The Experiment (Book 1): The Reluctant Superhero Read online

  - Copyright -

  Cover art by conrado via http://www.shutterstock.com.

  Copyright © Micah Edwards 2016.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Basically what this boils down to is that if you steal my stuff that I worked hard on, I’ll be sad. And I’d rather not be sad. So help me out on this one, would you?

  First printing, 2016.

  ISBN-13: 978-1523432202

  ISBN-10: 1523432209

  Want to talk to the author? I want to talk to you! Send me your thoughts at [email protected]. If they’re not mean, I will respond. If they are mean, I will delete them; please see the above note about not wanting to be sad.

  The production of this book was made possible by CreateSpace (http://www.createspace.com), an Amazon company.

  Table of Contents

  - Prologue -

  - Chapter One -

  - Chapter Three -

  - Chapter Four -

  - Chapter Five -

  - Chapter Six -

  - Chapter Seven -

  - Chapter Eight -

  - Chapter Nine -

  - Chapter Ten -

  - Chapter Eleven -

  - Chapter Twelve -

  - Chapter Thirteen -

  - Chapter Fourteen -

  - Chapter Fifteen -

  - Chapter Sixteen -

  - Chapter Seventeen -

  - Afterword -

  - About the Author -

  -

  Prologue -

  Picture this. You’re a scientist, right? And you’ve got yourself a pretty nice lab setup; you’ve got big gleaming sterile tables, crisp white labcoat, state-of-the-art microscope trained down on a petri dish full of bacteria. And you’ve got some stuff you want to test out, some chemical that should interact with the bacteria in interesting ways.

  So you get your dropper, peer through your microscope, fix one bacterium in your sights and juice it. Then you sit back and take notes. Maybe the chemical does what you thought, and the bacterium thrives. Maybe it doesn’t, and it dies. Maybe it reacts in really bizarre ways that you never saw coming, but hey, so much the better right? All data is good data, and you’re learning all sort of interesting things. Science marches on!

  Now picture being the bacterium.

  - Chapter One -

  Have you ever been outside in a hailstorm? One of those serious kinds, the ones that smash windows and dent cars. You take a chunk of ice to the temple, and abruptly it feels personal, like the whole weather system is out to get you, specifically.

  Know what sucks more than that feeling? Being right about it.

  I’m way ahead of myself, though, so let me back up. I want to start this thing at the beginning, tell you about who I was before I found out I was a bacterium. Quick version: I was an idiot.

  Here’s me, Dan Everton: standard white American male, 30 years old, standing 6’0”, carrying about 40 extra pounds, which I tell myself is at least half muscle. My belt tells me differently, but what does a stupid piece of leather know? Cows are dumb enough when they’re alive. I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to take opinions from meat. I could handle myself just fine in a fight if I had to, and that’s what matters.

  I know a lot of the opinions I’m putting out here right now sound dumb, all right? Like I said, I was an idiot. I’m just telling you how things were then. You filter it through whatever translation matrix you need. If you can’t follow this part, you’ll never stick with me through what’s coming up.

  I’ve got a job that’s beneath me, night watchman at a fossil museum. The pay’s lousy, the hours are night shift, and a lobotomized monkey could do the rounds, but I’m just killing time here while I make a little money, maybe get an associate’s degree from a community college, figure out what I want to do. No rush; this isn’t my life, but it’ll do for right now. I mean, it’s been doing for the last eight years, so it’s obviously going to keep on fine.

  It’s a funny thing. If someone’s settled down, that’s a good thing, right? They’re supposed to be in a good place, comfortable, where they want to be. But if you’re “settling,” that means you’re giving up, going for what you’ve got instead of what you dreamed about. So how do you get to be settled without settling?

  Don’t answer it; it’s a stupid question. That’s the kind of thing I’d kick around at night in between museum rounds. It’s the sound of a brain spinning its wheels, the wide-awake equivalent of dreaming. It’s a brain so bored that it starts generating nonsense just to have something to do.

  The whole thing’s a pretty great cosmic joke, really. There’s me, going nowhere, doing nothing, ready to comfortably hate it for the next forty years or until I kill myself from arteries clogged with half-muscle. And then, bam! I’m the target bacterium.

  I’d love to say it was destiny, fate, God, karma, anything like that. But does the scientist care where in the petri dish he injects his solution? It’s just whatever happened to be under the microscope. He doesn’t go through the bacteria to find which one is most deserving, which one will learn the most from this. He just looks into the microscope, lines up with whichever one is closest, and kicks things off. Asking “Why me?” is missing the point.

  So, there’s me. Feet tucked under the desk, bank of monitors in front of me that might as well be photographs for all the motion they’re showing, playing Candy Crush on my phone. Just finished my rounds, got another twenty minutes until it’s time to go walk my useless circuit again, so I’m tuned out. Doing nothing, thinking about nothing. I suddenly get this weird feeling, like an all-over ice cream headache, and then it’s gone before I can really process it.

  And then this guy tears the front door off of its hinges.

  At first, I don’t even realize that there’s a guy there. I just hear this noise like a car wreck at close quarters, and I jerk my head up to see the glass-and-brass door from the front of the museum flying straight at me. My first thought is that someone’s just driven their car into the front of the museum, and I’m about to get killed by dumb bad luck. And while my brain is sitting there trying to figure out what’s happening and why, I’m about to get creamed by a door.

  Fortunately, my body decides it wants to live, and cuts the power to my knees. I go down in a heap, the door levels the far side of the security desk, and I struggle back up to gawk at the mess.

  “Man,” I think. “Close call!” And then all of a sudden, I’m flying through the air, tumbling as I go. I smack into the wall back-first hard enough to crack the tiles, about eight feet up, and slam down to the floor. That’s when I first realize that this isn’t a car wreck, because there’s this missing link pounding across the floor toward me, roaring.

  He’s probably 5’6”, 5’7” tops, which is still plenty tall to a guy on the floor with maybe a crushed spinal column. Definitely human, but he’s got hair all over like matted fur, his pants and shirt are torn open along the seams, and his footsteps sound like he weighs maybe twice what you’d expect. And he’s coming at me like I insulted his mother and his favorite sports team all in one breath.

  I know you’re not supposed to move if you’ve got a back injury, but I figure that in this case I’d better take the chance, so I try to scramble away. And weirdly, my back doesn’t hurt at all. Could be I’m in shock, I think, but I decide to count my blessings
and deal with the damage later. First priority now is staying out of his way.

  And he’s not making it easy. He comes in with a double hammer-blow right where I was laying, roaring as he goes. I can smell his breath, and it smells like blood: not like he’s been eating meat, but like he’s got something badly torn inside, something vital. It’s not slowing him down any, though, as he scoops up a chunk of shattered tile and lobs it at me underhand like a fast-pitch softball. I flinch and throw my arms up in front of my face, and it smashes into them. The impact knocks my forearms into my face and pitches me over on my back again, but although it stings a little bit, it still doesn’t hurt like I’d expect it to.

  Finally, I start to get mad. This guy comes in after me, trashes my desk, chucks me around like a rag doll, and what did I ever do to him? And it’s not like my bosses are going to thank me for stopping him; I’ll probably get yelled at for letting the place get torn up. They might even fire me over it. Stupid useless job that I didn’t even want to be at, and they’re going to fire me? All because this idiot went mental and I happened to be nearby?

  He’s running at me again, but I’m on my feet now, and furious. I grab up a piece of wreckage and take a swing at him, and it connects hard. It’s a rising blow from the ground that meets him squarely under his chin. His head snaps backward and his entire body is lifted off the ground; he does almost a complete backflip in the air and smashes chest-first onto the ground with a grunt.

  He’s not moving, which is good, because I’m in shock. I’m haven’t got a clue how I hit him that hard. I look down at my weapon, and suddenly realize that it’s not a splintered piece of wood like I’d expected. I’m holding a chunk of the marble slab from the security desk. It’s solid stone, about two feet wide and maybe four feet long, which has to put it in the neighborhood of 150 pounds. And right now, it’s just casually resting in my left hand. I’m supporting it like it’s Styrofoam.

  The guy makes a noise, which snaps me back to reality. I see him moving a little bit, like he’s thinking about getting up, and I know what I need to do: I need to walk over to him with this slab I’ve got, and pulp his head while he’s down. I don’t need to try to take this guy in a stand-up fight again. I got a lucky shot once, but I might not again. Besides, it’s not like he wouldn’t do the same to me. He already tried once, after he bounced me off the wall with that first sucker shot. It’s just good sense. Self-preservation.

  And even with all of these perfectly great reasons, I can’t talk myself into it. So I square my shoulders, take a couple of steps back, and get my club ready for another hit. There’s seriously something wrong here; I lift the marble to my shoulder like I’m holding a baseball bat, and I’d swear to you it’s not more than a couple of pounds. I’m not even feeling any real pressure where it’s resting on my shoulder.

  The guy levers himself up to his forearms, head still hanging low. I think maybe he’s planning to come in low, take out my knees, but instead he just opens up his mouth and vomits out a cascade of blood. It’s bright red and it’s got horrible torn chunks in it. The river comes out of him for maybe four or five seconds before he collapses face down into it and lays there, totally still. And I know right then that I’ve killed him.

  I drop the slab and run over, but he’s already got no pulse and I have no idea what to do. I’ve seen CPR in movies, but given the amount of blood he just poured out, I don’t think hitting him in the chest is going to do him any favors. Even rolling him over on his back to start the process seems like maybe more trauma than he can take. And then I remember that I’m a security guard, and the right thing to do in this situation is to call the police.

  I scramble over what’s left of the desk and find the phone, which is fortunately still working. I call the cops to report a break-in and an injured man. I tell them that he’s not breathing, and they need to bring an ambulance. I sort of expect them to ask me a lot of questions, but the dispatcher just asks if I’m safe, tells me to be calm and that they’re on their way. So I hang up, only now I’m alone with a dead body and time to think.

  Everything makes basic sense to me, right up to the point where the guy chucked me into the wall and I didn’t get hurt. How come I just bounced off? Why could I lift so much and swing it like it was nothing? I know adrenaline boosts people’s strength, but this seems extreme. Besides which, the fight’s over, so I should be coming down from it, but I still don’t hurt at all. I’ve got some small cuts on my forearms from blocking that tile, but that’s it. And I’ve never heard of adrenaline making your skin proof again sharp edges or bruising.

  I experimentally heft the slab I was using as a club again, and it still comes up off the ground like a Hollywood prop. I set it aside and find a larger piece in the rubble, maybe two by seven, so we’re talking three hundred pounds. This outweighs me, but I can still pick it up without even trying. I cradle it in my right arm and start stacking stuff on top of it, looking for a limit.

  I’ve got a stack of wood and stone maybe a foot high, and it’s starting to get a little heavy, when I suddenly feel that all-over instant ice cream headache again, the pile plummets out of my arms like it’s just gained all its weight back, and a half-ton of wreckage slams down on my right foot.

  So that’s how the cops find the scene: a smashed entrance, a dead guy in a pool of his own blood, and me pinned to the floor with both hands wrapped around my ankle and begging them to please come get the desk off of me. Pretty heroic, right?

  - Chapter Two -

  The cops get my foot free while the paramedics check over the dead guy to see if there’s anything they can do for him. It takes four cops to shift the load on my foot enough so that I can pull it free, and by then my body’s given up on telling me about the pain, more or less. I can feel the foot like an extra heartbeat, but it doesn’t hurt, exactly, as long as I’m not putting any weight on it.

  The dead guy’s dead, sure enough, so after the cops talk to me and review the scene, they give the medics the go-ahead to get him out of there. They roll him onto a stretcher, but can’t heft him high enough to get the wheels to lock into place. After one of the cops pitches in, they finally get him up and rolling, but even then I can see that it takes a fair amount of elbow grease just to steer the thing.

  I hear the stretcher clang into the back of the ambulance outside, and then one of the paramedics comes back in, motioning to me. “Come on, man,” he says, “we’ve got to get your foot fixed up.”

  I shake my head. “No, I’ll get it looked at in the morning. I can’t leave the museum unguarded.”

  Behind me, one of the cops snorts. “I think we can manage to cover you. You want to tell me where the security tapes are before you get out of here? We’re gonna need to look those over, see if there’s anything you forgot to tell us.”

  I completely forgot about the security tapes. Suddenly, I am extremely glad that I couldn’t get up the nerve to crush that guy’s head while he was down. I can see the moment playing out in my head: all the cops gathered around the monitor, watching the replay as I calmly walk up to an unconscious man and methodically crush his head into jelly. The cops look at each other, and one says something into his radio. Then it’s my mugshot, then me in an orange jumpsuit in prison, trying not to look threatening to or scared of a bunch of guys who really belong there.

  “You okay?” says the paramedic, and I realize that I’m in a cold sweat just thinking about what could have happened. “Come on, take these crutches and let’s get to the ambulance.”

  I’m suddenly very eager to be away from the cops. “Yeah, thanks, um –”

  “Brian.”

  “Brian. Good to meetcha.” I try to offer my hand to shake, and almost spill myself off of the crutches. Brian grins as he steadies me.

  “Careful there, Dan. Crutches on a marble floor is not the time to try fancy maneuvers, you know?”

  “Hey, how’d you know my name?”

  Brian points. “It’s on your badge.”

 
; Like I said, I was an idiot.

  - - -

  The hospital turns out to be fine. I’ve barely been waiting at all when they call me in, x-ray my foot, prod me a few times just so I feel I’m getting my money’s worth, and fix me up with a cast. They give me a once-over for other injuries while I’m there, too, but it turns out that I really am totally fine.

  Nothing but a few shallow cuts from that whole fight! If I hadn’t been screwing around with the desk afterward, I would’ve walked away from it unscathed. I ask the doc about my super-strength, and he starts to explain about adrenaline, but I cut him off with a hand wave.

  “Yeah, I know all that, but how come it kept working for me after the fight? How come I don’t have torn muscles and bruises and stuff? Why’d it shut off all at once like that?”

  “The body and mind can respond to stress in unpredictable ways,” says the doc, which I think we can all recognize as medical-speak for “your guess is as good as mine.”

  After the cast sets, they let me go. I head back out to the lobby only to find that there’s a cop waiting for me, one of the same ones from the museum. I freeze up, the vision of the cops all watching me murder a guy on video running through my head again, and it takes an effort to remember that it didn’t go down like that.

  The cop’s walking over toward me, so I make myself keep moving toward him. When we’re close, I say, “Something I can do for you, officer?” It sounds stupid once I say it out loud, like I’m playing at being nonchalant, and I wince, then hope the cop didn’t see that, then realize I’m panicking again, and try to take a deep breath and end up swallowing some spit and having a coughing fit.

  The cop either doesn’t notice any of this or writes it off as me having had a pretty rough night, and says, “Nah, I’m just here to give you a ride back home. Save you the trouble of waking someone up at this time of the morning.”