shadow long and hard, waiting for it to do something, anything.

  “Roman,” Bill said in a tone that indicated it was the second time he was saying Roman’s name.

  “Sorry. Yes?”

  “I think it’s time you discuss what happened,” Bill said from the front of the room. “It has been a while, and I believe everyone in the crowd here is new.”

  “You got it,” Roman said as he exhaled audibly, trying not to sound like he was hating his life in that moment.

  He made his way up to the podium and placed both hands on it, looking out at the people in attendance. Men and women all sat before him, none of the non-exemplars eagerly awaiting what he had to say. Roman hoped to finish it up quickly.

  He began the mantra, a thought at the back of his mind appearing out of nowhere, telling him he should animate the podium just to show how little power he had. He ignored the thought, launching into the story about his wife, how he had tried to save her and the girl.

  The same lie he’d been telling since coming to these meetings.

  “Celia was like no one any of you have ever met. I can say that without knowing you, or knowing the people you’ve associated with. She was completely unique, beautiful, beyond an exemplar…”

  “Roman…” Bill said under his breath.

  “But she was a non-exemplar, like me. And the point I’m trying to make here, Bill, is that if she ever had been classified, she would have been classified as a Type V. Her godlike power was her personality and how much she cared for others, the way she could instantly make an impact on your life. She wasn’t a face in the crowd like all of you,” Roman told them with disdain. “She was different. And I can’t seem to remember any of her flaws, which leads me to believe that maybe she didn’t have any.” Roman felt tears starting to form at the corners of his eyes. “She’s the reason I’m here, the reason I continue attending these meetings.”

  He was quiet for a moment, waiting for someone in the back of the room to finish coughing.

  What had happened at the festival was fresh on his mind. His only role in the end was to take the blame, to deal with the fallout, to watch his wife waste away in a coma, to secretly wish he had been the one who had tried to save the young girl, that he had been the one who had taken the fall.

  “So like I said before, that’s why I’m here. I tried to save someone, and in the process I ended up accidentally sending my wife to her death. If I had been…” Roman gulped. “If I had been smarter, I would have let nature take its course. Exemplars would have come, and the little girl would have died, but it wouldn’t have been on me, and shit, she died anyway in the end. My wife would still be alive, and I wouldn’t be standing here in front you telling the same sob story over and over again.”

  Roman started to shove the podium to the side and stopped.

  “That is all.”

  Without looking at anyone, Roman walked to the back of the room and let himself out. He passed the motivational quotes in the hallway, ignoring the fact that Bill was calling for him to come back.

  Once he was outside, Roman unclenched his fists, the railing nearby rattling as a wave of emotion moved over him, his power radiating off his body.

  After a deep exhale and a little bit of pacing, Roman finally called the teleporter.

  He needed something to cheer him up. He needed to see Harper.

  Roman knocked on Harper’s door, a bouquet of flowers in his hand. He had chosen violet daffodils, the bouquet bursting with so much color that Roman knew an exemplar—probably a Type IV Class E—had something to do with it.

  They smelled absolutely wonderful, and the lady walking past him in the hallway smiled faintly as the scent hit her nose. Roman himself also took a few big whiffs of the daffodils,
happy to have found such a beautiful bunch.

  He was just about to knock again when Harper opened the door, tears in her eyes as her lips parted to say the word, “Run.”

  A shadowy spike tore through Harper’s chest, spritzing blood onto Roman’s face as it moved past, Roman barely able to get out of the way in time before his shoulder was clipped. The shadow easily cut through his jacket, the shirt underneath, and his muscle, grazing against the bone.

  Roman blasted backwards, his own self-defense instinct kicking in, and he used the floor as a launching pad. The wall behind him caught him, shifting Roman to the side as more shadowy blades tore out of the apartment.

  He heard the angry scream of a man whose voice he didn’t recognize as his brain scrambled to make sense of all this, barely able to fathom that Harper was lying face first in the hallway now, a halo of blood forming around her body.

  A door down the hallway opened and a man peeked out, frozen in place for a moment as more shadow tendrils tore out of the apartment, piercing the man in the neck, then lifting and slamming him into the ceiling.

  Roman opened a hole in the floor and quickly slipped through to the floor below.

  He paused there, breathing heavily for a moment as he tried to think of what he should do next. Anyone brave enough to open their door saw Roman with metal tightening around his arms, forming spikes that jutted out from his knuckles.

  They saw the look in his orange eyes, an odd mixture of fear and utter hatred as Roman made a split-second decision not to run, to go back up there and kill whoever did this to Harper.

  His mind hadn’t connected the dots at the moment. It hadn’t even begun to figure out who had attacked him, only that he had indeed been attacked.

  It was too busy calculating everything, Roman’s eyes jumped to his power dial and mentally took everything away from Celia and Coma, who were feasibly alive and well back at his apartment.

  Another door opened, and a man in a sleeveless shirt stepped out holding a frying pan, wondering what the hell was going on. As Roman passed him, he took the metal from the frying pan, which liquefied in the air and tightened around Roman’s clawed fists.

  A shadow user…

  A shadow user…

  The name of the man came to him in an instant. Hazrat, the exemplar who had tried to attack him in his cubicle what felt like so many years ago but was literally only two weeks back.

  But why?

  It doesn’t matter now, Roman thought as he made his way back up the stairs, stopping when he saw the shadows creep around the edges of the doorway that led to Harper’s floor, daring him to come forward.

  It dawned on him in that moment that he would not be able to fight back against the shadows. Roman didn’t have a type of power that would be able to bend something like a light or darkness; his only form of attack, then, would come from ambush.

  Turning on his heels, Roman trotted back downstairs to the floor beneath Harper’s, shaking his hands out, the metal falling to the ground. He looked up at the ceiling and waited in that moment for it to liquefy. The ceiling turned into liquid and lifted him up as if he were wrapped into a cocoon.

  Roman needed a way to breathe, so as he wrapped himself, he formed a straw out of the wood that bent downward to the floor beneath him, providing him a mouthpiece.

  Now suspended in the air, Roman merged with the ceiling, moving between the floors and stopping when he heard feet above him. A woman’s cry met his ears, her body falling, the thunk vibrating inside his head for a moment.

  He was only going to have one shot at this—this much Roman knew.

  He waited in the space he had formed between the floors, and the piping, wood, metal, plastic, everything moved sideways to accommodate him—none of it bulging outward, though.

  That would give him away.

  Hazrat stood directly above him now.

  Roman knew he could drive a spike up through the floor, cutting through the man.

  This was most certainly an option, but Hazrat may be wearing some type of protective apparatus, or perhaps he was using the shadows to form armor.

  No, Roman would have to wait.

  Focusing on all the sounds around him, Roman listened as the Hazrat took a few more steps directly over him. He was now at the area just above Roman’s knees, where he paused a moment and took another step forward, now directly above Roman’s feet.

  Once the man took another step, Roman started to push the floor material away, revealing his face, and a small amount of light created coronas on his pane of vision as he locked his eyes on the back his attacker’s skull.

  It was definitely Hazrat; Roman didn’t need to see any more of the red, Southern Alliance tattoos to know this fact.

  And without any more hesitation, he did exactly as he had practiced—or better, threatened—to do against William Bottorf’s clones.

  Focusing on Hazrat’s skull, Roman took hold of the blood vessels in the man’s head, his brain, the bone, anything he could grab hold of mentally.

  A hole exploded out of the back of Hazrat’s skull, painting the walls all around him crimson. The man instantly dropped to his knees, his shadows spiking out in every direction, piercing the floor and obliterating the ceiling above.

  Chapter Seven: A Long Story

  Roman gasped for air, and a wheezing sound met his ears.

  He was lying in the hallway below Harper’s apartment, his hands on his chest, his eyes barely open. He tried to sit up and failed, a piercing feeling preventing him from moving certain parts of his body.

  And he wanted to just lie there for the time being, letting his nerves calm, rest.

  But he knew better than to give up now.

  Roman brought his hands away from his chest and looked at his fingers, noticing the fresh blood from where the shadows had pierced his flesh. He coughed and felt a pain surge in his sternum, his ribs screaming out, then more wheezing.

  “Casper…” he whispered, giving a small amount of life to the tiny doll.

  “What the hell? Roman!” she cried out as soon as she saw the blood on his chest, his arms, his saturated clothing. The little doll stood on top of him now, looking around frantically, noticing that more people were coming out of their apartments and trying to leave.

  “You have to listen to me,” she told him, “you have to lift yourself up, order a teleporter, go back to the apartment and get the others.”

  “Apartment…” Roman whispered.

  “I don’t know enough about your world to know what happens if they find out about you, but you mentioned it before, and someone will be coming to check on this,” Casper said. “Roman!”

  “I have an idea…” Roman focused on the wall near his legs.

  The thick drywall and some of the lumber peeled down, leaving the support beams exposed as they formed stents for Roman’s legs, which slowly lifted his body. After one mental message to an unlicensed teleporter’s union, Roman took a few steps—or rather, he instructed his creation to move him forward, Casper now on his shoulder next to his face, her hand touching his cheek.

  “You have to stay awake until we get there. Coma can help, we can go to Nadine’s. Eli…”

  “Eli…” Roman said just as a teleporter appeared, a man dressed in all black, his form slightly blurred.

  A thought came to Roman that he could have tried to stand his own body up by taking hold of his own muscles and bone, but this would be a delicate task to undertake, and he didn’t know if it would kill him or not.

  Better to just stick with what worked.

  A flash of pixelated color and Roman reappeared in his living room, Casper and Coma lying lifeless on the floor, the teleporter not saying a goddamn word about how fucked everything was.

  The teleporter in black didn’t say goodbye either, just vanished in the same weird, pixelated way he had appeared.

  “Coma…” And with that, the masked doll came alive, Roman falling forward and barely catching himself with his own makeshift legs.<
br />
  When he glanced down at his power dial, he saw he was pushing his limit.

  There wasn’t time to explain, and Coma didn’t ask for an explanation as she moved to him, bringing Roman’s arm around her and letting him lean his weight against her.

  “We have to get out of here,” Coma said, reading his mind.

  “No shit!” Casper shouted from Roman’s pocket.

  “Yeah… whoever attacked me could be coming here. It was just one person… but I have the feeling… more…”

  Roman started wheezing again, coughing up more blood. He tried to bring his hand to his chest but could no longer lift it. Whatever was stuck in his throat simply fell back down into his body, and Roman could barely breathe as it did so.

  Spit, blood, whatever it was, Roman knew it wouldn’t be much longer now if he didn’t get medical attention.

  “We need to take Celia, too,” he whispered.

  “I have to support you,” Coma said.

  “We can just leave her here,” Casper started to say.

  “No,” Roman told her firmly. “I’ve got it.”

  He changed the structure of the material that was keeping him up right. It was stiffer now; he looked like he was wearing cardboard armor, but it was keeping him erect, even if the front of the material had started to darken, Roman’s blood staining it.

  He ordered another teleporter, just as Coma returned with Celia flung over her shoulder.

  “You have to tell Nadine too,” Casper reminded him, jumping up and down on his shoulder. “Tell Nadine you’re coming!”

  Another unlicensed teleporter arrived, this one a woman with muscular arms and a nose piercing that connected to her earlobe.

  If she thought anything of the man standing in his bloody cardboard armor, a beautiful woman in a mask wearing a Loli dress with another woman flung over her shoulder, or the pint-sized lady on the man’s shoulder jumping up and down telling him to message someone named Nadine, she didn’t say anything.